Diamond Law Library Printers Marks: An archival project by Emily Fairey
In 2010, I undertook an internship at Diamond Law Library of Columbia University. I was a library student at the time, and having just come back from a rare books course in Florence, Italy, I was interested in breaking into the field of Special Collections.
The books were housed in the basement “Treasure Room” of Diamond Law, and I had the opportunity to examine a collection of books from the earliest days of printing in the great printing cities, like Venice, or Lyons.
My task included assessment for possible conservation as well as writing out a hand tag with a “Hicks-Schiller system cataloguing number, then entering the data into the catalog.
I was fascinated by these books and got permission to photograph significant pages. To be systematic, I decided to photograph the “printers’ mark” page, or frontispiece. I collected over two hundred photographs of over fifty books during the month long internship, some of which were designated “keepers.” When asked by the Rare Books librarian what I planned to do with these pictures, I was not yet sure, but I knew I intended to learn as much as I could about them.
Printers and Printers Marks
The idea of the “Printers Mark” had allure. The combination of Renaissance engraving artistry with classical symbolism, and the quirky choices of self representation of the early printers: those sometimes humorous, sometimes cutthroat capitalists who were also sometimes impressive scholars and artists, who tended to come from and generate dynasties of their profession, frequently making corporations with other printers, intermarrying, litigating, specializing in types of literature…
Many of them came from Germany, the earliest seat of printing, in the 1400’s. Having achieved the apparatus and skill, many members of printing dynasties departed to different cities in different nations, often altering their names to fit in better with their new language, thus the ancestor of the famous Sebastian Gryphius of Leon was Michael Greyff of Reutlingen, Germany. By the 1500s, printing had spread from Germany to its Scandinavian neighbors, then to France and Italy.
In the 16th century, printing developed to new heights of skill and artistry, and established systems of self-governance. Cities like Venice in Italy reigned supreme, or Lyons in France.
The marks of the printers that I saw in those books of the Treasure Room weren’t just visual icons to identify their business. They were complex self-definitions, sometimes of individual printers, sometimes of fraternities, stating in clusters of symbolism what values they held preeminent. Marks do not exist in isolation, either, but in the frame of the front page. These frames are often ornate fantasies elaborating on the art and architecture of the times, as well as nature and religion. The printers mark is thoroughly integrated into the context of the book, so that to extract it and look at it in isolation seems like stealing an artifact from an archeological dig.
The Database of Diamond Printers Marks
After my internship was done, I focused my library studies for a time on programming. It was in a course of Drupal development that I had the idea to create a database of the Diamond Printers’ Marks that would act as a viewing gallery for the images, contextualized in their books, combined with as much information as I could gather on the printers who made them and the traditional meanings of the symbols in their marks. With my class partners I developed a site designed to submit several different “content types” into Drupal: Printer, Symbol, Source, and Mark, all linked to one another. There was a gallery with dynamic display for the images. After I input all the data, the site was open for tagging and comments. We designed usability studies, and even created forms for the public to submit their own marks.
Diamond Printers Marks was a beautiful, but a short-lived project. After a few re-bootings and migrations, but unfortunately no updates, the site became vulnerable to hacking and had to be taken offline. As I did not continue working steadily with Drupal, I had no real opportunity to work on upgrading or rebuilding the site. The version of Drupal I created the site with, 6.20, does not even function properly when installed on a host.
Redevelopment
In the meantime, in the course of my position as an Open Educational Resources librarian at Brooklyn College, I have worked in the last few years on developing technical and design skills in many different cost-free web presentation platforms. Asking myself, why I was so tied to Drupal, I had the thought that in order to free myself from the previous way of imagining the site, I should switch my vessel for presenting it, and try reimagining Diamond Printers Marks as an OER.
Of the free, media-rich archival platforms that I knew, Omeka was the one that had the best item-specific descriptive metadata. However, it is not the platform with which the most dynamic presentations can be made. I have been working with StoryMaps, a design app of ArcGIS, the online mapping tool. It seemed to me that the story of the early printers, as well as the story of this project, could be best viewed collectively from the basis the geography of printing, in other words, as a map.
This archive attempts to present Diamond Printers Marks and tell the story behind them by gathering resources on each mark and printer in a systematic way. It is amplified by ArcGIS maps and a StoryMap presentation.
I welcome you to examine the archive, exhibits, and maps for yourselves and to give me your feedback. To facilitate your comments in the most contextualized way, I have created a "Hypothes.is" group for this project, which you can join by following this link and registering with Hypothes.is . Please feel free to contact me at emily.fairey86@brooklyn.cuny.edu with any questions.