Re bookmaking and paleographic study: 
 I owned and operated a printing press 
(a used Kelsey, ca. 1957), when I has 
in high school, and made linoleum 
block illustrations for use with text. 
[I hoped to graduate to woodblock, 
partly on the example of the Agnes 
Miller Parker  woodcuts for the 
Coronation Edition of The Faerie 
Queene of 1953 (four years before the 
Baden-Powell Jubilee in 
Sutton-Coldfield -- Scouting's 
founding's fiftieth anniversary in 
1957 -- where Britain was represented 
by The Queen's Own Scout and Berkeley 
CA by yours truly).]  I knew that 
Elizabethan handwriting was strange 
(to me) from the bard's signature, in 
gold, on the red leather cover of my 
mother's complete india paper 
Shakespeare (Erskine's), in which I 
first read most of the plays; but I 
had to decline training from James 
Osborne in reading Elizabethan 
manuscripts in the Sterling Library 
basement at Yale in 1962 (where I was 
trying to learn PhD German--our 
textbook was in blackletter), because 
he did not propose to pay me -- not 
with anything fungible -- for the work 
of transcription that he wanted done, 
some sort of monetary compensation 
being part of the reason I was 
applying for a position under him in 
the first place.  The required PhD 
course in bibliography at Toronto 
(1963) went from foul papers to 
book-making in the first week.  I 
believe the course was taught by 
Douglas Lockheed in the basement of 
Massey College, where he was the 
librarian the first year of its 
founding by the Queen's Governor 
General in Canada (again, 1963).  It 
was somewhere around that that time 
that I learned of the proposal of the 
reversible -- and discovery of the 
reversed -- order of two chapters in 
Henry James' The Ambassadors in the 
English and American editions.  I'd 
read the latter (but I think 
"corrected") Freshman Year under 
Daniel Howard at Kenyon.  Could one 
reverse the positions of the Embassy 
and the Doloneia in Iliad IX-X, I 
wondered?  (The Wings of the Dove was 
also required, but it didn't seem to 
have the particular problem.)   My 
colleague Jerome McGann revisited the 
Ambassadors issue some years ago, and 
argued that the original American 
order, as in the New York edition, was 
actually the correct one, even though 
the English order had generally been 
preferred, after the discovery of the 
difference became known.  What 
emerges, in any case, is not only the 
piteous work of mutability, but also a 
relatedness of book-making to 
narratology (as perhaps in the problem 
raised by the rubric to FQ V.xii).  I 
became more interested in these kinds 
of matters, about the same number of 
years ago, because the study of early 
book production (codices, as from 
around Antioch) has proven to be a 
vital part of understanding the 
emergence and character of the New 
Testament and canon generally -- but 
also because of my writing at that 
time chapters called "The Broken 
Law-Book" and "The Book of the 
Covenant" in _Like unto Moses: The 
Constituting of an Interruption_.  The 
Chair of Moses in printing and 
book-making spoken of here and below 
actually seems to exist at the 
University of Virginia, in the Rare 
Book School that migrated from 
Columbia to the first floor of our 
main library -- but again, many years 
ago.*  Might not happen now.  (There's 
a banker's speech about risk and 
collateral in committing money--the 
taxpayers' included--in the film The 
Best Years of Our Lives (1946) that 
repays listening to.)   - Jim N.

*(But to suggest that such antiquarian 
things can happen hereabouts more than 
once, I gratuitously note that The 
American Shakespeare Center in nearby 
Staunton a year ago mounted George 
Chapman's Blind Beggar of Alexandria 
for the first time in 400 years, and 
about a week and a half ago sponsored 
a production of the Hamlet-related 
_Brudersmord_ in the original German.)

  On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 22:43:09 -0500
  anne prescott <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:
> Thanks, David. I signed--and with 
>all the more passion (not that it 
> shows in a mere signature) because I 
>wish we had had some required 
> training in such matters when I was 
>in grad school. Elizabeth Donno  and 
>William Nelson gave me some tips and 
>I did make my way through a  long MS 
>translation of du Bartas at the 
>Folger, but some real training  in 
>paleography would have been great--or 
>simply having an expert.
>       Someday there will be a chair 
>in that quaint bit of antiquity 
> called printing and book-making. 
>Anne.
> 
> On Feb 3, 2010, at 11:37 AM, David 
>Wilson-Okamura wrote:
> 
>> I'm not on Facebook, but there is 
>>now an online petition:
>> http://www.petitiononline.com/spkcl10. 
>>I don't know if these do any
>> good.
>>
>> -- 
>> Dr. David Wilson-Okamura 
>>   http://virgil.org 
>>          [log in to unmask]
>> English Department          Virgil 
>>reception, discussion, documents,  &c
>> East Carolina University    Sparsa 
>>et neglecta coegi. -- Claude  Fauchet

[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121