Quotes About Manuscripts

These men were manuscript hunters, teachers, scribes, scholars, librarians, notaries, priests, and booksellers—bookworms who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and tried to imagine and to forge a different world: one of patriotic service, of friendship and loyalty, of refined pleasures, of wisdom and right conduct, of justice, heroism, and political freedom; a world in which a life in a better society could be lived in the fullest and most satisfying

Italians were the largest producers, as indeed they had been for more than a century. The bibliographer Victor Scholderer once speculated that the printing press was invented and perfected in Germany because manuscripts were scarcer and less easily accessible in northern Europe than in Italy, prompting Gutenberg to contemplate a new and different means of producing books. 7

including the partial copy of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things—unseen by scholars for more than five hundred years—and eight previously unknown speeches of Cicero.

cartolai offered far more extensive services than just selling paper and parchment: they produced and sold manuscripts. Customers could buy secondhand volumes from them or hire them to have a manuscript copied by a scribe, bound in leather or board, and, if they wished, illuminated—decorated with illustrations or designs in paint and gold leaf.

Since books were not mass produced, each of these two hundred manuscripts was slightly different from the others, the product of an individual scribe at a particular point in time copying out the product of another individual scribe, and so forth. Manuscripts were often unreliable because of the errors and inaccuracies introduced over the centuries and then compounded as one flawed manuscript begat an even worse version.

Petrarch complained that, so sloppy were the scribes of his day, and so full of errors were the manuscripts they produced, "an author would not recognize his own work." 7

It was all too easy for errors in transcription to creep into manuscripts. To produce new copies, scribes needed to decipher handwriting that was sometimes several hundred years old and in a style very different from the one they knew.

this series of biographies quickly turned his interests and attention from the visual arts to the vibrant intellectual life depicted in Vespasiano's pages: from paintings and statues to manuscripts and libraries. The journey through the century, with this well-connected, name-dropping bookseller as a guide, proved exhilarating. Vespasiano was, Burckhardt declared, "an authority of the first order for Florentine culture in the fifteenth century," 7

Most of the codices were to be secured to their desks by chains attached to iron rails, preventing readers from making off with the valuable volumes.

Seneca the Younger, who condemned collectors for caring more about the outsides of books than their contents, and for using books "not as the tools of learning, but as decorations for the dining-room." Petrarch had likewise criticized collectors who hoarded manuscripts as ornaments for their homes. "There are those who decorate their rooms with furniture devised to decorate their minds," he sniffed, "and they use books as they use Corinthian vases." 36

Tell me, Channon, he said suddenly, do you like teaching? Some days. But it's the research I like best. I love digging through old manuscripst and trying to piece together the past. He gave a short, half laugh. No offense, but that sound incredibly boring. I imagine dragon slaying is much more action-oriented. Yes, it is. Every moment is completely unpredictable.

It is important to stress that carving on wood or stone is a fairly laborious process and that the kinds of things recorded using the runic alphabets tended to be short and of a different nature from texts that can be easily written only in manuscripts.

There are too many people in the world as it is, but the supply of ancient manuscripts is severely limited.

You're thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all. Failure is a teacher – a harsh one, perhaps, but the best. You say you have a desk full of rejected manuscripts? That's great! Every one of those manuscripts was rejected for a reason. Have you pulled them to pieces looking for that reason? You've got to put failure to work for you. That's where you'll find success. On the far side of failure.

Now in the privacy of your own home, you had the text correct, complete, and whole—pure and uncorrupted, as Renaissance scholars liked to say. The era of having to rely on untrustworthy handwritten manuscripts, or some medieval glossator who spent a lifetime trying to make sense of an often muddled or even counterfeit manuscript of Aristotle, was over.

I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.

He is a brilliant man, said Miss Doggett. She helped him a good deal in his work, I think. Mrs. Bonner says that she even learned to type so that she could type his manuscripts for him. 'Oh, then he had to marry her,' said Miss Morrow sharply. 'That kind of devotion is worse than blackmail - a man has no escape from that.

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

To be perfectly honest the old habits, specifically deadlines, still very much inform what I do. I am brutally disciplined about getting manuscripts in on time.

even though the orthodox claimed that this kind of manipulation of texts was a heretical activity, in the manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today almost all the evidence points in the other direction, showing that it was precisely orthodox scribes who modified their texts in order to make them conform more closely with orthodox theological interests.

There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

In one of my earlier books, Misquoting Jesus, I discuss the fact that we do not have the original copy of Luke, or Mark, or Paul's writings, or any of the early Christian texts that make up the New Testament.

If communities of believers obtained copies of various Christian books in circulation, how did they acquire those copies? Who was doing the copying? And most important for the ultimate subject of our investigation, how can we (or how could they) know that the copies they obtained were accurate, that they hadn't been modified in the process of reproduction?

One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text.