Items where Year is 2014

The Arcadian Library, based in London, is one of the finest collections of books reflecting European interest in the Arab and Islamic worlds. Among its c.10,000 volumes are many copies with important provenances and fine bindings. In this companion volume to no. 8 in the series, six distinguished authorities on the history of book-collecting and the ownership and use of books, and the history of bookbinding, deal with significant aspects of the Library's holdings from these varied perspectives.The scholarly essays in this volume are complemented by a very large number of specially commissioned photographs, making available a wealth of comparative evidence and new examples of particular bindings, details of decoration, inscriptions and marks of ownership.

Paul Gough is interested in drawing in-between places, liminal zones, waste grounds, empty places that were once something and now have been allowed to lapse back into their habitual shape. Look at his drawings of the former airbase at Greenham Common, or the ash-heaps of the old north Somerset coalfield, the abandoned village of Tyneham or the forlorn gullies on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They are powerful evocations of absence and embedded memory. Writer Marion Shoard coined these unloved, unseen and often unexplored spaces as the ‘edge land’, a mysterious hinterland of brick piles and rubbish tips, derelict industrial plant and ragged landfill, forlorn filling stations and scruffy allotments, abandoned ordnance lying amidst rogue plants.

Thirty years ago, the naturalist Richard Mabey in his book ‘The Unofficial Countryside ‘, had also opened our eyes to the vitality of these unkempt places. He, however, found little to cherish and celebrate in these wasted hinterlands. Instead he marvelled at the resilience of nature in such abject conditions, its refusal to be ground down by toxic contagion.

In exploring the mnemonic role of gardens, this paper will first focus on the value of gardens as both a palliative for melancholy, as liminal enclaves, and as carefully constructed surrogate memory systems. Their importance as places for reflection and recovery is examined through the lens of post-war Flanders, with a brief examination of the immense task required to recover the land from the trauma of the First World War. The paper then examines the manner in which pilgrims and veterans took their personal narratives to the battle zones. With so little to see, the bereaved had to reclaim lost names from the lost land; this process is explored through the work of the gardeners who had to ‘plant’ memory and to architects who designed vast monuments to enumerate those who had simply vanished without trace. Noting Fabian Ware’s transformational contribution to this process, this paper examines how the sites of battle became named and reclaimed, how shallow ditches and slight mounds were rendered sites of reverence, and how garden cemeteries have become the epicentres of ritual remembering. Two ‘mirror’ sites of national memory are examined – the ‘Anzac’ headland in Turkey, and the Memorial parkland and gardens of Shrine Reserve in central Melbourne, both hallowed places strewn with symbolic trees, designed gardens and abundant rhetorical ‘topoi’. They are also places where the seed and soil of distant battlefields has been mingled with the national landscape, where the front has literally been transplanted to another country. The paper concludes by suggesting that the garden memorial is an essential component in the future of remembering, creating open and inclusive spaces which rely on participation and careful nurturing to ensure that memory stays alert, relevant, and passed on from generation to generation.

Through our first repeated interaction with books, we come to recognize elements recurring in these experiences, such as: verso and recto pages, covers, spine, etc., as well as relations between these elements (front/back, part/whole, etc.). Such interaction enables us to construct abstracted mental representations of the book, which are simpler than any single physical instantiation, but indicative of many other books. This schematization provides the basis for a range of structures and pathways that can be linked, or mapped, onto text and imagery in both conventional and unconventional ways. Through metaphor and metonymy basic concepts evoked by schematic book-form can link with words and images to make new meaning. Therefore, rather than thinking of the book page as simply a substrate onto which the printed word is inscribed, it can be understood, for example, as a slice of time and/or space, and such an understanding provides opportunities for making associations with text and imagery. Consequently, the book is not a neutral carrier of meaning but can prompt the reader to think in particular ways about how information is presented. This essay will explore the book-form as a source of schematic structure that can be linked and blended with other elements to instantiate texts in diverse and creative ways. Using ideas from conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory, it will focus on one metaphorical understanding of the book: book is tunnel, to highlight possibilities for integrating book-form with book texts.

The tunnel-book is a format that has been explored by book artists in which apertures are cut into pages suggesting movement through, rather than around pages. This essay discuses a book produced as part of an ongoing PhD project that uses the same understanding of cutting through the book but instead seeks to evoke this understanding through imagery and the conventional codex rather than through piercing the book page and utilizing the tunnel-book format. An account is provided of how conceptions of moving through a tunnel are projected onto experiences of moving through a book and the ways in which these domains of experience can additionally be blended with other metaphorical journeys, in this case involving a progression through a course of postgraduate study.

These two chapters explore the development of two products and the reasons why they have acquired iconic status.

The Bic Cristal pen has been with us for more than sixty years. When launched, an average of 10,000 were sold daily in France. Now many millions are sold daily in more than 160 countries. Few brands share such logevity or geographical penetration, and no other pen has sold in such abundance. Its iconicity is further evidenced by its addition to leading museum collections,including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001, and the Pompidou Centre, Paris,in 2006, and its inclusion in such design compendiums as 'Phaidon Design Classics', 2006. Significcant also is its use as inspiration for the design of other artefacts, as in the lamp illustrated.

The Polypropylene chair was immeditately recogised as something special. Within weeks of its launch in April 1963 the 'Architects' Journal' reported: 'This excellent solution to the multipurpose side chair will certainly prove to be the most significant development in British mass produced design since the war'. The same year it won the Duke of Edinburgh's Award for elegant design, a first for a plastic product, and was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the UK's national museum of art and design. Nonetheless, no one could have foreseen its prolific future: that it would come to be manufactured globally in mulitiple millions, that it would be used in such diverse locations as Mexico's Olympic stadium and in Botswana in dug-out tree trunk canoes; that it would be widely copied and that it would still be in production and seen as 'of today', fifty years later. Its literal stamp of approval was its appearance on a Royal Mail first class stamp in a 2009 series, British Design Classics.

Since the 1970s, more products have been made of plastics than any other materials group. Thus all museums with 20th and 21st century collections whether focused on art or science contain large numbers of objects made of or with components of plastics. However the plastics material group contains a very large number of different types of materials that are more or less vulnerable, react differently to the environment and degrade in different ways. As a result different plastics need different conditions. These are important because after manufacture they are the single most important contributor to a plastics object’s life expectancy.

Preservation of plastics remains an underdeveloped area in conservation. There have been significant international research projects relating to plastics preservation including the EU-funded PopART (2008-12) and the Getty’s on-going Preservation of Plastics but these are aimed at specialist plastics conservators from scientific backgrounds. Creation of this resource required the identification of ways of translating this research into day-to-day curatorial practice. It involved a series of collaborative stages with the participation of sample potential users, including an online survey; a seminar; creation of the resource, including 18 case studies detailing the degradation of specific objects made of different plastics common in heritage collections with achievable guidelines for their care; and peer review of the resource.

This resource was developed to meet a need formulated by members of the Plastics Subject Specialist Network, drawn from more than 50 UK universities, museums and other heritage bodies. Web rather than paper publication makes it more readily available, provides ongoing access to the seminar papers by video, and allows users to take the path through it that best suits their needs. It is already a primary point of reference for museums and galleries and will, in time, contribute significantly to enhanced care of heritage collections.

Across the academy, scholars are debating the question of what bearing scientific inquiry has upon the humanities. The latest addition to the AFI Film Readers series, Cognitive Media Theory takes up this question in the context of film and media studies. This collection of essays by internationally recognized researchers in film and media studies, psychology, and philosophy offers film and media scholars and advanced students an introduction to contemporary cognitive media theory―an approach to the study of diverse media forms and content that draws upon both the methods and explanations of the sciences and the humanities. Exploring topics that range from color perception to the moral appraisal of characters to our interactive engagement with videogames, Cognitive Media Theory showcases the richness and diversity of cognitivist research. This volume will be of interest not only to students and scholars of film and media, but to anyone interested in the possibility of a productive relationship between the sciences and humanities.