The Discovery and Dundee

You’re probably wondering why there is an image of a ship on this blog. Not only does it look like the ship I helped Malcolm (the NLS volunteer who is scanning the Chambers’s woodblocks) identify this morning (it was in a tray that was labelled 2nd edition…when it really was an illustration for the entry “rigging” in the 1st edition) but this ship was the first thing I saw when I left the train station in Dundee.

The ship is the Discovery, which took Captain Robert Falcon Scott to the South Pole for the last time, it was also the ship the rescued Captain Ernest H Shackleton and his men from Elephant Island. I went to Antarctica for my honeymoon so anything about polar exploration excites me.

After my flying brief meeting today at the museums (I finally got my NLS badge) I took the morning train from Edinburgh to go to the 21st Century Book Historian workshop held at the University of Dundee. I saw Tom Mole again, and got to hear his talk on Printing Cultures. He mentioned something really interesting. After 1800, the statistics for the printing of “all” books stop, because it grew so exponentially, there was no point in measuring it further. We didn’t get to have question and answer discussion because he finished just before the break, and I had to leave before the more general discussion at the end because I had to catch a train back to Sheffield. But it seems to me that this exponential rise coincides with the Enlightenment, as steam presses were not yet used with until about 1812, and it began with newspapers.

He also talked about the need to get away from the idea that print is being subsumed by a new technology. We are living in an age when we read different media, but that is always been the case. I think this ties in with what I wrote about in a previous post, about thoughts before about oral culture replaced by print culture. We are continously engaging in different forms of communication at the same time.