Finch Collins

@finchinthestacks.bsky.social

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PGR at the Uni of Manchester, hosted at Chetham’s Library | libraries and data, early modern books and bodies | posts my own

Screenshot of a dozen spellings of "bookseller" in the data cleaning interface of OpenRefine: bokkseller, bokseller, bookbinder, bookdealer, bookeseller, bookse;;er, bookseller,$dfl.1746-1749, bookseller, booksellers, boookseller, booseller, booskeller, bpokseller.
The book Print and Catholic Persistence in the Dutch Golden Age, by Elise Watson. The cover shows a colorful illustration of the Virgin and Child.
Front cover of Gay Comix #3 from 1982. An illustration in bright colors showing two bare-chested light-skinned men hitching a ride from two women, one with dark skin and coily hair, and the other with light skin and blond hair, driving a pickup truck.
A 19th-century book with a colored portrait with a signature under it facing the title page of "The Life of George Brummell, Esq.", vol. 1.
A black and white cat tucking into a small pile of wet cat food.
Black and white image of a c. 1900 book cover. The central figure is a nude man in a sculptural, sensual pose. "The world is mine whoever comes and goes" is written in a medieval font around the border. The caption reads: Figure 10: a. Michael Field, The World at Auction (Ballantyne, 1898), bound by Phoebe Anna Traquair.
Image from the 1611 title page of The Roaring Girle. A woodcut showing a person smoking a pipe and holding a sword on their shoulder. The figure wears breeches, buckled shoes with flowers on them, a ruffled collar, a brimmed hat, and a half cape.
A medieval library press viewed through a wooden gate. On the table is a book-shaped light with translucent books floating above it.
Summary The effort required to create a research plan might be seen to take some of the fun and adventure out of research. When Galileo turned his home-built telescope to the night sky in 1609, he had not planned to make a discovery that would change the course of science. But in Galileo's day, research was largely a private undertaking, mostly self-funded or funded by patrons.
Black and white cat sitting on a lap, with her paws tucked in. She looks content.
Three grazing cows, one brown and two black, halfway up a hill covered in tall bushes. The brown cow is looking at the camera.
Finch, a white person with short brown hair, standing in front of the John Rylands Library, a red stone building with an ornate fence and the library’s name in gold on the side. Finch is smiling at the camera.
Two people looking at an antique book in a glass display case.
Botanical watercolor of Jonesia asoca, with red and orange cluster of blossoms, dark green foliage, and a brown seed pod. It’s bound into a book from about 1800.
RBMS 2025 Queer Bibliography Meet-up! Thursday, June 26, 4 to 5 PM, at the Blue Orchid, 130 Court St., New Haven, Connecticut 06511.
1628 title page for the book “Heinrich Hofmanni[i] Professoris Mathematici in der Universitat Jehna, Teutscher Euclides…” The imprint is given as “Johan Weidners Witwe.”
Illustration of three dung beetles rolling their dung balls, done in a 19th-century style.
Machine-readable library cataloging (MARC) record for David Lyndsay, who lived and published as a man his whole life. The 375 field, for "Gender," reads "subfield a Females subfield a Males subfield 2 lcdgt," suggesting that Lyndsay is simultaneously male and female for his whole life, which is maybe gender goals?
Two gold-printed illustrations of a stylized mast, with three vertical segments scaffolding upwards connected by two vertical pieces. The righthand illustration is greyed along the path a current took through it. The second experiment was intended to show, in a stylized way, the effect of the lightning rod rising and falling as the jibs and rigging were adjusted.
Two sets of scattered shapes printed in gold leaf. The righthand set has a greyed area where a current ran through it. It demonstrates the course of electricity through a random array of disjointed metal surfaces.
References. Finch Collins, assistant curator of rare books at the Linda Hall Library, in Kansas City, Mo., introduced me to the books of William Snow Harris. You should have seen his face when I asked if we could apply a battery to one of the lightning experiments in the book. You can see the books in person by visiting the library. Or you can enjoy fully scanned copies of Observations on the Effects of Lightning on Floating Bodies and Three Experimental Illustrations from your computer.
Pair of gold-leafed illustrations showing a sailor on a wooden ship holding a chain. The chain loops below the sailor as he holds it. The illustration on the right has the gold leaf charred at the top of the chain, the sailor, and the bottom of the chain, with the loop untouched, illustrating the danger of running a chain up a ship's mast during a lightning storm.
Full-color anatomical illustration of the first layer of the lower back, picturing muscles, lymph nodes, and tendons, with the anatomical figure's hips tilted back in contrapposto, revealing the anus and testicles. The image is from "Anatomia universale" ("Back, Stratum Primum," tab. 2, Florence: 1833). The anatomist and author is Paolo Mascagni and the artist is Antonio Serrantoni. Credit to the National Library of Medicine.
Cover slide for the lecture "Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and Perverse Desire in the 18th- and 19th-Century Anatomical Image, or: The Epistemology of the Anatomical Closet," by Mike Sappol, Uppsala University, Feb. 2025. The title is rendered in 2 very 90s' fonts that are definitely from queer theory books that I haven't been able to identify. To the left of the title is a full-color anatomical image of a human face with veins and muscles exposed.
Book cover of Michael Sappol’s “Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700-1900.” The background is light pink, with a dark pink reproduction of an 18th-century anatomical illustration of two very buff men wrestling, evocative of Greco-Roman statuary. One of the men has his very well-defined rear to the viewer, while he lifts the other man, whose struggles reveal defined arm muscles.
Detail of large letterpress spread reading “Rhizoplaca Chrysoleuca.” The letters are printed in a speckled turquoise, orange, and grey, resembling lichen on a rock.
Portion of a tech report page. There is a diagram of some space equipment with labels too faded to be legible. In the top corner is a label, placed atop the book during scanning, that says, "original page is of poor quality." It's unclear if the label was added when the microfilm was made from the book or when the microfilm was scanned into a digital format.
Detail of an artist's book spread featuring large, serif font printed in turquoise with splatters of grey, orange, and white. The pattern resembles lichen. The text is cut off but reads "Rhizoplaca chrysoleuca."
17th-century diagram illustrating the degrees and spheres of life. The spheres of life are concentric circles reading, from inside out: the center of the world, the mineral sphere, the vegetable sphere of life, the sensitive sphere of life, the rational sphere of life, the intellectual sphere of life, and the divine essence or fountain of life. The degrees of life are represented as a hierarchy. At the top is G-d, then the archangels, then the lower angels, then heroes, then idiots, then apes, then insects, then zoophytes.
Two books open on supports. The first book is open to a large, full-color illustration of Ascidae arranged in a geometric array. The second book is open to a black page with colorful cut-paper illustrations of fungi.
A weird creature-object from a 1698 German book on mining. The caption reads “Der Schlund oder Speise-Köhre.” p. 84 of “Corpus juris et systema rerum…”
Dense title page of an early modern book. The title begins, “Artzneybuch köstlich fur mancherley…” and is printed in red and black ink. The bottom 2/3 of the page are a woodcut image of a man thinking, a woman gardening, and a young man pouring something from a vial onto his head.
Page from an old book with splotchy brown stains across it. A closer inspection reveals leaf fragments and seeds stuck to the paper.
Two pages of 16th-century German notes in two columns. To my eye, which is not trained in early modern German paleography, they seem to be recipes.
Sheet of paper covered with writing in a 16th-century German hand. The date at the bottom reads 1546.
Block carver's anagram, GAP, signed with an abstracted blockcutting knife: a short triangle blade and a handle.
Entry for Linda Hall Library copy of Copernicus's 1543 De revolutionibus, from Owen Gingerich's 2002 annotated census. Provenance: 1. (tpv, 196v), oval library stamp removed. 2. William H. Schab, Catalogue 43 (1957), item 147, $3600; bought from Hamill and Barker (Chicago) in June, 1959. Clean except for a few pencil underlinings in the prefaces, and "auctore Osiandro” in pencil in an early hand at the head of the anonymous introduction. A small string-and- double-disk device with early writing, rather similar to the hand of Johannes Schöner (1477-1547), has been laid in at f. 67v (see Figure 59). The instrument is intended to show the straightline motion produced by the double epicyclet, and it matches the nomenclature of Copernicus' figure [ref. 1]. The other notes on the paper concern the 1717-year motion of the anomaly of precession, and relate to III,2-7. 1. After the similarity to Schöner's hand had been noted, I discovered that Schab had advertised this as Schöner's copy on Ernst Zinner's authority; nevertheless, the identification seems quite problematic. See Owen Gingerich, "A Tusi Couple from Schöner's De revolutionibus?," Journal for the History of Astronomy, 15 (1984), 128-33. II.297 1566 Kansas City 2, Missouri. Linda Hall Library. QB41.C64.1566. Incised pigskin, XX. 260 x 169mm. "Copernico" in brown ink on the fore edge. The title page and f. ii are torn and scruffy, and the Narratio prima is lacking.
Said very rare folding plate in black and red ink. The diagram shows a sundial in the form of a poplar leaf illustrated with a series of intricately curving lines against a straight grid.
Title page of Peter Apian's Folium populi. The very long title is in red and black on the top. The bulk of the page is an image of two men. On the left, a man wearing a turban and robes holds up a model of epicycles. On the right, a man wearing early-16th-century European fur robes and a flat hat holds up a quadrant. Between them is Apian's newly invented sundial in the form of a poplar leaf.
Exhibition label for the 1543 first edition of Nicolaus Copernicus’ “De revolutionibus”, the first appearance of Copernicus’ heliocentric diagram.
Close up of a portion of a 16th century printed calendar page in red and black ink. In the center are three solar eclipses, represented by black circles. The grain of the woodblock used to print the circles is visible, knots and all.
An incunable with a very messy manicure (?) in the margin. It’s barely distinguishable from a squiggle.
Two hand press books next to each other. The title page on the left shows a mirrored transfer of the page on the right.
Two matching illustrations of a sailor atop a mast with a cord in his hands. The sailor and the cord are printed in gold. On the right, the gold has been shocked with electricity, showing that a lightning strike to the cord would result in the sailor's electrocution.
A large old book in Latin with text and a diagram of orbits. The paper is degraded to a medium brown, darkest around the printing ink and generally spotty. Very cheap paper because Kepler wouldn’t pay more even though he was employed by Rudolph II.
Center medallion on a tooled pigskin binding, very German. The medallion reads: Ioachimus Comes De Windhag Excelsi Re Giminis Consiliarius.
Inscription in curly handwriting where all the letters looks pretty similar to this librarian. “No 254,” an old library number, appears at the end.
A table of books on color. Clockwise from top: a 1920s manual on color layout and design; Goethe’s work on color perception (in German and English translation), with hand-colored plates of color spectra and perception; Russell Maret’s colored objects, with two pairs of colored glasses next to a neon acrylic slipcase and the blue book; and a fold-out plate in Philosophical Transactions depicting Buffon’s classification scheme.
A tuxedo cat curled up with the top of her head on the blanket somehow
Two books inside a cardboard box with foam supports. The books are labeled “2024.6 Copernicus” and “2024.7 Copernicus.”
Top of a book cart with assorted spines and boxes visible in a rainbow of colors. Highlights include Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius, a blue velvet spine, and a teeny tiny book with a metal spine.
Email with header "Re: [EXLIBRIS-L] tips for getting cigarette smell out of books?" and reply from "vjz@tavbooks.com" with just a shocked flushed emoji.
Top of a c. 1970s folder with typewritten stickers reading “Annalen der Physik, Ser. 4, Vol. 17 (1905); Einstein papers (3); Master copies” and “Requests for photocopies of these papers should be filled by using these master copies instead of the original volume.” Underneath is part of the master photocopy, in black and white, looking clear but also like a photocopy.
PowerPoint speaker note reading "Why did Lister do this?"
1687 section title page for Liber 3 of Historiae Conchyliorum. The title page is in Latin and framed by a decorative border. The engraving is signed “Susanna Anna L.f.Delin.” (Susanna and Anna drew this).
Close up of an illustration of a bird screaming.
After Hours with the Listers. September 11, 2024. 1:00 - 2:00 PM CT. Presented online by Linda Hall Library for Science, Engineering, and Technology.