#E1523D

Slonimsky and John Cage, Los Angeles 1987 “enmeshed in the twisted musical ribbon” of Slonimsky’s invention called “Mobius Strip Tease”. Photo by Margo Leavin

Serial Mappers’ Visual Mapping Blogroll
pdfs by name and by author

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel De Landa, 1997

calyx:

Raymond Queneau. First page from Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes, 1961

From Wikipedia: They are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book, a type of children’s book with which Queneau was familiar. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, so that there are 10¹⁴ (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. It would take some 200,000,000 years to read them all, even reading twenty-four hours a day. When Queneau ran into trouble while writing the poem(s), he solicited the help of mathematician Francois Le Lionnais, and in the process they initiated Oulipo.

Stéphane Mallarmé, (1842-1898), Jamais un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard : poème (épreuves d’imprimerie). - (Paris : A. Vollard, 2 juillet 1897). - 39 cm

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance) is a poem by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Its intimate combination of free verse and unusual typographic layout anticipated the 20th century interest in graphic design and concrete poetry. The poem was written by Mallarmé in 1897 and published in May of that same year in the magazine Cosmopolis, but was published in book form only in 1914, 16 years after the author’s death, based on his extensive notes and exacting instructions. The first edition was printed on July 10, 1914 by the Imprimerie Sainte Catherine at Bruges, in a private 60-copy issue. The poem is spread over 20 pages, in various typefaces, amidst liberal amounts of blank space. Each pair of consecutive facing pages is to be read as a single panel; the text flows back and forth across the two pages, along irregular lines.

The sentence that names the poem is split into three parts, printed in large capital letters on panels 1, 6, and 8. A second textual thread in smaller capitals apparently begins on the right side of panel 1, QUAND MÊME LANCÉ DANS DES CIRCONSTANCES ÉTERNELLES DU FOND D’UN NAUFRAGE (“Even when thrown under eternal circumstances from the bottom of a shipwreck”). Other interlocking threads in various typefaces start throughout the book. At the bottom right of the last panel is the sentence Toute Pensée émet un Coup de Dés (“Every Thought issues a Throw of Dice”).

Source

“Jamais un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard” : épreuves d’imprimerie d’ “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard”

From House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski.

BS Johnson a Novel in a box

Saporta’s Composition No 1, original French edition - 7

Marc Saporta’s Composition No 1 is one of the classic loose leaf novels. It was published in 1962, and an American translation was published in 1962.
The book was recently republished by Visual Edition

photo via: Jill

Talmud Berakhot
Venice 1520-1523, Printed by Daniel Bomberg
BM499 1520-1523 v.1, Fols. 46v-47r.

The Talmud is a sort of hypertext. It contains commentaries on the first five books of the Bible, and commentaries on the commentaries arranged in concentric rectangles around the page. Its many conflicting voices are arranged on the page in a kind of hypertext. So are scholarly footnotes, with their numbered links between the main body of the text and supplementary scholarship.

from: The Curse of Xanadu By Gary Wolf

img via: COJS

science:

Maya glyphs seen in Palenque, present day Mexico. The Maya writing system is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been deciphered. It’s a complex system composed both of logograms (symbols representing words or morphemes) and syllabograms (symbols representing syllables). It was usually written in columns and read in pairs of two letters, left to right, top to bottom.

The key to deciphering Maya writing was found in the writings of the 16th century Spanish bishop Diego de Landa, who is infamous for his cruelty to the Maya and his large-scale destruction of their culture and customs. Despite his fervent attempts to convert the Maya to European, Christian ways, he compiled a small “alphabet” of the Maya script. It was based on the false assumption that there was a more or less one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters, like in the Latin alphabet. Nevertheless, Landa’s alphabet has been important in the modern effort to figure out the way the Maya writing really works.

It’s an interesting historic fact that writing developed independently at least two times in history (possibly more), in Mesopotamia in Asia’s Fertile Crescent and later in Mesoamerica.

Voynich Manuscript

Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript—named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912—are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text. Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.

Based on the subject matter of the drawings, the contents of the manuscript falls into six sections:
1) botanicals containing drawings of 113 unidentified plant species;
2) astronomical and astrological drawings including astral charts with radiating circles, suns and moons, Zodiac symbols such as fish (Pisces), a bull (Taurus), and an archer (Sagittarius), nude females emerging from pipes or chimneys, and courtly figures;
3) a biological section containing a myriad of drawings of miniature female nudes, most with swelled abdomens, immersed or wading in fluids and oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules;
4) an elaborate array of nine cosmological medallions, many drawn across several folded folios and depicting possible geographical forms;
5) pharmaceutical drawings of over 100 different species of medicinal herbs and roots portrayed with jars or vessels in red, blue, or green, and
6) continuous pages of text, possibly recipes, with star-like flowers marking each entry in the margins. For a complete physical description and foliation, including missing leaves, see the Voynich catalog record.

via: Beineke Rare Book

Family tree from MS Oxford St John’s College 17

found: here

MS Oxford St John’s College 17

MS Oxford, St. John’s College 17 is a collection of texts and extracts from texts on mathematics, astronomy, time, calendar, alphabets and writing systems, medicine and the natural world, illustrated with tables and diagrams. The manuscript was produced c. 1110 in Thorney Abbey, Cambridgeshire. It is believed to be largely based on a miscellany assembled by Byrhtferth (writing c. 985-1020), an Anglo-Saxon scholar at the abbey of Ramsey, Huntingdonshire. This miscellany (of which St. John’s College 17 is believed to be a copy) was a chief source of his Enchiridion, a commentary on computus (astronomical science that grew around calendar). St. John’s College 17 is invaluable for understanding the structure of Enchiridion, the methods of work of scholars such as Byrthferth, and Anglo-Saxon science in general. The manuscript includes annals of Thorney Abbey, the works by Bede, Helperic, Byrhtferth’s Epilogus, or preface to the computistical texts in the anthology, and other scientific texts. Four folios were removed from the manuscript by the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton in about 1623. These leaves are now in the British Library where they form part of British Library MS Cotton Nero C.vii. They are included here, making the manuscript available in its complete form for the first time in centuries.

via: oxford digital library

Concordia in Boris / Horologium viatorium from MS Oxford St John’s College 17

found: here