Luke Judge

In her book, “Too much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age,” Blair, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, examines the painstaking processes early scholars undertook for the sake of knowledge.

With the spread of paper in the late middle ages, then of printing after 1453, scholarship involved ever more reading: printed books, manuscripts, and letters. Scholars relied on note taking to retain what was useful from their reading. some collections of notes, organized with finding devices, were published as reference books, in which readers could find the best bits from many books they wouldn’t have the time or accessibility to read.

Blair set out to examine these early printed “reference books” — even though that term didn’t exist as such at the time, she notes — “to understand how they shaped readers’ practices of reading and conceptions of the organization of knowledge.”

“too much to Know” grew out of Blair’s first book, “The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science,” which examined a single work of encyclopedic natural philosophy of 1596. The research extended over a decade, and took her to “many wonderful rare book libraries in France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., and of course at Houghton,” she said.

“one of the manuscripts I studied, a collection of unpublished medical remedies in the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich, can tell us a lot about how these large works were made.

The pages that would have been sent to the printer were filled with slips of paper that were cut and pasted under headings” arranged by disease, said Blair. that manuscript was a decoupage of “all kinds of texts: from manuscripts, including reading notes, personal observations … and even from printed books written by others.”

Other published compilations were made using similar methods, including one eight-volume behemoth containing more than 10 million words.

All research, in general, said Blair, “certainly was painstaking” for early modern scholars.

“They advocated studying at all times,” she said. “They worked by candlelight early in the morning, and deep into the night, sharpening quills by knife, and drying the ink afterward with a sprinkling of sand. everything was written out by hand, and if you wanted to store information in more than one place, or include it in a letter, you had to copy it out that many times.”

Many scholars complained of damage to their eyes, and they “relied on letters to communicate with one another that could easily take weeks to get from one European city to another, and they constantly fretted about the mail not getting through at all.”

Blair notes that the challenges regarding information today are unprecedented in many ways — for example, in the scale of accumulation and its permeation of all areas of life. “but this book shows how earlier generations of scholars and students faced similar challenges of overload, with a similar range of despair and enthusiasm, in a quite different historical context,” she writes.

“They devised many thoughtful solutions, some of which are still familiar to us today and others that remind us that some of our working methods will no doubt seem strangely obsolete in due course, too.”

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From conception to the shipping of the finished product, a book has to pass many stages before completion. Publishers add value to an author’s labor of love and keep profits in mind while aiming to fulfill their cultural duty at the same time. The steps below illustrate the most important services a publisher provides.

Acquisitions

The acquisitions process deals with solicited and unsolicited projects. For a more detailed description, read about the responsibilities of an acquisitions editor

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The Wagner tuba is a rare brass instrument. Wagner invented it to get a new sound he wanted, combining elements of a tenor tuba and a french horn. The resulting instrument is played by horn players, who sometimes have trouble playing it well!

History of Wagner’s “Little Tuba”In 1853, Richard Wagner was working on the start of his Ring Cycle. He wanted a way to depict the glorious golden castle of the gods, Valhalla, in sound.

First, he thought about using trombones for the Valhalla motif. But they didn’t sound quite right. He then had an idea for a noble sound that would evoke old Norse legends in his audience’s mind.

Wagner visited Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone) in Paris, and liked the inventor’s “saxhorns” so much that he decided to use them for his Valhalla theme. But later he couldn’t find any saxhorns in the military bands in Germany.

So he searched for something else. It needed to be dignified, but also soft and dark. There were already quite a few experimental brass instruments around, but none of them were quite right for him. What to do, what to do…

He also realized that there was a gap in the timbre (the unique sound of an instrument) between the trombones and the horns. So he decided to do explore a bit on his own, and kill two birds with one stone.

He could fill the gap, which would also get him the right sound he needed to illustrate Valhalla. The whole brass section would be blended in the process. His brass palette would be a rich, continuous range, unbroken from the deep rumbling bass tubas to the high-pitched trumpets.

This would give him a hugely powerful sound for his epic drama, although he actually used the brass section very sparingly in his operas.

It took another two decades for Wagner to get enough money together and finally manufacture his “little tuba”. In the end, he created the brand new Wagner tuba, an odd mix of a tenor tuba and a french horn (though definitely more of a french horn).

The instrument has a pure, distant, and majestic sound, but is also capable of being deep, dark, and morbid. Perfect for depicting the evil in the Ring Cycle!

Here’s the Valhalla theme, played by four Wagner tubas. This is the noble sound that Wagner was after from the beginning:

The instrument is basically a horn (it’s played the same way) except that it’s wider and longer, so of course the sound is different. The bell (where the sound comes out) also points up into the air, instead of down like on a horn. Much better for hearing its majestic resonance!

Wagner only managed to get his special instrument made very shortly before the premiere of the Ring Cycle, after asking Hans Richter (the conductor of the Ring Cycle premiere and a horn player) to get them constructed in Berlin.

Because of this, he had to make it playable for musicians who could already play a similar instrument. Horn players were the obvious choice, since the Wagner tuba is so similar, and even uses the same mouthpiece:

In the Ring Cycle, which is the only piece that Wagner used his little invention in, the composer uses it in a group of four. These four players are the same ones that play horns numbers 5-8 in the brass lineup (yes, Wagner asks for 8 horns!). So half the time these players play Wagner tubas, and the rest of the time they play normal french horns.

The instrument is actually famously tricky to play, since it likes to be erratic. Horn players find it quirky and fussy. Some don’t like the challenge!

I think it’s a great example of how inventive a musician and thinker Wagner was.

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