Books and Essays
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Wikipedia-Article "Books"
- This page is about bound sheets of paper. For the graph theory concept, see Book (graph theory). For the musical theater meaning, see Book (musical theater).
A book is a collection of leaves of paper, parchment or other material, bound together along one edge within covers. A book is also a literary work or a main division of such a work. A book produced in electronic format is known as an e-book.
In library and information science, a book is called a monograph to distinguish it from serial publications such as magazines, journals or newspapers.
Publishers may produce low-cost, pre-proof editions known as galleys for promotional purposes, such as generating reviews in advance of publication. Galleys are usually made as cheaply as possible, since they are not intended for sale.
A lover of books is usually referred to as a bibliophile, a bibliophilist, or a philobiblist, or, more informally, a bookworm.
A book may be studied by students in the form of a book report. It may also be covered by a professional writer as a book review to introduce a new book.
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History
The oral account (word of mouth, tradition, hearsay) is the oldest carrier of messages and stories. When writing systems were invented in ancient civilizations, clay tablets or parchment scrolls were used as, for example, in the library of Alexandria.
Scrolls were later phased out in favor of the codex, a bound book with pages and a spine, the form of most books today. The codex was invented in the first few centuries A.D. or earlier. Some have said that Julius Caesar invented the first codex during the Gallic Wars. He would issue scrolls folded up accordion style and use the "pages" as reference points.
Before the invention and adoption of the printing press, almost all books were copied by hand, which made books comparatively expensive and rare. During the early Middle Ages, when only churches, universities, and rich noblemen could typically afford books, they were often chained to a bookshelf or a desk to prevent theft. The first books used parchment or vellum (calf skin) for the pages, which was later replaced with paper.
In the mid 15th century books began to be produced by block printing in western Europe (the technique had been known in the East centuries earlier). In block printing, a relief image of an entire page was carved out of wood. It could then be inked and used to reproduce many copies of that page. Creating an entire book, however, was a painstaking process, requiring a hand-carved block for each page. Also, the wood blocks were not terribly durable and could easily wear out or crack.
The oldest dated book printed by the method of block printing is The Diamond Sutra. There is a wood block printed copy in the British Library which, although not the earliest example of block printing, is the earliest example which bears an actual date. It was found in 1907 by the archaeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein in a walled-up cave near Dunhuang, in northwest China. The colophon, at the inner end, reads: Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong [i.e. 11th May, CE 868 ].
The Chinese inventor Pi Sheng made moveable type of earthenware circa 1045, but we have no surviving examples of his printing. He embedded the characters, face up, in a shallow tray lined with warm wax. He laid a board across them and pressed it down until all the characters were at exactly the same level. When the wax cooled he used his letter tray to print whole pages.
It was not until Johann Gutenberg popularized the printing press with metal moveable type in the 15th century that books started to be affordable and widely available. This upset the status quo, leading to remarks such as "The printing press will allow books to get into the hands of people who have no business reading books." It is estimated that in Europe about 1,000 various books were created per year before the invention of the printing press.
With the rise of printing in the fifteenth century, books were published in limited numbers and were quite valuable. The need to protect these precious commodities was evident. One of the earliest references to the use of bookmarks was in 1584 when the Queen's Printer, Christopher Barker, presented Queen Elizabeth I with a fringed silk bookmark. Common bookmarks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were narrow silk ribbons bound into the book at the top of the spine and extended below the lower edge of the page. The first detachable bookmarks began appearing in the 1850's and were made from silk or embroidered fabrics. Not until the 1880's, did paper and other materials become more common.
The following centuries were spent on improving both the printing press and the conditions for freedom of the press through the gradual relaxation of restrictive censorship laws. See also intellectual property, public domain, copyright. In mid-20th century, Europe book production has risen to over 200,000 titles per year.
Structure of book
- Main article: Book design
Depending of book's purpose or type (i.e. Encyclopedia , Dictionary, Textbook, Monograph) structure could vary, but some common (traditional) structural parts of the book usually are:
- Book cover (hard or soft, fancy-looking, with illustration)
- Title page (shows title and author, often with small illustration or icon)
- Metrics page
- (sometimes - dedication page)
- Table of contents
- Preface
- Text of contents of that book
- Index (publishing)
- Back cover (hard or soft, fancy-looking, with illustration)
Conservation issues
In the mid-19th century, papers made from pulp (cellulose, wood) were introduced because it was cheaper than cloth-based papers (i.e. vellum or parchment). Pulp based paper made cheap novels, cheap school text books and cheap books of all kinds available to the general public. This paved the way for huge leaps in the rate of literacy in industrialised nations and eased the spread of information during the Second Industrial Revolution.
However, this pulp paper contained acid that causes a sort of slow fires that eventually destroys the paper from within. Earlier techniques for making paper used limestone rollers which neutralized the acid in the pulp. Libraries today have to consider mass deacidification of their older collections. Books printed from 1850-1950 are at risk; more recent books are often printed on acid-free or alkaline paper.
The proper care of books takes into account the possibility of chemical changes to the cover and text. Books are best stored in reduced lighting, definitely out of direct sunlight, at cool temperatures, and at moderate humidity. Books, especially heavy ones, need the support of surrounding volumes to maintain their shape. It is desirable for that reason to group books by size.
Collections of books
Maintaining a library used to be the privilege of princes, the wealthy, monasteries and other religious institutions, and universities. The growth of a public library system in the United States started in the late 19th century and was much helped by donations from Andrew Carnegie. This reflected classes in a society: The poor or the middle class had to share most books through a public library or by other means while the rich could afford to have a private library built into their homes.
The advent of paperback books in the 20th century led to an explosion of popular publishing. Paperback books made owning books affordable for many people. Paperback books often included works from genres that had previously been published mostly in pulp magazines. As a result of the low cost of such books and the spread of bookstores filled with them (in addition to the creation of a smaller market of extremely cheap used paperbacks) owning a private library ceased to be a status symbol for the rich.
While a small collection of books, or one to be used by a small number of people, can be stored in any way convenient to the owners, a large or public collection requires a catalogue and some means of consulting it. Often codes or other marks have to be added to the books to speed the process of relating them to the catalogue and their correct shelf position. Where these identify a volume uniquely, they are referred to as "call numbers". In large libraries this call number is usually based on a Library classification system. The call number is placed inside the book and on the spine of the book, normally a short distance before the bottom, in accordance with institutional or national standards such as ANSI/NISO Z39.41 - 1997. This short (7 pages) standard also establishes the correct way to place information (such as the title or the name of the author) on book spines and on "shelvable" book-like objects such as containers for DVDs, video tapes and software.
In library and booksellers' catalogues, it is common to include an abbreviation such as "Crown 8vo" to indicate the paper size from which the book is made.
When rows of books are lined on a bookshelf, bookends are sometimes needed to keep them from slanting.
Keeping track of books
One of the earliest and most widely known systems of cataloguing books is the Dewey Decimal System. This system has fallen out of use in some places, mainly because of a Eurocentric bias and other difficulties applying the system to modern libraries. However, it is still used by most public libraries in America. Another popular classification system is the Library of Congress system, which is more popular in university libraries.
All books of the world are said to constitute the Gutenberg Galaxy, or, to use a term coined by eBook author Rick Sutcliffe in the early 1980s, the Metalibrary.
For the entire 20th century most librarians concerned with offering proper library services to the public (or a smaller subset such as students) worried about keeping track of the books being added yearly to the Gutenberg Galaxy. Through a global society called the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) they devised a series of tools such as the International Standard Book Description or ISBD.
Besides, each book is specified by a International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, which is unique to every book produced by participating publishers, world wide. It is managed by the ISBN Society. It has four parts. The first part is the country code, the second the publisher code, and the third the title code. The last part is a checksum or a check digit and can take values from 0-9 and X (10). The EAN Barcodes numbers for books are derived from the ISBN by prefixing 978, for Bookland and calculating a new check digit.
Many government publishers, in industrial countries as well as in developing countries, do not participate fully in the ISBN system. They often produce books which do not have ISBNs. In certain industrialized countries large classes of commercial books, such as novels, textbooks and other non-fiction books, are nearly always given ISBNs by publishers, thus giving the illusion to many customers that the ISBN is an international and complete system, with no exceptions.
Transition to digital format
The term e-book (electronic book) in the broad sense is an amount of information like a conventional book, but in digital form. It is made available through internet, CD-ROM, etc. In the popular press the term eBook sometimes refers to a device such as the Sony Librie EBR-1000EP, which is meant to read the digital form and present it to a human being.
Throughout the 20th century, libraries have faced an ever-increasing rate of publishing, sometimes called an information explosion. The advent of electronic publishing and the Internet means that much new information is not printed in paper books, but is made available online e.g. through a digital library, on CD-ROM, or in the form of e-books.
On the other hand, though books are nowadays produced using a digital version of the content, for most books such a version is not available to the public (i.e. neither in the library nor on internet), and there is no decline in the rate of paper publishing. There is an effort, however, to convert books that are in the public domain into a digital medium for unlimited redistribution and infinite availability. The effort is spearheaded by Project Gutenberg combined with Distributed Proofreaders.
There have also been new developments in the process of publishing books. Technologies such as print on demand have made it easier for less known authors to make their work available to a larger audience.
Related articles and lists
- Author
- Bookbinding
- Bookselling
- List of books by title
- List of books by author
- List of books by genre or type
- List of books by award or notoriety
- List of books by year of publication
- List of banned books
- List of fictional books
- Metasearch engine sites search multiple online bookstore sites. Some require separate searches for new or used books.
- Online bookstores
Online book databases and lists
- The Internet Book Database of Fiction
- Internet Book List
- ISBNdb.com, books database built from libraries data
External links
Wikipedia-Article "Essays"
- For the town in France, see Essay, Orne.
An essay is a short work that treats a topic from an author's personal point of view, often taking into account subjective experiences and personal reflections upon them.
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Form and content
Essays are usually brief works in prose, but works in verse are sometimes dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711) and An Essay on Man (1733-1734) and many voluminous works refer to themselves as essays (e.g. John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)).
Virtually anything may be the subject of an essay. Topics may include actual happenings, issues of human life, morality, ethics, religion and many others. An essay is, by definition, a work of non-fiction, and is often expository.
The essay as literary genre
The word essay derives from the French essai ('attempt'), from the verb essayer, 'to try' or 'to attempt'. The first author to describe his works as essays was, unsurprisingly, French: Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales [Moral works] into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued to revise previously published essays as well as composing new ones.
Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Notable essayists are legion. They include Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Bagehot, George Orwell, and E.B. White.
It is very difficult to define the genre of essay, but the following remarks by Aldous Huxley, regarded in his day as a leading practitioner of the genre, may be of interest:
- "Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays, "Preface").
The essay as a pedagogical tool
In recent times, essays have become one of the chief tools by which colleges judge the mastery and comprehension of material, and they are sometimes used as a part of the criteria by which the student body is selected as well. Academic essays are usually more formal and present the writer's own views as well as the comprehensive analysis of what has previously been written on a topic.
Many students' first exposure to the genre is the "five-paragraph essay": a highly structured form requiring an introduction presenting the thesis statement); three body paragraphs, each of which presents an idea to support the thesis; and a conclusion, which restates the thesis and summarizes the supporting points. The form is controversial. It does allow the student writer to put some structure in place, at a stage when the main concern is mastering more "tactical level" issues such as unified paragraphs, transitions, thesis statements, and so forth, but its simplistic structure severely limits the author's range of expression.
Other most common types of essays used for academic purposes include argumentative essays, definition essays, compare/contrast essays, cause/effect essays, etc.
From the point of view of the subject area the most common academic essays would be historical essay, philosophical essay, literary essay, etc.
Non-literary essays
Music
In the realm of music, composer Samuel Barber wrote a set of "Essays for Orchestra," relying on the form and content of the music to guide the listener's ear, rather than any extra-musical plot or story.
Film
Film can also be used to produce the more subjective reflective attitude characteristic of essays. Important essay film makers include Chris Marker, Guy Debord, Raoul Peck and Harun Farocki. One working definition of the essay film is "documentary laced with self-portrait." Theoretical approaches to this genre can be found in the works of Michel Beaujour, Raymond Bellour and Roland Barthes. Other filmmakers who have been active in the essay film are Orson Welles, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Hartmut Bitomski, Alexander Kluge, Jem Cohen, Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Kramer. Perhaps the original essay filmmaker was Dziga Vertov.
Photography
A photographic essay is an attempt to cover a topic by a series of photographs.
Philately
In philately, an essay is a prototype for a proposed stamp. In contrast, a proof is the prototype of an accepted stamp. Both, essays and proofs are rare, as usually just a few are produced. They are not sold publicly, but handled by insiders or held in postal museums or collections. Possibly the first essay of a stamp not accepted is the Prince Consort Essay from 1850.
Numismatics
A numismatic essay is a coin prototype proposed for general sale or circulation.
Related terms
References
Theodor W. Adorno, The Essay as Form in: Theodor W. Adorno, The Adorno Reader, Blackwell Publishers 2000
Beaujour, Michel. Miroirs d'encre: Rhétorique de l'autoportrait. Paris: Seuil, 1980. [Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. Trans. Yara Milos. New York: NYU Press, 1991].
Bensmaïa, Reda. The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text. Trans. Pat Fedkiew. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987.
External links
- How to write an essay - A short guide for university students by David Gauntlett
- Sample Essays Various topics.
- The Age of the Essay by Paul Graham
- Guidance on Essay Writing
- Essay eTexts at Project Gutenberg
- Custom Essays and Papers
- SlashDOC Essays and Research Papers - a collection of free and public domain essays
- Reference Generator - generates references in the correct form
- Essay Writing Tips - guides for writing different types of essays
- English Tutoring and Writing Center - guide to different kinds of essays
- Educational Essays: Custom Writing Resources - general academic writing resources