Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Page or Leaf

What is the difference between a page and a leaf?

I was thinking of the word leaf and how it is not often used in relation to books and metaphors that we use in screen-media.

The page of a book is the surface on which words and pictures are presented. The leaf refers to the actual sheet. A leaf will have two pages - one on each side. We say in the English idiom:

Turn a new leaf

To mean, starting again in a positive way. Of course, this means turning two pages. Screens are only one sided but there are a variety of ebook systems that simulate the turning of a page. I wrote an article about this a while ago, so I make a link to it here.

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Wednesday, August 02, 2006

The Print Clock

I was directed towards this web site by Edward Tufte’s Ask E.T.

S.Blair Hedges is the Professor of Biology at The Pennsylvania State University and he has created the Print Clock - a web page describing how to date prints and old books from previous centuries.

One of my reasons for following this link is that one of the examples that Professor Hedges uses is the Renaissance book, Bordone’s Isolario. This arouses my interest in islands of course and in particular the reminder that Books of islands (isolarii) were a popular literary form in Renaissance Italy. This author has already made reference to Cristoforo Buondelmonte, Incipt liber Insularum Arcipelagi here.

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