Category Archives: Authorship

Watermarks and Their Impact on Copyright: A Zero Draft Response

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In the early days of book history, many of the books being printed were religious texts such as the Bible or the Mainz Psalter, which have no clear author.  So, rather than distinguish these texts by an author, they were distinguished by their printing house.  Fust and Schoffer, who worked alongside Gutenberg, distinguished the Mainz Psalter, their set of commonly sung church psalms, with a printer’s device, or “a logo representing the book’s house of origin” (Howard 34).  After Fust and Schoffer, Howard notes that many other printing houses followed suit.  This tradition may be traced back to the development of watermarks by printing houses in the earlier days of printing.  Howard notes that, over time, many printing houses developed watermarks to be printed on the paper created in that particular printing house.  This served to distinguish the work of each printing house from one another.  This seems to be, according to Howard, one of the first forms of ownership in book printing.

Had printing houses not felt the need to distinguish their works from one another, would publishing houses today feel the need to do the same?  Would copyright and ownership laws be any different?  These are the questions I aim to answer in my first paper of the portfolio.

Who said what?

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Although I agree that knowing the author of a piece of writing is important when attempting to discern the true meaning, I also believe that it can hinder one’s ability to discern a text’s importance. Take for instance this quote from Benjamin Franklin:

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

This quote really resonates with you, and coming from one of America’s forefathers it is a great tip indeed. However, that was not Benjamin Franklin. The above is a line from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And although the quote remains an excellent one, it no longer holds the same weight as if it were a direct quote from Benjamin Franklin. Here we can see the problems with believing a text to be from an author. We give words from historic or famous people a certain reverence that we would not otherwise. Who knows how many great works have been attributed, wrongly, to historically significant figures. As the old adage goes “don’t believe everything you read.”

The Correlation between Handwriting and Intelligence

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Last class we discussed how bad handwriting can make one seem unintelligent.  Aesthetics were essential to the credibility and social status of books and authors hundreds of years ago.  According to Howard, The monks in the fourteenth century as well as the ancient and medieval scribes were required to be flawless without a single defect.   Before the invention of computers and typewriters, I wonder how many gifted and intelligent authors weren’t recognized because of their mediocre handwriting.

To further investigate this possible correlation, I found a study conducted in 1971 on 103 college students to search for a correlation between handwriting, intelligence, and personality.  They studied 47 different types “handwriting variables” and how they could predict behavior and answers to questions based on knowledge.  The study found that “clues about personality could be educed from handwriting.”  Specifically, 6 of 16 handwriting factors could be predicted by 5 of 10 personality and intelligence factors.  I could understand a few personality factors correlating.  For example i find myself to be pretty impatient with a “just go for it” attitude.  I could see this being a result of my bad handwriting because I like to write as fast as possible, getting as many of my thoughts on the paper as I can while i think of them.  I dont believe their found correlation between handwriting and intelligence is strong enough to make an official statement concluding that they are actually correlated.

Authorship and Its Importance

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During last week’s discussions, I was struck by the idea that, for a period of time, the author of a given work was not deemed important.  This was discussed briefly in “The Death of the Author,” by Barthes, who, in part, argued that the author of work should not be important and, in fact, only hinders discussions of the work.  I have been taught in my studies that the author of a work is extremely important; it can help illuminate parts of a work by allowing critics to compare a work by a given author to other works by that same author.  In doing so, critics, teachers, and students of literature can find similarities and differences between a given author’s works and, at times, come to interesting conclusions that would not have been possible had the author been unknown, as Barthes would seem to have it.  In this class, I hope to learn more about how the “author” became an integral part of a work through social and technological changes in writing and publishing.

Comment from last week…

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In talking about authorship, I thought Foucault’s argument was interesting in that the name of an author almost gives a “flavor” or significance to whatever text it is associated with. For example, I remember reading a study where the a group was presented with poetry from two sources: more modern, local poets, and historical, famous poets, such as Dickinson. The authors names were removed from each of the poems, and the group was told to rate the poems based on how “good” they seemed. Surprisingly, the poems authored by little-known people were given better overall ratings than the poems authored by a well-known source. A few people even thought the poems authored by the more famous people were “bad.” It’s interesting to see how the name of an author can so influence people’s ideas of their work – if the same work, or poem, was published by, say, myself, and Emily Dickinson, her poem would be the newest sensation, while mine would simply be sitting in some obscure literary magazine, never to be read by the masses. An author’s name is indeed a powerful thing.

Welcome, and a challenge

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Dear Readers,

Welcome to our course blog for VaST 231!  We will use this space for sharing research, discussing course activities, thinking “out loud,” and publishing polished writing.

To get things started, I’m offering an opportunity to not buy a book.  I have an extra copy of Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print, one of our required course texts, and it could be yours.  Here’s how:

Create a post on this blog in which you 1.) include a link to a news article about the president’s Autopen and 2.) give a discussion question based on your reading of the article.

The author of the post with the most comments from classmates responding to the question will receive the book on the first day of class.

Watch for a course syllabus on our Moodle site next week, and in the meantime, enjoy your January, and I look forward to meeting everyone in a couple of weeks.