Designing the space of linguistic knowledge: A typographic analysis of sixteenth-century dictionaries

Scrutinizing the ways in which early printed reference works were designed is a way of bringing typography and book history into the domain of library and information science. The core subject of this discipline is the concept of user-oriented organization of knowledge; it has a close connection to information-seeking behavior and retrieval. By studying the typographic arrangement of knowledge in early printed reference works, one can approach the history of the storage, organization, and retrieval of scientific information. The article discusses the typographic “architecture” of the dictionaries published by the Antwerp printer Christophe Plantin and, more specifically, the three dictionaries of the Dutch language compiled by Plantin’s learned proofreader Cornelis Kiliaan (ca. 1530–1607). Kiliaan was one of the first authors to introduce etymology and comparative linguistics into his dictionaries. By analyzing the typographic macrostructures and microstructures of his works, it is possible to discover the lines along which they developed—in the words of Paul Valéry—into machines à savoir. The article also compares Plantin’s dictionaries with the international benchmark for lexicographic publishing in the Renaissance world, viz. the translation dictionaries compiled and printed by the Parisian publisher Robert Estienne.published or submitted for publicationOpe

Editorial Board

The author demonstrates that book and library history deserves a central place in library and information science programs, but also that in order to obtain or keep this central place, it needs to orient itself in a direction that is closer to the heart of what library and information science is about, i.e. the organization of knowledge, and information seeking behaviour. Book and library history can illustrate these processes and explain how they have developed in the past. Early phenomena of knowledge organization have to be studied in their broader contexts, and these contexts to a large extent cover the production, dissemination and consumption of books in the past. The main return that book history will get out of this process is that it will be more strongly integrated into academic teaching and research.status: publishe

Books in Arabic Script

The chapter approaches the book in Arabic script as the indispensable means for the transmission of knowledge across Eurasia and Africa, within cultures and across cultural boundaries, since the seventh century ad. The state of research can be divided into manuscript and print studies, but there is not yet a history of the book in Arabic script that captures its plurilinear development for over fourteen hundred years. The chapter explores the conceptual and practical challenges that impede the integration of the book in Arabic script into book history at large and includes an extensive reference list that reflects its diversity. The final published version was slightly updated, and includes seven illustrations of six Qurans from the holdings of Columbia University Libraries, four manuscripts and two printed versions. Moreover, the illustrations are images of historical artifacts which are in the public domain - despite Wiley's copyright claim