Typhonen og Helios

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Randnoter til en Holbergbog

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Notits om et par bogejere nævnt i Henning Lehmanns afhandling om armeniske bøger i Fund og Forskning, 2013

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An Artist in the Making. Yehuda Leib ben Eliyya Ha-Cohen’s Haggadah, Copenhagen, 1769

Ulf G. Haxen: An Artist in the Making – Yehuda Leib ben Eliyya Ha-Cohen’s Haggadah, Copenhagen, 1769 ‘Eclecticism’ as an artistic term refers to an approach rather than a style, and is generally used to describe the combination of different elements from various art-historical periods – or pejoratively to imply a lack of originality. Proponents of eclecticism argue more favourably, however, with reference to the 16th century Carracci family and their Bolognese followers, that the demands of modernity (i.e. the new Baroque style) could be met by skilful adaptation of art features from various styles of the past. The essay concerns the eighteenth century scribe and miniaturist Yehuda Leib ben Eliyah Ha-Cohen’s illustrated Haggadah liturgy of the second book of the, Old Testament Exodus, which represents a shift of paradigm away from the traditional Bohemia-Moravian school of Jewish book-painting towards a new approach. Our artist experiments freely, and to a certain extent successfully, with a range of different styles, motifs, themes, and iconographical traits, such as conversation pieces. Yehuda Leib Ha-Cohen may have abandoned his home-town, the illustrious rabbinic center Lissa/Leszno in Poland, after a fire devastated its Jewish quarter in 1767. He migrated to Denmark and lived and worked in Copenhagen for at least ten years, as indicated by two of his extant works, dated Copenhagen 1769 and 1779 respectively. He was thus a contemporary of another Danish Jewish master of the Bohemia – Moravian school, Uri Feibush ben Yitshak Segal, whose iconic miniature work The Copenhagen Haggadah (1739) is well-known by art historians in the field. Yehuda Leib Ha-Cohen drew some of his Haggadic themes from two main sources, the Icones Biblicae by Mathäus Merian and the Amsterdam Haggadot 1695 and 1712 (e.g. Pit’om and Ramses, The Meal Before the Flight). He never imitates his models, however. He adapts the standard motifs according to his own stylistic perception of symmetry and perspective, furnishing the illustrations with a muted gouache colouring. Several of his Haggadic themes are executed with inventiveness, pictorial imagination, and a subtle sense of humour, such as The Seder Table, The Four Sons, The Finding of the Infant Moses, Solomon’s Temple, and Belshazzars Feast. Yehuda Leib’s enigmatic reference to the ‘the masons’ (Hebrew הבנאים ) in the manuscript’s colophon has until now hardly been satisfactorily interpreted. Incidentally, however, another Hebrew prayer-book written and decorated by Mayer Schmalkalden in Mainz in 1745, recently acquired by Library of Congress, bears the same phrase (fi ‘inyan ha-bana’im = according to the code of the Masons). Dr. Ann Brener, a Hebrew specialist at the Oriental Department of Library of Congress, suggests in an unpublished essay, that the reference may be an allusion to ‘the Talmudic scholars who engage in building up the world of civilization’, (The Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 114a). However that may be, Yehuda Leib Ha-Cohen’s miniatures constitute a veritable change of paradigm as far as eighteenth-century Hebrew book illustration is concerned.

Titler, typografi og andre tilpasninger

Charlotte Appel: Titles, typography and other adjustments. A study of Morten Hallager as a media-savvy publisher of Danish books for children during the last decades of the eighteenth century This article investigates the involvement of Morten Hallager (1740–1803) in the book business, and how he contributed to shaping a new commodity in Denmark: books for children. Until recently, Hallager has not attracted much scholarly attention due to a traditional focus on authors who made original contributions to Danish literature. However, Hallager’s combined experience as a printer (1771–84), a schoolteacher (from 1785) and an expert in German and French gave him a unique background to act as a transnational agent, introducing European Enlightenment literature for children (by J. H. Campe, C. K. J. Dassel, K. T. Thieme, A. Berquin etc.) to Danish readers. After an outline of Hallager’s life and career, the article presents a survey of his publications. He was particularly active as an author, translator, compiler and publisher of books for children c.1791–1804 (his last books were published posthumously), and during this period he published 38 individual titles – and 57 editions in all (including 19 second or later editions) – corresponding to c.11 per cent of all Danish titles for a young readership. Four main types of intervention that characterise Hallager’s books for children are analysed. First, he took great care over titles and the contents of title pages. Most of them would include an explicit reference to ‘child’, ‘children’ or ‘youth’, and Hallager would present himself as a schoolteacher and thus an expert in the field. Next, when it came to the physical appearance of the books, Hallager made use of his professional know-how. His initial success, a small reader in sextodecimo from 1791 (reprinted ten times), for example, demonstrated how he made choices concerning format, typeface etc. Third, Hallager made a number of pedagogical adjustments to the translated texts, reflecting his ambition to be as specific and concrete as possible and also to include variety, so that his young readers were never bored. Fourth, the article maps his impressive range of strategies with regard to translating, transforming and ‘localising’ foreign texts, so that they would become more digestible and relevant for a Danish audience. Finally, the conclusion argues that Hallager’s experience in every role and every position within Robert Darnton’s famous communication circuit (1982) was a key to his success – and may explain his wish to explicate his publishing strategies in great detail. For this reason, a study of Hallager’s publications provides us with new insights not only into his own book business but also into the emerging market for children’s books in general.

Meldahls modellerede Marmorkirke-modeller

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Ekspressionismen på anklagebænken

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Om forfatterne

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Christian 5.s parforcejagt i 1600-Tallets aviser

Kristoffer Schmidt: Christian V’s par force hunt in 17th century’s newspapersThe year 2020 marks the 350th anniversary of the foundation by Christian V of the par force hunt (also known as chasse à courre) in Denmark. This type of hunting was a spec-tacular sight, where riders and a pack of hunting dogs, imported from England, would hunt a selected animal (often a stag) through large, artificially adapted hunting areas such as the open landscapes at Jægersborg Dyrehave or the geometrically shaped hunt-ing routes at Gribskov or Store Dyrehave. After a pursuit lasting usually several hours the animal would collapse from fatigue. The king would then finish off the exhausted beast with a hirschfænger – a large dagger – or a spear. Studies of the royal hunt tend to depict the Danish stag hunt as primarily a means for absolute rulers to showcase a symbolic power. It enabled the absolute ruler to exhibit athletic strength, exemplary riding skills and extreme courage, and thus to paint the picture of a heroic ruler.Although participation in these hunts was limited to a small group of royal hunts-men, court members and foreign guests (for example, ambassadors and royalty), news of the king’s hunting adventures were conveyed through contemporaneous, partly state-controlled newspapers such as Anders Bording’s Den Danske Mercurius and Ahasver-us Bartholin’s Mercurius.This article examines how the royal hunt – primarily the stag hunt – was covered in Den Danske Mercurius and later Mercurius. It reveals that reports on the stag hunt seem to have two main purposes. On the one hand, the newspaper reports underscore the assess-ment of the royal hunts as a symbolic manifestation of power, combining a description of the hunting skills of Christian V with a more general depiction of him as the hero-king. On the other hand, the reports also reveal a need of the Danish-Norwegian absolutist regime to justify the King’s numerous hunting adventures. In several instances Bording, in particular, pointed to the fact that the hunt was considered a pastime for the King and the court. Therefore, Bording and Bartholin stressed that this type of pastime did not interfere with the King’s other, more important duties, such as affairs of state. In other words, the picture of the athletic hero-king did not carry more weight than the image of the King as a capable and efficient ruler. Thus, it appears that the stag hunt, despite its public grandeur, also had a recreational and more private purpose, and that Christian V withdrew from his more formal duties to go hunting.

Findes der skønhed i leksikografi?

Loránd-Levente Pálfi, Karin Wolgast & Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen: Towards an aesthetics of lexicography In this paper, we examine a subject which has apparently never before been the object of research or published intellectual reasoning. The question is if such a thing as a beautiful dictionary or encyclopedia exists, i.e. if we can address lexicographic beauty conceived of as the sum of various inner qualities of lexicographic reference works while stripping our concept of the external properties of books such as bindings, cover, the quality of paper and print, layout, user-interface, etc. After investigating aesthetic qualities as established in other academic fields, of which mathematics and literature have been selected as representative for the purpose of developing a complementary paradigm, the article undertakes a tentative definition of lexicographic beauty.