“When I was little, the Register and the Tribune had a huge joint photo library, a room about twenty-five by twenty meters where I often spent a pleasant half hour when I had to wait for my mother. There must have been five hundred thousand archived photos in there, maybe more. You just had to open any drawer to come across a fascinating episode from the city’s past. This was the whole visual history of Des Moines in the twentieth century. I recently returned to the R&T and discovered to my amazement that the photo library now only occupied a small room at the back of the building. Almost all of the old photos had been thrown away. “They needed space,” the librarian explained to me with a somewhat contrite air. […] They recycled them to recover the paper money. “
Codicology (literally “science of the codex”, that is to say of the manuscript book) is one of the so-called “science aids” of history – namely practices considered ancillary by historians and of which specialists have have long been (and have long been) thought of as being at the service of these. This highly technical discipline consists in analyzing everything that is not the text in medieval or modern manuscripts: the medium (parchment, paper); the watermarks of the paper; the rule (for the justification, the lineation and possibly the columnar organization of the text); color inks and pigments (mainly blue or red); writing and ornamentation; the format (largely determined by the number of folds of the parchment or paper, mainly from the folio to the octavo, more rarely beyond); the composition of the notebooks (number of nested two-sheets); binding; the terms of guaranteeing internal order (numbering of pages and advertisements); the marks of manufacture (colophons) then of appropriation (notes or signs of belonging, ex-libris, etc …
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