{"id":3777,"date":"2020-03-29T14:34:48","date_gmt":"2020-03-29T18:34:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/?p=3777"},"modified":"2020-05-17T18:19:37","modified_gmt":"2020-05-17T22:19:37","slug":"cartography-and-cosines-exploring-the-paratext-of-murrays-rudiments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/2020\/03\/29\/cartography-and-cosines-exploring-the-paratext-of-murrays-rudiments\/","title":{"rendered":"Cartography and Cosines: Exploring the Paratext of Murrays “Rudiments”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beyond the text itself, the book contains a very good deal of paratext. The book contains a title page, which contains a very brief list of a few of the topics covered by the work. It lists the printers, along with the year and location of the work (covered in my last post). Importantly, it also contains a sentence expressing the intended audience of the work, the \u201cYoung Gentlemen on board his Majesty\u2019s Ship Magnanime,\u201d as well as a sentence describing the author, Mungo Murray, as the \u201cschool-master of said Ship.\u201d<\/p>\n

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One of the more interesting additions is the dedication of the work, to \u201cHenry, the Earl of Gainsborough, Viscount Campden, &c., &c.\u201d I was (surprisingly) unable to find out anything about Henry, Earl of Gainsborough, except that his name was Henry Noel, and that he was the last Earl of Gainsborough with his death in 1798. Assumedly, he served on board HMS Magnanime under the tutelage of Murray.<\/p>\n

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The work further includes a table of contents, which divides the book into chapters and smaller sections. The book contains page numbers, as well as section and chapter headings to assist the reader. Catchwords are included in order to assist the binder.<\/p>\n

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The font of the work is in a roman style. Section headers are italicized, as are references to the plates included later in the book. This choice is sensible, as the book is intended to be functional at its very nature. There is little flourish anywhere, except for larger initials at the beginning of each chapter.<\/p>\n

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The book contains a number of illustrations, depicting geometric planes and explaining the angles of navigation.<\/p>\n

The whole book reads the same way, more as an instruction manual to going through geometrical calculations than as any abstract focus on what navigation is, per se. The engravings are an extremely useful addition to the text of the book with this taken into account. Understanding the geometric calculations necessary to operate a device such as a sextant would be extraordinarily difficult without a visual of the depictions.\u00a0<\/span>In many ways Murray\u2019s work reads as a modern geometry textbook does (indeed, that was surely the mission, as navigation is, at its core, calculations of spatial geometry). Trying to imagine these planes without the aid of a diagram would be extremely difficult (in fact, impossible), and trying to recreate them with new findings would be even more distressing to a young ensign just learning the navigational sciences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The diagrams are meant to go along with the text, were they provide the reader with crucial aids. Each time a new problem is introduced, the reader is directed to the appropriate plate in order to view the illustration as they read the solution. For example, the following problem pertains to the following plate:<\/p>\n

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While my knowledge of navigational geometry is not great enough to understand the problem which is being explained, I do know that its is one of a compass\u2019 declination. Having a diagram that shows <\/i>what is being said is crucial.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Each plate (in this case, Plate V) contains a number of figures which each correspond to one or more problems in the book itself (in this case only two figures, some have three or four).<\/p>\n

At the bottom of the illustrations are two signatures: on the left, W. Oxenham Deli; on the right, J. Gibson Sci. While I was unable to uncover anything about W. Oxenham (presumably William Oxenham), I was able to find some information about John Gibson.<\/p>\n

John Gibson, 1750-1792, was an English engraver and cartographer. Information about him is very hard to come by, however I was able to track down a few details. John Gibson\u2019s precise date of birth is unknown, but the first mention of his name comes from 1750. He was a skilled engraver specializing in cartography. This connection makes sense, given the subject of the book. He spent much of his life in debtor\u2019s prison, but from what I can find, he is best known for two things. Primarily, he authored his Atlas Minimus<\/em><\/a>, a pocket-sized atlas of world maps. However, he also did a number of engravings for the Gentleman\u2019s Magazine<\/em>, which I have discussed in previous posts.<\/p>\n

This magazine<\/a> was founded by Edward Cave (the grandfather of R. Cave, one of the printers of Murray\u2019s Rudiments) <\/em>in 1731 and continued for almost 200 years. Also notably, it was the first place of employment for Samuel Johnson. I have managed to find a few examples of the engravings done for the Gentleman\u2019s Magazine<\/em>, and one is included below. The fact that John Gibson was contracted as the engraver is not surprising, given the connections that existed between the printers, but it does make for an interesting connection!<\/p>\n

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At the time, copper-plate illustrations were highly technical and required the operation of an entirely separate press, the rolling-press, as a common press could not provide sufficient pressure. For this reason, the illustrations would have been done through contract with another print shop and given the previous connections between R. Cave and John Gibson, the partnership would make sense. The process and economics of illustration is well described in book historian Sarah Werner\u2019s work Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800: A Practical Guide.<\/em><\/p>\n

The print itself is intaglio, given the necessary precision of the lines in mathematical diagrams. While I cannot be certain as to whether the print was made through engraving or etching, it is my belief that it was most likely through engraving. I say this because of the fineness of the lines, the uniformity of their width except for the ends, as well as the straightness of their direction. I have come to make this educated guess after reading through Sarah Werner\u2019s description of the two processes in her aforementioned work. Another interesting connection I learned of upon researching the illustrations of this work is between the arts of cartography and navigation and the origin of engravings. One of the librarians in Special Collections (Thank you, Pat!) explained that engravings of this type actually had their origins in the need for more precision in cartography. With this in mind, it\u2019s very interesting that the engravings for a work on navigation were done by someone who was, primarily, a cartographer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beyond the text itself, the book contains a very good deal of paratext. The book contains a title page, which contains a very brief list of a few of the topics covered by the work. It lists the printers, along with the year and location of the work (covered in my last post). Importantly, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9804,"featured_media":3521,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[399577],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9804"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3777"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4362,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777\/revisions\/4362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/bookhistory2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}