Europäische Medien-, Journalisten- und Verlegerverbände appellieren
mit einem am 31. Januar 2019 veröffentlichten offenen Brief an
Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel und den französichen Präsidenten Emmanuel Macron,
»jetzt tätig zu werden und eine rechtzeitige Einigung über die
Urheberrechtsrichtlinie zu erzielen«. Das berichtet »Die Welt«. »Online-Plattformen verwenden regelmäßig redaktionelle Inhalte von
Verlagen und Nachrichtenagenturen, um Werbeeinnahmen zu erzielen«,
zitiert »Die Welt« aus dem Brief. Agenturen, Herausgeber und
Journalisten würden für die Übernahme aber nicht entschädigt. Ohne einen
eindeutigen rechtlichen Schutz aller inhaltlichen Angebote von
Presseverlegern sei »die Zukunftsfähigkeit der unabhängigen Presse und
des professionellen Journalismus gefährdet«. Ursprünglich war für den 21. Januar 2019 ein Treffen anberaumt, um
final über die EU-Urheberrechtsrichtlinie zu verhandeln. Die
Trilogverhandlungen wurden vorerst ausgesetzt und der Termin kurzfristig
abgesagt, da elf Länder den letzten Kompromissvorschlag der rumänischen
EU-Ratspräsidentschaft ablehnten (vgl. Meldung vom 20. Januar 2019).
Der Österreichische Bibliothekartag 2019, veranstaltet von der
Vereinigung Österreichischer Bibliothekarinnen und Bibliothekare (VÖB)
und dem Büchereiverband Österreich (BVÖ), findet vom 10. bis zum 13.
September in Graz statt. Er widmet sich in diesem Jahr schwerpunktmäßig
einem der interessantesten und meistdiskutierten Themen auch außerhalb
des Bibliotheksumfeldes: der künstlichen Intelligenz.
Politik & Kultur, die Zeitung des Deutschen Kulturrates, führt in
der neuen Ausgabe die Kolonialismus-Debatte weiter und fragt
Kulturpolitikerinnen und -politiker sowie Expertinnen und Experten aus
dem Museumsbereich, was bezüglich des Umgangs mit kolonialem Erbe in
Deutschland im Vorfeld der Eröffnung des Humboldt Forums in diesem
Herbst noch getan werden muss. Die Debatte in Politik & Kultur beginnt mit einem einführenden
Beitrag von Olaf Zimmermann, Geschäftsführer des Deutschen Kulturrates
und Herausgeber von Politik & Kultur und Gabriele Schulz,
Stellvertretende Geschäftsführerin des Deutschen Kulturrates, in dem sie
herausstellen, dass es um weit mehr als um Museumsbestände geht und
fordern, Afrika endlich politisch und wirtschaftlich gleichberechtigt zu
behandeln. Im Anschluss folgen Statements zum Thema von zahlreichen
Fachleuten und den kulturpolitischen Experten der im Bundestag
vertretenen Parteien.
Die vier bislang bestehenden Amts- und Ministerialblätter wurden zum 1.
Januar 2019 durch das digitale Bayerische Ministerialblatt ersetzt. Die
historisch erste Ausgabe des neuen einheitlichen Verkündungsorgans der
Bayerischen Staatsregierung ist am 23.01.2019 auf der neu entwickelten Verkündungsplattform Bayern erschienen. Die neue Verkündungsplattform Bayern bietet einen einfachen,
nutzerfreundlichen, rund um die Uhr verfügbaren und von überall
abrufbaren, leistungsfähigen elektronischen Zugang zu amtlichen
Dokumenten. Die Plattform wurde im Auftrag der Bayerischen Staatskanzlei
mit modernem, endgeräteunabhängigen Design von der Bayerischen
Staatsbibliothek entwickelt, die sie auch betreiben wird.
The New Lover’s Instructor contains a
collection of fictional letters, compliment cards and dialogues between
relatives, all on the subject of love. These were intended as templates
for readers to use during courtship. The New Lover’s Instructor
usually follows a courtship across a series of letters, enabling the
reader to see how a relationship between two individuals might develop.
In some ways, The New Lover’s Instructor resembles a collection
of scenes from plays and epistolary short stories, where characters and
plots are developed through a correspondence between two people. The book also contains several poems and riddles on the subject of
love, which could also be adapted by readers for their own use, or
simply enjoyed for their ingenuity.
More about letter-writing manuals
Letter-writing manuals in the 18th and 19th centuries did not just
provide instruction for lovers. Many were guides to writing letters on
business matters, such as requesting the payment of a bill or asking to
borrow a sum of money. Most people who used letter-writing manuals had
not received a classical or extended education, and so needed help with
expressing themselves according to the conventions of the day. Because
of this, many manuals contained a section on English grammar. The
professions of some of the fictional correspondents in The New Lover’s Instructor
reflect its probable readership: it includes letters from a tradesman,
an exciseman (tax collector), a young farmer and a linen-draper’s
apprentice. We can see letter-writing manuals as an early form of self-help book.
What does it tell us about courtship in the period?
The existence of letter-writing guides such as these shows the
codified nature of courtship in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like today,
men and women were expected to behave in certain ways throughout a
courtship, and to express their feelings and wishes according to
particular conventions. Courtship was usually a very formal process
designed to end in marriage.
Letters in Jane Austen’s novels
Letters play an important role in Jane Austen’s
novels. Sometimes they move the plot along; sometimes they convey
information about the character of the sender, or the characters of
those who read and respond to the letter. Austen’s novels often expose the conventions of courtship as absurd or even harmful. An example of this in Pride and Prejudice
is when Mr Collins proposes to Elizabeth Bennet. Elizabeth tells him
she will not marry him, but Mr Collins refuses to believe her: ‘You are
not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to
your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual
practice of elegant females’ (Pride and Prejudice, chapter 19). In The New Lover’s Instructor,
several of the women behave in the way that Mr Collins describes, such
as the ‘Lady’ in ‘Conversation the Second’ (pp. 80–82).
Full title:
The new lover's instructor; or, whole art of courtship.
Being the lover's complete library and guide; and containing ... love
letters, ... Cards of compliment, ... Love epistles in verse, written in
an elegant style; [etc.]
As soon as Omar Ibn Said’s autobiography entered the Library of Congress
collections, it came to the Conservation Division for evaluation. The
manuscript was clearly fragile — its cover and text pages were torn in
many places, and some pages were detached from the binding. Sewing
thread had cut through pages and cover paper, causing breaks and tears
along the spine as well. Compounding these issues, for much of its life,
the manuscript seems to have been kept folded in half, as if to fit
into a slim pocket. This strong center fold had caused multiple tears.
Now, unfolding each page risked losing fragments and detaching other pages, calling for immediate
conservation attention before the manuscript could be studied or
displayed.
Together, a team of Library conservators and curators formulated a
plan to treat and house the manuscript. It involved removing and
repairing the cover; assessing the inks and papers of both the cover and
the text for their degree of deterioration; and making repairs to the
manuscript paper. The plan specified that, afterward, the original would
be scanned and a facsimile created for scholarly use. As always, the
process would be fully documented.
Conservators first removed the cover and its tight sewing,
discovering the soft and thick cotton thread originally used to hold the
manuscript together through the center fold. Both threads were made of
cotton fiber, but the original sewing thread matches that used to sew
several of the other Arabic manuscripts in the Omar Ibn Said Collection
that come from West Africa. To open and repair the text, both cover and
original sewing threads were removed and saved with documentation.
Once the text pages were separated, the ink was examined under a
microscope and with ultraviolet light illumination. The type of ink is
iron gall, which is inherently acidic and can cause damage to the paper
underneath. In the case of Ibn Said’s writing, there was some sinking of
the ink to the opposite side of the page, but mostly it appeared crisp
and in reasonably good condition. A few heavily inked areas had,
however, broken through the lightweight text paper.
Interestingly, two different writing pens were used for Ibn Said’s
text. Where he wrote of his own life, his pen had a narrow nib, but
where he wrote in prayer verse, his pen had a wider, flatter nib like
the reed pen used by Arabic scribes. Photomicrographs — photos taken
under a microscope at high magnification — of the ink were taken, and
conservators will monitor changes in ink and paper deterioration over
time.
The cream-colored text paper was made by a papermaking machine with a
woven cloth screen. It has no watermark, but it has an even texture and
is made from good-quality fiber. Its pH is lower than the optimal
range, but after 200 years of natural aging, it remains in reasonably
good condition, aside from physical damage.
To mend text pages, we used a variety of adhesives and Japanese
tissues. First, we humidified the broken spine pieces of the pages and
flattened them under blotters and weights. We aligned split areas of
paper with no text and mended them invisibly with tissues of different
weights and colors, applied with wheat starch paste. Areas of the paper
with ink present were mended with transparent tissue precoated with a
hydroxylpropyl cellulose adhesive. All mends remain reversible in the
future. After treatment, we stored the manuscript in an acid-free
environment with a soft Japanese “mitsumata” paper interleaf isolating
the text from the cover.
Unlike the text, the cover was brittle, made of a poorly processed
pulp with visible undigested straw fibers, and with a suboptimal pH
level. Discoloration from the cover had transferred to the adjacent text
papers at the front and back of the manuscript. The cover ink was
stable, meaning that the cover could be immersed in several baths of
alkaline water until discoloration was no longer released from the paper
and the surface pH rose to a neutral level. A layer of gelatin sizing
was applied overall to provide greater strength for future handling.
Losses in the cover were repaired with layers of toned Japanese
“usumino” paper.
After scanning, the mended pages and cover were reassembled. They
were not resewn, to avoid making new holes in the paper and orienting
the text permanently in the wrong direction — the cover is meant to open
right to left. A custom drop-spine box made from conservation quality
materials was constructed to house the ensemble. In addition to Ibn Said’s autobiography, conservators treated and rehoused the 41 other items in the Omar Ibn Said Collection.
Handwriting on the Wall: The Case of Omar Ibn Said - YouTube-Video
Rund 25 Jahre nach seiner Eröffnung ist das einst heftig umstrittene
Stadthaus Ulm unter Denkmalschutz gestellt worden. Oberbürgermeister
Gunter Czisch (CDU) nahm am 31.01.2019 die Urkunde zur Aufnahme des
betont sachlich gehaltenen Gebäudes aus Beton und Glas in das
baden-württembergische Buch der Kulturdenkmale von besonderer Bedeutung
bei einer Feierstunde entgegen. Viele Einwohner hatten anfangs
Bedenken gegen den Entwurf des amerikanischen Stararchitekten Richard
Meier geäußert, der architektonisch nicht zum gegenüberstehenden
gotischen Ulmer Münster mit dem höchsten Kirchturm der Welt passe. Etwa
21 000 Teilnehmer eines Bürgerentscheids stimmten gegen den Bau, 17 000
dafür. Allerdings wurde die erforderliche Mindestbeteiligung verpasst,
so dass der damalige CDU-Oberbürgermeister Ernst Ludwig grünes Licht für
den weißen Bau geben konnte. „Das Stadthaus ist nicht
nur einer der bedeutendsten Bauten im Werk des Architekten Richard
Meier, sondern auch ein Schlüsselbauwerk“, sagte Professor Claus Wolf,
Abteilungspräsident des Landesamtes für Denkmalschutz. „Die
selbstbewusste Architektur in Korrespondenz zum Ulmer Münster macht das
Stadthaus zu einem herausragenden Zeugnis für die Geschichte der
Stadtbaukunst im 20. Jahrhundert.“
![Guide to writing love letters [page: frontispiece and title page]](https://www.bl.uk/britishlibrary/~/media/bl/global/dl%20romantics%20and%20victorians/collection-item-images/u/n/k/unknown%20guide%20b20094%2079.jpg?w=608&h=342)