| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥1,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,500,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Pierce Butler has been studied focusing on his later writings at the University of Chicago. From the viewpoint of media theory, I reconsidered Butler's library philosophy through examining not only his writings but also his practice and its theoretical background at the Newberry Library.
The incunabula collection which Butler built in his Newberry years indicates two important characteristics of cultural change : the process of the spread of printing and the process of modern book formation. He chose representative incunabula of various printers, specimens of various printing types which showed the change from block letters to roman letters, and examples to show the development stage in the characteristics of printed books such as the title-page, pagination, table of contents, index and so on. Butler was not only interested in analytical bibliography but also paid attention to social change, such as the expression of various thoughts, the development of modern science, the expansion of arts and sciences publication, the uplift of the sense of the rights of authorship, and the standardization of language by the spread of native language publications. Butler's ideas about books, the basics of his library philosophy, are common to a viewpoint of media studies in the latter half in the 20th century, which is to analyze the cultural influence of printing as a change of the human mind and social structure. Compared with today's media studies, a shortage is seen in Butler's evidence. However, I consider Butler to be a pioneer, who treated books in relation to social history and considered the invention of printing as a revolution in media communication.
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