Question about lubki

[David Borgmeyer]

Marcus,


I don’t know about the specific lubki and lubochnye romany
you mention, but the difference sounds like a printed sheet that is printed on
only one side and meant to be viewed all at once as one piece (like a cartoon on a poster,
more or less) and a printed sheet(s) that is(are) printed on both sides and meant to be
folded, sewn/bound, and cut at the edges to make a booklet (knizhka).  A sheet printed to be bound will have the
pages in a specific arrangement so a standard folding, sewing, and cutting will
produce pages that face the right way and appear in the right sequence.  I will confess to not knowing the intricacies
of bookbinding vocabulary in Russian, but in English, one folded
sheet (or group of folded sheets) is called a signature, and a number of signatures can be sewn/bound together
and glued into covers to make a book.  Books
made from standard size printed sheets made to be folded once are called folio (yielding
two leaves of paper [and two pages per leaf, since they’re printed front and
back] per printed sheet); books made from printed sheets folded twice are
called quarto (yielding four leaves per sheet), folded three times are called octavo
(yielding eight leaves per sheet), and so on. 
“Thirty two pages” could be 16-o with print on both sides (with a total of 16 leaves
– with print on both sides yielding 32 numberable pages) or 32-o (with 32
leaves and 64 numberable pages).  Modern
machine printing no longer requires the same printing, folding, and cutting
(often performed by the reader) that older, hand-binding techniques did.  I hope some of that makes sense and is
helpful.


Best,

DB



> Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:42:18 -0700
> From: levitt at COLLEGE.USC.EDU
> Subject: [SEELANGS] Question about lubki
> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
> 
> Dear Colleagues,
>  
> What is the difference between a lubok print of a complete story that is divided into panels, each with text and illustration, and a "lubochnyi roman" (that is commonly referred to as a "knizhka")?  Is it simply that the multi-sectioned print is folded and cut into a booklet, or are these different artifacts?  Schaarschmidt writes that lubok novels "ran from one to three printer's sheets of thirty-two pages each" (pp. 427-8 in "The Lubok Novels: Russia's Immortal Best Sellers," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature [Sept. 1982]), while the lubok story I am looking at is one sheet in eight panels.
>  
> Thanks for your help,
> Marcus
>  
>  
>  
> 
> Marcus Levitt, Associate Professor
> 
> Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
> University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
> Los Angeles, CA 90089-4353
> Fax (213) 740-8550
> Tel  (213) 740-2736
> Departmental Pages: http://college.usc.edu/sll/ 
> Personal Web Pages: 
> http://college.usc.edu/levitt/ 
> http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~levitt/
> 
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