New Blog on Iconic Books

Professor Watts from Syracuse has been building a blog called Iconic Books this year. It is full of fantastic pictures of sacred books and objects, and appears to be part of a bigger project to inventory iconic books and their uses called the Iconic Book Project. Professor Watts says:

The project's collecting and cataloguing activities aim to do basic research, but its study of iconic books has implications for understanding phenomena as diverse as the marketing of e-books, political ceremonies, legal conflicts over religion, artistic and media depictions of books, the reproduction of scriptures, the architecture of libraries and museums, radical religious uses of media images, the relationship between image and text, the role of religion in law, and the historical influence of “book religions.”

It looks like the posts on his blog are fairly regular and of interest not only to biblical scholars, but all religious studies scholars. Some of the books shown are quite phenomenal simply from the perspective of artwork, let alone religious significance and performance.