‘Blake’s Scattered Leaves’ explores the sibylline poetics of the poet and printmaker’s book making in America, Europe, The First Book of Urizen, and The Four Zoas, rematerializing Blake’s practices of invention and composition within and against constraints and teleologies of printing. Attention to material cultures of book making produces new readings of Blake’s sibylline metaphors and poetical possibilities, and practices of interleaving, repurposing of proofs, demediating the text, and freeing images as separate designs. Blake exploits the constitutively mobile potential of full-plate illustrations produced in different workshops, retaining that mobility in his illuminated books, where different placements make each copy unique and blur boundaries between different books. To capture the dynamic trajectories of mobile book parts or independent art works is to reconfigure the hybrid history of Blake books, questioning distinctions between book parts and artworks crystallized by institutional divisions of knowledge that separate the library from the print room.

The composite nature of perceptions is examined further in terms of mereological structure. Manifolds of outer intuition are stretched out in a space that both differentiates between an object and its exact duplicate and underlies fine discriminations ad indefinitum of a single object’s manifold. However, there is also a unity of space that runs through all spaces contained in it. Since space is a form of perception, there is therefore also a unity that runs through all nested perceptual manifolds. For this to be possible, space has to be a special kind of whole, namely, what Kant calls a totum analyticum, i.e., a whole whose parts depend on it, rather than vice versa, i.e., not a totum syntheticum. It is argued that a particular mereological structure of space is a precondition for the organization of manifolds of perception. Another precondition is what Kant calls “affinity,” i.e., that perceived particulars – including tropes – can be represented in ways that are associable with each other. In neither case is the unity due to a combinatorial synthesis. In empirical cognition, such a synthesis can only trace out an order of a perceptual manifold that is already there.

We define the category of polynomial functors by introducing its morphisms, called dependent lenses or lenses for short, and we show how they model interaction protocols. We introduce several methods for working with these lenses, including visual tools such as corolla forests and polybox pictures. We explain how these lenses represent bidirectional communication between polynomials and describe how they compose. By the end of the chapter, readers will have a comprehensive understanding of how polynomial functors and their morphisms can be used to model complex interactive behaviors.

We examine a monoidal structure on the category of polynomial functors, defined through the operation of substituting one polynomial into another. We explain how this composition product transforms polynomials into a richer algebraic structure, enabling the modeling of more complex interactions and processes. The chapter explores the properties of this monoidal structure, how it relates to existing constructions in category theory, and its implications for understanding time evolution and dynamical behavior. We also provide examples and visual representations to clarify how substitution works in practice.

This chapter focuses on one of the most important legal solutions in case of insolvency in seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the accord, or composition. It comprises a detailed qualitative analysis of almost 100 accords, combined with quantitative data obtained from the basic details of a broader dataset of more than 600 accords from the entire period covered by this book. These agreements between insolvents and their creditors sought to prevent an execution sale of the estate. At first, accords were concluded privately before notaries, until, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the Amsterdam burgomasters sought to subject their effectuation to prior consent of a public authority. Guarantors played an important role in securing such compositions. If the creditors trusted their debtor and his guarantors to make good on their promises, an accord would yield much higher returns than a simple execution of the estate. The Amsterdam regents thus endorsed, regulated, and added credence to an innovative and beneficial legal practice that had been developed among their own citizens.

Pierre Boulez was a great letter writer and a frequent correspondent. Since the extent of his correspondence is vast and very little of it has been published in English, this chapter looks solely at Boulez’s epistolary exchanges with the composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Elliott Carter. While the correspondence with Stockhausen is one of the richest of all, only a brief sense of this can be given here. The correspondences have been selected on the basis that all four composers were pivotally important for Boulez in different ways. He had important friendships with them. He valued and performed their music and they in turn were fulsome in their appreciation of his championing their music as well as of his achievements as a composer. This brief consideration shows how Boulez not only pursued his own musical path but also promoted the music of his composer friends.

Despite the fact that Boulez was criticised by many of his contemporaries insofar as they perceived him as having an excessively mathematical bent, some recent scholars have tended to minimise the significance of mathematical thinking for his compositional approach. This chapter posits that Boulez’s engagement with mathematical thinking cannot be so quickly dismissed. It disentangles the history of ideas and brings a new perspective to Boulez’s relationship with mathematics. After summarising the references to mathematical thinking in the literature on Boulez, it discusses the transformation of the field of mathematics that provided the context for Boulez’s engagement with the discipline and teases out the significance of mathematical thinking in Boulez’s compositional approach. Ultimately, it argues that there is an intimate relationship between the technical and aesthetic basis of his compositional approach and contemporary developments in the field of mathematics.

Shelley famously asserted that translation is as vain as casting a violet into a crucible to understand its colour and odour. Despite this seeming dismissal of the practice, translation forms an integral component of Shelley’s vocation as a poet and thinker. Throughout his writing career, he translated from French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish and also rendered some of his own poetry into Italian. His translation practice encompasses a wide range of genres: from Greek hymns and Latin georgics to Italian terza rima and ottava rima, to Spanish silvas and redondillas, to drama and philosophical prose. This chapter opens with a discussion of Shelley’s views on translation and the symbiotic relationship between translation and original composition in his own creative process. It then considers the connections between translation and language learning in the Shelley household before concluding with a survey of Shelley’s translations by language.

This chapter treats the design considerations for dictionaries as printed books, the transition from print to digital formats in the thirty years around the turn of the twenty-first century, and the considerations for digital and online formats. Section 1: Customer-focused decisions about format, size, and extent of physical dictionaries; the mapping of book and page components of printed dictionaries; the mutual influence of editorial and design choices; and the advent of digital composition and production for printed formats. Section 2: Factors driving the choice of digital versus print formats for changing customer needs; functional challenges of converting printed dictionaries to digital; design considerations for online interfaces, including both technical performance and user experience.

What is a composer, and what do they do? This introduction explores the idea of composition – in both Western traditions and further afield. It begins by tracing a brief cultural history of the composer in the classical music tradition and their shifting role in society, before considering a range of narratives and definitions of composition, challenging us to think about what the word ‘composition’ might mean for us in the twenty-first century.

This chapter presents the patterns of composition in Slavic languages. In Slavic, most compounds are nouns (like čel-o-věkъ) and adjectives (like *bos-o-nògъ). Verbal compounds (like blag-o-sloviti ‘to bless’) are less frequent and less productive (as is generally the case in Indo-European languages). The author reviews patterns and phenomena of nominal, adjectival, adverbial, verbal, pronominal, and numeral composition.

We start by examining the current composition of the atmosphere, and then turn our attention to some of the most important chemical reactions that take place in the unpolluted atmosphere. In particular, we will introduce you to the hydroxyl radical, nature’s garbage collector. As well as the three well-known greenhouse gases, the IPCC refers to a wide range of other substances as Short-Lived Climate Forcers, including chemically reactive gases such as methane, ozone, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, etc., and aerosols. The atmospheric fate of all these species needs to be understood. After that, we will examine the polluted atmosphere, particularly smog and acid rain. While this topic might not seem directly related to climate change, there are some useful lessons to be learned. We also include a short discussion on how we use isotope data to help narrow in on some of the more important processes in our environment.