Beneath the magnificent barrel-vaulted ceiling of the Playfair Library in Old College, Edinburgh, over two hundred people gathered on a mid-July weekend for the third Material Cultures conference organised by the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for the History of the Book.

A glance through the elegantly produced programme reveals the diversity of the disciplines and backgrounds represented. Over the three days, discussions of (to give an incomplete list) the buying, selling, publishing, giving, sharing, collecting, saving, printing, editing, listing, archiving, translating, illustrating, annotating, dedicating, digitising, indexing, and binding of material texts reached far beyond the traditional scopes of ‘bibliography’ and ‘book history’. Some of the panels focussed on particular people and places; in light of our location there were panels dedicated to the John Murray Archive in the National Library of Scotland, to the history of Shakespeare scholarship in Edinburgh, and to some specific manuscript anthologies in Renaissance Scotland. Other panels used broader themes such as ‘Printers Across Borders’, and ‘The Business of Books’ to bring together material texts usually separated by geographical and chronological distance. The titles of quite a few other panels and the papers within them were mystifyingly vague, and as we were not supplied with abstracts of papers this meant a certain amount of advance guessing was necessary. This in itself was a reminder of the sweeping consequences of ‘material culture’ and the challenges we face in talking meaningfully about texts as ‘material’ in inter- and intra-disciplinary ways.

Indeed, such was the scale and breadth of the conference that it sometimes felt that several conferences were happening simultaneously. Most noticeably, it was certainly possible to fill three days listening to papers about the digital: digital archives, digital texts, digital editions, screen media, virtual museums, digital bindings, Kindles, hypertexts, and e-books all featured, demonstrating the importance of this rapidly developing field of technology, research, and practice. It was equally possible, however, to experience a conference relatively free from the d-word, although in the final plenary session Jerome McGann warned us not to underestimate the ever-increasing complexity of the relationship between scholars, libraries, and digitisation.

In the opening plenary session, Roger Chartier asked some searching questions about the history of attitudes towards authorial manuscripts, suggesting the need to appreciate the function of the library or archive as the site of preservation not only of material texts, but also of particular sets of historically specific ideas and conventions about authorship. Later that day the second plenary session starred Peter Stallybrass, whose presentation developed some of the ideas he introduced at the inaugural CMT conference earlier this year. Pointing out the limitations of the traditional division we set up between ‘print’ and ‘manuscript’, he urged us to consider print as a medium which incites manuscript: ‘printing for manuscript’. In his lavishly illustrated talk, Stallybrass demonstrated how we can look again at everyday printed ‘blank’ documents which require completion with handwritten details. Immigration landing cards, cheques, birth certificates and field service postcards, for example, were juxtaposed with seventeenth-century funeral tickets. By viewing print as a medium which crucially creates space for manuscript, Stallybrass argued, we might consider afresh the presence of handwriting in early printed books, and think further about how we differentiate between ‘print’ and ‘manuscript’.

Such questions of terminology, definition, and categorization underpinned many of the discussions at this conference. The ‘material text’ crosses many disciplinary boundaries, and as scholars,  librarians, and readers, our task is to continue to explore the terms and language with which we may most fruitfully talk about the ‘text’ as something ‘material’.

On Euston Road, outside St Pancras station, a very small metal plaque on the pavement caught my eye. It said something like ‘legible london: visit the tfl [Transport for London] website’. What is this ‘legible london’ and how is it connected to transport, I wondered, and on arrival at the British Library did as the sign on the pavement told me and looked up this website:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/microsites/legible-london/default.aspx

Legible London is an initiative to encourage the novel practice of… walking. The government has realised that many people do not walk around this city. We tend to use public transport all the time, especially the London Underground system, when often it would actually be quicker, healthier, more environmentally friendly, and free, to walk.

The website explains that ‘Based on extensive research, the system uses a range of information, including street signs and printed maps, to help people find their way.’  At first I was surprised and somewhat sceptical to read that ‘extensive research’ was undertaken to produce the necessary material texts – signs and maps – which we surely ought take for granted as visible and legible in any urban space, particularly a capital city.

However, the ‘Maps and Signs’ section of the website explains the project in more detail. The material features of the new signs and maps have been thought about very carefully, to encourage a more intuitive interaction with the cityscape. Although I found the tone of the website a little patronising, I was interested by the explanations of how the size, shape, orientation, colour,  and positioning of the new maps and signs have been designed to make it easier to connect the meaning of these material texts with the environment and the routes we want to trace through it. On public transport we are moved passively around the city (particularly in the darkness of the Underground, where we literally cannot see or read the landscape). The Legible London initiative puts a spotlight on the importance of the material text in the context of changing realisations about urban travel, something essential for almost everyone, every day, everywhere.

Several CMT bags and their owners will be journeying north of the border this week for the ‘Material Cultures 2010’ conference hosted by the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh. The three-day programme, viewable here, features keynote papers by Roger Chartier, Jerome McGann, and Peter Stallybrass. Delegates will be spoilt for choice during the panel sessions, which promise material and textual delights from nineteenth-century fashion magazines and Algonquin words to blogs and Scottish manuscript miscellanies. Expect reports here afterwards!

The major spring/summer exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum this year is ‘Quilts 1700-2010’. This exhibition showcases over 60 British quilts from the V and A collection with others loaned from museums and galleries in the UK and beyond. Displayed alongside these historical exhibits are some striking quilts made by contemporary artists including Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry. I would love to include some photographs in this post, but they appear difficult to find online. Have a look at the BBC’s special audio slideshow for a glimpse of some of them.

The exhibition is arranged around five themes: ‘The Domestic Landscape’, ‘Virtue and Virtuosity’, ‘Meeting the Past’, ‘Making a Living’, and ‘Private Thoughts – Political Debates’. A message that is both implicitly and explicitly communicated throughout is that these handmade domestic objects hold stories and histories in their very fibres. They are understood as texts as well as textiles. The curators have consciously probed the ways in which quilts can ‘document love, marriage, births, deaths, periods of intense patriotic fervour, regional and national identity and developments in taste and fashion’, reminding us also in the printed exhibition guide that quilts are ‘repositories of memory’, ‘acts of remembrance’, and ‘a form of meditation and consolation’.

While much of the beauty and interest of these objects lies in the colours, prints, patterns, and textures of the intricately pieced fabrics, often their makers added words too – names, dates, biblical verses, and short poems, for example. Indeed, many of the quilts demonstrate an explicit engagement with the power of visible text. Several commemorate coronations and military victories. On others, short sentences and poems emphasise the value of hard work and perseverance embodied in the material in which we read them, and on others, they provide spiritual advice and comfort. On a quilt made for a nineteenth-century military hospital, for example, verses from scripture appear on all four edges, so that they could be read by patients in neighbouring beds as well as by the person lying under the quilt.

One of the most moving exhibits for me was the quilt made last year by inmates of Wandsworth prison. The impressive craftsmanship of the panels on this quilt belies the hands that made them – those of male prisoners who had previously had little experience of what is traditionally seen as a domestic and feminine activity. On their quilt we read a collection of embroidered messages that are witty, entertaining, angry, disturbing, and sad. For these men, the quilt became a communal site for expression in words and pictures; the materials and methods of quilt-making provide the opportunity for communication with language via a creative engagement with materials. Compare this with the Rajah quilt, made in 1841 by women convicts onboard HMS Rajah as they were being transported to lands in the south Pacific. The tools and materials they used were supplied by Elizabeth Fry’s social reform project, and the words embroidered in a central panel on the quilt express the gratitude of the quilt’s makers for the creative opportunities this charity gave them during their long voyage.

Of all the quilts in the exhibition, Sara Impey’s recent ‘Punctuation’ quilt explores most explicitly a relationship between text and textile. Each tiny panel of her quilt is an embroidered letter, and together the panels play with phrases taken from a love letter to Impey’s mother that was discovered after her mother’s death. You can see images of similar works by Impey here. In this very consciously material text, Impey explores the popular idea that love letters were traditionally cut up to make the paper templates needed for piecing a quilt. The traditional materiality of the patchwork quilt becomes a medium through which to make sense from textual and material fragments, to re-read the past and to contextualise a fragmentary piece of documentary evidence from her mother’s life.

The juxtaposition of quilts such as this one with others made as many as three hundred years ago illustrates how the quilt continues to be a site of personal or political protest, debate, and subversion. While every quilt has its own story, some quilts stress their message in visible textual ways, inviting us to read them as we might read other kinds of material texts.

Sue Pritchard, curator of contemporary textiles at the V and A, writes a blog in which she explores many of the quilts in more detail. ‘Quilts 1700-2010’ runs until for ten more days, until 4 July.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/21/children-do-not-write-letters

This short article was published in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve only just come across it. According to a survey by World Vision, one in five children today have never received a handwritten letter, and about one in four children have never written one themselves. Erasmus would surely be horrified at this symptom of the quick-fix lives we lead in the rich developed world of the twenty-first century. The education expert Sue Palmer (of ‘Toxic Childhood’ fame) offers some wisdom in this piece, although is she right to claim that ‘literacy is the hallmark of human civilisation’? (Answers on a handwritten postcard…)

Palmer’s view of literacy is a limited one – apparently emails and text messages are not evidence of literacy. She emphasises the importance of the physical effort involved in writing a letter by hand, and the pleasure of receiving a material text that can be treasured as an object. I don’t think we can disagree with her on this. True ‘literacy’, then, is firmly grounded in visible, tangible materials of writing and reading. Is this a fair and realistic expectation today, and can we really, like Palmer, relegate less tangible forms of communication to some other category?

Everyone is working very hard in Cambridge at the moment, especially those marking exam scripts. Here’s a more colourful image of industry and creative inspiration – a touching gift worked by a mother for her daughter, whose name we ‘read’ in the windmill.

The scene is quite crudely executed – the sails of the windmill are not at all symmetrical – but we can also see how this text is an inspired and very resourceful piece of work. The whole scene is worked with different scraps of tapestry yarn which don’t quite match, suggesting that the maker possessed limited supplies and simply worked with what materials she had. It speaks of a climate of austerity and ‘making-do’ that we no longer really know, and is a charming illustration of practicality and imagination employed in the making of a personal gift for a loved one, perhaps in restricted financial circumstances.

(Many thanks to my own mother, to whom this framed tapestry belongs. She found it on a market stall some years ago.)

There are many wonderful things to see in Lyon, a city with a vibrant history stretching back thousands of years. Some elements of this history are explored on the distinctive ‘murs peints’ which can be found all over the city. There are over one hundred of these painted walls; impressive works of trompe l’oeil which cover the sides of buildings. I stumbled across the one above, the ‘Fresque des Lyonnais’, which features significant figures from throughout 2,000 years of the city’s history, including Auguste and Louis Lumière, and Antoine de St-Exupéry. Individuals from different centuries converse with each other at windows and balconies, reminding us of the city’s rich creative heritage. In the lower left-hand corner of this wall, there is a painted bookshop…

And here are some of the books for sale, displayed in the window to tempt us inside…

The book titles and names of authors we see here are familiar, but the painted images themselves also play with our sense of reality. These books look tantalisingly real, but the painter reminds us with a few subtle brush strokes that not only are we separated from them by a window, but that the ‘window’ itself is only painted. I was reminded a little of the painted walls of the host’s house in Erasmus’s The Godly Feast. Although the walls in Lyon are not the morally improving images from scripture that cover the walls of Eusebius’s house and garden, they still provoke a similar speculation and wonder at the skill of the painter who renders people and things so life-like that it is as if we could reach out and touch them. Upon seeing the painted walls, one of the guests in Erasmus’s text exclaims ‘Who could be bored in this house?’ In Lyon, it is more a question of ‘Who could be bored in this city?’

I came across this doorway in a quiet back street of Lyon last summer. The words engraved above the date on the stone door frame are taken from Cicero:

‘The truth is, a man’s dignity may be enhanced by the house he lives in, but not wholly secured by it; the owner should bring honour to his house, not the house to its owner’

(De Officiis, 1.138-9, Walter Miller’s Loeb translation).

A man’s honourable character makes his house truly dignified, not the other way round. Engraved above the entrance to a building, this proverbial message is literally embedded in the matter and material about which it speaks.

This photograph presents us with a more elaborate material text, however. Cicero’s moralising words about the relationship between a man and his house, engraved by a seventeenth-century stonemason, are juxtaposed with the spray-can marks of contemporary graffiti. The multicoloured graffiti tags covering the door contrast with the delicate swirl motifs which ornament the letters in the stone above. The wooden door has become a public writing surface which invites the addition of more and more text, the presence of which, convention decrees, is an unauthorized defacement of the door, a dishonouring of private property.

As Juliet Fleming reminds in her landmark volume on early modern graffiti, the media with which graffiti are created usually means that their long-term survival is unlikely. Unlike the engraved motto on this door, which has so far survived for over three hundred years (and whose literary origin takes us back over two thousand years) the graffiti here are temporary, fleeting, and we can see where they have faded or been scrubbed away.

Fleming also reminds us it is ‘the visible placement of modern graffiti that constitutes its scandal as a form of writing that, exceptionally, is understood to be filling space’ (Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, pp. 33-4). We may not ‘read’ this modern graffiti in the same way that we read the seventeenth-century motto here, but this striking juxtaposition of distinctively early modern and modern forms of text in a very public space illustrates the different moral and aesthetic questions raised as writing negotiates its place in the material around us.

This week sees the broadcasting on BBC Radio 4 of the second part of ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, a collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum. Over the next eight weeks Neil MacGregor, the British Museum’s Director, will cover 1800 years of history from 300 BC to 1500 AD, as he explores another group of objects from the Museum’s collection.

The online presence of the project is key to the accessibility of the objects. There are short videos about some of the objects, and the 100 radio broadcasts can be downloaded as podcasts. The high quality photographs in the online gallery allow close inspection of each object. Furthermore, other institutions and individuals can participate with their own objects. Already over 350 museums across the UK have registered with 100 objects from their collections, and members of the public can also record details of their own objects online.

I have been thinking about the handful of objects from the 100 chosen from the British Museum’s huge collection which present us with ‘text’. The surfaces of some of the objects are decorated with pictorial representations; the illustrations on the mysterious Standard of Ur, for example, give us scenes of war in Mesopotamia over 4000 years ago. Hieroglyphs on an ivory sandal label found in the tomb of the Egyptian King Den (c. 2985 BC) celebrate the wearer’s military conquests. There are wall painting fragments, masks, sculptures, carved reliefs, and statues, all of which present us with anthropomorphic representations. Not so many of the objects actually feature writing, however.

The objects which do display text include a famous cuneiform tablet from Assyria (700-600 BC) telling the story of a great flood, which was sensationally compared with the Biblical flood when it was first translated in 1872; an Indus seal bearing some of the oldest writing from South Asia, as yet undeciphered; an early writing tablet from Mesopotamia; and an Egyptian mathematical papyrus. There is writing which plays with the aesthetic potential of ink on paper, as in the Tughra of Süleyman the Magnificent, and there are mathematical and scientific instruments which combine words and numbers. Text can be found on several maps, on Dürer’s woodcut print of an Indian rhinoceros, and on a broadsheet marking the centenary of the Reformation in Germany. Forms of money emerge as significant textual objects across thousands of years: there are five coins including a coin with the head of Alexander and a penny defaced by Suffragettes, a Ming banknote, and the newest of the 100 objects, a credit card.

In these objects, writing is found on flat surfaces and three-dimensional forms. It is found on the inside and outside of objects. It is carved, engraved, embossed, handwritten, stamped, and printed, and tells us about changing technologies of the word. Many different languages, ages, and civilisations are represented, and the writing on these objects serves many different rhetorical functions too.  The 100 British Museum objects, as well as all of the other objects registered on the website, can be sorted and compared by themes, including ‘Food’, ‘Travel’, ‘Protest’, ‘Body’, ‘Clothing’, and ‘War’. I would like to suggest another theme: ‘Text’. What could we learn by comparing all of the objects which feature writing in some form? In each example, how does the writing relate to the object? How do the specific materialities of these objects shape and inform their function as texts? Should we think about these objects differently from the objects without any text?

PS: The 100^th object is still a mystery: its identity will be revealed in the Autumn. Any guesses?

I recently bought a smart but very old suede handbag, second-hand. The clever design of the bag embraces its function as an object of both practicality and of aesthetic value. I was also attracted to it because of the information on the label – made in the small town of Pitlochry in the heart of Scotland, this accessory is a beautiful example of British craftsmanship, regrettably an increasingly rare phenomenon in our age of cheap imported goods made by exploited factory workers in China and Eastern Europe.

Inside the zipped pocket of this bag, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a tiny material text. It is a return ticket, printed on stiff card and measuring approximately 1×2 inches, for a mountain cable car in Austria. The ticket bears no date, but the price (24 schillings) is a clue to how old it might be – several decades, at the very least. The two holes suggest that the holder of this ticket successfully validated their ticket and made it up and down the mountain. Ephemeral texts like this one are all around us, and ironically it is often such small and disposable material texts as travel tickets, till receipts, and shopping lists, that slip through gaps or are stuffed without a second thought into pockets, and survive by being forgotten, to be discovered unexpectedly at times and places in the indeterminate future.

This particular ticket connects us to a specific tourist attraction (the Pfänderbahn above Lake Constance still exists, by the way, current price ten euros and eighty cents for an Adult return ticket), but what is most interesting about it as a material text is the unwritten story behind its survival and discovery in the personal space of a handbag. The unearthing of such ephemeral texts traces faint but tantalising connections between people and places, inviting us to imagine the journeys a text, no matter how small, has taken to reach us.

I am writing here as a graduate student guest blogger. Over the next few weeks I will be contributing more thoughts and reflections on material texts, not all of them as small or ephemeral as this one!