This is a series of meetings organized by Sachiko Kusukawa and Alexander Marr in conversation with Paul Antonio. We are interested in gathering scholars of early modern culture, science and art interested in letter forms, line and flourishes as part of their research. We are fortunate that Paul Antonio, a professional scribe with a deep familiarity with historical letter forms (for his work, please see (http://paulantonioscribe.com/; https://www.instagram.com/pascribe/?hl=en), has kindly agreed to work with Cambridge scholars in a series of meetings among his busy schedule.

What kind of manual dexterity and expertise are involved in letter forms? to what extent were the seemingly effortless ‘flourishes’ carefully planned and produced by a ‘disciplined’ hand? is it possible to speak of ‘individual styles’, when students were urged to trace and learn the lines from ‘copybooks’, especially in relation to ‘character’? what were the cultural cues and significance of particular letter forms, lines, curves and flourishes? did line-making and letter forms affect modes of thought? These are some of the questions we’d like to think through with Paul. To this end, we’ve organized two meetings: in the first meeting, we gather together to find a common ground of discussion and generate some specific questions, to which we will return with concrete examples, in a second meeting. We hope that these two meetings will lead to a colloquium on early modern script.

Meeting 1: 19 June (Monday) 2 to 5 pm (CRASSH, University of Cambridge)

Methodological and historiographic discussion.

Readings: M. Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), chapter 6, ‘The period eye’, Tim Ingold, Lines : A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), chapter 5, ‘Drawing, writing and calligraphy’.

Using these well-known studies as a spring-board, we will discuss various positions among historians about script and ‘linearity’ as a historical source, and how Paul’s perspective as a practitioner can be integrated to current interest in ‘reconstruction’ methods, visual culture and the history of material texts. We hope to generate specific questions that we can return to in the next meeting.

Meeting 2:  21 November (Tuesday) 2-5 pm:

Study Day with Paul Antonio.

Preparation: identification of specific historical cases that are of interest to scholars.

These will be commentary sessions, where scholars will present their working assumptions about particular scripts and why they consider them historically significant. We will then ask Paul Antonio to demonstrate how those scripts are formed, and reflect with him how our assumptions have been changed or challenged. This in turn will help us formulate new research questions.

Colloquium on Early Modern Script (TBC Spring/Early Summer 2018)

This would be a colloquium for scholars working on script, integrating demonstration and commentary by Paul Antonio, and hopefully also a professional engraver who knows what is involved in transforming letter-forms into print.

Some pictures, belatedly, from the 1st CMT/CUL Catalogathon, a gathering of volunteer early modern biblionerds that took place on 24 May in the University Library. Our aim was to add copy-specific information to the existing, skeletal entries in the online catalogue, for as many sixteenth-/seventeenth-century books as we could, as quickly as we could. In the end, we managed to check out 212 books, all but 40 of which contained some interesting evidence of use. We hope to run similar events in future–please get in touch if you would like to be involved.

Emily Dourish, David Pearson, Becky Tomlin, Edward Wilson-Lee and Micha Lazarus, hard at work.

Hero Chalmers, Tom Hamilton, Dunstan Roberts and Lucille Munoz, in the white heat of the event.

John Taylor (1578-1653) was one of the most inventive writers of his age. Styling himself ‘The King’s Majesty’s Water-Poet’, he was at once a Thames boatman, a dazzlingly prolific author, and a literary celebrity. He was a pioneer in numerous literary forms, including travel writing, nonsense verse, and the ‘it-narrative’, and was one of the first writers to explore the possibilities of subscription publishing. Taylor was a satirist, a polemicist and a purveyor of printed news who invented the role of the foreign correspondent in his reports back from European war-zones. His works were also crucial to the formation of the British canon and to an emergent sense of national identity.

This conference will be the first to focus exclusively on Taylor’s vast and multifarious oeuvre. Bringing together a group of leading scholars, it will reconsider the significance of the Water-Poet to our understanding of seventeenth-century literature and culture, and his legacy in our own day.

The conference, sponsored by the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts and the University of Southampton, will run from 11.30 on 14 September to 2.15 pm on 15 September, in the Senior Parlour, Gonville and Caius College.

14 September

11.30-12 Registration

12-12.15 Welcome

12.15–1.30: Session One

Bernard Capp, ‘John Taylor goes to War: Civil War writings 1642–1648’

Abi Shinn, ‘“Pace, Amble, Trot, Hand-gallop, Wild-gallop, Fals-gallop”: Motion and Conversion in the Rebellious Roundhead’

1.30–2.15: lunch

2.15–3.30: Session Two

Ros King, ‘John Taylor, playfulness, and nationhood’

Ariel Hessayon, ‘“A Swarme of Sectaries”: John Taylor and the enemies of his religion’

3:30: tea and coffee

4.00–5.45: Session Three

Anthony Ossa-Richardson, ‘Sartor Resartus: Or, A Learned Taylor?’

Adam Smyth, ‘“For a Friers mouth read a Pudding”: John Taylor and the uses of error’

Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Exuvial Taylor’

15 September

9.15–11.00: Session Four

Kirsty Rolfe, ‘The coast of Bohemia: John Taylor’s imagined geographies?’

Jemima Matthews, ‘Taylor’s Thames: Performing local geography and other “useful matters”’

Andrew McRae, ‘Travelling Taylor: Developing an Authorial Identity’

11.00–11.30: tea and coffee

11.30–1.15: Session Five

Will May, ‘The Whimwham: travelling on Taylor’s watery vessels’

Alice Hunt, ‘“And so my journey and my book is done”: John Taylor, England’s Republic and his Final Works, 1649–1653’

Johann Gregory, ‘John Taylor and Engaging Audiences: Findings from a Pilot Project’

1.15–2.15: lunch

The cost of attendance, including lunches, teas and coffees, is £60 (waged) and £30 (unwaged).

Accommodation can be arranged in Gonville and Caius College at a cost of £65.25+VAT (single ensuite) or £81+VAT (twin/double ensuite).

On the night of 14 September, there will be a conference dinner (price not included in booking fee) at a local Indian restaurant.

For a conference flyer, click here. For a booking form in Word format, click here.

For further information, please contact the organisers, Anthony Ossa-Richardson (anthonyossar@gmail.com) and Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk).

curated by Sophie Seita

Currently on display in the Cambridge English Faculty exhibition space is a selection of some of the most fascinating, rare, important, and often forgotten avant-garde magazines from the early twentieth century all the way up to the present day. ‘A Century of Avant-Garde Little Magazines’ celebrates the crucial and multifarious contributions magazines have made not only to the development of an individual writer’s or artist’s oeuvre, but to numerous national and international avant-garde groupings, and to cultural, political, and aesthetic tendencies more broadly. The exhibition includes print magazines associated with Dada, Modernism, the British Poetry Revival, the mimeograph revolution, feminist and contemporary communities, and a digital display of materials published on the peripheries of Conceptual Art and Conceptual Poetry, Language Writing, Fluxus, and many other avant-gardes. Moving away from a focus on the individual author or the single work, the exhibition emphasises the material richness and collaborative spirit of experimental publications and publishing communities, drawing attention to their innovations in design, typography, and aesthetic form, and to the collective work of editors, practitioners, readers, and other, often invisible, participants. The items on display are on loan from the Cambridge University Library, English Faculty Library, and private collections, while the digital materials are photographs taken in a number of archives, from the Beinecke Library (Yale), Fales (NYU), Princeton, New York Public Library, to MoMA, among others.

An introductory talk by Dr Sophie Seita, Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, will take place on Monday, 5 June, 3-4.30 in the Board Room of the Faculty of English.

Today, on a beautiful sunny day, a large group of diehards shut itself up in a couple of rooms in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education to discuss ‘The Children’s Book as Material Object’. Events were initiated by a richly detailed keynote from Philip Nel, who took on Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, which he read as a development of Paul Klee’s ideas about taking a line for a walk. Exploring every conceivable context including the history of crayons, the development of TV shows that encouraged children to write on the screen (using their ‘winky dink kits’), and the demands of offset chromolithography, he revealed how intricate was the construction of Harold. He also disinterred a subtle racial politics from Harold’s 10% brown skin, which some readers read as white and some as black. This ambiguity perhaps tied up with Johnson’s activities in the civil rights movement, for which he was under FBI investigation at the time that he was writing his book.

After this, the conference moved into parallel sessions. The one I attended took on the theme of play and interaction. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh delved into the history of playable media, showing some wonderful seventeenth- and eighteenth-century lift-the-flap books that allowed children to turn Adam into Eve, and Eve into a mermaid. Sandra Williams took us into the world of the –Ology series (Pirateology, Dragonology etc), bejewelled books that include all kinds of games that (in practice) lure their young readers into digressive play. The investigation of the responses of real schoolkids was also a feature of the final paper in the panel, in which Anne Neely and Noelle Yoo reported back on responses to their dinky 3D-printed posable figures of Elephant and Piggie, from the popular series by Mo Willems. If the book starts off as a self-contained reading experience, it seems that it has an afterlife in play, during which new stories are set loose.

After lunch, a second parallel session kicked off with Debbie Pullinger and Lisa Kirkham thinking (with help from Heidegger) about the differences between the tactile text of the physical book and the uncontained realm of the ebook. Naomi Hamer took on the proliferation of museums based on children’s books and children’s authors, noting that their curatorial aesthetic (images framed on walls, no touching please!) was radically incompatible with books that beg to be touched. And Tyler Shores explored the (mostly unsatisfactory) effort to translate comics to the ereader screen; the process of adapting a complex graphic medium to a new platform is presenting severe teething difficulties. All three accounts raised important questions about remediation, and how well books survive when they are translated to new environments.

The last, plenary session of the day had four papers. Sophie Defrance, from the University Library, discussed the blurred lines between children’s books and children’s toys and games in the library’s collections. Carl F. Miller called attention to the extraordinary power of literary prizes in the children’s book world, and noted that awards of comparable gravitas for ebooks have yet to emerge. Jen Aggleton reported on the responses of young readers to a set of illustrated novels, charting the process by which these 9/10-year-olds were awakened to the aesthetic pleasures of a well-crafted book. And Zoe Jaques took us deeper into the borderland between books and toys, where a variety of book-like ‘scriptive things’ create severe problems both of categorisation and of shelving.

Proceedings were wrapped up with a round-table, which offered an opportunity for broader reflection on the category of the scriptive thing and on the seeming self-containment of the book. For me, the day came neatly full circle, sending me back to the opening meditation on Harold and the Purple Crayon, which had revealed above all the extraordinary artfulness of the book’s construction. Modern children’s books, following Harold, are often triumphs of choreography, in which text and image work interact in very sophisticated ways. They are masterful in their handling of gaps and silences, teasing the child reader to make the necessary inferences (often with prompting from a nearby adult). And they constantly reinvent the book, offering new shapes and sizes and graphic conventions so as to pitch readers into weird and unpredictable worlds. It struck me that one of the reasons that we feel so nostalgic about children’s books is because they are so literary. They offer an intense foretaste of grown-up poems, plays and novels, in which the rules of the game are often similarly unclear, and the outcomes deliciously unpredictable.

A new exhibition opens at Cambridge University Library today. ‘Discarded History: The Genizah of Medieval Cairo’ puts on show just a few of the 200,000 manuscripts found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the late nineteenth-century. These were books and documents of all kinds that were no longer needed, but which could not be destroyed because they bore the holy name of God.

Conserving these fragments, many of which were ‘literally ground to dust’ in the crush of a single chamber (the Genizah) of the Synagogue, has been a major effort for the library in recent decades. Making sense of such an enormous and multifarious collection has proved just as difficult. Launching the exhibition, Ben Outhwaite said that the curators could have tried to dazzle spectators with ‘the first x’ and ‘the most important y’, but instead they went for a subtler approach, showing how this treasure haul of documents sheds light on the richly multicultural life of an ancient city.

The variety of materials is extraordinary: good-luck charms, prenuptial agreements, alphabet primers, first-hand accounts of earthquakes, and numerous letters–from a refugee, a woman with leprosy, the head of the Jerusalem Academy. There is Moses Maimonides’ treatise on aphrodisiacs (‘if ox-tongue is placed in wine until its strength is extracted, it greatly increases the joy and strengthens sexual intercourse’). There’s a trousseau list including ‘a pen-box made in China’ and a lavish collection of robes and wimples. And there’s one letter in which a woman threatens to go on a hunger strike (in the daytime, at least) if her husband doesn’t come back home full-time, rather than only turning up on the Sabbath. He writes on the back: ‘If you don’t break your fast, I won’t come back Sabbaths or any other day!’ In its charming and its less-than-charming details, it’s an absorbing display.

Friday 5 May, 1-2 pm   

Milstein Seminar Room, University Library     

Austen Saunders and Julia Smith (Oxford)

Collating early modern printed texts: the Traherne Digital Collator

Monday 5 June, 3-4.30

Board Room, Faculty of English                                               

Sophie Seita (Queens’, Cambridge)

A Century of Avant-Garde Little Magazines: An Introduction

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a forum for informal discussion on medieval script and scribal practices, and on the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their manuscript contexts. Each workshop focuses upon a particular issue, usually explored through one or more informal presentations and general discussion. All are welcome.

Friday 28 April 2017, 2-4pm, Faculty of English (West Road), Room SR24

Analyzing scribal technique: the perspective of a practitioner

An informal workshop on scribal techniques in the writing of the formal book-script, littera textualis, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, led by the scribe, Paul Antonio, focusing upon examples from the composite music manuscript, the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Bibliothèque de Médecine, H 196).

Friday 5 May 2017, 2-4pm Faculty of English (West Road), Room SR24

Late-medieval manuscript dissemination

Dr Phil Knox (Trinity College, Cambridge; Faculty of English) ‘Tracking manuscripts of the Roman de la rose in late-medieval Britain: approaches and problems’

Friday 12 May 2017, 2-4 pm Cambridge University Library (Milstein Seminar Room), 2-4pm

Analyzing parchment and binding structures: the perspective of a conservator

An informal workshop on parchment and binding structures of medieval manuscripts in the University Library, led by Edward Cheese, informed by his observations while working on these manuscripts as a conservator.

Convenors: Teresa Webber, Orietta Da Rold, Suzanne Paul, Sean Curran and David Ganz

For further details, email mtjw2@cam.ac.uk

Book-smells are in the news again. Some doughty chemists and heritage scientists at UCL have teamed up to produce a ‘historic book odour wheel’ that links the perceived scent of old books with their chemical olfactory triggers. So, for example, if you think your book smells of chocolate, that’s probably because it’s giving off vanillin, benzaldehyde and furfural, chemicals that are emitted as the cellulose and lignin in paper degrades. The researchers claim that they are shedding light on how libraries communicate through smell, putting the science together with cultural history to explore the elusive linguistics of scent.

This is just one of innumerable projects in which humanists and scientists are currently getting together to explore the history that lies hidden in old books (Cambridge’s own MINIARE is an excellent example of the genre). It can’t be long before we will be able to subject every book to a full body scan, reconstructing its entire history from its chemical composition. But to focus on scent is also to bring in the imponderables of the human relationship to matter, and all of the cultural variables that cannot simply be read off the physical details.

That much is clear from the comments thread at the bottom of the Guardian report on the research, in which scores of people come forward to confess their love or hate for particular old book-smells. The annuals that children cracked open at Christmas smelled lovely, it seems, while school textbooks usually smelled foul. Kindles are repeatedly faulted for their failure to smell. And the smellscapes of particular bookshops and libraries are fondly recalled. Inevitably there are plenty of parodic contributions, with regular allusions to Proust. But perhaps we are a little bit closer to understanding what the nose knows.

The writer Arundhati Roy was the guest on Desert Island Discs this week. The presenter asked her whether it was true that she was granted complete control over the appearance of her bestselling debut novel The God of Small Things. ‘Granted?–I insisted on it!’ she began; ‘I was just a stubborn thing’. Her publishers had asked her what she would like from them. Her answer: ‘Complete design control: no saris, no tigers on my cover!’

Her comments resonated for me with those of another writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, who recently published an essay entitled The Clothing of Books. The clothing of books means their covers, and for Lahiri the cover brings with it a social anxiety that recalls the anguish she felt as a child caught between the clothing styles of her American schoolfriends and her Bengali parents. On becoming a writer, ‘I discovered that another part of me had to be dressed and presented to the world. But what is wrapped around my words–my book covers–is not of my choosing’.

Lahiri writes movingly about the strange sense of alienation from her own creativity that the cover sets in train. Designed by somebody else, suggesting a reading of the book and a projection of its meaning out into the world, a cover gives a book a new personality and makes it something of a stranger to its author. Lahiri yearns to have the book naked, without all the paratextual elements (author-mugshots, blurbs, snippets from reviews) with which we are now deluged. ‘I want the first words read by the reader of my book to be written by me’.

Lahiri cares so much about her books because she feels them to be, in some sense, part of her. A recent autobiographical work, In Other Words, has her photo on the cover, and this is fitting: ‘In the end the author is the book’. When she asks herself to imagine her ideal cover, it is a reproduction of a still life by Morandi or a collage by Matisse. Having written this thought down, she find herself the very next day, coming out of a building, confronted by posters of Morandi to her right and Matisse to her left. For a few moments she imagines herself ‘transformed into the pages of a book’. Some demand complete design control; others have it thrust upon them.