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.

An opportunity to discuss your current research with other CMT members. UL tea-room, 11am, Monday 13 March.

Jane Austen’s Sanditon – 200 Years: the history of an unfinished work

The Cambridge English Faculty is currently displaying material tracing the public life and textual forms of Sanditon, Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, which she composed in the year of her death, 1817.

The manuscript of Sanditon is held in King’s College, Cambridge, where Jane Austen’s great-nephew was Provost. This exhibition traces the public life and developing textual forms of Sanditon, from the first public reference to the work in James Edward Austen’s-Leigh’s 1871 Memoir of his aunt, through to the first published edition of Austen’s fragment (1925), the first facsimile edition (1975) and other continued, illustrated and translated editions, up to digital text. The items on display in this exhibition are on loan from Cambridge University Library and from the Gilson collection at King’s College, Cambridge.

The exhibition, to be found in the first-floor atrium of the Faculty, coincides with a conference about Sanditon to be held at Trinity College, Cambridge, 29-31 March, 2017: details, including registration information are here: https://sanditon200years.wordpress.com

CMT coffee and cake: Thursday 16 March, 10.30, in the exhibition space

Friday 2 June 2017, Woburn Suite, Senate House

Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

CALL FOR PAPERS

2017 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Louis Elzevier, bookseller and founder of the publishing house which dominated Dutch printing in the seventeenth century. Elzevier books spread across the known world, through their own vast international trade network and via the many foreign students who read them while studying at Dutch universities. They thus helped shape how the topics represented were understood, learned, taught, read, collected and pirated. The renowned dynasty lives on today through the long collectability of its output and through its namesake, the Elsevier publishing house. This conference explores material evidence of the production and consumption of academic books in the early modern period, based around publications by the Elzeviers and their contemporaries.

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers on topics related to early modern scholarly publishing. Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

• The contemporary book trade and the migration of books;
• The secondhand/antiquarian book trade;
• The Elzeviers in context;
• Collecting and owning early modern books;
• Piracy, both of content and publishing strategies;
• Business models of academic presses;
• Cheap publishing / pocketbooks;
• Editing in the early modern period;
• Early modern book illustration
• Relationships between authors and publishers;
• The bibliographers of publishers;
• Digitisation and metadata

The conference will coincide with a display of Senate House Library’s Elzevier collection, one of the largest worldwide.

Please send abstracts of approximately 200 words and a short paragraph of biographical information to Dr Cynthia Johnston at cynthiajohnston@sas.ac.uk by 24^th April 2017.

https://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/elzeviers-and-their-contemporaries-conference

The Whipple Library’s ‘Science in Print’ seminar examines the
production of printed science books from the early 1500s to the early
1900s over the course of two terms. Following on from the success of
last term’s ‘hand press’ section, we look forward this term to thinking
about mechanized book production in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in a series of 3 sessions led by Drs Sarah Bull and James
Poskett on Wednesday 1, 8 and 15 March from 11.00am to 12.30pm in the
Whipple Old Library (further details below). There will be an additional
workshop at the University Library on Monday 20 March (11.00-12.30) to
look at a broader range of examples of the techniques and materials
discussed during the seminars.

The sessions are open to all (undergraduates, graduates, visitors and
beyond), but places are limited to ensure all have full access to the
examples. Please contact Anna Jones (ahr23@cam.ac.uk) to register your
interest as soon as possible. The sessions are conceived as a series,
but if you can’t manage all three, please indicate which you would like
to attend so we can allocate spaces accordingly.

_More about Science in Print II_
Understanding how a book is made and distributed is vital to the study
of its contents, helping to locate its economic and social context, its
audience, and its historical significance. Using examples from the
Whipple Library’s collection of rare books and periodicals, this
workshop series will explore some bibliographical techniques to identify
and describe the production and distribution of printed material from
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the focus will be
on scientific texts and illustrations, these sessions will be of
interest to book historians in all disciplines, and all are welcome.

I (1 March): Review of the material structure of the book; Introduction
to 19th and early 20th century printing methods.

II (8 March): Illustration methods in the 19th and early 20th
centuries.

III (15 March): Print and technologies of distribution in the 19th and
early 20th centuries.

IV (20 March): Workshop at UL to discuss further examples.

Fascinating to learn last week that three seventeenth-century letters that have been found beneath the floorboards in an attic at Knole House in Kent. The National Trust has reproduced the text of one of the letters, which asks for various goods to be brought from London to a house in Essex:

Mr Bilby, I pray p[ro]vide to be sent too morrow in ye Cart some Greenfish, The Lights from my Lady Cranfeild[es] Cham[ber] 2 dozen of Pewter spoon[es]: one greate fireshovell for ye nursery; and ye o[t]hers which were sent to be exchanged for some of a better fashion, a new frying pan together with a note of ye prises of such Commoditie for ye rest.

Your loving friend
Robert Draper

Octobre 1633
Copthall

The Trust knows exactly how this letter came to Knole, since ‘my Lady Cranfeilde’ married Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, in 1637, and there are documents showing that trunks full of linen, items of furniture and collections of papers were transferred from Copt Hall to Knole in the early eighteenth century.

What I like about the letter is that, both in its contents and in its later history, it is all about the transfer of stuff–the constant, pleasurable yet headache-inducing exchanges that we have with the things in our lives. I also love those ‘greenfish’. The term refers simply to fresh, unsalted fish, but one can’t help wondering whether they weren’t a bit off-colour when they arrived in the cart.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Date: Saturday, 27th May 2017

Venue: Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Within the study of media theory and history, competing narratives have identified, on the one hand, the absorption of the human voice or body within the text, and, on the other, the development of technology and material texts as extensions of that voice or body. To date these narratives have been largely located from the twentieth century onward. This one-day conference aims to readdress these narratives within a longer historical and wider interdisciplinary perspective. From eighteenth century concepts of the bodily consumption of texts by readers, and words being impressed upon their brains, to more recent imaginings of the multi-sensorial spaces of digital texts and their distribution in the new media landscape, the relationship between the media of writing and the human body has been fraught with affective potentials. This conference aims to examine this relationship between the materiality of texts and the materiality of bodies by bringing together researchers from different disciplines and time periods across the study of textuality.

Moreover, this conference seeks to make use of the potentials of such media forms for academic study. Speakers will be asked to send a digital copy of material related to their presentation ahead of the conference. These materials will be uploaded to the conference website, allowing speakers to explore the implications of their research during their presentations and enabling participants to view the material before and after the conference itself.

Possible topic areas could include:

• The physiology of reading

• The multi-sensory experience of texts: visuals, sonics, and tactility

• Literacy and the materiality of the alphabet

• The (dis)embodied nature of writing

• Technology and media and/as bodily forms of writing

• Text processing from print to the digital

• The Internet and (post)human identity

• Pens, typewriters, keyboards, touchscreens, and other media of writing

• The place of the body in media theory and history

Keynote speaker: Dr Seb Franklin (Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, King’s College London)

Please submit a title and abstract of a maximum of 300 words, along with a short biographical note of up to 50 words, to embodyingmedia@gmail.com by 20th February 2017.

Monday 30 January, 12.30-2

Milstein Exhibition Centre/Seminar Room, University Library

A guided tour of the Cambridge University Library exhibition ‘Curious Objects’, in the company of lead curator Jill Whitelock, followed by discussion.

Places are limited–please email jes1003 to reserve.

Monday 6 March, 12.30-2

Milstein Seminar Room, University Library

‘The Medical Book in the Nineteenth Century: From MS Casebooks to Mass Plagiarism’
A workshop led by Sarah Bull, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, HPS

Speaker: Prof Sasaki Takahiro (Keio University, Shidō bunko)

Place: Faculty of Asian and Middle Easter Studies, The University of Cambridge, Room 8-9
Date: Monday 23 January 2016, 5pm