University of Cambridge, 23 May

‘You wouldn’t want to appear at a fashionable party with a book that looked like this…’ This insight into Victorian etiquette was offered today in a talk given by Jim Secord (historian of science and a member of the CMT’s advisory committee) at the Cambridge ‘Things’ seminar. Secord’s aim was to consider the relationship between the physical presentation of books and the reading experience in the nineteenth century. Of particular interest was the development of the publisher’s cloth binding in the period, and how this related to the rise of a middle-class reading public that wanted quality and durability without the need for personalised rebinding. By thinking about the cloth of books in relation to fashionable clothing, Secord hoped to ‘get back to the reading experience and what it actually meant’ at a time when new technologies were transforming the business of making books.

Following Secord, Kristina Lundblad‘s paper began by demonstrating how much we do in fact judge a book by its cover, and how much we now rely on the fact that books are differentiated by their  covers. She displayed a striking slide showing what happens when you put the words ‘Pippi Longstocking/Astrid Lindgren’ or ‘The Gift of Death/Jacques Derrida’ on a particular illustrated front-cover, in place of the original words ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/Stieg Larsson’. Pan back in time to the early nineteenth-century and the physical forms of books were mostly very anonymous. Since their bindings were often paid for by the consumer, there was no need for them to advertise the book’s contents or to catch the eye. Only when publishers started to take over the job of binding did this situation begin to change. In England, titles appeared on covers from the 1840s; by the 1850s custom-made images might be embossed along with the author’s name and the title. By the end of the century, the covers of the book were a design space to be filled with all manner of colourful images, and each book was an individualised thing–all thanks to the marvels of mass-production.

I recently caught up with my colleague Simon Jarvis’s essay ‘Why Rhyme Pleases‘, which sets out to redeem the sound-effects of poetry from centuries of denigration. Borrowing terms from Protestant attacks on Catholic devotion, critics have long written rhyme off as a superficial jingling, a ‘trifling and artificial ornament’, a trinket or fetish. Manly, heroic poets (the archetype here being Milton, who rejected rhyme as ‘the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre’) should have nothing to do with it. So ran the received wisdom, although most poets carried on regardless, at least until the advent of modernism.

To redeem rhyme, Jarvis turns to Alexander Pope, supposedly a poet of neoclassical order and balance, but in his view an intoxicatingly musical writer whose rich sound-world now goes largely unappreciated. A key exhibit here is The Rape of the Lock, which captures the bewitching materiality of the modern world in its bewitchments of sound:

“That Pope’s style was habitually and routinely by everyone described as ‘polished’—this itself testifies to a felt link between the intensively worked-over surface of his verse and the gleaming cabinets, tables, canes and snuff-boxes evoked in The Rape of the Lock.”

At the end of the essay, Jarvis piles up all the qualities that Pope’s contemporaries ascribed to his writing: “its sweetness, its variety, its gay finery, its embroidery, its vivacity, its colouring, its glitterings, its flourish, its debauch, its embellishment, its enflure, its tunableness, its suavity, its easiness, its spirit, its elevation, its glare, its dazzle, its fluency, its musicality, its melodiousness”. He makes a compelling case for thinking that we have lost something vital to the appreciation of poetry–a feel for its surfaces, its textures, its elusive ways of being in the world–and that without this we may be condemned to miss the point.

It’s World Book Day today, and for some strange reason a storage company has conducted a survey into the books in British homes. According to their findings, the average home has 138 books, and more than half of them are unread.

The implication is that we are hoarding. According to the Telegraph‘s report, ‘two thirds of those who took part said they kept books because they were emotionally attached to them, while over one in four said they hated throwing anything away’. As numerous television programmes have taught us in recent years, this kind of irrational activity needs to be stopped. Time to call in the professional declutterer, who will rid you of our inner turmoil and your surplus stuff at the same time. If you remain emotionally attached to the books, the storage firm may be able to help (first month for just £1!)

Perhaps we like the unread books, though. They are a space of possibility, a spur to dreaming. The cookery books are full of meals we might cook, one day, the travel guides of places we might stay, when we have some time and money to spare. The novels are journeys not taken, yet. Our need for the hidden realms that lie beneath the covers is beautifully captured in Angela Leighton’s poem ‘BOOK’, from her new collection ‘The Messages‘ (Shoestring Press):

BOOK

A fan of leaves, a touching brief,
a dream-hold, bolt-hole,
an answeringness like calls in sleep,

and buff or gloss, matt or shine,
accommodating hands and eyes,
you’ll touch its brainwaves shut in lines–

the moveless picture of a moving sea–
and look to hear and mean to feel
in the swim of it how to drown for real.

Anyone who has spent time wandering around the churches of Venice will have imbibed the name of Cima da Conegliano (c.1459-c.1517), whose saints and madonnas pose against a background of bright cerulean skies and breathtaking landscapes, dominated by distant hill towns to which the eye wanders as if yearning to pay them a visit. This summer an exhibition in Cima’s home town will be setting the artist in the context of his place and time, and looking across the range of artistic production in sixteenth-century Conegliano and its environs. Among the pictures on display is this one by Domenico Capriolo of a studious young man with a book–the book itself beautifully rendered, a learned folio with text and commentary, decorated letters and rubrications. You can’t read the words, but you can’t help wondering what that chubby finger is pointing out.

To live in the modern world is to be a slave to form-filling. Our births and deaths require official certification, and in the interim we receive regular reminders that we are merely a number in an endless sequence of numbers. The documents and papers that assert our identity render us anonymous, reminding us of the terms of a mass society in which we are interchangeable and insignificant.

Simon Franklin’s paper at the History of Material Texts seminar last night traced the prehistory of bureaucracy by surveying the development of printed blank forms in Russia. Printed forms have become increasingly interesting to historians of the book in recent years, largely as a way of questioning the centrality of ‘the book’ in print culture. Single-sheet blanks were produced in large numbers from the very inception of print in the West, and they played an important part in making print commercially viable–no printing house could have made a living out of the works of Aristotle.

Looking at Russian forms complicates this story, however, since Russia was one of the many places where printing completely failed to enter into an alliance with market capitalism. The idea of ‘the printing press as an agent of change’ (to use Elizabeth Eisenstein’s celebrated formulation) becomes problematic in relation to a culture in which printing remained a state monopoly and where almost the only printed books were religious titles intended for use in church. Franklin’s research in Saint Petersburg has yielded a fine haul of forms of all kinds–passports, travel permits, grants of land and title–and has suggested that there was a decisive turn to print in the early eighteenth century, probably thanks to the Europeanizing project of Peter the Great. Even after this (comparatively late) move, there were frequent failures in the distribution of forms, so that people continued to produce manuscript copies with the attendant risks of forgery and malpractice. It takes a lot of effort to create a bureaucracy.

It’s easy to get absorbed in the material features of the forms themselves–the combination of printed text, decoration, handwritten names and numbers, stamps and seals… They are fascinating, I suppose, because the bureaucratic bustle, the proliferation of elements and agents, aspires to a finally unattainable ideal, a fantasy of authentication. In this sense the blank form seems to epitomise the anxieties about truth and lying that have always dogged the printed word.

Keynes Library, Birkbeck College, University of London

Perversions of Paper is a one-day symposium investigating the outer limits of our interactions with books and with paper. It considers unorthodox engagements with texts, from cherishing or hoarding them to mutilating and desecrating them, from wearing them to chewing them, and from inhaling their scent to erasing their content.

‘Perversion’ may apply to deviations from normal usage but also to our psychological investments in paper. To talk of having a fetish for books is common, but is there more to this than merely well-worn cliché? What part do books and other written artefacts play in our imaginary and psychic lives, and what complex emotional attachments do we develop towards them? Also, how might literary studies or cultural history register these impulses and acts; what kind of methodologies are appropriate?

This symposium invites reflections on perverse uses of – and relationships with – paper and parchment. We welcome proposals from a range of historical periods and disciplinary backgrounds, and from postgraduate students, as well as from more established academics.

Contributors are invited to consider bookish and papery aberrations from any number of angles, including but not limited to:

* the defacing or mutilation of writing
* the book as sculpture or art medium
* ‘upcycling’ or re-purposing
* the book or manuscript as a fetish object
* pathologies or obsessions related to paper
* psychologies of book collecting
* bibliophilia and bibliophobia
* book crazes, the tactility or sensuality of paper and manuscripts
* books, libraries and archives as sources of contagion, or as the focus of terror or abjection.

Deadline for proposals: March 30th 2014.

Please email abstracts of no more than 200 words together with a brief bio statement to Dr Gillian Partington (g.partington@bbk.ac.uk).

More information: http://archivefutures.com/events/perversions-of-paper/

This term Cambridge University Library will be holding two masterclasses as part of the Incunabula Project.

The first masterclass, entitled “Incunabula from Bavaria – how to identify provenances and reconstruct 15th-century collections”, will be led by Bettina Wagner, of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

The German state of Bavaria was not only a region where presses were set up soon after the invention of printing in Mainz, but also the site of some major collections of printed books. Many monasteries and some private owners built up substantial libraries in the 15th century, benefitting from a dense trade network and well-established connections to Italy. However, as a result of auctions and the dissolution of monasteries in the early 19th century, many books from Bavaria were dispersed and have ended up in collections in the UK and other countries. In order to reconstruct these historical collections, painstaking work is necessary. Marks of provenance and bindings have to be documented and identified, and archival records must be analyzed. The masterclass will introduce participants to the techniques and tools used for such research and thus help to place incunabula from the ULC’s collections into the wider context of late mediaeval collection building and book usage.

The seminar will be held in the Milstein Seminar Rooms at the Library on Tuesday, 4 February at 2.30 pm.

The second masterclass, entitled “Libri sine asseribus – incunables in early bindings without wooden boards”, will be led by Nicholas Pickwoad, director of the Ligatus Research Centre at the University of the Arts, London.

The standard image of the fifteenth-century book is of a large volume with wooden boards covered in white or brown skin, tooled in blind, with metal furniture, clasps and possibly a chain shackle. This is also the book that appears in contemporary painting and sculpture and became so fixed in the popular imagination that it survived as the symbol of the bible in trade signs right through to the eighteenth century, if not beyond. There were, however, other types of binding that were used by the booktrade to give cheap, lightweight protection to books as they moved through the book trade. Whilst not necessarily intended to be temporary, few have survived today and reconstructing their history is difficult. Enough however have come down to us to allow a picture of the rich diversity of binding types used for this purpose to be created and to give an indication of how they were presented to their first owners.

This seminar will be held in the Keynes Room at the Library on Tuesday 18 February at 2.30pm .

Both seminars will last approximately 90 minutes, allowing time for questions and discussion. Attendance will be limited in order to allow
all attendees a chance to see the books concerned up close, and to participate in the discussion.

To book a place on either seminar, please email<incunabula@lib.cam.ac.uk>.

Wednesday 29 January 2014

Dr. Fei-Hsien Wang (Centre for History and Economics & Magdalene College, U. of Cambridge)

‘Hunting Pirates in Beijing: Shanghai Booksellers’ Private ‘Copyright’ Police (1930-1937)’

All seminars take place on Wednesdays (unless otherwise arranged) at 5pm in rooms 8 & 9 in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Tea will be served at the same venue at 4:45pm. All are welcome.