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.

A friend’s Facebook post:

‘Uh oh. I just tried to zoom in on a picture – in a book – using the iPad-fingers-moved-apart-manoeuvre. In my defence, the page was shiny.’

I sympathise: I’ve been looking at some illustrated books this week and reflecting on how rarely you can actually see the detail you need to see in a reproduction of a painting. In this sense, digital technology seems like a distinct advance on print. The downside is that we are going to lose any sense of scale–the relationship between the body and the artefact cannot yet be reproduced, nor does anyone seem to care much about it. But the size of a painting, or of a book for that matter, would in the past have been part of the point of it, framing your whole experience.

So I hope my 3-D printer, when it arrives, will allow me to create a LIFE-SIZE reproduction of the Mona Lisa.

Seminars in the History of Material Texts 2014

Thursdays at 5.30 pm, Faculty of English, 9 West Rd

30 January, Faculty Board Room — Cristanne Miller (SUNY Buffalo)

6 February, SR24 — Mark Towsey (Liverpool)

‘Community Libraries: Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850’

Please note that this seminar has been cancelled due to UCU strike action.

20 February, SR24 — Simon Franklin (MML, Cambridge)

‘In Praise of Old Blank Forms (Especially in Russia)’

All welcome.

For more information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk), Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk) or Dunstan Roberts (dcdr2@cam.ac.uk)

A one-day conference at the Centre for the Study of the Book, Oxford University

Saturday 5 July 2014

Call for Papers

‘Pag. 8. lin. 7. for laughing, reade, languishing.’

Richard Bellings, A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1624), ‘Errata’

Recent histories of the book have replaced earlier narratives of technological triumph and revolutionary change with a more tentative story of continuities with manuscript culture and the instability of print. An abstract sense of technological agency has given way to a messier world of collaboration, muddle, money, and imperfection. Less a confident stride towards modernity, the early modern book now looks stranger: not quite yet a thing of our world.

What role might error have in these new histories of the hand-press book? What kinds of error are characteristic of print, and what can error tell us about print culture? Are particular forms of publication prone to particular mistakes? How effective were mechanisms of correction (cancel-slips; errata lists; over-printing; and so on), and what roles did the printing house corrector perform? Did readers care about mistakes? Did authors have a sense of print as an error-prone, fallen medium, and if so, how did this inform their writing? What links might we draw between representations of error in literary works (like Spenser’s Faerie Queene), and the presence of error in print? How might we think about error and retouching or correcting rolling-press plates? What is the relationship between engraving historians’ continuum of difference, and letter-press bibliographers’ binary of variant/invariant? Was there a relationship between bibliographical error and sin, particularly in the context of the Reformation? How might modern editors of early modern texts respond to errors: are errors things to correct, or to dutifully transcribe? Is the history of the book a story of the gradual elimination of error, or might we propose a more productive role for slips and blunders?

Proposals for 20-minute papers are welcome on any aspect of error and print, in Anglophone or non-Anglophone cultures. Please email a 300-word abstract and a short CV to Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@balliol.ox.ac.uk) by 14 April 2014.

Over Christmas I read Memoirs of a Leavisite by David Ellis, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Kent. It left me no more of a fan of the great F. R. Leavis than I was when I began, but it made me realise how much his theories of literature might still flow beneath the surface of my own reading and teaching–so I read it both with pleasure and with a kind of fascinated horror.

As befits someone brought up in Leavis’s school, Ellis confesses that he has little feel for or interest in books as material objects, though he admits one exception: the works of Roland Barthes in the Éditions du Seuil:

“As he became more famous he was able to publish shorter texts in this format, with bigger print, so that his book on photography (La Chambre Claire), with its wonderful expanses of white around the large lettering, became my model of what a book should look like, especially at a time when English academic publishers were cramming more and more words onto the enlarged pages, and thinner paper, of their books. With my eyesight weakening, I became a propagandist for this model until someone publishing one of my own books rather irritably told me that she was considering offering it to the public with a free white stick (an addition, I ought to have pointed out, that would not help the poorly sighted to read the print better).”

As well as saying a lot about the unending tussle between writers and publishers, and the hidden visual cues that shape our reading, this is also a good example of Ellis’s richly maudlin prose–perfect reading for a dark December day…

and meanwhile a couple of wags at the New York Times have come up with a witty prescription for the rebranding of print… Happy new year!

A colleague sent me a link to a slightly creepy article in the New York Times in which (as he neatly put it) ‘GCHQ meets CMT’. It seems that it’s not just governments and social media outfits that are intent on spying on us. It’s also publishers, who thanks to the burgeoning of ebooks are pioneering new ways of knowing what we read and how we respond to it.

There are all sorts of ways in which such information might be used, but the article seems to be most excited about the possibility of taking a focus-group approach to creative writing. Just as a big-budget movie might be tested out on an audience to find ways of increasing its appeal prior to general release, so novelists will now be able to find out what their readers like and ‘give them more of it’. I recoil in horror from the whole idea, but doubtless it will help someone somewhere to make a fast buck…

The one-day workshop on ‘The Biblioteca Hernandina and the Early Modern Book World’, held at the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge on Tuesday, was a richly stimulating event. Organised by Edward Wilson-Lee and José María Pérez Fernández, the workshop convened a group of experts to discuss aspects of the enormous library of Hernando Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, who after some early journeying with his father in the New World devoted much of his life to travelling in search of books.

José María and Edward kicked things off by offering a potted biography of Colón and an account of his life in book-buying. His shopping expeditions began in Spain in 1510, moved on to Italy in 1512, and subsequently took him to Germany, France, the Netherlands and England. He also sent agents out to extend his collections, instructing them to focus on cheaper and more unusual small-format books rather than buying the kind of expensive folios that could be obtained anywhere. Along the way he paid visits to heroes such as Erasmus, taking care to receive at least one book as a gift on each visit, and he may have befriended Albrecht Durer, whose works he added to his vast collection of printed woodcuts and engravings. The result was a library that dwarfed other collections of the day, boasting more than 15,000 titles. A number of catalogues witness his struggle not merely to list the books he owned, but also to render them useful. Rather than letting the books die on the shelves, he sought to release their contents through a massive project of indexing and epitomizing–a project that was doomed to failure, and which was left unfinished at his death in 1539.

One of the most striking features of Hernando’s collecting was his enthusiasm for ephemera, and in the morning session Miguel Martínez explored his penchant for broadside ballads, newsbooks and controversial pamphlets–the sort of cheap publications that would have flooded the streets of his native Seville. Despite their former ubiquity, such items now survive in single copies if they survive at all, and they no longer extant in Cólon’s library as it survives in Seville Cathedral. Andrew Pettegree picked up this topic of lost books, suggesting that as many as two-thirds of all early modern editions may have disappeared without trace. He explained how the editors of the Universal Short Title Catalogue are using a variety of archival records to infer the existence of lost editions–10,000 of them so far–which are being added to the catalogue to create a much fuller map of pre-1600 print culture. The third paper in this session focused on a particular book, Christopher Columbus’s copy of Marco Polo’s account of China. Ana Carolina Hosne reconsidered the question of how far Columbus was aware of Polo’s work when he set out to pioneer a westward route to Cathay–given that his copy in the Biblioteca Hernandina post-dates his second expedition of 1498.

The afternoon session began with Tess Knighton on Cólon’s music books. As well as setting Cólon in relation to other Spanish collectors, Knighton’s talk challenged the idea that all of Cólon’s music-buying would have required foreign travel. Although it is clear that some of his shopping for the earliest printed polyphonic music was done in Italy, the mobility of books in the period was such that a range of international publications would have been on sale in Seville. Alexander Marr took on the subject of prints, exploring the curious blind-spots in Cólon’s massive collection of woodcut and intaglio images and asking whether these point us to his personal tastes, or merely to the financial constraints imposed by someone who seems to have watched every maravedí as he trawled the seas of ink. Vittoria Feola concluded the session by considering the fate of the Hernandina library in relation to other great collections, including the library of Elias Ashmole, which she is currently cataloguing. Her account of the unpredictable twists and turns of books-as-property suggested that there are many ways in which a library can be ‘lost’. The most perfectly preserved collection can be unknown and unused, kept in a gilded cage with no catalogue to guide readers to its contents.

The conference closed with a round-table discussion which started out from a fascinating memoir of Cólon by his servant Juan Pérez, and which moved on to attempt to integrate the day’s findings. Was Cólon a bad collector, someone who put quantity above quality and whose cataloguing techniques were little better than quixotic? What should we make of his buying of books in languages he couldn’t read and that he considered ‘barbaric’ (such as his large collection of German Lutheran pamphlets)? And what sense can we make of his ephemeral collecting? Does his investment in the popular mark him out as exceptional, or does our propensity to find it surprising merely reveal the distortions in our view of the period?

You can read more about the project, and see some photos from books in Cólon’s collections, here.

Cambridge University Library’s Entrance Hall cases are hosting what is believed to be the first ever exhibition of colour printmaking in Tudor England, 1485-1603. These brightly printed pictures transform our understanding of the spread of technologies of visual communication in the English Renaissance. The exhibition is curated by Dr Elizabeth Upper and presents aspects of her research as the 2012/13 Munby Fellow of Bibliography at Cambridge University Library.

The exhibition can be viewed during Library opening hours until 18 January 2014. See https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk and, for further information, https://specialcollections.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=6612#more-6612.