I was interested to read in my weekend newspaper that when Michael Gove, secretary of state for education in the UK’s current coalition government, decreed that every school in the land must have a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible, the copies were inscribed ‘Presented by the Secretary of State for Education’. Scouring the web, I find that in fact these words were not just ‘inscribed’ in the books, they were actually tooled onto the bindings.

Does this kind of thing go on everywhere, or just here? I’d be very interested to learn whether followers of this blog know of other acts of large-scale book-giving by authorities around the world, especially if they have pictures of the curious books that result.

Thursdays at 5:30pm, room SR-24, Faculty of English, 9 West Road

Thursday 11 October

Andrew Zurcher, ‘Spenser’s Vomit: Imitation, Language, Materiality’

There are three short optional pre-readings for this seminar–download them here, here and here

Thursday 8 November

Abigail Brundin and Dunstan Roberts, ‘Italian books in an English great house library: The case of Belton House in Lincolnshire’

All welcome. Wine & soft drinks will be served at the start of the seminar.

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)

From Adam Mars-Jones’ review of the latest Ian McEwan, in the London Review of Books:

“Any residual nastiness in the new novel Sweet Tooth has been curiously displaced, onto the cover of the book. I don’t mean the photographic image, which shows a glamorous woman in a red dress … I mean the texture of the actual lamination used on the dust jacket, almost sticky yet almost slimy, creating a subliminal urge to wash the hands that have been in contact with it. This is an effect no ebook can hope to duplicate.’

Perhaps someone from the publishers (Cape) could tell us how the effect was achieved, and whether it was intended or just a happy accident?

for all those who contributed to the ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference earlier this week. An opportunity to reconnect head with hand, the fabric of language with the language of fabric, this event drew a wonderfully diverse crowd from across the world. We discussed all manner of topics from all manner of angles, kaleidoscopic interests jostling with dazzling images, extraordinary pieces of textile art, and (in one talk) a slab of flesh quivering under the needle. The conference’s numerous threads were drawn together in a plenary lecture by the anthropologist Tim Ingold that offered a lyrical unfolding of all that the human hand can know. His account of what it takes to make a piece of string was a highlight: simple yet miraculous.

The annual competition for fellowships tenable in the academic year 2013-14 is about to take place, with a closing date for applications of 30 November 2012.

The Research Division welcomes applications both for long-term awards of between 9 and 12 months and for short-term awards of 3 months or less. Among the long-term awards, the division is particularly keen to receive applications for the two Barbara Thom fellowships designed for non-tenured early-career faculty who will use the award to revise their doctoral dissertations into their first monographs. While the Thom fellowships essentially offer successful candidates the time to write, virtually all our other fellowships are aimed at those who wish to make extensive use of our collections. Our peer review committees, which make judgments about the quality and viability of applications, pay particular attention to the Huntington materials on which the applicant intends to work. There is also a separate competition for the Dibner Program in the History of Science and Technology.

More Info

The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is now accepting applications for the next round of funding – find out here how to apply. The deadline for the submission of preliminary application forms is 2 November 2012.

Unless action is taken now, much of mankind’s documentary heritage may vanish – discarded as no longer of relevance or left to deteriorate beyond recovery. This website explains what the Endangered Archives Programme is, and how it can help.

Learn about the threat to archives.
Find out more about the scope of the Programme.
Search the Endangered Archives Programme’s Projects.
Browse the Programme’s digital collections.

Grants may be awarded to individual researchers to identify collections that can be preserved for fruitful use. The original archives and the master digital copies will be transferred to a safe archival home in their country of origin, while copies will be deposited at the British Library for use by scholars worldwide.

The Endangered Archives Programme is generously sponsored by Arcadia.

If you know of any collections or cultures that are worthy of investigation, please contact us.

A fascinating media tangle is unfolding in the UK today, as The Sun newspaper goes against the wishes of Buckingham Palace and publishes pictures of a naked Prince Harry that have been widely circulated on the web. The newspaper’s editor pleads the freedom of the press and the public interest; media lawyers deny that there is any public interest in this particular game of strip billiards. Meanwhile radio pundits point out that ‘the genie was out of the bottle’–which strikes me as a lovely metaphor for the internet.

The whole debate is framed by the Leveson Inquiry, an ongoing parliamentary investigation into the malpractices of ‘red-top’ newspapers which, over the past few years, have got many of their most salacious stories through illegal phone-hacking. And it’s given added piquancy by the eternal soap opera of the royal family, which The Sun professes (ma’am!) to hold in the highest esteem. Beyond that, there’s the serious anxiety that newspapers might prove unsustainable in the age of free and instant online content. It’s a right royal mess, but with implications that go far beyond this prince caught with his pants down.

Writing Materials: Women of Letters from Enlightenment to Modernity

V&A Museum in partnership with King’s College London and the Elizabeth Montagu Letters Project (an AHRC-funded research network)
29-30 November 2012

This one and a half day conference will explore the tools and environments of women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  It aims to create new connections between texts and material objects, connecting intellectual history with its material medium – paper, quills, desks, letter-cases and ink. It takes as its inspiration the figure of Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Queen of the Bluestockings’ (1718-1800), a voracious writer, Shakespeare critic, coal owner, cultural patron and bluestocking salonnière. She placed herself at the centre of several key intellectual, cultural and social networks of her day – frequently securing her position through the display of materials – for example, her famous ‘feathered room’ attracted eminent visitors from poets to princesses.  Hester Thrale described her as ‘brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgement and critical in talk.’  Her Portman Square mansion became an important metropolitan site for the discussion of books and viewing of paintings.

We would like to invite proposals for speakers at a graduate student workshop on material cultures of writing from the Enlightenment to Modernity. We ask you to send in ideas for 5-10-minute presentations inspired by any object in the Victoria and Albert Museum concerned with the material culture of writing. This might include paper, ink, furniture, tools, printers, typewriters and keyboards, spaces and times, the postal system, digital images, friendship, business, privacy and publication. Proposals should not exceed one sheet of A4 and an image of the object should be attached if possible. Your presentation could be in the form of critical and/or creative writing; it could take the form of a missive, letter, journal, blog, email or tweet and it should invite a response from the audience.

Please send your proposals to k.spiller@swansea.ac.uk by 1 September 2012.

An item on this morning’s Radio 4 news programme Today asked listeners: ‘what is on your mantelpiece?’ This was a question first asked by the pioneers of Mass Observation—the project to map the everyday life of the British, initiated in 1937. As part of the effort to construct an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, observers were asked to “write down in order, from left to right, all the objects on your mantelpiece, mentioning what is in the middle” and then to do the same for other people’s houses, taking note of the age, class, and wealth of the householders, and enclosing photographs.

A researcher who has spent long hours in the Mass Observation archive, Rachel Hurdley, commented with a certain weary over-familiarity: “At first the eye can glaze over, because you’re thinking: right, this is going to have a clock; it’s going to have candlesticks; it’s going to have letters behind the clock or underneath the candle on the left-hand side; it’s going to have ashtrays which aren’t used as ashtrays, they’re used to dump collar studs in, sewing stuff, needles; there’s going to be a perpetual calendar; and no doubt there’s going to be smoking paraphernalia and stuff for the fire”. But then Hurdley got caught up in thinking about the letters, and what they meant at a time when there might have been several deliveries of mail each day, and when the envelopes on the mantelpiece might have been part of a dynamic system, a to-do list that represented a serious part of one’s engagement with the outside world. “Whereas now we have emails and iphones and twitter and blogs and god knows what”, then we had a shelf above the fire. “The mantelpiece was like your ipad today”.

Yet the mantelpiece is also a place for display, and the report suggested that such domestic displays are unusually intimate, laying bare the soul; as either Gilbert or George put it, “in five seconds you know exactly what sort of person you are dealing with”. There was also an absorbing discussion of the competition between hearth (or gas-fire) and television-set as the centre of the living-room. All of this might push one to think about the associations between fire, smoking and reading that cluster around those older mantelpieces. Do the candles, the ashtray, the fireplace and the letters connect up–did they connect up? Or were they disparate, chance collisions of unrelated objects, most of them less for use than show?

All the news these days seems to be about libraries closing down, and as an academic I hear more and more of my colleagues saying that they don’t need to go to the library any more. So it was interesting–on a weekend visit–to be confronted by the new £190m ‘Library of Birmingham’, which is due to open next year. The second largest library in the country after the BL, it’s an extraordinary building, sitting proudly alongside the Rep Theatre and Symphony Hall, wrapped in a whimsical lacework that irresistibly draws the gaze. Let’s hope it pulls in the punters too.