The commerce of literature, the literature of commerce: Anglo-French perspectives in the long eighteenth century

What role does literature play in commercial society? To what extent can literature resist or even counter market forces? In what ways does commercial society use the book trade to promote its own system of values? This conference proposes to illuminate the ongoing debates regarding the place of literature within commercial society – topics that have long exercised many working in the arts and humanities on both sides of the Atlantic – from a historical perspective, focusing on the long eighteenth century.

Eighteenth-century writers were acutely aware of living in an age in which social and international relationships were being rapidly reshaped by commercial forces. The world of letters played a crucial role in helping to assimilate, explore and influence this changing world: from histories of civil society to economic philosophy, merchant handbooks and, last but by no means least influential, imaginative literary genres, most notably the emerging modern novel. The eighteenth century was also a period, in which the world of letters itself was dramatically reorganized by these same commercial pressures and interests, bearing witness to the rise of the professional author and the rapid expansion of the book trade across European boundaries and across the seas. It is thus unsurprising that the objects of this growing international trade – the books and pamphlets – should reflect not only on commercial society in general but also on the economics of writing more specifically. While these were developments that were associated with an increasingly global commerce, France and England were key players. Furthermore, their books on trade and their mutual trade in books shows clearly the extent to which these two European powers each singled out the other for particular attention, motivated by conflicting sentiments of admiration, hostility and rivalry.

The conference organizers invite papers that explore from any of the above perspectives the interactions between commerce and literature across the long eighteenth century, in England and/or France and their respective colonies. Comparative studies are particularly welcome. Possible topics might include:
– the book trade: in what ways was the book trade integral to commercial society, offering a vital conduit for the commerce of ideas, including ideas on trade, that in turn fostered networks and attitudes conducive to finance and trade? What impact did the commerce of literature have on the national economy?
– the diverse literatures of commerce and their interactions: merchant handbooks, histories of civil society, economic philosophy, pamphlets…
– reflections on commerce within imaginative literature: what roles are played by plays, poetry, the novel in assimilating, promoting or contesting commercial society? in shaping the profile of the professional author? how are these imaginative genres shaped by market forces?
– Anglo-French connections: trading contacts, commercial and financial rivalries, practices of emulation…

Proposals of no more than 500 words should be submitted to c18anglo.french@gmail.com and the deadline for submissions is 16 April 2012. Prospective participants may wish to contact the organisers to register interest before submitting a full proposal.
Dates: Monday 2nd July – Tuesday 3rd July 2012.
Conference Organisers: D’Maris Coffman and Jenny Mander
Venue: Centre for Financial History, Newnham College, Cambridge
Deadlines: call for papers: 16 April 2012; registration: 15 June 2012
Sponsored by the Newnham College Senior Members Research Fund, the Centre for Financial History, the Trevelyan Fund of the History Faculty and the French Department at the University of Cambridge.

Bath Spa University is appointing professorships to enhance the university’s existing research profile, one of which could be in book history. This is from the university’s advertisement:

“We are seeking to appoint scholars with a track record of internationally excellent or world-leading research in their specialist field. They will also have a track record of achieving major research grants. It is likely that the successful candidates will be asked to undertake ambassadorial and recruitment work for the University at conferences and symposia outside of the UK. These posts are intended to extend and enrich the strong existing team in English at Bath Spa University by adding further expertise in key areas such as Writing and the Environment, Contemporary Writing, Book, Text and Place, 1500-1750, or by developing new fields. There are opportunities to help us develop new programmes of study in your specialist field. We are also happy to explore Visiting Professor appointments for those already committed to a fractional role in another university.”

The Book, Text, and Place, 1500-1750 research centre focuses on early modern literary culture, place, and the history of the book broadly defined. Further details are available at http://www.bsuprofessors.co.uk/

from John Banville’s review of the 2nd volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters, in the latest New York Review of Books:

“The so-called trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable … are the masterworks of his middle period and surely his most representative achievement in prose. Here at last he found a means of allowing the darkness Krapp had “always struggled to keep under” to spread over the page like so much spilled ink.”

I seem to have been to a feast of digital humanities talks in the last couple of days… At Thursday’s CoDE/CMT seminar, James Wade (Emmanuel, Cambridge) and Peter Stokes (King’s, London) discussed the digitization of medieval manuscripts, with Wade discussing the transmogrifications of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur as it moved from manuscript to print and into twentieth and twenty-first century editions, and Stokes asking what it means to ‘put a manuscript on the web’, given that such an act is literally impossible. Perhaps (he suggested) we need to stop thinking that we are accurately ‘representing’ the manuscript, and instead admit that we’re engaged in acts of modelling, which need to be tailored precisely to our sense of how the digitized materials will be used. For me this raised the question of how much we know about the ways in which people use digital resources–do we really read things online, or do we just raid them? (Or are reading and raiding much the same thing?)

Yesterday lunchtime I just managed to make time for the CRASSH Digital Humanities Network seminar on ‘Using Social Media Data for Research: The Ethical Challenges’. Here Fabian Neuhaus (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Sharath Srinivasan (Centre of Governance and Human Rights, POLIS) posed some difficult questions about the viability of gathering evidence from tweets or text-messages. The delight of such sources for the researcher is that they provide very precise details that allow you to locate the point of origin of a message; you can map the way in which people are using these media, and you can perhaps begin to tie up particular behaviours and viewpoints with places, times, and social strata (see http://urbantick.blogspot.com/ for more). But this also makes the data–which is difficult to anonymize–very sensitive and open to abuse.  How do you get ‘informed consent’ to use this material for research purposes in the first place? And what do you do when the police (or, in some circumstances, the local dictators) come to your office and ask if they can share your information?

Cambridge University Press has just sent me an email offering a 10% discount on selected titles to celebrate World Book Day. I click on the link and get a truly mouthwatering array of bargains. Core Topics in Airway Management heads the list, followed by Diagnostic Techniques in Hematological Malignancies; Morbid Obesity: Peri-Operative Management (down to £54.90!); Brain Repair After Stroke; Depression in Primary Care: Evidence and Practice... I trust that this list has not been targetted to my specific needs as a forty-something male, but I’m not taking any chances: the cake and champagne are going back in the cupboard.

There’s a new treat for book-fetishists everywhere, with the publication of the second volume in Yale’s Unpacking my Library series, this one edited by Leah Price and entitled ‘Writers and their Books’. Here Price conducts a series of interviews with many different kinds of reader-writer, asking about their collecting habits, the ecology of their buying and lending and merging and discarding, the geography of their reading (what books are lurking by the bed or piled in the kitchen?), and their theories about the future of the book. But the real meat of the volume lies in its extraordinary photographs, mostly photographs of bookshelves and the spines of books. Battered spines, shiny spines, spines neatly lined up in order or collapsing on a diagonal, spines asserting unities of genre or date or subject-matter, spines at cross-purposes (since publishers have never reached any agreement about which way the words should run). Then there are photos of the living-rooms and writing-rooms in which all these books live, to give you a sense of what our modern St Jeromes have in their studies.

One contributor, Lev Grossman, offers a kind of manifesto for the volume, declaring: ‘When you look around somebody’s personal library, you can actually see, physically instantiated as objects, a map of that person’s interests and preoccupations and memories’. There’s a Desert-Island Discs quality to the book, as contributors are invited to pick out their ten favourite volumes; here even a determined non-fetishist like Steven Pinker (‘I do love the contents of books, of course’) risks having his values upended as the ostentation of dust-jackets reminds us how powerfully ideas are bound in to the energies of past times and places. Much of the pleasure of this project is the painful pleasure of evanescence. The collector is at once present and absent in his or her books; the immortal text can only be propagated by a succession of rapidly dating material forms; the past in which these collections came together awaits the future in which they will split apart. ‘I’m so aware of my age’, says Edmund White at 71, ‘I see books as a problem that I might end up imposing on my heirs’.

All of the contributors are asked about their attitude to the e-book, and in the process some interesting anthropomorphisms surface. Rebecca Goldstein puts it philosophically: ‘Kant tells us that a person can never be used as a means to an end, but must be viewed as an end in itself … Well, that pretty much summarizes my attitude towards books. I would never use a book as a coaster or to prop up something else … Well, maybe a phone book, but not a book that was authored, into which some suffering writer … poured her heart and soul’. Claire Messud sees love of the physical book as a kind of shorthand for being fully alive: ‘Anybody who thinks books are dispensable is someone entirely lacking in appreciation of sensual pleasure. I pity such a person’. And Jonathan Lethem goes still further in his account of the erotics of the unread book: ”For me, there’s a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn’t given itself over to you yet–sometimes I’m the most inspired by imagining what the contents of an unread book might be.’ Milton’s claim that books contain a ‘potencie of life’ resonates in these passionate anatomies of bibliophilia.

For historians of reading, there is much food for thought here. Sophie Gee connects the problematic physicality of the book to its cultural significance: ‘Books are hard to transport and therefore signs of permanence’. This offers meat to those who see the weightless, digitized word as the irresponsible parent of a throwaway, twittering textuality, but it perhaps overlooks the way that print too facilitated ephemerality. Elsewhere, James Wood reflects on the fact that, as well as annotating his books, ‘I also regularly write to-do lists in the endpapers, or telephone numbers, or names of people I must e-mail. These latter often prove more interesting than any of my literary comments: years later, I stare at them, trying to work out who these people were’. Is that distraction from interpretation a good or a bad thing, or does it speak to some deeper mystery concerning the relationship between reading and its horizons? Finally, while some of these writers have teddy-bears and toy-cars on their shelves, I was struck by another moment in Rebecca Goldstein’s interview, when she recalled that: ‘There was a time when we had some vases and candlesticks mixed in with the books, but I didn’t like that at all. It seemed to me to qualify as what philosophers call a “category mistake”.’ Although she again puts it in rather intellectual terms, it seems to me that the point she makes is more importantly bodily. Like any kind of collecting, books present a problem of order and organization, and the way that one handles that problem is liable to be felt on the skin, in a shiver of discontent or a warm glow of satisfaction. In this sense, to unpack your library is indeed to unpack yourself.

A thousand thanks to whoever left this charming snippet of text on my car this morning… I love you too.

The new exhibition in Cambridge University Library, ‘Shelf Lives: Four Centuries of Collectors & their Books’, is a treat for anyone who wants to know more about how a great collection came together. Focusing on ten bibliomaniacs with enormously varied interests, spanning the globe and vast tracts of human inquiry, it blows the dust from some well-known treasures and a host of unknown gems. And it’s free, and open to all.

Today the UL, a copyright library, has more than 8 million items  on its shelves. The exhibition begins by taking us back to 1557, when its collection had dwindled to just 200 books, which could be itemized on just a few pages of ‘Grace Book Δ’. The first collector singled out for attention is Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon, and rescuer of numerous important manuscripts from the ruins of the dissolved monasteries. Parker donated 100 volumes to the library shortly before his death in 1574, and several of them are on display here—including an Anglo-Saxon gospel and a book of homilies, both penned c. 1050.

A few paces to the right is a manuscript that is strikingly different and yet really the same–a text of St Matthew’s Gospel in Persian, dating from the early eighteenth century. This was acquired by George Lewis, Chaplain to the East India Company, who was based in Madras from 1692-1714. His collection came to the University Library in a wooden cabinet labelled ‘Bibliotheca Orientalis’, and along with the seventy-six manuscripts it contained a number of beguiling objects, including a magnificent pair of embroidered slippers and a set of Indian playing cards on wood and tortoiseshell. One wonders what other weird and wonderful things are hidden away on the library’s shelves…

The changes keep ringing. From India, we head to China, and the collection made by a diplomat, Sir Thomas Wade. Wade gave 4304 Chinese books to the UL in 1886; one of them displayed here is open at a delicious picture of an exhausted student, lying asleep and dreaming of passing his exams. In the dream, this involves being anointed by a dragon-headed examination god. Then Haydn, and Marion Margaret Scott’s collection of scores, portraits and curios associated with the composer. Next Montaigne, and Gilbert de Botton’s recently-acquired library, which includes copies of the Essais owned by Napoleon and Ben Jonson, as well as the copy of Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura that Montaigne annotated in his tower in the Dordogne. And so it goes on, with manuscripts of John Donne, Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke; first-world-war ephemera, including trench money printed by the Austrians in Italy; a volume embroidered for Elizabeth I; and the celebrated Book of Cerne, a prayer book written c. 820-840 AD.

Working in a library like the CUL, you get scattered glimpses of the people who brought the books together—in bookplates, names scribbled on flyleaves, or the call-numbers of the books themselves, which often point to particular collections. It’s nice to be able to put names to faces at last. More importantly, though, as more and more books become available in ‘disembodied’, digitized form, it’s increasingly crucial to recognize how much history is embodied in our libraries—in the processes that have brought them together, often through the violent destruction of earlier collections. Research libraries need the resources—financial and conceptual—to start understanding what they’ve got in new ways. That’s why an exhibition like this really matters.

From Coleridge’s notebooks, 1802, on his second son:

‘Derwent extends the idea of door so far that he not only calls the lids of boxes doors, but even the covers of books. At a year and eight months.’

–quoted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Essential Meditations, ed. John Cornwell (2011)

CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy 2012

1st Annual Conference

Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, 27-28 March 2012

Call For Abstracts

The 1st Annual Conference of CoDE: Cultures of the Digital Economy will be held at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK on 27-28 March 2012. Participants from a range of scholarly disciplines are invited to present research related to digital culture and the digital economy.

Confirmed keynote speakers are Dr Jussi Parikka and Dr Astrid Ensslin, whose biographies are included below. Paper abstracts of up to 300 words can be submitted to code@anglia.ac.uk until 31st January 2012. In particular, abstracts related to the following conference themes are sought, though abstracts addressing other aspects of digital culture are also welcome:

Theme 1. Materiality and Materialism
It is straightforward enough to understand computation as a relationship between material objects (hard drives, screens, keyboards and other input devices, scanners, printers, modems and routers) and nominally immaterial ones (software, programming languages, code). This approach to the „stuff‟ of the digital risks ignoring a set of crucial questions around the relationships digital technologies construct with a range of material objects: from the „analogue‟ world modelled in weather systems and battlefield simulations to the body of the information worker interacting with spreadsheets and databases; from the range of artefacts that form the subject of the digital humanities to the materials, bodies, spaces and places of art practice and performance.

Theme 2. Performance, Production and Play
Innovative aspects of our interaction with performances and the production of artefacts for continuous engagement have evolved exponentially through the digital age, particularly with the development of ideas related to play and serious gaming, which brings novel opportunities for creative expression, not to mention innovative approaches related to parallel disciplines in science, education, healthcare and business. The collaboration between performance, production and play and adjacent academic fields is of particular interest given the cross-disciplinary requirements of the Digital Economy Act.

Theme 3. Digital Humanities – Archives, Interfaces and Tools

Digital Humanities works at the intersections of traditional research and technological innovation. Its techniques have helped to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for instance, and have even been used by the FBI to determine the authorship of sensitive documents. Today scholars in the digital humanities are primarily concerned to offer a gateway to previously hidden records of culture and heritage. A high-resolution digital photograph of a Chaucer manuscript, for instance, reveals its delicate pen strokes, and when placed on the internet, can pave the way for school children, university students, and those interested in culture generally, to learn about medieval literature from primary resources.
See www.anglia.ac.uk/code for more details–or click here.