Linda Bree came to talk to the History of Material Texts seminar last week, on the subject of ‘Scholarly Publishing and Technological Change’. As someone who knows the world of academic publishing from every possible direction–Linda is Editorial Director for Arts and Literature at Cambridge University Press, and a scholar working on the ‘long eighteenth century’–she is uniquely placed to tell us what is going on out there, and her talk was indeed eye-opening.

As someone who subscribes to the scholarly orthodoxy that new technologies don’t replace old technologies, but force creative adaptation, I had completely missed what to her was the most important feature of the current landscape: digital printing, and Print-On-Demand technology. Although POD can be unreliable (do you really trust Amazon to deliver you a decent facsimile of that novel from 1833?), for scholarly publishers it is transformative. It gives old books a new lease of life (CUP calls its project to digitize its back-catalogue the ‘Lazarus programme’!) and allows supply to be more closely tailored to demand for new books. It also promises to make publishing leaner and greener, since digital files can be printed out in locations across the world, cutting transportation costs. And you may be able to have a book freshly printed by your local bookshop, if something like the Blackwell’s ‘Espresso Book Machine’ takes off more widely.

Other areas of the picture Bree painted were more murky. The question of how libraries will survive when they are spending their budgets not on buying books but on renting digital content; or of how publishers will survive as the web fosters the illusion (or the ideal) that content should come for free–these were left hanging. In the short term, though, it seems that the physical book will remain the medium of choice for academic monographs. If you’ve got to read a big chunky book full of footnotes, cross-references, and appendices, a book that you may want to scribble on and store away for future reference, ink on paper remains indispensable. For now.

The novelist Jeanette Winterson has just published her autobiography, entitled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, and on Saturday the Guardian Review published an extract from it. The broad outlines of the story are familiar to anyone who has read her Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (or who has seen the TV adaptation). A magnificently mirthless Pentecostal Christian woman living in a two-up, two-down terraced house in Accrington adopts a daughter who becomes the principal victim of her oppressive domestic regime. Among the many bans to which the young Winterson is subject is a ban on literature–she’s not allowed to read books, because ‘the trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late’. ‘Too late for what?’, the girl wonders, sensing a world of pleasures and dangers that lies just out of view.

The story from there unfolds rather like the inspiring autodidact narratives that Jonathan Rose collected in his study of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001). It’s the tale of an individual empowered by books, and above all by the books in the local library, which in Accrington was a stone building finished in 1908 with money from the Carnegie Foundation, with carved heads of Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer and Dante outside and the words ‘KNOWLEDGE IS POWER’ on a giant stained-glass window within. There, Winterson remembers, she worked her way through the fiction section, starting with A for Austen. But she also bought herself books, which she hid under her mattress in layers composed of 72 paperbacks each. She was, she recalls, ‘going up in the world’ until her mother found the hidden treasures, threw them all out of the window into the backyard, and set light to them, leaving only charred fragments behind.

The event was, in Winterson’s retelling, foundational. Literature went inward: ‘The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed’. The bonfire of the vanities was the birth of the writer. But this writer is exceptionally alert to the inextricability of fact and fiction, and she must surely be aware of the resonance of her book-burning narrative. What went on in this terraced house in Lancashire is an uncanny recapitulation of the scene early in the first part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) in which the priest and the barber go through the mad knight’s library deciding which books to keep and which to massacre. The evil chivalric romances that have so beguiled Quixote are flung out of the window into the courtyard, where they are burnt to ashes by the housekeeper during the night. (Winterson’s burning is also a nocturnal event).

The main discrepancy between the two accounts is that Cervantes’ censors go through the books with some care, and find innumerable reasons to save their skins (ranging from sheer love, via the beauties of style, to personal associations: ‘Keep it back, because its author’s a friend of mine…’) They set the scene for a narrative that is enormously affectionate towards the absurd stories that it spoofs. No such luck for D. H. Lawrence and his companions in the twentieth century. They end up as ‘burnt jigsaws of books’, fragments which turn prose into broken poetry.

It’s over 20 years since Jonathan Goldberg published Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance, a study of how early modern students were disciplined by their teachers to become at once fine penmen and docile subjects of the crown. I remember being sceptical, when I first read it, about Goldberg’s claim that the pen-holding hands depicted in writing manuals were actually being violently dismembered (‘the body and its natural life are menaced by writing’). But a couple of weeks ago I came across these pointing hands in the margins of a late sixteenth-century book.

As Bill Sherman has taught us, in his more recent study Used Books, the manicule was one of the most important symbols that early modern readers used to process their reading. But although Sherman emphasizes the ‘excessive and quirky’ nature of many manicules, including those that emerge from elaborate ruffs, or sprout leaves and flowers, or turn phallic to mark discussions of male genitalia, I don’t think he has any that actually bleed. I’m just sorry that I’ve missed Hallowe’en for this post…

All existing and prospective members of the CMT are warmly invited for start-of-year tea and cake in the social space on the ground-floor of the English Faculty, 9 West Road, from 4 – 5.15 pm on Thursday 10 November (before Linda Bree’s HMT seminar).

Bidding ends on 31 October for the 169 ’emblems’ created by a motley array of writers and artists to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Lawrence Sterne’s marbled page. Dropped into volume III of his enthralling, exasperating shaggy-mammoth story Tristram Shandy, the marbled page is proposed as a ‘motly emblem’ of the work as a whole, with its endless digressions, its unpredictable eddies and cross-currents, its colourful, chancy swirl of ideas. The Lawrence Sterne Trust are auctioning off 169 visual and verbal meditations on Sterne’s 169th page, and in true Sternean fashion are playing a game of anonymity–will you end up with a Quentin Blake, a Lavinia Greenlaw, a Ralph Steadman, an N. F. Simpson, an Iain Sinclair, a Lemony Snicket? The eye-watering exhibition can be viewed here.

Reflecting on last Thursday’s History of Material Texts Seminar, given by John Rink from the Faculty of Music, brings me out in a fit of overblown adjectives. Rink has been at the helm of two extraordinary digitization projects, Chopin’s First Editions Online and The Online Chopin Variorum Edition. His talk took us through the bewildering profusion of different witnesses to Chopin’s scores–compositional drafts, presentation manuscripts, engravers’ manuscripts, proofs, multiple editions issued simultaneously in France, England and Germany–each of which might contain revisions–and printed copies marked up or elaborated by Chopin whilst he was teaching. That level of variability is an editor’s nightmare. (Even the celebrated ‘Funeral March’ from the Second Sonata was rethought and became a mere ‘March’ in some editions). But it’s meat and drink for a hypertext edition, which allows users to move between different versions, cross-compare, and put together their own text from the surviving evidence.

That said, the amount of work which goes into preparing such an edition–in terms not just of acquiring photographs of sufficient quality from archives across the world, but also of marking them up, bar-by-bar, so as to facilitate meaningful comparison between them–is prodigious. The results, though, are hugely worthwhile, since the application of new technologies raises fundamental questions about what a work of music actually is. Did this improvisational composer work towards a final, perfect goal, or did his pieces go on growing endlessly in different environments and different moments? How did publishers (including the women who actually engraved the music) go about regularizing and rationalizing Chopin’s sometimes idiosyncratic drafts? And how much license do performers today have in interpreting the textual evidence?

In questions, Rink suggested that it was fine for performers to pick and choose, in an informed way, from the different witnesses. He saw the quest for musical authenticity as often the enemy of important freedoms, imposing a rigid historicism on playing which in fact always takes place in the present. But he would presumably not condone re-opening Chopin to radical improvisation… How far should we go in our celebration of textual fluidity?

The New Yorker recently published an article about ‘the rise of bulletproof couture’, alerting us to the fact that every world leader worth his or her salt now has defensive panels sewn into a stylish coat or jacket. They’re mostly supplied by a company in Colombia and rely on a miracle formula that improves on Kevlar, the traditional petroleum-based monomer used in bulletproof jackets, which was invented by accident in a lab in the 1960s. The company ships its goods all over the world and is adept at adapting to local tastes–so it has safari vests for Nigeria, tunics for Dubai, and ecclesiastical vestments for Latin America. The churchmen have it easy–they can also buy ‘a bulletproof blanket, which can be thrown over a pulpit’ and ‘a large bulletproof Bible, which a priest can use, mid-sermon, as a protective shield’ (Sept 26, 2011, p. 71).

‘In an increasingly dangerous world threatened by terrorism and militant regimes, our soldiers, police, journalists, NGO workers and others from all walks of life are increasingly coming under fire, and what better a gift than the Bible which can withstand a bullet!’ So reads one website that offers to sell you a life-saving version of Holy Writ. Purists and completists beware: ‘to keep it light, and an easy fit in the backpack or breast pocket of those in the front line, we have just included the New Testament part of the American Standard Version (1901)’. Another such Bible looks like it doesn’t get much further than Genesis, but comes with a 20% discount for ‘active military with ID’. You can also buy versions with more impressive pedigrees–such as a World War II ‘soldier’s bible with a super hard steel metal cover. It was made to be carried in the left breast pocket to cover the heart. It is inscribed May The Lord Be With You.’ One careful owner…

All of this assumes that you need some special hard-binding to make a Bible bulletproof. But the ‘Iconic Books Blog‘ traces legends about soldiers whose lives were saved by the good book back into the nineteenth century, and finds that the latest examples come from the Iraq war. Meanwhile, don’t trust just any heavyweight book to save you. The latest crop of novels may take a while to read, but they can’t stop a bullet–as is proven here, by the doubtless horribly-biased people at Electric Literature.

Perception, Reception: The History of the Media in Society

Call for Papers for a conference to be held between 4th and 6th July 2012 at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. Extended deadline to 17th October 2011

The 4th Media History conference will focus on the ways in which people have understood the social, cultural and political roles of the media from the 15th to the 20th century. The concept of ‘the media’ will be interpreted broadly, so as to include print culture (including the press and publishing), cinema, broadcasting, and other visual and electronic media.

A great deal of work has been done by scholars on the institutional, political and cultural history of various media. ‘Perception, Reception’ will build on this literature to explore the ways in which the media have historically been understood, conceptualised, and imaginatively represented. Thus the conference will not focus on the content of the media as such, so much as the depiction, perception and reception of the media in different contexts over time. How have readers, consumers, and the respective media industries themselves framed arguments about the media as a force for good (or evil) at different points in time? Have contemporaries always seen the media as agents of change, or is there a counter-history of the media to be written in terms of promoting conservatism, deference and order? How have people understood and represented the media in terms of concepts of personal and geographical space, time, or changing belief systems? Can we think ‘internationally’ about perceptions of the media in different states and nations over time, or is the media still best understood and examined in largely local or regional contexts?

We welcome proposals from a range of chronological, geographical and methodological backgrounds. Abstracts, of around 200 words for papers of between 20 to 25 minutes duration, should be sent by close of business on 17th October 2011 to mediahist2012@aber.ac.uk<mailto:mediahist2012@aber.ac.uk>

The Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute (Anglia Ruskin University) & the Centre for Material
Texts (University of Cambridge) present:

BOOK PUBLISHING HISTORIES SEMINAR SERIES

Seminar II: The Impact of Digital Publishing Platforms for Academic Scholarship on Libraries and Readers

Hannah Perrett (Cambridge University Press)
&
Jayne Kelly and Sarah Stamford (ebooks@cambridge)

Tuesday 1st November 5.30-7pm
Lord Ashcroft Building 207, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge
For more information, please contact Dr Leah Tether: leah.tether@anglia.ac.uk

download a poster for this event here

On Tuesday 1 November 2011, Cambridge University Library will be holding its second masterclass as part of the Incunabula Project (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/incunabulaproject.html).

Prof. David McKitterick, Librarian at Trinity College Cambridge, will lead a seminar under the title ‘Mix and match: making up incunabula’.

“When we look at a copy of a book, we make many assumptions. But books may not be what they seem. This class will examine some of the ways in which the make-up of books can be changed and muddled between the time that they leave the printer, and when they are read today. Examples will be drawn from Caxton, and from fifteenth-century printers in Italy and the Low Countries.”

The seminar will be held in the Sir Geoffrey Keynes Room. It will start at 2.30pm and 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 under discussion up close, and to participate in the discussion. Attendance is open to anyone with an interest in the topic.

To book your place, please contact Katie Birkwood (kib21@cam.ac.uk).