Few medieval manuscripts have retained their original binding; fewer still have retained such interesting features as the one visible below.  Originally stitched into the spine, this simple leather strip is a material witness to fifteenth-century reading processes.  It marks the page and, courtesy of the little numbered rotating paper disc, also reminds the reader to which column of text he should return upon reopening the book.

The manuscript in question – Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton MS 14 – is a fine fifteenth-century copy of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, and it once belonged to the community of Carthusian monks at Sheen, on the banks of the Thames.  It is the only Polychronicon manuscript I have seen so far with a contemporary bookmark.  That these manuscripts usually come with scholarly apparatus designed to aid skim reading and ready reference – alphabetical indices, running book and chapter numbers, and marginal chronologies – suggests that this bookmark cannot have been unique among copies of Higden’s universal chronicle.  It is a rare illustration of the union of material and textual book design, and the response of bespoke medieval book producers to the common intellectual needs of their customers. 

The bookmark is an element of codicological culture that has been borrowed by digital media and, particularly, the internet (a fact which, ironically, makes Google searching for articles on medieval bookmarks problematic).  Nowadays, however, we are exhorted not just to ‘bookmark’ a webpage, but to ‘like’ it too.  The once private reminder is being superseded by a public advertisement that disseminates a text through cyberspace (though to a degree ultimately dependent upon one’s privacy settings), and in a format and forum that then invites comment.  Similarly, the Kindle e-reader allows e-books to be ‘e-annotated’: through ‘public notes’, marginalia can be shared and exchanged over the internet (though, again, this is limited by a Twitter-style system of ‘following’).  

The hermetic life of a Carthusian did not perhaps encourage such discourse, but the frequent annotation in the margins of the manuscript above is suggestive of some level of intellectual exchange, however indirect then or untraceable now.  The boundaries of that reading community were circumscribed physically by the cloister walls and materially by the movement of books within.  Now, there are – potentially – no boundaries to reading communities.  With the advent of e-readers, the anarcho-democratic ethos of the internet is now more closely tied to the book and to the text: freedom in the virtual margins, the power to broadcast, a limitless audience.  The capacity of readers of e-books to not just record their thoughts but to disseminate them too may mean that much that was once private thought or evanescent orality is now cached and backed-up, and awaits future students of the ‘reading experience’.  The ‘weightless text’ supports a heavier and heavier paratext of commentary, analysis and opinion, informed or not.

Where does authority lie in this digital world, this twenty-first-century Tower of Babel?  How is authority constructed and maintained?  Can the critic or academic maintain his status in a forum where comment is free – or should he or she even attempt to do so?  In a recent article on the ‘patchy’ quality of the Coen brothers’ films, Will Self opined that ‘…the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions…simply aren’t up to scratch’.  Ironically, the patchiness of Self’s own argument was quickly highlighted on the comments pages by some sharp-eyed readers, some of them no doubt the kind of ‘upper’ or ‘lower-middlebrow’ viewers whose opinions he had disdained so aristocratically.  The article presents no critical engagement with specific interpretations or reviews except his own.  In targeting ‘the generality’, does it do any more than represent Will Self’s self-will?  And is that any more authoritative than the opinions he criticised? 

Surely the job of the ‘serious cultural critic’ is to engage with and persuade, not just to tell – but then, perhaps, who is there to tell?  The internet gathers together opinions so diverse and diffuse that it may be impossible to address them except in the most general terms.  By transcending physical printed media, and by circumventing the complex and often slow publishing infrastructure through which debate has traditionally been channelled, the internet has removed nearly all ‘barriers to entry’ that once monitored or mediated the public sphere.  In doing so, it has made available great opportunities for the advancement of knowledge through collaborative endeavour or adversarial dialectic.  The internet has facilitated the freedom to comment, and has thus accentuated – though by no means created – a situation in which control over a text rests in no single pair of hands.  That command over Scripture Martin Luther sought to reassert in his 1525 pamphlets Admonition to Peace and Against the Rioting Peasants.  ‘Every man his own Bible reader’ he had once said, before the rise of heterodox interpretations of the vernacular holy text and the use of scriptural justification in the enactment of social revolution.  How will these old issues of authority, interpretation and debate play out in the new age of ‘Every man his own Kindle reader’?

Commercial dressmaking patterns from previous decades are domestic material texts in which there has been a surge of popular interest in recent years, thanks to the international selling, buying, and swapping communities and opportunities fostered by the internet. I was prompted to post something here after discovering within such a recent purchase a fascinating supplementary fragment of material text, pictured here. For those unfamiliar with the process of making one’s own clothes at home, it is worth explaining that dressmaking patterns usually consist of tissue paper templates and a printed sheet of measurements and instructions, inside an illustrated envelope. Templates can be reused again and again, and it is perfectly possible to find patterns from over fifty years ago that are still in very good condition. Written details are often charmingly of their era; a 1950s pattern by Butterick  for a ‘Cape Yoked Blouse of Many Moods’ for example is described on the envelope as ‘A blouse with a wonderfully split personality designed for wear morn to eve. (A) Afternoon in town blouse with below-elbow, puff sleeves. (B) Dinner appetizer with deep cut yoke, short sleeves. (C) Sleeveless morning casual.’

What I discovered inside my late 1950s dress pattern was a fragment of a local newspaper from a town in Texas, presumably originating from the same time. A previous user of this pattern had slightly altered the shape of one of the pieces and traced out her new design on a sheet of newspaper. As you can see, the page from which this pattern piece was made is the ‘Classifieds’ section. The adverts printed here give us a sense of the society in which the former user of this pattern lived, and at one level it is nothing special – this is the ordinary kind of literature about truck drivers and painters that we could all read in our local papers today (although if anyone could enlighten me as to what a ‘fountain girl’ did in a dairy I would be fascinated to know!). On closer inspection, though, it’s discomforting to the twenty-first century sensibility to notice jobs advertised specifically for ‘Colored Women’, or adverts which demand a ‘white man’ or ‘married men’. This fragment of newspaper is an everyday, disposable thing which at the same time preserves important details about a particular society at a particular moment in time – in this case, about  race and gender. Part of the startling effect of this discovery, I think, is the way it embodies the intrusion of major historical and political narratives into the everyday domestic. Newsheets are ubiquitously recycled materials, paper that is reused when the printed matter on it is no longer thought to be relevant. Through her efficient re-using of a newspaper sheet, the user of this pattern preserves a fragment of history and communicates something textual to us now in a way that she never would have imagined.

Last night, more evidence of the speed with which the world is turning a corner. A play-reading circle that I belong to was doing J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. In the past, when I’ve turned up to these wine-fuelled evening gatherings with my laptop, I’ve been the only one who hasn’t printed out the text from the web, or else bought a copy of the play. This time round, a laptop, a Kindle and an iPad were already up-and-running when I arrived. As my fellow laptop-user opined, those of us with wires were starting to look old-fashioned.

What play to do next time? Someone wanted Shakespeare, so I suggested The Double Falsehood, an eighteenth-century play that may preserve parts of the lost Shakespeare/Fletcher play Cardenio. It has just been edited for the Arden Shakespeare, so the time is ripe. ‘Oh no, not a book we have to buy,’ came a reply, ‘my house is too full of books already. How can I get rid of my books?’

In the midst of the digital revolution everyone seems to be dreaming about weightless text. Can we have those wonderful words without their associated baggage, the costly pages, the ever-proliferating bookshelves and libraries and siloes that are needed to preserve them? It’s like the fantasy of the house without clutter, the kind of house you see in Sunday supplements: clean lines, glass, light. The risk is that, as the weight goes, the text goes too. Pictures, prefaces, footnotes, fonts, your feeling for what kind of a book this is, your sense of where you are and where you are going–all are liable to disappear in ereader editions.

Of course, the same thing often happens in print. When texts are repackaged for new markets, they lose a lot of the framing, ‘paratextual’ features that gave them meaning in their old locale; this adaptation to the environment is what keeps them alive. But sometimes even a great work of literature leads only a half-life when stripped of its original physical vehicle. Encountering a book in its first incarnation can be a revelatory experience: the very look of the thing, its unconscious cues, its body language, put in you in a frame of mind to appreciate it.

So it’s two cheers for the new technology. Or am I just a luddite?

It was revealed earlier this month that the Ministry of Defence recently paid a large sum to have a publishing company destroy its entire first print run of Daily Telegraph journalist Toby Harnden’s book, ‘Dead Men Risen’, about the author’s experiences alongside British armed forces in Afghanistan. The Guardian reported in sinister tones that ‘all 24,000 copies are now being pulped under the supervision of military officials’. A controversially revised version of Harnden’s work is now available in bookshops, and you can read the author’s latest comments in response to this cynical and depressing story of censorship and book destruction here.

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No, these are not prose poems; they are quotations from the CMT spam queue. Behind the scenes, every day, we delete reams of comments. The highlights are these wonderful agglomerations of discontinuous text that have presumably been created by some not-too-bright translation software.

The more mundane entries are sent by websites called ‘Best Male Enhancement’, or ‘Intimacy Slide Show Tantra’, or ‘Bathroom Worktops’, or ‘Online Ouija Board’. They have two default modes–gushing praise (‘Hello. Awesome website. Thanks for taking the time to post about your thoughts with the planet’) or faint criticism (‘I was wondering if you ever thought of changing the layout of your site? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or 2 pictures. Maybe you could space it out better?’)

If anyone can shed light on these bizarre goings-on in the arrière boutique, I would consider that truly awesome, and might even be forced to say ‘respect to you, man’..

An interesting debate in the often controversial world of school examinations: according to this article from the Independent last week, the chief executive of Ofqual – the body responsible for monitoring GCSE and A Level examinations – believes that students should have more opportunities to write exam scripts on computers and that ‘school exams are running the risk of becoming invalid as their medium of pen and ink increasingly differs from the way in which youngsters learn.’

The natural familiarity of the youngest generations with computer technology in its increasingly sophisticated forms is a commonplace of contemporary society, but should we be concerned by this embracing of IT as the main medium of writing seemingly at the expense of (rather than alongside) pen and ink, by those near the top of the education hierarchy?