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)

Yesterday the West Road Concert Hall was packed for the libraries@cambridge conference, entitled ‘Blue skies … thinking and working in the cloud’. What will university libraries look like in 2020, 2040, 2060? Will there still be research libraries, or will they have gone the way of the dodo? Will they be operating in a society that looks more like the wild west, a walled garden or a beehive? (Those are among the scenarios for 2050 explored by the ‘Libraries of the Future‘ project). Will they have any books in them, or will they be beautiful light-filled atria full of bean-bags and plasma screens, open to endlessly spatial reconfiguration as users flow through them? Will academics still write books, or will they create online content? Will we need subject librarians if interdisciplinarity and specialization have annihilated the very concept of a subject? These were just some of the questions raised in the first two hours… (Answers on a postcard, please!)

On today’s feast of the Epiphany it is a custom in many parts of the world for people to mark the front door of their house using specially blessed chalk. The date of the new year is inscribed as above, along with the letters C, M, and B, which stand for the three names traditionally given to the Magi – Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar – or for Christus mansionem benedicat, ‘may Christ bless the house’. As well as the highly symbolic location of these letters, the use of chalk is also symbolic –  it is a substance from the earth itself, and while its traces will gradually fade away as the year passes, their meaning is invisibly inscribed forever in the hearts of the faithful.

There is a prayer for blessing chalk in the Rituale Romanum, one of the official Roman Catholic ritual books, but I don’t know how far back this tradition goes. Can anyone enlighten me?

‘On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…’ Probably not eleven lords a leaping. Perhaps a book, perhaps a book all about things—last year, Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects; this year, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes. This remarkable book reconstructs the history of a collection of exquisite Japanese carvings that passed down through the generations of a single illustrious family, from their first acquisition in the 1870s to the present day. History–a global history of trade and nationalism and war–swirls round the netsuke as they pass from Paris to Vienna to Tokyo. And de Waal—an accomplished potter—is uniquely qualified to convey that history in tactile terms, fleshing out ever-changing relations between the carvings and the cabinets, rooms, buildings and cities that held them.

For connoisseurs of material textuality, The Hare offers all the pleasures of digging into a typically happenstance family archive. Among the grainy reproductions in my paperback copy there is the neatly-tabulated page of an opera and theatre notebook from 1916, showing that Wagner, Delibes and Shakespeare continued to enchant Viennese audiences in the middle of the First World War. There is the stylish little card that an uncle who had fled anti-Semitic mitteleuropa for Sunset Boulevard sent out to advertise his new collections ‘of Smart Accessories’—‘Belts, Bags, Ceramic Jewelry / Compacts, Handknit Suits and Blouses’. And many other documents are evoked verbally, as they are fished up from beneath the bed by the author’s father, or as they fall out from the magazines on a bookshelf. So de Waal finds ‘sandwiched between June and July 1966 an envelope containing very old documents, official-looking, in Russian’. He shows the documents to an expert: ‘This is the old paper … they changed this in 1870; that is the stamp, that is the fee. Here is the signature of the governor, always so emphatic—look, it has almost gone through the paper … This is a clerk’s copy, poor writing’. In such hands, ‘the dessicated records … flicker into life’.

Elsewhere, though, de Waal is sceptical about the dessicated record. At one point, sketching his grandmother Elisabeth’s epistolary relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, he turns to consider some books that he inherited from her. He combs through them for clues: ‘comments in the margins, scraps of a forgotten lyric, a lost letter’. But ‘when I do find things, I wish I hadn’t’. There’s a transcribed Rilke poem on a page torn from a diary, ‘black and red like a missal’. There’s a ‘translucent gentian marking a page’ in a Rilke collection, a photograph of the sitting-room in her Proust. ‘I feel like a bookseller judging the sunning of the cover of a book, marking the annotations, assessing its possible interest,’ de Waal comments. ‘It is not only a trespass on her reading, which feels strange and inappropriate, but close to a cliché. I am turning real encounters into dried flowers’. And later: ‘What she loved was poetry, the world of things, hard and defined and alive, made lyrical. She would have hated my fetishising of her books’.

It’s interesting that the word ‘fetishising’ should appear here—and, to my recollection, nowhere else in The Hare—since the word inevitably hovers over any project so closely focused on things. Peter Stallybrass and Anne Rosalind Jones have a fascinating discussion of this subject in their book on Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory; drawing on the work of William Pietz, they trace the roots of the term in European colonialism (it was ‘the natives’ who were guilty of fetishism, whilst colonizers had a properly detached, capitalist attitude to possessions). For Marx, by contrast, fetishization meant the capitalist investment in fungible commodities, the very opposite of attention to the individual object with all of its personal associations, its precious freight of memories.

I wonder whether de Waal’s dealings with his netsuke and his abortive engagement with his grandmother’s books are really so different—why should the first be permissible, the latter out of bounds?

Some New Year spring-cleaning uncovered these images of a couple I spotted gracing the windows of a high street shoe shop some time in the autumn.  I couldn’t see through the glass which books they were wearing, but the use of printed texts to emulate textiles certainly gives a visually impressive effect.

On which note, let these two also be harbingers of an exciting CMT event planned for later in the year… the details are secret at the moment, but look out for news before too long!

Some of the most beautiful festive material texts are those aimed at children. Jan Pienkowski’s creations have already been mentioned amongst the CMT stocking-fillers, but today’s treats are from the American ‘paper engineer’ Robert Sabuda, who has designed numerous pop-up books. He often uses only white card to construct his pop-ups, emphasising shapes and forms rather than colour. On the left (apologies for the poor photography) is a page from his version of the classic poem The Night Before Christmas; ‘as dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly’, Sabuda’s energetic white reindeer burst out of the book, seemingly restrained only by their silver ribbon harnesses. Just as lovely is his A Christmas Alphabet, below, in which each flap conceals elaborate snippets of festivity.

Sabuda’s comprehensive website offers some fascinating designer’s insights into the pop-up world. Usually intended for children, such books are thought of as novelties, objects which are not as seriously bookish as other books. However, Sabuda’s descriptions of the processes involved in designing and mass-producing these objects is thought-provoking. These are books which emerge at the skilled hands of the designer, and then go on to depend on the hands of the reader to open them and reveal the surprises they contain, not to mention to carefully fold them away again and ensure they do not get damaged. When we read a pop-up book, we cannot but be highly conscious of its materiality; of the simultaneous strength and fragility of paper and glue and stitches. Sabuda writes: ‘people love the surprise of not knowing what is going to be on the next page of a pop-up book. At our studio we call that the “WOW” moment. When someone opens a pop-up book and goes “WOW!” they are really affected by the magic of a pop-up and amazed that they have the power in their hands to make it happen because they themselves are turning the pages.’

In France, seasonal greetings cards are traditionally exchanged at New Year rather than Christmas.

This village scene with houses made from postage stamps is a lovely handmade example of one such carte de voeux from exactly a century ago.

Best wishes for 2012 from all at the CMT!