Today sees the publication by Cambridge University Press of a new edition of the poems of D. H. Lawrence. Censorship has always been a key part of the story of Lawrence’s career as a writer, but this edition reveals for the first time how much it affected the poems as well as the novels.

In particular, a sequence of poems that Lawrence wrote in 1916, in which he was fiercely critical of the imperialist ventures of the British army in the Middle East, was rendered meaningless by the refusal of publishers (in the wake of the banning of The Rainbow) to print explicit references to places such as Salonika and Mesopotamia. According to the volume’s editor, Christopher Pollnitz, early readers would have ‘found little that they could understand in these poems beyond two facts, that they were by D.H. Lawrence and referred obliquely to war’.

You can read more about this historic publication, which rounds off CUP’s 40-volume Lawrence edition, here.

Thanks to Dan Woodford for drawing my attention to Nina Katchadourian’s ‘Sorted Books’ project–a series of photographs of books with their titles juxtaposed so that they form micro-narratives, poems, jokes… now published in book-form.

Brainpickings quotes Katchadourian: ‘I am always paying attention to the physical qualities of the books, and I try to work with their particular attributes as much as possible. The size of a book carries temperament and tonality, as does the way the text sits on the spine. A heavy volume with large text on the spine, for example, might be exuberant, urgent, pushy; a small typeface might communicate a voice that’s exacting, shy, insecure or furtive’.

And the overwhelming impression that I get from the photos is of a clash of visual voices. Each title moves things in an unexpected direction, as the books agree or disagree among themselves, marshalled by the wit of the artist. I wonder what conversations are going on, unsuspected, on my own bookshelves?

Much debate in the UK about the government’s new proposals for press regulation, in the wake of multiple scandals involving the hacking of mobile phones by journalists desperate for a headline. The plans, agreed by leaders of the three main political parties in meetings that took place in the wee small hours yesterday morning, create a new independent regulatory body with powers to force apologies and exact fines from newspapers that misbehave.

While politicians are celebrating their success in bringing about this deal, the red-top newspapers have been dusting down Winston Churchill’s dictum that ‘a free press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize’, and wondering whether the new watchdog will become an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’. As far as their pundits are concerned, the legislation is nothing more or less than revenge for the press’s exposure (from 2009) of how MPs had been fiddling their expenses claims, which seriously dented public trust in the political classes.

And meanwhile everyone is mystified about how the legislation will apply to online publications, including blogs…

Sara Impey, who spoke at the CMT’s ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference last September, has written a review of the event for The Quilter. You can read a PDF of the document here. And if you’d like to revisit our report on the conference, click here.

Acknowledgment: This article first appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of The Quilter, the quarterly membership magazine of The Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles: www.quiltersguild.org.uk

… has to be this, a Papal Conclave ballot paper. I’m not sure how old it is (over the centuries there have been several high-profile Cardinals by the name of Mattei) but it appears mysteriously to have escaped the flames of the Sistine stove…

Habemus Papam Franciscum!

Question: what do the following items have in common?:

Ebooks, blueberries, self-assembly kitchen wall units, children’s electronic educational toys, packaged stir-fry vegetables, daily disposable contact lenses.

Answer: they are all to be found in the ‘shopping basket’ that the UK’s Office for National Statistics uses to calculate the current rate of inflation. These items have all just been added to the basket, and are taken to indicate emerging consumer priorities. They replace an equally random assemblage of outmoded goods, including  digital TV boxes, round lettuces, champagne (those days are gone), basin taps and soft contact lenses. Ebooks have been singled out in newspaper reports as the most striking new addition–they accounted for roughly 14% of all book sales in 2012 by volume, and roughly 7% by value.

As a devotee of what the critic Umberto Eco calls the infinity of lists, I love it when books turn up in shopping baskets like this–brain-food jostling with body-food, words alongside the lenses you need in order to read them, electronic books ghosted by electronic educational toys. Of course it’s only a virtual shopping-basket and a series of chance connections; these items are unlikely ever to come together in one place. Still, it’s hard not to fantasize about such meetings. Would they be (to quote the Comte de Lautréamont, prophet of surrealism) ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’? Or would they be more like this?

Will it be today? While 115 Cardinals have gathered in the Vatican to choose the next Pope, all eyes are on the special chimney erected on top of their meeting place, the Sistine Chapel. After each ballot, all the ballot papers are burned in a stove, which will emit black smoke if no majority has been reached, and white smoke if a new pontiff has been chosen. Because the colour of the smoke can sometimes be ambiguous, a bell also rings when white smoke is issued. In 2005, Pope Benedict XVI was chosen very quickly, in less than 24 hours. Last night a great cloud of black smoke was seen, signalling an inconclusive first vote – how many more rounds of ballot papers will be burned this time?

A reminder of warmer times–this magnificent letter-box spotted in the upper town of Matera last summer… it’s a bit out of place, for sure, but do they come more stylish and evocative than this?

My friend Milly Cockayne recently picked up a second-hand book with this quaint library bookplate in it. The Hampshire authorities asked readers to ‘report to the Local Librarian any case of infectious disease occurring in the house while a Library Book is in their possession’.

The idea of the book as a vector of disease goes back a long way. Leah Price’s How to do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012) includes illustrations of book fumigating machines that could purge away any pestilential traces deposited by one’s fellow readers. Price sees such machines as a symptom of anxieties about the sheer size of the book-reading, book-circulating public in the nineteenth century.

Google Patents will take you to a fumigator designed in1918 by one Robert Oldham of Salt Lake City, which ‘provide[d] the means to turn the leaves of a book and supply a gaseous disinfectant to each and every leaf and portion of the book’. Oldham claims that the efforts of health boards to prevent contagious diseases have led to the destruction of ‘many large libraries and thousands of school books’.

The machine itself is an impressive assemblage of clamps and sprockets–part of the prehistory of the modern photocopier, perhaps, or something that Google itself might want to raid in its effort to digitize all of the world’s books?

I’m in mourning for the newspaper. About a week ago, I went mad with my credit card and bought a fancy tablet computer. Ever since, I’ve been reading the Guardian online with a free 14-day trial subscription. I’ve already saved plenty of money and I’ve wasted a lot less paper. But am I going to pay for a subscription at the end of the fortnight? I have my doubts, because I really don’t like the digital format.

What’s not to love? Today I splashed out on a paper copy (at an astronomic £1.40) to try to work it out, but the reason is still eluding me. It’s something to do with scale–the pleasurable extent of the printed page, which has of course long been a mark of snooty cultural distinction (the upper-crust ‘broadsheets’ versus the down-and-dirty ‘tabloids’). But it’s also to do with crowding–the amount of material that’s packed onto each page, and that sense of many different things jostling for your attention. The press of the world is laid out to view, made tangible. The packed columns of text have a kind of tautness to them, as if they are providing the right number of words for the right physical space. And you know how to read that space–you have internalized all kinds of physical cues that tell you how significant this particular story is, how wealthy the company that can afford to advertise on that scale.

In the digital edition, every item has its own page, where it sits flaccidly in endless white space. For all the joy of the hyperlinks–the fact that you can find out what a columnist means when he refers to the ‘felicific calculus’ with an instant leap across to Wikipedia–there’s a kind of laziness to the online experience. I’m reminded of a friend who used to object to any pop song that was longer than 4 minutes; the discipline of the ‘single’ forcing bands to say what they had to say without endless padding and repetition. Without column inches, what is going to differentiate a newspaper from any other website?

It’s easy to mock digital tools that too closely resemble their ‘hard-copy’ precursors for failing to reinvent themselves in the new medium. But I think the digital newspaper may need to learn a bit more from its printed counterpart.