The skin is a supple and a slippery surface on which to write, so already impregnated and under-primed with various kinds of meaning that no word or phrase, when scored or inked on the skin, can be read simply. Cattle are branded, slaves and prisoners marked, warriors wounded both ritually and really, while the demographics of tattooing both abroad and at home predispose people to read the inked skin in particular ways – class, race, gender, and other categories are all at play, stressed and sometimes fractured. Last weekend’s (Ninth) International London Tattoo Convention (http://www.thelondontattooconvention.com/) put me in mind of tattooing again,  and made me worry about the fact that I had written “WAFFLES” across my forearm in mad majuscules – not the “Que sais-je” of the post-modern Montaigne, alas, but a reminder to myself to season the irons before next Saturday breakfast, so that I don’t let down my daughter (again).

The tattoo convention also reminded me of the two inked skincases in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick – Queequeg’s metaphysical mapping, and Ishmael’s mnemonic self-writing. Of Queequeg’s illustrated skin Melville tells us a great deal, but nothing of all that description gets us any closer to an understanding of Queequeg himself, or of the “heavens and the earth” of which he is the microcosm:

[T]his tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.

The tattooing on Queequeg’s skin, the liminal surface between his beating heart and the world, draws attention to the incommensurability of the man and his universe, the strangeness of the human figure in its wide and inhuman seascape. The skin here is a material witness of the unintelligibility of the world to the human observer, but also of the human observer to the world. By contrast, Ishmael uses at least part of his body as a surface for recording observations about this world, here the dimensions of a whale:

 The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing—at least, what untattooed parts might remain—I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.

The literature with which Ishmael crowds the surface of his body lies cheek by jowl with “valuable statistics”; here, on the surface of his body, the world can be measured, and represented. What other fantastical figurations might cover the tattooed parts, we never learn, but certainly his skin appears (unlike Queequeg’s) a legible parchment. In both cases, though, Melville draws attention to the skin of the human body as a site for literary writing, as the place for “a wondrous work in one volume”, or the material on which one might compose a poem. Certainly the two men provide different versions of what Moby Dick, as a novel, itself is – a collection of facts and figures, of methods and dimensions, a narrative, a history, but also a poem of the world and its making, its flourishing and its destruction, a sort of occult chronicle of all things. In that sense, the two men’s skins provide by analogy two models for the novel. But in his tattoos Melville seems also to draw us right down from the grand literary project to the human basis, and the leaves fanning beneath our fingers become momentarily the case of a whale, the skin of a whaler. The skin might be a version of the novel; or the novel might be skin.

“Prince Giolo”, a tattooed Pacific Islander famously purchased, returned to England, and displayed in 1691. According to Thomas Hyde’s account of Giolo’s life (An account of the famous Prince Giolo, pub. 1592), the tattoos on Giolo’s back were even more impressive, and Queequeggian: “the more admirable back parts afford us a lively Representation of one quarter part of the World upon and betwixt his shoulders, where the Arctic and Tropick Circles meet in the North Pole upon his Neck.”

Of course books used to be bound in skins of various kinds, and it’s not much of a leap to start musing on the material dependence of our culture (including our literature) on the oil extracted from whales. It comes as no surprise when Melville classes his cetacean quarry in its various sizes and bulks, from duodecimo to folio. Michaelangelo stands in a sewer, eating a leg of lamb. But writing on the body brings very immediately to the attention the various ideological, economic, emotional, and even ontological operations at work in verbal representations of all kinds, and the way in which those representations constrain and limit, authorize and empower, connect and divide us. The mother who has tattooed a portrait of her child on her chest, or the child’s name on her shoulder, remembers the child, but also owns and assimilates it. The muscled masculine arm festooned with flowers can tolerate the perfume and sensuous colour of their blooms. The full embrace of a torso entablatured at once celebrates and denigrates the body, adorning it and effacing it, re-conceptualizing and re-equipping it as a surface rather than a solid of penetrable stuff. Paper is close to parchment, and parchment is skin; the activities of writing and reading always memorialize this corporeality, even if you aren’t working on Melville, or Plath, or Gilbert Godfrey. Every time we write and read, we cross that oceanic gap between the heavens and the earth, between the sea and sky, the gap that sounds us from guggle to zatch. Tattoos mind that gap; what do CPUs do?

I’m just reimmersing myself in Leah Price’s indecently clever How to do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012), and have come to a point early on where she cites Elaine Scarry on the way that print in general, and literature in particular, is defined ‘by its power to drown out the significance that would otherwise be attached to its material form’. Scarry, in Dreaming by the Book (1999), writes that unlike music, sculpture, or painting, ‘verbal art, especially narrative, is almost bereft of any sensuous content. Its visual features … consist of monotonous small black marks on a white page’. Any sensory response the book elicits is ‘not only irrelevant but even antagonistic to the mental images that a poem or novel … produces’.

A short time before I came across this passage, I was listening to my 9-year-old son doing his reading homework. (He has to do 20 minutes a day, every week-day, and does he grumble). He’s reading a delightful book by Kate DiCamillo called Because of Winn-Dixie, about a girl from Florida who unexpectedly acquires a dog and a life. He doesn’t like reading to himself so he reads aloud, and it’s seriously interesting to hear him and to ponder how much is going on when a literate adult approaches a sentence.

Things are exacerbated, I imagine, when you are reading a book that is maybe 75% conversation, and in an unfamiliar version of English. But what comes across to me as I listen is the extraordinary amount of hard-won skill that goes into working out the emphases of printed speech. To be able to predict where a sentence is going, to sense the likely arc of the words and guess how it will answer to the sentences that preceded it–this is not an innate ability, but is one that we have to acquire and go on acquiring throughout our lives. Turns of phrase that come naturally to me sound bizarre to a 9-year-old; to talk of ‘a candy that was famous the world over’, for instance, is plain ungrammatical. And (come to that) why do they have to put so many ‘m’s into ‘Mmmm-hmmm’? And why do they always have to write ‘the Herman W. Block Memorial Library’ every time they mention it, instead of just saying ‘the library’? Some of the most characteristic sentences in the book have the temerity to be just one or two words long (‘And I have to admit, he stank. Bad.’, or the ubiquitous ‘Yes, ma’am’). To get the force of them you have to be able to make a lot out of a microscopic bit of punctuation that you would rather didn’t exist, and put your knowledge together with an understanding of unfamiliar idioms, accents, tones of voice.

What I think I’m noticing as I listen to this fledgling reader is the complex orality of the printed word. It’s not a new or profound point, and doubtless there’s a vast literature on it somewhere (Walter Ong is in the back of my mind…) But it concerns me that people who think about ‘the book’ as an artefact wouldn’t bracket voice with the ‘material’ aspects of a text. In Price’s quotation from Scarry, a poem or novel furnishes ‘mental images’, but even to begin to think this way is to start to neglect the process of making meaning from the succession of words on the page. And that meaning is secured by material means, although it doesn’t involve anything obvious like a different kind of paper, or a change in the font, or a marginal note. Along with word-order, ‘visual’ phenomena including spelling, elision, and punctuation can all be invoked to render the voice. (‘Sister Pullet, you may do as you like, and you may let your husband rob you back again o’ the money he’s given you, but that isn’t my sperrit.’–to pull a sentence not quite at random from George Eliot). Dashes, brackets, semicolons, exclamation marks, italics and commas all offers subtle tools for rendering vocal cadences. And don’t get me started on paragraph breaks… Far from being monotonous, the average printed page positively fizzes; and the smaller that black mark is, the more important it is likely to be.

Someone just (very belatedly!) drew my attention to the video-map of the early modern book collections at Harvard–http://vimeo.com/46773161. It’s interesting to see the spread and growth of early printing centres, though I imagine that this version based on a single collection will soon be superseded by a more comprehensive set of images deriving from the Universal Short Title Catalogue.

What’s a bit of a mystery is why they choose to start in 1400, half a century before the advent of print. It’s hard to assign precise dates and places of publication to manuscripts, so it’s meaningless to try to shoehorn them into a map like this. Did they mean  to suggest that everything was benighted until Europe started to light up thanks to the press? Let’s hope not…

If you visit the webpage of the Senate House Library at the University of London, you will be invited to ‘discover [their] historic collections” and “holdings of manuscripts, archives, printed materials and maps’. Last week it looked as if Christopher Pressler, the Director, had forgotten the meaning of the words ‘collection’ and ‘holding’, as the library announced plans to auction off four early folios of Shakespeare’s complete works, in order to raise money for ‘development’. Following a public outcry (see our contribution below), a petition, and withering criticism from respected bibliographers, scholars, and others, the University of London has now revised its intentions and recalled its sacrificial volumes from Bonham’s, where they had been due to be slaughtered in November. Professor Sir Adrian Smith, Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, has said that the university will now consider ‘alternative ways of investing in the collection’. Holding onto the collection is a good first step.

While the Senate House Library begins making muffins for its bake sale, this may be a good moment in which to reflect on the consequences of the corporatization of the university sector for its libraries and archives. Universities are public institutions, and exist to serve the public, but the treasures that they conserve have throughout the centuries often had to be defended from that public. Jack Cade and his loyal followers lamented that the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment, and looting destroyed many manuscripts in fifteenth-century London. Modern Cades may attack from within; in the name of the collection, they are prone to break up the collection, and while hurrying after development they may not care to conserve. It is a simple matter for us to exclaim against these bibliobarbarians, but the academics among us should probably also look within — shouldn’t we be doing more to educate and inform the public about the value of these materials? Shouldn’t we be trumpeting the importance of conservation and material history?

It’s a dangerous thing to be a Shakespeare first folio. In 2006, Dr Williams’ Library in London decided that it would prefer to have £2,500,000 than its copy, which it put up for auction at Sotheby’s. In 2003, Oriel College in Oxford sold its 1623 Comedies, Histories and Tragedies to a Getty. And now there are rumours that the Senate House Library at the University of London is planning to put its copies of the first, second, third and fourth folios up for sale, so that it can devote itself to attracting more readers and recovering the government funding that it lost in 2006. The folios are worth an awful lot of money on the open market but according to the Library’s director Christopher Pressler they are rarely consulted. Nobody is going to notice their absence.

I have to confess to an instinctive revulsion for libraries that want to sell off their books–the role of a library being to collect books and to preserve their collections, especially those extraordinary items that (like this one) they have accepted as bequests. Who is going to want to donate their prized possessions to the University of London after this? Of course, libraries would be far cheaper to run if they didn’t have to look after books at all … many of them would make lovely shopping centres.

This particular sell-off is more perverse than average. Were the dollar-signs not ringing in their eyes, the custodians of this collection would doubtless see the possession of so many Shakespeare folios as part of its claim to status. The first folio in particular is a legendary book, an ur-text of English literary culture (half of the plays would have been lost had this edition not appeared in 1623). It is also a landmark of print history; each surviving copy is unique, and each bears the scars of its past in ways which have been hugely generative for our understanding of how early publishing worked. These folios are books that should be in display-cases, and on the desks of researchers, rather than heading off to the highest bidder.

The claim that nobody has been consulting the books is the most infuriating of all. If you go into the average research library (though there are some very honorable exceptions), you tremble in fear if you want to call up an early printed edition of Shakespeare. Why do you want to see it? Have you written to the Director six months in advance? There is a microfilm you can consult, somewhere in a darkened vault… Librarians hide their treasures away and then cite the fact that nobody has looked at them when they want to sell them off.

Enough fuming… Anyone moved to protest about the proposed sale should write to Mr Pressler (christopher.pressler@london.ac.uk) or the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor Sir Adrian Smith FRS (adrian.smith@london.ac.uk). Or you can sign a petition at http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/senate-house-library-university-of-london-reconsider-the-proposed-sale-of-its-first-four-shakespeare-folios