I learnt a lot from another current exhibition at the Huntington, about the man sometimes called the ‘founding father of California’.  ‘Junipero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions’ coincides with the 300^th anniversary of the birth of the Franciscan priest who journeyed in the mid-1700s from the Spanish island of Mallorca to Mexico, and then up to California, where he established a series of missions for the conversion of the native Indians to the Catholic faith.

Curated by Steven Hackel and Catherine Gudis, this tremendous exhibition paints a very complex picture of the relationships between the region’s diverse Indian communities and the Franciscans who ran the missions throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.

Many of the 250+ artefacts (from the Huntington’s collections, and loaned from an impressive number of other places as well) in the exhibition were intriguing material texts – some of the numerous letters Serra wrote to fellow priests in Mexico, and to his family back in Spain; a woodblock supposedly used by Serra to print religious sheets for distribution in the streets; rare surviving written examples of a few of the more than one hundred languages spoken by the Indian communities. One of the really striking things was the bureaucratic efficiency of the Franciscans in charge of the missions, who documented every baptism, marriage, and burial. As the curators are careful to point out, these records would have been for Serra and his colleagues a glorious accounting of souls saved, but they can also be read as a terrible toll of mission life on Californian communities: disease, for example, brought untimely death to thousands of Indians. The surviving records have been collated in the Early California Population Project.

All Californian schoolchildren learn about Junipero Serra today, and this remarkable exhibition attempts to complicate some of the traditional narratives around this figure, emphasising the rich range of responses of the Indians to the missionaries. The curators also stress the ways in which both the Indian and Spanish pasts have been romanticised – through the ‘mission revival’ architectural fashions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the evolution of the missions into tourist attractions, for example. Another material text chosen for the exhibition speaks of this tendency to mythologise California’s complex past: in 1967, Ronald Reagan was sworn into office as Governor of the state with a bible thought (though nobody can be sure) to have been used by Serra.

The exhibition continues until 6th January 2014, and is definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area.

For some time I’ve been on the trail of an Elizabethan/Jacobean reader named William Neile. It all began when I read the discussion of Garnet’s straw in Julian Yates’ 2003 book Error Misuse Failure. Garnet’s straw was an ear of corn that fell out of a basket that was being used to dismember the body of the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet, just after he was executed for his alleged involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. Removed from the scene by a Catholic onlooker, the straw rapidly became a relic when it was found to bear ‘a perfect face, as if it had been painted, upon one of the husks’. It was encased in crystal and inevitably began to work miracles, which were (just as inevitably) debunked in a Protestant pamphlet entitled The Jesuits Miracles, or New Popish Wonders. Yates included a photograph of the title-page of this book, which has an amusing woodcut of the relic with its tiny face, in his discussion of the furore over Garnet’s posthumous agency. But the title-page of this particular copy (now in the British Library) also testified to a reader’s agency: it had, boldly inscribed beneath the title, the flourished signature of ‘Wm Neile’; further down the page on the right-hand side, the name ‘Jo Neile’.

I’d seen that name before, and I would see it again, most prominently in a lavishly-bound 1602 Bible (possibly the former property of the dying Queen Elizabeth I) in the library of my own Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius. Here it was, again, involved in quite a showy performance–Neile signs his name three times, adds a note to the effect that the book was a gift from his brother Richard, and parades the name ‘Milldred Neile’ down the right-hand margin. I began to look out for Neile books, and to type the occasional idle provenance search into library catalogues that allow for such things.

In the end I came up with a list of about 25 books, and it seemed to me to be an interesting list. There were plays–including John Day’s controversial The Ile of Guls, which ran into serious trouble for its attacks on the Scottish in the first years of the Stuart monarchy; a Jacobean masque, Middleton and Rowley’s The World Tost at Tennis, attacking extravagant clothing; and an old interlude called New Custom. There was page-turning romance (Barnabe Rich’s Don Simonides) and urban reportage (Thomas Dekker’s The Dead Terme). There was a helpful book to teach you how to boast like a Spaniard (Jacques Gaultier’s Rodomontados. Or, Bravadoes and bragardismes). There was religious literature–Latimer’s sermons, a life of Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift, more anti-Catholic polemic in various shapes and sizes. Above all, though, there was news, news about embassies to Spain, victories over the Turk, the villainies of the Catholic League, the coronation and later the burial of Henri IV. All of these titles showed signs of attentive reading, in the form of rapid pencil marks in the margins. The collection offered a scratch-portrait of a man-about-town, reading all kinds of things to keep himself informed, entertained and properly prejudiced. Here was a clear-cut case of what I call a ‘polyreader’, a reader on the lines of the poligrafi or ‘polywriters’ who wrote in many different modes to feed the hungry presses of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Little more than a century after the arrival of print in England, here was the man that books built.

So who was this unknown reader? He was born in 1560, in the parish of St Margaret’s, Westminster, with which he would retain a lifelong association. In his early years, he appears to be have been a servant of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in the land. He worked closely with his younger brother Richard, who was a household chaplain of Cecil’s at the start of a stellar career that took him from Dean of Westminster, via the bishoprics of Rochester, Lichfield and Coventry, Lincoln, Durham, Winchester, to the Archbishopric of York. William seems to have spent the rest of his life clinging to Richard’s coat-tails, getting various posts in Westminster during his brother’s time there, and becoming his brother’s steward from 1612. He was himself ordained in 1616, and got a living at Sutton-in-the-Marsh, Lincolnshire; he died in 1624. After his death Richard went through William’s almanacs, stretching back to 1593, extracting notes on births, marriages, deaths, debts and freak weather, such as ‘A fearfull thunder one Crack lastinge neere halfe an hower’. (My thanks to Andrew Foster, who wrote the entry on Richard in the new DNB, for some of these biographical details).

Last week I finally got my hands on Will’s will, which turns out to be quite a document. The principal bequests are to his children, who are given various bizarre/delightful combinations of weapons and armour, musical instruments, chests and boxes, and money. (In a later codicil William laments the fact that he seems to have spent all the money, so the gifts have to be scaled down somewhat). But above all, he gives books, and in the process he puts my modest reconstruction of his reading in perspective. To Mildred, his eldest daughter, he gives 100 books. To Richard, his eldest son, he gives 200. Then William and John also get 200 each, while Dorothy and Frances have to make do with just 40 apiece; but newborn Robert, since he’s male, gets 100. Each of the books has, the will informs us, been individually assigned with the name of the recipient written on the title-page–as we saw with the 1602 Bible (for Mildred) and Garnet’s straw (for John), above.

So there is some work to be done here. I have about 25 books, but it would be nice to locate the remaining 855. If you find one, let me know (jes1003@cam.ac.uk)!

This summer’s exhibition at the Huntington (running until 28^th October) reveals more than 40 intriguing examples of extra-illustrated books from the Library’s collection. Ranging from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, these ‘Grangerised’ volumes (named after James Granger, the eighteenth-century biographer and print collector, and a notable extra-illustrator) expose a fashion for customising printed books with the addition of prints, manuscripts, and other paper materials. One of the stars of the exhibition is a part (containing Romans and 1 Corinthians) of the mid-nineteenth-century Kitto Bible, ‘probably the largest Bible in the world’: originating as a very ordinary two-volume Bible, it now consists of an astonishing sixty individual books. Canonical works appear to have been particular favourites for Grangerisers – impressively expanded editions of Shakespeare and Virgil both feature here, too.

The delicate process of extra-illustration involved taking a book apart at the binding, cutting frames within its pages, pasting additional sheets into these frames, and then re-binding the sheets, which helped to reduce the problem of the volume becoming too awkwardly voluminous. The exhibition’s curators have even made a short film demonstration (http://vimeo.com/65673921) – although they reassure viewers that no eighteenth-century prints were harmed in the experiment. This sense of apprehension towards extra-illustration and the cutting and altering it involved comes across very strongly in the exhibition commentaries, which is not surprising, coming as they do from a curator of rare books. The Huntington has more than a thousand extra-illustrated books in its holdings, and while they are often incredibly striking to the casual viewer, they present all kinds of bibliographical and curatorial tangles for those who look after them. How do you catalogue a book that contains material from many different sources, none of which is necessarily contemporaneous with the original printed volume? How do you catalogue an engraving that would normally be found in an art collection, but which has been pasted into a book with lots of other prints, each from a different source? These ‘illuminated palaces’ have a complicated reception history (they were not short of critics in their heyday), and they continue to challenge our definition of ‘the book’ today.

So Morrissey is going to have his autobiography published in Penguin Classics. Joining the likes of Susan Sontag, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov and Evelyn Waugh on the imprint’s non-fiction list, Morrissey’s signing must raise some serious questions about what the ‘classic’ label means in the twenty-first century. As a legend in his own lifetime and someone who brought the most world-weary wisdom to the heart of youth culture, Morrissey has a better claim than many to instant classic status. But the arguments that bedevilled the publication of the autobiography (just a couple of weeks ago it was going to be pulled thanks to a ‘last minute content disagreement’) makes one worry about the timelessness of this particular screed.

Will it be annotated? My copy of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (only a Penguin Modern Classic, not a Penguin Classic) manages to provide seven footnotes in the first two paragraphs, many of them giving away the plot and decoding the symbolism for readers who like to have their symbolism decoded. I hope we won’t have to work out Morrissey’s symbolism all by ourselves.

Generally speaking, these days, when someone says she has been on a wild goose chase, she’s been out trying to accomplish something she has come to recognize as fruitless and zany. When we use this phrase, our emphasis is on the goal, some object we have been seeking, the quarry, which has eluded us. This is strange because the clear emphasis in the phrase itself is on the process of the movement – the chase – and not on the quarry. It’s the more odd because the phrase originally did refer to the course and not to any sort of goal; the goose was not to be caught, but its erratic and unpredictable flight imitated. Geese come into it because when wild geese migrate, those following the leader will imitate and pursue its every move, no matter how erratic or unpredictable. Thus a “wild goose chase” described a country sport in which a follower was required to reproduce the exact movements of a leader, or a horse race in which the second rider had to direct his horse in just those motions and gestures set, as a pattern, by the first. Over time, its true purpose having been forgotten, the phrase was taken to refer to a course without a purpose, “a foolish, fruitless, or hopeless quest” (OED, “wild goose chase”, n. 2); the phrase’s focus on the course at the expense of the goal was taken to be a flaw, rather than the point of the experience.

I was on a wild goose chase this afternoon, in the Cambridge University Library. Due to space limitations, in places the classification system no longer corresponds to the physical organization of the books on the shelf, and by a series of imperfectly visible notices you may be led from a truncated series on one shelf, to another part of the library, from there to a window, from the window to a far corner, from the corner to a rebate behind an elevator shaft, and so on until at last you discover that the object of your increasingly abject desire – and the desire has of course been growing exponentially in proportion to your frustration – is somewhere in use, by someone else. This is a wild goose chase in both senses: an absurd and erratic dance, orchestrated by the librarian who, discarding notices in his wake, has preceded you; and a fruitless and zany quest for a fugitive end.

A sixteenth-century epistolary cipher. Doesn’t this fill you with a sense of collegial calm?

It so happens that the book I was looking for contains an essay on early modern codes and ciphers, and their use in the manuscript letters of the period. In particular, it deals with the the almost inexplicable fact that most of these codes are remarkably, even incredibly, straightforward. Even a wild goose wouldn’t be fooled. A simple alphanumeric substitution, especially one that proceeds linearly from a=1 to z=26, was unlikely to detain Sir Thomas Phelippes for very long. So why bother? It may be, say some, that the goal was not to deceive or confuse prying eyes, but to lead the reader on a satisfyingly sociable wild goose chase; that is, if I use a cipher, you must get out your key and decipher it, following every step I take, in a way that brings us together. We may look like a couple of dumb birds, but we look like a couple of dumb birds. Share the key with a small community of like-minded friends, co-religionists, or conspirators, and you have a gaggle, or what scholars call an epistolary community.

This kind of socially constructive practice turns on the materiality of the things that pass between people – the material letter with its material marks, the physical book in its lovingly prepared oubliette. I have no doubt that the scholars on South Front 4 this afternoon had watched a succession of agitated, swearing colleagues bustle from notice to notice around the University Library stacks, and in some sense we were brought closer together by the experience. Quite apart from the book that I ought now to be reading (reader: I found it somewhere else), these professional and educational rituals have an interest in their own right, for they are the ceremonies that we perform around the sacred or devotional objects at the centre of our intellectual pursuits. By contrast, the fragmentation of scholarly communities through the deprecation of material texts, and the gradual transformation of libraries into internet workstations, deprives us of our wild goose chases, and of the ritually enacted performances that construct us as a social group, and create bonds of affection, trust, and communication between us. The instant gratification characteristic of online databases – those that hold citations, journal articles, scanned books, and copies of rare printed and manuscript material – collapses the race and the chase into a single step. Everything is so much faster and less frustrating, it’s true; but all the same, everything is so much faster, and so less frustrating. It needs no Michel come from Montaigne to tell us that difficulty increases desire, nor to tell us this:

C’est, au demeurant, une très utile science que la science de l’entregent. Elle est, comme la grace et la beauté, conciliatrice des premiers abords de la societé et familiarité; et par consequent nous ouvre la porte à nous instruire par les exemples d’autruy, et à exploiter et produire nostre exemple; s’il a quelque chose d’instruisant et communicable. [The knowledge of entertainment is otherwise a profitable knowledge. It is, as grace and beautie are, the reconciler of the first accoastings of society and familiarity: and by consequence, it openeth the entrance to instruct us by the example of others, and to exploit and produce our example, if it have any instructing or communicable thing in it.] (Montaigne, “Ceremonie de l’entreveuë des Roys”, Essais, 1.13)

Now for my book.