After the death of playwright Harold Pinter on Christmas Eve, 2008, the Guardian published the last interview he had given, earlier that year, with one of the paper’s journalists. Pinter spoke from his London home, mainly about one of the great passions of his life: cricket. Recalling the occasion, Andy Bull describes Pinter’s study as ‘heavy with the clutter of a cricket fan’, with shelves which ‘creaked under his cricket library, including all 145 editions of the Wisden Almanack’. As Bull points out, the appeal of cricket to one who writes plays is palpable, in its ‘endless potential for narrative, the games within a game’. Today the British Library revealed that those weighty Wisdens turned out to play a crucial role in another narrative – that of an important new acquisition of letters written by Pinter between 1948 and 1960. Sent to friends when Pinter was a young man, none of the letters came with a date, presenting a significant problem for the Library’s curators. But Pinter’s love for cricket – what he once described as ‘the greatest thing that God created on earth’ – is manifest throughout them, and his frequent cricketing references became invaluable clues. The curators cunningly matched these up with the details in Wisden volumes to identify dates for the letters, in an enviably neat synthesis of epistolary remains and contemporaneous material texts.

This unusual paperback novel caught my eye recently (and most serendipitously, on a shelf of free books in a railway station waiting room! I’ll leave something in its place when I’m next there…). This copy of Mr Emmanuel  is a special ‘Services Edition’, produced for the Services Central Book Depot in London, for distribution to the Allied Forces. Although I’ve found a lot of information about a similar scheme in operation in the USA during the 1940s (the American Armed Services Editions), less has been written about the story of books like this one. There are some avid collectors, and this photograph from Getty Images shows great piles of books in preparation at the Depot, in 1944.

The book is printed on very thin paper, in a size surely intended to fit the pocket of a uniform, and the pages are held together with two sturdy metal staples. Golding’s novel, about a Russian Jewish refugee  who travels from England to Germany, was originally published in 1938, and made into a film in 1944, and so this would have been distinctly topical and contemporary reading matter when it was sent out to the Forces in the 1940s. In several ways, then, it’s a markedly ephemeral text, and I wonder how many others like it have survived.

Coming back down to earth after the fascinating conference on ‘Failure in the Archives‘ at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (University of London) on Thursday. The conference culminated in a lengthy open discussion about how the myth of the ‘invisible archive’–the archive that functions as the neutral holder and transmitter of its materials–could be busted once and for all. This might mean finding ways in which archivists, librarians and curators could be fully credited for their intellectual contributions, so that they would cease to be viewed merely gatekeepers and custodians of the past. There are formidable obstacles to this, mainly to do with the funding pressures that dog the majority of collections. But the conversation seemed to offer a glimpse into a brighter future.

After the conference there was a guest lecture from Natalie Zemon Davis, who is just coming up to her 86th birthday but appears to be more radiant and full of energy than ever. She shared some of her recent work on the slaves of eighteenth-century Surinam, and offered a masterclass in the kinds of patience and ingenuity that are needed to make the archives speak, or sing.

The Cambridge University Library’s exhibition ‘Private Lives of Print: the Use and Abuse of Books, 1450-1550’ opens today, and is accompanied by a beautiful book entitled Emprynted in this Manere: Early Printed Treasures from Cambridge University Library.

As David Pearson pointed out at the launch event for the book, held in the Wren Library yesterday, studies of early printing would once have focused on the production side–identifying publishers, typefounders, woodcut artists and the like. Such matters are by no means neglected here. But both the book and the exhibition focus more on circulation and consumption than on production. They concentrate on illuminators, binders, owners and readers, and show how the books were put to use across the course of centuries.

So we’re invited to imagine Venetian bookbuyers weighing the cost of a Bible against the cost of six chickens or five geese; to witness the future Queen Katherine Parr giving her uncle a prayer book, and asking him to remember his ‘louuynge nys’ when he looks on it; to admire a doctor’s drawing of a foetus in the womb in the margins of a medical book. A student at the University of Padua spills ink on his Livy, and writes fastidiously around it, in Latin: This blot … I stupidly made on the first of December 1482′. The books are often marvels in themselves, but they really come to life in the hands of their owners.

If you can’t get to Cambridge, you can see the ‘virtual exhibition’ at https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/incunabula/

for 2013-14 can be accessed by clicking here. We’ve tried to round up everything that’s been going on, and have added a new section of relevant publications by members of the Centre, which is quite some list.

Last year was pretty busy, but I have a feeling that the coming year is going to trump it–see the conclusion of the report for a few of our plans.

Private Eye‘s ‘Pseuds Corner’ this week picks up an advert from the London Review of Books, for ‘special limited first edition’ copies of Ian McEwan’s new novel The Children Act:

‘Comprising 100 copies only, printed on Logan Book Wove 150gsm paper. Seventy-five are quarter-bound in Kaduna Green Nigerian Goatskin, the sides letterpress-printed on Passport Sage Felt with a design by Edward Bawden and numbered 1 to 75. Twenty-five copies, number I to xxv, are fully-bound in the same leather and contain three facsimile pages of notebook manuscript and one page of hand-corrected typescript from an early draft of the novel, all supplied by the author. Full leather £350 (sold out); Quarter £175’.

It’s always startling to be reminded that the modern book world, apparently so open and democratic, is in fact full of status distinctions. There is the basic distinction between paperback and hardback, which seems fairly trivial but has significant implications–in the way it creates a pecking order of early readers and latecomers, or its tendency to separate formal, sit-down reading from informal reading-on-the-hoof. Now we also have ebook editions, bought over a wire, weightless, malleable, accessible from numerous platforms, and so divorcing the experience of reading from any particular physical form. But as we come to terms with this new technology, our culture is still busily producing leather-bound books with mock-manuscript fragments tucked into them–not to mention typescripts with marks from the author’s hand. What should we make of this? More interestingly, perhaps, what would Ian McEwan make of this?

An early reader of a 1570 Euclid — possibly Sir Thomas Tresham — learns the hard lesson that neither number nor magnitude have any materiality. For more on this annotated copy, see our Gallery page.

A Radio 4 documentary has just been discussing the work of Adam Lowe and his company Factum Arte, which–in the breaks between 3D-printing concrete sculptures for Anish Kapoor–has created a digital scan of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. The scan allows you to see every scar and fissure in the skin upon which the map was drawn–not the skin of a calf, apparently, but of a seriously large cow. And the facsimile recreation of the surface lets visitors run their hands across the map for the first time. (A second-best option is to run your eyes over it on the Mappa Mundi website here).

There’s a film that shows the scanning in progress here, and for a commentary by Jerry Brotton, who has been collaborating with Factum Arte, click here.

Here’s a holiday snap from northern France: a carved stone panel showing the four evangelists, from the mid sixteenth century. While it’s common to see the writers of the gospels holding books and accompanied by their symbols (from L-R here: Mark with a winged lion, John with an eagle, Luke with a winged bull, and Matthew with an angel), I was struck that this panel depicts all four of them caught in the very act of writing. Matthew (whose gospel was for a long time believed to be the earliest) balances a scroll on his knee, while the angel holds up his ink pot. Luke makes use of a lectern and the other two work with much more compact-looking codices. The carver included scroll flourishes behind each figure – and if the panel was once polychromed, presumably they bore words which could be read.

Spotted on a bookstall in Nice… who was the Demoiselle Vinet de Gray who recorded her thoughts in such redoubtable script?