Saint Isaac of Syria on the pleasures of silent reading, as quoted by Alberto Manguel:

“I practice silence, that the verses of my readings and prayers should fill me with delight. And when the pleasure of understanding them silences my tongue, then, as in a dream, I enter a state when my senses and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.”

Our prediction that the ‘intelligence services’ would have to go back to using snail mail, following the revelations of the extent and relative ease of electronic interception, has been fulfilled. Yesterday the Guardian reported that the German government had bought a new consignment of typewriters, now cutting-edge technology in the war on snooping. Only problem is, they seem a little bit embarrassed at the fact that this news has leaked out…

We are a little late with the news of the waxwork image of Jane Austen that has been created with the help of a ‘forensic scientist’ working for the Jane Austen Centre in Bath. This is the closest ‘anyone has come to the real Jane Austen for 200 years’, according to press reports. Commentary feels superfluous here–let’s just be grateful, and head for the gift shop!

… this copy of the works of Charles I, a tiny little book now falling apart at the seams. It claims to have been printed in 1657 in the Hague by Samuel Browne, but in fact this is a false imprint and the book was really published in London. The reason for the duplicity is obvious–during the interregnum you were not supposed to be printing the Reliquiæ Sanctæ Carolinæ (the relics, or textual remains, of the holy Charles). To publish these writings, and in particular the Eikon Basilike or ‘Royal Portrait’ that supposedly set out the King’s pious responses to his tribulations during the 1640s, leading up to his execution, was an oppositional gesture. To own these works was oppositional, too, andthis copy comes with a handwritten inscription, ‘In perpetuam rebellionis infamiam / 1648’–‘Concerning the perpetual infamy of the rebellion’. (This looks like a parodic inversion of ‘Ad perpetuum rei memoriam’–‘as a perpetual remembrance of the matter’–a classical formula relating to things that deserved to be recorded forever).

What I really like about this copy, though, is the mark of ownership. On a flyleaf, the book declares itself the property of one William Sanford, 1658. Then it adds ‘Ex dono pecuniæ suæ / Pretium 3s 4d’–‘The gift of his own money / Price 3 shillings 4 pence’. People routinely gave books as presents in this period, and recorded these acts of generosity in ‘ex dono’ inscriptions, often with flowery adjectives describing the firm friendship between giver and recipient. This purchaser says the book was the gift not of a friend but of his purse. Was he disgruntled? Or was he proud?

The Times Higher Education Supplement reports that the Warburg Institute library is under threat again, as the University of London heads off to court to contest the terms of a deed of trust made in 1944.

Anyone who has worked in the library, based in the Institute’s building in Woburn Square, will know how special it is. With vast amounts of material, much of it available nowhere else in the UK, and instantly accessible on open shelves, it’s a goldmine for scholar working on the history of European art and literature.

The Warburg apparently runs a £500,000 annual deficit–which is presumably small change for an institution of the size of the University of London. Let’s hope that the administrators can be made to see sense.

yet again… last week we learnt that ebook sales are predicted to overtake physical book sales in 2018, although apparently all the figures are skewed by Amazon’s refusal to release sales figures for Kindle books. Then the Guardian ran a report on how Foyles, the world-famous bookshop on Charing Cross Road, has moved to new premises in the hope of continuing to sell serious numbers of physical books. (The online version comes with a rather nice time-lapse video).

Meanwhile the scholarly folks at SHARP, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, have been having a vociferous online discussion about whether their journal should accept books for review in electronic formats. The interventions have really run the gamut. Ebooks are inconvenient because they (sometimes) don’t have page numbers, or they don’t reproduce images well, or they don’t allow sufficiently easy access to notes; physical books are hopeless because they are so cumbersome, or because you have to keep on typing in the long urls they supply as footnote references. Ebooks are cutting-edge technology, set to replace the printed book just as the codex replaced the scroll; ebooks as we currently know them are anything but cutting-edge, and are just a stop-gap which will be replaced by something far better in the coming decades. We ought to have physical books to test-drive if physical books are what is being sold; we ought to accept ebooks so that we can point out the deficiencies of the format to authors, publishers and readers. The cat is clearly among the pigeons. Who knows what will be left when the feathers have stopped flying?

The Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, has been digitising its manuscripts–including lots of medieval devotional books and chronicles, copies of poems by Chaucer, Langland, Lydgate, and Donne, plus gems such as the notebook kept by Milton which includes his drafts of Lycidas and a first go at Paradise Lost (in dramatic form). You don’t have to be able to read old hands or foreign languages to appreciate them–many are illustrated, including an elegant volume described as ‘Drawings of Roman Sculpture Etc’ (R.17.3), dated to the 1580s.

You can access the full list of ‘virtual manuscripts’ by clicking here.

I’ve just caught up with the inspirational video that the British Library has made to celebrate the opening of its new ‘Newsroom’, which brings its enormous archive of newspapers, dating from the seventeenth century to the present, to the main library St Pancras. (Previously, the newspapers were hived off in a separate facility at Colindale in North London). In fact, in a typically modern paradox, the real newspapers are being moved to Boston Spa in Yorkshire, where they can be preserved in a low-oxygen environment, while digital reproductions are made available in London. (Apparently the paper versions will be available on request).

What is most wonderful/shocking about the video, for me, is the fact that it features *digital* microfilm readers. Anyone who has visited a county record office will be familiar with these frustrating machines, to which you are directed whenever the original material is deemed to fragile for consultation. They are something like those old-fashioned, two-spool tape-recorders that disappeared from view at some point in the 1960s or 70s (the ones that bulk large in Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation and Samuel Beckett’s one-man-play Krapp’s Last Tape). The first challenge is to work out how to get the reel onto the spool, so that you can start to move through the document–usually you begin by putting it on upside-down, or back-to-front, and you have to do various mental and physical gyrations to correct your mistake. Then, when you’ve sorted that out and found the right page, you’re confronted with a depressingly grimy image that gives you an instant headache when you try to read it (see below for a sample). The idea that new technology might render the whole experience palatable or even pleasurable is extraordinary–and might just do something to stop all that celluloid ending up in landfill.

There’s much online buzzing this evening about the purported discovery (on eBay!) of Shakespeare’s dictionary–a copy of Baret’s An Alvearie, or Quadruple Dictionarie, first published in 1580, supposedly annotated by the playwright. I haven’t had time to read the lavish publication in which two intrepid antiquarian booksellers, George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, justify their claim. So I don’t know quite what has led them to the extraordinary conclusion that they have uncovered a literary goldmine. But I have spent an hour ogling the high-quality digital images that they have generously supplied on the project’s beautifully-produced website. On the basis of a brief look, I’m happy to report that we can all go to bed at the usual time. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Shakespeare was the annotator of the volume.

The dictionary is certainly thickly annotated–as are many dictionaries of the period. One of the main jobs that the annotations do is to make up for missing entries in the text, supplying English headings or lemmas where they are lacking, and sometimes offering translations, particularly into French. This reader wants to improve their book–as many early modern readers did. And this reader wants to be able to speak French, copying down sometimes quite obscure idioms and phrases in order to get the trick of the language. So the book will be useful for those who want to study the process of language-acquisition in the sixteenth century. And it will delight those, like me, who love to work with annotated books. Beyond that, it may prove to be something of a damp squib.

A few weeks ago I made a pilgrimage to Great Yarmouth – not, as fellow early modernists might suspect, in the footsteps of Thomas Nashe, but on the trail of a temporary exhibition at the town’s Time and Tide Museum. Frayed: Textiles on the Edge brought together a poignant collection of historic and contemporary textiles associated with personal experiences of suffering. These pieces were framed as the work of outsiders – people ‘on the edge’ in some way. But – created by individuals whose circumstances kept them in a workhouse, prison, or hospital, or who were isolated by grief or mental illness – they were also the products of the experience of confinement, of being physically or mentally locked inside.

Several of the exhibits were sorrowful works of memoriam, a reminder that in previous centuries, the death of a child was much more common, and no less painful. Anna Brereton, the maker of a patchwork counterpane and bed hangings in the eighteenth century, must have been in an almost permanent state of recent bereavement, losing four children in their infancy, and her eldest son at the age of fourteen. As some of the other pieces revealed, the reality of death was known from a young age and like adults, children also marked out their grief in stitches. There was a sampler which had been started in 1833 by a little girl called Martha Grant, and finished the following year, probably by her sister, after Martha died at the age of eleven years. Between 1823 and 1829 another young girl, Louise Buchhotz, made three small samplers, each stitched in black thread, to mark the deaths of her parents and uncle. ‘For since she’s dead, for ever gone/ O GOD my soul prepare/ To enter into heavens high gates/ In hope to meet her there’, she stitched in memory of her mother, on a tiny piece of pale linen no bigger than a page of a pocket-sized book.

In an understated way, Frayed challenged typically gendered narratives of stitching in which embroidery is thought of as a solely female occupation. I did not know that after the second world war, manufacturers of embroidery silks set up ‘Needlework for H.M. Forces’ schemes, supplying recuperating soldiers with kits to ‘help relieve the inevitable boredom of idle hours’, and give ‘the satisfaction that arises from the practice of personal skill’. Relief from boredom and satisfaction at creating something beautiful out of the horrors of the past must have in part motivated John Craske, the maker of a large woolwork tapestry depicting the evacuation of Dunkirk. Craske spent long periods recovering from physical and mental illness following military service in the first world war, but poignantly, the piece is unfinished, for he died in hospital in 1943. The contemporary tapestry cushions made by men in prison through the social enterprise Fine Cell Work demonstrated that the therapeutic value of stitching for everyone, but especially those in confined conditions, is still taken seriously today.

The therapeutic value of stitching was painfully evident in another piece, loaned for the exhibition from the V & A. Elizabeth Parker’s sampler was made around the year 1830, by a woman who worked as a nursery maid and endured cruel treatment from her employers. In letters worked in tiny red cross-stitches on linen cloth, she set down a confessional account of ‘that willful design of selfdestruction’ which tormented her. Scripture providentially helped her out of the darkness: ‘the Bible lay upon my shelf I took it down and opened it the first place that I found was the fourth chapter of S. Luke where it tells how our blessed Lord was tempted out of Satan I read it and it seemed to give me some relief for now’. Her own writing stops mid-sentence, however – ‘What will become of my soul’ – leaving nothing else but the remaining blank space of her linen page.

At the centre of the exhibition were two truly extraordinary stitched texts (pictured above and below) by a woman called Lorina Bulwer, who was an inmate in the ‘lunatic wing’ of the Great Yarmouth workhouse for several years at the beginning of the twentieth century. During her time there, Bulwer covered each of these three-metre lengths with densely embroidered text in which she expressed feelings of anger and frustration. Both pieces are made up of brightly coloured cotton fabrics stitched together, with a wadded lining and a backing fabric, like a quilt. Each individual letter is stitched through all of these layers. Writing in the first person, Bulwer offers a torturous working-out of her own identity. She is obsessed by names and places, frequently referring to herself by name, as well as to other people, including her own relations, members of the Royal family (she claims to be ‘Princess Victoria’s daughter’), and various towns and places in the East of England. A disturbing tangle of visceral, furious commentaries on people and situations apparently significant to her, Bulwer’s texts are impossible to summarise, but you can read transcriptions of them here.

The overall effect is one of unsettling, febrile tension between the text and its textile medium. Bulwer’s words are undoubtedly a rant, composed entirely in capital letters and without any punctuation – but their manifestation on the ‘page’ is the result of a slow process, in which each stitch has been individually formed. Writing with a needle is much slower than writing with a pen – another exhibit, Sara Impey’s machine-stitched contemporary quilt, made this point explicitly: ‘THE MOST DEMANDING ASPECT OF STITCHING IS TIME. THE STITCH DICTATES THE PACE’. Time, of course, is the one resource that imprisoned people, like Bulwer, often have most readily to hand. In her work, however, the inherently time-consuming, careful method of material composition contrasts with the angry, breathless quality of her words. It is clear that Bulwer intended her work to be read: she changes the colour of her thread according to the colour of the background so that the text is always clearly defined, and often highlights individual letters in contrasting thread where they cross over two different background colours. She underlines almost every word, and sometimes continues the text at right angles, along the borders. The cheery colours of the threads and background sit uneasily with the apparent bleakness of her experiences, and her implications of abuse. Bulwer’s desire to communicate is very evident, but this exhibition was the first time that both pieces have been displayed together (they are held in two different museum collections) – a sign, perhaps, of a general uncertainty about exactly how to read them.

Frayed: Textiles on the Edge has now ended, but the Time and Tide Museum (shortlisted for the Council of Europe’s Museum of the Year in 2006) is definitely worth a visit.