Above: stoneware mug by Ludlow potter Martin Homer, signed on the base by the artist

At a seminar last week organised by the Material Culture Lab in the department of Archaeology in Cambridge, four speakers offered some thoughts on what ‘material culture’ means in their discipline. Amongst them was classicist Robin Osborne, who mentioned his recent work on artists’ signatures on statues, vases, and other objects. I tracked down his article, ‘The Art of Signing in Ancient Greece’ (Arethusa 43 (2010), 231-51), in which he offers a window onto some ancient Greek material texts. Lately I have been thinking a lot about the title-pages of early modern printed books, and found Osborne’s articulation of the ways in which writing itself ‘attracts writing’ (p. 243), as well as his discussion of what the relative size and position of artists’ names and other texts on Acropolis column dedications, gravestones, and drinking cups might tell us about the interactions between the various agents involved in their production, to be surprisingly pertinent.

Below: frontispiece and title-page of Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad

A cat-obsessed friend just alerted me to the most creative piece of medieval marginalia I’ve ever seen. You can view it here.

Bizarre news the other day on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One (now available as a written feature on the BBC website).  Verifiable figures are not available, but French firms – perhaps as many as 50% of them – continue to employ graphologists in recruitment processes.  Applicants must submit a sample of their handwriting, which is then submitted to the ‘experts’ for analysis.

I don’t doubt that handwriting analysis can have specific practical or scholarly applications.  I imagine the well-established techniques used by palaeographers to identify archaising scripts (or, conversely, to identify manuscripts copied by the same hand) – attention to the minute idiosyncrasies of letter formation and the duct of the scribes’ handwriting – aren’t too different to those involved in proving a modern forgery.  Since such identifications can be the subject of scholarly disagreement, any ambitious claims for modern handwriting analysis need to be viewed with considerable scepticism.

Any attempt to apply graphology in the realms of psychology or medicine, however, just seems like bald charlatanism to me.  Even where the stakes are far lower – in this case, occupational recruitment – I’m far from convinced of its usefulness.  Like astrologers, chiromancers or psychics, graphologists stick to the vague and avoid the specific, and use evidence already given to them by the person they’re reading: literally, in this case, since graphologists usually study a handwritten personal statement rather than a neutral piece of writing and have spectacularly failed to give accurate descriptions when confronted with a neutral sample of handwriting.

The French attachment to graphology is a cultural one – they invented it, so it’s not surprising they remain attached to it – but it is used elsewhere, in Germany, Switzerland and Israel.  Psychometric tests were, in their modern form, an American invention and remain more popular in the Anglophone world, though not to the exclusion of graphology.  Indeed, graphology may be catching on on this side of La Manche.  A growing number of companies justify its use as an additional screening tool because it is cheap and they claim it offers a fresh perspective on a candidate that CVs do not.

Could this perception that the manuscript word is more ‘personal’ than the printed or digital word – at a time when the future relationship between all three remains unclear – be a reaction against recruitment processes that have been rendered increasingly impersonal by e-mailed CVs and the use of online application systems?  A 1990 report by the Law Society Gazette cautioned that – regardless of doubts about graphology’s credibility – European law states that submitted applications are the property of the recruiter.  He or she may legally (though perhaps not ethically) send it for analysis without acquiring the applicant’s consent.  So, when you’re next asked to provide something in manuscript – caveat scriptor! – you’ve no idea where it might end up.

My last blogpost touched on the subject of trolling. Another diverting/infuriating form of digital textuality is the phishing email–the letter which tries to persuade you to give away all your numbers and passwords in order to spike your system, compromise your online security, or relieve you of significant sums of money. The etymologists link the word ‘phishing’, predictably enough, with fishing, angling for personal information (the OED dates its arrival to 1996), but explain that it has probably been crossed with ‘phreaking’–an older scam for getting free telephone calls (dating back to 1971).

This morning members of the University of Cambridge were taken on a particularly creative phishing trip:

“Dear Staff/Student,

As phishing schemes become more sophisticated, with phishers being able to convince up to 50% of recipients to respond, it has become increasingly important for the Webmaster of The University of Cambridge to upgrade the University’s Webmail server to the new and more secured 2013 version.

This will enable your webmail take a new look, with virus protection and anti-spam Security. You are advised to verify and upgrade your account to the University’s 2013 latest Webmail version to enable recommended advanced features.

To verify your account, please click and follow the verification link below for the required upgrade or simply copy and paste the link into your web browser;

[link deleted, for obvious reasons]

To ensure full protection of your account, please take a few minutes now – it could save you a lot of time and frustration later.”

It’s ingenious, isn’t it? Shades of Shakespeare’s Iago, pretending that he wants to keep Othello from harm at the same time as he destroys his marriage and his mind. I particularly like ‘with phishers being able to convince up to 50% of recipients to respond’–such modesty!

Robert Priest spoke at our seminar last night about his work on the fan mail and hate mail that arose from Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus, 1863). Treating the gospels as a set of unreliable historical sources rather than as Holy Writ, Renan’s study scandalized the Catholic establishment and became one of the most hotly-discussed and bestselling books of the age.

While the Vie received vast numbers of printed rebuttals, Renan himself was subjected to a torrent of letters from all over France and beyond its borders. Some of the letters were from readers who had experienced the  book as a kind of revelation that brought the historical Jesus to life for the first time. But others were savagely hostile, calling the writer an animal and telling him that he would burn in hell for his lack of faith. A third type of communication came from those who sought to bring Renan back to the fold by gentler means, often with prayer cards depicting the Sacred Heart, significant terms underlined so as to drive home the message more directly. Taken together these letters testify to the extent to which the Vie (published in a cheap, simplified edition in 1864, and issued with illustrations in 1870) had penetrated French society, attracting readers among the rural poor as well as among urban elites. And they show how much controversy it continued to cause, while the author sat back and declined to comment on the furore.

For the modern reader, these letters can’t but seem prescient of internet commentings, and of the virulent work of the troll, who employs the invisibility cloak of anonymity to post flagrantly offensive messages. (The recent trolling case involving Cambridge academic Mary Beard was widely publicized). But while anonymity was also a feature in much of Renan’s hate mail, Priest emphasized that these were not proto-posts. With no established line of communication, and no evidence of a concerted campaign of writing, each letter was the result of an individual initiative by the sender, an experiment pitting the power of handwriting against the force of print.

I’ve been yearning for an excuse, however tenuous, to post this picture of a friend’s mouth-watering library of poetry, but I’ve been completely unable to think of one. So here it is, on no other pretext than that, in a rain-sodden, snow-drifted UK, spring might at last have sprung…

  The organisers of last September’s CMT ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference were touched to receive this stitched postcard  (left; apologies for the blurry photo) from one of the participants shortly afterwards. I was reminded of this lovely thank-you note today after reading the latest blog post from Edinburgh-based writer and designer Kate Davies, in which she shares some beautiful pictures of her collection of machine-embroidered postcards made in France and Switzerland in the early twentieth century. As Davies explains, these sentimental greetings cards were especially popular with British troops serving in France, and surviving examples with their handwritten inscriptions offer poignant glimpses into lives from the past. Unlike the postcard above, these mass-produced material texts were not stamped and sent in the regular postal service, but transported in military mail pouches, and so were more protected in transit. The delicacy of their voile overlays and the bright colours of their jolly floral designs reinforce their optimistic stitched messages (‘A KISS FROM FRANCE’; ‘We are all right’), and must have offered a striking contrast with the bleakness of the front line.

A few of the material texts I encountered during a few days spent in Venice. Here, writers are protesting against the closure of yet more bookshops; the nineteenth-century writer Niccolò Tommaseo dominates a square with books apparently tumbling out from his coat (his statue is affectionately known as ‘cacalibri’); and there’s a shop where a woman can personalize an apron or bib with a calligraphic name in less than a minute!

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?