There was a fascinating article in yesterday’s Guardian by Wayne Gooderham about an exhibition he has curated at the Charing Cross Road branch of Foyles, on ‘the secret contents of secondhand books’. Gooderham keeps a lovely blog of book inscriptions, but he writes in the Guardian about some of the other kinds of things that lurk between the covers of old books. Over the years, he discovered, staff at the Skoob Books warehouse have gathered a considerable collection of photographs, postcards, tickets and bills of numerous varieties, postage stamps, pressed flowers, bookmarks, and even a cemetery map – each one carefully noted and collated, and each a tangible yet mysterious trace of some past reader’s presence…

Gooderham’s exhibition continues until 13th December.

One thing that is bound to happen as e-texts threaten to displace traditional printed books is that publishers will fight back by designing ever more beautiful objects. This is the binding of a cookery book which comes without a spine–just threads running across folds of paper. Or so it appears. In fact, when you run your hand across it, it feels gluey, as though those green strings aren’t really doing much of the work. Still it’s a nice surprise and somehow appropriate to a genre which is all about remembering that you’re flesh and blood, at the end of the day and at quite a few times in the day before that.

Which wit at the OED set the ‘Word of the Day’ to ‘chad’?  Material texts have lain at the heart of American political ideology and national identity since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which is on permanent, reverent display alongside the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights in the Rotunda Building of the National Archives in Washington D.C.  It is ironic that the outcome of the 2000 presidential election hung not on these grand constitutional documents but on tiny squares of waste paper, and whether they had dropped or were dangling or dimpled.

Given past and present anxieties over the reliability of the electronic voting machines that consigned the chad to the paper recycling bin of history, perhaps it is time the U.S. honoured the Founding Fathers’ commitment to the material text and reintroduced to its democratic process a piece of paper and a stubby little pencil on a piece of string.

This week’s material text was destined for the rubbish bin, along with a great many dead spiders. Since moving house recently, I’ve spent too much time emptying boxes and dusting shelves, and this grimy scrap of newspaper was dislodged from somewhere during the course of my tidying. The name of the newspaper and date of publication do not appear on this fragment, but some casual investigations revealed that it is nearly half a century old, and from a local paper – the University Arms, venue for the ‘Dinner Dance’, is just around the corner from where I live. The cinema listings for a ‘pre-release presentation’ of the film Behold a Pale Horse, starring Gregory Peck, date it to 1964, and on the other side, you can just about make out the end of a report about the Olympics in Tokyo, which took place in October of that year, as well as a reminder about the seasonal changing of the clocks.

Last week I heard a lecture by Hugo Rifkind (columnist for The Times and The Spectator) in which he shared his cynical perspective on the future of newspapers. In the UK, most of the national broadsheets and tabloids are now published in both print and digital formats, and Rifkind showed some statistics which suggested how rapidly the demand for the former is decreasing. The fastest-growing newspaper format is the ‘app’ for tablet computers, which offers subscribers a convenient way to read their newspaper of choice on a portable screen while retaining some of the familiar layout of the printed version. The implications of these changes in the marketplace are manifold for newspapers and their employees. Rifkind spoke about his own growing nostalgia for the dying culture of printed news and all the rituals it incorporated – his paper, The Times, is no longer printed in the building in which he and his colleagues work, and so gone is the possibility of running down to the basement at 3 in the morning to see your column coming literally hot off the press. While news journalism will continue to evolve in many different forms, how long does the newspaper have left?

I was interested to read in my weekend newspaper that when Michael Gove, secretary of state for education in the UK’s current coalition government, decreed that every school in the land must have a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible, the copies were inscribed ‘Presented by the Secretary of State for Education’. Scouring the web, I find that in fact these words were not just ‘inscribed’ in the books, they were actually tooled onto the bindings.

Does this kind of thing go on everywhere, or just here? I’d be very interested to learn whether followers of this blog know of other acts of large-scale book-giving by authorities around the world, especially if they have pictures of the curious books that result.

From Adam Mars-Jones’ review of the latest Ian McEwan, in the London Review of Books:

“Any residual nastiness in the new novel Sweet Tooth has been curiously displaced, onto the cover of the book. I don’t mean the photographic image, which shows a glamorous woman in a red dress … I mean the texture of the actual lamination used on the dust jacket, almost sticky yet almost slimy, creating a subliminal urge to wash the hands that have been in contact with it. This is an effect no ebook can hope to duplicate.’

Perhaps someone from the publishers (Cape) could tell us how the effect was achieved, and whether it was intended or just a happy accident?

for all those who contributed to the ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference earlier this week. An opportunity to reconnect head with hand, the fabric of language with the language of fabric, this event drew a wonderfully diverse crowd from across the world. We discussed all manner of topics from all manner of angles, kaleidoscopic interests jostling with dazzling images, extraordinary pieces of textile art, and (in one talk) a slab of flesh quivering under the needle. The conference’s numerous threads were drawn together in a plenary lecture by the anthropologist Tim Ingold that offered a lyrical unfolding of all that the human hand can know. His account of what it takes to make a piece of string was a highlight: simple yet miraculous.

Ahead of next week’s CMT conference on ‘Texts and Textiles’, I thought I’d share this beautiful notebook which was given to me by a friend. The handsewn book has been bound in Shetland wool, knitted in a Fair Isle style, thus combining in one object, as the label above says, two traditional skills. The knitted wool creates an especially tactile surface, quite the opposite of the smooth, glossy covers of mass-produced hardback books. And I like the way that the repeated patterns of dark stitches against a pale background evoke the appearance of written text on a page.

A fascinating media tangle is unfolding in the UK today, as The Sun newspaper goes against the wishes of Buckingham Palace and publishes pictures of a naked Prince Harry that have been widely circulated on the web. The newspaper’s editor pleads the freedom of the press and the public interest; media lawyers deny that there is any public interest in this particular game of strip billiards. Meanwhile radio pundits point out that ‘the genie was out of the bottle’–which strikes me as a lovely metaphor for the internet.

The whole debate is framed by the Leveson Inquiry, an ongoing parliamentary investigation into the malpractices of ‘red-top’ newspapers which, over the past few years, have got many of their most salacious stories through illegal phone-hacking. And it’s given added piquancy by the eternal soap opera of the royal family, which The Sun professes (ma’am!) to hold in the highest esteem. Beyond that, there’s the serious anxiety that newspapers might prove unsustainable in the age of free and instant online content. It’s a right royal mess, but with implications that go far beyond this prince caught with his pants down.

An item on this morning’s Radio 4 news programme Today asked listeners: ‘what is on your mantelpiece?’ This was a question first asked by the pioneers of Mass Observation—the project to map the everyday life of the British, initiated in 1937. As part of the effort to construct an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, observers were asked to “write down in order, from left to right, all the objects on your mantelpiece, mentioning what is in the middle” and then to do the same for other people’s houses, taking note of the age, class, and wealth of the householders, and enclosing photographs.

A researcher who has spent long hours in the Mass Observation archive, Rachel Hurdley, commented with a certain weary over-familiarity: “At first the eye can glaze over, because you’re thinking: right, this is going to have a clock; it’s going to have candlesticks; it’s going to have letters behind the clock or underneath the candle on the left-hand side; it’s going to have ashtrays which aren’t used as ashtrays, they’re used to dump collar studs in, sewing stuff, needles; there’s going to be a perpetual calendar; and no doubt there’s going to be smoking paraphernalia and stuff for the fire”. But then Hurdley got caught up in thinking about the letters, and what they meant at a time when there might have been several deliveries of mail each day, and when the envelopes on the mantelpiece might have been part of a dynamic system, a to-do list that represented a serious part of one’s engagement with the outside world. “Whereas now we have emails and iphones and twitter and blogs and god knows what”, then we had a shelf above the fire. “The mantelpiece was like your ipad today”.

Yet the mantelpiece is also a place for display, and the report suggested that such domestic displays are unusually intimate, laying bare the soul; as either Gilbert or George put it, “in five seconds you know exactly what sort of person you are dealing with”. There was also an absorbing discussion of the competition between hearth (or gas-fire) and television-set as the centre of the living-room. All of this might push one to think about the associations between fire, smoking and reading that cluster around those older mantelpieces. Do the candles, the ashtray, the fireplace and the letters connect up–did they connect up? Or were they disparate, chance collisions of unrelated objects, most of them less for use than show?