A poignant image from the news this week: miniature bibles about to be sent 700 metres underground to the 33 men trapped in a Chilean mine. This scene illustrates starkly the practical importance of the materiality of texts – only volumes as small as these will fit in the narrow tube that connects these men to the surface. In this extreme but real-life context, the physical properties of these books have as much significance as their textual content. (Photo from www.guardian.co.uk).
Has anyone been to ‘The Sculpture of Language’, a current exhibition curated by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at the Tate Liverpool? It’s one of the three parts of the DLA Piper series ‘This is Sculpure’ (the other two are ‘Sculpture: The Physical World’ and ‘Sculpture Remixed’), each of which has been developed by Tate curators alongside leading cultural figures from a range of disciplines. From the Tate collection Duffy has chosen works from 1699 to the present day which engage in some way with written words, including pieces by David Kindersley, Eric Gill, Sonia Delauney, and Salvador Dali. Duffy has contributed a specially-written sonnet, ‘POETRY’, to the exhibition too. More can be read about ‘The Sculpture of Language’ here. I’m interested in how this kind of exhibition investigates the ways in which artists working with different media respond to words and language, and invites us to reconsider text in the context of other art forms. If you’re in Liverpool during the next few months, this certainly looks worth a visit.
A friend has just alerted me to a website displaying perhaps the most material text any of us is ever likely to encounter–http://ny.bloomsburyauctions.com/detail/NY014/383.0. The auctioneer has done his/her best to make sense of this magnificent artefact, but perhaps followers of this blog can offer fuller meditations upon its meaning?
Yesterday I learnt that, if I want to look at a book in the Middle Temple library, I’ll have to pay £30 for the privilege. ‘As a private library, we are forced, by the rules of the Inn, to charge non-members for access’. I immediately started fuming; if every library in the land starts charging for access, a lot of serious research is going to become impossible. But perhaps this is the future, and we’re all going to have to get used to it. Are other libraries already routinely charging their academic users? Are librarians contemplating the introduction of charges, as budgets get squeezed and educational institutions become more and more private?
Beneath the magnificent barrel-vaulted ceiling of the Playfair Library in Old College, Edinburgh, over two hundred people gathered on a mid-July weekend for the third Material Cultures conference organised by the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for the History of the Book.
A glance through the elegantly produced programme reveals the diversity of the disciplines and backgrounds represented. Over the three days, discussions of (to give an incomplete list) the buying, selling, publishing, giving, sharing, collecting, saving, printing, editing, listing, archiving, translating, illustrating, annotating, dedicating, digitising, indexing, and binding of material texts reached far beyond the traditional scopes of ‘bibliography’ and ‘book history’. Some of the panels focussed on particular people and places; in light of our location there were panels dedicated to the John Murray Archive in the National Library of Scotland, to the history of Shakespeare scholarship in Edinburgh, and to some specific manuscript anthologies in Renaissance Scotland. Other panels used broader themes such as ‘Printers Across Borders’, and ‘The Business of Books’ to bring together material texts usually separated by geographical and chronological distance. The titles of quite a few other panels and the papers within them were mystifyingly vague, and as we were not supplied with abstracts of papers this meant a certain amount of advance guessing was necessary. This in itself was a reminder of the sweeping consequences of ‘material culture’ and the challenges we face in talking meaningfully about texts as ‘material’ in inter- and intra-disciplinary ways.
Indeed, such was the scale and breadth of the conference that it sometimes felt that several conferences were happening simultaneously. Most noticeably, it was certainly possible to fill three days listening to papers about the digital: digital archives, digital texts, digital editions, screen media, virtual museums, digital bindings, Kindles, hypertexts, and e-books all featured, demonstrating the importance of this rapidly developing field of technology, research, and practice. It was equally possible, however, to experience a conference relatively free from the d-word, although in the final plenary session Jerome McGann warned us not to underestimate the ever-increasing complexity of the relationship between scholars, libraries, and digitisation.
In the opening plenary session, Roger Chartier asked some searching questions about the history of attitudes towards authorial manuscripts, suggesting the need to appreciate the function of the library or archive as the site of preservation not only of material texts, but also of particular sets of historically specific ideas and conventions about authorship. Later that day the second plenary session starred Peter Stallybrass, whose presentation developed some of the ideas he introduced at the inaugural CMT conference earlier this year. Pointing out the limitations of the traditional division we set up between ‘print’ and ‘manuscript’, he urged us to consider print as a medium which incites manuscript: ‘printing for manuscript’. In his lavishly illustrated talk, Stallybrass demonstrated how we can look again at everyday printed ‘blank’ documents which require completion with handwritten details. Immigration landing cards, cheques, birth certificates and field service postcards, for example, were juxtaposed with seventeenth-century funeral tickets. By viewing print as a medium which crucially creates space for manuscript, Stallybrass argued, we might consider afresh the presence of handwriting in early printed books, and think further about how we differentiate between ‘print’ and ‘manuscript’.
Such questions of terminology, definition, and categorization underpinned many of the discussions at this conference. The ‘material text’ crosses many disciplinary boundaries, and as scholars, librarians, and readers, our task is to continue to explore the terms and language with which we may most fruitfully talk about the ‘text’ as something ‘material’.
News today that Raymond Scott, an antiques dealer, has been jailed for eight years for handling a copy of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio that had been stolen from the Durham University Library in 1998. In his summing-up, the judge claimed that Scott’s motive for dealing in this ‘quintessentially English treasure’ was ‘financial gain’; in particular, he ‘wanted to fund an extremely ludicrous playboy lifestyle in order to impress a woman [he] met in Cuba’.
Such a judgment confers a prophetic quality on one of the more curious aspects of Anthony James West’s magnum opus, a history of the Folio in four volumes, which began to appear in 2001. West calibrated the price of the Folio in the first three centuries of its life against the cost of bread (44 loaves on its first publication, 5,000 loaves by the 1850s). But for the twentieth century he instead compared it with the cost of ‘three luxury items … a Purdey shotgun, Russian caviar, and a Jaguar motor car’. ‘The purchaser of these items,’ he suggested, ‘is likely to have had certain characteristics in common with the purchaser of a First Folio–such as disposable wealth, aspects of lifestyle and taste, and perhaps the wish for “the esteem and envy of fellow men”‘. Or women, we might now add, with an eye to Mr Scott.
When West compiled his Census of Folios, documenting the whereabouts, provenance and physical condition of every surviving exemplar, he noted that the Durham copy was unavailable for inspection because it had been stolen. Bought by John Cosin sometime before 1632, this copy was incorporated into Peterhouse library in Cambridge during the Civil War, while its owner was exiled in France, but was later recovered to grace the episcopal library on Palace Green in Durham, which Cosin endowed in 1669. It thus has a claim to be the first First Folio to have sat on the shelves of a public library.
It’s good to hear that the stolen book will soon be on its way back home. And West’s work, which renders any individual copy of the Folio instantly identifiable, ought to make any ludicrous playboy think twice before raiding the library.
On Euston Road, outside St Pancras station, a very small metal plaque on the pavement caught my eye. It said something like ‘legible london: visit the tfl [Transport for London] website’. What is this ‘legible london’ and how is it connected to transport, I wondered, and on arrival at the British Library did as the sign on the pavement told me and looked up this website:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/microsites/legible-london/default.aspx
Legible London is an initiative to encourage the novel practice of… walking. The government has realised that many people do not walk around this city. We tend to use public transport all the time, especially the London Underground system, when often it would actually be quicker, healthier, more environmentally friendly, and free, to walk.
The website explains that ‘Based on extensive research, the system uses a range of information, including street signs and printed maps, to help people find their way.’ At first I was surprised and somewhat sceptical to read that ‘extensive research’ was undertaken to produce the necessary material texts – signs and maps – which we surely ought take for granted as visible and legible in any urban space, particularly a capital city.
However, the ‘Maps and Signs’ section of the website explains the project in more detail. The material features of the new signs and maps have been thought about very carefully, to encourage a more intuitive interaction with the cityscape. Although I found the tone of the website a little patronising, I was interested by the explanations of how the size, shape, orientation, colour, and positioning of the new maps and signs have been designed to make it easier to connect the meaning of these material texts with the environment and the routes we want to trace through it. On public transport we are moved passively around the city (particularly in the darkness of the Underground, where we literally cannot see or read the landscape). The Legible London initiative puts a spotlight on the importance of the material text in the context of changing realisations about urban travel, something essential for almost everyone, every day, everywhere.
Several CMT bags and their owners will be journeying north of the border this week for the ‘Material Cultures 2010’ conference hosted by the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh. The three-day programme, viewable here, features keynote papers by Roger Chartier, Jerome McGann, and Peter Stallybrass. Delegates will be spoilt for choice during the panel sessions, which promise material and textual delights from nineteenth-century fashion magazines and Algonquin words to blogs and Scottish manuscript miscellanies. Expect reports here afterwards!
The major spring/summer exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum this year is ‘Quilts 1700-2010’. This exhibition showcases over 60 British quilts from the V and A collection with others loaned from museums and galleries in the UK and beyond. Displayed alongside these historical exhibits are some striking quilts made by contemporary artists including Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry. I would love to include some photographs in this post, but they appear difficult to find online. Have a look at the BBC’s special audio slideshow for a glimpse of some of them.
The exhibition is arranged around five themes: ‘The Domestic Landscape’, ‘Virtue and Virtuosity’, ‘Meeting the Past’, ‘Making a Living’, and ‘Private Thoughts – Political Debates’. A message that is both implicitly and explicitly communicated throughout is that these handmade domestic objects hold stories and histories in their very fibres. They are understood as texts as well as textiles. The curators have consciously probed the ways in which quilts can ‘document love, marriage, births, deaths, periods of intense patriotic fervour, regional and national identity and developments in taste and fashion’, reminding us also in the printed exhibition guide that quilts are ‘repositories of memory’, ‘acts of remembrance’, and ‘a form of meditation and consolation’.
While much of the beauty and interest of these objects lies in the colours, prints, patterns, and textures of the intricately pieced fabrics, often their makers added words too – names, dates, biblical verses, and short poems, for example. Indeed, many of the quilts demonstrate an explicit engagement with the power of visible text. Several commemorate coronations and military victories. On others, short sentences and poems emphasise the value of hard work and perseverance embodied in the material in which we read them, and on others, they provide spiritual advice and comfort. On a quilt made for a nineteenth-century military hospital, for example, verses from scripture appear on all four edges, so that they could be read by patients in neighbouring beds as well as by the person lying under the quilt.
One of the most moving exhibits for me was the quilt made last year by inmates of Wandsworth prison. The impressive craftsmanship of the panels on this quilt belies the hands that made them – those of male prisoners who had previously had little experience of what is traditionally seen as a domestic and feminine activity. On their quilt we read a collection of embroidered messages that are witty, entertaining, angry, disturbing, and sad. For these men, the quilt became a communal site for expression in words and pictures; the materials and methods of quilt-making provide the opportunity for communication with language via a creative engagement with materials. Compare this with the Rajah quilt, made in 1841 by women convicts onboard HMS Rajah as they were being transported to lands in the south Pacific. The tools and materials they used were supplied by Elizabeth Fry’s social reform project, and the words embroidered in a central panel on the quilt express the gratitude of the quilt’s makers for the creative opportunities this charity gave them during their long voyage.
Of all the quilts in the exhibition, Sara Impey’s recent ‘Punctuation’ quilt explores most explicitly a relationship between text and textile. Each tiny panel of her quilt is an embroidered letter, and together the panels play with phrases taken from a love letter to Impey’s mother that was discovered after her mother’s death. You can see images of similar works by Impey here. In this very consciously material text, Impey explores the popular idea that love letters were traditionally cut up to make the paper templates needed for piecing a quilt. The traditional materiality of the patchwork quilt becomes a medium through which to make sense from textual and material fragments, to re-read the past and to contextualise a fragmentary piece of documentary evidence from her mother’s life.
The juxtaposition of quilts such as this one with others made as many as three hundred years ago illustrates how the quilt continues to be a site of personal or political protest, debate, and subversion. While every quilt has its own story, some quilts stress their message in visible textual ways, inviting us to read them as we might read other kinds of material texts.
Sue Pritchard, curator of contemporary textiles at the V and A, writes a blog in which she explores many of the quilts in more detail. ‘Quilts 1700-2010’ runs until for ten more days, until 4 July.
A painful story. A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, drawing on the expertise of staff and students on the V&A/RCA MA in the History of Design. I had pre-circulated an early modern inventory that is central to my current research, and at the start of the workshop I sent round a few pages of a diary/account-book that is another of my key sources. The discussion went quickly in a very intelligent and not entirely unforeseeable direction. Who (I was asked) was supposed to be reading this account book? How was it bound, and what did the binding materials imply about its status? Was this a pre-bound volume into which entries had been written, or a pile of paper that had been bound up after the event? Embarrassed, I had to confess: I hadn’t actually seen this manuscript. I was in Cambridge; the manuscript was in Washington. Obviously, during the course of my research I *would* get my hands on it and answer those important questions, but the time had not yet come.
This was a curious moment for me, partly because it seemed so bizarre (how could I, who had written a whole book about the importance of books as artefacts, have fallen into this trap?) and partly because it made me feel insufficiently jet-setting (other academics in my field must be flying over to Washington once or twice a year, and dropping into the Folger on a whim). But if I’m honest, my motives for not having yet visited my manuscript are partly ecological–I don’t want to cross the Atlantic again until I have a need sufficient to justify (however thinly) my flight. To some, such agonizing will seem absurd, and they should stop reading now. Others may see that there’s a problem here, a problem which is in any case separable from the environmental concern. (How) can we work on a material text when we can’t actually get to it?
One kind of answer to this question might come from the libraries. Our great research libraries enjoy welcoming scholars from overseas, but they could start thinking of more ways to keep them at bay, or to provide a greater range of academic services at a distance. They could offer cheap, watermarked digital images for research purposes, for example, so that the physical properties of the book can be gauged and interpreted; or they could employ in-house bibliographers to answer detailed enquiries about books (including, say, transcriptions of marginalia). Or they could maintain a register of affiliated scholars who would be willing to act as proxies in the investigation of material aspects of a text (for a small fee, or on a tit-for-tat basis). But libraries have a lot on their plates already. We academics could be advertising our research services for ourselves. Is there, somewhere out there on the web, a bulletin board for this purpose?
It’s true, of course, that nothing can substitute for personal engagement with the real thing, and I shall certainly be going to Washington at some point in the near future. But if there’s an early modernist sitting in the Folger who wants to swap an hour or two of research time with me in Cambridge, please drop me a line (jes1003@cam.ac.uk). Who knows, it could be the start of something…