As we reach the last few days of campaigning for the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, a pro-remain friend reports on Facebook that she has found a torn-up ‘IN’ poster outside her front door. Coming a few days after the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, this is scary stuff.

It may be harder to read the words on a torn-up poster, but its message is all too legible. It also reveals something important about the medium: about paper, with its susceptibility to tearing, to shredding, to violence–its palpability, which is also its palpable ability to act as a metaphor for the body. If you hate this blog post, you can leave an abusive message in response to it; you can troll me or mount a cyber-attack. But you cannot convey your anger through the universal language of the tear. Ripping the page to shreds is a micro-drama that is rapidly fading from our everyday life. The power of paper turns out to be its weakness, its disposability.

There are a few moments in Shakespeare that capture these aspects of paper. Amid the utter bleakness of the ending of Troilus and Cressida, Troilus receives a letter from Cressida. We never find out what it says; Troilus dismisses the contents as ‘words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart’, before tearing it up. ‘Goe wind to wind, there turn and change together’. The fluttering of the paper becomes a visual metaphor for what Troilus perceives to be his beloved’s faithlessness.

At a similar moment of trauma in Cymbeline, Imogen learns that her beloved Posthumus Leonatus wants her killed. She doesn’t yet know why this should be so, and guesses that he has met a new love; ‘Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, / […] I must be ripped: To pieces with me!’ She asks her servant Pisanio to get on with the job of stabbing her, and bares her heart to make the job easier. But she finds the way to her heart barred: ‘What is here? / The scriptures of the loyal Leonatus, / All turn’d to heresie?’ It turns out that she has been storing the letters inside her clothing, like a lining. In this case, she merely throws the letters away (‘Away, away / Corrupters of my faith, you shall no more / Be stomachers to my heart’). In a play that is full of images of bodily dismemberment, it matters that she doesn’t seem to rip them up, and that Pisanio refuses to rip her up. This is a play about restitution–the words will come together, and will be full of meaning once more, by the end.

Let’s hope the political sphere will see some similar restitutions in the coming days and months…

Filling in a questionnaire about digital photography–since, praise the Lord, archives and libraries are increasingly allowing visitors to take photographs of materials in their collections–I start to wax lyrical:

‘Broadly speaking, I’d say that being able to photograph has allowed me to develop my sense that the visual is as important as the verbal in written communication. I think I am quite visually responsive to text—where an older generation would just want to get at the ‘content’, my generation sees content in the physical disposition of words and their endless interactions with images.’

It’s not exactly The Who, but I think it’s true all the same: for those of us who straddle the shift from print to digital, there’s something a bit scandalous about our interest in the visual. And given the ease with which images can be shared on social media, the scandal looks set to deepen with time.

I just caught up with an interview with the American author Don DeLillo in a recent Saturday edition of the Guardian. Two moments in it caught my eye. (Well, three, actually but I’m only going to quote two):

‘”People always use the word ‘identify’. ‘Do you identify with these individuals?’ And I really don’t. I can’t talk about characters outside the frame of the fiction. I identify with the words on the page. I identify with the paragraphs.”‘

And then

‘I ask DeLillo how he came to write [White Noise], but his recollection is hazy. The rhythms and patterns appear to be all that remain. He says, “I can remember the main character’s name, which is Jack Gladney. And there was something in that name–JA for Jack and GLA for Gladney–which felt important. I’ve done the same thing for other books. I’m always very conscious of the patterns of letters in a name. Ross Lockhart isn’t a great example, but its RO and then LO. So it’s a thing that I do. A character takes shape because of that confluence of letters.’

The comments resonate with a moment in DeLillo’s gruelling 9/11 novel Falling Man, when a (very minor) character learns that his name is his destiny:

‘Someone told Rumsey one night, it was Dockery the waggish adman, that everything in his life would be different, Rumsey’s, if one letter in his name was different. An a for the u. Making him, effectively, Ramsey. It was the u, the rum, that had shaped his life and mind. The way he walks and talks, his slouchings, his very size and shape, the slowness and thickness that pour off him, the way he puts his hand down his shirt to scratch an itch. That would all be different if he’d been born a Ramsey.’

The way that a character–or a type, a way of being in the world–unfurls from a single letter in a name here is rather magical, and it’s interesting that it’s the adman who should be most attuned to the power of names. DeLillo’s writing practices take us back to the root of the word ‘character’, which was being used to indicate brands, stamps, marks and letters for a good century before it was used to signify a person’s identity. (The OED currently gives the first citation in the latter sense to Ben Jonson, and the list of characters that preceded Every Man in his Humour in 1600). Of course, though the Guardian interviewer doesn’t mark it, it must matter that Don DeLillo has himself got the most wonderful little poem of a name, a tongue-twister incorporating a miniature Manhattan skyline, and the best brand that he could have hoped for.

I’m really looking forward to our two panels representing what you might call the diasporic CMT at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in Boston this Thursday:

The Early Modern Material Text I: Reading, Collecting, Compiling

Thu, March 31, 8:30 to 10:00am, Park Plaza, Mezzanine, Georgian Room

There was a Guardian obituary yesterday for Ray Tomlinson, the man who put the @ in your email address. Back in 1971, he needed to find a way for computers on the Arpanet (precursor of the internet) to send messages to each other, and he created the now-ubiquitous identifier username@computername format. The invention apparently caused some problems in operating systems that used the @ symbol to mean ‘delete this line’. (The obituary sadly doesn’t tell us who invented the dot, as in .com).

Coincidentally, yesterday my wife was phoning various Italian archives to try to get permission to reproduce pictures in their collections. Intimidating archivists were rattling off email addresses far too quickly. What’s a ‘chiocciola’? A bit of googling established that the chiocciola (snail) or sweeter still the chiocciolina (little snail) is indeed the @ sign. But the @ is also a mouse’s tail or a sleeping cat in Finland, a rolled pickled herring in Czechoslovakia, a monkey in Poland, and a puppy in Russia. Or perhaps all of the many contributors to this online discussion were having their readers on?

Last week I was involved in a seminar in which Professor Marjorie Garber, visiting from Harvard, reported that she bans her students from writing ‘Shakespeare says…’ Shakespeare doesn’t say anything; you can’t find anything in any of his works which isn’t contradicted by something else in them. So it was amusing to read, this week, that the British Library is planning to digitise the section of the manuscript play Sir Thomas More that is thought to be Shakespeare’s sole surviving draft.

Shakespeare writes some stirring speeches for More who, in his role as a sheriff, is called in to quell a riotous mob of Londoners who are protesting against immigrant labourers. Supposing the King should banish them for their insurrection, he says, ‘whither would you go?/ What country, by the nature of your error,/ Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,/ To any German province, Spain or Portugal,/ Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:/ Why, you must needs be strangers’.

As the BL curators have pointed out, this is all strikingly relevant to current politics. But, much as we might like to associate Shakespeare with these anti-xenophobic sentiments, we can’t know where he stood; he was just doing his best to fill a gap in a play that was struggling (and which would eventually fail) to get past the censor. Still, the scene at least reminds us how very hackneyed our problems are.

An image from the manuscript of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Sing Song’, the subject of Mina Gorji’s paper at the History of Material Texts seminar on Thursday. It’s an anthology of nursery rhymes, charming and faintly macabre in equal measure, as in this ceremonious poem for a dead thrush, and illustrated in faint pencil-sketches by the author. You can view the whole book here.

Material media can go down as well as up. This week we learnt about the demise of a British newspaper–The Independent–that is ‘going online’, having proved unsustainable in print. This is meant to be the future but it feels like a vanishing, the discipline of rectilinear newsprint disappearing in the sprawl of the digital interface. Reading a newspaper online is a video game in which you have to zap the pop-up ad before it flickers into hideous life.

Meanwhile as paper recedes, vellum has been saved as the medium on which English laws will be written, reversing a threatened cost-cutting move to ‘higher-quality archival paper’. Many have been surprised to learn that we are still writing our laws on the skins of dead calves. Perhaps the laws will be better now that this is widely known?

Early sea pilots’ books were “books you kept on the bridge of your ship”, according to T.A. Birrell. He writes in his 1986 Panizzi Lectures on English Monarchs and their Books that one of the most intact surviving examples of the genre was owned by Prince Henry, most likely because it was never taken on board to be “soaked with the rain and the spray”. The Prince’s copy of Pierre Garcie’s Le Grand Routier (1607, Rouen) probably owes its acquisition to the navigator Edward Wright, who was the prince’s mathematics tutor and later librarian.

Le Grand Routier was just one in a series of “sea rutters” whose origins can be found in early fifteenth-century manuscripts. ‘Rutter’ was the English name for a book of sailing directions, derived from the French routier, route-book. The equivalent expression in Portuguese was roteiro; in Spanish derrota; in Italian portalano (port-book); in Dutch leeskaart (reading chart); in German, Seebuch (sea-book). Although Portuguese manuscript roteiros existed in the early fifteenth century, they were treated as top-secret documents, and it is likely that the first printed book of sailing directions, an Italian portalano published in Venice by Bernadino Rizo in 1490 derived from a compilation of French manuscript route-books. One example of an early manuscript rutter, copied between 1461 and 1465 by the scribe William Ebesham, survives in BL MS Lansdowne 285, a manuscript better known as Sir John Paston’s “grete booke”.

The route-book written by Pierre Garcie (1430?-1503?), which was later reprinted in the edition owned by Prince Henry, was the first to focus on the physical features of the coast, comprehensively describing the appearance of the coasts and the sea-bed of western France, Spain, and Portugal. Most importantly, Garcie illustrated his route-book with 59 woodcuts, made by Enguilbert de Marnef, which gave seamen an impression of coastal outlines. Birrell describes each woodcut as “a heavy, crude, black silhouette: you stared at the printed page and imprinted the silhouette on your visual memory, and then looked up from the book, into the rain and the fog, trying to find a coastal outline that would fit”.

 These woodcuts were made as early as 1484, but did not change significantly until the seventeenth century. Their crudeness did not detract from their imitation of important coastal features which the seaman in unfamiliar waters could recognise even through miserable weather. As D.W. Waters writes in The Rutters of the Sea (1962), the woodcuts “made prominent with simplicity what the anxious shipmaster sought”, when he perceived a coast “looming up suddenly over a darkening sea, or frowning over spume-swept waters through the gloom of leaden skies”.

Coasts in a 1671 route-book: The safeguard of sailers, or, Great rutter, p. 143, from EEBO.

By the later seventeenth century, printed rutters had established finer detail in illustrating coasts, though their use on board, as reference volumes with illustrations to be compared and held up to unfamiliar coastal views, remained the same. Few printed rutters survive, so Prince Henry’s well-preserved 1607 copy of Le Grand Routier is worth a browse; it has been digitised on Google Books here.

We’re very excited about the arrival of our CMT display cases on the first floor of the English Faculty… Our first exhibition, of nineteenth-century commonplace books, is now in situ. Please come along to eat cake, talk material texts and celebrate the new arrivals on Monday, 26 January, from 10.15-11.15 am.