Congratulations to CMT member Sarah Howe, whose dazzling poetic collection Loop of Jade is winning prize after prize–yesterday it took the T.S. Eliot, the first debut ever to do so. As a taste of its riches, here is a particularly material-textual poem, which takes its curious title from Borges:

(n) That from a long way off look like flies

More a midge really, flower-pressed: pent
in this hinged spread of my undergrad
Shakespeare. Down the page, a grey smudge
tinged with a rusty penumbra, like blood–
mine or its? Two sheer wings, stilled mid-word,
trace out a glyph in a strange alphabet.

At empathy’s darkening pane we see
our own reflected face: how, if that fly
had a father and mother? On the heath, Lear
assumes all ragged madmen share
ungrateful daughters. The way my father,
In his affable moods, always thinks you
want a gin and tonic too. I wonder
if I should scrape her off with a tissue.

Nothing this year to rival last year’s amazing Twelve Days of Christmas Blog… but this year the CMT’s Christmas presents came early, in the form of two new state-of-the-art display cases. These cases are now happily housed in the first-floor atrium of the English Faculty. In the New Year we will start using them to host mini-exhibitions, tied in with research and teaching and events and libraries in Cambridge. Watch this space for further details…

Yesterday the CMT convened a one-day colloquium entitled ‘The Academic Book of the Future: Evolution or Revolution?’ This was part of Cambridge’s contribution to a host of events being held across the UK in celebration of the first ever Academic Book Week, which is itself an offshoot of the AHRC-funded ‘Academic Book of the Future’ project. The aim of that project is both to raise awareness of academic publishing and to explore how it might change in response to new digital technologies and changing academic cultures. We were delighted to have Samantha Rayner, the PI on the project, to introduce the event.

The first session kicked off with a talk from Rupert Gatti, Fellow in Economics at Trinity and one of the founders of Open Book Publishers (www.openbookpublishers.com), explaining ‘Why the Future is Open Access’. Gatti contrasted OA publishing with ‘legacy’ publishing and emphasized the different orders of magnitude of the audience for these models. Academic books published through the usual channels were, he contended, failing to reach 99% of their potential audience. They were also failing to take account of the possibilities opened up by digital media for embedding research materials and for turning the book an ongoing project rather than a finished article. The second speaker in this session, Alison Wood, a Mellon/Newton postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities in Cambridge, reflected on the relationship between academic publishing and the changing institutional structures of the university. She urged us to look for historical precedents to help us cope with current upheavals, and called in the historian Anthony Grafton to testify to the importance of intellectual communities and institutions to the seemingly solitary labour of the academic monograph. In Wood’s analysis, we need to draw upon our knowledge of the changing shape of the university as a collective (far more postdocs, far more adjunct teachers, far more globalization) when thinking about how academic publishing might develop. We can expect scholarly books of the future to take some unusual forms in response to shifting material circumstances.

The day was punctuated by a series of ‘views’ from different Cambridge institutions. The first was offered by David Robinson, the Managing Director of Heffers, which has been selling books in Cambridge since 1876. Robinson focused on the extraordinary difference between his earlier job, in a university campus bookshop, and his current role. In the former post, in the heyday of the course textbook, before the demise of the net book agreement and the rise of the internet, selling books had felt a little like ‘playing shops’. Now that the textbook era is over, bookshops are less tightly bound into the warp and weft of universities, and academic books are becoming less and less visible on the shelves even of a bookshop like Heffers. Robinson pointed to the ‘crossover’ book, the academic book that achieves a large readership, as a crucial category in the current bookselling landscape. He cited Thomas Piketty’s Capital as a recent example of the genre.

Our second panel was devoted to thinking about the ‘Academic Book of the Near-Future’, and our speakers offered a series of reflections on the current state of play. The first speaker, Samantha Rayner (Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies at UCL and ‘Academic Book of the Future’ PI), described the progress of the project to date. The first phase had involved starting conversations with numerous stakeholders at every point in the production process, to understand the nature of the systems in which the academic book is enmeshed. Rayner called attention to the volatility of the situation in which the project is unfolding—every new development in government higher education policy forces a rethink of possible futures. She also stressed the need for early-career scholars to receive training in the variety of publishing avenues that are open to them. Richard Fisher, former Managing Director of Academic Publishing at CUP, took up the baton with a talk about the ‘invisibles’ of traditional academic publishing—all the work that goes into making the reputation of an academic publisher that never gets seen by authors and readers. Those invisibles had in the past created certain kinds of stability—‘lines’ that libraries would need to subscribe to, periodicals whose names would be a byword for quality, reliable metadata for hard-pressed cataloguers. And the nature of these existing arrangements is having a powerful effect on the ways in which digital technology is (or is not) being adopted by particular publishing sectors. Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at Cambridge and President of the Royal Historical Society, began by singing the praises of the academic monograph; he saw considerable opportunities for evolutionary rather than revolutionary change in this format thanks to the move to digital. The threat to the monograph came, in his view, mostly from government-induced productivism. The scramble to publish for the REF as it is currently configured leads to a lower-quality product, and threatens to marginalize the book altogether. Danny Kingsley, Head of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge, discussed the failure of the academic community to embrace Open Access, and its unpreparedness for the imposition of OA by governments. She outlined Australian Open Access models that had given academic work a far greater impact, putting an end to the world in which intellectual prestige stood in inverse proportion to numbers of readers.

In the questions following this panel, some anxieties were aired about the extent to which the digital transition might encourage academic publishers to further devolve labour and costs to their authors, and to weaken processes of peer review. How can we ensure that any innovations bring us the best of academic life, rather than taking us on a race to the bottom? There was also discussion about the difficulties of tailoring Open Access to humanities disciplines that relied on images, given the current costs of digital licences; it was suggested that the use of lower-density (72 dpi) images might offer a way round the problem, but there was some vociferous dissent from this view.

After lunch, the University Librarian Anne Jarvis offered us ‘The View from the UL’. The remit of the UL, to safeguard the book’s past for future generations and to make it available to researchers, remains unchanged. But a great deal is changing. Readers no longer perceive the boundaries between different kinds of content (books, articles, websites), and the library is less concerned with drawing in readers and more concerned with pushing out content. The curation and preservation of digital materials, including materials that fall under the rules for legal deposit, has created a set of new challenges. Meanwhile the UL has been increasingly concerned to work with academics in order to understand how they are using old and new technologies in their day-to-day lives, and to ensure that it provides a service tailored to real rather than imagined needs.

The third panel session of the day brought together four academics from different humanities disciplines to discuss the publishing landscape as they perceive it. Abigail Brundin, from the Department of Italian, insisted that the future is collaborative; collaboration offers an immediate way out of the often closed-off worlds of our specialisms, fosters interdisciplinary exchanges and allows access to serious funding opportunities. She took issue with any idea that the initiative in pioneering new forms of academic writing should come from early-career academics; it is those who are safely tenured who have a responsibility to blaze a trail. Matthew Champion, a Research Fellow in History, drew attention to the care that has traditionally gone into the production of academic books—care over the quality of the finished product and over its physical appearance, down to details such as the font it is printed in. He wondered whether the move to digital and to a higher speed of publication would entail a kind of flattening of perspectives and an increased sense of alienation on all sides. Should we care if many people our work? Champion thought not: what we want is not 50,000 careless clicks but the sustained attention of deeply-engaged readers. Our third speaker, Liana Chua reported on the situation in Anthropology, where conservative publishing imperatives are being challenged by digital communications. Anthropologists usually write about living subjects, and increasingly those subjects are able to answer back. This means that the ‘finished-product’ model of the book is starting to die off, with more fluid forms taking its place.Such forms (including film-making) are also better-suited to capturing the experience of fieldwork, which the book does a great deal to efface. Finally Orietta da Rold, from the Faculty of English, questioned the dominance of the book in academia. Digital projects that she had been involved in had been obliged, absurdly, to dress themselves up as books, with introductions and prefaces and conclusions. And collections of articles that might better be published as individual interventions were obliged to repackage themselves as books. The oppressive desire for the ‘big thing’ obscures the important work that is being done in a plethora of forms.

In discussion it was suggested that the book form was a valuable identifier, allowing unusual objects like CD-ROMs or databases to be recognized and catalogued and found (the book, in this view, provides the metadata or the paratextual information that gives an artefact a place in the world). There was perhaps a division between those who saw the book as giving ideas a compelling physical presence and those who were worried about the versions of authority at stake in the monograph. The monograph model perhaps discourages people from talking back; this will inevitably come under pressure in a more ‘oral’ digital economy.

Our final ‘view’ of the day was ‘The View from Plurabelle Books’, offered by Michael Cahn but read in his absence by Gemma Savage. Plurabelle is a second-hand academic bookseller based in Cambridge; it was founded in 1996. Cahn’s talk focused on a different kind of ‘future’ of the academic book—the future in which the book ages and its owner dies. The books that may have marked out a mental universe need to be treated with appropriate respect and offered the chance of a new lease of life. Sometimes they carry with them a rich sense of their past histories.

A concluding discussion drew out several themes from the day:

(1) A particular concern had been where the impetus for change would and should come from—from individual academics, from funding bodies, or from government. The conservatism and two-sizes-fit-almost-all nature of the REF act as a brake on innovation and experiment, although the rising significance of ‘impact’ might allow these to re-enter by the back door. The fact that North America has remained impervious to many of the pressures that are affecting British academics was noted with interest.

(2) The pros and cons of peer review were a subject of discussion—was it the key to scholarly integrity or a highly unreliable form of gatekeeping that would naturally wither in an online environment?

(3) Questions of value were raised—what would determine academic value in an Open Access world? The day’s discussions had veered between notions of value/prestige that were based on numbers of readers and those that were not. Where is the appropriate balance?

(4) A broad historical and technological question: are we entering a phase of perpetual change or do we expect that the digital domain will eventually slow down, developing protocols that seem as secure as those that we used to have for print? (And would that be a good or a bad thing?) Just as paper had to be engineered over centuries in order to become a reliable communications medium (or the basis for numerous media), so too the digital domain may take a long time to find any kind of settled form. It was also pointed out that the academic monograph as we know it today was a comparatively short-lived, post-World War II phenomenon.

(5) As befits a conference held under the aegis of the Centre for Material Texts, the physical form of the book was a matter of concern. Can lengthy digital books be made a pleasure to read? Can the book online ever substitute for the ‘theatres of memory’ that we have built in print? Is the very restrictiveness of print a source of strength?

(6) In the meantime, the one thing that all of the participants could agree on was that we will need to learn to live with (sometimes extreme) diversity.

With many thanks to our sponsors, Cambridge University Press, the Academic Book of the Future Project, and the Centre for Material Texts. The lead organizer of the day was Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk); he was very grateful for the copious assistance of Sam Rayner, Rebecca Lyons, and Richard Fisher; for the help of the staff at the Pitt Building, where the colloquium took place; and for the contributions of all of our speakers.

Recently, I have been taking a closer look at a manuscript I consulted this summer in the Folger Shakespeare Library. The volume (MS V.b.132) contains a long and absorbing set of letters by Francis Bacon, carefully copied in the late 1620s or early 1630s by the scribe Ralph (Raph) Crane (Beal BcF 187). When examining the manuscript’s binding and construction, however, my research took an unexpected detour away from Bacon and Crane, and into the everyday world of early modern shipping.

The manuscript’s binding guards are made up of a set of written accounts, covering the recto and verso of a single folio page (pictured). Having photographed the eight exposed page fragments, I reassembled the snippets into two misshapen, but potentially readable, pages (below), to try to date the material. Although the accounts don’t contain any dates themselves, they contain enough references to ships and people to point to a likely time of writing. The pages record the expenses involved in the importation and sale of ‘ambergres’, ‘chests of suger’, and ‘bages’ of ‘anesede’. It is possible to make out the names of two ships – the Hopewell and the Amity – and of some customers or merchants: one ‘collins’, ‘doctor lopus’, and ‘folkes the queenes ma[jes]ti[e’s] […]’.

From scanning the tables of Elizabethan ships in Kenneth Andrews’ Elizabethan Privateering (1964), and the detailed chronologies of sugar importation in T.S. Willan’s Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (1959), it seems likely that the Hopewell was the ship of that name captained by Abraham Cocke and then William Craston, which carried sugar, ginger, cochineal, pepper and sarsaparilla, and that the Amity may have been the Amity which was employed in the Barbary trade between 1574 and 1594, managed by a syndicate from the Grocers Company. The reference to ‘collins’, to which the account-writer sold ambergris could therefore have been Edward Collins, factor to the brother of John Symcot, who was himself engaged in the sugar trade and also imported on the Amity during 1587-8.

The accounts also have a celebrity connection: ‘doctor lopus’ is almost certainly the Queen’s notorious physician Roderigo Lopez, who was involved in the importation of aniseed and sumac from 1584 until he was executed in 1594. Lastly, the word ‘grocer’ is likely to complete the line on ‘folkes’: the Royal Grocer Richard Foulkes charged a fixed importation fee on sugar under the royal right of purveyance. This fee was implemented in 1584, and lasted until the abolishment of Foulkes’ post in 1589.

With this in mind, it seems probable that the two pages of accounts were written sometime between 1584 and 1589, by an established trader in sugar, ambergris and aniseed. Unfortunately, the Francis Bacon manuscript bound in these accounts was produced much later, and does not touch on Elizabethan spice importation. Although this digression into merchant shipping led to little more than a footnote in my work on the manuscript, the process of reassembling these accounts and tracing their references was a nice reminder of the potential of binding material, and the unexpected nature of manuscript research.

It’s the start of a new academic year in Cambridge, which means the publication of our annual report for the previous year–looking back over a major incunables exhibition at Cambridge University Library, a feast of festive blogging on the subject of the word made flesh, and some of the rudest visual marginalia ever seen. You can download a copy (with said marginalia) from our homepage.

We’re also looking forward to a new year of HMT seminars (click on the ‘Seminar Series’ tab for details), and in a new development many of these will take place in the UL’s Milstein Seminar Room. This will mean less wine but more books, a trade-off that we hope will be bearable. In the course of the year, we’re also going to be getting some exhibition cases, so we can start putting on our own shows. We’re saying goodbye to some valued members and saying hello to some new ones, including National Trust Libraries Curator Mark Purcell, who is going to be the new Head of Research Content and Strategy at CUL. And a host of colloquia and conferences are in prospect. Watch our Twitter and Facebook feeds or sign up to our mailing list (details on the ‘Members’ page) for details.

The novelist Iain Pears has published his latest novel, Arcadia, as both a book and an app. The book has a series of wildly playful plots that tangle storytelling with time-travel; the app allows you to explore the strands of narrative in any order you like, as well as offering ancillary materials that are not contained in the book.

Steven Poole’s review in last Saturday’s Guardian recommended that readers buy the book, not the app, on the grounds that ‘a printed book is much better than an iPad for reading on the beach (probably the most charitable context in which to consume Arcadia)’. But Poole also found the book to have ‘a curious feeling of weightlessness’; ‘ideas are thrown together without much compelling detail or texture’. Since weightlessness is something we habitually associate with digital texts, I wonder whether Pears is deliberately adopting a style that suits the screen rather than the page.

Meanwhile the app only costs £2.99, but the book is £18.99. So I think I know which I’ll try first…

“Water is the great enemy of books,” my grandmother used to tell me, for reasons that I can’t now recall. I’ve always suspected that she was right, though, and have always been wary of reading in the bath. Presumably things are riskier still for those who have moved over to ereaders.

Now, though, books and water have come together in what the press is billing ‘the drinkable book‘–a book made of paper that is capable of filtering out bacteria, rendering the water that passes through it safe for drinking. The paper is being touted as a cheap and easy solution for parts of the world that are afflicted by a shortage of clear water. It’s still at the development stage, so it might not be plain-sailing from here–but it sounds like a wonderful prospect.

Perhaps the odd thing about this story is why the filter papers should have come together as a book–since you don’t buy kitchen-roll, or toilet-roll, or coffee-filters in book form. I wonder if it’s because reading has so often been associated with eating and drinking, so that there’s a kind of rightness to the idea of drinking a book. (If this seems like a strange claim, see the report on our 2012 conference on the theme of ‘Eating Words‘. Or settle down with a glass of wine and a good book to test it for yourself).

Congratulations to Alba Fedeli, who spotted during her recently-completed doctoral work on the Mingana manuscripts at Birmingham University that two leaves in volume predated the rest. Now radiocarbon dating has established that these leaves date from AD568-645, making them almost contemporaneous with the death of the prophet Muhammed in AD632, and challenging existing scholarly accounts of the Qu’ran’s composition. It’s a wonderful example of how close attention to the physical composition of a text can transform our understanding of its history.

Tate Modern is currently hosting the first UK retrospective of the work of Sonia Delaunay, who is known for her bold use of colour, movement, and abstraction. As the exhibition richly illustrates, Delaunay’s contributions to modernism spilled over from fine art into set and costume designs for theatre and dance, interior design, commercial publishing, advertising, fashion, and textiles.

During a career as artist and successful businesswoman spanning most of the twentieth century, Delaunay collaborated with others including her husband, artist Robert Delaunay, with whom she developed a distinctive approach to abstraction and colour, which they called simultanism. This interest in the rhythmic and vibrant effects of simultaneous contrast can be seen in her paintings, collages, book bindings, painted boxes, and garments, many of which have been brought together in this wonderfully energetic exhibition. She was also interested in the simultaneity of text and other forms of visual expression; she worked with Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, producing the Prose on the Trans-Siberian Railway and of Little Jehanne of France 1913, in which the poet’s fictional journey from Moscow to Paris was accompanied by her stencil illustrations.

The exhibition also features some sketches from her series of dress-poems. The 1920s sketches are all that survive of these garments, for which she drew on the work of avant-garde poets such as Tristan Tzara, Vicente Huidobro, and Joseph Delteil to create ‘poems in motion’. These elegant dress designs feature her characteristically bold, graphic shapes – zig-zags, diamonds, circles, and lines – incorporated with painted words. The lettering is read across sleeves, waistlines, hems, and other seams and structural features of the garments, drawing the whole of the female body into an intensely visual and mobile expression of simultaneity.

Sonia Delaunay, Dress-Poem no.1329, 1923

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased, 1980 © Pracusa 2014083

The Library of Congress is celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of the acquisition of Thomas Jefferson’s 6,487-volume library by expanding their long-running exhibition Thomas Jefferson’s Library. Jefferson sold his library to Congress in 1815 to replace the collection lost to fire during the war of 1812. A second fire in 1851 destroyed nearly two-thirds of Jefferson’s volumes, and the present exhibition details the Library of Congress’s longstanding project to reassemble and reorder Jefferson’s library as it was first sold.

The books in the exhibition have been arranged by subject, following Jefferson’s own division of his books into History, Philosophy and Fine Arts. He followed Francis Bacon’s table of science (Memory, Reason, and Imagination) for this ordering, dividing his books into 44 ‘chapters’, beginning with Ancient History, Modern Europe, Modern France, and moving on to ‘Physical History’, which incorporates zoology, geology, and astronomy. His arrangement concludes with books on technical arts, which contained many topics new to the Congressional Library, including beekeeping, brewing, embroidery, and book-keeping.

The modern assemblers of the exhibition’s Jefferson library have further categorised his books, using coloured ribbons. A green ribbon marks books that were part of the original library, gold marks those which have recently been purchased for the project, and no ribbon is used for those which have been taken from the Library of Congress collection to fill gaps in the library. The ribbons highlight the transitional character of the library as it stands now, as well as its necessarily hybrid nature.

297 books remain to be found; white boxes mark their places on the shelves until they can be acquired. Lists of these books are currently circulating on the rare books market, but Jefferson’s preference for second editions and smaller, pocket-size editions mean that precise matches are hard to come by. However, selections of Jefferson’s surviving books are still being located, most recently in the Law Library of Congress and Washington University in St. Louis.

Jefferson’s books are easily identifiable at least. Although there are very few instances of marginalia in his books, he regularly indicated his ownership of a volume in a unique way: by turning to the book’s ‘T’ signature, and inscribing a J alongside it, or by turning to ‘I’ and adding a T, he recorded his initials in the same location throughout his collection.

Out of the Ashes: A New Library for Congress and the Nation continues until May 2016, and the Thomas Jefferson’s Library exhibition is permanent.