Yesterday was World Book Day, and children across the country were invited to go to school dressed as a character from a book. My 10-year-old son, not a big fan of dressing-up, got a white shirt and a flat cap and said he was the ghost of a chimneysweep, from David Walliams’ Awful Auntie.

There’s a lovely news story doing the rounds this morning about Liam Scholes, an 11-year-old from Manchester who went as the male lead in Fifty Shades of Grey, dressed in a grey suit, carrying a face mask and cable ties. The school judged the costume inappropriate, excluded the poor lad from the group photographs, and politely asked him to rebrand himself as James Bond–apparently a suitable role-model for children of this age.

Good on Liam for exposing the perversity (as it were) of World Book Day, and the sanitized notion of the book that we too often fall back on. We need to let children know that books are NOT good for you. That’s why so many adults love reading.

I’ve been mulling over the relationship between the spoken and the written quite a bit recently, along the lines of a blog I posted ages ago about how children learn to read. And I’ve just come across the latest New Yorker, a 90th-anniversary special, which contains the ruminations of Mary Norris, a copy-editor at the journal for many decades. ‘An editor once called us prose goddesses; another description might be comma queens’.

Norris is particularly interested in the comma, and in the ‘serial comma’ or ‘Oxford comma’, the comma that comes before ‘and’ in a list of three or more things. ‘My favourite cereals are Cheerios, Raisin Bran, and Shredded Wheat’. She cites some cases where the serial comma really does resolve ambiguities (‘This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God’), although she suspects that it is going to disappear, along with lots of other punctuation, as communication becomes ever more rapid, engagement more cursory. Norris remains maximalist about her punctuation:

‘Suppose you’re not in a hurry. Suppose you move your lips when you read, or pronounce every word aloud in your head, and you’re reading a Victorian novel or a history of Venice. You have plenty of time to crunch commas. … I remain loyal to the serial comma, because it actually does sometimes prevent ambiguity and because I’ve gotten used to the way it looks. It gives starch to prose, and can be very effective. If a sentence were a picket fence, the serial commas would be posts at regular intervals’.

Starched prose, picket-fence prose–I like these attempts to grasp at the difference that punctuation makes. Also the idea that the density of punctuation has something to do with the pace of reading, and the degree of verbalization or aural engagement. Or is this just a false nostalgia? Whatever it is, Norris’s piece is a lovely tribute to a profession that is not mere harmless drudgery, but ‘draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey’.

Roughly a century ago, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson marked the end of the Doves Press by throwing the beautiful typeface that he had created into the River Thames. Inspired by the example of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, and modelled on type created in Venice in the 1470s, the font had been used to print works by Shakespeare and Milton, as well as a five-volume Bible.

Now, remarkably, an enthusiast for the Doves typeface, who had already gone to the trouble of creating a digital version, has gone fishing for the font, and has recovered  no fewer than 150 pieces from their watery bed in the Thames. You can read the full story here.

Here is another entry in our (very occasional!) series of gravestone errata: the memorial stone of Godfrey Washington (1670-1729), who was the great-uncle of the first President of the USA, George Washington. This stone is mounted on the north wall of the parish church of St Mary the Less in Cambridge, where Washington is buried, having been Vicar, and Fellow and Bursar of the neighbouring Peterhouse. The stone attracts a fair number of pilgrims, who note the eagle, stars, and stripes of the Washington coat of arms, from which the emblem and flag of the USA are said to derive. On closer inspection, however, there is apparent confusion over the year in which he died:

What is the story behind this error? Is it really a careless mistake on the part of the stone carver, who perhaps lost concentration as he reached the end of his work? (Compare the story of American author Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose gravestone proclaimed him winner of the 1978 ‘Noble’ Prize for Literature…). There’s something especially surprising about errors and corrections in gravestone inscriptions. As texts, they are literally monumental and often sacred sites, and our expectations of their permanence and finality make any errors and corrections stand out as particularly affronting.

20 + C + M + B + 15

In many parts of Europe, it is customary to mark houses with specially blessed chalk on the feast of the Epiphany. The exact number of Wise Men who travelled to Bethlehem with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrhh is not specified in biblical accounts, but they are traditionally named Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Their initials are chalked above the front door and they can also stand for ‘Christus Mansionem Benedicat’, ‘Christ Bless this House’.

Here is the final exhibit, with thanks to one of our readers: the illuminated leaves showing the beginning of the gospel of John from the eighth-century St Gall Gospel Book (click on the images to see them in more detail). In literary terms, each of the four gospels begins in a different way – but the drama of St John’s meditation on words and the Word must have been especially inspiring for scribes producing such elaborate, precious versions of the scriptures as this.

Images: Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

This intimidating piece of metalwork is an iron lectern from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, although you would be forgiven for thinking it was five centuries older. An imposing fortress ornamented with shields supports the book-rest, on which the opening of John’s gospel is cast in relief: ‘IN PRINCIPIO VERBUM’. John 1:14 appears around the base of the book-rest, above the battlements: ‘ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST’. The other church furnishings in this very eclectic exhibition have been associated with the altar, and the sacrament of the Mass. Here, however, the words from John are integral to a piece of ‘book furniture’, and the reminder that ‘the Word was made flesh’ underlines the words read from any book opened on this lectern.

This Catalan image of the Virgin and Child was carved from limestone in the middle of the fourteenth century, and still bears traces of polychromy and gilding. The infant Christ holds a book with both hands, and points us to the words visible on the open pages: ‘VERBO/CARO’ (left page); ‘FACTUM/EST.ET/ABIT/UIT M/’ (right page). Standing at just under life-size (132.7 cm tall), this statue offers a strikingly elegant exposition of John’s words, especially the end of the verse: through the Incarnation, Mary brought Christ ‘among us’.

Metropolitan Museum of Art; bequest of George Blumenthal, 1941
Accession Number: 41.190.282
Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art

This small round container (8.2 cm in diameter) is a silver pyx, used to protect and transport the Blessed Sacrament. Made in England at the turn of the seventeenth century, its history is uncertain; it may have been associated with recusant Catholicism in post-Reformation England. The words ‘VERBUM CARO FACTUM’ are engraved around the edge on the front of the pyx. Visible through the glazed panel, the consecrated Hosts would have been framed by these words, and venerated by the two tiny angels above. On the reverse of the pyx, Christ on the cross is framed by Moses and the serpent, and Abraham and Isaac – two Old Testament prefigurations of the Crucifixion. There are also further Latin inscriptions: ‘FILIVS IMMOLATUS DATVR CIBVS VIATORIBVS’ (‘The son who was sacrificed is given as food to travellers’) and ‘+ HÆC EST MENSA DOMINI NOBIS DE CÆLO PARATA ADVERSVS OMNES QUI TRIBVLANT NOS’ (This is the table of our Lord prepared for us from Heaven against all those who bring us tribulation’). Through this object, the Word made flesh becomes a portable source of nourishment to be consumed anywhere, not just at the altar.

Victoria and Albert Museum
Museum no. M.18-2012
Image: Victoria and Albert Museum

This woven silk panel (36.2 x 55.2 cm; see link for better image) is from Florence or Siena, made in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. It would have been part of a liturgical vestment worn by one of the sacred ministers in church. Under a canopy borne by four angels, the Virgin Mary kneels before her baby. The letters ‘VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST’ appear on the panels of the canopy; a scriptural annotation literally interwoven into the scene. God took on human flesh in the infant Christ, this image tells us, but it is also symbolic of the Eucharist: a canopy such as this would be used in liturgical processions, to protect and honour the Blessed Sacrament. The stylised representation of the manger with its radiant beams is reminiscent of a monstrance, with which the sacramental presence would be displayed on the altar or in processions and before which the faithful would kneel in adoration, in imitation of the Virgin Mary here.

Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fletcher Fund, 1946
Accession Number: 46.156.96
Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art