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…

Boris Jardine has curated a small exhibition at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. It’s called ‘The Paper Tools of Science’, and it brings together a range of paper technologies and printed instruments from the early modern period to the 20th century. The Whipple is located on Free School Lane and is open weekdays only, 12.30 to 4.30 pm.

7-9 January, 2016

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge

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.

Over the centuries, writers have tried to represent linguistic failure better. There has been a persistent deepening of efforts to get closer to real speech, with its disfluencies, false starts and interruptions. Peculiar as it may sound, an unfinished sentence can, in its own way, be as much of a literary accomplishment as a couplet.

Punctuation has been fundamental in this aspiration towards the depiction of ordinary speech. The focus of my work has been to trace the development of a punctuation mark that emerged specifically to denote interruptions, hesitations and other forms of incompleteness. This is the history of … a symbol that became notorious in the early twentieth century as a sign of the elusive and generally vague…

The collaborative work of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford at the turn of the twentieth century provides an interesting study in the rise and resulting disapproval of the dot, dot dot. When working together on The Inheritors (1901) Ford and Conrad aimed to capture ‘the sort of indefiniteness that is characteristic of all human conversations, and particularly of all English conversations that are almost always conducted entirely by means of allusions and unfinished sentences.’[i] The Inheritors contained over four hundred instances of … though it was a relatively short novel.

Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (London: William Heinemann, 1901), p. 232; CUL. Misc.7.90. 468

The critics didn’t like this. Conrad wrote in a letter about The Scotsman’s review, ‘It is the typographical trick of broken phrases: … that upsets the critic. Obviously. He says the characters have a difficulty of expressing themselves; and he says it only on that account’ (to Ford Madox Ford, 11 July 1901).

That critics could be upset in 1901 at characters speaking in broken phrases is surprising, to say the least. Marks of ellipsis had been used in English print since the end of the sixteenth century to indicate unfinished sentences. Dots, dashes and asterisks had been prevalent in print to mark inarticulacy for centuries.

Drama was especially important in the evolution of the ellipsis. This is perhaps to be expected, as drama is the literary form that is connected in the most concentrated way with speech as it is spoken. In 1588, what I believe to be the earliest marks of ellipsis in English drama appeared in a translation of Terence’s Andria. On three occasions, a series of hyphens are used to suggest interruption — or self-interruption. This was a simple but brilliant innovation. The mark worked as a form of stage direction, providing, at a glance, information about delivery, possibly offering space for gesture, and suggesting a great deal about characterization.

Terence, Andria, translated by Maurice Kyffin (London, 1588); © The British Library Board, C.13.a.6 sig. I4r.

The mark quickly caught on, with ellipses becoming a common feature of play texts. Ellipsis marks appear in some of the early printed plays by Shakespeare and in abundance in the work of Ben Jonson.

It is difficult to ascribe agency for these markings absolutely in this period. Printers often took responsibility for punctuation, and, at the very least, the choice of ellipsis mark may have been determined by what a printer had available. By the eighteenth century, alongside dashes and hyphens, series of dots began to be seen in works written in English, most probably with the influence of developing continental practice. Hyphens, dashes and dots would largely have been understood as equivalent marks. Dot, dot, dot, had yet to develop its own strongly recognizable set of connotations and attributes.

William Congreve, Love for Love: A Comedy (London [The Hague]: [for Thomas Johnson], 1710), p. 52; CUL, Brett-Smith.b.9

It was in the novel that these marks of ellipsis proliferated most spectacularly, taking on new representative dimensions. Novelists imitated play texts by punctuating their dialogues with interruptions and hesitations. Elocutionists took notice of this, debating the efficacy of these marks in aiding the transcription of the human voice. But novelists also used the same punctuation marks to depict failures of voice more fundamentally, as ellipsis marks in narrative passages presented questions about narrative authority and representational ability. Ellipsis marks were also enlisted in novelistic realizations of human interiority, including its incoherencies and blanks. Dots and dashes became wildly popular in the pan-European language of sensibility of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where they became tokens of emotion and passion, burgeoning across lines and even pages, acting often as shortcuts to the meaningful.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the variant marks of ellipsis began to take on different roles, with the dash becoming especially popular as a fully accredited mark of punctuation. Grammarians finally acknowledged the dash as one of the primary marks of punctuation in the late 1700s, with Lindley Murray’s extraordinarily successful 1795 English Grammar even being described by one commentator as having legalized the dash.[ii]

Changes in the printing industry over the nineteenth century also led to increasingly uniform methods of punctuation, one reason being that common practice facilitated augmented rates of book production. Guides for printers encouraged standardized punctuation and the dash proved versatile in marking (among other things) incomplete sentences, pauses and changes in tone. Dot, dot, dot, by contrast was to serve mainly a citationary function, indicating material omitted from quotations. However, for literary writers at least, the marginalized identity of the … made it an interesting and often unsettling resource in contradistinction to the ubiquitous dash. Wilkie Collins in his pioneering detective novel, The Moonstone (1868), deploys series of dots in an orthodox fashion to indicate missing words in a transcription, but he imbues those omissions with the mysterious qualities of the unconscious mind.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone. A Romance (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1868), vol. 3, p. 148; CUL, Nov.143.69-71

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, George Meredith was attempting to articulate minute changes in human sensation by means of different styles of ellipsis. In The Tragic Comedians (1880) Meredith even notates different ways of ‘thinking without language’, by contemplating subtle variations between ‘tentative dots’ and the dash.

In an essay on ‘The Psychology of Punctuation’ published in 1948, E.L. Thorndike commented, not on the presentation of fictional psychologies by means of punctuation, but on what punctuation can reveal about the psychological processes at work when we read and write. A large part of his essay concerns the invisibility of punctuation. Writing about the remarkable rise of ‘…’ in twentieth-century fiction, Thorndike notes that though he was often in the company of dot, dot, dot as a reader of George Meredith, Edith Wharton and others, ‘Not until I found it abounding in my counts of punctuation, did I ever think anything about it’.[iii] Thorndike testifies to the extraordinary ways in which what is in front of us on the printed page can remain unseen in the reading process. But such invisibility is curiously apt with respect to dot, dot, dot, which mediates between the suppressed and the manifest and which emerged, long before George Meredith was writing, to make silence (almost) seen.

Anne Toner

[i] Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth & Co., 1924), p. 135.

[ii] Justin Brenan, Composition and Punctuation Familiarly Explained (London: Effingham Willson, 1829), p. 68.

[iii] E. L. Thorndike, ‘The Psychology of Punctuation’, American Journal of Psychology, 61 (1948), 222-8, pp. 225-6.

Seminars in the History of Material Texts

Thursdays at 5 pm

15 October–Discussion of Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 45/3 (2015), ‘The Renaissance Collage’

Venue: Milstein Seminar Room, CUL

This special issue is available online at http://jmems.dukejournals.org/content/current

29 October–Jennifer Richards (Newcastle University), ‘Listening readers and the visible voice’

Venue: S-R24, Faculty of English

12 November–Catherine Ansorge (University Library), ‘Ink and gold; how the Islamic manuscripts came to Cambridge’

Venue: Milstein Seminar Room, CUL

26 November–Vittoria Feola (University of Padua/University of Oxford),  ‘The Bartolomeo Gamba Project – or, the London-Paris-Padua book trade connection, 1600-1840′.

Venue: Milstein Seminar Room, CUL

11 November 2015, 9.30-5
Darwin Room, Pitt Building, Trumpington St, Cambridge

This event will bring together people from all stages in the production cycle of the academic book, from authors and publishers to booksellers, librarians and readers, to consider the past, present and future of scholarly communication. How did the academic book come to take the form in which we know it today? What should we cherish and what should we loathe in the academic book? And, as we start living our intellectual lives online, what does the future hold for scholarship in this form?

Speakers will include: Richard Fisher (former Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press), Rupert Gatti (Faculty of Economics/Open Book Publishers), Anne Jarvis (University Librarian, Cambridge University Library), Danny Kingsley (University of Cambridge, Office of Scholarly Communication), Peter Mandler (Faculty of History, President of the Royal Historical Society), Samantha Rayner (Senior Lecturer in Publishing, UCL), Alison Wood (Mellon/Newton Trust Postdoctoral Fellow, CRASSH).

Sponsored by the AHRC-funded ‘Academic Book of the Future‘ project, Cambridge University Press and the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts, this one-day colloquium will form part of a week of events and exhibitions taking place across the country.

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…