“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).

This conference on the Ferrars is timed to coincide with the completion of a major project in Magdalene College to preserve the Ferrar papers and prints which are housed in the Old Library.

Conference Dates:  10am on 5th September  to 5pm on 7th September 2016.

Venue: Magdalene College Cambridge (main venue Cripps Court)

Call for papers: proposals for papers should be sent to litfest@magd.cam.ac.uk

FURTHER DETAILS ARE HERE: https://magdalenelitfest.wordpress.com/2015/08/17/the-ferrars-a-conference-at-magdalene-college-cambridge/

Registration is open now and closes on 1st April 2016. Accommodation is limited; early booking recommended.

Updates to confirm the programme and speakers will be made in due course.

Ligatus is proud to announce the launch of the Language of Binding online thesaurus of bookbinding terms, which was celebrated with a one-day event in the Chelsea College of Arts (University of the Arts London) in collaboration with CERL on 23 June, 2015.

Ligatus is a research centre of the University of the Arts London with projects in libraries and archives and with a particular interest in historic bookbinding. The Language of Binding thesaurus is the result of our long experience with historic bookbindings, but has been greatly assisted by contributions from an international group of bookbinding experts and book conservators. This work was made possible by a Networking Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK.

The aim of the thesaurus is to present a consistent vocabulary for the use of all those who work with early bindings, built wherever possible on existing resources, but adapted for use in an on-line hierarchical environment that will allow terms that are not known to a user to be found. It is constructed around concepts (such as different bookbinding components, features, materials or techniques) that can be expressed by a number of language terms (labels). The thesaurus allows one concept to have more than one label, which allows the same concept to be searched for by the different terms that may have been used historically to describe it. It will also allow the concepts to be expressed in different languages.

The Language of Binding thesaurus can be used as a reference online resource that can be searched by keyword or alphabetically. The concepts contained in the thesaurus are, however, also arranged hierarchically, based on a class/sub-class relationship, which allows concepts to be retrieved by navigating down the hierarchies even if their label (the term) is not known.

It is hoped that the thesaurus will enable all those who work with books in early bindings to arrive at more consistent descriptions of those bindings. By being based primarily on single concepts, it has tried to avoid the more familiar but sometimes frustratingly imprecise language that has often been used in the past. This means that some of these familiar terms will not be found as labels, though they may be referred to in the scope notes that define and describe the concepts (and can therefore be found by a simple keyword search).

At the moment, the thesaurus contains labels primarily in English, but work on its translation has already started, and plans for the addition of illustrations are also underway. The thesaurus can, in addition, be used as a look-up service for software applications that need to populate schema fields from thesauri.

An accompanying volume, Coming to Terms: guidelines for the description of historical bindings, which is based on the terms in the thesaurus, is to be published in the autumn.

The success of the thesaurus will to a large extent depend on contributions made to it by its users, either to add more concepts, refine existing scope notes or correct mistakes. Such contributions to the thesaurus will be welcomed, and can be made online following a registration process.

The thesaurus can be accessed at: http://www.ligatus.org.uk/lob

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 CMT will be hosting an end-of-year garden party on Tuesday 7th July, 4-6 pm, in the Fellows’ Garden, St John’s College, or in the Parsons Room if wet. Strawberries will swim in the cream. Please come!

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.

Yesterday we learnt that Philip Larkin is to be given a memorial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. The stone will be unveiled on 2 December 2016, the 31st anniversary of his death.

The dean of Westminster, the Very Rev Dr John Hall, who made the decision, claimed that Larkin was ‘absolutely agnostic’–flying in the face of considerable evidence of his outright atheism. Questioned on the Radio 4 Today programme, Hall also downplayed the poet’s reputation for racism and misogyny, saying that Larkin’s beliefs were typical of his time, and that it was hard to tell whether they were deeply-held prejudices or mere sallies of wit.

Listening to Dr Hall, I was reminded of the medieval notion of Purgatory, a spiritual holding-zone where your sins could be burnt away over a set period of time. Larkin, it seems, has done his time; he’s cleaned up and ready for eternity.

On 1 May 2015, the Centre for Material Texts sponsored a colloquium on the subject of visual marginalia—the annotation of books with pictures rather than (or as well as) words. In the Middle Ages, scribes often decorated the margins of their texts with images, which sometimes bore an ironic or subversive relationship to the words they accompanied. Our colloquium, organized by Dr Alexander Marr from the Department of History of Art, focused on a later period (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and on images added by later readers rather than by the initial producers of texts.

The images that renaissance readers left in their books took many forms. One of the most common was the pointing hand, or manicule, that served to direct attention to a particular passage. Some scholars used astrological symbols to make the themes of a book visible—Mars for war, Venus for love, Mercury for wit and so on. Others added illustrations marking references to particular places, individuals and events. Once a whole volume had been ‘digested’ in this way, the margins would function as a kind of running contents list that made information retrieval easy and pleasurable. Then there are a few prestige books, such as the copy of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly that was illustrated by Hans Holbein, which can be considered works of art in their own right.

Julian Luxford (History of Art, St Andrews) opened the colloquium by drawing attention to the sheer variety of kinds of visual marginalia, and the difficulty of locating, describing and understanding them. Showing a range of examples, from pictures that seemed to be executed by trainee artists to sexual images perhaps added by bored schoolboys, Luxford suggested that it was time to stop thinking of these marginalia as ‘doodles’ or ‘pen-trials’. However amateurish they may seem, we should take them seriously as evidence for the visual culture of the period. He also wondered whether we should be talking about ‘margins’–a term with a lot of ideological baggage–or should think instead of ‘borders’, a term which forces us to think about what lay beyond the boundaries of the page.

The study of visual marginalia is sometimes challenging by design, as when early modern readers created esoteric pictorial schemes that  elude our best efforts to make sense of them. In their contribution to the colloquium, Alex Marr and Kate Isard (Visiting Scholar, Cambridge) discussed the copy of Vincenzo Cartari’s Imagini (1581) now in the Houghton Library at Harvard. This book has been annotated extensively in Dutch, Latin and French, and has been illustrated with a series of astrological, alchemical, mock-heraldic and downright lewd images that are at once wonderfully bizarre and exceptionally difficult to decode. The volume presents an ongoing puzzle and a provocation to further research.

Other kinds of visual marginalia were technical and professional. In his talk, Richard Oosterhoff (Cambridge) explored the schoolbooks of the German humanist Beatus Rhenanus, in which we can see him ‘thinking through diagrams’ about the relationship between mathematics and the nature of reality. Francesco Benelli (Columbia) turned our attention to a tiny diagram–less than one inch square–that the Renaissance architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger added in the margins of his copy of Vitruvius’s treatise on architecture, marking his misunderstanding of the text in ways that went on to influence the buildings he created. These papers suggested the fecundity and the difficulty of the process of translating words into images, which is manifested when readers start to draw in the margins.

In the wake of the colloquium, the CMT has assembled a small exhibition, currently on display in the University Library entrance hall, of books with images on the edge. The four books shown here were all discovered by Kate Isard and Liam Sims in a recent search of the Cambridge rare book stacks. For those who can’t make it to the UL to see them, here they are:

Adv.c.25.1: faces in the margins

This is a copy of a treatise on poetry and poetics by the Italian humanist Giovanni Francesco Conti (1484-1557), published in Venice in 1519. An unknown early reader engaged closely with the text, adding dense underlining and numerous verbal annotations. More unusually, the reader added roughly-drawn faces of different sizes, along with marks that could perhaps be interpreted as scythes. These symbols may be intended merely to flag up passages of interest, but it is possible that they serve some more specific purpose. They are certainly not part of the standard repertory of reader annotation, and they give the book—which has unfortunately been heavily cropped during rebinding—a very distinctive appearance.

Adv.d.3.22: picturing the past

This catalogue of Roman imperial coins was compiled by the German numismatist Adolf Occo (1524-1606), and was printed in Antwerp by Christopher Plantin. It was published at the author’s expense, and perhaps to save money it had no illustrations. This copy was bought in Antwerp by James Cole in August 1588. Cole was a London silk merchant, a member of a Huguenot immigrant family and a nephew of the celebrated mapmaker Abraham Ortelius. He was a dedicated collector of rarities, including plants, fossils, coins and medals. Cole interleaved his copy of Occo’s book with numerous blank pages which he used to supplement the information provided in the printed text. He also pasted in illustrative portraits of each emperor, conspicuously improving on the original book. This sort of customization was not unusual in a period when books were sold unbound in sheets, to be put together by their purchasers. The detail and precision of Cole’s interventions reveal his intense curiosity about the classical past.

Td.54.32: an absurd image?

The second-century Latin author Aulus Gellius is known for a single work, the Noctes Atticae or Attic Nights, a compilation of miscellaneous information which preserves many excerpts from classical works that are now lost. This edition was published in Paris in around 1512. An early reader has added notes in Latin not just in the margins, but also in between the closely-packed lines of print. The style of the annotations suggests that they may have been penned by a student recording a teacher’s glosses upon the text. There are also scattered drawings in the margins, including this picture of a piper or flautist. The drawing accompanies Gellius’ description of a king who sent his armies into battle along with orchestras of pipe- and lyre-players ‘and even female flute-players, such as are the delight of wanton banqueters’. Perhaps it was the strangeness of this notion that prompted a visual response.

Td.56.2: some handy hymns

Antonio de Nebrija (1441-1522) was a Spanish Renaissance scholar who became a widely-published author; among his works was a Castilian grammar that was the first printed grammar of a vernacular language. This book, a commentary on liturgical hymns, went through numerous editions (our example was printed at Logroño in northern Spain). An early reader made copious linguistic notes on the text of the hymns, finding Spanish equivalents for Latin words and phrases. They also added manicules (pointing hands) to note particular passages, and on this page they drew a number of hands with the fingers pointing upwards. Since these appear at the beginnings of the three hymns discussed here, their purpose was presumably to make the structure of the printed book more evident to its reader.

MARK McGURL (Stanford University) will be talking about EVERYTHING AND LESS:THE NOVEL IN THE AGE OF AMAZON

THURSDAY 4th JUNE at 5.30pm

ROOM G06/7, ENGLISH FACULTY

Mark McGurl is the author of, among other works, a much discussed and lauded recent book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009)

‘Magisterial’ (Fredric Jameson)

‘It is a cliché to say that a book so changes your view of a particular historical period or problem that you never see it the same old way again. But this is the kind of book that warrants such praise.’ (Jim English)