The Bodleian Library in Oxford has just received Charles I’s travelling library as a bequest. It looks like a lovely collection of miniature books–just the thing to distract the king’s mind from his troublesome day-job, or perhaps to refresh his mind so that he could be an even more superlative ruler (delete as applicable to your view of seventeenth-century history).

Today I looked at The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History, by Patricia Simons (Cambridge, 2011), in which the Acknowledgements conclude:

‘Kelly has been a constant and beloved companion during the writing of this book, most recently in her makeshift feline hospice on my desk. I provide the room service, she walks over the keyboard on occasion to leave her mark. If any typos remain in this book, say hello to Kelly’ (xv).

It’s almost standard now, in scholarly monographs, to include such a prefatory apology for any mistakes, although it’s not always the cat who gets the blame! Upon reading this, I was reminded of this week’s Things seminar at CRASSH on ‘Printed Things’. One of the participants, Adam Smyth, spoke about error and early modern print, and showed us some of the intriguing bibliographical moments produced by and in response to error – a seventeenth-century title-page with a ‘1939’ colophon, Robert Barker’s infamous seventh commandment, and lots of lovely pasted-in and fold-out errata lists. Such instances of error, and attempts to acknowledge and correct error, remind us just how messy the collaborative business of printing books actually is. They take us back very tangibly to the sites of production, making us think more about the significance of the environments in which writers and printers work – whether it’s an early modern print shop, or a desk occupied by a cat as well as a computer keyboard.

Earlier this month I heard a seminar paper about centaurs, which ranged across the history of thinking about these hybrid horse-people from ancient Athens to sixteenth-century England. Along the way the speaker, Micha Lazarus, referred to Lucretius, who dismissed the possibility of centaurs on the grounds that the life-cycles of horse and human were so different (‘a horse reaches its vigorous prime in about three years, a boy far from it’).

The discussion reminded me of a twelve-line poem by William Empson called ‘Invitation to Juno’, which begins:

Lucretius could not credit centaurs;
Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.
‘Man superannuates the horse;
Horse pulses will not gear with ours.’

These lines, first published in 1928 when Empson was a student in Cambridge, refer to the myth of Ixion, a mortal king who attempted to have an affair with Juno, wife of Jupiter, but was foiled by her husband who sent a cloud in place of his wife. Ixion’s union with the cloud led to the creation of the race of centaurs, whose nature conjoins two cycles–‘such bicycle’, as Empson puts it. (As punishment for trying to father a demigod, a ‘two-wheeler’, Jupiter fastened Ixion to a single burning wheel).

Like many of Empson’s poems, ‘Invitation to Juno’ reads like a cryptic crossword. It’s bizarrely compressed and requires elaborate decoding. The poem alludes not just to Lucretius, but also to Darwin, Dr Johnson, and the growth of embryonic heart tissue; it’s not surprising that it requires three and a half pages of notes in the latest scholarly edition by John Haffenden. But were Empson’s sources all abstrusely learned? Yesterday I nearly fell off my own bike when I passed this ‘ghost sign‘ on King St in Cambridge.

It turns out that a company called Centaur Cycles, based in Coventry, made bikes from 1876 to 1915 (they were taken over by Humber in 1910, and production moved to Stoke). There are some lovely examples of their advertisements here; the testimonials report that a Centaur is ‘a wonderful machine’ which ‘mounts hills splendidly’–‘a great luxury after a cheap and nasty mount’. Empson was later known for devotion to a clapped-out bike; a student at Sheffield in the 1950s recalls his riding a ‘very old, preposterously rusty sit-up-and-beg bicycle, wobbling stoically amid the smog and tramlines of Western Bank’. Was it, I wonder, the last of the Centaurs, asynchronous as ever? Or did Empson just see this sign (or signs like it), and start thinking about the intricate relationship between man and mount, ravelling up the tangle of allusions in the poem?

After the death of playwright Harold Pinter on Christmas Eve, 2008, the Guardian published the last interview he had given, earlier that year, with one of the paper’s journalists. Pinter spoke from his London home, mainly about one of the great passions of his life: cricket. Recalling the occasion, Andy Bull describes Pinter’s study as ‘heavy with the clutter of a cricket fan’, with shelves which ‘creaked under his cricket library, including all 145 editions of the Wisden Almanack’. As Bull points out, the appeal of cricket to one who writes plays is palpable, in its ‘endless potential for narrative, the games within a game’. Today the British Library revealed that those weighty Wisdens turned out to play a crucial role in another narrative – that of an important new acquisition of letters written by Pinter between 1948 and 1960. Sent to friends when Pinter was a young man, none of the letters came with a date, presenting a significant problem for the Library’s curators. But Pinter’s love for cricket – what he once described as ‘the greatest thing that God created on earth’ – is manifest throughout them, and his frequent cricketing references became invaluable clues. The curators cunningly matched these up with the details in Wisden volumes to identify dates for the letters, in an enviably neat synthesis of epistolary remains and contemporaneous material texts.

This unusual paperback novel caught my eye recently (and most serendipitously, on a shelf of free books in a railway station waiting room! I’ll leave something in its place when I’m next there…). This copy of Mr Emmanuel  is a special ‘Services Edition’, produced for the Services Central Book Depot in London, for distribution to the Allied Forces. Although I’ve found a lot of information about a similar scheme in operation in the USA during the 1940s (the American Armed Services Editions), less has been written about the story of books like this one. There are some avid collectors, and this photograph from Getty Images shows great piles of books in preparation at the Depot, in 1944.

The book is printed on very thin paper, in a size surely intended to fit the pocket of a uniform, and the pages are held together with two sturdy metal staples. Golding’s novel, about a Russian Jewish refugee  who travels from England to Germany, was originally published in 1938, and made into a film in 1944, and so this would have been distinctly topical and contemporary reading matter when it was sent out to the Forces in the 1940s. In several ways, then, it’s a markedly ephemeral text, and I wonder how many others like it have survived.

Coming back down to earth after the fascinating conference on ‘Failure in the Archives‘ at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (University of London) on Thursday. The conference culminated in a lengthy open discussion about how the myth of the ‘invisible archive’–the archive that functions as the neutral holder and transmitter of its materials–could be busted once and for all. This might mean finding ways in which archivists, librarians and curators could be fully credited for their intellectual contributions, so that they would cease to be viewed merely gatekeepers and custodians of the past. There are formidable obstacles to this, mainly to do with the funding pressures that dog the majority of collections. But the conversation seemed to offer a glimpse into a brighter future.

After the conference there was a guest lecture from Natalie Zemon Davis, who is just coming up to her 86th birthday but appears to be more radiant and full of energy than ever. She shared some of her recent work on the slaves of eighteenth-century Surinam, and offered a masterclass in the kinds of patience and ingenuity that are needed to make the archives speak, or sing.

The Cambridge University Library’s exhibition ‘Private Lives of Print: the Use and Abuse of Books, 1450-1550’ opens today, and is accompanied by a beautiful book entitled Emprynted in this Manere: Early Printed Treasures from Cambridge University Library.

As David Pearson pointed out at the launch event for the book, held in the Wren Library yesterday, studies of early printing would once have focused on the production side–identifying publishers, typefounders, woodcut artists and the like. Such matters are by no means neglected here. But both the book and the exhibition focus more on circulation and consumption than on production. They concentrate on illuminators, binders, owners and readers, and show how the books were put to use across the course of centuries.

So we’re invited to imagine Venetian bookbuyers weighing the cost of a Bible against the cost of six chickens or five geese; to witness the future Queen Katherine Parr giving her uncle a prayer book, and asking him to remember his ‘louuynge nys’ when he looks on it; to admire a doctor’s drawing of a foetus in the womb in the margins of a medical book. A student at the University of Padua spills ink on his Livy, and writes fastidiously around it, in Latin: This blot … I stupidly made on the first of December 1482′. The books are often marvels in themselves, but they really come to life in the hands of their owners.

If you can’t get to Cambridge, you can see the ‘virtual exhibition’ at https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/incunabula/

Jim Canary (University of Indiana)

Beneath the text in the books and manuscripts of Tibet is a world of artisans that provide the support for the words with paper, pen, and inks. Preserving these texts involves delving into that world to understand how things were done using what materials and how they differ from place to place and in time. As a Conservator and student of Tibetan I have had the opportunity to examine a variety of Tibetan materials and have been documenting the old ways of book production. We will have a look into that world and see the richness of their traditions.

Mond Building Seminar Room, Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit, Free School Lane

4.30-6.00, TUESDAY 28 OCTOBER 2014

ALL WELCOME

http://www.innerasiaresearch.org [1]
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Due to exceptional demand for places, the forthcoming AMARC conference has been moved to a larger venue in the Conference Centre at the British Library.

See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/10/illuminated-manuscripts-conference-more-places-available.html#sthash.5yaEHFFy.dpuf

July 16th-18th 2015

Newcastle University and City Library, Newcastle

Organiser: Jennifer Richards, Newcastle University with Helen Stark, Newcastle University

Keynote Speakers

Heidi Brayman Hackel (University of California, Riverside), Anne Karpf (London Metropolitan University), Christopher Marsh (Queen’s University, Belfast) with The Carnival Band, Perry Mills, Director of Edward’s Boys (King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon)

Although it is often acknowledged that early modern books were routinely read aloud we know relatively little about this. Oral reading is not embedded as an assumption in existing scholarship. On the contrary, over the last two decades it is the studious and usually silent reader, pen in hand, who has been placed centre stage. This conference invites contributions that explore the kind of evidence and research methods that might help us to recover this lost history; that think about how reading/singing aloud relates to other kinds of orality; that recover the civic and/or social life of the performed book in early modern culture; and that reflect on how the performance of the scripted word might inform our reading of early modern writing today. We also welcome papers that think through what it might mean to make ‘voice’ central to our textual practice.

We invite proposals (in English) that address the relationship between orality and literacy in any genre in print or manuscript in any European language. The genres might be literary, religious, musical, medical, scientific, historical or educational. We encourage proposals that recover diverse communities and readers/hearers. We also welcome papers that consider problems of evidence: e.g. manuscript marginalia; print paratexts; visual representations; as well as non-material evidence (voice; gesture). We will be particularly pleased to receive suggestions for presentations that include practical illustrations, performances or demonstrations.

Topics might include, but are not restricted to:

• The sound of print

• The physiology of voicing

• Singing and speaking

• Rhetoric: voice and gesture

• Performance and emotions

• Communities of hearers

• Acoustic reconstructions

• Children’s reading / reading to children

200-word abstracts for 20-minute papers from individuals and panels (3 speakers max) to be sent to voicesandbooks15001800@gmail.com. The DEADLINE is Friday January 16TH 2015.

There will be a small number of travel bursaries for postgraduate and early career researchers. If you are interested in applying for support please contact Helen.Stark@ncl.ac.uk. The DEADLINE for the bursaries is May 1st 2015.