Keynes Library, Birkbeck College, University of London

Perversions of Paper is a one-day symposium investigating the outer limits of our interactions with books and with paper. It considers unorthodox engagements with texts, from cherishing or hoarding them to mutilating and desecrating them, from wearing them to chewing them, and from inhaling their scent to erasing their content.

‘Perversion’ may apply to deviations from normal usage but also to our psychological investments in paper. To talk of having a fetish for books is common, but is there more to this than merely well-worn cliché? What part do books and other written artefacts play in our imaginary and psychic lives, and what complex emotional attachments do we develop towards them? Also, how might literary studies or cultural history register these impulses and acts; what kind of methodologies are appropriate?

This symposium invites reflections on perverse uses of – and relationships with – paper and parchment. We welcome proposals from a range of historical periods and disciplinary backgrounds, and from postgraduate students, as well as from more established academics.

Contributors are invited to consider bookish and papery aberrations from any number of angles, including but not limited to:

* the defacing or mutilation of writing
* the book as sculpture or art medium
* ‘upcycling’ or re-purposing
* the book or manuscript as a fetish object
* pathologies or obsessions related to paper
* psychologies of book collecting
* bibliophilia and bibliophobia
* book crazes, the tactility or sensuality of paper and manuscripts
* books, libraries and archives as sources of contagion, or as the focus of terror or abjection.

Deadline for proposals: March 30th 2014.

Please email abstracts of no more than 200 words together with a brief bio statement to Dr Gillian Partington (g.partington@bbk.ac.uk).

More information: http://archivefutures.com/events/perversions-of-paper/

Wardrobe advice from the Guardian last weekend: ‘text has never been so fashionable’.  Speculating that ‘perhaps it’s a spin off from watching subtitled Scandi dramas that these days we feel hip and culturally on-point if we’re looking at words’, the columnist finds herself no longer quite so opposed to jumpers emblazoned with a message, or, ‘a speech bubble in knitwear form’…

This term Cambridge University Library will be holding two masterclasses as part of the Incunabula Project.

The first masterclass, entitled “Incunabula from Bavaria – how to identify provenances and reconstruct 15th-century collections”, will be led by Bettina Wagner, of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.

The German state of Bavaria was not only a region where presses were set up soon after the invention of printing in Mainz, but also the site of some major collections of printed books. Many monasteries and some private owners built up substantial libraries in the 15th century, benefitting from a dense trade network and well-established connections to Italy. However, as a result of auctions and the dissolution of monasteries in the early 19th century, many books from Bavaria were dispersed and have ended up in collections in the UK and other countries. In order to reconstruct these historical collections, painstaking work is necessary. Marks of provenance and bindings have to be documented and identified, and archival records must be analyzed. The masterclass will introduce participants to the techniques and tools used for such research and thus help to place incunabula from the ULC’s collections into the wider context of late mediaeval collection building and book usage.

The seminar will be held in the Milstein Seminar Rooms at the Library on Tuesday, 4 February at 2.30 pm.

The second masterclass, entitled “Libri sine asseribus – incunables in early bindings without wooden boards”, will be led by Nicholas Pickwoad, director of the Ligatus Research Centre at the University of the Arts, London.

The standard image of the fifteenth-century book is of a large volume with wooden boards covered in white or brown skin, tooled in blind, with metal furniture, clasps and possibly a chain shackle. This is also the book that appears in contemporary painting and sculpture and became so fixed in the popular imagination that it survived as the symbol of the bible in trade signs right through to the eighteenth century, if not beyond. There were, however, other types of binding that were used by the booktrade to give cheap, lightweight protection to books as they moved through the book trade. Whilst not necessarily intended to be temporary, few have survived today and reconstructing their history is difficult. Enough however have come down to us to allow a picture of the rich diversity of binding types used for this purpose to be created and to give an indication of how they were presented to their first owners.

This seminar will be held in the Keynes Room at the Library on Tuesday 18 February at 2.30pm .

Both seminars will last approximately 90 minutes, allowing time for questions and discussion. Attendance will be limited in order to allow
all attendees a chance to see the books concerned up close, and to participate in the discussion.

To book a place on either seminar, please email<incunabula@lib.cam.ac.uk>.

Wednesday 29 January 2014

Dr. Fei-Hsien Wang (Centre for History and Economics & Magdalene College, U. of Cambridge)

‘Hunting Pirates in Beijing: Shanghai Booksellers’ Private ‘Copyright’ Police (1930-1937)’

All seminars take place on Wednesdays (unless otherwise arranged) at 5pm in rooms 8 & 9 in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Tea will be served at the same venue at 4:45pm. All are welcome.

In the most recent episode of the BBC’s Call the Midwife (a drama about a community of nursing nuns in the East End in the 1950s, based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth), we learn that the eccentric Sister Monica Joan, now in her nineties, maintains a small personal library. The amount of time she spends tending to her ‘repository of knowledge’ (including rebinding volumes with leather and paste, and ripping the ‘heretical’ pages of the Apocrypha out of a Bible) is the cause of much frustration for the indomitable Sister Evangelina, who mutters ‘Never been a reader. Always been a doer’. Arranging her books on makeshift shelves, Sister Monica Joan complains that ‘the Dewey Decimal System is altogether too earthbound, and likely to speak loudest to pedantics’ – and instead she puts volumes by Astley Cooper and Rousseau next to each other, so that they can converse, while ‘Plato and Freud can be companions in their ignorance’. All of this playing with books is intended, as is usually the case with Sister Monica Joan’s especially eccentric moments (she is getting dementia) for bittersweet comic effect. However, contrary to Sister Evangelina’s suspicions, ‘reading’ turns out to be ‘doing’, too. In the main storyline, two young brothers are very sick, and the doctor cannot find a diagnosis for their mysterious symptoms. Noone has an answer other than the old-fashioned catch-all of ‘failure to thrive’, until Sister Monica Joan hears about it and runs through the rain in the night to give the doctor a book from ‘the reign of Queen Anne’, from her collection. I’m not sure what this book was, but it leads him to diagnose the two children with cystic fibrosis (in the 1950s, this had only recently been identified as a genetic condition). The elderly nun is vindicated, for she spoke truth in her perceived madness, and as the episode came to a close, it was pleasing to see that she was given a proper bookcase for her precious volumes.

A friend’s Facebook post:

‘Uh oh. I just tried to zoom in on a picture – in a book – using the iPad-fingers-moved-apart-manoeuvre. In my defence, the page was shiny.’

I sympathise: I’ve been looking at some illustrated books this week and reflecting on how rarely you can actually see the detail you need to see in a reproduction of a painting. In this sense, digital technology seems like a distinct advance on print. The downside is that we are going to lose any sense of scale–the relationship between the body and the artefact cannot yet be reproduced, nor does anyone seem to care much about it. But the size of a painting, or of a book for that matter, would in the past have been part of the point of it, framing your whole experience.

So I hope my 3-D printer, when it arrives, will allow me to create a LIFE-SIZE reproduction of the Mona Lisa.

Seminars in the History of Material Texts 2014

Thursdays at 5.30 pm, Faculty of English, 9 West Rd

30 January, Faculty Board Room — Cristanne Miller (SUNY Buffalo)

6 February, SR24 — Mark Towsey (Liverpool)

‘Community Libraries: Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850’

Please note that this seminar has been cancelled due to UCU strike action.

20 February, SR24 — Simon Franklin (MML, Cambridge)

‘In Praise of Old Blank Forms (Especially in Russia)’

All welcome.

For more information, please contact Jason Scott-Warren (jes1003@cam.ac.uk), Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk) or Dunstan Roberts (dcdr2@cam.ac.uk)

A one-day conference at the Centre for the Study of the Book, Oxford University

Saturday 5 July 2014

Call for Papers

‘Pag. 8. lin. 7. for laughing, reade, languishing.’

Richard Bellings, A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1624), ‘Errata’

Recent histories of the book have replaced earlier narratives of technological triumph and revolutionary change with a more tentative story of continuities with manuscript culture and the instability of print. An abstract sense of technological agency has given way to a messier world of collaboration, muddle, money, and imperfection. Less a confident stride towards modernity, the early modern book now looks stranger: not quite yet a thing of our world.

What role might error have in these new histories of the hand-press book? What kinds of error are characteristic of print, and what can error tell us about print culture? Are particular forms of publication prone to particular mistakes? How effective were mechanisms of correction (cancel-slips; errata lists; over-printing; and so on), and what roles did the printing house corrector perform? Did readers care about mistakes? Did authors have a sense of print as an error-prone, fallen medium, and if so, how did this inform their writing? What links might we draw between representations of error in literary works (like Spenser’s Faerie Queene), and the presence of error in print? How might we think about error and retouching or correcting rolling-press plates? What is the relationship between engraving historians’ continuum of difference, and letter-press bibliographers’ binary of variant/invariant? Was there a relationship between bibliographical error and sin, particularly in the context of the Reformation? How might modern editors of early modern texts respond to errors: are errors things to correct, or to dutifully transcribe? Is the history of the book a story of the gradual elimination of error, or might we propose a more productive role for slips and blunders?

Proposals for 20-minute papers are welcome on any aspect of error and print, in Anglophone or non-Anglophone cultures. Please email a 300-word abstract and a short CV to Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@balliol.ox.ac.uk) by 14 April 2014.

Over Christmas I read Memoirs of a Leavisite by David Ellis, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Kent. It left me no more of a fan of the great F. R. Leavis than I was when I began, but it made me realise how much his theories of literature might still flow beneath the surface of my own reading and teaching–so I read it both with pleasure and with a kind of fascinated horror.

As befits someone brought up in Leavis’s school, Ellis confesses that he has little feel for or interest in books as material objects, though he admits one exception: the works of Roland Barthes in the Éditions du Seuil:

“As he became more famous he was able to publish shorter texts in this format, with bigger print, so that his book on photography (La Chambre Claire), with its wonderful expanses of white around the large lettering, became my model of what a book should look like, especially at a time when English academic publishers were cramming more and more words onto the enlarged pages, and thinner paper, of their books. With my eyesight weakening, I became a propagandist for this model until someone publishing one of my own books rather irritably told me that she was considering offering it to the public with a free white stick (an addition, I ought to have pointed out, that would not help the poorly sighted to read the print better).”

As well as saying a lot about the unending tussle between writers and publishers, and the hidden visual cues that shape our reading, this is also a good example of Ellis’s richly maudlin prose–perfect reading for a dark December day…

  One of the broadsheets found in their archive this sorry story of a witness in a law case and the ‘foul Testament’ from which she contracted a ‘malignant itch’ after kissing it by way of swearing her oath. While a certain ’eminent prima donna’ of our own times has met with other troubles after her recent appearance as a witness in a high-profile trial, she has at least avoided this troublesome complaint. The original correspondent would be pleased to know that kissing the Book is no longer necessary in Court…