Someone just (very belatedly!) drew my attention to the video-map of the early modern book collections at Harvard–http://vimeo.com/46773161. It’s interesting to see the spread and growth of early printing centres, though I imagine that this version based on a single collection will soon be superseded by a more comprehensive set of images deriving from the Universal Short Title Catalogue.

What’s a bit of a mystery is why they choose to start in 1400, half a century before the advent of print. It’s hard to assign precise dates and places of publication to manuscripts, so it’s meaningless to try to shoehorn them into a map like this. Did they mean  to suggest that everything was benighted until Europe started to light up thanks to the press? Let’s hope not…

If you visit the webpage of the Senate House Library at the University of London, you will be invited to ‘discover [their] historic collections” and “holdings of manuscripts, archives, printed materials and maps’. Last week it looked as if Christopher Pressler, the Director, had forgotten the meaning of the words ‘collection’ and ‘holding’, as the library announced plans to auction off four early folios of Shakespeare’s complete works, in order to raise money for ‘development’. Following a public outcry (see our contribution below), a petition, and withering criticism from respected bibliographers, scholars, and others, the University of London has now revised its intentions and recalled its sacrificial volumes from Bonham’s, where they had been due to be slaughtered in November. Professor Sir Adrian Smith, Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, has said that the university will now consider ‘alternative ways of investing in the collection’. Holding onto the collection is a good first step.

While the Senate House Library begins making muffins for its bake sale, this may be a good moment in which to reflect on the consequences of the corporatization of the university sector for its libraries and archives. Universities are public institutions, and exist to serve the public, but the treasures that they conserve have throughout the centuries often had to be defended from that public. Jack Cade and his loyal followers lamented that the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment, and looting destroyed many manuscripts in fifteenth-century London. Modern Cades may attack from within; in the name of the collection, they are prone to break up the collection, and while hurrying after development they may not care to conserve. It is a simple matter for us to exclaim against these bibliobarbarians, but the academics among us should probably also look within — shouldn’t we be doing more to educate and inform the public about the value of these materials? Shouldn’t we be trumpeting the importance of conservation and material history?

It’s a dangerous thing to be a Shakespeare first folio. In 2006, Dr Williams’ Library in London decided that it would prefer to have £2,500,000 than its copy, which it put up for auction at Sotheby’s. In 2003, Oriel College in Oxford sold its 1623 Comedies, Histories and Tragedies to a Getty. And now there are rumours that the Senate House Library at the University of London is planning to put its copies of the first, second, third and fourth folios up for sale, so that it can devote itself to attracting more readers and recovering the government funding that it lost in 2006. The folios are worth an awful lot of money on the open market but according to the Library’s director Christopher Pressler they are rarely consulted. Nobody is going to notice their absence.

I have to confess to an instinctive revulsion for libraries that want to sell off their books–the role of a library being to collect books and to preserve their collections, especially those extraordinary items that (like this one) they have accepted as bequests. Who is going to want to donate their prized possessions to the University of London after this? Of course, libraries would be far cheaper to run if they didn’t have to look after books at all … many of them would make lovely shopping centres.

This particular sell-off is more perverse than average. Were the dollar-signs not ringing in their eyes, the custodians of this collection would doubtless see the possession of so many Shakespeare folios as part of its claim to status. The first folio in particular is a legendary book, an ur-text of English literary culture (half of the plays would have been lost had this edition not appeared in 1623). It is also a landmark of print history; each surviving copy is unique, and each bears the scars of its past in ways which have been hugely generative for our understanding of how early publishing worked. These folios are books that should be in display-cases, and on the desks of researchers, rather than heading off to the highest bidder.

The claim that nobody has been consulting the books is the most infuriating of all. If you go into the average research library (though there are some very honorable exceptions), you tremble in fear if you want to call up an early printed edition of Shakespeare. Why do you want to see it? Have you written to the Director six months in advance? There is a microfilm you can consult, somewhere in a darkened vault… Librarians hide their treasures away and then cite the fact that nobody has looked at them when they want to sell them off.

Enough fuming… Anyone moved to protest about the proposed sale should write to Mr Pressler (christopher.pressler@london.ac.uk) or the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor Sir Adrian Smith FRS (adrian.smith@london.ac.uk). Or you can sign a petition at http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/senate-house-library-university-of-london-reconsider-the-proposed-sale-of-its-first-four-shakespeare-folios

This little problem has been puzzling me for some time. It’s from an account book compiled in 1597, and it’s a double disaster–an illegible name and a deletion. Get your eyes in, there is some serious glory to be won here!

The world has been well and truly caught on the hop by Jeff Bezos’s decision to spend 1% of his personal fortune buying the Washington Post. What does it mean when the founder of Amazon, who once reportedly proclaimed that ‘God did not create the word because they were written on dead trees’ (sic!), begins to show signs of respect for the industry that he appears to be destroying?

Commentators have floated many possible explanations, including Bezos’s fondness for wacky experimentation–he also invests in space travel and various other yet-to-be-found causes. But is this really such a difficult conundrum to crack? Let’s speculate that Bezos loves the newspaper and values its extraordinary journalistic achievements (the greatest of which was its exposure of the Watergate scandal). He guesses that the next two or three decades will witness the successful migration of the great papers to the net. He sees that the current crisis in newspaper journalism is a blip, a birthpang rather than a death-knell. And since he has his finger on the digital pulse, he’s prepared to invest.

All of this is good news for the Post and bad news for anyone who still holds a candle for the idea that the web will be a utopian space which rewrites the rules of communication. The rules will surely change in all kinds of ways, but each passing day brings us new signs that established social structures are moving in on the web, which is already (for good and ill) more heavily policed and more thoroughly commodified than any real-world space. We are witnessing the first phases of the process by which this new technology will become everyday and eventually–dare one say it?–boring.

There was much debate over the weekend about Jane Austen’s turquoise ring, which might be ‘saved for the nation’ if someone can step in with £150,000 to snatch it from the finger of the American Idol-winning singer Kelly Clarkson, who recently bought it at auction. The UK government has placed an export bar on the ring, Culture Minister Ed Vaizey saying: “Jane Austen’s modest lifestyle and her early death mean that objects associated with her of any kind are extremely rare, so I hope that a UK buyer comes forward so this simple but elegant ring can be saved for the nation”.

One way of understanding the debate over the ring would be to see it as an argument between purists and sentimentalists. On one side are those who think that since Jane Austen was a great writer, it is her writings that matter, and all the rest is fluff and fetishism. (Compare Ben Jonson’s chair, in my earlier blogpost below). On the other are those who are fascinated by the writer as much as the writings, who are moved by anything associated with Austen, and who point out that material things play vital parts in her novels. The latter group might be somewhat split by the question of Kelly Clarkson’s emotions–since she is clearly a true Janeite, and it feels wrong to cheat someone of their possessions when you share so many of their sentiments.

I have sympathies for all sides in this argument. My critical training convinces me that it’s the writing that matters, and that biographical mythmaking is often a way of simplifying or avoiding works of literature. But the cultural historian in me knows that things like this ring also matter in all kinds of ways (think of The Merchant of Venice, you po-faced literary critics!), and that the idolization of authors is a force to be reckoned with. My prescription: the American Idol needs to find somewhere in the UK to keep her ring. And perhaps she should think of leaving it to an Austen museum in her will.

Some clever people at the University of Antwerp have discovered that shoppers will change their behaviour if the scent of chocolate is wafted through a bookshop. Apparently, people gravitate towards romances and the cookery section, becoming 3.5 times more likely to look at books in those categories, and 6 times more likely to buy them. But there’s no impact on the sales of crime novels or travel guides.

Clearly this is a research project that might run and run–is it really true, for example, that you are more likely to flog your house if you have brewed a pot of fresh coffee just before the prospective buyers arrive? But the results might also prompt us to reflect on the business of browsing–a word which can denote both open-ended shopping and a certain kind of semi-engaged skim-reading.

Moving through a bookshop we find ourselves browsing in both senses simultaneously, opening ourselves up to the variousness of the fare on offer in the books that we open up, exposing susceptibilities that can easily be swayed by subliminal signals like an unusual choice of font or a strange scent in the air. Browsing is a peculiarly heady experience, and one that keeps on drawing me back to real bookshops with all their smells and textures. Though if I catch myself buying any Mills & Boon, I may have to rethink…

Deadline for CFP: 1 September 2013

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new AHRC-funded international research network on Community Libraries, which aims to establish a dynamic, interdisciplinary research forum to investigate the role of libraries in shaping communities in the long eighteenth century. Developed by Dr Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool) together with partners at Loyola University Chicago, the Newberry Library, and Dr Williams’s Library (London), the Network will explain the emergence of libraries in the ‘public sphere’ between 1650 and 1850. We will assess the contribution made by libraries to the circulation and reception of print of all kinds, and to the forging of collective identities amongst local, national, and international communities of readers. In addition, the network aims to explore the emergence of libraries in comparative perspective, asking how far models of library provision and administration were disseminated, discussed, imitated, and challenged as they travelled between different social environments and political regimes.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES:

a)     To explain the emergence of libraries in the ‘public sphere’ between 1650 and 1850;

b)     To examine the emergence of libraries in comparative perspective, testing the explanatory power of the Atlantic paradigm for Library History;

c)     To pool expertise on the use of database software for interrogating library records, discussing the full range of approaches, potential pitfalls, and successful solutions;

d)     To investigate the feasibility of developing a universal ‘virtual library system’, connecting up records relating to different types of library, in different places, and at different times with other large scale digital analyses of historic book production, distribution and reception;

e)     To assess the contribution made by libraries to historical processes of community formation, including questions relating to collective identity, gender, civility, sociability, literary censorship, social exclusion/social mobility, mental health and well being, and the impact of print;

f)      To contribute to current debates about the future of public libraries in the UK and the US, highlighting ways in which historical models of library provision might be adapted to contemporary needs.

PLANNED ACTIVITIES:

The Network will organise three two-day colloquia in the UK and the US. Each colloquium will focus on a specific theme, and will feature methodological workshops, work-in-progress presentations, pre-circulated papers, and roundtables.

Colloquium 1: Libraries in the Atlantic World, to be held in Liverpool on 24-25 January, 2014

Colloquium 2: Digital Approaches to Library History, to be held in Chicago on 30 May-1 June, 2014

Colloquium 3: Libraries in the Community, to be held in London on 23-24 January 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS:

The project team invites initial expressions of interest from scholars interested in any element of the Community Libraries research programme. If you feel you can make a significant contribution to any or all of our colloquia, please send abstracts of 500 words, together with a brief summary of your research interests and career to date, to the Principal Investigator Dr Mark Towsey (towsey@liverpool.ac.uk) by 1 September 2013.

The St Andrews Book Conference for 2014

Questions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but others are very scarce, and many have disappeared altogether. We can infer this from the improbably large number of books that survive in only one copy, and it is confirmed by the many references in contemporary documents to books that cannot now be identified in surviving book collections.

This conference will address the issue of how far this corpus of lost books can be reconstructed from contemporary documentation, and how this emerging perception of the actual production of the early book trade – rather than those books that are known from modern library collections – should impact on our understanding of the industry and contemporary reading practice.

Papers are invited on any aspects of this subject: particular texts, classes of texts or authors particularly impacted by poor rates of survival; lost books revealed in contemporary lists or inventories; the collections of now dispersed libraries; deliberate and accidental destruction. Attention will also be given to ground-breaking recent attempts to estimate statistically the whole corpus of production in the first centuries of print by calculating rates of survival.

The conference will take place in St Andrews on the three days 19-21 June 2014. The papers given at this conference will form the basis of a volume in the Library of the Written Word.

The call for papers is now open and also available online on the USTC website at the page: http://www.ustc.ac.uk/?p=1119. Those interested in giving a paper should contact Dr Flavia Bruni (fb323@st-andrews.ac.uk) at St Andrews, offering a brief description of their likely contribution. The call for papers will close on 30 November 2013.

There are lots of wonderful things to see in the latest exhibition from the Royal Collection, In Fine Style, which explores English courtly fashions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Alongside the sumptuous portraits, suits of armour, and embroidered doublets sits this volume, a copy of the Eikon Basilike with blue silk ribbons attached to its binding:

An inscription inside the book claims that this is the ribbon with which Charles wore his Order of the Garter medal. The Eikon Basilike was one of the most popular seventeenth-century printed works, published very soon after Charles’s death in January 1649 (the Royal Library alone holds around 70 copies). Its content encouraged the belief that Charles was a martyr, and its popularity was matched by a proliferation of relics associated with the executed king. Copies of the Eikon Basilike could often acquire relic status themselves, reportedly being bound with cloth dyed in the king’s blood, or in covers made from his hair. This unique object straddles the categories of book and relic, and you can see more photographs and read about its history in a Royal Collection essay about its conservation, found here on the exhibition website.

In Fine Style continues at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 6th October 2013.