In this week’s New Yorker Nicholson Baker has a long and fascinating piece about the history of the liquid crystal display that you are looking at right now. He traces its development back to the 1880s, when German scientists were studying the strange behaviour of cholesterol derived from carrots, and reporting excitedly on the existence of ‘flowing crystals! … The impossible here really seems to become possible’. Fifty years later a prototype LCD television had been patented, but it was decisively outgunned by the cathode ray tubes which dominated our living rooms from the 1950s onwards. ‘The bigger they got the heavier and boxier their containers were,’ Baker recalls, ‘(although they did give off a nice odor of baked dust when you sniffed the vents at the back)’. Finally the technology moved to Japan and Korea, where vast quantities of unthinkably sophisticated precision-engineering go into making the flat screens for our TVs, our cameras, our i-gizmos. Remarkably, the liquid crystals themselves still come from the same German firm, Merck, that started making them in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Baker tours the Korean factories and expos that allow him to glimpse the present and future of our glossy, hyperreal displays, and what really excites him are screens that threaten to annihilate pixellation–‘screens towards which we would be able to bend close, as we would to a printed page, and on which we would (almost) be able to read words the way they were meant to be read, not as stair-stepping digital approximation but as smooth, continuously curving shapes of meaning’. His yearning for ‘unblurred, crisply seriffed’ letters takes on extra significance in the pages of the New Yorker, a magazine dripping with its accumulated cultural capital, printed in a beautiful font on glossy paper, and so prim in its editorial standards that it insists on introducing a diaeresis (thank you, Wikipedia!) into words with ambiguously doubled vowels, such as ‘coöperate’ or ‘reëmerge’. All this extraordinary energy, and at the end of it we might have reinvented the wheel of ink on paper… Perhaps all it proves is that writers are not the people to ask about the future of LCD.

Discussion of the controversial privatisation of Royal Mail – and what this will mean for those sending, sorting, and delivering letters –  rumbles on in the newspapers. On a happier note, the Guardian yesterday featured an album of pictures of things from the British Postal Museum and Archive, which is hoping to raise enough funds to open a museum in London by 2016. These artefacts, including a telegram announcing the sinking of the Titanic, and a photograph of the Beatles opening fan mail, are suggestive of the rich mine of material texts in this archive – and when Royal Mail is no longer in public hands, a museum will be an important monument to this centuries-old institution.

Last week I blogged about an old reading-and-riding exercise-chair at Belton House in Lincolnshire. Coincidentally, an article by Charles Nicholl in the Guardian on Saturday set about describing a different reading chair. No longer surviving today, this one belonged to the poet and playwright Ben Jonson. It is documented by the Restoration virtuoso John Aubrey, who reported having seen ‘[Jonson’s] studyeing chaire, which was of strawe, such as old woemen used’. Aubrey compared it with the chair shown in a picture of the Latin writer Aulus Gellius.

Further sleuthing allows Nicholl to establish that Jonson’s chair was on display for part of the seventeenth century in a ‘tippling house’ (The Jonson’s Head) on the Strand, where a poetaster pinned some rather lame verses above it, and the wits quipped that it signified ‘that Poets in these hard times, though they should invoke the nine Muses, may still want nine pence to purchase a pint of Canary’.

To some, all of this harping on a long-lost chair will seem fatuous. But scholars are increasingly turning to literary relics and souvenirs, both as a way of gauging the development of a writer’s reputation over time, and of charting changing ideas about the nature of the creative process. It would be nice to know what became of this particular seat of learning.

a post from Christopher Burlinson:

This little watercolour of a pair of ringed plovers, overseeing their clutch of camouflaged eggs, dropped out of a copy of The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (marked with an inscription, ‘Margaret L. Hall / Christmas 1924 / from Violet’) that I picked up in a second-hand bookshop in York. On the back, another text: a 1917 proclamation of King George V (‘issued under the authority of the Minister of Food’), instructing all heads of households ‘to practise the greatest economy and frugality in the use of every species of grain’ by reducing their consumption of bread by a quarter, and abstaining from the use of flour in pastry. It is printed on thick paper, presumably making it useful as artists’ material.

It was the plovers, I confess, and not the mystical poems, that made me buy the book.

Who was Margaret Hall, though? Was she the painter of this watercolour? How soon after receiving the text of the proclamation did she decide to repurpose it—trimming it to the right size and painting a scene on the back? Was the proclamation already out of date? Did the painting have a life (on display? between the pages of another book?) between the day it was painted and the point at which Margaret used it to mark a poem? And why trim the proclamation before painting? Was Margaret perhaps copying the image from a book (which one?), and keeping to the same dimensions? Or was the image painted from her memory, or her imagination?

I came across this early sixteenth-century French ‘coffret’ earlier this week, amongst many other treasures at the 2013 Masterpiece fair . The lid is lined with a woodcut image of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, standing with the Virgin Mary at the foot of the Cross.

What was this box used for? It appears book-sized, as though it could have held a prayer book. But it clearly has a devotional purpose in itself, exposing a colourful image to be meditated upon. Jason has alerted me to a wonderful auction catalogue of further examples of these intriguing objects (all of them French) and I shall investigate further – though sadly, at tens of thousands of pounds each, I won’t be buying one any time soon!

to Dr Orietta da Rold of Leicester and Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries of Cambridge, who have both been appointed to CMT-related lectureships in Literature and the Material Text in the Faculty of English at Cambridge. Their appointments mark the start of an exciting new phase in the development of the Centre, which was founded in 2009, and which has become an increasingly important part of the research landscape both locally and internationally.

University of Vienna, 23-25 April 2014

Keynote Speakers: Thomas Wallnig (University of Vienna) and Howard Hotson (University of Oxford)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Paper and panel proposals are invited for Scientiae 2014, the third annual conference on the emergent knowledge practices of the early modern period (ca. 1450-1750). The conference will take place on the 23-25 April 2014 at the University of Vienna in Austria, building upon the success of Scientiae 2012(Simon Fraser University) and Scientiae 2013 (Warwick), each of which brought together more than 100 scholars from around the world.

The premise of this conference is that knowledge during the period of the Scientific Revolution was inherently interdisciplinary, involving complex mixtures of practices and objects which had yet to be separated into their modern “scientific” hierarchies. Our approach, subsequently, needs to be equally wide-ranging, involving Biblical exegesis, art theory, logic, and literary humanism; as well as natural philosophy, alchemy, occult practices, and trade knowledge. Attention is also given to mapping intellectual geographies through the tools of the digital humanities. Scientiae is intended for scholars working in any area of early-modern intellectual culture, but is centred around the emergence of modern natural science. The conference offers a forum for the dissemination of research, acts as a catalyst for new investigations, and is open to scholars of all levels.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Intellectual geography: networks, intellectual history, and the digital humanities.
• Theological origins and implications of the new sciences.
• Interpretations of nature and the scriptures.
• Antiquarianism and the emergence of modern science.
• The impact of images on the formation of early modern knowledge.
• Genealogies of “reason”, “utility”, and “knowledge”.
• Humanism and the Scientific Revolution.
• Paracelsianism, Neoplatonism, and alchemy more generally.
• Interactions between the new sciences, magic and demonology.
• The history of health and medicine.
• Morality and the character of the natural world.
• Early modern conceptions of, and practices surrounding, intellectual property.
• Poetry and the natural sciences.
• The development of novel approaches to cosmology and anthropology.
• Botany: between natural history, art, and antiquarianism.
• Music: between mathematics, religion, and medicine.
• The relationship between early modern literature and knowledge.
• Advances or reversals of logic and/or dialectic.

Abstracts for individual papers of 25 minutes should be between 250 and 350 words in length. For panel sessions of 1 hour and 45 minutes, a list of speakers (with affiliations), as well as a 500-word abstract, is required. Roundtable discussions or other formats may be accepted at the discretion of the organizing committee. All applicants are also required to submit a brief biography of 150 words of less. Abstracts must be submitted through our online submission form by 15 October 2013. If you have any questions, please contact the conference convenor, Vittoria Feola (vittoria.feola@meduniwien.ac.at).

The 2014 conference will be held in the Juridicum at the University of Vienna, a modern conference building which is part of the ancient University of Vienna, founded in 1365. The conference will take place in the historic city centre of one of Europe’s most beautiful capitals, easy to reach by plane and train.

Last month, our members were treated to the first ever CMT coach trip: a site-visit to the Cambridge-curated exhibition at Belton House, Lincolnshire, which is displaying books and maps collected by several generations of the Brownlow family on their Grand Tours across Europe. Among the highlights was the reading/exercise chair shown below, which allowed its users to bounce up and down as if on horseback whilst working their way through Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or catching up on the latest Austen. A machine for creating the healthy mind in a healthy body, it even sat in the corner of a bedroom, like its modern equivalents. (Would we be right to guess that exercise bikes double up as places of reading for many of their users?)

For a new report on the exhibition, which runs until 3 November 2013, click here. 

In a graveyard on a hill overlooking the harbour in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, a headstone marks the burial site of Anne, the youngest Bronte sibling, who died while seeking recovery from tuberculosis in the coastal resort. The original stone, now somewhat eroded, claims that ‘She died Aged 28/ May 28th 1849’. In 2011 the Bronte Society placed another stone next to it, pointing out that ‘The text contains one error’ – Anne was in fact 29 when she died (her birthday being 17th January 1820). Anne’s sister Charlotte apparently discovered multiple errors when she visited the grave three years after her death, and the stone was then refaced, but with this mistake remaining, uncorrected until now.

As the whistleblower Edward Snowden leaks ever more information about global bugging operations — today it’s the US spying on the European Union, but a week or two ago it was the British government spying on participants in the last G8 summit — the question inevitably arises: how can you communicate securely in the modern world? And with that, the inevitable but somewhat horrifying answer — they are all going to have to start sending letters again. I hope the CIA has hung on to a kettle that it can use to steam them open.