… has to be this, a Papal Conclave ballot paper. I’m not sure how old it is (over the centuries there have been several high-profile Cardinals by the name of Mattei) but it appears mysteriously to have escaped the flames of the Sistine stove…

Habemus Papam Franciscum!

Deadline for applications:  12pm 16 May 2013
Six-month or 12-month Fellowships to be held from January 2014 to September 2015.

The Centre for Research in Arts, Social Societies and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and the Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI) at the University of Southern California / Huntington Library invite applications for Visiting Fellowships in Early Modern Visual and Material Culture, to be held between January 2014 and September 2015. These fellowships are part of the collaborative programme Seeing Things: Early Modern Visual and Material Culture  CRASSH / EMSI will appoint up to four fellows over the period (two fellows for twelve months each or 4 fellows for six months each). Fellows will spend half of their fellowship at CRASSH and half at the Huntington Library, San Marino.

During their residencies in each institution, fellows will be expected to conduct research on a topic in early modern (1400-1800) visual and material culture and to participate in the life of CRASSH / EMSI.  There are no geographical restrictions on research topics, but proposals related to the special collections and museum holdings of Cambridge and the Huntington will be particularly welcome.

In addition to carrying out independent research, fellows will be expected to deliver at each institution a master class for early career researchers and graduate students, on a topic of their choice.

Question: what do the following items have in common?:

Ebooks, blueberries, self-assembly kitchen wall units, children’s electronic educational toys, packaged stir-fry vegetables, daily disposable contact lenses.

Answer: they are all to be found in the ‘shopping basket’ that the UK’s Office for National Statistics uses to calculate the current rate of inflation. These items have all just been added to the basket, and are taken to indicate emerging consumer priorities. They replace an equally random assemblage of outmoded goods, including  digital TV boxes, round lettuces, champagne (those days are gone), basin taps and soft contact lenses. Ebooks have been singled out in newspaper reports as the most striking new addition–they accounted for roughly 14% of all book sales in 2012 by volume, and roughly 7% by value.

As a devotee of what the critic Umberto Eco calls the infinity of lists, I love it when books turn up in shopping baskets like this–brain-food jostling with body-food, words alongside the lenses you need in order to read them, electronic books ghosted by electronic educational toys. Of course it’s only a virtual shopping-basket and a series of chance connections; these items are unlikely ever to come together in one place. Still, it’s hard not to fantasize about such meetings. Would they be (to quote the Comte de Lautréamont, prophet of surrealism) ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’? Or would they be more like this?

The British Library has been successful in applying for a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) award from the AHRC. This award covers six doctoral studentships each year for three years, from 2013-2016.

Each studentship will be jointly supervised by a member of the British Library curatorial staff and an academic from a UK Higher Education Institution, as with the existing CDA scheme. The HEI will administer the studentship, receiving funds from the AHRC for fees and to cover the studentÿÿs maintenance. The British Library will provide additional financial support to cover travel and related costs in carrying out research of up to £1,000 a year.

One of the 9 potential research topics is ‘Digital transformations in medieval illuminated manuscripts’. The closing date is Friday 22 March. Find out more and apply at: http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/highered/hecollab/collabdoctpar/index.html

Will it be today? While 115 Cardinals have gathered in the Vatican to choose the next Pope, all eyes are on the special chimney erected on top of their meeting place, the Sistine Chapel. After each ballot, all the ballot papers are burned in a stove, which will emit black smoke if no majority has been reached, and white smoke if a new pontiff has been chosen. Because the colour of the smoke can sometimes be ambiguous, a bell also rings when white smoke is issued. In 2005, Pope Benedict XVI was chosen very quickly, in less than 24 hours. Last night a great cloud of black smoke was seen, signalling an inconclusive first vote – how many more rounds of ballot papers will be burned this time?

A reminder of warmer times–this magnificent letter-box spotted in the upper town of Matera last summer… it’s a bit out of place, for sure, but do they come more stylish and evocative than this?

My friend Milly Cockayne recently picked up a second-hand book with this quaint library bookplate in it. The Hampshire authorities asked readers to ‘report to the Local Librarian any case of infectious disease occurring in the house while a Library Book is in their possession’.

The idea of the book as a vector of disease goes back a long way. Leah Price’s How to do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012) includes illustrations of book fumigating machines that could purge away any pestilential traces deposited by one’s fellow readers. Price sees such machines as a symptom of anxieties about the sheer size of the book-reading, book-circulating public in the nineteenth century.

Google Patents will take you to a fumigator designed in1918 by one Robert Oldham of Salt Lake City, which ‘provide[d] the means to turn the leaves of a book and supply a gaseous disinfectant to each and every leaf and portion of the book’. Oldham claims that the efforts of health boards to prevent contagious diseases have led to the destruction of ‘many large libraries and thousands of school books’.

The machine itself is an impressive assemblage of clamps and sprockets–part of the prehistory of the modern photocopier, perhaps, or something that Google itself might want to raid in its effort to digitize all of the world’s books?

I’m in mourning for the newspaper. About a week ago, I went mad with my credit card and bought a fancy tablet computer. Ever since, I’ve been reading the Guardian online with a free 14-day trial subscription. I’ve already saved plenty of money and I’ve wasted a lot less paper. But am I going to pay for a subscription at the end of the fortnight? I have my doubts, because I really don’t like the digital format.

What’s not to love? Today I splashed out on a paper copy (at an astronomic £1.40) to try to work it out, but the reason is still eluding me. It’s something to do with scale–the pleasurable extent of the printed page, which has of course long been a mark of snooty cultural distinction (the upper-crust ‘broadsheets’ versus the down-and-dirty ‘tabloids’). But it’s also to do with crowding–the amount of material that’s packed onto each page, and that sense of many different things jostling for your attention. The press of the world is laid out to view, made tangible. The packed columns of text have a kind of tautness to them, as if they are providing the right number of words for the right physical space. And you know how to read that space–you have internalized all kinds of physical cues that tell you how significant this particular story is, how wealthy the company that can afford to advertise on that scale.

In the digital edition, every item has its own page, where it sits flaccidly in endless white space. For all the joy of the hyperlinks–the fact that you can find out what a columnist means when he refers to the ‘felicific calculus’ with an instant leap across to Wikipedia–there’s a kind of laziness to the online experience. I’m reminded of a friend who used to object to any pop song that was longer than 4 minutes; the discipline of the ‘single’ forcing bands to say what they had to say without endless padding and repetition. Without column inches, what is going to differentiate a newspaper from any other website?

It’s easy to mock digital tools that too closely resemble their ‘hard-copy’ precursors for failing to reinvent themselves in the new medium. But I think the digital newspaper may need to learn a bit more from its printed counterpart.

(deadline 18 March 2013)

PhD Studentship, University of York (3 years, from September 2013; AHRC-funded) (ref: PhD1)

The student will be based at the University of York in the Department of English and Related Literature, under the supervision of Dr Kevin Killeen (co-editor of Pseudodoxia within the Browne edition). As part of the AHRC-funded edition of The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne (8 vols, OUP 2015-2019; general editor, Prof Claire Preston), the student will interact extensively with the eleven editors, two post-doctoral researchers, and a second doctoral student in contributing to its intellectual, analytical, and textual framework. The student may be expected to contribute, as directed, to background research on the edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Enquiries are welcome. Please contact either Dr Kevin Killeen ( kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk) or Prof Claire Preston (c.e.preston@bham.ac.uk), specifying ‘PhD1’.

PhD studentship, University of Birmingham (3 years, from September 2013; AHRC-funded) (ref: PhD2) Co-supervised by Prof Claire Preston (Birmingham), the general editor of the AHRC-funded Browne edition, and Dr Andrew Zurcher (Cambridge), co-editor of Browne’s correspondence, the student will be formally attached to the Birmingham Department of English and additionally supported by the Centre for Reformation and Early-Modern Studies, and by Cambridge’s Centre for Material Texts. As part of the AHRC-funded edition of The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne (8 vols, OUP 2015-2019), the student will interact extensively with the eleven editors, two post-doctoral researchers, and a second doctoral student in contributing to its intellectual, analytical, and textual framework. The student may be expected to contribute, as directed, to background research on the volume of Browne’s letters that forms part of the edition. Enquiries are welcome. Please contact either Prof Claire Preston (c.e.preston@bham.ac.uk) or Dr Andrew Zurcher (aez20@cam.ac.uk), specifying ‘PhD2’.

Click here for further particulars and application procedures for PhD1 and for PhD2.

If you have been to the new Alison Richard Building on the Sidgwick Site in Cambridge, you will probably have seen the three vitrines filled with porcelain by the potter Edmund de Waal, which are sunk below the paving just outside the entrance. Inside the building, there is another piece by de Waal: atlas, a wall-mounted vitrine divided into multiple shelves, on which are 120 lids from vessels he has made and broken because they were ‘not quite right’. Yesterday, I picked up a beautifully produced leaflet about these works, in which de Waal writes movingly about his motivations. Of the wall-mounted vitrine (pictured above, in the leaflet), which works so well in the space it occupies, he says:

‘If the structure of the vitrine looks familiar, it is because it is a gentle echo of a manuscript page with texts, footnotes and commentaries in intimate conjunction.’

De Waal intended this and the other vitrines, he reveals, as ‘a kind of archive’, designed for a ‘site full of libraries and archives, and the people who care about libraries and archives’. Located at the threshold to the building, as well as at the heart of the building’s airy atrium, de Waal’s elegant vitrines remind us that our engagement with the materiality of pages, archives, and libraries, while often frustrating and challenging, can also be intensely beautiful.