Justine Provino is embarked on a PhD in the Faculty of English at Cambridge. Here she describes her unusal and challenging project.

In normal times, writing a PhD on how libraries can preserve and facilitate access to self-destructive books might seem strange enough. The duty of these ancient institutions is to care for the works that they gather on their shelves, and to pass the information they enshrine from one generation of readers to the next. What would they make of a book that has been designed not to survive?

In the time of Covid-19, my PhD research has turned into a full-scale practical test on the work of the library in framing written culture. The physical thresholds of our cultural heritage institutions have become impossible to cross, locking away all those books that were bound so as to last, but which are also bound to decay, like all organic matter. One might mischievously assert that this state of affairs is optimal for preservation: all of the books are shielded from the touch of readers, enjoying the absence of the stress that afflicts their spines every time they are opened. But being untouched, for a book, also means that it is not fulfilling its main function in our society: the transmission of content through the process of reading. The transfer of knowledge accelerates the decline of the book as a container (torn pages, distressed covers), as we know; sometimes, it can even spell the destruction of the book, as books are ‘read to death’. Books put up different degrees of resistance to their assailants—the flimsier examples might be said to have ‘built-in obsolescence’, falling apart at the first opportunity. Unbound products of the press, such as newspapers are date-stamped in the full knowledge of their own ephemerality. But few books actively seek their own ends.

So what is a self-destructive book? Why was it even made? Where is it? Can it be seen and touched? Why would one wish to preserve and access such a counter-intuitive bibliographical artefact in a library?!

A self-destructive book is just that: a book intended by its makers to self-destruct. My PhD case study, the 1992 American artists’ book, Agrippa (a book of the dead), is so far the only example of its kind. But my research keeps me on the lookout for instances that would prove this claim wrong, and I would be delighted to be contradicted as soon as this blog is posted. Agrippa was the product of a collaboration between the publisher Kevin Begos Jr, the writer William Gibson, and the artist Dennis Ashbaugh. Though many artists’ books have involved an element of destruction, from John Latham’s Skoob Towers, burning books in the 1960s, to Stephen Emmerson’s latest translation of Rilke in spores, in which a fungus grown on the book’s cover feeds from the paper and ink, the materials in these books existed before they were re-used in a process of creative destruction. By contrast, Agrippa was made to self-destruct and self-erase before it was turned into a bound object.

Inside the book, Ashbaugh’s printworks represent vintage technologies (a pistol, a Bell telephone), and these images are overprinted onto a transcription of the DNA of the fruitfly. This insect is usually associated with ‘something rotten’, and the printmaking technique itself is rooted in decay: a first layer of aquatint etching is overprinted with unfixed-toner carbon ink. This second layer necessarily offsets onto the next page, and it also moves from its support as the page is being turned by the reader, or as the reader touches the top layer of the image; over time, it disappears. Accompanying this artwork is Gibson’s literary contribution, an autobiographical poem about his family and his emergence as a writer. The poem is digitally encrypted on a Mac floppy disk encoded to self-destruct as being read. The floppy disk is inserted into a hollowed cavity which is carved into the centre of the analogue textblock of the book. It was encrypted so as to be playable only once—after a single ‘performance’ of the poem, the disk would become unreadable, echoing the physical decay of the images.

Not all of the forms of self-destruction in Agrippa were ‘intended’. The composite multi-media confection is encased in a presentation fibre-glass box, the interior of which is made of cardboard covered in an as-yet-unidentified paint. These elements are very likely to offgass acidic components onto the book, thus contributing to the oxidation – and alteration both in composition and aspect – of Agrippa’s organic materials (the stiffening of its textblock, the yellowing of its cloth-covered boards). On the exterior, this box takes the shape of an early century Kodak photo-album labelled ‘Agrippa’. This makes it a simulacrum of the photo-album Gibson found in his family home, filled with his late father’s and grandfather’s photographs. This vintage artefact was the germ of his poem about the dead, and gave the collaborative artist’s book its title.

Begos’s archive on Agrippa, housed at the Bodleian Library, retraces the creation of the book and the reaction of the public from 1992 to 2005. This archive is accompanied by a deluxe- and a small-edition copy of Agrippa, which materially evidence some of the many phases in the making of the self-destructive book. The deluxe edition is missing its floppy disk and has no ‘disappearing images’; the small edition is not visibly lacking any elements. Both editions have presentation boxes made of acidic materials. As a book conservator by training, these copies present me with both an ethical and practical challenge. They were made to trigger our common – but quixotic – idea of the book-object as a permanent support. Agrippa presents us with the material reality that a book is an object that necessarily evolves over time, and we have to take into account the book’s evolution in order appropriately to care for and to preserve its informational content. The most ancient form of codex and its hardware (chains, clasps) and the latest e-book software have in common the fact that they are transferable supports, generated by copying in the scriptorium or coding on the computer. They can also be erasable supports, whether they are palimpsests or data files. Agrippa’s makers remind us that we quickly become oblivious to the materiality of a text as long as it ‘does the job’, forgetting that it is vital to the communication of its content. Agrippa reveals a lot about the relationship between our idealised vision of the book and its material reality.

But can Agrippa be preserved? Strikingly, it preservation started the moment it was released. After Begos advertised it, highlighting its ephemerality, Gibson’s poem was hijacked via a secret recording, made during the public reading of the text from a computer screen at the time of Agrippa’s launch on December 9^th 1992 (the recording is now available on YouTube). In parallel to this public intervention, Begos himself gathered and preserved Ashbaugh’s artist’s proofs and his experiments in the process of overprinting, together with information on the making of the fibre-glass presentation box, and the contract for the encryption code; these items are all in the Bodleian archive. The library is now the framework that allows this network of digital and physical data to be reconnected, allowing the researcher to glimpse the unfolding process of a one-off, entirely unrepeatable performance.

During the Covid lockdown, the London Review of Books has been exploring its back-catalogue, and sending out choice articles to cheer its subscribers up. Today I had my day interrupted by an article on the way that social media interrupts our day–Rebecca Solnit’s ‘In the Day of the Postman‘.

It’s a rueful meditation on the simplicity of the lives we used to lead, written by someone whose life has straddled the digital divide. As another straddler, I don’t find it all easy to make moral judgments about the before and after–life before was, as I recall, often quite boring, while life after seems to involve too many people playing Candy Crush or watching James Bond on their phones. But Solnit analyses it very well, and her proposal that we need to work to put the world back together again–to regain a local, meaningful, slow and honest relationship to our experience–resonates. Will I be deleting Facebook and Twitter? Soon, I promise, but not just yet…

One of the stranger consequences of the coronavirus lockdown has been a growing fascination with the contents of the bookshelves that are suddenly visible in the backgrounds of politicians and pundits forced to Skype or Zoom or Facetime in to deliver their wisdom to the nation. Such bookshelves have long been a matter of passing interest for the way that they help to shore up the authority of the speaker, and for the occasional revelations they offer about the intellectual coordinates of a politician’s life. But now they have become unavoidable.

Yesterday we were briefly transfixed by the “shelfies” of the conservative politician Michael Gove and the Daily Mail commentator Sarah Vine, in which the eagle-eyed spotted copies of The War Path, by the Holocaust denier David Irving; Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve, which argues that intelligence is unequally distributed by race; and Ayn Rand’s right-wing novel Atlas Shrugged. Many commentators noted that owning a book doesn’t mean that you agree with its contents, while others remarked on the general lack of female writers among Gove’s heavyweights, or wondered what the response would have been had Jeremy Corbyn (repeatedly accused of antisemitism during his time as leader of the Labour party) been found to have holocaust deniers on his shelves. Last night, BBC’s Newsnight ran a feature in which they showed politicians in front of their bookshelves, and gender was again at issue: we’re sorry for the preponderance of men, Emily Maitliss told us, but that was because it’s men who tend to sit in front of bookshelves for their interviews. And a Twitter account called ‘Bookcase Credibility’, which circulates pictures of egregious shelf-parading, is trending.

All of this was of course just the usual storm in a social media teacup, which will soon blow over and leave us exactly where we were before. But it has a particular resonance for those of us who work on the history of libraries, or for people like me who just find themselves unable to take their eyes off other people’s bookshelves. My recent book, Shakespeare’s First Reader, grew out of the fits of nosiness that sweep over me when I visit a friend’s house and see their shelves, tranposed to the sixteenth century. What are all these books? Where did they come from? Have they been read? How have they shaped the life, the experience, the identity of the person I thought I knew?

Part of the fascination is, of course, not just in the individual items but also in their disposition—neatly organised or heaped-up and messy? well thumbed or pristine?—and the relationship between the books and the rest of the room, with its multiple markers of taste, wealth and interest. The material details are so telling, though often in ways that are hard to formulate: we just react to them with a shiver or a feeling of warmth. But beyond that, the sight of a bookshelf sets up an oscillation: it lets you in and screens you out; holds out the books but keeps them firmly closed; shows you ‘reading’ whilst asserting that you could never see something as intimate and secretive as reading. All of this explains why I’ll be keeping more than half an eye, with a twinge of guilt, on that twitterstorm. 

Friday 7 February, 2-5pm
Alison Richard Building SG2 
Re-thinking the Book
A CMT 10th anniversary collaboration with the CRASSH ‘Re-‘ project, starring Juliet Fleming, Alexandra Gillespie, Deidre Lynch, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth 

Thursday 20 February, 5pm  
Board Room, Faculty of English 
Susanna Berger (University of Southern California) and Bill Sherman (Warburg Institute) in conversation

Thursday 5 March, 5pm
Board Room, Faculty of English 
Drew Milne (Cambridge), ‘The Artefacts of Poetry in the Era of Digital Reproduction: Towards a Poetics of Small Press Publishing’ 

All welcome

A couple of weeks ago, the CMT and the Cambridge Bibliographical Society finally managed to organise a long-promised site visit to Audley End House and the ‘Souvenirs of Italy’ exhibition, curated by Abigail Brundin of the Department of Italian and Dunstan Roberts, Praeceptor in English at Corpus Christi College.

At the heart of their investigations was the figure of Richard Aldworth Neville, 2nd Lord Braybrooke, who went on a Grand Tour to Italy in the 1770s. He has never been part of the official narrative of the house, as it is presented to visitors, but he slowly rose to prominence as research on the library proceeded. Here he is shown holding a book in a portrait done by George Romney c. 1779.

Richard Neville had Europe and Italy in the blood; his father met his mother, Magdalena Calandrini, in Geneva when he was on his own Grand Tour in the 1740s. She died in childbirth in 1750, and her husband began to fill the pages of a massive black-edged mourning book in her memory (despite the evident depth of his sadness, he didn’t get very far through the volume).

The exhibition featured some documents from Richard’s childhood, including a cute account book that he kept at Eton, which included a foretaste of Italy in a reference to ‘Biscuits savoy and naples’. But the main focus was his Grand Tour. Before he set out, Richard drew detailed maps showing the distances between towns. This tempting example gets us from Florence to Rome, via Siena and Viterbo:

Richard kept a diary of his travels, which includes numerous sketches, including this picture of the litter that he was carried in as he descended the Alps. (He expresses some sympathy for the carriers).

As the exhibition showed, Richard’s travels are richly documented, in souvenirs from Pompeii, in letters describing the paintings he had bought, and in books. The archival gatherings in the display cases provided the context for a picture on the walls of Audley End, in which Richard and his schoolfriends are shown admiring classical statuary. This picture was done to celebrate a six-week stay in Rome, when the group of friends undertook a course in classical antiquities.

For years after their return from Italy, these old friends continued to cement their relationships by exchanging tokens of classical culture, such as this book given to Richard by the author William Young.

Although there are not many Audley End books that can be assigned with full assurance to Richard, it is likely that some of the substantial collections of Italian literature now held at the house were acquired by him.

The ‘Souvenirs of Italy’ project, which followed on from an earlier project at Belton House in Lincolnshire, was a great example of how taking country house libraries more seriously can bring their buildings and collections into a new focus. As a side-benefit of the project, a couple of Audley End books owned by the Tudor translator Thomas Hoby also came back into view. These were made the subject of a virtual exhibition at the Cambridge Digital Library that is also well worth a visit.

Our thanks to Abi, Dunstan and Peter Moore, curator of collections at Audley End, for showing us round!

Applications are invited for an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with Queens’ College Cambridge Old Library entitled: Exploring Humanist Networks of Knowledge and Reading in Queens’ College Old Library.

The studentship will be based in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. The successful applicant will work on a collaborative project led by Dr William Poole <william.poole@new.ox.ac.uk>, Faculty of English (Oxford), co-supervisor, Dr Tim Eggington, Queens’ College Cambridge <tje25@cam.ac.uk>

Available for 2020-21 entry. The deadline for applications is 10 January 2020.

For full details see the OOCDTP pages:
https://www.oocdtp.ac.uk/exploring-humanist-networks-knowledge-and-reading-queens-college-old-library

31 October 2019, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Jason Scott-Warren (Cambridge), ‘On First Looking into Milton’s Shakespeare’

28 November 2019, 5 pm, Board Room, Faculty of English

Drew Milne (Cambridge), ‘The Artefacts of Poetry in the Era of Digital Reproduction: Towards a Poetics of Small Press Publishing’

All welcome!

There has been a small bounce for the CMT website in the wake of the identification of Milton’s copy of the first folio of Shakespeare:

The amount of press coverage given to the discovery, since the news was first disseminated by The Guardian last week, has been astonishing. Claire Bourne has collected some of it here, but hasn’t yet added articles from Germany, Italy, Mexico and elsewhere. We made it to the front page, ‘above the fold’, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and were offered as a sign that ‘it wasn’t all bad’ (despite Boris and rising tensions in the Middle East) on the first page of ‘The Week’. There was also some radio coverage, on NPR in the US and ‘Front Row’ in the UK. Commentators were particularly interested in the role of digital scholarship in the dissemination and approval of the find, and there was some effervescent writing about just how ‘totally and thoroughly awesome’ the survival of this book is.

Things are now quietening down, so there’s a bit of time for us to catch our breaths and start on the hard work. Claire and I are going to collaborate on putting the full story together–hammering out the evidence for the identification, establishing whatever can be established about the dating of the annotations, and thinking about their broader implications for readers of Shakespeare, Milton, and both together. It promises to be fun but also pretty demanding! Watch this space for further developments.

Public Engagement and Special Collections

Weston Library Lecture Theatre, Oxford 

4th October 2019, 10.45-16.30

Through six presentations by academics, curators and education professionals, the Association of Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections will be exploring various approaches that are being developed in order to share special collections with the general public and the challenges and benefits of such activities.

All are welcome to attend.

Registration (includes tea/coffee and lunch): 

£20 AMARC members / £15 AMARC student members / £25 non-members.

To register, go to:

tinyurl.com/AMARCOxford2019

It’s always annoying when someone tries to claim that they’ve discovered a lost literary artefact. I was myself a little bit brutal when, five years ago, we were treated to the supposed rediscovery of Shakespeare’s dictionary. In this as in other cases, there’s usually a lot of wishful thinking, plus copious spinning of the evidence to make it seem plausible, and elision of anything that doesn’t seem to fit. However, I’m going to make my own unwise pronouncement on the basis of just a few hours of research. I’m going to claim to have identified John Milton’s copy of the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623.

In a recent article (‘Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as Play-Reading in the First Folio’, in Kathy Acheson, ed., Early Modern English Marginalia [London: Routledge, 2019]), Claire M. L. Bourne offers a rich analysis of the manuscript annotations in a copy of the Folio now at the Free Library of Philadephia. She demonstrates that the annotations are highly unusual in character, having been added by a reader who was very attentive to misprints and metrical errors, and who in two cases–those of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet–was comparing the Folio text with the text supplied by a Quarto edition of each play (Q5 [1637] in the case of the former, and one of Q3-5 [1611-37] for the latter). In several cases, the reader corrected the Folio from the Quartos, but his emendations were by no means slavish, and were accompanied by other textual changes that seem to have been inspired by his own sense of what was needed in the particular context.

The reader also added a few smart cross-references, to Tottel’s Songs and Sonnettes for the Gravedigger’s song in Hamlet, and to Samuel Purchas’s Purchas his Pilgrimes for the identity of The Tempest‘s deity Setebos; and he supplied the second verse of the song that is sung to Mariana in Measure for Measure. (Someone, perhaps a different reader or the same reader using a display hand, transcribed the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet, which is missing from the Folio text). Finally, our reader added marginal markings to all of the plays except for Henry VI 1-3 and Titus Andronicus. Bourne suggests that these are not marks for cuts but are instead commonplace markers, indicating passages of special note or broad applicability. On the basis of the various texts cited and of the binding, which likely dates from the early Restoration, Bourne tentatively dates the annotations between c. 1625 and some point in the 1660s.

So this reader is intelligent and assiduous. But the evidence that makes me want to suggest that it’s Milton is strictly palaeographical. This just looks a lot like Milton’s hand. Here I’m going to offer some words and letter-forms for comparison. Let’s start small and relatively unrevealing, with ‘the’. On the left we have the Folio, on the right the Trinity manuscript.

With that citation on the left, and its neatly spaced reference by volume and page to Purchas, we might compare this citation of Machiavellis’ Arte della Guerra in Milton’s commonplace book in the British Library:

(The commonplace book also makes reference to the same first volume of Purchas, but since everyone read Purchas this may not mean very much. Having a cross-reference for a reference to Setebos does seem quite sophisticated, though).

Now let’s look at some more specific words. At one point in the text of Measure for Measure, Milton struggles to make sense of Angelo’s claim that ‘these blacke Masques / Proclaime an en-shield beauty ten times louder / Then beauty could displaied’. He changes ‘en-shield’ to ‘enshrin[ed]’ or ‘enshrin[‘d]’ (the page has been trimmed in binding, so not all of the word survives). Here is the word in the Folio, and next to it is ‘shrine’ from the Trinity MS (sadly wordpress keeps rotating the images, so please crank your head through 90 degrees):

Another comparison: ‘morne’ (Trinity) and ‘morn’ (Hamlet):

Those are perhaps pretty equivocal (it’s something about the tidy separation and discreteness of the letter forms, rather than the forms themselves, that might make us wonder). But here’s ‘Hence will I’ (in the Folio) and ‘will I trie’ (in Trinity):

And here’s ‘he’ (Trinity MS/Folio), which seems to me quite telling in the way that the right foot of the ‘h’ doesn’t quite get to the ground before it heads up into the ‘e’:

While we are going minute, we might also note that Milton has an enlarged italic hand, sometimes rather scratchy, sometimes quite elegant, that he uses for headings and suchlike. Compare the ‘R’ in the speech-heading for ‘Romeo’ in the Folio and another ‘R’ from the commonplace book:

Finally we could look at the way Milton corrects things, in the Philadelphia Folio and in the corrected copy of ‘Lycidas’ in Cambridge University Library (Adv.d.38.5). It would be wrong to claim any easy overlap here–one of Bourne’s points is that the annotator of the Folio seems to be adding new readings while leaving the original to stand, so as to suggest that both are possible. But still, here is ‘Lycidas’ on the left and the Folio on the right:

Obviously, in the style of this kind of analysis, I’ve suppressed all the information that doesn’t with fit my claims. One interesting thing (confessing for a moment) is that the annotator of the Folio seems to use the ‘modern’ Italianate form of ‘e’ rather than the ‘Greek’ epsilon-shaped ‘e’, which Milton uses a lot in the poems of the Trinity manuscript, though rather less in the prose. Wishfully, I’d suggest that this might be due to his desire to imitate the forms of print when annotating. Palaeographers have also suggested that Milton dropped Greek-‘e’ after he returned from a visit to Italy in 1639, so that detail might also allow us to date the annotations.

The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts lists nineteen books that have been thought to survive from Milton’s library, though many of those are lost, spurious or disputed. The description of the annotations in one of these, Heraclides of Pontus’ Allegoriae (1544), now held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sounds at least promising. One description refers to lots of curved vertical pen-strokes, perhaps akin to those that fill the margins of the Folio. But nobody, in the age before digital cameras, took photos of curved vertical pen-strokes.

If this book is what I think it is, it’s quite a big deal, since Shakespeare was, as we know, a huge influence on Milton. The younger poet paid tribute to his forebear in an epitaph published in the Second Folio of 1632, in which he testified to the ‘wonder and astonishment’ that Shakespeare created in his readers. Milton learnt so much from Shakespeare–how to write nature poetry; how to create charismatic villains like Comus, or Satan in Paradise Lost; how to sculpt taut, tense argumentative exchanges between speakers locked in verbal combat–though their relationship has often described as fraught and agonistic in itself, with Milton struggling to break free from his brilliant precursor. Perhaps the most obvious objection to my proposal is that the Free Library of Philadelphia Folio isn’t quite interesting enough to be Milton’s. Wouldn’t his copy be bristling with cross-references, packed with smart observations and angrily censorious comments? To this I have no response, except that maybe (as the epitaph claims) he was just wowed and struck dumb by Shakespeare. Or perhaps he saved those kinds of interventions for his Quartos…  

Postscript 11/9/19: I’ve received a very positive response from several distinguished Miltonists who are confident that this identification is correct–and have been roundly rebuked for understating the significance of the discovery. On the basis of his knowledge of the development of Milton’s hand, Will Poole (who a few years back discovered the poet’s copy of Boccaccio’s Life of Dante) has suggested that the earliest handwritten addition (the prologue to Romeo and Juliet) probably dates from the early 1630s, but that the bulk of the annotations were likely made in the 1640s. So this is probably a re-reading (or several re-readings) rather than a first reading, coinciding with a time of political upheaval, when Milton was writing some of his most powerful polemical prose. My concluding comments on how the volume may be ‘not interesting enough’ will also need to be revised, given the density and detail of the annotation to this copy. More to follow.

Postscript 12/9/19: Am adding in some higher-quality images below; these were generously shared by Claire M. L. Bourne, and are posted here with the kind permission of the Free Library of Philadephia.