Tagged: bindings

multivalent print, or, learning to love ambiguity in three easy lessons

Below are the slides for and the approximate text of a talk I gave at the 2013 MLA convention as part of a panel on “Convergent Histories of the Book: From Manuscript to Digital” organized by Alex Mueller and Mike Johnston. I spoke ex tempore, so my text here won’t precisely line up with what I said at the MLA, but the gist should be the same. I’ve indicated where the slide changes are and after each change have inserted a footnote linking to source and, where available, a link to the image. I’ve also indicated my indebtedness to other scholars, particularly Jeffrey Todd Knight and Adam Smyth, in the notes.



I want to talk today about how early print complicates any trajectory from manuscript to digital, focusing on some common mistaken assumptions that are made about early print. The first assumption we make is that print replaced manuscript, that once the printing press was invented, writing by hand withered away. [slide 2] But print is not the opposite of manuscript. Indeed, we might understand print as having spurred on an increase in handwriting. When people think of the first printed work, they usually think of the Gutenberg bible. [slide 3]1 But Gutenberg’s first printed work was an indulgence, printed in 1454 and, as you can see, filled out by hand on 27 February 1455. Gutenberg wasn’t the only early printer to print indulgences. [slide 4]2 This is an indulgence printed in 1498 by Wynken de Worde. It hasn’t been filled out; in fact, it wasn’t ever cut into individual indulgences to be sold. What you’re looking at is a sheet of indulgences and the only reason it survived is because it was used as part of the binding of a book. Other categories of printed forms were popular aside from indulgences. [slide 5]3 This is a legal document, a summons from the Exchequer filled out on 1 August 1622. [slide 6]4 And this legal document from 1677 makes Francis Read of Giggleswick Bailiff of the Wapentake of Ewecross.5

All of these documents were designed for the insertion of handwriting. But writing flourished on texts even when the print wasn’t inviting it. [slide 7]6 In this copy of Polychronicon, printed by Caxton in 1482, an early user has supplied the missing final leaves with his own manuscript copy. Is that book manuscript or print? It seems pretty clearly print: the bulk of the volume is print and the manuscript provides access to missing print. [slide 8]7 This copy of Aristotle’s Ethics was so  heavily annotated by its owner that the margins of the pages were not enough: he added in blank leaves to give himself more room for his notes. Is this book print or manuscript? We value it for the manuscript additions, for the dialogue between print and hand.

[slide 9] As these books make clear, print is not closed, finished, done at the moment of printing. [slide 10]8 We all know that print wasn’t fixed; books were printed with errors all the time, and errata notes calling attention to them. This 1624 example is one of my favorites: “There are many other errors, which being but small, I entreat the courteous reader to correct as he findes them.” [slide 11]9 In this 1673 book, a user has gone through and made the corrections the errata list invites him to, here crossing out “company” and writing in “presence.”10

But not all marginalia responds in the way that a book invites. [slide 12]11 In this copy of Caxton’s 1483 printing of Confessio Amatis, a mid-sixteenth-century owner has gone through and crossed out “pope” and, in this instance, cleverly substituted “abominable” for “honourable.” But not all of the marginalia in this book responds to the text, or even works against the text. [slide 13]12 In the blank space on this leaf is recorded the date of the writer’s marriage: “Chrystofer Swallowe was marryed the 12th day of July in the yere of oure lorde 1553 whiche was the seventhe yere of the Reigne of kinge Edward the Sixth …. and in the firste year of the Reigne of our most Excellent and worthie princes Queyne marie the fyrst.” [slide 14]13 And across the bottom margins of another opening is a deed of land involving Swallowe and “Dorithe his wife.”

[slide 15]14 Early readers also used print for their own purposes in other ways, taking books apart and reassembling them to make their own meaning. A famous example are the Little Giddings bible concordances (here showing one at Harvard). The Little Giddings community wove together the four different gospels to produce one narrative of Christ’s life, cutting words out of the gospels and pasting them together in their harmonies. If you look closely at this image (or follow this link to see other pages from Harvard’s copy), you’ll see the small slips of paper that have been carefully rearranged and glued to make a new text.

The Harmonies are a particularly famous example of this reworking of texts, and are often discussed by later readers as shocking: Can you imagine cutting apart your bible and remaking it? [slide 16]15 But there are other examples of what Adam Smyth calls “reading with scissors” in this period.16 John Gibson’s commonplace book, put together while he was imprisoned in the 1650s, cuts out and repurposes print material with his manuscript additions. [slide 17] Gibson is not the only one to remix works. This copy of Mary Sidney’s translation of Philippe de Mornay’s A Discourse of Life and Death (1600) has been supplemented an early user with images cut from Richard Day’s A booke of Christian prayers, hand colored and pasted in, and with manuscript couplets.17

It didn’t always take wielding scissors to remake texts. [slide 18]18 Since many early books were not sold bound, buyers could choose how and when to bind them, sometimes bringing together multiple works within one binding. In this case, a seventeenth-century reader created a compilation of verse works, ranging from narrative poetry to love lyrics and epigrams and binding together five printed works and one manuscript. As the work done by Paul Needham on Caxton and Jeffrey Todd Knight on Renaissance sammelbände shows, sometimes the books early modern readers created are surprisingly different from what we expect.19

One of the reasons for our surprise is that we don’t often encounter early modern works in the same manner in which early modern readers would have. [slide 19] Our notion of what is important, of the difference between print and manuscript, of what readers do with texts, has been shaped by the assumptions and practices of collectors and curators in the nineteenth century. The questions that I asked about whether we consider a specific work print or manuscript are not questions without important implications for researchers. In most libraries, print and manuscript are cataloged separately, often with different curators in charge and with different policies and grants in place. Early modern readers might not have differentiated between print and manuscript, but nineteenth-century caretakers of those books did, and often remade them according to their notions of what was appropriate, assumptions that continue to govern how we treat and encounter early books.

[slide 20]20 As we just saw, binding together different works into a single volume was one way early readers made and encountered their books. It was a particularly handy way of treating plays, which were slim works that didn’t always need to be bound individually. This list shows the contents of one such volume, a collection of thirteen plays and interludes housed in one binding. But this is no longer how we encounter this volume. [slide 21]21 In 1961, these plays were separated from each other and rebound individually. The binder’s note in the back of each play records what it once was; the original table of contents remains with the first play in the collection. But the sense of the plays as a gathering is gone. [slide 22]22  What we see are slim, tidy playbooks, not the heterogenous collection they once were.

[slide 23]23 Sometimes we are lucky and we catch a glimpse of what was. [slide 24]24 But more often we encounter early works through the interventions of later assumptions about what they were, our view of the seventeenth century shaped by nineteenth-century lenses. What we think we know about early print—that it is distinct from manuscript, that it is fixed and stable—are mistaken lessons that obscure the ambiguities and complexities of what print was and can be.

 

  1. Gutenberg indulgence, Mainz 1454, John Rylands Library, Manchester; http://enriqueta.man.ac.uk:8180/luna/servlet/s/l023vj [↩]
  2. Indulgence for the benefit of the confraternity of St. James of Compostella printed by Wynken de Worde (1498), Cambridge University Library. shelfmark Inc.Broadsides.0[3552]; http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/inc/history_37.html [↩]
  3. Summons from the Exchequer to the Fee farmer of the Priory of Caxford, 1622, Folger Shakespeare Library. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/dkfy3d [↩]
  4. [Miscellaneous Public Documents.] Noverint universi per presentes nos [manuscript] printed not after 1677. Folger Shakespeare Library. http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/2h197c [↩]
  5. The idea of print spurring on manuscript through an increased use of forms comes from Peter Stallybrass, who has given numerous talks on the subject (see, for example, his 2013 Miraeus lecture. [↩]
  6. Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon, as translated by John Higden and edited by William Caxton, 1482, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=161534 image by Sarah Werner: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wynkenhimself/8422379404/ [↩]
  7. Aristotle, Ethics, 1562. Sixteenth-century Annotated Books: A Collection of 30 editions in 18 volumes (Warboys, Cambs.: Roger Gaskell Rare Books, n.d.). The books in this catalog are now owned by Houghton Library. [↩]
  8. John Smith, A Generall Historie of Virginia, 1624, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=164134 image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wynkenhimself/8421544841/ [↩]
  9. Richard Flecknoe, Epigrams, 1673, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=134774 images of book: http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/dp4552 [↩]
  10. For more on the mistakes in that book, see my blog post “Correcting mistakes” in The Collation. [↩]
  11. John Gower, Confessio Amatis, 1483, Folger Shakespeare Library. record: http://shakespeare.folger.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=161517 set of images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wynkenhimself/sets/72157628802792177/ [↩]
  12. ibid [↩]
  13. ibid. [↩]
  14. Bible. N.T. Gospels. English. Authorized. 1630. [Little Gidding concordance] [Little Gidding, 1630.] Vault A 1275.5. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45243608 [↩]
  15. John Gibson, commonplace book, 1650s, British Library (BL Additional MS 37719). For more on Gibson, see Adam Smyth’s “‘Shreds of holinesse’: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England” English Literary Renaissance (2012) 452-81. [↩]
  16. Smyth’s work on fragmentary texts and cut-ups has influenced my own sense of the practice. See his “Shreds of holinesse” (cited above) and “‘Rend and teare in peeces’: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England” in The Seventeenth Century (2004) 36-52. [↩]
  17. For more on this book, see Heather Wolfe, “Dye to live, live to dye” The Collation April 2012; http://collation.folger.edu/2012/04/dye-to-live-live-to-dye/. [↩]
  18. British Library C.39.a.37. For more on this volume, see Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Making Shakespeare’s Books: Assembly and Intertextuality in the Archives” Shakespeare Quarterly 60 (2009): 304-340, esp. 335-38 [↩]
  19. Paul Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner: An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton (Library of Congress, 1986). In addition to the two Knight works cited here, see his forthcoming book Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (U Pennsylvania P, 2013). [↩]
  20. Table of contents on front flyleaf of Folger STC 4965; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/t1nq03; for more on this volume see Jeffrey Todd Knight, “Fast Bind, Fast Find: The History of the Book and the Modern Collection” Criticism 51 (2009): 79-104. [↩]
  21. Binder’s note in the back of Folger STC 11473.2; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/i1bd29 [↩]
  22. Binding for STC 11473.2; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/4054tw [↩]
  23. A sammelband of early plays; Folger STC 4619; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/bi7cg8 [↩]
  24. A view of some of the Folger’s Shakespeare quartos; http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/66x7b7 [↩]

pretty picture penance

It’s been much longer since I’ve written a proper post here than I meant for it to be. In my defense, I’ve been pretty busy over at The Collation, running the show and writing my own contributions. There’s lots of good stuff over there, including a whole world of manuscript exploration that I don’t do here; check out Heather Wolfe’s and Nadia Seiler’s interesting posts if you like that sort of thing (and if you don’t think you do, browse anyway and you’ll learn that you do!). And if you’re looking for advice on using Folger digital resources, like searching Luna and the power of permanent URLs and Mike Poston’s new tool, Impos[i]tor, the tooltips series is for you.

In any case, this post isn’t meant to be an advertisement, but to do a pretty picture penance: sharing some great book images, even if I don’t have the time to talk in any detail about them.1 So . . .

Voila! This is a lovely blue and red penwork initial letter from an edition of Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum libri IV, printed in Basel in 1482. (Here’s your catalog record; all photos, through cell-phone crapola, can be clicked and embiggened.)

Here’s another initial, where you can see how delicate the penwork is. I love how the details drape down the column of text:

Not all the initials in the text are so fancy. Here’s a nice, albeit plain, red one:

But that’s not the most interesting detail in this photo. Look again. And then look at this one:

And this one:

You know what I’m talking about, right? They’re the impressions left behind by the finding tabs that were once there! If you look again at the three photos, you can see how they line up, each new section marked slightly below the previous one, so that the tabs stick out, all easy to find and to use to jump to the beginning of a section. Here’s a detail from the first tab:

And here’s the verso of that leaf:

You all know how I like it when I see details of physical features of books that are normally hidden:

Because the front board is loose, you can see some of the knots of the sewing structure holding the binding and the book together.

And what else do I love? Details that show something about the printing process:

At first glance, that looks simply like ink bleeding through from the other side of the leaf. But did you notice any bleedthrough on any of the other pages? That’s some heavy-duty paper. No, that isn’t bleedthrough, it’s offset! In the words of John Carter, offset is

The accidental transfer of ink from a printed page or illustration to an adjacent page. This may be caused either from the sheets having been folded, or the book bound, before the ink was properly dry, or from the book being subsequently exposed to damp. Offset from engraved or other plates on to text, and from text on to plates, is commoner, and also much more disfiguring, than offset from text on to text. Text offset occasionally provides valuable bibliographical evidence, since it usually derives from the very earliest stage in the assembly of the printed sheets into a book. And some of the neatest deductions have been made from the offset, not from one page to another of an individual copy, but from the offset on a page of one book from printed sheets belonging to another which happened to be stacked with it at the printer’s.

So there you go, a whole bunch of my favorite things, all in one book!

  1. Ok, so this isn’t really penance, given how much fun it is for me to do this, but I couldn’t resist the alliteration. [↩]

an armorial binding mystery

Another book from my students’ projects, this one with a curious binding:

At first glance, what you might see is an armorial binding: a binding in which an owner has stamped his arms in gold tooling. No big deal, really; there are plenty of books like those in libraries. But this one is more complicated: there are TWO coats of arms, one stamped on top of the other. Here’s a close-up of the center of the binding, where the arms are:

And here’s the picture again with one of the two arms outlined:
A close-up of the top portion, in which you can see that there are two crowns juxtaposed and the heads of two faintly visible supporters:
Looked at in raking light, you can see that the supporter on the right looks like an antlered stag:

And the supporter on the left looks like a horse:

I can’t make out the details of the arms themselves, but you can see the motto on which the supporters are standing:

My student deciphered it as “fidei coticula crux” and that looks right to me.

If you look closely at that last picture, you can see that the arms with the supporters and motto was done second: its lines cross on top of the other arms. And if you look at the original arms, you might recognize them as James I’s arms: there’s the harp on the bottom left of the shield, the lions and fleur-de-lis quartering the right, and the motto “honi soit qui mal y pense” circling the shield. (This gives you some sense of the arms, though that harp is a bit excessive.) (And I should point out, although it’s surely obvious by this point, that I’m not particularly knowledgeable about arms and that my vocabulary choices might not be quite precise. But this is why we need help.)

So whose coat of arms is on top of James’s? Is it possible it’s James’s favorite, George Villiers, aka the first Duke of Buckingham? According to the Burke I was looking at, not only was the family’s motto “Fidei coticula crux”, but he used the supporters of “a dapple grey horse” and a stag. But, as I said, I’m not super confident of my ability to deal with armorial and geneological crap, so does someone want to confirm or deny this? I’m drawn to it because if someone WAS going to stamp their arms on top of the king’s, wouldn’t it be great if it was him? (If you’re not familiar with this period, you might want to know more about Villiers; this link should, I hope, get you into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography‘s article on him for the next few days [though April 27th]. If it no longer works, well, this would be a good time for you to do some scouting about on your own! If you know of some reliable open access information about him, please leave it in the comments. Or go edit the Wikipedia page, which could use improvement!)

I should say something about what book this is, I suppose. It’s John Smith’s 1624 The generall historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles. It’s a very interesting book, and there’s some great marginalia in it, but that will have to wait until another post, especially since my student is still in the middle of her research! But the arms thing is tricky to decipher and the Folger catalog record identifies only one of the two crests (James’s, of course), so I wanted to lend her a hand in getting it sorted out. And I certainly didn’t want to lead her astray with my desire for it to be Buckingham! So please leave me a note telling me what you think and I’ll pass it on to her.

O rare!


I’ve been looking at another book that a student was working on. It’s unprepossessing on the outside, just a small, worn brown leather binding, with the remains of ties that have long since disappeared. But the book is much more interesting on the inside. Take a gander at some of the photos I snapped (I did these with my cell phone, so they’re not super high quality, but they’re not too bad either):

 

 

 

The whole book is like this, covered with marginalia. There are manicules, trefoils, asterisks, notes more and less extensive. It’s a seriously used book.

And do you know who used this book so seriously? He inscribed his name right there on the title page:

O rare Ben Jonson! And while Jonson’s book when he used it might seem unprepossessing, later owners certainly valued it for its association and house it accordingly, in its own locked box.
There’s much more to be said about Jonson and his books but I wanted to get these pictures up before they burned a hole in my pocket. You can find the catalog record for this book here and I’ll try to follow this up with a bit more Jonsonia.
(Oh, I suppose many of you got the title of the blog post, but just for clarification’s sake: Jonson is buried in Westminster Abbey under a plaque that reads, “O rare Ben Johnson”–and yes, that’s how it’s spelled on the plaque, even though Jonson didn’t spell his name that way.)

updates and welcomes


I’ve been swamped recently, so just a quick post with some updates and links:

First, thanks to Lorem Ipsum’s suggestion on my last post about the catalogue entry for James’s Essayes of a prentise, the Folger’s record has now been updated! The author is, of course, James I, as that is the standard form of his name, but the note has been clarified to read “By James VI of Scotland and (later) James I of England, whose name (Jacobus Sextus) is given in an acrostic on A1r.” So thanks to Lorem Ipsum and to Deborah Leslie!

As for the binding, which I suggested might be a presentation copy from James to Burghley, my friend Adam points out that Burghley’s library was rebound in the early 18th century, so surviving presentation copies to either Burghley or his son Robert Cecil, are quite rare. My student had conjectured that this book was not part of Burghley’s library past the mid 1600s since it doesn’t appear in the 1687 Bibliotheca Illustris, which record the contents of the Burghley library put up for sale. (I have to say that I haven’t actually looked myself to verify whether this book is included or not, so if this is a mistake, feel free to let me know!)

That’s it for the updates. The image accompanying this post is a timely one: it’s a 1331 mahzor, or High Holiday prayer book, that has just been placed on exhibit at the Israel Museum. It’s from the Jewish community in Nuremberg, and amazingly survived not only the 1499 expulsion of Jews from Nuremberg, but the Holocaust and the ravages of the twentieth century. You can read more about it at Tablet magazine. Shanah tovah to those of you celebrating the new year!

And a special shout-out to my fellow blogger, Mercurius Politicus, who has finished his dissertation and welcomed his new son!

Here’s to new starts of all sorts–and to–maybe!–more timely blogging in the future.

UPDATE: Ooops! I forgot to issue congrats to bookn3rd, who has also finished dissertating and has joined the ranks of working stiffs. Welcome!

essayes of a prentise


Another example of a student project today, this time at the intersection of politics and poetry as well as of England and Scotland: King James’s The Essayes of a prentise, in the divine art of poesie. This book is a collection of poems and translations by James, as well as “A treatise on the airt of Scottis Poesie.” Published in 1584 in Edinburgh, James was then King James VI of Scotland, and net yet King James I of England, a title he didn’t take until 1603, although the book is cataloged by the STC as authored by James I. (The STC record is the source of the Folger’s catalogue entry for the book; there are standardized rules for all cataloging, of course, but it seems to me misleading to think of this work as being by the King of England, rather than an aspirant to that title.)

There are some great things about this book, including the fact that it’s written in a Scots dialect. Are you surprised that James would write a treatise on poetry? He addresses that very surprise in his preface:

“ze may marvell paraventure, quhairfore I sould have writtin in that mater, sen sa mony learnit men, baith of auld and of late hes already written thairof in dyvers and sindry languages: I answer, That nochtwithstanding, I have lykewayis writtin of it, for twa caussis.”

If you want to know the two causes, you’ll have to read the essay yourself. (By the way, I’ve regularized the u/v usage, as I typically do in transcriptions for this blog, and I’ve reproduced the long “s” form as our modern “s”, but you’ll have to provide your own accent to make sense of the rest of it.)

As you might imagine, part of James’s aim is to argue for the particularity of Scottish learning: the rules for English versification are not and should not be the same as those for Scottish. Just as poesie is also politics in the treatise, so it is throughout the book, which proceeds wtihin a network of Protestant politics, from the Huguenot who printed it while in exile in Edinburgh to the substance of the works.

The book itself has a wonderful sense of presence, including lots of white space and even blank pages (a sure sign of luxuriousness, given the cost of paper). The layout of these poems is a lovely example of early shape poetry:


One of the most interesting aspects of the book isn’t what is in it, but what binds it:


That’s a beautiful, and unusual, orange vellum binding, with tooling, including the name of its owner, W. Lord Burghley. According to research done for a Folger exhibition, this binding is nearly exact that of another copy of this book, one which is tooled with the name “W. Lord Hunsden”. The existence of the two bindings, plus the face that this binding does not resemble the bindings of other books Burghley owned, suggests that it could be a presentation copy by James VI to Burghley–bringing us back to the intersection of poesie and politics.

It was the binding that brought my student to this book–Michael came across it by browsing through Hamnet for “tooling” and “ties”. But, as we’ve seen before, when you start looking at a book from one point of view, others open up, so that he moved from physical object, to text, to social and networks–none of which, of course, are separate from each other.