Tagged: talks

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 [↩]

where material book culture meets digital humanities

Below is the text from a talk I gave at the Geographies of Desire conference, held at the University of Maryland on April 27-28. Almost everything that I said there is something that I’ve said here before, so faithful readers won’t find much that’s new. But I promised I’d stick it up here, so here it is! If you’re simply looking for the set of links to the resources I mentioned, you can find those on Pinboard. I haven’t included all of my slides here, but you can find those here. I haven’t included all my ad-libbing either, but you would have had to have been there for that.

“Where material book culture meets digital humanities”

Discussions about early modern books and digital tools have tended to focus on one of two responses. One of the first things that people focus on is the amazing access that digital tools have given us to early modern works. Instead of schlepping from library to library across the globe—a series of journeys that many scholars could not easily afford—we can access nearly all extant early modern printed English books, and many continental ones, from our desktops. Thanks to EEBO (Early English Books Online), ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), and Gallica (the digital collection of the Bibliothèque nationale), among others, digital facsimiles are available for us to consult and download entire works from the early modern printed world.

There are limitations, of course. One is the quality of the images. EEBO consists of digital facsimiles not of early books, but of microfilms of early books. As a result, it doesn’t always capture what we might want it to. Here we see an image from EEBO of the second quarto of Hamlet.

opening from a Folger Q2 Hamlet, as in EEBO

You can see one column of text on each page, along with a whole bunch of other junk. [slide] Here’s the same page opening from the Folger’s reproduction of that book:

same opening, same copy, in a high resolution image from the Folger

There’s still ink bleeding through from the other sides of these leaves, but it’s a bit easier to sort out what’s what.

Then there’s this, another image of not-quite visible ink mixed in on the page:

opening from a 1557 Primer, as in EEBO

But this is an instance of red ink not reproducing clearly.

same opening, in a high-resolution image from the Folger

And because the red isn’t visible, you miss in the EEBO copy what’s really a great mistake on this page, the moment where the phrase “of the five corporall joyes of our Ladie” is really a correction for the mistaken “joyes of our lorde.”

never mix up your lord and your lady

My favorite EEBO moment, however, is this one: the title page of a 1612 elegy mourning the death of Prince Henry.

the title page of STC 23576 as in EEBO

This is how the image appears in EEBO; but this is how the image appears in their reproduction of the second state of this edition.

title page of STC 23577 as in EEBO

Do you see what happened? It’s a mourning book, and it was printed on pages bordered in black and sometimes entirely in black, with a xylographic title page, that is, a title page in which white lettering appears on a black background. But when the microfilm was being processed, someone clearly didn’t believe what they were seeing and they assumed it was a mistake, that it should be black on white, and so they reversed the negative, producing a facsimile of a book that doesn’t exist.

There are resources that provide higher quality digital facsimiles of early modern books and that, unlike EEBO and ECCO, are free to use. The Folger has digitized many works in their entirety, including all copies of the pre-1642 Shakespeare quartos and a couple of first folios. The British Library has digitized some of their collection, cover-to-cover, as have many other libraries, including that of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, University of Oklahoma, and the Bavarian State Library. The English Broadside Ballad Archive now includes some high-resolution color facsimiles, and the Universal Short-Title Catalogue (covering all books printed in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries) includes links to digital copies from many European libraries.

Digital tools have, without a doubt, increased our access to facsimiles of early modern books. If I can sit in my study in Rockville and study Erasmus’s 1516 translation of the New Testament by looking at a copy currently held in Basel, that’s a win.

If one dominant way of thinking about digital tools and early modern books is in terms of access, another has been in terms of text. Access is about text of course—what we’re gaining access to is the ability to read texts. But there are also digital tools that don’t simply read texts, they distant read them. EEBO-TCP can make research a bit easier if you’re interested, say, in sassafras and want to find instances of it being discussed. In the right hands, you can do much more interesting types of computational analysis that can reveal things that would be difficult to see otherwise. Recent work by Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope, for instance, reveals that genre is marked not only in terms of plot, but also linguistically at the sentence level—histories and comedies and tragedies are genres that are grammatically inflected.  That seems like a win to me, too.

These tools that I’ve just described rely on the ways we have always read books, albeit with increases in distance or speed (you can read a book held at the Folger Shakespeare Library from your study in Gdansk; you can analyze the texts of the entire Shakespeare corpus in a matter of minutes rather than years). I want to take this moment to wonder what new possibilities we might imagine. How might we use digital tools to look at texts differently? How might we use digital tools to represent texts differently? Can we move away from reading text to studying the physical characteristics of text, characteristics that can reveal important information about the content of the text and the cultural and historical creation of the artifact?

The multi-spectral imaging done by the Lazarus team of the Archimedes Palimpsest gives a hint of how digital tools might let us see things that would otherwise go unseen. The Archimedes Palimpsest is a 13th-century Byzantine prayerbook written over a 10th-century manuscript containing writings of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, as well as multiple other works from various periods. Using multi-spectral imaging, along with other tools, the team was able to recover visual access to much of the earliest writings in the book. Google took the project’s dataset and made a “Google book” of the earliest state of the codex resulting in a digital reproduction of a book that exists, but is not visible to us just by looking at it.

One recent paper about the use of densitometers to study levels of dirt on the pages of medieval manuscripts suggests that we can learn about book usage through analyzing how and where dirt is distributed across a book. It might seem obvious that pages that are used more often will be dirtier, and that is in part what the author found, but the use of the densitometer revealed that it’s more complicated than we can always assess with the naked eye. The paper’s author, Kathryn Rudy, points out, for example, that she had assumed that two different patterns of dirt on an opening came from two different users, but the densitometer’s analysis suggested that the patterns were similar enough that they were likely to have been made by the same person—perhaps they held the book in different ways suitable for different prayers. The analysis also pointed out that even books that retain visible marks might have been cleaned by modern owners to such a degree that the dirt is no longer viable as an analytical tool, something that might help us think about the changes books undergo during modern ownership.

Studying the distribution of dirt is just the beginning of how we might begin to use technology to help us understand books in new ways. A colleague in Antwerp reports that German books held in Belgium smell different than German books held in Germany. The cause lies in how the paper was treated: paper needs to be treated with sizing agents so that it handles ink properly (instead of absorbing ink, ink sits on the surface of the paper and dries there, producing crisp and legible marks). His speculation is that books in Germany were sized in a multi-stage sequence, with the last step taking place after the book had been printed, perhaps as part of the binding process. Books that remained in Germany after they were printed went through this final process; books that were shipped outside of Germany seem to have missed that final stage, resulting in a noticeably different smell because of their different chemical properties. If this is the case, the smell of early German books can help scholars understand not only the physical acts of making paper and books, but can help us trace the circulation of early printed works. Using computers to analyze the smells of books and software to map those smells could help researchers learn how books were made and sold and used.

We could also use new technologies to explore other the other senses we use when handling books. The feel of paper (or parchment) is another element of books that has more to offer than nostalgic fetishizing: the thickness, color, and pliability of paper can tell us about the costs of production, in part, but also give insight into the experience of using the book and its intended audience. How might the characteristics of feel be represented in digital media? Could a 3D printer replicate samples of different paper qualities? Could we project back from a paper’s physical characteristics today to how it might have appeared and felt when it was made?

The three-dimensional aspects of paper extend beyond what can be felt by human touch. The process of making books in the letterpress period—and the process of writing on leaves of paper and parchment in all periods—is a process of putting pressure on the paper, leaving behind an indentation on one side of the leaf and an extrusion on the other side of the leaf. In most cases, the indentations are visible because the instrument causing them (type, woodblock, stylus) left behind ink markings. In other cases, there are indentations without ink, sometimes caused when two sheets of paper are accidentally run through the press, sometimes left behind when the bearing type used to even out the blank spaces in a page leaves behind blind impressions.

Folger STC 7043.2, leaf F1v under raking light (click to see this image compared to one under normal light)

There are also the indentations left behind during the papermaking process from the wires and frames used in the forms. Once we start thinking in these terms, we can find more topographical variations on leaves of paper: wormholes, dog-eared corners, holes left from stitches sewing gatherings and the binding together, plate marks from engravings. What might we learn from visualizing books not as texts to be read but as topographical maps?

Another option would be to use digital tools to visualize the context of books, to encounter them not in isolated codices, but in libraries. This 360° panoramic view inside the Strahov Monastery’s Library in Prague lets you see not only the entire room, but to zoom in to see the titles of the books on the shelves. This is primarily a pretty picture, but imagine if this technology was married to something that let you look at catalog records of the books that you’re seeing, or to switch from catalog records to a view of a book on a shelf.

screenshot of a zoomed out view of Strahov Library
titles on books at the far end of the library

If we could use digital tools to estrange ourselves from our books, to defamiliarize what we think we know, we might learn something new about how they were made and how they are used. People keep pointing out to me that we are in the incunabula age of digital texts. We are. And that’s what makes it so exciting.