SHARP NEWS
Winter 2009
Volume 18, Number 1
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
Libros de Emblemas y obras
afines en la Biblioteca
Universitaria de Santiago de
Compostela
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
7 – 11 July 2008
This exhibition was originally conceived to
accompany the Sixth International Conference
of the Society for Emblem Studies that took
place at the Universidad de La Coruña in 2002.
For security reasons, the exhibition was only
open for three days and lacked a catalogue. Six
years later, the eighth congress of the
Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro offered
the opportunity to remount the exhibition
and to prepare a proper catalogue, under the
direction of Sagrario López Poza.
The phenomenon to which this exhibition
is devoted traces its origin to the publication
in 1531 of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber,
which was widely imitated throughout
Europe through the eighteenth century. In its
canonical form, an emblem contains an
inscriptio, a cryptic title; a pictura, an engraving
that illustrates the title; and a subscriptio, an
explanation that describes the picture and
offers a commentary, generally moralizing, on
it. In other words, the emblem book unites
image and word to transmit a message of a
generally moralizing character.
Much has been written about emblems of
late, so that it would have been an easy matter
for López Poza simply to have gone into the
stacks of the Biblioteca Universitaria in
Santiago de Compostela and pulled out the
usual suspects. It is much to her credit that
she resisted this temptation, deciding instead
to devote considerable thought and study to
some of the problems surrounding
scholarship on the emblem. Unlike many
genres in early modern literature, this one
appeared suddenly and unexpectedly, with the
publication of Alciato’s emblem book. As
López Poza shows, however, Renaissance
culture linked word and image in a number of
other similar ways. Once born, the emblem
book achieved instant popularity, but it in turn
affected the development of several later genres
as well. By situating the emblem book within
the parallel phenomena that gave it life and
tracing the influence it had in later cultural
activities, López Poza has created an unusually
interesting exhibition.
Among the precursors of the emblem
book was the group of 3,700 epigrams that
circulated as the Greek Anthology and the
collections of loci communes (commonplaces)
made during the Renaissance, both of which
provided ready-made titles for emblems.
Illustrated books like the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili, published in 1499 by Aldus Manutius,
along with the Imagines of Philostratus the
Elder and Younger and the Descriptiones of
Callistratus, got readers accustomed to a tight
link between word and image. Egyptian
hieroglyphs also contributed to the creation
of emblems, in that authors like Giovanni
Pierio Valeriano and Athanasius Kircher saw
the hieroglyph as a symbol that also hid a
profound truth in need of decipherment. The
Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, along with the
mythology manuals of Lilio Gregorio Gyraldi,
Natale Conti, and Vincenzo Cartari, presented
images and stories from antiquity that, like
emblems, were understood to have
philosophical and moral content. Coins,
perhaps surprisingly, worked in a similar way:
Roman coins often presented a portrait of an
emperor on one side accompanied by an
allegorical or mythological composition on the
other, accompanied by an inscription, and
beginning with Pisanello, Renaissance
medallists worked toward an even more unified
presentation, linking their medals to the origin
and development of the emblem. Finally, we
should not forget the fable, especially the ones
derived from the Corpus fabularum of Aesop,
which circulated throughout the Renaissance
in illustrated editions that linked word and
image around a moral observation, often
focused conveniently on a maxim or sententia.
Readers familiar with these genres, as
López Poza suggests, doubtless found
Alciato’s Emblematum liber less of a shock than
we might imagine if we continue to view it in
isolation. Alciato began with the epigrams, in
this case taken in part from the Greek
Anthology, and it was actually the printer,
Steyner, who proposed adding illustrations
to make the book more saleable. The resulting
emblem book proved most useful indeed for
presenting and reinforcing a lesson, but it was
difficult and expensive to produce, requiring
in each case an author who could select and
organize the material, an artist who could
illustrate what the author conceived, an
engraver who could make the plates, and a
printer or publisher who could finance the
edition. Paris and Lyon became the centers of
publication, with Guillaume Rouillé and
Christophe Plantin among the most active
printers. The Jesuits found the new genre
especially useful, as much for combating
Protestantism as for teaching, with a good
number of school occasions being celebrated
by emblems as well. Emblem books also
proved useful to authors wishing to make
political statements, like Diego Saavedra
Fajardo, whose Idea de un príncipe político
christiano representada en cien empresas entered
the seventeenth-century debate about
whether a Christian prince could adopt
Machiavellian methods. Once established,
emblem books proved useful in a number
of allied fields, as López Poza shows. The
... / 3
CONTENTS
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
DANKY FELLOWSHIP 2009
SUMMER INSTITUTES
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
CONFERENCE REVIEWS
CALL FOR PAPERS
BOOK REVIEWS
IN SHORT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1
2
2
5
6
9
10
23
24
2 e WINTER 2009
SHARP NEWS
EDITOR
Sydney Shep, Wai-te-ata Press
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand
editor@sharpweb.org
REVIEW EDITORS
Fritz Levy, Book Reviews – Europe
University of Washington, WA, USA
reviews_europe@sharpweb.org
Gail Shivel, Book Reviews – Americas
University of Miami, FL, USA
reviews_usa@sharpweb.org
Simone Murray, Book Reviews –
Asia/Pacific
Monash University, Melbourne, AUS
simone.murray@arts.monash.edu.au
Lisa Pon, Exhibition Reviews
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, TX, USA
reviews_exhibs@sharpweb.org
Katherine D. Harris, E-Resources Reviews
San José State University, CA, USA
kharris@email.sjsu.edu
BIBLIOGRAPHER
Robert N. Matuozzi
Washington State University Libraries
Pullman, WA 99164-5610 USA
matuozzi@wsu.edu
SUBSCRIPTIONS
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Journals Publishing Division
PO Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211–0966
membership@sharpweb.org
e
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SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
DANKY FELLOWSHIP 2009
SUMMER INSTITUTES
Book History & Media History
In honor of James P. Danky's long service
to print culture scholarship, the Center for the
History of Print Culture in Modern America,
in conjunction with the Wisconsin Historical
Society, is again offering its annual short-term
research fellowship.
The Danky Fellowship provides $1000 in
funds for one individual planning a trip to
carry out research using the collections of the
Wisconsin Historical Society (http://
www.wisconsinhistory.org). Grant money
may be used for travel to the WHS, costs of
copying pertinent archival resources, and living
expenses while pursuing research here. If in
residence during the semester, the recipient will
be expected to give a presentation as part of
the colloquium series of the Center for the
History of Print Culture in Modern America
(http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/).
Preference will be given to: proposals
undertaking research in print culture history;
researchers from outside Madison; research
likely to lead to publication. We strongly
encourage applicants to speak with the WHS
Reference Archivist ph: 608-264-6460; email:
askarchives@wisconsinhistory.org before
applying for a grant. We are happy to help
identify potential collections of which you may
not otherwise be aware. There is no
application form. Applicants must submit:
1) A cover sheet with name, telephone,
permanent address and e-mail, current
employer/affiliation, title of project, and
proposed dates of residency.
2) A letter of two single-spaced pages
maximum describing the project and its
relation to specifically cited collections at the
society and to previous work on the same
theme, and describing the projected outcome
of the work, including publication plans. If
residents of the Madison area are applying,
they must explain their financial need for the
stipend.
3) Curriculum vitae.
4) Two confidential letters of reference.
Graduate students must include their thesis
advisor.
Applications are due by 1 May. The
recipient will be notified by 31 May.
Please mail applications to:
Christine Pawley, School of Library and
Information Studies, University of WisconsinMadison, 4234 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N.
Park St., Madison, WI 53706 USA.
American Antiquarian Society
22 – 26 June 2009
What does it means to ‘do’ book history
in the digital age? Does it matter that
nineteenth-century printed texts are today
increasingly encountered as digital images and
searchable data? This seminar will explore
points of contact between book history and
media history. Focusing on the efflorescence
of popular print in the period from 1830 to
1870, our aim will be to better understand
the circulation of culture under conditions
of social and technological change. The
seminar will be led by Lisa Gitelman and
Meredith McGill. Gitelman is Visiting
Associate Professor of the History of Science
at Harvard University and author of Always
Already New: Media, History, and the Data of
Culture. McGill is Director of the Center for
Cultural Analysis at Rutgers, the State
University of New Jersey, and author of
American Literature and the Culture of
Reprinting, 1834-53. Further information
about the seminar is available from http://
w w w. a m e r i c a n a n t i q u a r i a n . o r g /
sumsem09.htm.
America Engages Russia, 18801930: Studies in Cultural
Interaction
14 June – 3 July 2009
This NEH Institute will bring together
twenty-five university teaching faculty,
curators, and senior bibliographers with
nationally-recognized session leaders to
consider, investigate, and reflect upon the
implications of the various forms of cultural
engagement between the United States and
the Russian Empire/Soviet Union from the
late nineteenth century to the beginning of
the 1930s. During the Institute, participants
will have the opportunity to work with many
of North America greatest repositories of
Americana and Slavic and East European
materials, among them the NYPL and
Columbia University Libraries plus museums
and archives in the Greater New York
Metropolitan area. A full description of the
program, and details of the application
process are available at: www.nypl.org/
research/chss/slv/2009_neh.pdf.
WINTER 2008 f 3
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
... / 1
Mondo simbolico (1653) of Philippo Picinelli,
for example, was the most popular of a series
of compilations or encyclopedias that were
organized and indexed as aids for rhetorical
invention and widely used by speakers,
preachers, academics, and poets. Printers’
marks did not generally have all the parts of
an emblem, but as Aldus Manutius’s anchor
and dolphin with its accompanying motto
semper festina lente shows, they functioned
according to the same basic logic. And public
festivities of the early modern period, especially
the triumphal entries of princes, were
accompanied in turn by emblems which could
then be reproduced in an accompanying book
that functioned as a guide to the symbolic
and ideological value of the artistic works
commissioned for the occasion.
The exhibition was accompanied by a nicely
produced, ninety-eight-page catalogue which
is available from the Servizo de Publicacións
of the Universidade de Santiago de
Compostela (www.usc.es/spubl). One always
says that even the best catalogue cannot
substitute for actually seeing an exhibition,
and that is unfortunately true here as well.
The catalogue does a good job of repeating
the narrative content that made the exhibition
special, but instead of dividing the 149 books
that López Poza selected among the relevant
topics (e.g., coins and medals, festivals), as was
done in the display cases, it lists them in
alphabetical order by author, leaving the reader
to figure out where each book fits into the
narrative. But that is a small quibble. López
Poza produced an unusually thoughtful
exhibition that mixed significant new
observations into a well-organized synthesis
of much previous scholarship, and this comes
through in the catalogue as well. Anyone with
a serious interest in emblem books will find
the catalogue well worth having.
Craig Kallendorf
Texas A&M University
e
Imprentit: 500 Years of the
Scottish Printed Word
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
27 June – 12 October 2008
In 1508, having been granted a license by
King James IV, Walter Chepman and Androw
Myllar set up Scotland’s first printing press, in
Edinburgh’s Cowgate, in order to print a book
of prayers, psalms, and hymns for the use of
priests. 2008 marked the 500th anniversary of
the first printing in Scotland, and in
commemoration, the National Library had
organized an exhibit designed to investigate
no less than the ‘role of print in the life of
Scotland, 1508-2008.’
The exhibition room is just inside the
National Library’s main entrance. Visitors first
pass through a hall with panels charting the
library’s history and describing some recent
acquisitions. Imprentit: 500 Years of the Scottish
Printed Word is housed in the next room, large
and T-shaped. The exhibit begins with a display
on how and why printing first came to
Scotland, explaining how William Elphinstone commissioned Chepman and Myllar to
print a book ultimately known as the
Aberdeen Breviary, and the exhibit displays the
only known copy of this work, as well as
unique copies of other books and pamphlets
from Chepman and Myllar’s press, including a
humorous poem called “The Flyting of
Dunbar and Kennedy,” which visitors can hear
read aloud. No works printed in Scotland
survive for the period 1511 to 1540, but
thereafter Scottish printing became more firmly
established and the exhibit features examples
of other early printed Scottish books, including
the 1540 Acts of Parliament.
Around the walls near the top is an A-to-Z
featuring the names of notable people, places,
and things associated with the print culture of
Scotland. A number of hands-on components
punctuate the exhibit, including a desk where
visitors are instructed on how to design a logo
for a publishing house, and a table where
children can draw illustrations.
But the most significant and interesting
elements of the exhibit are the large glass cases
each examining the influence of print culture
on a different aspect of life: education, leisure,
religion, politics, literature, children’s books,
and science. Diverse printed items from the
past five hundred years reveal the way print is
ever-present in our lives and shapes our
history. The religion section discusses the role
of the publication of the 1637 Book of
Common Prayer in fomenting the religious
dissent that turned violent during the
Covenanting period. Further, it features a
pulpit at which visitors can hear a sermon
preached and published in Dundee in 1853, in
which the preacher links a recent cholera
epidemic in the area to God’s anger at the
community’s loosening morals. Along a wall,
one panel discusses the ability of print to
preserve yet distort oral culture, citing Robert
Burns’s mother’s famous reaction to Walter
Scott’s ‘transcriptions’ of her traditional
songs. The literature section includes a sofa
and a table piled with books by Scottish
authors or with Scottish settings. Elsewhere,
one panel displays a timeline history of
Scottish publishing, tracing the history of
major houses including Oliver & Boyd and
Chambers. The corresponding display case
features a diverse set of books published in
Scotland, from influential science works like
J.H. Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source
of the Nile (1863) to recent best-sellers like
Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002). By contrast, a
display of locally printed, small-circulation
fanzines shows how print publication has
long created underground communities.
The exhibit no doubt raises awareness of
this important anniversary for Scotland, and
is full of fascinating individual items from
Scottish printing history. Yet the broad scope
of the exhibition necessarily limits its depth.
Since literally thousands of items from the
National Library’s vast holdings might have
been included, the items that have been
selected seem slightly haphazard. Print has
become so integral to life that to chronicle
five hundred years of Scottish printing history
is to chronicle five hundred years of Scottish
history in general. And perhaps this is the
point.
The end of the exhibit features desks
devoted to two related projects. Firstly there
is the Book Crossing Corner. The Book
Crossing project [http://www.bookcrossing.
com] allows readers to share books by leaving
them at designated locations or elsewhere. The
books at this spot have Scottish authors or
were published in Scotland, but the shelf was
empty during both my visits. Another table
features the Scottish Readers Remember project,
at the Scottish Archive of Print and
Publishing History Records [http://
www.sapphire.ac.uk], and includes audio
testimonials from Scots born before 1945 on
their experiences with reading.
More information about the exhibition can
be found at <http://www.nls.uk/events/
printing-exhibition>.
Ruth M. McAdams
University of Edinburgh
4 e WINTER 2009
Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years
of Children's Books
The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois
27 September 2008 – 17 January 2009
The Newberry Library acquires children's
books, not as a genre unto itself, but as a
necessary and desirable complement to its rich
holdings for adult readers in subjects across
the humanities. The result is an exhibition,
co-curated by Jenny Schwartzberg and Paul F.
Gehl, that combines traditional themes in the
study of children's literature with several
unexpected perspectives on the interaction of
children and books throughout history.
The exhibit opens with a selection of Latin
texts from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries
chosen to make the point that there were few,
if any, texts designed for beginning readers in
the Middle Ages. A child might be handed a
manuscript book containing the Psalms, for
example, and told to pick out all the A’s on
the page: a challenging task, made more so by
the often tiny lettering used. The occasional
instructional text was likely to be based on a
title originally for adults, as with the sixteenth
century De re vestiaria libellus. This abridgement
of a longer work was prepared by a wealthy
family's tutor to provide simplified Latin
readings for his student.
The use of literature to teach moral values
and ethical behavior, rooted in the oral
tradition, continued strongly into the
manuscript and printed book eras. Newberry
holdings range from fifteenth-century
manuscripts of Aesop's fables, to tiny
illustrated storybooks from the American
Anti-Slavery Society, to the Girl's ethical reader,
published in Shanghai in 1912. The stern
rectitude of nineteenth-century moral tracts is
even reflected in many works marketed directly
to children, such as the colorful, single-sheet
illustrated stories known as ‘Épinals’ after the
French printing house that originated them.
One such in the Newberry exhibition, The
sailor-boy's dream, tells the tale of a lonely,
homesick sailor boy, whose bittersweet
memories of a happy family life contrast
sharply with the hard work and harsh
discipline aboard ship. At the end, we learn
that the boy's father handed him over to the
ship's captain as a punishment for laziness.
"In vain he deplored his fault, it was too late!
Sail away, poor boy!"
The expression ‘children's literature’ usually
denotes works for children, rather than works
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
by children. This assumption is challenged in
a section of the Newberry exhibition
examining the child as creator of texts, images,
and music. Publication necessarily involves
adults, so it is highly likely that children's
creativity was co-opted for adult agendas.
Examples offered in the exhibition include
Three lessons for the harpsichord or piano forte,
composed by Elizabeth Weichsell, a child eight years
of age (published about 1775 and heavily
promoted by Elizabeth's parents) and Granma,
proa a la historia, published 200 years later in
Cuba.
The latter work uses Cuban children's
drawings about the 1959 coup to illustrate a
historical text. The Cuban Revolution was
sixteen years in the past by the time Granma
was published, so the young artists' views had
to reflect school lessons or family stories, not
personal experience. The use of children's
drawings rather than photographs, however,
endows the historical commentary with a
wealth of emotional associations: innocence;
the tragedy of children suffering from political
violence; perhaps a suggestion that revolution
is justified to secure the well-being of children
and their families.
Another book, Sailor Tommy, involves
children as the targeted audience, and,
unexpectedly, as protagonist as well. Its
appearance during World War I (with a
companion title, Soldier Bob) suggests it was
intended to convey to young children what
Daddy was doing far away in the Navy.
Presented as an example of books as toys, the
16-inch hardcover is die-cut in the shape of its
hero and could stand on a shelf like a doll:
ready for battle, with a cutlass on his shoulder
and a pistol in his belt. Strikingly, Sailor
Tommy is not a teenager or even close. He is a
toddler: round face, wide blue eyes, and
rosebud lips pursed as if obediently preparing
to give Grandmother a kiss.
But Tommy is a full participant in the war
at sea. Ships explode in the cover image, and
the text speaks of gun-boats and submarines.
"Twas Boom! at night and Boom! by day /
Before we chased the boats away, / The enemy
who sailed the sea / And wrecked the boats
of boys like me." Mothers reading this little
story to their small boys must have dreaded
the wars they would fight when grown.
Artifacts of Childhood offers many valuable
insights into the interaction of children and
books throughout history, and the way books
(perhaps unwittingly) document the social
history of childhood.
A checklist of books in the exhibit is
available at <www.newberry.org/exhibits/
images/Artifacts%20of%20Childhood%20
Checklist.pdf>.
Ruth Ann Jones
Michigan State University Libraries
e
Breaking News: Renaissance
Journalism and the Birth of the
Newspaper
The Folger Shakespeare Library
Washington D.C., USA
25 September 2008 – 31 January 2009
In October of 2008, The Christian Science
Monitor – the Monday-through-Friday daily
newspaper founded by Mary Baker Eddy –
announced that it would end its century-old
tradition of print publication and shift to an
online-only format, becoming the first
national American newspaper to do so. The
paper’s decision is hardly surprising given the
competition from multiple sources of
information and the longstanding decline of
printed newspaper circulation. And although
neither has signaled any intent to abandon
print, both The Washington Post and The New
York Times have experimented for years with
the information they provide online, adding
and tinkering with such digital features as
audio, video, blogs, sophisticated interactive
graphics, and – most recently – social
computing functions mimicking such widelyused sites as Delicious <www.delicious.com>,
LinkedIn <www.linkedin.com>, and
Facebook <www.facebook.com>. Clearly,
readers interested in news at the beginning
of the twenty-first century find themselves
on unstable ground: while readers’ appetite
for news is unlikely to diminish, the forms
and practices through which news will be
gathered, distributed, and consumed are
bound to change.
Lest we think these contemporary issues
are anything new, this admirable exhibition,
curated by Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey,
provides much-needed historical context. The
two historians have organized an impressive
selection of materials from the Folger’s
archives to illustrate the developments that
brought about the birth and evolution of
the newspaper in England. The several
sections of Breaking News not only follow a
roughly chronological order but also address
a variety of issues related to material form,
WINTER 2008 f 5
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
content, government restrictions and
manipulations, and market demands. As in
our own increasingly digital ecosystem of
media, the news in the early decades of
widespread print was made available in a
constantly shifting array of media.
Among the earliest documents on display
are personal letters reporting the latest to the
addressee, including a 1606 letter from James
Montagu to Elizabeth Hardwick Talbot,
Countess of Shewsbury Whitehall, in which
he shares with her London’s court gossip and
political developments. Before the advent of
the print newspaper, these letters were the
most efficient means of spreading the news,
but they persisted even after the newspaper
had been established, in part because they were
less likely to incur the wrath of censorious
government officials. Printed news in these
pre-newspaper decades included Tudor-backed
propaganda, scandalous anti-Catholic gossip,
and single-sheet broadside ballads that
wrestled with issues of the day. News
publishers experienced varying degrees of
regulation, interference, and even competition
from government officials, who quickly
recognized the power that newspapers held
over public opinion. Breaking News features a
regulatory proclamation from Queen
Elizabeth, in both a printed copy and a signed
manuscript, a pairing which not only
demonstrates the investment of the
monarchy in controlling sources of
information. The two copies also provide a
telling example of a transitional moment in
English book history as manuscript and print
practices begin to alter in response to each
other: the printed copy of the Queen’s
proclamation had the advantage of possible
wide distribution but the singular manuscript
was carried the authority of the crown.
A particular strength of the exhibit is the
detailed explanation – and documentary
evidence – of the decades preceding the debut
of the now-familiar genre of the newspaper.
Not until 1620 did the first proper example
of this genre appear in England, imported
from Amsterdam and containing news from
the continent. The decades that followed were
marked by many experiments in form and
content in various attempts to respond to –
or perhaps create – a reading public with an
appetite for news. These experiments went
on for decades before the 1702 appearance of
the first newspaper to publish successfully a
daily issue: The Daily Courant. By this point,
readers had become accustomed – “addicted”
is the curators’ term – to staying informed
about a variety of topics domestic and global,
serious and satirical. London’s coffeehouse
culture had in the meantime grown to such a
degree that sustained and intense
conversations by townspeople were fueled by
the latest news and strong doses of caffeine,
leading to the later development of what
Jürgen Habermas famously (and controversially) theorized as the eighteenth-century
public sphere.
A much-needed reminder of the material
objects that brought about these sometimes
overly abstract-sounding developments is
provided by a replica of a Gutenberg-era press
displayed in the exhibition hall corner. The
only possible quibble is that this exhibit of
early modern information technology and its
impacts would have been effectively
supplemented with contemporary information technology, ideally in the form of a
companion website. However, this is a minor
complaint regarding an otherwise superb
scholarly achievement.
An exhibition catalogue ($29.95, ISBN
9780295988733) is available for purchase from
the Folger shop website: <http://
w w w. f o l g e r . e d u / s t o r e / s i t e /
product.cfm?id=775E4DF3-1CC4-74E01C17ACCF727DFE9D>.
George H. Williams
University of South Carolina Upstate
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Congreso Internacional. Lectura y
Culpa en la Europa del siglo XVI. En el
450 Aniversario de la publicación del Índice de
libros prohibidos de Valdés (1559). San Millán de
la Cogolla, 6-8 de marzo de 2009. Organizan:
Cilengua, Instituto Biblioteca Hispánica,
Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura,
Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Poética
Europea del Renacimiento. http://www.lasemyr.es/?p=64
International Congress: Reading and
Sin in Sixteenth-Century Europe. On
occasion of the 450th Anniversary of the
Publication of the Valdes’ Index of Prohibited
Books (1559). San Millán de la Cogolla (Spain),
6-8 March 2009. Organized by: Cilengua,
Instituto Biblioteca Hispánica, Instituto de
Historia del Libro y de la Lectura, Universidad
Autònoma de Barcelona, Poética Europea del
Renacimiento. http://www.la-semyr.es/
?p=64
Book Networks and Cultural Capital:
Space, Society & the Nation. Fifth annual
Conference on the Study of Book Culture,
sponsored by the Canadian Association for
the Study of Book Culture / Association
canadienne pour l’étude de l’histoire du livre
– at Carleton University in Ottawa – during
the annual Congress of the Humanities and
Social Sciences – 26 and 27 May 2009. For
further information on CASBC/ACEHL,
please consult our website: http://casbcacehl.dal.ca/.
Réseaux du livre et capital culturel :
territoire, société et nation. Cinquième
colloque annuel de l’Association canadienne
pour l’étude de l’histoire du livre / The
Canadian Association for the Study of Book
Culture (ACÉHL/CASBC), dans le cadre du
congrès de la Fédération canadienne des
sciences humaines, qui aura lieu à l’Université
Carleton à Ottawa, les 26 et 27 mai 2009.
Inaugural Conference on Intellectual
Property (CIP) will be held on 12-13 June
2009 at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY,
and will include keynote addresses by Laura
M. Quilter, M.L.S., J.D. and painter Joy
Garnett. The purpose of this conference is to
explore intellectual property, in a crossdisciplinary context, as both a concept and a
reality relating to the professional fields
whose concerns intersect in understanding its
essence and implications. CIP papers and/or
abstracts will be included in a conference
proceedings, and selected essays may be
published in a proposed collection for a peerreviewed press. For information, please see
the conference website at www.iona.edu/cip.
Book & Media Science: Research,
Researchers, and Communication. An
international Conference dedicated to the
200th anniversary of Lithuanian book science
at Vilnius University, 22-23 October 2009.
Organised by the Institute of Book Science
and Documentation at the Faculty of
Communication of the Vilnius University &
the Nordic-Baltic-Russian Network on the
History of Books, Libraries and Reading
(HIBOLIRE). Languages of the Conference:
Lithuanian, English, Russian. Simultaneous
translation will be provided. For more
information, please contact: Prof. habil. dr.
Domas KAUNAS domas.kaunas@kf.vu.lt;
Assoc. prof. dr. Ausra NAVICKIEN
ausra.navickiene@kf.vu.lt or the departmental
administrator Iveta JAKIMAVICIUTE
iveta.jakimaviciute@kf.vu.lt
6 e WINTER 2009
CONFERENCE REVIEWS
Networks of Design
University College Falmouth, Tremough
Campus, Penryn, Cornwall, UK
3 – 6 September 2008
Cornwall lies on the periphery, or so said
Alan Livingstone, the Rector of University
College Falmouth in his speech of welcome
to the delegates of the 2008 Annual
International Design History Conference. The
statement, which bemused the many
Antipodean delegates present, prefaced a small
explanation of the presence and the state of
the University itself as a site and as a learning
institution. Cornwall's 'peripheral' status was
accorded attention from EU policies to
advance the fortunes of the less economically
and socially advantaged places within the
Union's sphere of interest. As a consequence
of this special attention a university had
recently been built in Falmouth to serve the
needs of young local populations who might
otherwise leave the area for their tertiary
education, and thus almost inevitably become
lost to Cornwall. It was also designed to foster
the growth of an economy that included
tertiary education, and all that that brings with
it, in the cultural landscape of the county. Reimaging in Cornwall: networks and narratives, an
exhibition of design at The Poly (the old
Polytechnic Institution) reinforced the notion
of a Cornwall in the process of re-designing
its place in a twenty-first-century world.
The theme of the conference, Networks of
Design, took its impetus from a move away
from consideration of the objects of design
and the activities of the designer towards the
many and varied interactions, mediations and
agencies that inform design. It was a conference
that, as its organisers Fiona Hackney, Caroline
Pullee and Viv Minton explained, was
‘determinedly international’ and indeed it was,
not just including delegates from all parts of
the world, but embracing the many disciplinary
activities that feed into design theory, process
and praxis. The three keynote speakers were
emblematic of this international and
interdisciplinary approach. The first to deliver
his keynote speech was the eminent
philosopher/anthropologist turned historian/scientist, Bruno Latour, whose
development of actor network theory inspired
the conference theme. Ironically, he chose to
speak, not of actor network theory, but of
design, about which he professed to know
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
very little. This proved not to be the case as he
proceeded to deliver an address entitled “A
cautious Promethea? A few steps toward a
philosophy of design (with special attention
to Peter Sloterdijk)” that adroitly explored the
term ‘design.’ He was interested in how design
works both materially and symbolically and
how its meaning has extended beyond the
modernist notion of form and function in
the production sense to a term which
encompasses every aspect of life, human and
otherwise. This notion is, of course, part of
the actor network theory in which every entity
in the mix has agency and a role to play in the
whole.
The second keynote speaker was the design
journalist, activist and researcher Jeremy
Myerson who traced the development of the
twentieth-century-designed workplace and its
ability to control and constrain in “Power of
the network: Transitions in working life from
Taylorist time and motion to networked
space.” Beginning with the early Taylorite office
which was designed to regulate, oversee and
control activity in the workplace and, curiously,
was often depicted from an elevated vantage
point, he wandered through the spaces of the
commodious and light-enhanced offices of
the post-war period. Myerson's exploration of
how power structures are facilitated through
the design of office spaces extended to those
of the present, where the control is
maintained, not through specific physical
arrangements of employer and employed, but
in a climate of work being done increasingly at
home, through digital networks.
Dutch designer and co-founder of Droog
Design, Jan Konings, the third and final
keynote speaker, presented a view of what
might be the future for the design of spaces
for living in “Infill attractions.” His stance was
ethical, his view universal and his approach
inclusive. The modern high-density, concrete
Dutch urban landscape became, under his
imagined direction, a medium-density living
space in which the indoors spilled out into the
outdoors in which families might gather,
children might play and gardens might grow.
Anxious to include all sectors of society, he
told of projects where the interior spaces of
derelict buildings were ‘tented’ to afford clean,
comfortable and warm living spaces for the
homeless, and public seating was designed to
accommodate the habits of the young to
deposit themselves anywhere but on the seats
of benches. It was a little difficult to see quite
how these ideas might fit within a broader
bureaucratic and pragmatic vision of urban
design, but they do belong to a peculiarly
Netherlandish and utterly charming brand of
social utopianism.
The conference proper was categorised
under thematic strands that included ideas,
things, technology, people and texts. It is the
latter that I assume would be of interest to
this audience and thus to which my attention
will now turn. In keeping with what has
become known as the 'visual turn' and what
is now being explored as the 'material turn'
in, among other disciplines, textual studies, I
will choose presentations that deal specifically
with these two approaches to texts. There were
over two hundred delegates to the conference
and thirty-four in this strand. At the time I
chose to attend those presentations that
interested me and here I have selected those
among them which I feel represent the
diversity of interests that were contained in
just this one strand.
In the strand, ‘The visual in texts,’ art
historian Marilyn Cohen explored the ways
in which the 1930s American movie poster
acted beyond its function as an advertisement
to entice people into theatres and became a
text through which a number of sociological
phenomena might be read. For Cohen, these
movie posters became the ubiquitous face of
American technological modernity,
underscoring the new visualities that emerged
through industrial cinematic production. Her
presentation “Reading the American movie
poster or the movie poster as text” attempted
to override perceptions of them as
anonymous, aggressive and conventional
advertising material and to understand them
as commentaries that spoke of their time and
place. They were, and can be read as,
affirmations of social and contractual
arrangements such as the star system; their
internal narratives encouraged and embedded
a growing contemporary consumerism; and,
she argued, they created the symbolic
Hollywood out of a small Los Angeles
suburb. They acted, in other words, as agents
for social change, for cultural formation and,
through their ubiquitous presence in the
visual landscape, reflected and reinforced a
contemporary view of modern American life.
Also assuming a speaking role for visual
texts, design researcher Jacqueline Naismith
examined how New Zealand holiday
magazines and publicity material were
complicit in the transformation of particular
towns into tourist destinations. In “A world
in miniature: Travel networks and the
mediation of New Zealand as a holiday
destination in the 1950s,” she argued that New
WINTER 2008 f 7
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
Zealand became increasingly a part of the
international tourist network through
changing travel modes and shifting views of
what constituted leisure activity and that this
could be demonstrated in the publicity material
designed to promote New Zealand. Naismith
analysed the imagery contained in the material,
identifying the rhetorical strategies and style
codes that worked to position local places as
holiday destinations.
In the strand, ‘The material in texts,’ a
number of papers addressed the notion that
the materiality of texts contained knowledges
no less expository than their visuality or,
indeed, their textuality. Archivist Anja
Tollenaar is project co-ordinator of the Central
Register of Design Archives in the
Netherlands. The lack of one central and secure
home for these archives has led to a coordinated and collaborative project involving
a growing number of institutions which
Tollenaar explained is crucial to the continued
survival of the archival material. In her paper,
“The Central Register of Design Archives as a
network of artefacts, metadata and cultural
heritage institutions,” she argued that its
survival was, in turn, crucial to the history of
design in the Netherlands as it embodies, not
the products of design, but their processes.
They comprise preliminary sketches,
correspondence with other parts of the design
network, prototypes and all the traces of the
how and why of design that are not evident
in the what of design. Everything is relevant.
Were this material to be lost or simply made
unavailable to research, then a great deal of
the narrative of design in its contemporary
context would also disappear, including much
of what Latour argued as the extended
comprehension of design as a touchstone.
Reinforcing Latour's view of design as an
extended or limitless term, William Macauley
took his audience into outer space via the
NASA space programme. His paper,
“Inscribing scientific knowledge: Interstellar
communication c. 1959-1977, with particular
reference to design of NASA's Pioneer plaque
and Voyager record,” explored the necessarily
interdisciplinary relationships between the
methodological and analytical tools of the
visual, and scientific and technology histories
in the work of scientists, technicians, and
artists. They were responsible for the graphical
inscripted messages on the artefacts attached
to Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft of the 1970s.
Macauley positioned this interdisciplinary
approach as one which might assist
understanding of material practices and
artefacts that were designed to communicate
with extraterrestrial intelligence. Extending
beyond the simple, didactic scientific drawings
designed to support textual messages, these
material messages, comprising images and
non-linguistic symbols, were calculated to
initiate a scientific dialogue.
In summary of this stand, I might also
add that there were discussions on the textual
or narrative possibilities in the 1930s movie
Metropolis, Japanese furniture drawings,
landscape architecture, vivisectionists'
websites, digital databases and my own paper
which analysed the visual in the texts of
nineteenth-century emigration advertising.
The strand exemplified a conference of
impressive diversity and, while some papers
appeared to neglect the historical dimension
of design, all enthusiastically engaged with the
theme of the networks implicit in the design
process.
The social life of the conference was equally
diverse: a trip up the River Fall to the famous
Trelissick Gardens was preceded by a tour of
Falmouth's new Maritime Museum and
followed by a visit to the ZedShed, a small
eco-community in Penryn was my choice for
the first day. A highlight was a celebratory
reception for the joint anniversary of the
Design History Society and the Journal of Design
History held at Pendennis Castle. Sitting high
on a promontory overlooking the entrance to
the Fall River basin, the castle provided
spectacular views over Falmouth for some and
a few Rebecca moments for others. A splendid
conference in a stunning location and one that
reminds us that design is now a term that
resides in a world where increasingly, everything
is designed, or perhaps re-designed. That
might even include nature if one takes into
consideration the present need to control, or
re-design, phenomena like climate change.
Patricia Thomas
Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
e
The Culture of Print in Science,
Technology, Engineering and
Medicine (STEM)
University of Wisconsin, Madison
11 – 13 September 2008
This conference, sponsored by the Center
for the History of Print Culture in Modern
America, focused on the intersection of print
culture, communication and science. In his
introduction to the conference, Professor Greg
Downey of the University of WisconsinMadison School of Library and Information
Studies and Department of Journalism, set
the tone for the subsequent presentations by
noting that the artifacts of print culture and
social processes are central to the study of
science, technology, engineering and medicine
in America. Print is essential to the past in
these fields, but even the technology which
purports to replace print still draws on
metaphors from the world of print. A print
culture of laboratory notes, gray literature, and
other materials continues to lie behind the
digital surface of the sciences. In a broader
sense as well, science study is about charting
knowledge in all its forms.
The conference demonstrated the scope
and variety of the world of the print culture
of science. Sessions were wide-ranging
including: Engineering Education & the
Home; Popularizing Science in Print &
Popular Medical Texts; Promoting the Medical
Profession; Science & Literature; Government,
Commerce, & International Communication;
Representations of the Body & Nature; New
Technologies & Graven Images; Technological Fascination; Rural Networks; Libraries;
Political Controversies; Old Information &
New Technology; The Natural World in Print;
Mathematics – Code and Text.
Presenters and participants meeting
around these topics came from the fields of
history, the humanities, information studies,
social sciences, medicine, nursing, art, mass
communication, agriculture, engineering,
mathematics, and others in a fruitful crossfertilization of ideas which provided a sense
of energy and engagement for the sessions.
Conference presentations included such
subjects as the process leading to displacement
of folk names in ornithology by scientific
nomenclature, the colorful reception history
of the X-ray, the cultural commentary of
classification, including issues surrounding
fiction about science, a variety of approaches
to promoting science in a number of settings,
issues surrounding children and science
through time, and a variety of approaches to
science in rural areas in the United States and
Canada.
Several sessions dealt with the popularization of science, and it was this subject
which prompted lively discussions and
exchange of ideas. In this context, participants
were able to consider the print culture of the
twentieth-century environmental movement
... / 8
8 e WINTER 2009
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
... / 7
along with related topics such as the intersection
of philanthropy and advertising, and the
fraught subject of scientists as popularizers
of science and the fictional treatment of science
and scientists. Examples of these issues in
earlier times included such formats as medical
catalogs as well as the popular reporting on
new developments in the past, such as the Xray. Contemporary changes in publication
patterns for popular science, and issues
surrounding engineering education were also
part of this stream. Political controversy
surrounding scientific and technological
controversies including disease, terrorism and
eugenics provided another perspective on the
popularization of science.
Aspects of networking and coding
provided themes which moved through
several sessions. Sessions included discussion
of code and coding as both unifying and
distancing features in contemporary scientific
and technological environments, while other
presentations dealt with early networks such
as those provided by bookmobiles and by the
movement of scientific materials across the
ocean in the baggage of immigrants.
The organizers anticipate publishing
selected papers from the conference in the
University of Wisconsin Press series "Print
Culture History in Modern America." The
volume will be edited by professors Rima
Apple, Greg Downey and Stephen Vaughn.
Barbara Walden
University of Wisconsin-Madison
e
50 Years since
l’Apparition du livre
University of Helsinki, Finland
16 October 2008
The Department of History at the
University of Helsinki and the Nordic-BalticRussian Network on the History of Books,
Libraries and Reading arranged a workshop
“50 Years since l’Apparition du livre” to
commemorate the publication of Lucien
Febvre’s and Henri-Jean Martin’s eminent
work on book history and to create discussion
on the current traits of book history. The
workshop gathered around thirty book
historians from five countries and various
academic institutions and libraries.
Prof. Laura Kolbe (University of Helsinki)
welcomed participants, remarking how book
history has recently emerged as a significant
research field in Finland. The first guest
speaker, Prof. Simon Eliot (University of
London), began with introducing Febvre’s and
Martin’s work. He concentrated on showing
Febvre’s and Martin’s far-sightedness:
although book historians remember in the
first place the emphasis on the social and
economic aspects of the print culture,
l’Apparition du livre includes such visionary
point of views as stressing the continuity
between manuscript and print cultures, or
seeking to break the European limits and write
book history in global settings. During the
latter part of his presentation, Eliot
concentrated on explaining the development
of the field. As book history is an emerging
research domain, Eliot did not limit himself
to scientific results only but included also the
institutional developments of book history
into the presentation.
The second guest speaker, Prof. Emer.
Margareta Björkman (Mälardalen University),
presented views on the history of reading.
Björkman concentrated on tracing the changes
in reading habits which took place during the
eighteenth century. She outlined tentative
plans for studying core or even ideal reader
groups, such as educated elites, peasants,
women and children. At the same time, she
aimed to create a holistic view which would
not be limited by over-determined social
classifications.
Three Finnish speakers presented local
researchers’ views on book history. Jaakko
Tahkokallio (University of Helsinki) spoke
about the importance of studying manuscript
cultures as a part of the book history tradition.
He emphasized how l’Apparition du livre does
include a chapter on the late medieval
manuscript culture, written by Marcel Thomas,
and that researchers of the medieval
manuscript culture have for decades
concentrated on some of the central book
history issues, such as the study of
distribution networks.
Dr. Jessica Parland-von Essen (Swedish
Literature Society in Finland) introduced
research about studying book collections. She
emphasized the diversity of the theme:
although researchers might concentrate on
studying book collections that exist still today
as complete entities, many of them have in
fact their own individual past that reveal
histories of various earlier collections. Similarly
the histories of book collections are available
through secondary sources.
Finally, Dr. Jyrki Hakapää finished the
workshop with a presentation on the Finnish
book history tradition. In the ninteenth
century, the emphasis of the national culture
on studying the Finnish folklore and language
and bringing the Finnish language up to the
same level with other vernaculars, meant the
study of books and writings in Finnish began
early. Aside from the bibliographic tradition,
certain Finnish literature researchers and
historians picked up continental influences
and studied the history of reading or the
history of literature from the social point of
view. As a result, these articles and books from
the era between the two world wars carry
similar themes and ideas of Febvre’s and
Martin’s book, whose views and visions were
not ‘invented’ in the 1950s, but basically were
results of Febvre’s and Marc Bloch’s annalist
approach from the 1920s.
After the workshop participants visited the
National Library of Finland. Dr. Sirkka Havu
showcased the current exhibition of the
library “Passion for Books” and the recently
received Reenpää Collection, which includes a
good amount of rare Finnish printed works.
All in all, the workshop emphasized the
visionary aspects of Lucien Febvre’s and
Henri-Jean Martin’s title. It became evident,
that researchers of book history are
substantially still working on fulfilling their
visions and following their paths.
Jyrki Hakapää
University of Helsinki
e
Réseaux et circulation
internationale du livre:
diplomatie culturelle et
propagande 1880–1980
Université de Lausanne, Université de
Fribourg
13 – 15 November 2008
Over the past decade, a community of
French-speaking scholars has sprung up
around the topic of the book as an object of
international relations. Thriving on the
comparisons made possible by the
culminating national book history projects,
this group, under the esteemed guidance of
Jean-Yves Mollier (Université de Versailles
Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), François
Vallotton (Université de Lausanne), Claude
Hauser (Université de Fribourg), Jacques
Michon (Université de Sherbrooke), Martyn
Lyons (University of New South Wales), and
WINTER 2008 f 9
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
others, has organized five conferences since
2000 to investigate the internationalization of
the book trade and the cultural dynamics of
books that cross political boundaries. The
latest meeting occurred in Switzerland, at the
universities of Lausanne and Fribourg, on the
topic of books as deliberate instruments of
cultural diplomacy or propaganda in the latenineteenth and twentieth centuries.
What is at stake in the exportation of a
book? Immediately after the Second World
War, Switzerland undertook a large-scale
distribution of books to Germany. Was this
action an altruistic measure of reconstruction
offered by a German-speaking neighbour, or
an ideological buffer calculated to halt the
westward expansion of communism? Luc
van Dongen (Université de Lausanne) probed
this question in a memorable paper that
encapsulated as well as any the delicate
meaning of ‘cultural diplomacy.’ Whether the
term is a euphemism for ‘propaganda’ or a
designation of a fairer sort of cultural
exchange depends on the power differential
involved and one’s perspective. Another case
from the same period is The European
Inheritance, a history launched by the Allies
with the goal of uniting war-ravaged Europe
within a common narrative of Western
progress. Edited by Ernest Barker, it was
imagined as objective anti-propaganda, but
in fact the project soon foundered on crosscultural misunderstandings that exposed its
biases, as Leslie Howsam (University of
Windsor) showed, and the book never
reached its intended audience. The Vatican’s
international anti-Bolshevik novel prize of the
mid-1930s, described by Stéphanie Roulin
(Université de Fribourg), appears in hindsight
to have been mere propaganda, although a
number of German and Swiss writers of the
time used it to air sincere concerns on the
paradigm of the nearby Soviet Union. Swiss
books in the United States between 1940 and
1960, by contrast, seem harmless cultural
diplomats, spreading neutral images of
mountains and Swiss horns. As Thomas
Kadelbach (Université de Fribourg) explained,
however, this ‘neutrality’ was itself designed
to present Switzerland as an autonomous,
stable land during the Cold War – one that
belonged to the Atlantic world rather than
the Sino-Russian, and one that was open for
business with the United States. The character
of a nation is perhaps most easily perceived
by or projected to a foreign audience.
Indeed, foreigners can be instrumental to
the making of a national culture. The
canonization of Balzac, for example, is
inextricable from the American market. This
is the argument of Thomas Loué (Université
de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), who
has investigated the crucial role of the critic
Ferdinand Brunetière in recuperating Balzac,
an author whose value was disputed in the
late-nineteenth century. Brunetière’s literary
biography appeared in the grand series,
Frenchmen of Letters, published by J.B.
Lippincott of Philadelphia, and it was this
foreign event that rendered irrevocable Balzac’s
fame. If early twentieth-century cases such as
this were somewhat fortuitous, the interplay
between domestic culture and the foreign
market has since been increasingly rationalized
and consciously deployed. One outcome is
the policy of ‘nation branding,’ the strategy
of organizing a country’s information
industries (tourism, publishing, research,
education, etc.) under the umbrella of a single
attractive logo. Maxi Freund (Universität des
Sarrlandes) discussed the strikingly successful
brand, “Germany – Land of Ideas.”
The international dynamics of the Arabic
book were outlined in an excellent paper by
Franck Mermier (Institut français du ProcheOrient). Here, as in the West, piracy and
censorship have created industry booms and
intellectual gradients, most notably in the case
of Lebanon, which emerged as a centre of
Palestinian and pan-Arab culture after 1965
because of its liberalization of publishing.
Other fine papers treated other regions of the
globe, and I was constantly impressed by the
insights that scholars working in other
languages bring to the field. If as a
phenomenon the book is indisputably
international, the scholarly gaze that tracks it
must be equally so. The Society for the History
of Authorship, Reading and Publishing will
only benefit from increased contact with nonAnglo-American groups such as this.
Eli MacLaren
Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
e
Moscow calling
The Oxford International Centre for
Publishing Studies, at Oxford Brookes
University, and Moscow State University of
Printing Arts notched up another first when
the new Master’s in Publishing opened its
doors to a 50-strong cohort in Moscow on 1
November 2008.
The two institutions have been working
closely together over the past four years to
develop the award, which gives the graduating
student an MA in Publishing from Oxford
Brookes and its equivalent from Moscow State
University of Printing Arts. The new
qualification will significantly increase the
student’s employability both in Russia and
beyond.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Library & Information History
(formerly Library History)
Throughout history, libraries have been
the repositories of knowledge of all kinds.
More recently, this has broadened into a
history of information as we have entered
the information age, with historians
reconsidering the fundamental concepts and
manifestations of knowledge and
information in society.
Library & Information History is a fullyrefereed, quarterly journal publishing articles
of a high academic standard from
international authors on all subjects and all
periods relating to the history of information,
in its broadest sense, and on the history of
libraries and librarianship world-wide. Library
& Information History is a journal for anyone
interested in the social, cultural and intellectual
history of information, books, libraries and
all forms of knowledge in society.
The editorial board invites scholars to
submit papers to their learned journal that
conform to the usual standards of publishing
within the journal. Papers relating to all aspects
of the journal's aims and scope are welcome,
but the editorial board are very interested in
developing particular themes within the
journal, areas of interest are: the theory,
development and methodology of
information history; the history and origins
of the information age; the cultural and social
role of the library and/or librarian in the past;
the role of the library and/or librarian in times
of war or conflict; the history of the intellectual
organisation of knowledge; the future
directions of Library History as a discipline.
Contributions and other correspondence
should be sent to the Editor, Dr Toni Weller
via email: tweller@dmu.ac.uk. Please see the
website for submission guidelines and Notes
for Contributors:
www.maney.co.uk/journals/notes/
libraryhistory
10 e WINTER 2009
BOOK REVIEWS
Eve Tavor Bannet, ed. British and American
Letter Manuals, 1680-1810. 4 vols. London:
Pickering and Chatto, 2008. 1712p. ISBN-10:
1851969187; ISBN-13: 9781851969180.
£350.00/$595.00 [cloth].
This four-volume set traces the history of
letter manuals published in Britain and
America during the long eighteenth century,
providing facsimiles of manuals as well as
prefaces by Eve Tavor Bannet, author of
Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and
Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820
(Cambridge, 2005). Bannet starts the first
volume with a general introduction that
establishes the significance of the letter
manual, a genre that influenced conduct and
the culture of letters. She argues that these
manuals reveal conventions of eighteenthcentury letters, thereby enabling us to
recognize departures that create meaning and
commonplaces that are more opaque than we
might assume. As conduct literature, these
manuals are equally illuminating in their
attention to the manners and morals of social
groups rarely covered in other types of conduct
books (1:xi-xii).
This set is excellent in a number of ways,
starting with the organization. Bannet arranges
the letter manuals to illustrate broad shifts
over the century, devoting each of the four
volumes to one kind. The first volume consists
of “Academies of Complement, 1680-1805”;
the second volume focuses on “Secretaries,
1687-1760”; the third volume is “Complete
Letter-Writers, 1740-1795”; and the final
volume has “The Art of Correspondence,
1770-1810.” In each volume, Bannet begins
by explaining what is distinctive about the
particular kind of manual as well as how it
relates to the other kinds in style, audience,
and objective. For instance, the “Academies
of Complement” reflect an older, courtly
tradition in modeling compliments between
courtiers and extravagant love-letters between
gentlemen and ladies, but they increasingly
show the interests of the developing
Secretaries. The “Secretaries” address men and
women in a wider range of ranks and provide
model letters concerning social, professional,
and domestic matters. Bannet illustrates her
points about generic change through her
selection of popular manuals that reached a
broad, transatlantic audience.
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
Within each volume, Bannet demonstrates
further transformations by organizing the
letter manuals geographically: each volume
contains facsimiles of manuals published in
London followed by American and/or
Scottish adaptations. Bannet’s concise sectional
introductions highlight how successive
editions of manuals significantly abridge or
reorder letters. A manual published in
London might therefore appear in a different
region with a new narrative, moral emphasis,
or local appeal. For instance, the Glasgow
edition of The Complete Letter Writer reworks
the original London edition to address local
anxieties about trade following the American
War of Independence (3:176). Throughout
each volume, Bannet’s remarks create a larger
narrative about letter manuals while teaching
readers to be more sensitive in their own
interpretations of particular texts.
Bannet supplements her lucid
introductions with brief notes at the end of
each volume and a good index at the end of
volume four. The only weakness in the editing
of this set is the occasionally unclear transition
between letter manuals. This shift, particularly
between excerpts from texts included in a
single section, is indicated by a small symbol
that blends too well with the facsimiles (see,
for example, the shift between Complete Letter
Writers 1:13-14). However, this minor
problem is greatly outweighed by the
strengths of this outstanding set, a set that
will be useful for anyone interested in the
culture of letters, conduct books, and
transatlantic connections.
Caroline Breashears
St. Lawrence University, New York
e
T. H. Barrett. The Woman Who Discovered
Printing. London: Yale University Press, 2008.
xiv, 192p. ill. ISBN 0300127286. $25.00
Can the discovery of printing be attributed
to the only woman who ever ruled China as
emperor (690-705CE)? For some this may
bring up memories of the media controversy
surrounding Al Gore’s alleged claim of having
‘invented’ the Internet. Even though the title
suggests otherwise, Barrett’s contention is
much closer to the claim that Al Gore actually
made. The former Vice-President said in an
interview in 1999 that he “took the initiative
in creating the Internet” and hoped thereby
to underscore his early support as a
congressman for a technology that had already
been invented [“Transcript: Vice President
Gore on CNN's 'Late Edition'”; March 9, 1999.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/
stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/
transcript.gore/]. Barrett similarly sets out to
demonstrate that the few archeological
remains and the snippets of textual evidence
we have for the use of printing in seventh
through ninth-century China, and East Asia
more broadly, suggest that the Empress Wu
Zetian played a central role in the exploitation
and dissemination of a technology that had
its antecedents in the decades and centuries
preceding her rule.
In the first half of this slim volume
(chapters 2-5) the author examines the
political, religious, technological and
environmental factors that may have
contributed towards the use of printing for
the mechanical reproduction of texts on a
large scale in the seventh and eighth centuries.
The early invention of paper and its use for
recordkeeping within the bureaucracy from the
second century onwards meant that Chinese
artisans had at their disposal a material highly
suitable to bear inked impressions when
compared to the materials in use elsewhere in
the medieval world. Interestingly, Barrett
contends that the efficiency of paper and
manuscript copying may also have been a
deterrent to the adoption of print.
Techniques for carving and impressing seals
and for taking rubbings off inscriptions
incised on hard materials such as stone and
jade were already used for the reproduction
of longer texts by the late fifth century, but
then and in later centuries manuscript copying
on paper allowed for the large-scale
reproduction of texts (in tens of thousands
of copies) at an affordable cost.
The author traces the main impetus behind
the mass production of texts in China to the
Buddhist reconceptualization of the written
word as a relic: a material artifact that embodies
the presence of the Buddha and his teachings.
The multiplication of written artifacts
propagating Buddhist teachings became a
means through which to assist others in the
pursuit of enlightenment and to show
concern for the rebirth of the deceased, all
practices that contributed to the accumulation
of karmic merit. Historians have long
recognized the special significance of
Mahayana Buddhism in the early history of
printing and book culture. To this general
acknowledgement the author adds that the
WINTER 2008 f 11
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
specific circumstances of the late sixth century
made the reproduction of texts a more pressing
concern and thus contributed to the demand
for a technology that could satisfy this demand
more adequately. Relying on recent work on
the world history of climate change, he argues
that worsening climate conditions contributed
to anxieties regarding the disappearance of the
Buddhist faith. Such anxieties may have
inspired Sui and Tang emperors in the late
sixth and early seventh centuries to imitate
the model of the Indian ruler Ashoka who
allegedly had 84,000 stupas established
throughout the Indian peninsula in an effort
to preserve and spread the Buddha’s teachings
in the third century BCE.
What is the evidence for the case that Wu
Zetian’s role in the development of printing
went beyond that of earlier rulers who
invested in the mass (manuscript) production
of texts? The evidence is scanty. Apart from
the stamped security passes that may have
been in use at the court during her rule, the
case rests on her patronage of a Sogdian monk,
Fazang, who participated in the translation
of the first text known to have been massproduced in print: The Great Spell of Unsullied
Pure Light. Fragments of this text are known
to have been printed in Korea between 705
(when it was first translated in Tang China)
and 751, and in Japan between 764 and 770.
The sequence of events leads the author to
propose that Fazang had his translation of
the text printed as an offering for the spiritual
well-being of his patron who had died of
natural causes during the year in which he
finished the translation. This scenario would
also imply that the main rationale for the use
of print was in this case the greater speed at
which large numbers of copies could be
produced. Speed was of the essence among
those who believed that little time was
available between the departure of the soul
and its next reincarnation.
The primacy of the Buddhist rationale for
the earliest uses of printing also explains the
dearth of evidence of printed material during
the century following Emperor Wu’s rule. The
author argues that the emperors who restored
Tang rule increasingly turned to Daoism and
discontinued the earlier practice of state
support for the large-scale distribution of
Buddhist texts. It wasn’t until the ninth
century that further evidence emerges of the
official as well as commercial printing of
Buddhist and other texts, but that later history
of printing remains the subject for another
tome.
In sum, this tiny volume offers a compelling
reconstruction of what the early history of
printing may have looked like given the scanty
and disparate clues that remain today. The
author alerts the reader to its speculative and
incomplete nature, and I would caution the
reader the same way. This is a highly readable
and humorous story targeted at specialists and
non-specialists alike. Whether historians of
printing and reading will now be prodded to
accept the role of Buddhist merit and Chinese
xylog raphy, and the contributions of
concubines, monks and other non-heroic
characters in the global history of printing
remains to be seen.
e
Hilde De Weerdt
University of Oxford
Lynn Cain. Dickens, Family, Authorship.
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Kinship and Creativity.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. xviii, 183p. ill. ISBN
9780754661801. £50.00
This short book comprises mainly a close
reading of four of Dickens’s novels from the
central, well-explored period of the author’s
life when he transformed himself from ‘Boz’
to ‘Charles Dickens.’ After a dense eighteenpage introduction and a six-page Foreword –
an essential read if one is to understand the
orientation of the rest – there are four chapters,
each devoted to a single novel: Martin
Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield
and Bleak House. The blurb claims that Cain
“interweave[es] critical analysis of the four
novels with biography and the linguistic and
psychoanalytic writings of modern theorists,
especially Kristeva and Lacan.”
Cain is well aware of the embattled position
of psychoanalysis in literary study (pace the
blurb, there is no substantial use of linguistics
here) and her Foreword seeks to defend it as
an interpretative mode, claiming that the
historicist method “hermetically seals [novels]
within their own time-frame, oppressively
censoring the reader’s responses in favour of
the ‘real’ understanding to which only the
culturally-informed critic has access” (x). The
proper application of psychoanalysis to
literature, claims Cain, confirms Freud’s
famous admission that fiction writers had
realised the operations of the mind long before
he had. Dickens’s greatness for Cain lies in his
anticipation of what psychoanalysts would
come to systematise in the twentieth century.
Psychoanalytic theory provides Cain with
a ready-made set of hierarchies that enables
her to trace a developmental narrative over
the four novels whereby the ‘maternal’
becomes increasingly important to the extent
that on the last page she can claim that Bleak
House realises that the paternal symbolic needs
“the linguistic, domestic and cultural support
of the maternal” (159). We all use
hierarchising maps to generate our readings.
The question is how valid any particular use
of a theoretical map might be. The major
problem with Cain’s book for me is that it is
not as in control of what it does as it could
be, and thus not as valid as it might be.
The book consistently overclaims and
overgeneralises, is confused (or perhaps not
as open as it might be) regarding its premises,
and uses a limited palette of psychoanalytic
texts, all in English translation and often
secondary. What ‘psychoanalysis’ is – what
set of texts it comprises – is not argued,
explained or justified. There is no trace of the
newer translations of Freud (and certainly
none of the original German). Despite their
names being highlighted in the blurb, there is
no mention of Lacan’s writing beyond the
old and very limited selection in Sheridan’s
1977 and 1981 translations, and Kristeva’s
works run to just three well-known short
books and two essays. Much psychoanalytic
material appears to derive from secondary
sources.
As regards the book’s use of generalisation,
at a fundamental level there is, for example,
no new or convincing justification of why
the idea of a mother-father-child triad should
be prioritised when a good deal of recent work
(e.g. by McClintock) has reminded us that
children were and are brought up in social
units much more complex than that. There
are many unsupported statements where
juxtaposition or amplificatio rather than real
logical subordination provides the linguistic
coherence. Then the idea that psychoanalysis
opens texts to readers who are not culturally
informed is belied by a book which projects
an idea of a reader whose lexicon belongs
exclusively to high and often classical culture
(we have here no work on the fliegende Blätter
Freud recommends, and which Sally Ledger
has recently explored in relation to Dickens).
There is extensive reference to Dickens’s life
(and especially words) drawn from published
letters and biographies as well as to more
general secondary contextual material. There
is also a decent (and, regrettably, hardly
sourced) overview of the variety of visual
... / 12
12 e WINTER 2009
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
... / 11
experience in the nineteenth century as the
introduction to the chapter on Dombey and Son.
This goes on to claim, however, that that
novel’s stress on the visual shows, for example,
how “Dombey senior is apparently trapped
in the minute interstice between Winnicottian
mirroring and Lacanian mirror stage” (53).
A psychoanalytic approach to reading
Dickens might indeed be unfashionable, but
this, regrettably, is not a book to reinstate it. It
uses psychoanalysis as a Procrustean grid
derived from just a few well-known
Anglophone sources and overlaid on just a
few well-known texts. It does not, alas, fulfil
the potential of psychoanalysis as a careful,
subtle and self-reflexive investigative process
that tests its own methods and theories with
new data to generate new, surprising and
illuminating narratives.
Andrew King
Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
e
Des Cowley and Clare Williamson. The World
of the Book. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press,
2007. xiv, 249p. ill. ISBN 9780522853780.
$AUD59.95.
What is striking about this book, before
you even begin to read it, is its great visual
presence and beauty – a true celebration of
the book as object and even as art. The
production values are very high, with attention
paid to paper, design, colour saturation,
typography, binding, and various other
elements that make up the visual and the
physical book. The choice of illustrations is
also excellent, as befits a book that started life
accompanying the State Library of Victoria’s
permanent exhibition Mirror of the World:
Books and Ideas.
The World of the Book “is written by and
intended for those who love and read books”
(xii). It is not an academic text (with no notes,
references or other scholarly apparatus, apart
from a list of texts for further reading), and
the essays are not intended to be
comprehensive analyses. It seems rather that
they are meant to complement and to provide
an entry point into and context for the many
illustrations. The World of the Book begins
with a broad survey of the history of the book,
using a very wide-ranging definition of ‘the
book’ – from ‘The Book Before the Book,’
referring to cuneiform tablets and
hieroglyphics on papyrus, through
illuminated manuscripts, to genres as diverse
as pulp fiction and comic books. These
chapters are lively and accessible, and a
reminder that the search for a balance between
durability or preservation, and accessibility or
portability, has been ongoing for as long as
people have been writing things down.
While it could be argued that the early essays
contain a very European focus – they mention
only in passing the production of manuscripts
in the Islamic world, and the use of paper
and block printing in China, for instance –
when the essays shift to a more thematic focus
there is a distinct opening up to other parts
of the world. Indeed, the thematic essays
display a very wide range of interests, including
‘Books that Changed the World,’ a discussion
of the use of design and typography at
Penguin Books, a section on maps and travel
books, and (fittingly, for such a visually
appealing book) several essays on art and
design. The range is sometimes so wide that
one wonders precisely how the different
themes or topics were chosen – there are
essays, for instance, on relatively obscure topics
such as Beat poetry, the book in Edo Japan,
and books that focus on classical antiquity.
The focus is often on the book as object and
on the physicality of how books look and are
handled, as well as their social impact.
This does lead one to consider the question
of the intended audience for the book, and to
return to the notion that it is for ‘those who
love and read books’ – perhaps it should be
read purely for entertainment and pleasure.
At the same time, it could be of great use as a
sourcebook for teachers and lecturers of book
design and publishing history. And when we
put aside our academic leanings and theoretical
frameworks, every book-lover will surely find
something of interest in the broad offerings
collected here.
Beth le Roux
Director, Unisa Press, South Africa
e
Grace Eckley. Maiden Tribute: A Life of W.T.
Stead. Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2008. vi, 458p. ill.
ISBN 9781425727086 (pb) $24.99.
The difficulty in writing the life of W.T.
Stead is that, as a central figure in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth-century press,
he was also an influential figure in the period
more broadly. Grace Eckley’s Maiden Tribute
provides a much-needed account of the life
of Stead but, in attempting to tell the life
through the events that it touched, often loses
sense of both Stead as an individual and the
culture with which he was inextricably bound.
Stead is not an easy person about whom
to write. An energetic supporter of causes
ranging from spiritualism to feminism,
imperialist in outlook while advocating a
brand of socialism, Stead put his principles
into practice, using his networks, founding
organizations and, of course, writing and
publishing voluminously. Eckley’s response
is to tell his life chronologically, beginning
from his birth in Yorkshire in 1849 to his
death on the Titanic in 1912, dividing the
intervening years into seventeen chapters, each
devoted to a particular branch of Stead’s
activities. Although necessary, this method of
organizing such a life is only partially successful.
Stead rarely focused exclusively on any one
activity for a period of time and, as Eckley
requires the time periods to line up in a
chronological sequence, she imposes artificial
temporal constraints on the subjects under
discussion. As a result, the most successful
chapters are those that have a tight thematic
focus such as Chapter 7 “Telepathy: Psychics,
Spirits, and Parapsychologists,” or discuss a
particular event such as Chapter 4 “‘The
Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ 1885.”
The majority, however, are uncomfortably
bound by their thematic and temporal
boundaries, and Eckley often excludes relevant
material in an attempt to maintain their
coherence. The result can be bewildering for
readers, who are forced to piece together
information scattered throughout different
chapters in order to fully understand an event
or incident from Stead’s life.
This difficulty arises, in part, due to the
diversity of Stead’s interests and the
doggedness with which he pursued them.
Eckley ably communicates both the tenacity
of his character and the scope of his activity,
but does so at the expense of explanatory
details. Although Maiden Tribute is an
accessible read, without a wide knowledge of
the period much of its import is lost. I
suspect even experts in the period will find
themselves occasionally confused by the
people and events who are introduced in
passing. The overall effect is to render the
period flat, a one-dimensional background
of names and events against which Stead acts
that diminishes both the importance and
complexity of his various struggles and
achievements.
The book is, however, excellently
researched and Eckley is keen to establish the
WINTER 2008 f 13
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
evidence for the various claims that have been
made about Stead, particularly with regards to
his role in the ‘Maiden Tribute’ scandals and
his presence on the Titanic. Her emphasis is
very much on Stead himself, and those
interested in his influence on the press will
have to recover the valuable information that
is distributed throughout the book. Maiden
Tribute is a celebration of a remarkable life and,
although at times a little defensive over his
legacy, remains a vital contribution in our
attempts to understand the influence of Stead
upon both publishing history and his culture
more broadly.
James Mussell
University of Birmingham
e
A. S. G. Edwards, ed. English Manuscript Studies
1100-1700, Volume 14: Regional Manuscripts 12001700. London: The British Library, 2008. vi,
268p. ill. ISBN 9780712349888. $90.00.
The most recent volume of English
Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 continues to
spare no expense in terms of its production
values, though perhaps to more modest effect
than in previous editions. This installment is
a bit slimmer than usual, and fewer of its
contributors than normal have taken
advantage of the journal’s willingness to
reproduce high quality images of the
manuscripts under consideration. The
subtitle, “Regional Manuscripts 1200-1700,”
also obscures a noticeable chronological
emphasis, as eight of the eleven articles
concentrate on the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, perhaps, in fairness, as a corrective
to the journal’s more frequent emphasis on
sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and even eighteenthcentury materials.
One recurring interest in the volume is the
transmission of manuscript texts by
generations of users. Kathryne A. Lowe
studies the work of both government and
monastic scribes to demonstrate that, contrary
to their name, inspeximus charters were not
routinely inspected prior to recopying. Vincent
Gillespie argues that the Speculum Christiani
was only the most successful of several early
fifteenth-century experiments to produce a
vernacular aid to parish priests from the Cibus
Anime, a Latin reference work aimed at clerics
and monks. Peter Murray Jones studies the
social textuality of the Tabula medicine, a
fifteenth-century medical encyclopedia that he
suggests had its roots in mendicant circles but
which continued to be consulted and actively
reconstituted by a diverse readership well into
the sixteenth century. Andrew Taylor shows
how a sixteenth-century manuscript ballad
collection may constitute the efforts of a
Northern balladeer to compile regional works
for subsequent print publication in London.
In addition to these specific cases, A. I. Doyle
has provided an introduction to four pages
of notes from the late Neil Ker, offering
helpful guidelines, if somewhat limited in their
range of topics, to the shifting norms of
manuscript production in England from the
twelfth to the sixteenth century.
Alongside these studies of transmission
history, three articles focus on chronicle readers
or writers: John Spence’s survey of AngloNorman prose chronicles reveals a
geographically, socio-economically, and
intellectually diverse English audience for these
texts, notwithstanding the growth of Middle
English; Anne F. Sutton provides further
evidence to identify the Robert Bale who
authored a London chronicle with the scrivener
of the same name and shows how his
professional life would have facilitated that
chronicling; and Christopher Lay explores a
manuscript containing both chronicle material
and notes by London historian John Stowe
to examine how he synthesized source material
for his city history.
Another two articles offer accounts of new
manuscript discoveries: Kathleen L. Scott
reviews some newly discovered booklets that
very nearly complete a Middle English
manuscript miscellany probably disassembled
by Thomas Rawlinson at the beginning of
the eighteenth century; and Simon Horobin
offers a compelling case for identifying a recently
discovered translation of the Legenda Aurea
with a previously lost work by fifteenth-century
poet and translator Osbern Bokenham. Finally,
Marlene Villalobos Hennessy shows how a
grouping of Marian texts in a Carthusian
manuscript reveals the integrated nature of
these monastic communities, providing texts
that bridged the purportedly insuperable gap
between lay-brothers and choir-monks.
The volume closes, as always, with a catalog
of recent manuscript sales at auction. A. S. G.
Edwards once again fills this duty, covering
sales from January 2006 to December 2007.
Garth Bond
Lawrence University, Wisconsin
Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds., A
companion to the history of the book. Malden,
MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007. xvi,
599p. ill. ISBN 9781405127653. $149.95.
The publication of Simon Eliot and
Jonathan Rose’s Companion to the history of
the book is a real event for aficionados of this
nascent discipline, which is as flourishing as
any field can be in today’s human sciences.
Comprehensive in its coverage and
authoritative in its analyses, this is the singlevolume introduction that we have been
wanting for a long time. It is much more
than a ‘companion’ in any conventional sense
– which is a good thing, and not only because
of its distinctly uncompanionable price. Eliot
and Rose have produced a definitive survey
to which specialists as well as lay readers will
find themselves returning frequently for
information and analytical insight.
Eliot and Rose take the term ‘book’ in a
broad sense, embracing not only codex
volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals,
ephemera, clay tablets, and a variety of other
communicative objects. The forty chapters
they have corralled together add up to a
composite global history of the making,
distribution, and use of these objects. The
narrative extends in a grand arc from the
invention of writing, around 5,000 years ago
in what is now Iraq, to the digital revolution.
Across that immense period, regimes of
regulation and jurisdiction (censorship,
intellectual property) and systems of storage
and classification (libraries, bibliography) also
get substantial attention. There are inevitably
gaps, but they are surprisingly hard to identify.
The equally inevitable variations in the quality
of description and analysis are also slight
given the scope. It is only mildly unfortunate,
for example, that the book opens with
chapters on bibliography and textual
scholarship that set a dry and defensive tone
quite unrepresentative of the whole. Skip
them; the rest is much more welcoming. Some
of the most impressive contributions actually
deal with relatively unfamiliar topics. Eleanor
Robson’s account of tablets in ancient Sumer,
Assyria, and Babylonia is intellectually
gripping; at the other end of the story, Paul
Luna’s account of technologies in the latemodern age provides an account of recent
developments in publishing that is revelatory
for the contemporary author. And there are
plenty more fine contributions in between.
To select winners would be artificial when the
overall quality is so consistent. The collective
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... / 13
achievement is what really matters, and that is
substantial indeed.
A major synthesis such as this invites the
reader to stop and reflect on the shape and
purpose of the field as a whole – the
“adventure,” as Eliot and Rose call it, that is
the history of the book. The moment is also
opportune because 2008 marked the fiftieth
anniversary of the work that, more than any
other, launched the history of the book.
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s
l’Apparition du livre was published in 1958 as
the lynchpin of a grand positivist project,
originally mooted at the turn of the century,
to tell the story of civilization itself. It is worth
asking how the nature of the history of the
book that is represented in the Companion
realizes Febvre and Martin’s ideals, and how
far the enterprise has become something
different.
Febvre and Martin’s vision was in one sense
much narrower than Eliot and Rose’s: they
took ‘the book’ to be the codex, and especially
the printed codex. But in another it was
broader. Febvre and Martin were interested in
the printed codex for a reason, and that reason
was extrinsic to the book itself. They wanted
to know about what they called “the book in
the service of history.” Febvre’s conception
was that the book was one of the “tools”
with which people fabricated culture, society,
and politics. That process was their real target.
This distinction corresponds loosely to
one that Eliot and Rose frame at the outset
of their Companion, between two ‘premises’
of the history of the book. These are the
premises that books make history and, in turn,
are made by it. The first they associate with
Robert Darnton and Elizabeth Eisenstein
(whose Printing revolution in early modern Europe
itself turned 25 this past year). The second
has no such obvious heroes, but seems to be
the principal concern of scholars in general
who nowadays self-identify as disciplinary
specialists in the history of the book. In
consequence, while the Companion emphasizes
that an ambition to pursue both aspects
simultaneously is precisely what makes the
history of the book exciting and important,
in practice it allows the second to overshadow
the first. This accurately represents the field as
it now exists, as a glance at recent influential
work will confirm. What it indicates is that
the entrenchment of the history of the book
as a discipline – cause for satisfaction as it is,
and occasion for such a fine celebratory
Companion – has not been without costs. For
good reasons, disciplines tend to narrow the
focus of their practitioners and to direct their
gaze away from broader questions, which
become somebody else’s business. Eliot and
Rose know what their business is and they
discharge it impeccably. But I do not think
that Febvre and Martin – not to speak for
Darnton or Eisenstein – would have
committed themselves without at least some
ambivalence to the history of the book as the
enterprise it has become.
The distinction that Eliot and Rose invoke
has been the subject of a lot of academic
polemic since the mid-1990s. They are right, I
think, to identify the value of the history of
the book with an ambition to pursue both
sides of it at once. Their Companion, of course,
is meant to exemplify the fruitfulness of doing
that, not to challenge its very terms. But in the
end that is what it does. It indicates, I think,
that the way to realize the potential of the
enterprise that Febvre and Martin launched
and Darnton and Eisenstein established is to
accept that the distinction is ultimately an
empty one. And in new work it is possible to
see it treated as such. In their very different
ways, books like William St. Clair’s The reading
nation in the Romantic period (Cambridge, 2004)
and Richard Sher’s The Enlightenment and the
book: Scottish authors and their publishers in
eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and America
(Chicago, 2006) simply ignore it. They take it
as read that understanding the constitution
of books is impossible without
understanding both their context and
consequences. Taken seriously, that distinctly
Febvrean perspective would be a dizzying one
for most of today’s historians of the book to
adopt. But there too is a purpose of
disciplinarity. Now that the history of the
book finally has a secure footing, it can afford
to be more truly adventurous.
e
Adrian Johns
University of Chicago
Trevor Fawcett. Georgian imprints: printing and
publishing in Bath, 1729-1815, Bath: Ruton,
2008, 119p. ill. ISBN 0952632640. £9.00.
Despite the unique position enjoyed by
Bath from the late seventeenth century, as
England’s principal spa and social resort, the
noble art of printing arrived relatively late to
the city in 1729. This was probably due to the
proximity of Bristol, which was rapidly
growing due to trade with the American
colonies, especially in African slaves. However,
by the mid 1740s the book trade in Bath was
beginning to catch up with comparable
provincial centres elsewhere and the city even
had its own newspaper. For the remainder
of the Georgian period Bath saw a rapidly
growing volume and surprisingly wide variety
of printing and publishing activity, as detailed
and illustrated in Trevor Fawcett’s new study.
This work consists of fifty illustrated
accounts, dealing with individual businesses
or else topics such as the printing office,
jobbing, publishing the antiquities,
experiments with lithography, each about two
pages in length. These are presented in a
broadly chronological order. Inevitably this
structure provides more than enough space
for some topics, but tends to limit others
somewhat. Personally I would have
welcomed more information relating to
Samuel Hazard’s role as one of the two
printers and publishers of the Cheap Repository
Tracts.
The work is copiously illustrated, showing
that there were talented engravers as well as
letter press printers in the city. Some of these
illustrations are typical examples of
contemporary provincial printing, but others
have a vitality that is not often found, such as
the illustration of the author canvassing for a
subscription, which is also reproduced on the
cover. In most cases the standard of
reproduction was good, but illustrations of
the Bath newspapers, in tight bindings,
would have benefitted from more careful
photography and some cleaning up before
reproduction. Most of the illustrations are
numbered and referred to in the text but there
are a few which seem to have been added
purely for decoration and are not identified.
Trevor Fawcett clearly knows a great deal
about his subject and has consulted a wide
range of local materials, but there is a danger
that those working on the trade in one area
can become too focussed on local sources and
forget that early eighteenth-century printers
frequently moved around before they became
established. For example, the mysterious “B.
Lyons” who introduced printing to Bath
about 1729/30, is probably the Benjamin
Lyon who is mentioned in the stationers’
registers and who briefly operated a press in
Norwich in 1718. This man served his
apprenticeship in the same London printing
shop as Samuel Farley, the grandfather of Felix
Farley, the second Bath printer in 1733.
New accounts of English provincial
printing and publishing are always to be
WINTER 2008 f 15
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
welcomed to help redress the long held
misconception that there was little printing
of value or interest in eighteenth century
England outside London, Oxford or
Cambridge. This is especially so with respect
to Bath where the book trades have not been
previously studied in great detail, although
there are some accounts of individual
tradesmen. There is much in this volume both
in terms of the text and illustrations that will
be of value to those interested in the history
of the city and also of printing in the
provinces.
e
David Stoker
Aberystwyth University
Peter R. Frank, Johannes Frimmel, Buchwesen
in Wien 1750-1850: kommentiertes Verzeichnis der
Buch-drucker, Buchhändler und Verleger. Mit einer
um Informationen zur Verteilung der Befugnisse,
Adressen und Biographien wesentlich erweiterten
Fassung im PDF-Format auf CD-ROM.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008. (Buchforschung: Beiträge zum Buchwesen in
Osterreich; 4.) XVIII, [3], 299p. ill. ISBN
9783447056595.
The greatest part of this excellent volume
consists of an alphabetical list of individuals,
printers, publishers, booksellers, engravers,
illustrators and others involved in the book
trade in the capital of Europe’s most ethnically
diverse empire. Each entry contains details of
the various owners of each firm, sometimes
shown by extant catalogues of its backlist(s),
and secondary literature. The list confirms the
published findings of other researchers such
as Helmut Lang in highlighting the linguistic
and typographical versatility commanded by
many of these firms.
By way of illustration of the volume’s
value, I take one name from the list, that of
the Trattner family, whose most famous
member, Johann Thomas (1719-1798),
exhibited the commercial and social
possibilities, including ennoblement in 1764,
open to a Protestant from the provinces
blessed with a sharp business brain and
driving ambition, who dominated the trade
in Vienna and in several other cities. His
backlist numbered some eight thousand titles,
encompassing literature, school textbooks,
almanacs, periodicals and musical scores, and,
like some of his co-professionals, he did not
scruple to deal in clandestine publications,
although one presumes that he did not risk
making these available in another of his
enterprises, his lending library.
The volume includes several lists, of
secondary sources, of individuals and firms,
of places where business was conducted, of
engravers, of periodicals, almanacs and
calendars and subjects covered in the main list.
Also included is one of foreigners involved in
the Viennese book trade, where, as further
proof of the dazzlingly cosmopolitan nature
of the Empire, one finds Serbs, Czechs,
Ukrainians and Italians, besides the numerous
Germans. Accompanying the volume is a CDROM, which, duplicating the information
available in the printed version, makes for a
very useful, space- and weight-saving aid to
the travelling bibliographer.
The publication of the present volume
continues a disturbing trend in book history
in that major advances in our knowledge of
the individuals, printers, publishers,
booksellers and others are left to nonlibrarians. As a trained librarian and active
researcher in book history, I say ‘disturbing’
deliberately, for I am concerned that the great
libraries of western Europe, national and
university-linked, seem largely to have
abandoned their traditional role of publishing
specialised catalogues of their early holdings.
If librarians are relegated to watching over their
collections in the manner of prison guards, as
was once bizarrely suggested to me by a senior
colleague, why should they need specialised
training?
The volume is well printed and attractively
laid out, as one would expect of Germany’s
leading publisher, which deserves the thanks
not only of the authors but also of all
involved in the book history of the Germanlanguage areas of Europe for having taken over
this important series.
W.A. Kelly
Napier University, Edinburgh
e
Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond. Books
Without Borders, Vol. 2: Perspectives from South
Asia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
xiv, 204p. ISBN 0230210333. £45.
From the outset this collection (the second
of two interlinked volumes) announces its
broad perspective on book culture and the
term ‘book.’ The editors’ Introduction
appreciates the power and significance of the
inscribed word – including as opposed to
presuming – the printed book, accounting
too for varieties of editing, packaging and
reading.
This inclusive approach dovetails in one
example of a materially, politically significant
act of writing from the age of the Emperor
Asoka, one-time ruler of Northern India, who
commissioned a gigantic piece of political
graffiti in 261 BCE. The Introduction notes
that the idealistic statements carved into a
rockface ‘would put the United Nations to
shame’ (2). Even so they are surely a physical
indicator of colonisation, signalling Asoka as
the new controlling force in the region. The
point should be that all writing, consumption,
circulation, and so on is politically charged and
culturally imbued, not just those examples
emerging from relatively recent colonial
systems. It is the translations carried out by
James Prinsep in 1832 that are heralded here
as an “appropriation of a pre-colonial past”
(2). Prinsep emerges as the author of the
inscriptions, unveiling the pre-colonial past
to an Anglophone nineteenth century. In
short, the near colonial past dominates this
volume’s Introduction and extends across the
volume as a whole: book culture is inescapably
colonial, and the tension between
Anglophone and a largely uncharted vernacular
book history is prominent in this collection.
Rather than theorising this, the editors allow
the struggle to play out: Indian literature, for
example, is “overwhelmingly” pre-colonial
(3), yet the Introduction opens with a
quotation from Forster’s A Passage to India.
The geography of South Asia is not defined,
and there is an obvious bias toward studies
of India in the volume (a feature which,
perhaps, cannot be helped since the volume
developed from a conference, but might have
been addressed by the editors).
This volume, however, dealing with book
cultures that are arguably on the threshold of
established book history, is welcome, and the
studies here are provocative and varied. In
the volume’s first essay Harish Trivedi
redresses one of the “fondest vanities of the
colonial enterprise” – that imperial rule
brought the book (12). This essay has an
unnecessarily combative tone. Trivedi notes
that in the 1770s, the British began produce
“translations into English from Sanskrit of
foundational works of Indian law, scripture
and literature.” These acts of cultural
appropriation did not appear to “promote
or strengthen British rule but led on the
contrary to the discovery of the greatness of
Indian culture and civilization dating from a
period when Britain had not had so much to
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... /15
show for itself ” (15). However Trivedi
acknowledges the varied and local nature of
books in a pre-print landscape, and implicit in
his study is an insistence on the inclusivity of
the term ‘book’ or manuscript, or codex, or
grantha, when book history as a discipline
frequently displays a print-bias.
Of note are Kitty Scoular Datta’s readable
treatment of the post-print treatment of
Havez in both England and India (58-70),
and Priya Joshi’s ‘Futures Past: Books,
Reading, Culture in the Age of Liberalization’
(85-111), which, using India as a case study
(reminding us that India should not be
conceived of as a “discrete national identity or
limited geographical space” [86]), interrogates
each of the terms of her paper’s title. Datta
notes that the terms overlap; indeed her
section on ‘Books,’ rather than approaching
the book as a symbol or attitudes towards
books, is concerned with consumption and
taste, describing Bombay’s markets in which
publications (in English) are sold in food
markets as an “urban, public display” (88).
This is not at all unique to Bombay; perhaps
what ought to be interrogated is the language
and cultural bent of the books for sale. Fraser’s
assessment of the flooding of the OUP India
building in 1943, and the concurrent Japanese
air strikes, is compelling. He reads the events
as a single episode: a pivotal moment
symbolising the ‘inner and outer’ threat to
British cultural and political sway in India.
Minor reservations aside, this book
represents a valuable step towards a “holistic
view” (8) of book history and textual
transmission, highlighting issues of
methodology and approach, and questioning
the boundaries of the discipline itself.
Carrie Griffin
University College Cork, Ireland
e
Peter Holliday, Edward Johnston Master
Calligrapher. London and New Castle: The
British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2007. xx,
389p. ill. ISBN 9780712349277 (BL);
9781584561989 (Oak Knoll). £25.00; $49.95.
Edward Johnston, calligrapher and type
designer, has been the subject of a loving
biography by his daughter and of a large
number of appreciations by other
calligraphers, but Peter Holliday’s book is the
first attempt at a thorough examination of
both Johnston’s life and work. It is to be
regretted that the book is posthumous:
Holliday died in 2003, and it was left to his
sister to put his notes into some semblance
of order.
The results are both fascinating and
uneven. A group of introductory chapters
discuss Johnston’s almost fortuitous entry
into the field of calligraphy, his employment
as a teacher, first at London’s new Central
School of Arts where he was hired by William
Lethaby, later at the Royal College of Art, then
continue with his association with the ‘heirs’
of William Morris, and his years analyzing
the scripts of medieval manuscripts in the
British Museum. These are followed by a
further group of four chapters examining, in
great detail, Johnston’s connections with the
craft communities in Ditchling, Sussex, where
his friend and former pupil, Eric Gill, was for
a time the dominant force. Johnston –
probably fortunately – was never altogether
drawn into Gill’s orbit, and the increasing
Catholicism of Gill, Douglas Pepler, and the
rest of Father McNabb’s acolytes eventually
caused a split; ultimately, it was Gill who left
for deepest Wales, and Johnston who
remained in Ditchling. Others joined him
there, among them the weaver, Ethel Mairet;
and there were visitors too, including Bernard
Leach, the potter, and two Japanese folk artists
– of whom one, Shoji Hamada, based his
own pottery village on what he had observed
in Ditchling. In these chapters, Johnston’s life
as a member of a community matters almost
as much as his artistic work, and these chapters
serve as well as an introduction to a village
where the craft traditions continue.
The remaining chapters of the book focus
first on Johnston’s relationship with Robert
Bridges, the poet laureate, then examine
Johnston’s influence in Britain and Germany.
The problems of the book emerge most
clearly here. In fact, while Bridges and
Johnston admired and liked each other, their
professional relationship consisted mostly of
Bridges’ attempts to persuade Johnston to
devise a phonetic alphabet – an enterprise of
which Johnston was pretty skeptical. The two
chapters on influence all too often degenerate
into lists of names, without much analysis.
And similar difficulties occur elsewhere: a long
analysis of Lethaby’s philosophy of art, drawn
almost entirely from secondary sources, sits
uneasily amidst much else on the Arts & Crafts
Movement, while the story of Johnston’s
long and uneasy association with Count Harry
Kessler is scattered and disjointed. Nor are we
told as much as we might wish to know about
Johnston’s most famous commission, the
construction of a font for London Transport
which, in modified form, still adorns the city’s
signage.
In the end, Johnston’s influence came
most importantly through his handbook,
Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering, first
published in 1906 and still readily available,
and through his lectures and demonstrations.
For all its faults, Peter Holliday’s book, heavily
annotated and profusely illustrated, is a
worthy monument.
Fritz Levy
University of Washington
e
Andrea Krupp. Bookcloth in England and
America, 1823-50. New Castle, DE and
London: Oak Knoll, British Library Press and
The Bibliographical Society of America, 2008.
92p. ill. ISBN 9781584562139 [Oak Knoll],
ISBN 9780712350075 [The British Library].
US$35.00.
This ‘field guide’ will help accurately
identify and date early American and British
bookbinding cloths. Andrea Krupp’s introduction offers a brief look at the technological
development of early bookcloth, bookcloth
grain nomenclature, and bookcloth manufacture. Three appendices then follow. The
first is in the form of a dense table, where her
nomenclature is compared to terms developed
by other researchers. The second appendix,
forming the bulk of the book, is the actual
catalogue of nineteenth century book cloth
grains. The third appendix covers the subset
of ribbon-embossed cloths, where patterns
are reproduced in actual size.
The continued growth of interest in
nineteenth-century books is evidenced by
recent conferences such as the Well Dressed Book:
A Symposium on Nineteenth-Century American
Cloth Bindings held in College Park ,Maryland
in 2008. Andrea Krupp spoke at that
conference on her recent findings, and this
publication makes her technical work, and her
excellent color illustrations, more easily
available. Some of this work was first
published as an article in 2006, and the 2008
book expands on that earlier article with new
information. Krupp has noted that 160 new
grain patterns were found in compiling the
research, and 135 of those appear before 1850.
To date, using earlier sources, only 57 different
grains were identified, with 17 appearing pre1850.
WINTER 2008 f 17
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
Like many special collections projects today,
this research is also going to have a digital
existence. The Library Company of
Philadelphia’s McLean Conser vation
Department will soon be hosting on-line
access to The Database of 19th-century Cloth
Bindings and The Catalogue of 19th-century
Bookcloth Grains (CBG). And it is also worth
pointing interested readers to the University
of Alabama’s excellent Publishers’ Bindings
Online, 1815-1930 site, which actively gathers
information about current exhibitions and
research.
While this book contains information and
images that should eventually be available online, having this guide in your hand with the
images, the introduction and the nomenclatures all united, is both elegant and
convenient. As the book historian Sue Allen
says in her preface, “Andrea’s book provides
… dictionary and grammar” for looking at
the glorious and often confusing visual and
textural variety of bookcloths.
Chela Metzger
University of Texas at Austin
e
Jack Lynch. Deception and Detection in EighteenthCentury Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. xiv,
218p. ISBN 9780754665281. £50.00.
“To bring a fact within the compass of
possibility, there is nothing required but that
it should not contradict itself; but to make it
probable, it is likewise required that it should
not be contradictory to ordinary experience.”
Thus Allan Ramsay in 1753 to Henry Fielding
in their quarrel over the strange case of
Elizabeth Canning, but it might have been
the motto to Jack Lynch’s wide-ranging study
of a curious phenomenon of the eighteenth
century: the proliferation of literary hoaxes,
forgeries and frauds.
Canning’s case (she claimed that she had
been abducted and kept in a room for over a
month with next to nothing to eat before
miraculously escaping) has never been
satisfactorily resolved. It still is an interesting
legal starting point for any discussion about
the reliability of witnesses and the
admissibility of evidence. The century’s
fascination with fraudulent behaviour – from
Mary Toft claiming to have given birth to a
large number of rabbits to Chatterton’s fake
Rowley poems – has everything to do with its
ever increasing awareness of the
epistemological boundaries between fact and
fiction and of historical change. Shakespeare
no longer got away with having Richard the
Third mention Machiavelli, and William
Lauder didn’t get away with accusing Milton
of plagiarism because Milton’s defenders
checked Lauder’s sources.
Lynch’s book is of major importance
because of the very specific and original angle
he opts for. He rightly claims that “this book
is different,” as he addresses, not the fakers
themselves, but the critics who argued over
the fakes: “Toft’s case deserves our attention
not because of the prodigious birth – history
is full of them – but because it prompted so
much learned debate” (viii). This approach
results in a fascinating and convincingly argued
account of some major changes in our ways
of thinking about authorial authenticity, the
nature of evidence, and the connection
between reputation and literary values.
Well-written and entirely jargon-free –
indeed, Foucault gets a deserved slap when
Lynch says “Since many critics who draw on
Foucault’s considerations of authorship are
bogged down in the morass he has left, I hope
to look for a more concrete illustration of the
status of the author” (85) – this careful analysis
of its subject opens up new areas, and makes
one for instance aware of the possibility that
“Ossian’s Fingal was far better than
Macpherson’s Fingal” (28) because of modern
ideas of authorial personality. Lynch sharpens
one’s sense of the various degrees of the legal
admissibility of evidence, and of the mutual
influence of historiography and literary
criticism. As he puts it: “Ossian’s supporters
opened the historicist door. Ossian’s critics
rushed through it. Once it was suggested that
the epics afforded verifiable historical
information … those who doubted
Macpherson’s story could use historical
information to discredit the poems” (125).
Also, his account makes one wonder why those
fakers did what they did. Lying successfully is
an arduous task, and truth will always out (or
so we hope).
The first chapter of this excellent book is
titled “Recognizing a Fake When You See One”
– which raises a few questions, especially when
one considers the concluding chapter, in which
Lynch points out: “If we consider the fake as
a literary kind, we know only the inferior
exemplars of the genre: the best are by
definition unknown to us” (180). This is a
very sobering thought indeed.
Peter de Voogd
University of Utrecht
Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody, eds.
Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers,
Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction.
Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2007. xxii, 191 p. ill. ISBN 9780754657316.
£50.00; $99.95.
This collection of essays sensibly takes up
the topic of paperback cover art with the
advent of mass-market publishing in the
twentieth century. The thirteen chapters are
widely different in focus and methodology,
but this diversity is genuinely welcome as it
opens up new ways to think about book
design, marketing, and the changing roles that
paperbacks have played in the broader
discursive game of culture.
To help the reader better comprehend this
rather unwieldy subject, the editors have
grouped the essays into four appropriate
subsets. The opening quartet work out from
an historical analysis of the surprisingly slow
evolution of the paperback market (which can
date its origins back to the disposable paperbound books issued in the nineteenth century
by Baron Freiherr von Tauchnitz for Englishspeaking travelers to the Continent) through
a series of different attempts to show how
covers are read by potential – and actual –
consumers of popular romance, mystery,
science fiction, and fantasy.
In the next group, three authors assess
various factors that contribute to a book’s
popularity: especially the impact that modern
literary prize competitions (such as the
Booker) has had on the marketing of
paperbacks. As might be expected, these
researchers have found that the affirmation
of cultural distinction conveyed by a
“strapline” banner – cutting diagonally across
the cover or screaming from the top margin –
can make a work an instant bestseller. But
such power might come at a certain price, and
these contributors are well aware of the
paradoxes this subject invites. As Claire
Squires observes, “The choices of winning
books reflect not only on the books
themselves . . . but also back on the Prize,
affecting its reputation and creating journalistic
capital which is vital for the Prize to achieve its
prominence and impact” (81).
Three more chapters then parse the lucrative
interplay between paperback publishing and
other so-called culture industries (most
obviously, cinema). So conspicuous have these
crossovers become that the covers of modern
paperbacks can almost be said to provide –
and promote – a kind of cartography of
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... /17
subsidiary rights, a celebration of all the nonliterary ways in which a copyright can be made
to pay. To emphasize the seamlessness of
cultural production (even when the two
products might be imagined or understood
to be radically different), publishers have
happily embraced and sought to replicate the
model of movie poster art in the covers used
for titles with Hollywood tie-ins.
The last group of essays focuses on cover
art as a mechanism to target very specific
market segments – with examples drawn from
lesbian pulp fiction (typically provocative
silhouettes of female bodies) to the works of
Muslim women writers, from the covers of
which dark eyes peer from behind the necessary
veil.
Students of the American book trade may
be disappointed to find that almost all of the
contributors focus on British or Continental
examples as the basis for their individual case
studies. Even so, important generalizations
and inferences can be drawn out that should
prove helpful in thinking about the paperback
revolution more generally. All of them give
empirical weight to Gérard Genette’s
suggestive theorizing of the significance of
the “paratextual” elements of literary
production.
Michael Anesko
Pennsylvania State University
e
Alistair McCleery and Benjaman A. Brabon,
eds., The Influence of Benedict Anderson.
Edinburgh: Scottish Centre for the Book,
Merchiston Publishing, 2007. viii, 94p. ISBN
9780955356117.
Much like Edward Said’s Orientalism,
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities has
become an extremely influential text for
literary, cultural and postcolonial studies;
armed with a concern with narrative and mythmaking that is the stuff of literary and cultural
studies, both books strive to connect with
diverse fields such as economics, politics and
history to reflect on ties that bind and divide.
While detractors point to inaccuracies in
Anderson’s historical summations, a tendency
to a certain sweeping generality, a somewhat
breathless conflation of contrary
methodologies and concepts, there is no
doubting that Anderson’s handling of
temporality, narrative, print capitalism and the
rise of news media to meditate on the creation
and fostering of imagined communities has
been richly allusive and enormously
productive.
The Influence of Benedict Anderson brings
together four essays to evaluate and critically
engage with Anderson’s contributions to the
debate on nationalism. Howard Wollman and
Philip Spencer’s “Can such Goodness be
profitably discarded?” points to Anderson’s
foregrounding of literature and language in
his political theorisations and their paper sets
out to explore enabling and disabling
paradoxes inherent in Anderson’s disciplinary
and intellectual allegiances, and contradictions
in his theorisations. They assert that
Anderson’s generalisations are undertaken at
the expense of detail, that his concern with
discursive and rhetorical forms moves his work
away from traditional Marxist approaches to
politics and state, that his theories paradoxically
reinforce an essentially colonialist orientation
and that despite nationalism’s deeply
problematic features (racism and
ethnocentricism), Anderson’s attitude is,
ultimately, one of sympathy.
Cairns Craig’s excellent essay, “Benedict
Anderson’s Fictional Communities,” looks at
Anderson’s use and abuse of José Rizal’s
novels (and their translations), that make their
appearance in Anderson’s work from Imagined
Communities to Under Three Flags. Craig turns
Anderson’s assertions about the realist novels’
magical ability to conjure and recreate society
on its head; instead of art imitating life, Craig
argues, realist fiction shows just how “illusory
is the reality which it describes.” Craig
problematises what Anderson takes for
granted as fiction by unpicking the temporal
processes of reading, particularly, the
theorisation of ‘homogenous empty time’
(what readers hold in their heads,
simultaneously, despite the encounters with
different characters and episodes in their lives),
which Anderson uses as an analogy for a
national awareness. Craig argues that that
Anderson’s temporal analogy does not
accurately reflect the reading process. Narratives
often attempt to move the plot forwards
through readers’ discovery of past lives,
affiliations and events; nations resemble
novels because both seek to imagine “a future
they seek to turn into reality” by recovering
“in that future the past’s imaginings.”
Benjamin A. Brabon’s paper, “Benedict
Anderson and the Gothic Cartography of
Great Britain” engages with the spatialisation
of the nation in relation to its naming of
places, mapping, location and drawing of
boundaries. While the essay isn’t always
convincing on the specific links between the
gothic novel and the nation (this section being
all too cursory) Brabon’s analysis of how
colonialist cartographic practices create ghosts
and spectres that must be suppressed and
repressed, but which may later provide the
basis of future postcolonial national
imaginaries, makes interesting reading.
Robert Fraser’s essay takes the Bengal
Emergency of 1907-6 as a test case for
Anderson’s theory of the foundational
contribution of print capitalism and
vernacular languages to the formation of a
national imaginary. While a print revolution
may foster national consciousness in the case
of Europe (Anderson, after all, is indebted
to Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s
L’apparition du livre, and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s
Print Revolution in Early Modern Europe), Fraser
argues that the strength of regional
publishing and vernacular languages in India
attests to the creation of diverse communities
but that these do not amount to the unified
whole that Anderson imagines.
McCleery and Brabon bring together a
cluster of provocative and critical responses
to Anderson’s work but published as it is
under the auspices of the Scottish Centre for
the Book, it is perhaps curious given the
volume’s preface that none of these essays
engage in a sustained fashion with Scotland.
The volume does, however, represent the first
in a series of monographs emanating from a
successful colloquia series, each focussing on
a key figure in book history studies and
engaging with scholars from around the
globe.
e
Gail Low
University of Dundee
Matthew McLean. The Cosmographia of
Sebastian Münster: Describing the World in the
Reformation. Aldershot, England; Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2007. viii, 378p. ill. ISBN
9780754658436. $99.95.
Sebastian Münster’s ambitious work
Cosmographia attempted to comprehend the
world’s geography, natural history and
ethnography in one volume. Matthew
McLean’s exhaustive study begins with a
biography of Münster (1488-1552) who held
the Chair of Hebrew at the University of Basel
from 1529 until his death. The second chapter
summarizes the history of cosmographies
WINTER 2008 f 19
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
following two major styles developed by the
ancients (the descriptive style of Strabo and
the mapping style of Ptolemy) through to
Münster’s own period. Chapters 4 and 5
summarize McLean’s close reading of the 1550
edition of Cosmographia, its engravings of
cityscapes and descriptions ranging from local
politics to exotic flora and fauna.
Of most interest for members of SHARP
would be chapter 3, in which McLean discusses
the creation, printing, sales and uses of the
Cosmographia (we learn for example that both
Goethe and Montaigne found the book
indispensable). McLean also outlines the
differences between later editions of the text,
both under Münster’s control and those
outside of his control. One example of a
foreign-language edition is the Frenchman
François de Belleforest’s Cosmographia
Universelle, which was more a “transposition”
(Peter Burke’s term from The Fortunes of the
Courtier, [90-93]) of the text than a translation.
According to McLean, Belleforest’s “changes
to the maps [and his] splicing in of various
other authors, all radically altered the nature
of the work” (175).
Although McLean does not concern
himself much with the historiography of
authorship, reading and publishing (which
might be the one weakness of the book), there
is much there that could be explored. McLean’s
findings could speak to the ongoing debate
between Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian
Johns about the fixity of print in early modern
Europe.
For Eisenstein, the printing press made
possible the wide proliferation of similar if
not identical texts, allowing scholars to
compare their writings with those of their
contemporaries and of the ancients. Münster’s
Cosmographia was a product of the culture of
print in that it incorporated findings from a
wide variety of printed sources, as well as the
fruits of an open letter that Münster printed
in 1528 inviting scholars across the Holy
Roman Empire and the republic of letters to
contribute histories, maps and descriptions
of their cities for inclusion in the Cosmographia.
Adrian Johns has shown that an edition of
an early modern book was not all that uniform
and a scholar could not be sure that he had
the same text as another scholar. Münster was
aware of such issues. He stayed close to the
printing of his books maintaining
relationships with printers in Basel, including
the Frobens, Konrad Pellikan (for whom
Münster worked as a corrector and editor) and
Heinrich Petri (who was Münster’s stepson).
When Pellikan’s shop undertook the risk
involved in printing the massive Cosmographia
in 1544, Münster “was still at work on the
manuscript, correcting, having pictures cut and
captioning the maps” (169). Münster even
invented a printing forme in which he could lay
out the engraving of a fixed map (which could
speak to the ideal of Eisenstein’s fixity in print),
but with “spaces for movable type” leaving
open the possibility to change the text if
necessary for the same or future editions.
Adrian Johns argues that part of the fluid
culture of early modern texts was the abundant
pirating of texts. Johns provides an example
where engravings of Galileo’s maps of the
moon were “pirated” by German and London
printers for their editions of Galileo’s books
(Johns, Nature of the Book, 22-23). In McLean’s
study, we find that printers freely shared their
wood cuts and engravings with each other,
and in the printing of Münster’s Cosmographia,
several images were used multiple times (171).
Such features of the culture of printing during
Münster’s time pose the question whether we
can call such practices pirating if they were the
nor m? McLean’s study of Münster’s
Cosmographia offers answers to these and other
questions and will be a valuable addition to
any library with holdings in the history of the
book.
Derek Jensen
Brigham Young University, Idaho
e
Paradise: New Worlds of Books and Readers. Special
issue of Script and Print: Bulletin of the
Bibliographical Society of Australia and New
Zealand vol. 29, no. 1-4 (2005, issued 2007).
384p. ill. ISSN 00847852, ISBN 9780975150023
(pbk). $AUD65.00
If, when you hear the title Paradise: New
Worlds of Books and Readers, you are thinking
of remote, tropical islands situated in
turquoise waters, with white beaches and lush
bush to which the power of print is being
bought, then you will be disappointed to know
that most of the articles contained in this
special issue of Script and Print describe rather
different, and differing, paradisiacal places of
reading. All of the twenty-seven articles began
as papers delivered at a SHARP regional
conference in Wellington, New Zealand in
January 2005. This issue therefore reflects the
character of conference proceedings, and the
scope and nature of the essays is accordingly
wide-ranging. From Japanese print culture in
early twentieth-century Saó Paulo, to the
question of orality and literacy in critical
perspectives on indigenous Australian lifewriting, the selection of papers offers a
refreshing – and at times unexpected –
approach to the overall theme. What unifies
them – as outlined in the opening piece by
Alberto Manguel – is an understanding of
reading as an activity which questions existing
boundaries, reflects on the self, and nurtures
a power that is embedded in imagination.
A large number of articles examine the
emergence and intrusion of print into ‘new,’
albeit flourishing, cultures in relation to
notions of power, political agenda and agency.
Rimi Chatterjee’s outstanding paper on book
history in India first provides a broad
conceptual overview of the arrival of Western
print culture on the subcontinent, before
explaining in more detail how “the crossfertilisation of orality and literacy” (50)
produced Bengal’s hybrid print culture. Like
Nicola Cummins’ paper on children’s stories
in the New Zealand newspaper, Otago Witness,
Chatterjee illustrates that reading cultures in
the colonies and outside the imperial centres
were far more alive and diverse than was
perhaps assumed. Local conditions impacted
upon print cultures and facilitated cultural
exchange and interaction independent from
the ‘mother’ society.
While most articles are confined in scope
to national histories, a few convincingly argue
for a transnational approach to book history.
One of them is Alistair McCleery’s case-study
on the publishing history of the Penguin
edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in both New
Zealand and the UK during the 1960s.
McCleery argues that this was a key event in
redefining the changing relationship between
UK publishers and Dominion markets.
Likewise, Kevin Molloy’s study of the Irish
in New Zealand points to the significance of
newspapers and book distribution channels
for ethnicity- and identity-building in new
places of paradise.
Some essays explore the theme of new
worlds of readers, not as a geographical
category, but as one related to time: Raichel
LeGoff examines the response to Imagines of
Philostratus the Elder in early modern Greece
more than twelve centuries after its initial
creation. Her article is particularly striking as it
sits at the intersection between art history and
bibliography, highlighting the interplay of the
text and its materiality in the form of
... /20
20 e WINTER 2009
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
... / 19
paintings. These translate the imaginative
paradise into images and thus create “a new
‘text’ from which Philostratus could be read”
(158), in addition to the actual physical paradise
of the Studiolo. This unusual perspective
confirms once more that book history is
enriched most when allowing interdisciplinary
dimensions and methods.
Even though not all the papers are equal
in standard, the majority are convincing and
testify that there is much work being done in
book history outside the traditional
metropoles which warrants greater attention.
The volume will be particularly useful for
scholars working on print culture in the Pacific,
as a large number of papers have their
geographical focus here, but also for anyone
interested in the power and function of
reading and print in marginalised societies. On
a last note, Paradise is the inaugural volume of
Script and Print, the re-fashioned Bulletin of
the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New
Zealand. This is a good indication that book
historians ‘down under’ are embracing current
debates and trends in the field by providing a
forum for questions that go beyond mere
bibliography.
Susann Liebich
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
e
Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, eds.
Michael Field and Their World. High Wycombe,
U.K: The Rivendale Press, 2007. 255p. ill. ISBN
1904201083. $55.
Heather Ingman. Twentieth-Century Fiction by
Irish Women: Nation and Gender. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2007. 206p. ISBN 0754635384.
$99.95.
Michael Field and Their World is a collection
of essays that originated in a 2004 conference
held at the University of Delaware. The essays
are arranged into four sections: Biography;
Contexts: Literary and Cultural Worlds;
Thematics: Sexuality and Religion; and
Translations: Textuality and Genre. Individual
essays represent a broad array of topics and
approaches, including highly-theorized
readings, studies of influence, close textual
analysis, literary history, and publishing
history. Stetz and Wilson, the editors, are
correct to note that “some of the
contributions, we admit, will be valuable
mainly to academic readers and to specialists
[while others] will be accessible and interesting
to more general readers” (8).
Two essays will be of particular interest to
SHARP members, though book history is
mentioned in several others, and the volume's
illustrations provide context for discussions
of book design. Marion Thain's “Apian
Aestheticism: Michael Field and the
Economics of the Aesthetic” offers an
insightful discussion of how Field's 1908
volume Wild Honey from Various Thyme takes
part in a Victorian conversation about bees.
Bees, Thain asserts, “had gained a new and
topical currency at the end of the nineteenth
century” (224), and she concisely delineates the
discussion on bees that Field was engaging.
Thain works with aspects of the book as a
physical object and considers how the thematic
developments of the poems interact with their
physical presentation in the volume. Joseph
Bristow's essay, “Michael Field's Lyrical
Aestheticism: Underneath the Bough,” shares
Thain's interest in book history. Bristow's
essay is part of the biographical cluster, and
he provides a useful overview of Field's
engagement with all aspects of their books'
publication, describing their “characteristically
exacting demands regarding the terms of their
contract, the typography, page layout, and
binding” (51). As he traces the evolving history
of Under the Bough's publication, he provides
an intriguing glimpse into the lives of Field,
other late-Victorian authors, and publishing
houses including the Bodley Head and
Thomas B. Mosher of Portland, Maine.
Because the collection originated in a
conference, there are some regrettable
omissions in subject (a comparison to
Somerville and Ross would seem a natural
inclusion) and approach (while Field's
conversion to Roman Catholicism is
important in several essays, all of the writers
take a skeptical stance; the presence of a scholar
versed in less-secular theory would have been
welcome). Some repetitions could have been
avoided by a stronger editorial hand; many
essays repeat the same introductory
explanation of Field and their work. As a
reader new to Michael Field, I appreciated the
introduction this volume provides to the
unusual aunt-niece writing duo. A bibliography of their works, and an index, would
have provided a valuable service to those reader
who are not experts on Field. A minor
distraction throughout the volume was the
insertion of “sic” after English spellings in
quotations from Field. All in all, this book
offers a glimpse into the lives of two
interesting yet little-known writers and puts
them into a variety of contexts likely to interest
members of SHARP.
Ingman's book takes a two-part approach
to its subject, switching back and forth between
presenting the historical (and literary-historical)
context for these writers and employing Julia
Kristeva as a theoretical framework.
Explaining her choice, Ingman notes that her
“choice of Kristevan theory as a lens through
which to consider fiction by Irish women was
prompted by Kristeva's own interest, from
the 1990s onward, in nations and nationalism
and by the place she grants to women in this
topic” (3). Those readers interested in
Kristeva's theory will find Ingman's readings
satisfactory.
The book's opening chapter, “Irish
Women in the Twentieth Century,” introduces
her topic, and provides a chronological
overview of political, social, and literary
milestones of the century; the final chapter is
on Northern Ireland. The intervening five
chapters focus on different themes in Irish
women's fiction, such as “Reclaiming the
Mother in the Mother-Daughter Story" and
“The Feminine and the Sacred.” Ingman
provides close readings of novels by widelyknown authors, such as Edna O'Brien and
Jennifer Johnston, and includes a valuable
introduction to writers less familiar
(particularly to North American readers), such
as Deirdre Madden and Mary Morrissy. Her
reading of Elizabeth Bowen's The Last
September is excellent, and may provide readers
with a different perspective on Bowen's betterknown novels such as The Death of the Heart.
Ingman's political sensibilities sometimes
shine through too clearly – she refers casually
to ‘the colonial oppressor’ and the ‘Six
Counties’ – and the chapter on Northern
Ireland is the weakest in the book. Ingman
fails to explain why Anne Devlin's play serves
as an important example in a book on fiction,
and a broader historical perspective (like that
provided by Marianne Elliot's Catholics of
Ulster) would have benefited the discussion.
Overall, Ingman's book offers less that is
directly of interest to SHARP members than
the volume of essays on Field, but it presents
a rewarding array of authors and persuasive
readings of women's fiction. Were it not for
the prohibitive price, the book's broad range
and historical context would make it a useful
undergraduate course text.
Rosemary Erickson Johnsen
Governors State University, Illinois
WINTER 2008 f 21
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of the University of Virginia. David L.
Vander Meulen, ed. Vol. 56, 2003-04.
Charlottesville, NC: The University Press of
Virginia, 2006. [vi], 349p. ISBN
97808139253041 (cloth). $US70.
Studies in Bibliography, Volume 56, contains
ten articles that cover subjects from the
Renaissance to the twentieth century. Six,
including G. Thomas Tanselle’s “Dust Jackets,
Dealers, and Documentation,” Conor Fahy’s
“Paper Making in Seventeenth-Century
Genoa: The Account of Giovanni Domenico
Peri (1651),” and B. J. McMullin’s “Watermarks
and the Determination of Format in British
Paper, 1794-circa 1830,” deal with various
aspects of bibliography. Two, Richard Bucci’s
“Tanselle’s ‘Editing without a Copy-text’:
Genesis, Issues, Prospects” and Lance
Schachterle’s “Cooper and His Collaborators:
Recovering Cooper’s Final Intentions for His
Fiction,” join the debates on scholarly editing
that focus on such contested notions as final
authorial intentions and authorial
collaborators. And two, “Historiographical
Problems and Possibilities in Book History
and National Histories of the Book” by
Michael F. Suarez, S. J. and “How to Read
Book History” by David L. Vander Meulen,
consider the strengths and weaknesses of the
present state of book history.
The articles are the work of good scholars,
but they are not without faults. Tanselle
reverses the name of Ernest Thompson Seton
(72). Suarez uses “data” (147 et passim) as a
single, rather than a plural, noun. Stanley
Boorman’s “Bibliographical Aspects of Italian
Printed Music of the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries” needs a context that
allows it to be understood by a critic trained in
bibliography but unfamiliar with printed
music. In “The Dissemination of
Shakespeare’s Plays circa 1714,” the tone
employed by Don-John Dugas and Robert
D. Hume to correct Harry M. Geduld’s Prince
of Publishers: A Study of the Work and Career
of Jacob Tonson (1969) – Geduld committed
“gross” errors (263), and he made “ludicrous”
statements (265) – seems inappropriate.
Nevertheless, these articles represent some of
the best that is being thought and written on
bibliography and editing – and on such
SHARP subjects as authorship, reading, and
publishing.
As an editor of early English-Canadian
prose, my favorites were Bucci’s analysis of
the importance of Tanselle’s many statements
on editing, in particular his essay “Editing
without a Copy-Text,” which first appeared in
Studies in Bibliography in 1994, and Schachterle’s
study of the editions prepared by “The
Writings of James Fenimore Cooper.” Having
taken a course on editing from Tanselle, I can
only reinforce Bucci’s comments on the
former’s “generous and inviting spirit” and
the complexity that should make his ideas
attractive to “the best editorial minds of all
orientations” (44). And having been influenced
by both Tanselle and David Nordloh, both
of whom Schachterle names as “collaborators”
(317), I was fascinated to discover how his
comments about such matters as “holograph
witnesses” (317) and the role that copyists and
printers played in changing Cooper’s texts
reflected their ideas – and my experiences.
What was most challenging about these
essays was their emphasis on the importance
of actual artifacts, their conviction that these
are being destroyed by librarians and ignored
by many scholars of book history, and their
concern about the lack of bibliographical
knowledge. Tanselle’s plea “for libraries to
preserve jackets” (90-91), Vander Meulen’s
comments about the “attractions” of floating
“above all disciplinary boundaries” (171) while
forgetting “the centrality of artifacts and their
study” (172), and Suarez’s “disturbing truth”
that many “engaged in book-historical
scholarship received no bibliographical
training” as graduate students (155) reinforce
these concerns. That there is room for hope,
however, is amply demonstrated by the articles
in this volume of Studies in Bibliography.
Mary Jane Edwards
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
e
Hamish Thompson. Cover Up: The Art of the
Book Cover in New Zealand. Auckland: Godwit,
2007. 176p. ill. ISBN 9781869621230.
$NZD39.99.
Cover Up is a fine addition to the growing
body of literature tracing the history of
modern book cover design. With an
indebtedness to Heller and Chwast (Jackets
Required, 1997), and more recently, Drew and
Sternberger (By its Cover: Modern American Book
Cover Design, 2005), Hamish Thompson
synthesizes New Zealand book cover design
from the 1930s through to the present,
infusing international character into the
concept of International Design.
Thompson, a Wellington-based graphic
designer educated in England and
Switzerland, began his career teaching graphic
art in the United States and New Zealand.
After ten years as an educator, he became a
designer for New Zealand’s National Library
and Te Papa Tongarewa Museum, and is
currently a freelance book designer. Singlehandedly shouldering the task of
documenting and explicating New Zealand’s
graphic arts history, Thompson’s first book,
Paste Up (2003) explored his nation’s
contributions to poster design. Cover Up
performs a similar assessment for book jackets
and paper-covered bindings, providing a first
look at this little-explored aspect of book
history.
Cover Up celebrates the threedimensionality of the book. Its own paper
binding depicts a circular arrangement of the
spines of many of the covers illustrated
within and emphasizes the need for a book
to succeed in attracting attention face-on as
well as in profile on the bookshelf. Organized
chronologically by each artist’s date of birth,
Cover Up explores the careers of thirty-six
graphic designers with brief professional
biographies and reproductions of their work.
Their major covers provide a taste of New
Zealand’s evolving book design aesthetic since
World War I.
Commercial art was not formally taught
in New Zealand until the 1960s. Accordingly,
early works emphasized drawing and lettering
as taught by two of the country’s art schools
and three technical colleges. Isolated from
mainstream Modernism, covers from the
1930s through to the 1950s combine strong
typographic elements with painted, engraved,
or woodcut illustrations reminiscent of period
travel posters. Many rely on a frugal pallet of
one or two colors to keep production costs
down. By the 1950s, Geoffrey Nees and Bill
Sutch led the way to professionalizing graphic
art in New Zealand by formally incorporating
design within the Department of Industries
and Commerce; Nees went on to found the
New Zealand Design Council in 1967. The
work of John Drawbridge, Mark Cleverly, and
Graham Percy from this period merged
Modernist elements with local sensibilities,
clearly amalgamating local visual language with
the international influence of Alvin Lustig,
Paul Rand, and Rudy de Harak.
Bold abstract constructions dominate the
cover designs of Don Pebbles whose joyous
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22 e WINTER 2009
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
... / 21
treatment of color and form reflects the
influence of Leo Lionni. This reviewer was
struck by the work of Gordon Walter, who
converted indigenous Maori symbols into
formal graphic archetypes, capturing the
unique spirit of Kiwi awareness in classic
Modernist constructions. Walter’s covers
provide an excellent example of graphic art’s
ability to fix a book’s identity in both time
and place.
Thompson’s survey sheds light on the
relationship between production and
reception. Cover Up provides rich and varied
evidence that New Zealand book cover designs
drew on regional traditions tempered by
international style. The books appealed to an
indigenous audience like nothing else on earth.
Randy Silverman
University of Utah
and the cultural and social history of
information.
Information is ubiquitous in society,
historically and now. Potentially, this makes
for a subject that many would believe to be at
best wide-ranging and therefore cumbersome
and at worst opaque and nebulous – can a
study of the taxonomy of routine at the
Victorian dinner party be considered
information history? Others, Weller included,
would argue that the parameters of
information history can be articulated, with
historians in a wide variety of fields
acknowledging its coherence and engaging in
it flexibly, without having to sign up in
perpetuity to a new domain. The aim, after
all, would appear to be the construction of a
new field, not a new college. If this is to be
the path for information history, then this
book will have helped to have cleared the way.
e
Toni Weller, Information history – an introduction:
exploring an emergent field. Chandos
Information Professional Series, Oxford:
Chandos, 2008. xvi, 147p. ISBN 978184334
3943 (paperback); 9781843343950 (hardback).
£39.95 (paperback); £59.95 (hardback).
Significant events and developments in the
contemporary social world tend to prompt
historical studies of their roots and earlier
manifestations. It is not surprising, therefore,
that the revolution in digital information and
communication technology, and the associated
perceived emergence of an information society,
should have encouraged scholars to investigate
how in the past information was collected,
organised and used. Weller’s book is both an
outcome of this recent scholarship and an
attempt to legitimise it as a field of history
supported by a distinct, identifiable and
growing academy (the sub-title takes for
granted that the field is ‘emergent’ and,
therefore, exists).
Chapters offer an introduction to the recent
literature of information history; reflect on
how the field might develop in the future;
show how information history has practical
relevance to the information student and
professional; and map out the components,
or sub-fields, of information history – these
being library and book history; the history of
information systems and infrastructure; the
history of the information disciplines; the
origins and history of the information society;
Alistair Black
University of Illinois
e
Min Wild. Christopher Smart and Satire: ‘Mary
Midnight’ and the Midwife. Aldershot,
Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2008. vii, 231p. ISBN 9780754661931.£50.
Christopher Smart’s The Midwife, or Old
Woman’s Magazine (1750-1753) has long been
viewed as an irreverent work filled wild
transformations, parodic history, mad
schemes, and paradoxical commentary on the
plight of the oppressed. Its subject matter
includes the discovery of a “fossilized turd,”
an organ constructed of tortured cats, a shop
for exchanging heads, and copious parodies
of rival journals. In the first book length
study of the Midwife, Min Wild undertakes a
broad contextualization of Smart’s highly
entertaining but critically neglected magazine.
Her revisionary argument – deriving from
John and Deborah Ayer Sitter’s suggestion
that Smart’s work provides “‘a rhetorical
continuity between Swift and Sterne’” (45) –
is that the Midwife is a product of Smart’s
training in classical rhetoric and thus a late
manifestation of the tradition of “learned
dissent”(11-12, 45-6). Central to Smart’s
technique is the “rhetorical trope called
prosopopoeia” – “the representation of ‘an
imaginary or absent persona as speaking, or
acting; attributing life, speech, or human
qualities to dumb or inanimate objects’” (27).
In the female voice of “Mary Midnight,” Wild
contends, Smart develops a flexible and
sometimes self-contradictory instrument
through which to engage satirically a wide array
of eighteenth-century topics.
Ranging from theoretical and historical
speculation to detailed readings and
summaries, Wild adopts a richly inclusive
approach to Smart’s magazine that sometimes
(like Smart’s work itself) risks incoherence. She
argues that close attention to Smart’s various
personae “can broaden our understanding of
print culture [and] concepts of authorship,”
while simultaneously illuminating “wider
debates in the period: questions about the
nature and status of gender, of political
engagement, of personal identity, and
ultimately of the cultural reception of aspects
of Enlightenment thought” (3). On the topic
of authorship, Wild’s layered readings of the
Midnight persona provide stimulating new
insights into Smart’s practice. But in the wider
arena of Enlightenment culture and politics,
her universalizing tendencies too often lead
her to jostle together superficial snippets of
historical, theoretical, and critical observation
without the virtue of integration. Structurally,
such an approach can produce choppy chapters
made up of short sections addressing
disparate issues: chapter two, comprising only
twenty-eight pages, has no fewer than eleven
sections, one as short as two paragraphs (64).
If Wild succeeds in capturing, however
irregularly, the complexity of the print culture
that produced the Midwife, she offers
surprisingly conservative conclusions about
Smart himself. Her focus on “learned dissent”
tends to cast Smart as a reluctant hack-bynecessity “who barely bothered to hide his
disgust with what he was doing” (12) and
who infused his ostensibly lunatic magazine
with “sub-Scriblerian” literary and social
doctrine (128). In part this is true: Smart could
certainly work both sides of the porous
Scriblerian-Modern divide. But Wild’s verdict
that Smart wrote the Midwife “to satirize a
society in which he saw materialism, greed
and ignorance as threatening to obliterate not
only a hard-won tradition of learning and
scholarship, but also the cardinal human
qualities of judgment and benevolence” (195)
seems an overly moralistic reduction of the
intermittently brilliant farrago of wit, outrage,
pop culture, politics, filth, and foolishness
that her study has traced. The dichotomy of
Smart the enthusiastic (in both senses)
student of the popular culture and Smart the
conservative critic behind the “Midnight”
WINTER 2008 f 23
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
mask will remain a subject of complicated and
continuing discussion. Wild’s Christopher Smart
and Satire: ‘Mary Midnight’ and the Midwife is a
noteworthy contribution to this debate and
tells us more about the Midwife than we have
ever known before.
Lance Bertelsen
University of Texas at Austin
e
Ruth Clayton Windscheffel. Reading Gladstone.
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008. xvi, 330p. ill. ISBN
0230007651. $69.95.
“The history of books cannot … be
separated from the history of souls” (134).
Why didn’t any of us ever think of stating
our mission in such forceful and pithy terms?
In fact, long before Lucien Febvre and HenriJean Martin, those words were written by
William Ewart Gladstone. His fourteen
volume dairies may be the most extensive
document of reader response ever produced
by one individual, recording roughly 17,500
books and pamphlets as well as innumerable
periodical articles. He acquired books
obsessively and preserved his collection by
creating St. Deiniol’s Library at Hawarden.
After their marriage, his wife was somewhat
dismayed to discover that her new husband
devoted every moment of his spare time to
his books (rather than to her).
Political historians have tended to play
down the importance of Gladstone’s
bibliophilia, treating it as a diversion from the
real business of parliamentary government.
But he makes an ideal subject for the book
historian, and that challenge has been taken
up by Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, who spent
four years studying at St. Deiniol’s. Her objective
is to reveal “Gladstone’s persona when he was
engaging with texts … by examining how his
reading functioned as an expression of self ”
(2-3). She scrutinizes his marginalia, which
extended to annotating and correcting tourist
guides and maps – “interactive” avant la lettre
(75). She details Gladstone’s management of
his personal library, which his servants enjoyed
access to. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer
who struck down “taxes on knowledge,”
Gladstone earned his halo as the apostle of
cheap print, though he sometimes doubted
whether the workers or the Irish could be
trusted to enjoy an entirely free press.
Of course Windscheffel discusses
Gladstone’s choice of books, which covered
every topic from chicken farming to
pornography. Apropos of that, he often used
reading as a tool in his efforts to rescue
prostitutes. Perhaps thinking that one fallen
woman would take an interest in a poem about
another, he twice recorded reading Tennyson’s
“Guinevere” to a retired courtesan “with
undiminished admiration.” “Whether this
was of the poem or his hostess is unclear,”
Windscheffel observes (123).
Windscheffel analyzes in detail the influence
of Gladstone’s reading on his theology, but
its influence on his politics gets surprisingly
little attention. She tries to draw connections
between his scholarly interests and his
reengagement with national politics over the
“Eastern Question,” but the two were not
entirely compatible. Gladstone was torn
between spending his precious hours in the
study or in the House of Commons, and his
public image as a monkish reader damaged
him as a politician.
Reading Gladstone is an original departure
in book studies, prodigiously researched, but
Windscheffel doesn’t fully connect the literary
and the political, and that is something of a
disappointment. As early as The Rise and Fall
of the Man of Letters (1968), John Gross
highlighted the fact that Victorian and
Edwardian parliaments were densely
populated with litterateurs. Surely the next
frontier for book historians should be to
explain how politicians’ reading shaped their
policy agendas. And not just in Britain: as
recent studies by Timothy Ryback and
Ambrus Miskolczy have shown, Adolf Hitler
also had an impressive library.
Jonathan Rose
Drew University
IN SHORT
Anthony Grafton, Codex in Crisis. New York:
The Crumpled Press, 2008. v, 53 p. ISBN
9780979696923. Limited edition, no price
indicated.
In this elegantly printed pamphlet, a revised
and expanded version of an article that first
appeared in The New Yorker in 2007, Grafton
considers the effect of the vast proliferation
of internet resources, but concludes that the
library, and the codex, remain necessary for
serious research and, particularly, for the
training of young scholars.
www.designinginformation.org
A new website to support Designing
Information for Everyday Life 1815-1914, an
AHRC-funded research project at the
University of Reading
... /24
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18.1
24 e WINTER 2009
BIBLIOGRAPHY
General
Cornelius D. Andriesse, Dutch Messengers:
A History of Science Publishing 1930-1980.
Boston, MA: Brill, 2008.
Laura Cruz, The Paradox of Prosperity: the
Leiden Booksellers’ Guild and the Distribution of
Books In Early Modern Europe. New Castle, DE:
Oak Knoll Books, 2008.
Antwan Qaysar Dabbas and Nakhlah
Rashshu, Tarikh al-tiba ‘ah al- ‘Arabiyah fi alMashriq: al-Batriyark Athnasiyus al-Thalith
Dabbas 1685-1724, muassis awwal matba ‘ah
‘Arabiyah lughatan wa-harfan fi al-Mashriq.
Beirut, Lebanon: Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashr, 2008.
Michael Empell, Gutenberg vor Gericht: der
Mainzer Prozess um die erste gedruckte Bibel.
Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Lang, 2008.
Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond, Books
Without Borders: The Cross-National Dimension
in Print Culture. 2 vols. Basingstoke, England
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Akira Isobe, ed., Higashi Ajia no shuppan to
chiiki bunka: mukashi no hon no monogatari.
Tokyo, Japan: Kyuko Shoin, 2008.
Luc Knapen and Leo Kenis, Hout in boeken,
houten boeken en de fraaye konst houtdraayen.
Leuven, Belgium: Maurits Sabbebibliotheek,
Faculteit Godgeleerdheid: Peeters, 2008.
Miha Kovak, Never Mind the Web: Here Comes
the Book. Oxford, England: Chandos, 2008.
Alfred Noe, Renaissance. Graz, Austria:
Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 2008.
David Pearson, Books as History: The
Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts.
London, England and New Castle, DE: Oak
Knoll Books, 2008.
Gabrielle Watling and Sara E. Quay, eds.,
Cultural History of Reading. 2 vols. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2008.
Martin Welke and Jürgen Wilke, eds., 400
Jahre Zeitung: die Entwicklung der Tagespresse im
internationalen Kontext: 1605-2005. Bremen,
Germany; Ed. Lumière, 2008.
Austria
Peter R. Frank and Johannes Frimmel,
Buchwesen in Wien 1750-1850: kommentiertes
Verzeichnis der Buchdrucker, Buchhändler und
Verleger. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz,
2008.
SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1
China
Muzhi Yang, Gu ji zheng li yu chu ban zhuan
jia lun gu ji zheng li yu chu ban. Nanjing, China:
Feng Huang chu ban she, 2008.
Jiarong Wang, Min zu hun: jiao ke shu bian
qian. Beijing, China: Shang wu yin shu guan,
2008.
Mark Wildermuth, Print, Chaos, and
Complexity: Samuel Johnson and EighteenthCentury Media Culture. Newark, DE: University
of Delaware Press, 2008.
Margaret Willes, Reading Matters: Five
Centuries of Discovering Books. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2008.
France
Florence Bouchet, Le discours sur la lecture
en France aux XIVe et XVe siècles: pratiques,
poétique, imaginaire. Paris, France: Honoré
Champion Éditeur, 2008.
Jean-Yves Mollier, Edition, presse et pouvoir
en France au XXe siècle. Paris, France: Fayard,
2008.
Eric Vigne, Le livre et l’éditeur. Paris, France:
Klincksieck, 2008.
United States
Nicholas A. Basbanes, A World of Letters:
Yale University Press, 1908-2008. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2008.
David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice
of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New
England. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Al Silverman, The Time of Their Lives: The
Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers,
Their Editors and Authors. New York: Truman
Talley Books, 2008.
Wayne A. Wiegand and Christine Pawley,
eds, Alternative Print Culture: Social History and
Libraries. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008. [This is a special issue
of Library Trends, vol. 56, no. 3 (Winter 2008).]
Germany
Stephanie Rahmede, Die Buchhandlung der
Gelehrten zu Dessau: ein Beitrag zur
Schriftstelleremanzipation um 1800. Wiesbaden,
Germany: Harrassowitz, 2008.
Italy
Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, Print
Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Growth
and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder. London,
England: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008.
IN SHORT [CONT]
Japan
Masatsugu Matsumoto, Akio Ueno, and
Kenya Washio. Watashi no sengo shuppanshi.
Tokyo, Japan: Toransubyu, 2008.
Robert D. Fleck, Books about Books. A History
and Bibliography of Oak Knoll Press, 1978-2008.
New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2008. v ,
232p. ill. ISBN 9781584562481 (pb);
978584562598 (hb). $25.00 (pb); $45 (hb)
United Kingdom
David Ainsworth, Milton and the Spiritual
Reader : Reading and Religion in SeventeenthCentury England. New York; Routledge, 2008.
Asa Briggs, A History of Longmans and
Their Books, 1724-1990: Longevity in Publishing.
London, England: British Library and New
Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2008.
Laurie Ellinghuasen, Labor and Writing in
Early Modern England, 1567-1667. Aldershot,
England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Valerie Holman, Print for Victory: Book
Publishing in Britain 1939-1945. London,
England: British Library, 2008.
Kate Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1660-1740:
Deception in English Literary and Political
Culture. Aldershot, England and Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2008.
M.B. Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes:
A Closer Look at Scribes. Aldershot, England
and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Robert D. Fleck is known to most of
SHARP’s members as the founder and
proprietor of Oak Knoll Press, a publishing
house specializing in books about books
(defined very broadly), and to the more
affluent among us as owner of a bookshop
specializing in private press books and rare
volumes concerning every part of the history
of the book. In the fifty or so heavily illustrated
pages at the front of the present book, Fleck
details his struggle to establish the shop and
the press, his successful efforts to co-publish
with a variety of other presses, and his work
within a number of booksellers’ associations.
The style is light, even jaunty, and perhaps
disguises what must have been a great deal of
hard and often financially risky work. Fleck
concludes with a detailed listing of the 309
titles the press has already issued, plus the
eleven currently in the works.