Shady Characters

This is the one hundred fourth in a series of one hundred five posts on Miscellany. Start at PART 1, continue to PART 105 or view ALL POSTS in the series.

In the second of this miniseries of post-deadline catch-ups (the first dealt with punctuation), I’ve collected some links on the subject of books.

First is a recent exhibition at Harvard’s Houghton Library, called “Marks in Books”, that has, sadly, run its course. But John Overholt, a curator of early books and manuscripts at Houghton, writes to say that the exhibit was adapted from a 1984 exhibition on the same subject and that the catalogue of that earlier incarnation is available online.

And that catalogue, my goodness. The introduction, penned by a Harvard librarian named Roger E Stoddard, reads as if it was the prologue to one of MR James’s celebrated ghost stories,* which, for the uninitiated, often begin with a hapless academic uncovering some cryptic historical artefact, and which are invariably told with a kind of gentle stuffiness that belies their unsettling plots:

In the spring of 1973 during my bi-annual acquisitions trip I visited in London the premises of E. P. Goldschmidt Ltd. as two generations of Harvard librarians had before me. Pulling down and leafing through books is one of the disciplines of acquisitions work, so when I came upon a small folio bound in reverse calf,† I took it and opened it even though its binding signified business or law rather than my desiderata, arts and sciences. Opening up the book revealed the most intense patterns of decoration and annotation that I had ever encountered in a sixteenth-century book.

In James’s hypothetical story, the protagonist would now find himself transported to early modern Germany, or beset by some hideous ancient creature, but Stoddard is luckier: he has found a 1509 work decorated with paragraph marks, rubricated capital letters, manicules and copious reader’s notes — glosses, marginalia, summaries and index words.

If Stoddard’s introduction doesn’t hold your attention, the rest of the catalogue will. There are examples here of every kind of post-hoc mark in a book that you might ever expect to meet: pilcrows, asterisks, obeli, hyphens of all sorts, catchwords, illustrations, comments, notes, signatures, stamps, and translations. I wish I’d known about it while writing Shady Characters! Have a read, if you can; it’s the next best thing to having seen the exhibition itself.

And if you manage to consume the “Marks in Books” catalogue and still have a yearning for marginalia afterwards, consider Micheline White’s illuminating (I’m sorry) 2013 essay on illuminations and other marks in books distributed by Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, at Cambridge University Press. I am in no way an expert on the quote-late Henrician court-unquote, but White’s paper nevertheless contains lots of intriguing details about one particular decorated book and has a host of manicules to ogle, too.

You wait ages for an article on the advent of paper in medieval bookbinding and then two come along at once. In November and December last year, Yungjin Shin, a conservator at the Thaw Conservation Center of New York’s Morgan Library, published a pair of articles on how bookbinders managed the transition from parchment to paper by means of reinforcing parchment strips. Read them here and here; Shin wears her expertise lightly, and, yet again, I wish I’d had access to her articles as I wrote The Book!

In “Case-endings and Calamity” at the London Review of Books, Erin Maglaque reviews a new book on the life of Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer whose books established many of the traditions still followed by book designers today. Her review is a great read, and, if it is anything to go by, Aldus Manutius: The Invention of the Publisher by Oren Margolis should be excellent too.

As a postscript to my last post, I was saddened to read that the St Andrews bookshop J&G Innes has closed its doors for the final time. Quite apart from the striking inscription above the door and its Arts and Crafts design (have a look at them here, in an earlier post), it was, apparently, the town’s oldest independent bookseller. It’s a pity to see such a venerable bookshop close up shop — a reminder that we need to support our local businesses if we don’t want them suffer the same fate.

*

Standard Ebooks, a volunteer-run website that produces some of the best ebook editions of classic works, has a what looks to be a fairly comprehensive collection of James’s work. I urge you to read it! ↢

†

“Reverse calf” being calf leather used with the flesh side outward that has been roughened slightly to resemble suede. ↢