Themselves are only mystic books

For Valentine’s Day I’m sharing one of my favorite poems — John Donne’s Elegy XIX: To his Mistress going to bed.  This is its second appearance in print, from the third edition of his poetry published in 1669.

The poem, denied a license for publication in the first edition, was printed first in an anthology in 1654 before taking its place alongside his other works in 1669.  Visit Texas A&M’s Digital Donne website to see the entire text, as well as other early Donne books and manuscripts.

None of Donne’s poetry was printed before his death in 1631, but pieces such as this one did circulate widely in manuscript.  You can read more about that, and see some manuscript examples, in a fascinating short essay at the Folger Library: John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to bed” As an Open Source.

Elegy XIX: To his Mistress going to bed

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defie,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir’d with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heavens Zone glittering,
But a far fairer world incompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th’ eyes of busie fooles may be stopt there.
Unlace your self, for that harmonious chyme,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envie,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals,
As when through flowry meads th’hills shadows steales.
Off with that wyerie Coronet and shew
The haiery Diadem which on your head doth grow:
Now off with those shooes, and then softly tread
In this loves hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven’s Angels us’d to be
Reveal’d to men: thou Angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomets Paradice, and though
Ill spirits walk in white; we easly know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below,
O my America! my new-found-land,
My Kingdom’s safest, when with one man man’d.
My Myne of precious stones: My Emperie,
How am I blest in thus discovering thee?
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be,
Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be,
To taste whole joyes. Jems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s ball: cast in mens views,
That when a fools eye lighteth on a Jem,
His earthly soul may court that, not them:
Like pictures or like books gay coverings made,
For lay-men are all women thus arrayed.
Themselves are only mystick books, which we,
(Whom their imputed grace will dignifie)
Must see revealed. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to thy Midwife shew
Thy self: cast all, yea, this white lynnen hence
There is no pennance due to innocence:
To teach thee I am naked first, why than
What needst thou have more covering then a man.

Birds part I

If you look carefully you’ll begin to notice birds in all sorts of medieval manuscripts, used as anything from decorative flourishes to representations of the divine.  In this series of posts I’ll explore a variety of bird imagery, beginning today with ornamental figures and moving on to birds as symbols of power.  In the next post, birds of morality, philosophy, and religion.  (As usual, click the images to go directly to the sources.)

Our first examples come from Huntington Library HM 65, a copy of Ptolemy’s Almagest made in southern France in 1279.  This is an astronomical text, so the birds and other animals in the margins are purely decorative.  Like acanthus leaves and running hares, these birds are a familiar visual trope of the period.  Out of all the medieval birds they’re probably my favorites.

Sometimes birds illuminations aren’t just decorative but refer to the text.  Harvard University’s Houghton Library MS Typ 0446 is a 13th-century Latin Bible.  On one page we see a decorative bird perched on an illuminated initial, but in Exodus a stork appears with a frog in its beak—a reference to the plague of frogs.

Birds also grace the bindings of books.  These clasps date from 14th-century Germany.  Columbia University X242.1.S.

Bird in a blind stamped binding, bound between 1510 and 1519 by a Dutch binder named John Reynes who was active in London.  Huntington Library HM 36336.

The margins of manuscripts were a kind of no-man’s land where artists could explore subversive fears and fantasies.  The creepier aspects of birds are apparent in these grotesques from the pages of a 16th-century Dominican gradual.  University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center HRC 013.

But manuscript birds were just as likely to have a humorous character.  The Macclesfield Psalter, for instance, depicts a man riding a ‘hobby duck’.

A charming bird sneaks a bite from a penwork initial, from the University of Notre Dame, Hesburgh Library MS 12.  You are what you eat, after all.

Birds were also common as heraldic devices and symbols of authority.  This lovely 13th-century wax seal featuring a bird on a branch is affixed to a “Quit claim by Gwenllian, widow of Madoc ap Seycil to the monks of Abbey Dore of her widow’s third of the 4 1/2 bovates of land on Grosmont hill which Madoc gave to them for his burial for her soul and the soul of Madoc.”  Lawrence, University of Kanses, Kenneth Spencer Research Library MS 191:13.

The Luttrell Psalter is famous for its idealized depiction of English manor life.  Here a peasant feed chickens and a man uses a slingshot to drive crows from the newly tilled fields.  In this case the birds are a significant part of the manuscript’s meta-narrative: depicting its patron Geoffrey Luttrell as a benevolent and pious lord presiding over a bountiful estate.

Another way that birds embodied power and status was via falconry scenes — depictions of the nobility engaging in one of their favorite pastimes.  You could argue that owning a falcon was the medieval equivalent of driving a super car or owning a yacht, and wealthy book patrons would have enjoyed seeing this high status activity reflected in the pages of the luxury texts they commissioned.   Below is the illumination for the month of May from the Fecamp Psalter, created in France circa 1180.

Ptolemy with a falcon, from Der Naturen Bloeme, a 14th-century Flemish bestiary, KB KA 16.

Two examples of falconry from British Library Yates Thompson 13, a 14th-century English book of hours: the first is part of a calander page for the month of May.

Still Alive

During the past four months I have not been trapped under a stack of books in a lonely corner of a library sub-basement.  Or entangled in an international bibliographical conspiracy stretching from the Parisian catacombs to the highest levels of government (or at least I haven’t noticed).

What I have been doing is: finishing my dissertation, which was due in September, finding employment, visiting home for a few weeks, starting my new job at an antiquarian bookshop in London, finding a flat, graduating, sending in my visa application, and generally sorting things out.  As well as enjoying the absence of academic deadlines, though I’m already exploring options for starting a PhD in book history.

So a stressful transitional period is ending and I’m ready to think about writing again.  But I wanted to take a second and thank everyone who’s been reading the blog for the past few years, linking to my posts, and providing feedback and information.  It’s really incredible to be part of this tightly-knit biblioblogosphere, and I wish I could meet more of you in person.

Special thanks also goes to those who helped with my job hunt, particularly the people who went out of their way to assist me in person; all the advice and emotional support has truly meant a great deal to me.  I feel incredibly lucky to not only have a job, but one that I enjoy and consider a real career.  If you know me well you will understand how very strange it is when I say that that I’m eager to get out of bed in the morning.

So yeah, thanks everybody, and back to regularly scheduled posting.

Blurry graduation at Senate House.

Vade Mecum

A few months ago, in a post on medical manuscripts, I wrote about vade mecum and lamented that I couldn’t find any images online.  Reader Margie has come to the rescue with a great list of examples, and I’ve collected and annotated some of the images below.  Thanks Margie!

Vade mecum were carried by variety of professions, especially the mendicant religious orders, and not all included medical information.  Though the Welcome and UCLA examples below include medical diagrams, some of the others seem to be purely calendrical in nature.

Wellcome MS 40

This example was made in the late fifteenth-century.  Here we see the outer appearance of the vade mecum, including the folded pieces of parchment that make up the booklet and the two individual pieces that cover the front and back as a form of loose binding.

A calendar page fully opened from the front and displaying two months.  You can see the four folds that create the booklet – one horizontal and three vertical.  At the bottom the binding is visible.

A calendar page fully opened from the back.  On the lower half is the table of contents listing the three months written on this page.  When folded, the calendars are hidden and only the table of contents is visible while flipping through the almanac.

A zodiac man, with descriptions of each sign.

A phlebotomy, or bloodletting, man, showing the points to cut, as well as astrological charts.

Berkeley Huntington Library HM 47641 (please see correction in the comments below.  Thanks Justin!)

This example, from the Huntington Library at Berkeley, is unusual in that it has a brass cover.  It’s possible that other vade mecum had similar covers of metal or leather which have been lost.

The Berkeley manuscript opened – this liturgical calender has a different, and less commonly seen, orientation than the Welcome manuscript above.

Royal Observatory Edinburgh (scroll down)

This is a great photo, showing exactly how the booklets were opened and consulted.

Schoyen Collection (see MS 1581 and MS 2913)

MS in Norwegian and Latin on vellum, Uvdal, Norway, 1636, 30 ff. (complete), 5,5×5,5 cm, single column, (5×5 cm), 15 lines in capitals, Norwegian Gothic cursive script and a variant of Roman numbers, 80 miniatures of saints or their symbols, 12 circular diagrams, 12 miniatures of the occupations of the months, all in full colours; the book flattens out into a long strip, 67×11 cm, each section cut and folded around each month.

Binding: Norway, 1636, not bound but plied together to form a book, in its original girdle type leather covered wooden box.

Context: Very similar to 2 Norwegian girdle calendars dated 1558: the Hegra Calendar in Trondheim, Det Kgl. Norske Videnskabers Selskabs Bibliotek, and the Oslo Calendar, cf. MS 1581. Layout and illustrations are nearly identical, but the two earlier calendars are rather crudely executed compared to the present one.

This Norwegian almanac is very interesting in that it was created in 1636, long after the establishment of printing throughout Europe.  It would be interesting to learn more about manuscript calender production in this period, and why this format might have been chosen over printed calenders in this region.

More examples from the Bodleian Library and UCLA:

Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 939

Bodleian MS Ashmole 8

Bodleian Canon. Liturg. 237

Bodleian MS Rawl. D. 28

UCLA MS Rosenbach 1004/29 – Two medical images – a bloodletting man and a urine wheel (used to diagnose based on the color and texture of a patient’s urine).

Wanted: 1 Book Nerd

So I’m looking for a job.

I know there’s a recession on, but I’m hoping that someone is looking for a book nerd who has:

• A Bachelor of Science in the history of technology and will soon have a Master’s degree in book history.
• Deluxe, honed-in-the-British-Library research skills.
• Is a great writer.
• Is well-read.
• Interested in printing, the early modern era, science, technology, medicine, and natural history.
• Has previous experience in a bookshop and a library, and is not afraid of dust or heavy boxes.
• Familiar with internet book selling.
• Up-to-date with all the latest books news, trends, and criticism.
• Has great customer service experience.
• Loves computers and technology.  Knows about exciting things like blogging, websites, the social web, and digital photography, but also less exciting things like Access and Excel.
• Is good at admin stuff.  Microsoft Office, spreadsheets, reception, answering the phone, filing – check.
• Familiar with Latin and French and eager to improve.
• Motivated and detail-oriented.

I’d love to work in a bookshop or library, but I’m open to anything.  My dissertation will be completed by the 23rd of September, and I can work part-time in the UK until then.  When I’ve finished school I can work full-time and I’ll be eligible for a two-year British work permit.  I’d like to remain in the UK, but am definitely open to positions in the US (or Canada, Australia or New Zealand, for that matter).  If you know of something email me: laura AT bookn3rd DOT com, and I’ll send in a CV and cover letter.  Thanks!

Death and the Press

While writing about the Danse macabre in a recent post I remembered this, the oldest known illustration of mechanical printing.  It’s from a chapbook version of the Danse macabre printed in Lyons in 1499, at the very end of the incunabula period.

By this time printing has spread across Europe and the structure of the wooden press and the workflow of the printing house are well established.  On the left of the woodcut sits the compositor, filling his tray with letters from the case.  Beside him, resting on the bench, is the forme which holds the type tightly together during printing; this one looks like it holds two pages, making a folio-sized book.  The page sticking up is the copy that he works from.

In the middle are the two pressmen, one waving an ink ball.  These were made of treated, stuffed leather and the inker worked with one in each hand to spread the special, greasy ink on the assembled type.  The third man would have operated the press itself, pulling on the wooden bar to lower the heavy platen, squeezing the paper onto the inked forme.  The detail here is very good—the large wooden screw in the top of the press is clear and the press stone, which holds the forme and slides in and out for easy access, is visible.  The press is also accurately shown as being stabilized via beams attached to the ceiling.  The image on the right is a stationer’s shop, which were sometime attached to printing houses.

On a side note, one has to feel for the poor inker: with his colleagues dead and work at a standstill he’s loosing a day’s wages.  No wonder he’s yelling.

Of course, printing hadn’t been invented when the Danse macabre became popular in the late fourteenth century.  The inclusion of new technology into an old illustrative tradition shows that book designers were innovative even when copying older manuscript forms.  And I imagine that it was a fun bit of self-referential black humor to the printers, known for being a bawdy, jovial lot.

This wasn’t the last time death would appear allegorically in the printing house.  The illustration below is from a Danse macabre published at Lyons in 1568, nearly seventy years later, though the date of the woodcut itself is uncertain as they were often reused.  It’s a copy of the 1499 image, and though this artist was less talented, he seems to have been as familiar with the print shop as was his predecessor.  He has included details that are unclear or not visible in the older woodcut, such as the second ink ball, the platen, and the forme on the press stone; and he’s made the halfway finished forme next to the compositor four-pages (quarto-sized) rather than copying the two-page forme above.

Just a note:  The 1499 woodcut is very well-known, but I discovered the second through a short article titled ‘An Early Picture of a Printing Press’ by William M. Ivins in the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 19, 1924.

Irony

The world’s largest collection of sixteenth-century anatomical prints, or ‘fugitive sheets’ has been digitized and is available online, thanks to the Wellcome Library.  There are nineteen prints with pop-up action allowing the reader to see different organ systems in the order of dissection.  In this male and female set you can see both still images and video of the flaps being lifted—brilliant!  (I do wish that more of the entries offered stills, since the video is cool but it’s hard to get a detailed view of the different layers.)

I’m in the process of looking through all these, but I’m especially intrigued by this one.  Can you guess who’s making an unauthorized celebrity cameo?  It’s Vesalius’s head on that body, copied from his full-page portrait in the Fabrica.  Right next to an organ (on the right) taken from the same book.  Vesalius spent a great deal of energy, even prior to publication, in trying to forestall the plagiarism of his work.  I doubt, though, that even he imagined his own head would end up on a perpetually-being-dissected body.  One has to wonder about the motives of the artist—an ironic joke at the great dissector’s expense?

Here’s the original portrait for comparison:

Tweets from Beyond the Grave

Congratulations are in order for Jeremy and the Massachusetts Historical Society: the new John Quincy Adams Twitter feed has amassed more than 5000 followers and been featured by a number of news outlets, including the AP, NY Times, and Morning Edition.  You can see Jeremy speaking about the project with CBS in this video.  Great job!  Be sure to follow the Twitter feed to get Adams’ succinct daily updates on his trip to Russia.

European Blockbooks

Lately I’ve been looking at a lot of medieval manuscripts.  And thinking about mostly just… medieval manuscripts.  Which is great; I’ve seen amazing things in the last few days and my dissertation is coming along nicely.  But I’d like to think about something else for a bit, so while this topic is actually kinda still medieval, at least it’s a form of printing.

Blockbooks appeared in northern Europe at almost the same time as movable type, during the mid-fifteenth century, and may have developed from the printing of patterned fabric, individual devotional images, and playing cards.  They can be differentiated from other types of early printed books because they didn’t use movable type: text was always carved into the block along with the images.  This process is labor-intensive and sort of a bitch if you screw up or decide to change something, but it allowed for quick, cheap reproduction.  Pages were printed on one side by rubbing the paper against the carved and inked block, and the blank sides were often glued together before binding.  Hand-coloring of the illustrations was also common.  These were cheap, popular, and ephemeral publications, similar in that way to the broadsides that would become ubiquitous in later centuries.  Blockbooks were probably owned by a range of people, including the illiterate, and may have been common teaching aids.  This is mostly speculation, though, as few copies remain and we have little material evidence of their use.

Blockbooks developed into a handful of extremely specific genres, usually based on older manuscript books and traditional illustration cycles.  Here are examples of a few:

Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying): You’d think that once at the deathbed there couldn’t be much left in the way of sin.  After all, you can’t move enough to commit murder or adultery, and you’re probably not in the mood for gluttony.  Unfortunately, this is incorrect.  In the medieval Christian worldview death was a time of significant temptation and obviously the most important time to resist.  The Ars moriendi were guides to a good death, explaining the types of sin that the dying could fall into, and counseling both the sick and his or her family on how to behave at this crucial time.  In the illustrations saints and demons fight over the soul of a dying man, who eventually goes to heaven.  In the image below, from the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (which has a nice selection of digitized blockbooks), the dying man is tempted by devils into deathbed-specific sins such as despair, impatience, and pride.

Apocalypse:  These blockbooks are based on the Book of Revelation, one of the most visually interesting parts of the Christian Bible, and their format and illustrations come from manuscript traditions that are extant in an illuminated Apocalypse held by the Bodleian Library.   The image below, of the mouth of Hell, is from a hand-colored Apocalypse at the University of Glasgow, which was featured as their website’s book of the month in August 2005.  The site includes lots of images and a really excellent discussion of this particular book of the Bible and the blockbooks it inspired—highly recommended.

Danse Macabre (Dance of Death): This was a widely popular series of illustrations that originated in the late Middle Ages, probably as a response to widespread mortality during the plague, and it appeared in many variations in books and artwork.  In each image Death takes someone, from children, paupers and farmers to merchants, scholars, knights, kings, and popes; the lesson being that Death can come at any moment and he doesn’t care how much money or power you have.  Potentially humbling for the rich, darkly humorous for the downtrodden.  BibliOdyssey has posted a nice set of images from a German Totentanz at the University of Heidelberg: below, death takes (what I assume is) a haughty queen.  Interestingly, in most of the pictures Death looks jovial, but here he seems pretty annoyed by the queen’s attitude.  The coloring in these is also nicely done.

Biblia Pauperum (Poor Man’s Bible):  Some might say it’s the ideal Bible for the easily distracted internet generation.  The Biblia Pauperum compresses the the whole thing into 40 pages— mostly illustrations of the life of Christ.  From the Herzog August Bibliothek, a page featuring a scene from Genesis.  I really like the serpent, though a it’s bit odd that Eve seems to be the one offering the fruit.  Here you can see that the quality of script carved into a piece of wood could easily be less than optimal.  The text in the Ars moriendi above is much better.

Typecasting on Film

Via Typoretum, short films featuring Stan Nelson of Atelier Press, part of a planned 30 min documentary on letterpress printing called Out of Sorts.  These four shorts are extremely well-done, making it easy to see and understand what’s happening in the fairly complex process of type production.  The assembly of a mold from its component parts, which I’ve never seen on another video, is worth its metaphorical weight in gold.  And the tempering segment is quite exciting— another fine example of why books are not as safe and boring as they’re made out to be.  I’ve listed the films in chronological order below (just keep in mind that the first starts a bit abruptly with the tempering of the matrix rather than its initial creation).  I’m looking forward to seeing more clips and the completed film.

1: Striking and tempering matrices

2: Assembling a 72 pt. mold

3: Casting type

4: Dressing type