Lexie Shadix, Campus Carrier asst. arts and living editor
English 450, History of the Book, examines how books have been made through time. Recently, the class was tasked with completing a descriptive bibliography on an old book or manuscript. The books and manuscripts used were part of Associate Professor of English rhetoric and writing Mark Taylor’s collection. Taylor is also the professor of English 450. Students mainly focused on the condition of their chosen book or manuscript, which is drastically different from the work that most English classes entail. Instead of examining the contents of the book, students are examining the physical books themselves. They were asked to document things such as any damage on the piece of literature, what condition the binding is in, and notes written inside of the book.
“[A descriptive bibliography] is one of the most basic kinds of scholarship in bibliography,” Taylor said. “Bibliography is not just the works cited at the end of your essay, but it is the study of books themselves to try to understand what a book is and all its particulars. Not just a text, not just an author, not just content, but also everything else about the book. To be able to do a descriptive bibliography means that you know how to look at a book as a physical object.”
A few students choose to write about the English translation of the “Saxon Chronicle,” one of these students being Peter Merrill, a senior majoring in English. This book was translated from Latin to English and compiled of Anglo-Saxon stories. This particular edition was a first edition, printed in 1692, and created by Edmund Gibson.
“It’s an account of [Anglo-Saxons] from the time they came to England and started warring with the Celtic people,” Merrill said. “These stories started circulating around the 700s, which is a few hundred years after the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain.”
The book is partially written in Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, the latter two being dead Germanic languages.
“Physically, it’s just an impressive looking book,” Merrill said. “It looks like what you’d imagine an old tome to look like.”
The book was slightly damaged, the edges of the pages featuring crinkling from water damage. It had foxing, which are brown spots that appear on paper left in rooms with too much humidity, some burn marks and random ink spots. It featured names of previous owners inside the front cover, the first being Walter Hart. Since books with provenance will take on the names of their former owners, the copy used is the “Walter Hart copy of the first edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from 1692.” It also posed an interesting challenge when attempting to document pages that were damaged due to its obscure page numbering. In early manuscripts, pages were not numbered, their gatherings, a group of sheets folded in half and then bound together, being counted instead.
Memorial Library Archives, where many preserved historic documents are
housed
“So, in early printing, they were trying to replicate what a manuscript looked like because people are always averse to change,” Merrill said. “[The printing of the “Saxon Chronicle”] is just 100, maybe 200, years after printing had really taken off in Europe, and so page numbering wasn’t formulaic yet.”
The book began with no page numbers, then featured a section with page numbers, which was followed by another section without them. Then, when the pages began to be numbered again, they started over from one. This made it challenging for students to indicate the page they analyzed.
The assignment also entailed creating a facsimile of the title page.
“We basically had to remake the cover page,” Sarah Varnadoe, a senior majoring in English, said. “You found the typeface that was the closest [to the one used in the original book]. You had to get the spacing correct, like the spacing between the letters and spacing between the lines. And then, if there’s these little ‘swooshes’ on the letters you had to mark those in a different way.”
Chloe Spector, a senior double majoring in Creative Writing in English, did her descriptive bibliography on a manuscript opposed to a printed book.
“I looked at the ‘Commonplace Book of Hannah Ellen’,” Spector said. “It was basically this lady’s journal that she kept, and she wrote poetry [in it]. The illustrations in it were absolutely beautiful and the quality of the handwriting was just incredible.”
However, since this was someone’s handwritten journal, there is no publisher information; so, Spector turned to ancestry.com to research the author.
“I was able to find out where she lived, who she was married to and how many kids she had,” Spector said. “It was really cool to be able to see that.”
At first glance, a class that focuses on the book itself may seem obscure and unimportant. However, this approach to literature provides valuable insights and skills that may not be found from a critical analysis of the text.
“The older I get and the longer I teach, the more I feel that the essence of learning is how to see,” Taylor said. “Ignorance is a form of blindness. What we try to do in the English major is to get students to be more perceptive about the text that they read, to do a close reading, which is not just solving problems of symbolism but more to any given text than literary value that you’re not going to get on the first reading.”
However, a text is not just intangible themes, it is an object, a physical piece of art. Without the book itself, there would be no English major.
“If we do not have the text in material form, we don’t have the text at all,” Taylor said. “So, we can learn to understand what our literacy is all about the more we can understand the materiality of it. To look at books, to examine bindings, papers, ink, handwriting and typefaces, and what it means to create a collection of texts or a library. We become more cognizant of who we are as literate people and our own culture as a literate culture and us as being educated people. Of course, for us education involves a lot of book learning. So, I want students to be able to see that because if they see that, they will know who they are.”
As society advances into the digital age, it will hopefully become easier to create databases that store books and manuscripts and make comparing them easier. Scholars may be able to have an easier time determining which copies are from the original author versus which ones are from scribes by having computer programs that will compare the documents word for word. This is just one way that technological advancement can improve scholarship. However, technology does not negate the need to preserve and study these books. As the world advances into the age of technology, the use of books and preservation of them is falling by the wayside. People are reading eBooks or listening to audiobooks, there is no longer a need to maintain a collection of physical books.
“I think especially from eras where books were more prioritized and books were a main source of communication, I think it’s very important to preserve that,” Hope Carter, a senior majoring in English and minoring in Communication, said. “It’s a pillar of life and society.”
Books are valuable pieces of history, the words within them often reflecting the time period they were written in or the person they were written by. They detail a point in time that people can only study and never return to. If they are treated carelessly or completely ignored, then the vision of the past can become blurred, and the opportunity to learn something from those who came before us is lost.