Tom Roper's Weblog

The Copious Text

The copiousness of the Copious Text symposium last month has defeated me. It’s taken me so long to take my fifteen pages of notes and turn them into something readable partly because the papers presented there were so rich, and partly because I am not up to date, if I ever was, in early modern studies. When one speaker began describing the changing reactions to and criticisms of E M W Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture over the decades, it came as news to me that this book, which provided the background for my Shakespearean studies at A level so long ago, was not still considered the definitive work on Elizabethan cosmology. And I fear that, at a distance of a month, the meaning of some of my notes is obscure. If any of the speakers read this, I ask forgiveness from those whose contributions I have mangled and compressed.

Five speakers spoke about five texts, or, in the first case, an author: Professor Neil Rhodes from St Andrews on Shakespeare, Dr Angus Vine of Sussex on William Camden’s Britannia, Dr Kathryn Murphy on Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Dr Kevin Killeen of York on Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Dr Kate Bennett, once more from Oxford, on Audrey’s Brief Lives.

The copious text is a text written in the abundant style described by Erasmus in De Copia and what attracted me, and another librarian, Katherine Schopflin, who is researching the early history of encyclopaedias at UCL, was their description as early encyclopaedic texts.

Neil Rhodes spoke of the encyclopaedic texts available to Shakespeare. One, Batman upon Bartholomew, was a modernised edition of Bartolomaeus Anglicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum, originally translated into English 1398 and first printed by Wynkyn De Worde (? Caxton) in 1495. Organised hierarchically, it mingles fact with fiction. A more modern composition, Pierre de la Primaudaye's The French Academie was first translated in 1586 and went through several editions, expanding with each new version, until 1618. He also described some of the forerunners of the modern dictionary of quotations, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers and Erasmus's Adagia, which hark back to a pre-literate society, designed as a rhetorical support system, providing the speaker with quotations to make an argument for or against any given proposition. Professor Rhodes pointed to a contradiction in encyclopaedic texts: that they present knowledge both as fixed, and as fluid. The places and head used in a commonplace book are by no means arbitrary but represent forms and things. Turning to the Shakespearean theatre, he said that it too has an encyclopaedic character, betrayed for example by he name of the Globe. The structure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre building is microcosmic, a model in plaster and wood of medieval cosmology. Compare Hamlet's speech or the line in the Duchess of Malfi, 'look you, the stars shine still.'

Angus Vine showed how William Camden used collaborators to expand the Britannia from edition to edition, encouraging and acknowledging the contributions of readers and local antiquaries, so that he was sometimes more editor than author. Britannia went through six editions, in 1586, 1587, 1590, 1594, 1600 and 1607, starting as a dumpy quarto and ending as a folio, and translated into English in 1610. The work started as a collaboration, for Camden was recruited by a Dutchman, Abraham Oretelius, who was working on a dictionary of Roman place names; his two previous English correspondents had let him down. Dr Vine showed us correspondence between Camden and Nicholas Roscarrock about Cornish saints, and with a Robert Claxton in Northumbria, asking about the Picts' [that is to say, Hadrian's] Wall and Reginald Bainbrigg about standing stones at Salkeld. At Camden's death in 1623 he was buried in Westminster Abbey and Thomas Browne, of whom more anon, wrote a poem in his honour in a memorial volume, Camdeni insignia, published in 1624.

At lunchtime it was a great pleasure to be taken over to the Special Collections at the University Library, to admire some items chosen to reflect the concerns of the symposium.

Kathyrn Murphy spoke first in the afternoon, on Burton and polymathy and polypraxy, two variants of copiousness. Burton wrote an early anti-papist play in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Philosophaster, in which he contrasted the good polymath or polyhistor with the bad, Jesuitical, polypraxist or polypragmatist. The encyclopaedic can either be helpful, as in Aristotle, or a busy-body. Is the Anatomy of Melancholy encyclopaedic? The question is anachronistic, for the encyclopaedia for Burton was not a type of book but an abstract noun. There is always a danger that encyclopaedic knowledge can be but 'shallow smatterings'. Burton warns against this shallowness in scholarship.

Kevin Kileen discussed Theopaediae or Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Empidemica, of common and vulgar errors, a book that has fascinated me since, as a boy, I discovered a copy in the' attic of our house in Cambridge. Introducing this with the philosophers' puzzle of the Argo, whose planks were replaced one by one until it might, or might not, be a new vessel, This is an anti-encyclopaedia, in that it catalogues and exposes false ideas, rather than compile and collect correct ones. Dr Kileen discussed the different forms of organisation of such a work: alphabetical, hexameral or according to some systematisation of knowledge such as the Ramist one.

Finally, Kate Bennet, who is preparing an edition of Audrey's Brief Lives, took us through the challenges facing an editor of a copious author's texts, not least those of unravelling the erroneous editorial decisions taken by one's predecessors, and of striking a balance between presenting material as it is, and as it should be.

'He was an energetic perfectionist with a relentless interest in detail'

The title is the description of Charles Wilfred Black from the New Munford, the wiki-based version of Munford's Who was Who in British Librarianship developed by John Bowman, formerly of UCL library school. It could apply to many I have met in my time in this great profession of ours. John spoke earlier this year at a CILIP in London meeting about Robert Proctor.

Introduced by Edward Dudley, who cited a recent definition of a wiki heard on Radio 4 , John started by warning us that dead librarians might not be everyone's cup of tea. Munford's original work was published in print by the Library Association, in a cloth binding of the sort that one could not now imagine Facet producing. Munford tried to cover chief librarians and their deputies, though he was sometimes inconsistent. As well as public libraries, his coverage of the British Museum Library and government libraries was good, though he was weaker on university and college librarians

John first conceived of a digital version of Munford some years ago. To create this version he had Munford's text scanned and checked by a UCL student. Local authority boundaries, names and responsibilities have changed considerably, both in the period covered by Munford , and since.

John explored various possibilities. To build a database would have been an expensive solution and then he hit on the idea of a wiki. Equipped with a copy of Wikis for dummies, he set out to create the wiki, hosted on wikipages, deciding on a page per person. He was nervous about depending on a site which could disappear, or hold him to ransom, so he makes frequent back-ups.

From each page, back links allows the user to see related pages: thus, from a place-name or library authority page, one can find everyone who has been associated with that place or authority. John has added to Munford's information in several ways: where possible he has added to library authority pages the date of adoption of the library acts, taken from Kelly, and has also incorporated information from Greenwood's Library Yearbook and from the British Library Yearbook. He has made links out to Oxford DNB entries, and to the BL catalogue for those who were authors. In the case of modern public library authorities he has links out to their websites, when possible.

Tasks awaiting attention include tidying up the names of library authorities and university libraries, adding links to university histories where these exist, and incorporating some of the local government changes since 1974, such as unitary authorities, including information not in Kelly, such as Robin Alston's database, adding information from Library Association obituaries, and, at the suggestion of Kate Wood in the audience, adding information from LA membership records, now kept in the UCL archives.

John showed an interesting use of the wiki. In James Duff Brown's famous article, Where do we get our librarians? in Library World 3 1900/01, Duff Brown analysed the patterns of training and influence in the public library world of the time, but without naming names. Using the wiki, it is possible, by searching for combinations of authority names, to find out which individuals Duff Brown meant.

John is keen for more volunteers to join the wiki, but made a plea for people to accompany their request to join with some explanatory material. He has had a lot of spam requests.

Engels and the good life

I went, at the prompting of Guy, an old friend and colleague, to a meeting of the Sohemians, at which Tristram Hunt spoke on Engels. Introduced by Tim Pendry, Dr Hunt, who has just published a major life of Marx's comrade and collaborator, in keeping with the Sohemians' taste for the combination of the louche and the political, gave a talk based around Engels and the good life.

Engels rode to hounds, as did many in the labour movement in the 19th century, hunting with the Cheshire Hunt. He joked that his horsemanship would be useful if he were to be called on to lead a cavalry charge in the revolution. But in the Dialectics of Nature, he also makes the point that hunting can be a way to a better understanding of the natural world. He enjoyed relationships with women, not only the Irish mill-girls Mary and Lizzie Burns, marrying the latter on her deathbed, and in his youth paid for sex. A lover of champagne and claret, he kept open house at 122 Regents Park Road on Sundays, and many witnesses, such as Bebel, describe the lavish hospitality he offered his guests.

In a phrase which Dr Hunt attributed to Nye Bevan, but which I believe has earlier roots, Engels believed that, 'nothing was too good for the working class'.

In discussion, I wondered about the reception of Engels work. Im his day, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was his most well-read text; in the 1920s and 1930s the Dialectics of Nature; I think the first work I read must have been the Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, not least because it is cited so much by Lenin in his State and Revolution. The Anti-Dühring, as with many polemical works, has ensure that its target's name, which otherwise would have vanished into obscurity, is remembered. To my surprise some members of the intelligent and widely -read audience confessed to not having read any Engels at all.

Hunt, Tristram
The Frock-coated Communist: the revolutionary life of Friedrich Engels
Allen Lane, 2009

John Bowman on Robert Proctor

Who says incunabulists are dull? I went to the CILIP in London monthly meeting in the Sekforde Arms in Clerkenwell, lured there by beer and sausages, but more by the prospect of hearing John Bowman talk about his work on Robert Proctor (1868-1903). John is preparing an edition of Proctor's diaries with extensive commentary to be published by the Edwin Mellen Press.

Proctor is chiefly remembered for Proctor order, the method of organising pre-1500 printed books first by country, in order of the spread of the movable type printing press, so Germany files first, then by town, and then by printer, as well as for his work on the British Museum's incunabula, and for a mysterious death on a walking holiday in the Austrian Alps.

His diaries, started in 1899, are in the British Library. There were four volumes but volume 3 is lost. They discuss his bibliographic work, his home life with his mother, and his views on current affairs. The one photograph that survives, used for a posthumous tribute edited by A W Pollard, is excised from an undergraduate group portrait from his time at Corpus Christi Oxford, his boater being removed by some primitive touching-up process. There is a also a pen portrait, a physical description by Pollard in the Wimbledon and Merton Annual, describing Proctor as he might appear at a railway station waiting for a train.

The diaries show an impetuous, impatient and highly driven man, somewhat accident-prone and extremely energetic. He would think nothing of walking the Surrey and Sussex countryside al night before going to work, and arriving at the British Museum at the gentlemanly hour of 11.30.

He was influenced both politically and culturally by William Morris, whom he met. Under Morris's influence, he turned his hand to translating Icelandic and threw himself in to the activity of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings. He was a passionate opponent of the Boer war and fervently anti-monarchist. John asked if anyone could help with the derivation of a phrase Proctor used on the death of Queen Victoria, 'the old washerwoman of Windsor'. I do not know this phrase; the 'famine queen', yes, but this is a new one.

John described the sources he had used, and how electronically networked information had made his task of tracking down and expounding Proctor's references considerably easier. Among those he cited are:

The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue and other online catalogues such as COPAC

Philip Harris's History of the British Museum Library, for references to colleagues

The DNB for understanding the small world of late Victorian intellectuals

Who Was Who, which, John lamented, is not longer available through KnowUK,. at least for members of Ealing public libraries.

Photo London, for details of nineteenth century photographers. Proctor fought many battles with photographers, who used to invade his space to take pictures of items from the BM collections

He found Kelly's Directories at the Guildhall invaluable for tracing neighbours and tradesmen mentioned. Some are digitised at http://www.historicaldirectories.org. The 1901 Census was also useful for Oxshott, though he drew attention to the many transcription errors made in digitising the census records.

The Times Digital Archive (subscription required)  was useful for tracing military events, and for records of book sales, and in Google Scholar and Google Books John had been able to find sources for conundrums such as a malapropism attributed by Esdaile to one of Proctor's fellow BM workers, who spoke of having 'crossed the Barbican'.

He had use print sources to identify such out-of-the-way information as the identity of a 'one-armed man from the School of Economics', which he found in Ralf Dahrendorf's History of the LSE; he had traced meticulously the trains that Proctor took in Baedeker's and Bradshaw's. One of the audience turned out to be the new Librarian at the London Transport Museum, who mentioned that they have embarked on a major digitisation exercise, exciting news for my many male librarian colleagues who are transport obsessives, a compulsion I do not share.

In questions and answers, a colleague from KCL drew attention to the staff cuts in Information Services at Kings and asked people to sign their online petition.

Edward Dudley announced that on 9 December CILIP in London would hold a meeting at Ridgmount Street at which John would once more speak, this time on the wiki Who Was Who in British Librarianship, known as the New Munford, and to which anyone can contribute.

John told me that his interest in Proctor came from an interest in Greek typography, and that his PhD thesis was on that very subject. I shall look it out. Proctor was involved in the development of a new type face for printing Greek, based on the Alcalà font of 1512. The new font was known as Otter and an example is given in the article from the Burlington mentioned below.

A new fount of Greek type. The Burlington Magazine for connoisseurs 1903 2(6); 358-360

Scholderer, V The private diary of Robert Proctor The Library 1950-51 5th ser 5:261-9

Rhodes, Dennis E Proctor, Robert George Collier (1868-1903) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Bowman, J H Greek printing type in Britain from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century
Ph D thesis, Reading 1988 (subsequently published by Typophilia, Thessaloniki: 1998)

The library of Alexandria

The latest In Our Time has Simon Goldhill, Matthew Nicholls and Serafina Cuomo discussing the Library of Alexandria.

The listen again version is available until Thursday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

I shall listen to the podcast on tomorrow morning's train.

Teddy bears at Skegness: Keith Manley on the Twopenny Libraries

Keith Manley of the Institute of Historical Research spoke to the first CILIP in London meeting of the new year at the Sekforde Arms on twopenny libraries. flourishing from the 1920s to 1950s, these private, circulating libraries in small premises, these charged twopence (c 0.84p in decimal money) for the loan of popular fiction and spread widely, since they filled a need that publicly funded libraries were reluctant to meet. They were not popular with the book trade, with the more established circulating libraries, such as Boot's, Mudie's and W. H Smith's, nor with the library profession, who, as J.D Stewart of Bermondsey Libraries put it, felt they merely gave people a 'daily dose of imaginative dope,'. or sniffily pronounced that they catered for those who read for amusement only. The fearsome Queenie Leavis attacked them as 'twopenny dram shops' and Orwell satirised them in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for example the woman client who asks for salacious romances by requesting something 'modern but not deep'

Keith based much of his talk on work he has done with Home Office papers, for in the mid-thirties on the reforms to the Shops Act of 1911, under which the hours of work of shop assistants were regulated. The twopenny libraries had claimed exemption from these provisions, on the grounds that they were not in the retail business, and shopkeepers resented what they saw as unfair competition by the long opening hours offered by the twopenny libraries. A key test case had been whether a man who ran a pitch on Skegness beach, at which he offered an entertainment known as slippery bears, was a shop keeper or an amusement caterer.

It was a fascinating paper, and inspired a number of questions form the audience. Many of us, like me, were old enough to have entered the profession when the 'fiction debate' was still live, the hard-fought issue of whether public libraries should stock popular fiction, or restrain themselves to works of literary merit. As did other in the audience, when I first used a public library, tickets were allocated for fiction or non-fiction, to try to make sure borrowers balanced their frivolous fiction reading with some serious non-fiction.

I offer the term 'amusement caterer' to Edinburgh Council, where they propose, in the face of staff and public opposition and considerable ridicule in the press and on library blogs, to rename library staff as 'audience development officers'.

The lights are going out all over Europe

Any blogger could fill reams with posts exposing inaccuracies. I spotted the other day, but see that rogueclassicism got there first, some very odd dating of Herodotus on UK Tech Cruch, in an articles about demotix.
So I shall have to be content with pointing out  Stuart Jeffries' misattribution to Winston Churchill, in an article on light bulbs,  of the words, "the lights are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime'. As any fule kno, it was Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary at the time, who said this just before the start of the First World War.

Review: Our Longest Days: A People's History of the Second World War

More than sixty years later, it is still 'the war'. Its popular, anti-fascist character distinguishes the Second World War from, on the one hand, the imperialist hecatomb of 1914-18, and, on the other, from the colonial and neo-colonial adventures we have been dragged into since 1945. I was born ten years after VE Day, part of a generation for whom the war, though outside our direct experience, was, through our parents and teachers, an important part of our formation. The playground question, 'what did you Dad do in the war then?' was for us an important conversational ice-breaker and an excuse for tall tales and one-upmanship. In my case, the truthful answer I would give, that he had been Medical Officer with the rank of Bimbashi, literally leader of a thousand, in the Sudan Camel Corps, was not always believed by my interrogators at the Fawcett Infants School in Trumpington. But even in the minds of generations for whom the subject of the question would be not a father, but a grandfather or even great-grandfather, it remains 'the war'.

The late Sandra Koa-Wing's collection of extracts from wartime Mass Observation diaries stresses this poplar character. The diarists are two-thirds civilians. I believe King's Regulations forbade servicemen from keeping diaries, though this did not stop five of them who served in the forces at home from recording some details of service life. Of the others, one is a conscientious objector, while others work as land girls or volunteer for the Home Guard. From fifteen diarists, Sandra has taken entries which show the impact of great events, but also the mundane. There is no better way to understand the progress of the war than through the accounts of how Dunkirk, the Blitz, the Soviet Union's entry into the war, the later entry of the Americans, the battle for Stalingrad, the struggle for a Second Front, the D-Day landings and the V1 and V2 rocket attacks affected people. One can also trace in the entries the development of the determination that post-war Britain would be different, as the foundation of the sixty year-old National Health Service exemplified

The strength of this book is the way in which these great events and the domestic detail of everyday life interact. Food is a constant preoccupation, whether for Jenny Green who tries to convince a well-meaning fellow worker that a pork pie sent to the British Expeditionary Force in France would be unlikely to survive the trip and still be safe to eat, or for Nella Last who sends her husband to do battle with a butcher who claims he has no meat, to return victorious with a leg of lamb. A chemist tells a diarist that the demand for 'tonics' has fallen sharply. Historians of Mass Observation will enjoy the episode when a star-struck Muriel Green goes to London to visit Tom Harrisson, the anthropologist co-founder of the organisation.

How much background knowledge can the editor expect from the reader? Some explanations, for example that of duodecimal, currency, pounds, shillings and pence may be useful for readers not yet born and of an age to spend money in 1971, but not for those like me who can remember being given 6d, sixpence, 2.5p pocket money per week, supplemented occasionally by 2/6, half a crown, or 12.5p from visiting uncles. Taken chronologically by year, each year's entries are prefaced by a helpful summary of the course of the war in that year. The first entries are from 3 September 1939, the day war was declared, and the book ends six years later on 3 September 1945, a month after VJ Day. I might take slight issue with the footnotes on the situation in Greece on 1944-45, which misinterpret the role of British forces in the beginnings of that country's civil war, attributing to them a more impartial role than they actually played.

The editor of this collection of material from Mass Observation diarists, Sandra Koa-Wing, died very young in 2007. Sandra worked in the University of Sussex Library's renowned Special Collections and there is a fund in her memory. Her blog, A Glimpse from the Attic, survives her,

Koa-Wing, Sandra
Our Longest Days: A People's History of the Second World War
London: Profile, 2008

A footnote: as this review was gestating, I saw Nöel Coward's In Which We Serve; there could be no greater contrast than between the realistic picture of war-time life in this book and Coward's sentimental myth-making, his rough but loyal other-ranks. decent officers and cheery civilians. I also had news of the death of Angus Calder, whose work with the Mass Observation archives did much to bring them back to attention. There's a tribute by Dorothy Sheridan on the Mass Observation website: http://www.massobs.org.uk/angus.html

Libraries once, twice, three times in the THES

In today's Times Higher Education Supplement (soon to become the Times Higher Education) I was surprised to find two items of interest in among the tedious lists of establishment gongs. Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network discusses the differences between librarians' and researchers' ideas about what librarians should be doing. Subject expertise and information literacy training are best delivered by academics, the researchers believe, and while librarians have tried to find a place in the open access movement, and in the management of institutional repositories, Jubb reports that most repositories are 'short of content and little used'.
Elsewhere, Rebecca Knuth reviews Lucien Polasatron's Books on Fire: the tumultuous story of the world's great libraries*. Her review appears twice, on page 24 with the headline, 'a flaming injustice that destroys our records' and again on page 25, with the same headline but shorn of the initial indefinite article. The final paragraphs of the two versions of the review differ. Another review appears in full on page 24, and then its latter half is repeated on page 25 with the headline repeated and an accompanying picture. A pity; too much sherry at the THES sub-editors New Year party, I suppose.
*Polastron, Lucien X
Books on Fire: the tumultuous story of the world's great libraries
London: Thames & Hudson, 2007
9780500513842

Technorati Tags: judd, libraryhistory, Polasatron, RIN, THES

A la recherche du Tom perdu

As country mouse, I went to town today, to two exhibitions, both highly evocative of my childhood, the Royal Society of Medicine's Treasures from the Libraries and Collections of Gentlemen’s Clubs and Learned Societies in London at which I saw the Emperor penguin (Aptenodites Forsteri) pictured here. This penguin is on loan from the Army and Navy Club where, I was pleased to learn, he is looked after by his own veterinary officer, Major P N Skelton-Stroud, late of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. As a small boy, living on the same street in Cambridge as the Scott Polar Research Institute's museum, I often admired their stuffed Emperor penguin who, when I first saw him, must have been about as big as me. To my over-literal child's mind, the statue of a naked man in front of the building, intended to convey Scott's self-sacrifice, made me wonder why he had gone somewhere so cold without any clothes. There are many treasures to be seen in the exhibition, which runs until 25 October. I very much enjoyed the exhibits from the Athenaeum and the Travellers' Club, and some mementoes of Alexis Soyer from the Reform Club, where he was chef, and whence comes the name of the dish, lamb cutlets reform. Then I went to the Royal Academy to see the tercentenary exhibition of the Society of Antiquaries, Making History: Antiquaries in Britain 1707-2007, an impressive study of the importance of physical evidence in history, of objects and their interpretation through art. This stirred childhood memories too: in the very first room was a copy of Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial, as well as works by Camden and Aubrey.; When I was about eight or nine years old I found in the attic of my childhood home a 1686 edition of Browne's complete works, and would spend many afternoons up there reading. I think my favorite was Pseudodixia or vulgar Errors. How could one not enjoy a chapter called Of the pissing of Toads, of the stone in their head, and of the generation of Frogs? There is plenty here to please the heraldically minded schoolboy, for, like many at that age,; I was fascinated by and studied heraldry, even, when I had exhausted what the public library could offer me on the subject,; pestering my father to take me with him to Cambridge's University Library so I could consult their collection.; The start and finish of the Neolithic marathon that I ran earlier this year are well represented here, for both Stonehenge and Avebury were popular objects of study for antiquaries. The final room is particularly impressive, concentrating on Stonehenge and showing it as portrayed by artists such as Turner and Constable, as well as Inigo Jones. There are also some illustrations of the site for children's books from the 1950s on display, by Alan Sorrell, which seemed very familiar; I wonder if they might have appeared in Look and Learn, which I read voraciously as a boy. There's also an impressive genealogical scroll, tracing the lineage of Henry VI back to Adam, and Eve; there are brass-rubbings, studies of burial mounds, cathedral drawings, a copy of the Bayeux tapestry, much on Maiden Castle including some film of Mortimer Wheeler's excavations, and a room devoted to Pugin, Morris, and Burne-Jones, for the Society owns Kelmscott Manor.

Technorati Tags: antiquaries, clubs, penguins, avebury, stonehenge, puppy, puppy

Technorati Tags: antiquaries, avebury, clubs, penguins, puppy, stonehenge