My research at the Bodleian focused on printed books held in the Savilian Library, a collection of works on mathematics, astronomy, geometry and applied sciences collected by the early Savilian Professors, including Henry Savile, Christopher Wren and John Wallis. I was especially interested in annotations inscribed in the collection’s books for information they provide into the scholarly practices of early modern mathematical reading. Some features of this reading observed in the Savilian books include summarizing an author’s argument, correcting errors, following along with mathematical proofs, and redrawing and/ or modifying diagrams while reading. Because the Savilian collection contains the printed books shared by a community of early modern mathematicians, the annotations in the books provide information as to how a scholarly community shared practices amongst its members and how these practices changed over time.
For more on Renee’s research and time at the Bodleian Libraries, watch this video.
For news on Visiting Scholars at the Bodleian, click here.
On Monday 14 June, Dr. Alexandra Franklin calmly peeled back layers of a ‘human head’ in the Pitt Rivers lecture room. The ‘head’ in question was an instructive illustration from Bartisch’s rare Opthalmodouleia, a sixteenth century treatise on diseases of the eye from the Bodleian Libraries’ special collections. As she pulled back layers of paper under the document camera, Franklin challenged her audience to imagine the challenge of describing and digitizing the page. These were the questions at the centre of Franklin’s presentation, which was part of a weeklong Digital Humanities training program.
Running from 14 – 18 July, the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School is an annual weeklong program exploring the history and future of the digital humanities. In addition to interaction with the University’s experts through lectures, demonstrations, and workshops, participants interact with the Bodleian Libraries’ extensive collection. Not despite but because of the program’s focus on the digital humanities, the chance to interface with the material collection was an important one.
As we increasingly move towards the digitization of physical collections, the material objects themselves shape the way we think about the process of description and digitization. Franklin demonstrated this on Monday afternoon in her discussion of eight unusual objects from the Bodleian’s collection.
Each of the objects posed a unique challenge. How, Franklin asked, do we catalogue a religious manuscript illumination that has been nearly effaced by devotional rubbing? What is the effect of describing it simply as ‘damaged’? Or: How do we photograph a page onto which a miniature has been sewn? Franklin posed these questions and more as she invited participants to examine the objects below.
Bodleian, Wood 106. The first foure bookes of Virgil’s Æneis, tr. into Engl. heroicall verse by R. Stanyhurst. With other poëticll deuises thereto annexed, 1583. The covers are made from a 12th c. manuscript of the Aeneid.
Bodleian, Alm. g 1686.1. Calendarium Londinense, or, Raven’s almanac, with the ‘ass’s skin’ treated pages for writing with a stylus. 1678.
Bodleian, MS. Rawl. liturg. e. 8, fol. 6v. Introductory full-page miniature for a 15th century Hours of the Virgin (Matins). Annunciation. Virgin (rubbed) and Archangel Gabriel holding scroll. This image would have been rubbed by pious readers.
Bodleian, Douce B subt. 305. A page from Bartisch’s text on diseases of the eye. G. Bartisch: Ophthalmodouleia Das ist Augendienst. Dresden, Mathes Stöckel, 1583.
Bodleian, Gough Missals 177. Hore beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis ecclesie ritum: M.D. xxxiiii. 1534. A coloured xylographic print has been sewn to the page.
Bodleian, MS. Ashmole 6. A 15th century vade mecum (‘go with me’), or girdle book. These portable books were often worn by medieval monks and aristocrats.
Bodleian, Harding B 41. A scrapbook of printed clippings and manuscript verse made by a young lady, Mary Marshall, in 1805.
Bodleian Library Broxb. 97.40. A frisket made from a recycled manuscript leaf. Friskets were used to mask off areas when printing in order to select certain characters or images for color printing.
These notes on the Bodleian’s collection of harlequinades, by Sarah Wheale (Bodleian Rare Books), were first posted in 2008-9, and are presented again in anticipation of the conference taking place in Oxford, Sept. 2014, ‘Forms and formats: experimenting with print, 1695-1815’ See the event posting to register: http://bit.ly/1lWPgxO
A harlequinade (known also as a metamorphosis, flap-book or turn-up book) is composed of two single engraved sheets. The first sheet is folded perpendicularly into four sections. A second sheet is cut in half and hinged at the top and bottom edges of the first so that each flap could be lifted separately. The sheets are folded into four, like an accordion, and then roughly stitched with a paper cover. A verse on each section of the flap tells a simple story usually concluding with instructions to turn a flap to continue. When the flap is turned either up or down the viewer sees that half of the new picture fits onto the half of the un-raised flap, so the act of lifting one flap after another creates a surprise unfolding of the story.
The Library has recently (in 2009) acquired an album of 89 coloured prints dating from the early 1820s. It may have been issued by William Darton Jr. (1781-1854) and his firm at Holborn Hill during the mid-1820s as a sample album to show potential customers examples of his work. It contains a small number of sheets originally issued in 1800 by William Darton Sr. (1755-1819); 11 harlequinades in unfolded sheets with the imprint of B. Tabart & Co., and some sheets bearing Darton Jr’s imprint with dates ranging from 1821 to 1824. This mix of imprints suggests that Darton Jr. inherited some of his father’s old stock upon his death, including some of Benjamin Tabart’s publications which William Sr. possibly acquired in 1811 when financial difficulties may have forced Tabart to sell off some of his stock.
The harlequinades are especially interesting as very few examples survive generally, and four of the eleven Tabart examples in this album are currently untraced elsewhere. There are certainly difficulties locating harlequinades in library and museum catalogues around the world as they can be treated equally as toys, books, ephemera or prints, but as some titles were not located by Marjory Moon in her bibliography of Tabart’s Juvenile Library it seems likely that some of the Bodleian copies may be unique survivals. It is also possible that these eleven titles represent Tabart’s entire output of harlequinades, but that is pure speculation.
Blue Beard. Sold by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809. Robinson Crusoe. Sold by B. Tabart & Co. June 1. 1809. Veroni or the novice of St. Marks. Published by B. Tabart & Co, June 1. 1809. Mother Goose. Published by B. Tabart & Co., July 1st 1809. Hop o’ my thumb. Published by B. Tabart & Co., Jany. 1st. 1810.. Black Beard the pirate. Published, by B. Tabart & Co., July 1st. 1809. Parnell’s hermit. Published, by Tabart & Co., Jany. 31st. 1810. Exile, as performed at the royal theatres. Published by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809. Robin Hood. Published by B. Tabart & Co., June 1st. 1809. Polish tyrant. Published, by B. Tabart & Co., Aug. 1st. 1809. A tale of mystery. Published by B. Tabart & Co., Jany. 25th, 1810. Shelfmark: Vet. A6 c.118
See the records of the pictured harlequinades here:
Corrected proof of a plate from Richard Gough’s Sepulchral monuments, folded into Bodleian Gough Warw. 22, William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656)
The CSB conference ‘Error and Print Culture, 1550-1800’ convened by Adam Smyth (Oxford) welcomed delegates to Oxford for a day of contemplation of errors, posing questions both historical and philosophical: why did printed materials deviate from authorial intentions – how can we be sure that any printed line is wrong, or right? – and when does an error happen: in the printing, or in the reading or theatrical or musical performance or the peal of church bells based on a printed guide?
John Taylor’s ‘Errata, or faults to the Reader’ rehearses the usual excuses – sickness, and a job put out to several printers – and the plea for readerly generosity.
On Friday 20 June, Dr. Marie-Claude Felton stood in front of a type case, composing stick in hand. She was selecting metal type to complete a line that read ‘Oxford, Printed at the Bodleian Printing Office by the Author.’ The ‘Bodleian Printing Office,’ officially known as the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop, houses several hand-printing presses, in a temporary home at the Story Museum on Pembroke Street.
Dr. Felton at the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop
What brought Dr. Felton to the printing press on a Friday afternoon? She was there to compose and print a handbill memorializing her recent lecture at the Bodleian. For a historian of publishing practices, this opportunity to work with antique printing technologies was perfectly suited.
Self-Publishing, past and present
Dr. Marie-Claude Felton, one of the Bodleian’s two 2013-4 Royal Bank of Canada Fellows, recently published a book, Maitres de Leurs Ouvrages, focusing on self-publishing in late-eighteenth-century Paris. Her research at the Bodleian expands on this, focusing on self-publishing in Paris, Leipzig, and London –the three main European publishing centres – between 1750 and 1850.
Dr. Felton gave an overview of her past and current research at the Convocation House on 3 June in a lecture titled ‘Masters of Their Own Work.’ She began with an observation about the current state of publishing:
With the growing online book market, especially with the advent of digital publishing and the popular e-readers, one of the more dramatic changes to impact publishing today has been the ability of a growing number of authors to bypass traditional publishers to produce and sell their own books. In fact, for a few years now, self-publishing has been producing more books each year than traditional publishing. This phenomenon naturally raises a number of questions regarding, among other things, the place and role of authors, and the relevance of the booksellers and publishers as cultural mediators and promoters of literature.
These questions, suggested Dr. Felton are not new ones. In her talk, she defined self-publishing before answering the crucial questions ‘who, what, and how?’ Self-publishing was not confined to any one subject or type of author, she said. Interestingly, authors who self-published often sold the books from their homes, which resulted in more direct interaction with their readers. Divided as the artistic enterprise of writing and the professional pursuit of publishing and selling may seem to us now, Dr. Felton suggests that the two were not irreconcilable – that, in fact, many authors fused the two in a variety of ways in the eighteenth century.
Fresh off this lecture, and still immersed in her current research, Dr. Felton tried her hand at ‘self-publishing.’ With the assistance of Dr. Paul Nash, the printing tutor at the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop, she composed, set, and printed the sheet below.
A proof with several errorsThe finished product
As you can see, the first draft is rarely the final draft. Indeed, early proofs almost always contain errors. While some are due to mistakes on the part of the compositor, others result when letters are mistakenly returned to the wrong tray. This often occurs with letters that have similar shapes, which might explain the confusions between h, n, and u, seen here.
With a range of types and presses – including Albion, Columbia, Vandercook, and others– the Hand-Printing Workshop hosts classes as well as open workshops from 2 – 5 pm on Fridays. Click here for schedules and further information.
The Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop, temporarily at the Story Museum
‘Book collecting is a growing addiction for me,’ writes Sophie Ridley, the first winner of the Colin Franklin Book Collecting Prize. Funded by Anthony Davis, the award is offered in honour of author, bibliophile, and book collector Colin Franklin, who shared his love for collecting with Oxford’s students, fostering a new generation of collectors. Sophie’s entry was chosen on the basis of the ‘interest, originality, thoughtfulness and creativity’ of her collection and her persistence as a collector.
Sophie Ridley, winner of the 2013-14 Colin Franklin Book Collecting Prize
Sophie began collecting books at age 16, hunting through the book corners of charity shops. Sophie writes of the joy of finding a 1911 copy of the Edwardian ‘Girl’s Own Annual’: ‘It had nothing to do with hairdressing, it was the time travelling that excited.’ Though she began with no particular criteria for collection, her interests soon focused, and she began to collect craft-themed books. Her collection currently has two major themes: ‘The first is the collecting of advice and expertise in lost craft skills. The other, the social history of radical change in attitude towards the crafts, spurred by the Arts and Crafts Movement.’
Sophie has donated several books with the balance of the prize. Those already received are:
Donald Gair and Ian D. Stewart, Courses in Handiwork (London: The Grant Educational Co., 1932), and
Handicraft in the School, vol. I (London, Gresham Publishing Co; Printed at the Villafield Press, Glasgow, by Blackie & Son, undated)
The next Colin Franklin Book Collecting Prize contest will be announced in October, 2014. Undergraduates or graduate students of the University of Oxford in good standing are eligible.
A Little Girl Reading [after William Charles Thomas Dobson, RA (1817–98)], Bodleian Library collections from Dana Josephson and Alexandra Franklin (Bodleian Libraries)
Among the treasures of the Bodleian’s Rare Books section is the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature. On a coal-scuttle from about 1860 in the possession of Mrs Iona Opie (but not part of the collection in the Bodleian) is a painted image of a little girl reading, a subject which clearly appealed to the collecting interests of Peter and Iona Opie, who recorded so many children’s rhymes, games and songs.
Little girl reading, from a coal scuttle of about 1860 in the possession of Mrs. Iona Opie
Seeing this image in the publicity for the Bodleian’s exhibition of the Opie collection in 1987 prompted Annie Laurie Valentine to donate a painting which evidently derives from the same source. Until the recent refurbishment of the New Library, it hung in Room 132, the Modern Papers reading room. By means of some opportunistic research, and consultation of the very useful ‘Your Paintings’ database, Bodleian staff recently learned the identity of the artist of the painting on which this portrait is based.
The Infant’s Magazine, annual number for 1870
A version of the image was used on the cover of The Infant’s Magazine for 1 February 1870. Clive Hurst, who retired last year as Head of Rare Books, noticed this magazine in the Lower Reading Room of the Old Library, in a pile of books awaiting return to the bookstack. The imprint on the back cover names the printer of this version as Edmund Evans (1826-1905). Evans was well known as an engraver and printer of illustrations for children’s books. Here he appears to have been using a relief printing process known as chromoxylography, in which different woodblocks were made to print each colour in the image, with careful registration of each block in relation to the others to obtain a unified picture.
Detail, cover of The Infant’s Magazine, 1870, engraved by Edmund Evans
The Infant’s Magazine cover is captioned, ‘after a painting by W.C.T. Dobson’; following through in the Your Paintings database revealed this as William Charles Thomas Dobson, RA (1817–98). The prime version of this painting may be that called ‘Fairy Tales’, at Cusworth Hall (Doncaster Museum Service).
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The copies are faithful to the apparent original, including the fringed sleeve of the girl’s dress, except that the later versions omit the doll in Dobson’s painting, who does add another dimension either as an audience for reading aloud, or as the plaything put aside in favour of the more absorbing storybook.
On June 18, the opening day of the Bodleian’s WWI centenary exhibition ‘The Great War: Personal stories from Downing Street to the trenches’, the curator, Mike Webb, joined in conversation with representatives of two other institutions staging similar exhibitions: Frank Druffner, from the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach; and Julien Collonges, from the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire Strasbourg. They were joined by Chris Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Libraries, and by Christophe Didier, director for development of collections of the BNU Strasbourg, for a panel discussion on the theme of exhibiting the history of WWI. A partnership between these three institutions has included some reciprocal loans of manuscripts for display in this centenary year, with the aim of exploring the connections between national histories and the archival collections that hold memories of the War.
The discussion on 18 June, moderated by Stuart Lee (English Faculty, and director of The First World War Poetry Digital Archive), considered questions including how much historical truth is conveyed through poetry; how to tell the story of individuals during the war, and whether at the same time to acknowledge their later reputations; and the roles of libraries and archives as repositories for national memories of war.
Profound differences in the national attitudes to the memory of WWI and the historical debates that have been generated around the centenary were explored in this discussion. It was evident that the three exhibitions, primarily shaped by the available collections in each place, were also responding to different audiences and contexts. Mike Webb described his approach in the Bodleian exhibition, which traces the history of Oxford connections with the war up until 1916, as seeking immersion in the historical moment, maintaining the immediacy of the impressions of fast-moving events as captured in letters and diaries, such as the diary of Lewis Harcourt, a member of Cabinet during the War, who in July 1914 recorded his deep dislike of the belligerent attitude of Winston Churchill. This curatorial approach contrasted with the challenges described by Julien Collonges, who will use the Strasbourg exhibition opening in Autumn 2014 to explore the work and relationships of three poets: Ernst Stadler, Charles Péguy, and Wilfred Owen. Collonges found in planning the display that he had to tell the story not only of the days of 1914, but of the post-war reputation of the poets, and this was both rewarding and problematic in the case of Péguy, whose patriotic verses have been appropriated by right-wing nationalists, with resonances for the later history of France and Europe.
The shadow of later events also falls on the survival of material; asked what single item the Deutsches Literaturarchiv would have liked to display, Frank Druffner described an album of drawings by the writer Ernst Jünger, who was also a noted entomologist, of insects in the trenches. The album was lost during WWII.
This event was supported by the Institut Français, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Oxford German Network, the Fonds culturel franco-allemand, the Maison Française Oxford, and the Bodleian Libraries
On 10 June, amidst centuries’ worth of scientific implements at the Museum of the History of Science, Michael Weatherburn gave the fifth Byrne Bussey Marconi Lecture. Titled ‘Time and Emotion Study: Anne Shaw, Metropolitan Vickers, and Work Experiments on the Twentieth Century British Factory Floor,’ the presentation, which drew on research in the Bodleian’s Marconi Archives, began with an image familiar to many in the audience: a poster for the 1959 film ‘I’m Alright Jack.’ The Boulting Brothers comedy, starring Peter Sellers, Ian Carmichael, and Terry Thomas, was the most popular film of 1959. It was not the film’s popularity, however, that made it relevant to Weatherburn’s research, but the issue at the centre of its satirical plot: in the film, a national strike is prompted by a single time and motion study.
These efficiency studies were the subject of Weatherburn’s lecture, which introduced his audience to a new way of understanding twentieth century British labour and business history. Most existing work by labour historians, said Weatherburn, focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain. He also noted that historians of business stress that crucial changes made to the analysis and organization of work on the factory floor were completed by World War One.
His research shifts the focus to the twentieth century, particularly during WWII when, he noted, Britain was in fact at its most industrialized, either before or since. While the typical narrative of postwar British industry is one of the ‘British management failure’, Weatherburn challenged that assumption, asking if there was indeed such a failure by interrogating the terms of judgment; in fact a great deal of effort was put into management – but, as Weatherburn asked, was it successful on its own terms while doing little to improve output?
Time and motion studies were at the centre of Weatherburn’s presentation. He explored their use by companies such as Metropolitan Vickers, drawing on the records of the electrical company contained in the Marconi Archives. Weatherburn also highlighted the role played by individuals like Anne Shaw in the development and adoption of time and motion studies. He explained that Shaw was a protégé of Lillian Gilbreth who, along with her husband Frank, was a pioneer of motion studies in the United States. Their work analysis films can be seen here. (The Gilbreths are perhaps most popularly known as the subjects of the 1948 book and 1950 film Cheaper by the Dozen).
In his presentation, Weatherburn spanned the pre-WWI and post-WWII decades, and focused not only on management strategies but on worker responses. He explained the Labour government’s decision to continue efficiency studies after WWII, pointing to the creation of the British Institute of Management and asking whether it is fair to say, as many have, that the post-war Labour government failed to intervene (or intervened unsuccessfully) in attempts to increase British industrial efficiency. Perhaps, Weatherburn suggested, Labour succeeded on some of its own terms; it is towards those terms, and away from normative standards of success, that Weatherburn shifted analysis.
Weatherburn’s research was funded by the Byrne Bussey Marconi fund, and relates to his doctoral research, which aims in part to ‘reframe the history and historiography of management, particularly in relation to British industry.’ Read more about Weatherburn’s research here.
By Matthew Neely This entry from the political journal of Lewis Harcourt describes the discovery of a bomb hidden in a tree at his Oxfordshire home Nuneham Park in 1907. Harcourt was the First Commissioner of Public Works in the Liberal government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. He was strongly opposed to the extension of the electoral franchise to women. Writing in his journal, Harcourt reasoned that the planting of the bomb was probably ‘a delicate attention to me from the Female Suffragists.’
