Books in art and science, Sharp (1):the 1st folio; science books as school; Nazi non-censorship! and dire predictions

‘”That might do”‘ (John Everett Millais’s illustration for a satiric scene in Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington

Thomas Bewick’s History of Birds

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve just spent a pleasant and stimulating 3 and 1/2 days at a Sharp conference held in Washington, D.C. first at the National Library of Medicine (Maryland), then the Library of Congress and Folger Shakespeare Library, and last the Dillon Ripley Center, one of the several buildings of the Smithsonian Institute which surround the mall. Since I can no longer take down in stenography the arguments of the papers I hear (my hand coordination is not as firm), I’ve not been writing about the conferences I’ve gone to in the detail I once did, but I still would like to make sense of, remember and share some of what I heard and experienced. Scholars came from far and wide: people from Australia and New Zealand; the UK, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands; South Africa and Egypt, not to omit various places in Canada, the US and South America. There were book collectors and antiquarians; and publishers, librarians, and teachers; scholars from different disciplines, all to discuss primary research in the history of books. There were generous receptions (with wine flowing and lots of yummy snacks), plenary lectures, a book exhibit, and exhibits and tours in the Library of Congress, the Folger (on the first Folio); the weather was lovely and I spent two lunch hours by the side of a fountain overshaded by trees where people and children gathered to eat, talk, and play.

Thursday, July 14th:

I went first to the Folger Shakespeare Library for an hour long talk and tour of an exhibit centering on the history of the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays. The Folger owns an astonishing 92 copies from the extant 225 or so, and you learn about the printing of this book, its early history, present conservation and tales of collectors’ dealings and thefts. As important as this book is (without it we’d be missing 18 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays), it’s hard not to be aware that a strong fetishicizing goes into the determination and a kind of competition to own many of these volumes.

Not that it doesn’t mean a lot to me too: the first present Jim got me for our anniversary was a modern facsimile of this book; I once dreamed of writing my dissertation on Cymbeline and have read a number of the plays as they appear in this volume. I am touched by his friends and fellow players’ letter to the reader where they urge us to “read him” and say if you do not like him, you are in danger of not understanding him, so get friends to talk with you of him and help you understand.

From there I walked about the area and sat in a Starbucks for an hour, drinking coffee and reading Emma Donoghue’s Passion Between Women (excellent), then got myself on the Metro and took the long ride out into Maryland past the zoo, into Bethesda and the NIH. There was a tedious security check to get past a gate onto a bus but waiting on line I began to meet the various people there and discovered immediately how friendly everyone was, courteous, and ready to talk about their work and interests. I met a man whose work I have read and much admired, Jonathan Rose, who I quickly learned organized the first conference which took place 19 years ago here in DC.

The NIH is one of these vast institutions made up of many imposing buildings set out in a grand green landscape — all of which told us that we were in the presence of a formidably powerful or at least well-connected and paid set of people running the place. A shuttle bus took people there and soon in an auditorium a few hundred people were listening to Jonathan Topham from Leeds University, talking about “Why the history of science matters to book history.” He really told us how scientific knowledge came into being and spread through the publication of key, many learned, and school texts. Specific texts he discussed included James Secord’s Victorian Sensation about the impact of The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in Victorian England and Robert Darnton’s Kiss of Lamourette about the central importance of Enlightenment publications in science and the art (not to omit the intersection of political radicalism and pornography). I liked the talk afterwards about school texts. These were (it was said) “profoundly gendered”, aimed at boys. I remembered all my work on Rosalie de Constant’s botany drawings and the dissemination of her work, and thought to myself perhaps it was printed and said to have circulated widely because botany was a subject girls were allowed to study and this book could facilitate, indeed enable girls to begin.

At the reception I talked with (among others) a male scholar from Dublin who is going to be one of those who organize next year’s conference in Dublin. He confirmed the destruction of egalitarianism is happening apace in Ireland too. I didn’t wait for the bus as a young man was walking to the Metro and I walked with him back to the train and then home again home again jiggedy-jig.

Friday, July 15th:

I came by Metro and walked and just made it in time. I had forgotten how vast and labyrinthine the halls and tunnels in the three buildings that make up the Library of Congress. Gentle reader, I spent many happy hours (Saturdays and evenings) in the 1980s and early 1990s doing research in the Library of Congress, mostly in the Jefferson where the rare book room for literary works from the 16th through 19th century is to be found. I bethought myself that Frederick Wisemen really ought to make a film called The Library, so many are the people, so different their tasks and ranks, and (as I have reason to know) so politicized from intriguing and revealing points of view is much that controls what goes on.

A typical cover at the time: Ella Maillart was a French writing and speaking Swiss travel writer and photographer (this remarkable author & book were not one of those cited during any of the talks)

The session I went to was one of the finest I heard: “Not Censored! Publishing Loopholes in Hitler’s Germany”. Ine Van Linthout in her “Nazi Ideology vs. External Pressures in the German Book Market” showed that economic pressures (cash was short in the Reicht & foreign currency) as well as a perceived need for cultural legitimation (high culture would be part of this image), nationalist pride and personal rivalries and ambitions all led to the publication of humanist and (to Nazis) covertly radical books. Translations as well as books in the original language (particularly English language) circulated. They even allowed “trash” (sexy & violent junk entertainment).

The same reasons and forces explained why (to quote the subtitle of the second paper), Michelle Troy “Why the Nazi Regime Tolerated the Albatross Press.” The Albatross Press was a multinational cosmospolitan press whose central office was in Paris, funded from banks in the UK, and connected to Mondadori (Italian) publishing books like Joyce’s Dubliners, william Saroyan’s The Way To Be Alive, Huxley’s Brave New World, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Forster’s A Passage to India, even Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (No, not one book by a woman was mentioned). Albatross was carrying on the tradition of the 19th century publisher, Tauchite which published in the original language, many English novels across middle Europe. Prof Troy quoted Geoffrey Faber (of Faber Press) that “books are a nation thinking aloud.” Among the unexpected realities here were the Jewish owners who were allowed to publish their books and the escape with their families and money in the later 1930s; Troy described other people and activities in Paris who were left alone to publish and distribute books. There were translations of available of uncensored texts: Gone with the Wind (the only women mentioned in this second paper), novels by William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck. In 1943 the regime did clamp down but in 1933 more than 1000 books had been banned, and during the 12 year dictatorship there had been book burnings in 72 cities, 93 pyres supported by the educated middle class conservatives.

Despite its title, the last paper, Jan Pieter Barbian’s “After the Book Burnings: What Made it Past the Censors” gave the other side of the story. He showed pictures of scary-looking Nazis who were heads of publishing firms completely controlled by the Nazis. In fact not very much made it past the censors on the whole. One way you could stop people from publishing books was to deprive them of (expensive) paper, and that was done throughout; there were also now and again terrifying executions of people scapegoated. Scientific books were disliked. The Nazis also feared allowing workers to get their hands on any communistic texts; these were forbidden, destroyed, controlled far more than any erotica or scepticism.

Really chilling throughout this 90 minutes were the photographs of thug looking people sometimes in uniform (sometimes not) standing in front of Jewish stores that had been closed down, the phalanxes of soldiers and men in suits with guns and flags everywhere. All three people said the Nazis did not want to make the same mistake the powerful in WW1 had done, which was to ignore the average German person’s desires for some pleasures. Apparently the Nazis had as a goal not to put “the people” in a “bad mood” which was the result of the inflictions of death and misery and terror from 1914-18 (so for example, they let certain sophisticated French texts be published almost to the end of the war). Still, the Nazies were not against terrifying people.

The Keynote plenary: Elizabeth Eisenstein’s “From Divine Art to Printing Machine and Beyond.”

Elizabeth Eisenstein when she was youing, and the first ever Resident Scholar the History of the Book Center at the Library of Congress

Elizabeth Eisenstein, historian, professor, librarian, gave her speech in the Coolidge Auditorium which I’ve been in a number of times to see plays, listen to singers, and even hear lectures. The room was full; her talk was accessible. Basically she pulled piquant quotations from passages written by famous people from the Renaissance to our own day, most of which predict sudden endings of whatever was the going technology then and would result in dire loss of texts, readers, knowledge. Her remarks along the way were suggestive. I had not thought about how the uniformity of a printed book in comparison to a hand-written manuscripot would seem strange and thus be stigmatized as magical. She showed a long-standing ambivalence in various cultures (and many people) towards (these wicked) printers (they invade privacy, spread information and ideas). A single law can have disastrous results: the religious prohibition against printing in Arabic for a couple of hundred years (until the early 18th century) stopped the spread of literacy, and kept the average person and/or whole communities in a state of isolation and ignorance throughout the middle East and wherever this law was applied.

Towards the end she naturally focused on European culture. In 18th century Europe printing may be said to have created the Enlightenment electorate and created an opponent to religious reaction for the first time. In the 19th century people were most impressed by the influence of newspapers (as an engine of progress that many people really read). Nowadays we have been seeing some idealization of reporters and print journalism and she thought it important to understand that printed books are dependent on newspapers (and now the Net) to reach the public.

It was while I was in this auditorium that I made a friend who I had lunch with twice during the conference, who I attended a couple of sessions with and whose paper was especially interesting to me: Elizabeth Starr who teaches at Westfield College (Massachusetts). Her interests coincided with mine: 19th century novels and illustration traditions and I can truly say her company on and off during the next couple of days brightened the whole time for me. On Sunday we sat together on a bench, sharing a sandwich and watching children and parents at play in a beautiful sunny (with some shade) spot on the mall near the sculpture garden and fountain and a cafe.

A photo of the fountain on another day

As this is long enough for one blog, I’ll stop here and resume again tomorrow or the next night to tell of Friday afternoon where my topics which include book covers, what we can learn about readers from studying 20th century compilations of monthly periodicals, and Saturday morning where I was privileged to again listen to unusually informative papers on transnational circulations of novels and travel books through Mudie’s and other circulating libraries as well as the true realities behind the later 20th century be-prized book marketplace.

Sharp 2, Sharp 3, and Sharp 4.

Ellen