Write-ups
A Taste of History
Leaders: Barbara Wheaton, Curator; Marylène Altieri, Curator of Books and Printed Materials, Schlesinger Library
Write-up by Marylène Altieri (Schlesinger Library, Harvard)
Schlesinger Library presented two sessions of a workshop that combined verbal presentations with an exhibit of treasures from the library’s famous culinary collection, highlighting the profound impact of this particular genre of book on our lives. Curator of books and printed materials, Marylène Altieri, and honorary curator of the culinary collection, Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, welcomed attendees to Schlesinger’s Radcliffe College Room, where they could view over 40 books under the benign gaze of Sarah Wyman Whitman, a benefactor of Radcliffe College at the time of its founding, and a renowned artist in bookbinding design and stained glass. Whitman’s portrait by Helen Bigelow Merriman is at one end of the room and one of her stained glass windows is at the other. On the tables and counters were some of the oldest and most significant rare cookbooks in Schlesinger’s collection, along with representative examples of cookbooks from more recent times that have important or unusual research interest. Included were Schlesinger’s oldest cookbook, the 1601Trattato della natura de’ cibi et del bere of Baldassare Pisanelli; a 1679 edition of Anna Wecker’s Neu, köstlich, und nutzliches Koch-buch, the first cookbook published by a woman (in 1596); 18th century works from Britain (Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery) and France (Vincent La Chapelle’s Le Cuisinier Moderne); the first cookbook published by a freed slave woman, What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking (1881), and American classics such as the first edition from 1931 (donated by Julia Child) and the 1943 wartime edition of Irma Rombauer and Marion Becker’s The Joy of Cooking, and Minnie Fox’s The Blue Grass Cookbook from 1904. Many of these works had provenances that added to their value, having come from the collections of Julia Child, Samuel and Narcissa Chamberlain, Carl Sontheimer, inventor of the Cuisinart, the American Institute of Wine and Food, and antiquarian book dealer Eleanor Loewenstein.
Marylène Altieri began the presentations by offering some background on the Schlesinger Library, which is one of the world’s premier collections on women’s history, and about culinary collecting at Schlesinger. Begun with a 1960 transfer of 1500 historic cookbooks from Widener, the culinary collection attracted the attention of Julia Child through her close friend Avis DeVoto, who worked at Radcliffe College in the 1960s and knew that Schlesinger (until 1965 called The Women’s Archives) was collecting materials on the lives of American women. After the two women donated their voluminous correspondence to Schlesinger, Child began donating her thousands of cookbooks, many of them rare and historic, and her papers, continuing over the next 30 years and right up until her death. Child’s donations inspired others, and as interest in culinary history began to grow, the collection did too. Eventually Schlesinger, where there had been some skepticism about collecting cookbooks at first, embraced these resources as essential to women’s history and began to devote funds to acquiring books to fill out the collection. Today, between the substantial gifts and wise purchasing, the culinary collection stands at 18,000 volumes, along with many periodical runs, thousands of culinary pamphlets and ephemera such as menus, dozens of manuscript, or handwritten, cookbooks from the 18th through 20th centuries, and the papers of important culinary women such as Julia Child, Simone Beck, Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher, and several others, along with the records of organizations focused on nutrition, home economics, and healthful eating. The broader setting in which this collection resides—Schlesinger’s deep and enormous collections of the papers of American women in all walks of life and records of organizations concerned with the lives of women—gives this culinary collection a context that is unique and distinguishes it from every other existing collection.
Next, Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, an independent scholar of culinary history who has been working with the collections, writing, teaching seminars on culinary research, and advising other scholars at Schlesinger for over 40 years, spoke about some of the oldest volumes on display. Picking each one up in turn, she explicated their significance both as texts and as artifacts. Her close examination of recipes and her deep understanding of social history, combined with her parallel knowledge of art history, have led her to a profound understanding of these works that she feels impelled to share. She drew particular attention to the significance of ordinary individuals publishing their recipes, pointing out that the act of publication gave a voice to people, especially women, who were outside of the sphere of literature or scholarly knowledge and who likely never expected to have such a voice. Marylène Altieri took up where Wheaton left off, in the late 19th century, and gave the attendees a quick overview of the many different types of cookbooks collected by Schlesinger that were on display, from the humble charity or community cookbooks to the cookbooks aimed at specific gender or ethnic groups to the lavish artistic or high-tech productions. Examples included the poignant Eskimo Cook Book from Shishmaref, an Alaskan village imperiled by rising ocean levels; the iconicSettlement Cook Book; Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl’s Cookbook; the spectacular edition of M.F.K. Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste with illustrations by Wayne Thibaud; and the massive El Bullicookbooks of Ferran Adrià. Also included were wartime, low-income, and vegetarian cookbooks from the past, evidence that many of today’s food issues are not new. Indeed, the trajectory of cookbooks over time is a reflection of the world’s history and of the needs and hopes of people at their most fundamental level, the imperative to feed themselves.
Archiving from the Web
Leaders: Marilyn Dunn, Executive Director of the Schlesinger Library and Radcliffe Librarian; Amy Benson, Librarian/Archivist for Digital Projects; Wendy Gogel, Manager of Digital Content and Projects
Write-up by Greg Afinogenov (History, Harvard)
Linux creator Linus Torvalds once joked that “only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.” As we are learning more and more, however, the Internet’s ability to preserve its own content isn’t unlimited. Blogs, comments, and whole Web sites routinely wink out of existence, potentially doing irreparable harm to our ability to keep a record of our online past. Paradoxically, digital media—which are uniquely easy to store, replicate, and distribute—may also be peculiarly fragile, especially since the need to preserve them is often not taken seriously.
These challenges were at the center of discussion at the “Archiving from the Web” panel on Thursday. Marilyn Dunn of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library spoke of the continuities between her library’s decades-long efforts to preserve the first-person voices of ordinary American women and its currentproject to archive women’s blogs. For the Schlesinger librarians, the medium is especially useful as a point of entry into the experiences of constituencies that are not well-represented in the library’s other collections, especially conservative women and women of color. The online archive is thus a means of promoting inclusivity as well as preservation.
Amy Benson discussed some of the technical issues surrounding the project. Although the archive currently contains only about 20 blogs, the crawler software used to collect material for archiving also follows external links, which allows it to capture much of the ecosystem of discussion in which their authors participate. The problem, of course, is that the range of sites located even a few degrees of separation away from the original blogs could potentially be infinite. The solution adopted by Benson’s project is a combination of software-based restrictions and manual pruning by the archivists themselves, which suggests that a purely automatic system is not feasible for an effort of this kind. Naturally, the archivists must also communicate with the authors, something that becomes especially important if—or rather when—their blogs go private or are deleted entirely. In fact, the archive is already demonstrating its value, since a substantial number of the original blogs have already disappeared from the Web.
Wendy Gogel of the Harvard University Library Office of Information Systems also addressed the spectrum of technical, legal, and other challenges posed by digital preservation. In particular, she focused on WAX (the Web Archive Collection Service), developed as an in-house software solution specifically for Harvard digital preservation projects, such as the Capturing Women’s Voices collection. Although WAX is similar to other digital archive packages, such as the Internet Archive’s Archive It! Service, its emphasis on curator control (broadly-defined), full-text search and indexing, and “value-add” in the form of detailed descriptive metadata make it especially useful as a resource of scholars. At the same time, the complex and multilayered, often international, legal issues surrounding digital preservation made cooperation with Harvard’s Office of Legal Counsel indispensable for the project’s success.
The inside view provided by these presentations was enlightening and useful, especially since the audience seemed to be mainly composed of archivists and librarians interested in introducing digital preservation at their institutions. At the same time, the session suggested a number of larger issues. How can digital preservationists work with each other to make their archives accessible to users beyond their own institutional settings? After all, a constantly-growing multitude of small, disconnected archiving projects risks duplication of effort and even irrelevance, especially since many of them are (by design) not indexed by Google. Ironically, the world of Internet preservation risks becoming less open and less searchable than the network it is supposed to preserve.
In that context, it seems worthwhile to ask about the potential contribution of private and commercial institutions like Google, which has made the indexing of the world’s information its corporate mission. For better or for worse, Google has become an indispensable part of most scholarly research these days, and indexing or at least keeping a registry of online archives would be a logical extension of its book-digitization and caching projects.
Corporate actors can only be trusted so far, however. Ten years after Yahoo! bought the legendary Geocities sitehosting service in 1999, it began quietly preparing to take its servers offline permanently—a process it finally completed this week. If the story had ended there, years of crucial early Internet history would be gone forever: though frequently lambasted for its blinking, flashing, garish site designs, Geocities hosted some of the earliest informal personal Web sites on the Internet. Thankfully, a shadowy grassroots group calling itself the Archive Team managed to back up most of the data, and when Geocities was shut down, released it in the form of a gigantic 900GB torrent. Perhaps, then, the future of digital preservation will not rely completely on institutions and companies. Though archivists sometimes like to pretend otherwise, individuals are perfectly capable of caring for data—and the way they skirt the boundaries of legality may end up helping us preserve materials that libraries simply cannot.
Three Authors and their Books in Context: William James, Samuel Johnson, and Emily Dickinson
Leaders: William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian, Houghton Library
Write-up by Jacob G. Stulberg (English, Harvard)
Thomas Horrocks, associate librarian for collections, welcomed us to the Houghton Library by stressing just how much material the space held in store. From its earliest days, Houghton had sought out far more than printed books—"I won't even begin to imagine what we have in terms of ephemera," said Horrocks, "but there's tons of it." For today's visit, the library's staff had framed the worlds of three authors between texts of both kinds: the books that inspired their innovations, and the "ephemera" that preserved their day-to-day lives.
Our visit began at the William James exhibition in the library's Edison and Newman Room. Leslie Morris, curator of the Modern Books and Manuscripts collection, led us through the upbringing of this so-called father of American psychology. From his sketches as an aspiring artist to the doodle-filled notebooks of his medical studies, we saw James' early struggles take vivid form. The exhibition continued with documents from James' career at Harvard, where he introduced the study of psychology while exploring other, even less mainstream approaches to the human mind. On one especially striking page, a thin column of notes in James' handwriting sat next to a tangle of wild, jagged scrawls. These were the results of "automatic writing," Morris explained: an interpreter would copy down words supposedly dictated by a spirit and channeled through a medium. As for James' own mind, the most extensive traces were all around us, if not on display, in the glass-windowed bookcases lining the room. There, over 600 books from James' personal library bore the marks of his reading: underlined passages that he would later quote in his own work. (Those unable to visit the library can view the exhibition online.)
One floor upstairs, assistant curator Heather Cole led us into the Dickinson Room. Aside from the carpet and light fixtures, we learned, every item here had been transferred from Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst. These included over 900 volumes from the poet's personal library, as well as the chest of drawers in which hundreds of her manuscripts were discovered after her death. Also on display was the tiny desk at which Dickinson wrote (as befit the writer of such tiny poems, Cole remarked). In fact, the room itself would accommodate just half of our group at once. The rest of us waited next door in the Keats Room, where Horrocks directed our attention to the "calm and confident" life mask of John Keats—a haunting counterpart to the portrait of a ten-year-old Dickinson one room over.
For the last leg of our visit, we followed John Overholt, assistant curator of the Donald and Mary Hyde Collection. Leading us into their namesake room, Overholt explained how the Hydes had endowed this elegant ellipse-shaped space to house the library of Samuel Johnson. If the previous authors on our tour built their careers on collections of printed words, Johnson took this process further still, spending nearly a decade amassing words from his library into the Dictionary of the English Language. Overholt told the story of this vast project via a small but diverse sample of texts, beginning with a page of examples copied from the Aeneid—one of several thousand such scraps that gave tangible form to Johnson's reading knowledge. At the other end of the table sat various editions of the magnum opus itself, including one just an inch high! In between, Overholt had set out several texts telling the checkered tale of the dictionary's publication, including the infamous "Letter to Chesterfield" in which Johnson spoke out angrily against his wealthy patron. As Overholt reminded us, the dictionary arrived at a pivotal moment in the history of the book. In place of the old business model, where patrons endowed those authors without funds of their own, publishers were increasingly buying rights from authors and sending them the proceeds. We may take this system for granted today—but without it, the careers of James and Dickinson might have been very different indeed.
"I Have Often Regretted Not Buying a Book, but I Have Never Regretted Buying One"—Herbert Somerton Foxwell, economist and book
Leaders: Christine Riggle, Special Collections Librarian, Baker Library; Laura Linard, Director, Baker Library Collections
Write-up by Carra Glatt (English, Harvard)
The presentation—led by Christine Riggle, the rare book cataloguer at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library—began with some background on Harvard Business School (HBS). Founded in 1908, it was the nation’s first graduate school of business, and part of its mission was establishing the study of business as a legitimate intellectual pursuit comparable to law or medicine. To that end, HBS emphasized the history of business to add scholarly cachet to a discipline many still regarded as a purely practical trade. Building a vast historical collection at Baker Library, which opened in 1927, was a crucial component of this mission. The library’s acquisition in the 1930s of a significant portion of the library of Herbert Somerton Foxwell established Baker Library as one of the leading centers of economic history.
Foxwell (1849–1936) was a British economist who collected about 70,000 books from the 1870s to his death. Despite publishing no books, his articles and reviews made him an influential figure in his field. He is better remembered, however, for his collection. Foxwell collected broadly; rather than focusing exclusively on acquiring editions of the seminal works of economic thought, he also collected minor studies, pamphlets, letters, ephemera, and government documents, as well as political commentaries with less direct relevance to the economy. Because Foxwell was one of the few economists to collect economic literature, his responses to his readings, recorded both in annotations and in his chronologically arranged card catalogue, are particularly valuable. His acerbic assessment of David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, for example, was that the work’s conclusions were so skewed that teaching it to a “half-educated” person would be “like giving a child a razor to play with,” while his more measured analysis of a 1705 letter to Queen Anne from the Hanseatic League held that “The letter…is striking evidence of the decay in the power of the League due to Anne’s strong policy and to the thirty years war.” His catalogue also paid particular attention to provenance; Foxwell’s most prized volume was Frederick the Great’s copy of Helvetius.
The collection is divided between HBS and Goldsmith’s Library at the University of London. Foxwell, who had remained single into his forties, found the cost of supporting a wife and two daughters prohibitive, leading him to sell much of his collection to the University of London around the turn of the century. He began collecting again immediately, seeking out replacements for volumes lost in the sale of his first library and new works. In the last years of his life, Foxwell again experienced financial troubles and sold his second library to Harvard Business School. Because the money used to purchase the library came from the philanthropist Claude Washington Kress, the collection was named in his honor. While the Kress collection has expanded to include other works of economic history, Foxwell’s volumes still make up about seventy percent of its holdings.
The rest of the session dealt with the practical issues of maintaining and providing access to a large collection. Director of Baker Library Collections Laura Linard, who assisted during the presentation, noted that until the library’s renovation several years ago, the collection had been housed in a beautiful room resembling a luxurious 1930s study. She then took us to its new location: a basement storage room kept at frigid temperatures better suited to the preservation of the books. As we looked at the volumes caged in behind a partition, Linard acknowledged that the sacrifice had been severe: this room would preserve the collection, but at great cost to its aesthetics and accessibility. The latter factor may have been weighted more heavily had the renovation not roughly coincided with the digitization of a large portion of Foxwell’s collections both at Baker and at Goldsmith. Since Making of the Modern World has become one of the most widely used digital resources on HOLLIS, use of the physical collection has plummeted. But, Linard observed, only sixty percent of the collection is digitized: in taking advantage of the convenience of the digital archive, researchers actually limit their access to the collection as a whole. On the way out, Riggle called our attention to the library’s card catalogues (preserved but no longer updated), another reminder of the changing nature of library research.
Interesting Characteristics: The Harvard Law School Library Colllection
Leaders: David Warrington, Librarian for Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library; Mary Person, Rare Books Cataloger, Harvard Law School Library
Write-up by Heng Du (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard), Lispeth Nutt (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard), and Hansun Hsiung (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard)
When is a book finished and complete? One recalls Roger Stoddard’s oft-quoted quip, that “whatever they may do, authors do not write books.” A manuscript or Word file, even after it’s dashed in to publishers, is still far from that final stage of thing-ness we call a “book.” Cue editors; cue marketing experts; cue graphic designers. After a brief intermission, we return to the now-angered author, throwing down a galley proof as if it were a glove. This—whence our narrative derives its motion: the “book” emerges only after protracted negotiations between multiple actors and agendas; its production is an agonistic field. Finally, though, it’s over. Language perfected, typefaces and layout fixed, cover designed, marketing angle established, the book sits on a shelf at your local bookseller. Curtains. The book is complete.
Or is it? Over the course of an hour and a half on the afternoon of October 28, specialists at the Historical and Special Collections of the Harvard Law School Library, in a presentation entitled “Interesting Characteristics,” invited us to reconsider the proposition. Crammed with words, marks, and apparatuses added by readers themselves, the exhibited items testified to the idea that the “book” as an object is a perpetually open process, sustained and revitalized by interactions with book owners, whether permanent or temporary. It is this “book,” augmented through use—and not the unmarked product fresh from the printing house—that often strikes us as the most fascinating object of all.
Coordinated by Dorothy Africa, Edwin Moloy, Margaret Peachy, Mary Person, Lesley Schoenfeld, and David Warrington, the exhibit was divided into three separate presentations. In the first of these, “Sixteenth Century English Law Books and Traces of Former Owners,” Rare Books Cataloger Mary Person guided attendees through fourteen different legal works, their dates of printing ranging from the incunabular period up to the late 16th century. Across all these books, familiar marks greeted those acquainted in the history of reading. Acollection of cases from the reign of Edward IV (1471–1483), printed in 1564, featured elaborate “manicules,” complete with detailed sleeves. Another year book covering the same period bore dates after sections to record when its user read the passages in question. Readerly craftsmanship was also evidenced in vellum tabs sewn onto the sleeves of a 1584 survey of justices of the peace in England, while an earlier work from 1570 testified to active reader engagement in the form of corrections made in the text, and to the numbering of leaves. These signs of readership were compounded, in turn, by demonstrations of ownership, from names written down and crossed out, to more ornate medallion stamps.
Of all the forms of post-printing “production” on display, however, that of bookbinding was perhaps the most alien to modern-day readers. Up until the early nineteenth century, “books” were sold, for the most part, as unbound sheets, or else in the most rudimentary of bound forms. Buyers would then have to select and pay for binding themselves, often commissioned separately from a professional binder. The quality and type of binding could reflect the status or the buyer; it might also reflect the status of the book in the buyer’s eyes. A volume of statues from 1587, for instance, has endpapers that are clearly recycled “scrap” paper in the form of manuscript notes concerning grain deliveries, dated to 1596. A different book of statutes has endpapers cut from an unidentified English almanac. These examples point to the disjuncture between the “book” as we know it—the bound codex—and the “book” in the early modern period.
More interestingly, the possibility of delay between purchase and binding, as well as the common event of rebinding, allowed readings to make their own insertions and editions to texts. The variety of personalization this afforded was made clear in several copies of Les tenures du monsieur Littleton. Some were interleaved with blank pages to create extra space for note-taking. Paratextual guides were also common in most copies, with one reader composing a hand-written alphabetical index of forty-eight leaves in the front of the book. Of particular interest was a hybrid editions, wherein the original 1579 Les tenures. . . was bound with an index from a later edition of the same work (1581), and one gathering from a yet even later edition (1583).
Next, David Warrington guided us through a presentation entitled “Birth of a Pedagogy: What Annotated Textbooks, Teaching Notes, and Student Notebooks Can Tell Us about the Origins of the Case Method of Teaching.” The items included in this presentation are loose puzzle pieces from the early days of the “case method” of teaching, a pedagogic technique developed by the first dean of Harvard Law School, Christopher Langdell (1826-1926).
Launching this new form of instruction was an important step in the history of professional education, revolutionizing the teaching of law in the United States. Replacing rote lecture-recitation, case method teaching required students to confront directly the actual texts of judicial decisions and deduce operating legal principles based on their own analysis.
New methods of pedagogy, however, require new course materials to accompany them. Placing students in a head-on collision course with the text of real legal decisions also meant placing those texts—their actual physical pages—on a collision course with students’ hands and pens. Soon after the introduction of this new method, Langdell realized that in order to protect the library’s collection of court reports from the onset of his students, he also needed to invent a new genre of textbook. His Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts, published in 1871, became the first example of the case book, a collection of key legal cases to be studied in a course. Every student in his classes was subsequently required to possess such a copy and to use it in class.
Surrounded by Langdell’s notebooks for class instruction, as well as notes taken by his students, four such case books stood out as the centerpiece of Mr. Warrington’s presentation. These copies of Cases in Equity Pleading were all opened to the pages Scott v. Broadwood to reveal the extensive annotation produced by their owners, the participants in Langdell’s class on October 19, 1875—namely, Langdell, assistant professor James Barr Ames, and two students. Mr. Warrington’s choice of case and page was not a mere instance of curatorial whim, but a demonstration of the power these books and their marginalia have already played in current research. Using these notes to Scott v. Broadwood, historians have reconstructed precise classroom interactions, shedding a new type of intimate light on the nature of this paradigmatic pedagogical transformation.
Given the prestige of Harvard Law School, it is not merely Langdell’s annotated casebooks that tantalize researchers. Copious notes from the hand of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., are, for example, another historical treasure trove (indeed, many case books often possess traces of several hands—several readers—within them). Fortunately, Harvard Law School’s ongoing digitization project, partly conducted in conjunction with the Making of Modern Law project, has now made most of these materials accessible online, with more to come in the near future. This project aims at digitizing not only all of the surviving case books from the faculty and the students, but also other materials in the Special Collection. In addition to the usual suspects of non-circulating collections – rare books, manuscripts, and special reference works – this would also include all HLS holdings printed before 1851 and most U.S. materials printed before 1877, as well as the so-called Red Set, comprising publications authored by HLS administration, faculty, and students. Unlike older digitization projects, where standards of “cleanliness” and readability exclude texts with too much marginalia, this would offer us a new set of instantly accessible materials through which to further explore the act of reading. At the present, all of Harvard Law School’s course catalogues and exams (Langdell also—surprise!—invented the law exam as we know it) are already digitized.
Following the presentations by David Warrington and Mary Person, participants in the “Interesting Characteristics” site visit were invited to browse through an exhibition of library holdings curated by Dorothy Africa, who works as a conservationist in the “historical and special collections” division of the law school library. Ms. Africa had grouped the books into the following categories:
- Books of Association to Persons with Families, Known and Unknown
- Notable Sewing and Attachment Features/li>
- Decorative Papers/li>
- Interesting Bindings/li>
- Documents and Features of Note/li>
- Marginal Annotation/li>
- Conservation Example/li>
- Techniques and Tools of the Trade/li>
Ms. Africa's organizational scheme itself is informative, in that it is clearly structured around the concerns of a bibliographer and conservationist; an intellectual historian like myself, even when focusing on the non-textual elements of a printed book or manuscript, would have picked significantly different categories—possibly grouping the works by era, genre, or geographic region. In contrast, this organizational scheme could serve as a checklist for the kinds of socio-historical evidence located within the corporeality of an individual book: annotation, personalization, binding method, etc.
The first category served to demonstrate the importance of ownership, interpersonal relationships, and individual circumstance to understanding the life of a text. One interesting example in this regard was Henri Lammasch's copy ofSystematische Darstellung des deutschen Strafverfahrens auf Grundlage der neueren Strafprozessordnungen seit 1848 by Julius Wilhelm von Planck. (Von Planck was a law professor in Kiel and Munich, but would perhaps be more notable to most of us as the father of Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory.) Lammasch, who was also a professor of law, had the book bound interleaved, which allowed him to add his own abundance of hand-written notes. This sea of scrawled commentary often dwarfs the “actual” text and would provide the historian of law with an invaluable resource for understanding how a text like that of von Planck was received and put to use. The first category of books also included one of the only (semi-) non-Western sources, The Civil Code of the Egyptian Native Tribunals, which contains a number of texts bound together in Cairo at the behest of Frederic Maurice Goadby. Goadby was an Englishman who taught for a time at the Royal School of Law in Egypt, before being appointed to oversee Western-style law classes in Jerusalem following the first World War. While its contents are not themselves terribly riveting, this bound volume does function as a tantalizing snapshot into the complicated network of relationships in turn-of-the-century Cairo among the British and French colonial powers, khedivial “modernizing” initiatives, the traditional institutions of Islamic law, and networks of local courts.
The conservation example toward the end of sequence of books (Vocabularius perutilis vtriusque iuris) was presented along with a detailed description of the thirty hours that went into its rebinding and restoration. Reading these details filled me with a mix of horror, confusion, and gratitude: “The text was dry cleaned throughout using vulcanized rubber eraser, and the gathering folds mended by gampi tissue.” Historians are forever in debt to the painstaking work performed by conservationists to preserve the physical “casings” for texts that we so often treat as disembodied! The final group of objects also included a number of sourcebooks relevant to the history of book production, including Ms. Africa's personal copy of Manuscript Inks: Being a person exploration of the materials and modes of production by Jack C. Thompson, which is itself a fairly rare book; touchable samples of vegetable-tanned book leather, alum taw, and vellum; and a copy of an 1880 poem entitled “The Bookbinder's Lament,” which is (amusingly) more of a curse and which catalogs all of the catastrophes that can befall the bookbinder. An excerpt seems a fitting conclusion:
May rats and mice devour your paste,
Your paper and your leather;
May your hand-letters be defac'd
Your types all mix'd together. . .
And may your coulours be too strong,
So as to rot the leather;
May all your books be titled wrong,
Each fly-sheet past'd together...
May your apprent'ces run away,
Your business be diminish'd;
And may your booksellers sever pay
You, when your work is finish'd.
God grant that you be distress'd may b,
From constable to the beadle;
And live till you can't feel or see
Your press pin from your needle.
Dorothy Africa reported having gotten the poem out of a volume of the journalSkindeep; I found this slightly different version on pp. 129–30 of The New York City Artisan 1789–1825: A documentary history by Howard Rock (1989).
Why (Design) Books?
Leaders: Timothy Jones, Art Director, Harvard University Press
Write-up by Greg Kornbluh (Harvard University Press)
Harvard University Press (HUP) art director Tim Jones began this session by speaking briefly about the technical aspects of the design process, and then moved on to a series of slides of various jacket designs. For most, he showed us several approaches to the design for each book, which was great for demonstrating both a designer’s thought process and also how different designs can greatly impact one’s initial perception of a book.
His examples demonstrated the variety of factors that designers have to consider. He showed five different versions of the jacket for Stuart Banner’s 2002 book The Death Penalty, the last three of which were variations on the same theme, but with different type and color treatments. His own preference had been black type on a black background, but, as he explained, that got nowhere with the sales and marketing departments.
He scrolled through no less than a dozen versions of the jacket for Nigel Hamilton’s Biography: A Brief History. The first design, still his favorite, featured the artist Cindy Sherman, whose agent wouldn’t even consider licensing the photo to us. Tim came close with Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, but finally settled on a still of Lillian Gish from the film Annie Laurie.
Tim also talked about some instances in which HUP has failed to anticipate the effects that jacket design can have on a project. For example, the design for Devin McKinney’s 2003 book Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, featured a fairly straightforward treatment of a photo of The Beatles exiting a plane. For a little fun and a Warhol echo, three different versions of the jacket were produced, each in a different pastel, and books were randomly jacketed. It turned out not to be so fun for bookstores and customers that didn’t get the color they wanted, though. The paperback version of the book the next year came just in green.
In another case that he described, the jacket design for the hardcover just didn’t end up serving the book. The initial approach to Dominance by Design, by Michael Adas, had a very “designy” cover – a stainless steel ball bearing, on a cold, sparse background. Rather than an actual analysis of design, though, the book is a history of how the U.S. used its technological superiority to underwrite its policies of unilateralism and global “civilizing” efforts. The hardcover design was found not to appeal to the actual audience for this book, so the paperback got a complete redesign, featuring the familiar Currier & Ives lithographWestward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, but with the shadow of military helicopters echoing the original design. As Tim explained, this redesign has actually served the book much better, and has helped spur a nice run as a course adoption title, which was unlikely with the original design.
Tim then explained the depth of work involved in HUP’s relaunching this fall of The Image of the Black in Western Art, a series begun by the Menil Foundation in the 1960s. In collaboration with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, HUP is reproducing the original volumes, completing those that were never offered, and even extending the series with a volume on the 20th century. The first four books of what will be ten in total were released by HUP this fall, and the final is scheduled for 2015. Tim detailed the designer’s role in each step of this massive project, and also explained why books are still the perfect format for the series. He passed around copies of the original editions along with HUP’s new versions, and pointed out some of the ways that the new design differs from the old.
One theme of Tim’s presentation was that a book designer’s job is to subsume him- or herself to the nature of the project. One choice quote: “I’m supposed to feel awful as a designer for saying ‘market it,’ but it’s my job. We’re most interested in presenting the book the way the book needs to be presented.” Later, in explaining why his book designs don’t always represent his own design aesthetic, he said “I’m a utilitarian designer. I think it’s the reader first.” He explained that designers of fiction usually read the book for which they’re designing the jacket but that at a place like HUP, where designers are responsible for ten to twenty jackets a season, they’re dependent on editors and the sales and marketing departments to help them understand the appropriate direction for a book’s design.
When asked about general approaches to design, Tim explained that much of it differs from designer to designer, but that an obvious first step is identifying the book’s genre. “I’m going to design a science book much differently than an American history book,” he said.
In response to various questions, Tim explained his background (BFA in painting), bemoaned the lost art of page layout, offered advice to people interested in becoming book designers (“Be open to all design, not just book design. . . . There will still be design in the world, it just might not be all in one little package.”), described the process of working with authors (“It can be really shocking, the number of emails you get from one author about their jacket. And when you’re trying to design twenty, it can be a problem.”), the process for design circulation (“When you give too many options, you get too many opinions.”), and detailed HUP’s ongoing efforts to design books meant to last, physically and aesthetically.
Why (Sell and Market) Books?
Leaders: Susan Donnelly, Assistant Director of the Harvard University Press and Director for Sales and Marketing
Write-up by Greg Kornbluh (Harvard University Press)
Susan Donnelly, Harvard University Press (HUP) director of sales and marketing, began her session by asking the assembled 15–20 guests for a round of introductions. Among them were authors, librarians, book dealers, collectors, and a few folks working in publishing. All book people, but from a number of different angles, and that diversity was reflected in the questions and discussion that followed.
Susan started her talk by offering a straightforward answer from HUP’s perspective to the question posed by this conference: “We make enough money to cover our costs and stay in the black by publishing books, so we continue to do it.” She went on, though, to talk about HUP’s mission to produce and disseminate important scholarship, a concern that goes beyond the bottom line.
She discussed how changes in the book world at-large are affecting HUP. On the subject of e-books and technology, she expressed confidence in the continued relevance of HUP’s model. “From where we sit at Harvard University Press, the book does not appear to be an endangered species,” she said. According to Susan, HUP is not anticipating e-book sales accounting for more than 10% of HUP’s total sales within five years. “The reading experience of big, fat books does not transition well to the eReaders currently available,” she said.
She said that the complete reshaping of the book review scene has probably been more significant than the technological changes. There was a time, not so long ago, when one big, glowing, definitive review could be all a book needed to really take off. “There were a handful of review outlets,” she said, “and they meant everything.” Now, at least for a publisher like HUP, the demise of the newspaper book section and the ensuing online fragmentation of the review scene mean that the big, book-making review just doesn’t really exist anymore. Instead, there are countless review outlets spread around online and in print, and many of them are pretty specifically targeted. That can be a great thing for readers, and to ensure a breadth of book world coverage, but for HUP it also means a sea change in the way that book publicity works. Publicists and marketing people now have so many more outlets and reviewers with whom they have to establish relationships. As Susan put it, “The more opportunities there are, the more work there is to be done.”
Susan explained that HUP basically publishes two kinds of books, both of which highlight and depend on first-rate scholarship:
- Books that can be pitched to the general reader, and then go on to a second life as a course adoption title.
- Books for the scholarly or specialist audience that are often produced by junior faculty as part of their tenure requirement.
Generally, she said, HUP publishes books that are in conversation with each other. She gave the example of HUP’s publication of John Rawls’ landmark A Theory of Justice, which helped to define modern political philosophy, and subsequent publication of Amartya Sen’s 2009 The Idea of Justice, which is a direct engagement with Rawls. Next will come Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs, another “big idea” approach to justice, due this fall, and then, next spring, Martha Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities, which details a definitional approach to justice developed in conversation with Sen.
Like Tim Jones in the preceding “Why (Design) Books?” session, Susan spent time detailing HUP’s reintroduction of The Image of the Black in Western Artseries this fall. She explained the history of the series, how it began in the 1960s as a project of the Menil Foundation, for whom HUP distributed the original volumes. The series was never completed, and the archive was eventually brought to Harvard’s Du Bois Institute. Susan talked about how, years ago as a travelling sales rep for HUP, the accounts she’d visit would often ask whether the series would be completed, and whether HUP would reprint the original volumes, some of which had long been unavailable. In collaboration with the Du Bois Institute, HUP is reproducing the original volumes, with new, full-color designs, completing the previously unpublished volumes, and adding a new volume covering the 20th century.
Susan talked about why she and HUP believe this to be an important series, and she discussed the strategy for helping to ensure that the series makes a splash and gets the attention that it deserves. She displayed a variety of marketing material for the series, which included two different versions of a blad, postcards featuring the covers of the first four books, and a small bi-fold brochure meant to facilitate the pre-purchase of the entire ten-book set, produced at the request of series editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. There has been a push to get media coverage focusing on Professor Gates and his co-editor, David Bindman. There are a number of launch events in the works, including at the British Museum. And talks are underway for the staging of a major, touring art exhibition to coincide with the completion of the series in 2015.
Susan explained how a series like this could be greatly helped by positive review coverage, but that it can be difficult to get reviews for an incomplete collection of books. She also explained how difficult the timing for reviews of art books can be, as they can’t be reviewed from galley copies like text-only books, but that production schedules often don’t allow much time between the mailing of finished review copies and the publication of the books. She noted that the series had been included in Publishers Weekly’s fall roundup of “sleepers” from independent publishers, and described how helpful that sort of coverage can still be.
The session closed with a round of questions on topics as varied as rights reversion, BISAC codes, remaindering, and profit margins.
Informal Tour of the Weissman Preservation Center, Special Collection Conservation
Leaders: Deborah Mayer, Helen H. Glaser Conservator, Weissman Preservation Center
Write-up by Heng Du (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard) and Hansun Hsiung (History and East Asian Languages, Harvard)
Notions of information overload throughout the century confronted readers with the anxiety that there was too much to know. One can recall a related fear, however, that there is too much that cannot be known—too much that is vanishing before our eyes. Text, images, sounds, insofar as they manifest themselves as inscriptions on the surface of some medium, remind us that no matter how lofty our ideas, humanists need to maintain at least a minimal commitment to materialism. Whatever remains for us to know remains because that which carries it, through a combination of luck and effort, has managed to survive.
It is likely no mere coincidence, then, that the dense series of antiseptic island stations on the second floor of 90 Auburn St., home to the Weissman Preservation Center, remind visitors of clinical operating tables. This is where maps, books, scrolls, photographs, and more come for check-up, treatment, and, sometimes, emergency surgery. Serving over seventy-three of Harvard's libraries located across the globe, the Weissman Preservation Center dedicates most of its time to preparing items for digitization or exhibition, in the meantime doing general repair and conservation (eternally backlogged). Above all, digitization projects have done the most to multiply the Center’s conservation projects, bringing to light objects long-forgotten in depositories.
The site visit began, fittingly, a session on the history and chemistry of paper. The Center specializes in paper objects, and divides its labor further into three main categories—work on photographs, work on bound books, and work on loose-leaves. Although, today, techniques for upping calcium content and eliminating acid pulp have led more durable forms of archival paper, the majority of paper in our books is not so durable. Moving through combinations of bast, cotton, wood, and grass, the presentation detailed the advent of machine-made wood pulp paper in the late nineteenth century (lower quality), and went on to address the reliance of modern-day conservation methods on a far more ancient paradigm—a combination of Japanese tengujô tissue with wheat starch paste. This type of paper is gentle enough to avoid putting extra stress on the materials to which it is applied; at the same time, its long and multi-directional fibers offer strong support. Participants were then encouraged to browse freely across the floor, stopping at the stations of different specialists to hear about their ongoing conservation projects. In what follows, we provide brief summaries of some of the major tasks facing conservators, and the techniques used to address them.
Photographic Conservation
Most photographs feature one or more layers of emulsion that give them the depth, texture, and dimensionality we have come to expect of them. Unfortunately, emulsion over time cracks and flakes off, bringing with it the image itself. Concomitant with this process is the warping of photos. Unlikescroll projects, where moisture is applied to regions in need of flattening, photographic emulsion is too sensitive to be humidified. Consolidation and flattening projects attempt to address this problem thorough the use of gelatin in two stages. First, a solution with a low percentage of gelatin is used to “mist” the photograph lightly. This begins to glue down flakes into place. A high-percentage gelatin solution is then applied after this; ethanol-based adhesives can be used to further secure specific problem areas.
While this method holds for most photographs, it does not for early photographic paper prints, namely salted paper prints. Popular during the two decades from 1840–60, salted paper prints are characterized by their flatness, wherein the image sits directly on the paper; developed naturally through exposure to sunlight/ultraviolet radiation, their sensitivity to blue yields details of defects and discolorations easier, and is often associated with a “grittier” quality. Given that they lack the emulsion layers of later photographs, salted paper prints do not experience the same difficulty of cracking. They are not as stable, however, as chemically-developed prints. Moreover, because of their flatness and blue-sensitivity, it was common to retouch salted paper prints through various means, e.g. hand-coloring, coats of varnish or wax, or toning in gold. This has made it difficult to identify salted paper prints, as their characteristic flatness becomes obscured. Thus, in order to conserve these early paper photographs, Harvard has embarked on a project to identify all salted paper prints in its holdings, the expected range of which is currently estimated at somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 prints. This is achieved through X-ray fluorescence technology. Only by first identifying which prints are, in fact, salted paper print, can they be prioritized for early conservation.
These were some of the demonstrated techniques for conserving photographs themselves, but what of print reproductions of photographs? A presentation on the turn-of-the-century Atlas photographique de la lune gave at least one answer to the question. This formidable folio-sized set of photographs of the moon was published by the Observatoire de Paris, and has fewer than twenty known copies around the world. A special telescope was made to produce these photographs, but to print these literally astronomically detailed images was another challenge. A competition was held to select the most competent printer, and sand-grain photogravure technique carried the day. Conservators have chosen to repair the better-preserved of the two complete sets at Harvard. This set will be repaired so that the other set in worse condition will not suffer further damage from frequent future use.
Conservation Against Conservation: The Case of Tape
One of the major tasks of conservators is to undo the damage of ill-conceived conservation methods from earlier generations. The most ubiquitous offender was tape, which made its way into library holdings during the 1920s. Tape created tracks, left nasty stains; their removal now threatens to severely damage objects. An example on display was that of a regional map for Brussels circa 1898. Part of a larger project to digitize historical maps of all major cities, the main task of the conservator was removing all the tape that had, it its own way, built another geography across the original map, holding in loose pieces and in other places supporting sharp creases in the paper. The poor quality of the map’s wood-pulp paper further complicates the task. On average, seven to eight minutes are required to remove just one inch of tape. Tears and loose sections then need to be readdressed with current adhesives, namely water-soluble wheat starch paste, as mentioned above. Even after work on the map itself ends, the question of storage still remains. The final goal before returning the map to its collection will be to design a friendlier container for it, one that will alleviate the problems created by storage that requires folding the map, an act that increases damage from creasing.
Chinese Rubbings
The culture of placing large sheets of paper against steles and pounding them to create an impression of original inscriptions upon stone continued into the twentieth century in China, although the steles themselves were of much more ancient provenance. These “rubbings” are now candidates for digitization. Prior to that, however, they need to be flattened; previously, most had been kept folded in plain manila office envelopes, creating chessboard-like wrinkles in the paper. In this case, flattening is a delicate task, as conservators also need to preserve the relief quality produced by the rubbing procedure itself. To both preserve these reliefs while flattening out the paper overall, Weissman conservators have chosen a “minimalist” approach. Using a Japanese water brush, the conservator moistens only small areas around the fold and then flattens these with small, delicate weights. Damaged areas in need of repair are filled out with small strips of tengujô paper.
Recovering Erasure: Palimpsests
Readers familiar with the work of Peter Stallybrass will likely recall his work on erasable writing technologies in the Renaissance period. Under operation at Weissman was another, earlier specimen of the writing table discussed in his work—a small pocketbook made ostensibly for merchants in 1581. A calendar and almanac containing, prominently, the names and weights of foreign coins, this small, palm-sized book also featured slips of parchment coated in a few millimeters of gesso. The end board of the pocketbook had a hole bored parallel and lengthwise, within which was placed a thin metal stylus, reminiscent of a long pin.
In the medieval period, wax tablets were used as “erasable” mediums for note-taking. These gesso-coated parchment slips functioned similarly in the early modern period. A mixture of chalk and glue, gesso is water-soluble. Using the metal stylus, a user essentially scratched (wrote) metal particles into the surface of the gesso. When he wished to erase, he took either a wet finger or a dampened cloth, and ran this over the gesso, dissolving the top player where the metal particles were sitting, and mixing this in with the rest. The writing tables at Weissman appeared to be blank, and unwritten upon. Conservators discovered, however, that when placed under ultraviolet light, layer upon layer of writing that had been rubbed-over could be made visible, allowing one to read what had been, for all intents and purposes, “erased.” In this case, the erased writing appeared to be mostly arithmetic figures, leading one to the conclusion that this type of pocketbook was often pulled out on the spot for the quick calculation that couldn’t be accomplished in the head.
Covers and Binding
Whether or not students actually read their assigned books is a secret unveiled during interactions with professors. What is clear, whether or not the text itself remains read or unread, is that covers suffer from constant wear and tear. Often a centerpiece for undergraduate trips to Houghton, a first edition of Sense and Sensibility is now under repair for extensive cover damage. The goal of repair is, for Weissman conservators, to remain as faithful to the original as possible, making the object look as if it were wholly “untouched.” This Austen had a specific green color to it, and approximately twelve hours were spent toning Japanese tissue with different acrylic paints to recreate the exact shade of green that would match the existing cover, then attaching these strips to damaged sections.
When books are read, though—or at least turned and paged through thoroughly—spines begin to suffer damage. A first edition 1611 King James Bible with coptic binding between wooden boards had now completely eroded. Conservators needed to remove the remnants of the old cords and sew in new, durable linen cords.
It was not rebinding, but reinsertion of pages that faced another conservator, albeit through a more scandalous history. Published after the famous Franco-Tuscan Expedition in 1827 and filled with hand-colored drawings, the I monumenti dell'Egitto e della Nubia. . . had twenty pages torn out of it by a less-than-generous user. After the culprit was discovered in Spain, most of these pages were recovered, although five are still missing. Conservators are now trying to make exact matches between the free-standing sheets and the stubs so that the repair can be as seamless as possible.
A visit to the Weissman Preservation Center thus revealed that many of the objects we hold are, rather than original products of their time, assemblages and erasures, compiled together through the ages. The group labor behind this assemblage is effaced in our academic considerations. Consider this as you pick up your next rare book: a scrap of 1811, to be sure, but also a snippet of the 1920s, with some gelatin, paint, string, and Japanese paper of 2010 throughout to make a restored whole.
Challenges and Opportunities in the Emerging E-Book Age
Leaders: Alexander Parker, Director of Research Computing in the Humanities; Liza Daly, President, Threepress Consulting; Emily Arkin, Editor for Digital Publications Development, Harvard University Press
Write-up by Samuel Jacoby
Alexander Parker, director of research computing in the humanities, began with the long view at “Challenges and Opportunities in the Emerging E-Book Age,” one of a series of site visits accompanying the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study's “Why Books?” conference, organized by Ann Blair ’84, BI ’99, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Harvard College Professor, and Leah Price ’91, RI ’07, Professor of English and Harvard College Professor. In that, he was joined by Liza Daly of Threepress Consulting, a digital publishing specialist, and Emily Arkin, editor for digital publications development at the Harvard University Press.
Parker drew a parallel between the development of the book in the fifty-year window following the invention of print in the mid-15th century—the incunabula period—with the foment accompanying the rise of the e-book. Now, Parker said—or at least since 2006—we've entered a new age: that, he dubbed, of the “e-incunabula,” a period of great uncertainty and development in the digital book, in which we will see a variety of competing designs and formats. In such periods, Parker said, people naturally array themselves groups of “touters” and of “doubters:” there are those who are apologists and defenders of new technologies and those are skeptical.
He remarked that this was a familiar pattern that accompanies disruptive change, noting that the “shock of the new” dated back to Plato, who warned that writing would erode man's true intellect. On the touter-to-doubter spectrum, however, the panel's speakers fell squarely in the middle, somewhere in-between Plato and Nicholas Negroponte, who Parker skeptically quoted predicting the disappearance of the printed book in the next five years. Parker pointed out, though, that what seems like a sudden transformation to digital has been a long time in the making.
He showed a design sketch, the Dynabook, from 1972 that is uncanny in its similarity to the present-day crop of ereaders and tablets. Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook also have more immediate, if similarly obscure, antecedents. The now-defunct RocketBook and SoftBook appeared in the late 1990s, and though short-lived, are the predecessors of the impressive digital wafers that capture our attention today.
Parker also examined the fundamental differences between the ink-based ereaders and flashier multimedia tablet devices. One slide showed the Kindle and the iPad side-by-side, albeit magnified several hundred times. At that magnification, the black-and-white ink nodules of the Kindle looked like a pebbled beach, while the iPad had the bright red, green, and blue slabs familiar to anyone who has sat too close to a television. The reasons for “screen fatigue” were suddenly self-evident.
He went on to highlight the complex, and at times, downright loopy relationship between text on paper and text on an e-reader. Parker showed a spread from a recent issue of the Atlantic magazine, which in promoting its Kindle offerings printed a photograph of the device displaying a continuation of that issue's content. Parker was quick to point out that despite publishers’ eagerness to diversify their offerings, a Kindle is no magazine. The sharply-designed printed pages had little in common with the porridge-gray screen and tepid typography of the Kindle.
Parker also considered the question of heft—whether in reading from lightweight, portable devices, we would—or could—still do the intellectual lifting required by, say, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Parker showed a photo of the multi-volume opus, contrasting it with the Wikipedia page on the Iraq War. He noted, however, that the Iraq War entry, when printed out—including full annotations and edits—filled a dozen physical volumes itself. To be just, one might imagine that all of Gibbon's notes and revisions would dwarf his finished project as well. Unfortunately, he could not “track changes.”
Liza Daly, a digital publishing consultant, examined the genealogy of the modern digital book, noting that the vast majority of digital books still originate as that very familiar thing: a paper codex. The scanning process used by Google and many others—along with the hand-keyed entries that Project Gutenberg has been assembling for decades—introduce numerous errors and artifacts into the text. She highlighted the latex-gloved hand of a Google book scanner captured in the act of turning a page.
Daly also discussed the distinctions between such facsimiles, which capture an exact photograph of a page, and “reflowable” digital formats, like those that are making their way onto e-readers and tablets. She highlighted one format in particular, EPUB, an open XML-derived schema which appears poised to become an industry standard. Such reflowable formats are familiar from the Internet, where a Webpage resizes and aligns to accommodate the changing shape of a browser window, from a large desktop screen to a mobile telephone. Reflowable e-books have been a boon to users, Daly said, as they can modify the text size and font as they see fit: a freedom, she pointed out, that many casual readers appreciate as well, though the features were originally intended as accessibility options.
Such fluid formats, she said, “drive book designers insane,” as a designer's carefully calibrated design decisions are superseded by a device's restrictions and a reader's own size and font choices. Readers, she noted, have minded far less than the design community: a photograph of a baby staring eagerly into an iPad made the point. Some readers, no doubt, will remain more discriminating. In the following Q&A, Alexander Parker said that high-quality layout-dependent books may have a much slower transition to digital. Textbooks, for example, have proven relatively resistant, though were once considered a market segment overripe for conversion.
Like Parker, Daly also discussed the changing ways in which we read. Though many dolefully reflect on the loss of a focused one-to-one text experience, Daly was frankly unapologetic. Devices now, she said, have infinite distractions—you might watch TV, check a website, read a book for a few minutes, and then play a game. That is simply how we read. Few now have the patience to sit down and mull over a substantial tome. Perhaps we haven't had the patience for centuries: look to the dense scrimshaw that fills the margins of books in the 16th century.
What now passes for reading may be wholly unfamiliar to those raised and educated in an exclusively paper world. Daly pointed to recent “enhanced books,” so laden with multimedia features that their printed genes are hardly recognizable. Some books, she observed, are far better tools when so modified: she called up a slide of the Oxford English Dictionary, which though far too large and unwieldy to be conveniently used outside of a reference setting, makes a particularly graceful transition to digital formats. Those digital formats, Daly said, are rapidly improving.
Daly closed with a discussion of emerging digital standards that are intended to make it easier for publishers and authors to create and distribute richer e-books. Many of those changes focus on introducing multimedia features into existing e-books. Though she warned that she could not predict the future, she briefly showed a picture of it: a reactive book that responded and shifted its narrative as its reader navigated in the physical world.
Emily Arkin, editor for digital publications development at Harvard University Press, discussed a subject of keen interest to many in the audience: the digital publishing “ecology” in the university press. Arkin showed two sets of figures: the first graphed the exponential rise in the sales of e-books—a smooth upward-rocketing slope with no end in sight. The second charted the size of the total US book market against the revenues of the corporate titans now muscling into the market. It's a sobering graphic. Google, Apple, and Amazon, the largest players in digital book distribution, each separately have revenues comparable with the book market as a whole. Considering that academic publishing makes up somewhere under 2% of that total, it's hard to know what the future looks like for that market niche.
Despite showing a grim cartoon—Godzilla's foot hovering over Bambi—Arkin did not preach pessimism. University presses, she said, would continue to occupy the liminal space between commercial publishing and the wash of information on the web. She found promise in the diversity of publishing options in the future. New platforms, she pointed out, create new opportunities, and digital tools and methods still now in their infancy could provide new fodder for the next generation of university presses.
She acknowledged that was of tepid comfort to academic authors, for whom publication is a necessary benchmark of professional advancement. Digital publication is of relatively untested merit, professionally speaking at least, and it's unclear whether editorial practices adapted for print dissemination will make a smooth transfer to the workflows of digital publication. Arkin predicted an increase of “scholar-technologists,” traditional academics trained to take advantage of new tools to self-publish in nimble, effective ways, as well as leverage the practices now emerging in the digital humanities. Just what route things would take, however, Arkin judiciously did not say. She showed a slide with some two-dozen possible university press business plans, peppered with complex jargon—the “freemium” model or “open access?” What would work? Bio-diversity indeed. It is a jungle out there, in which, Arkin said, the university press, like Bambi in a forest glade, will have to be nurtured.
The thicket of hands raised as the session concluded was confirmation of the many questions that remain and will be discussed over the coming months and years. E-books, still in their e-incunabula phase, have no doubt a great deal of growing to do.
Preserving Web-Based Digital Material
Leaders: Andrea Goethals, Manager of Digital Preservation and Repository Services, Harvard University
Write-up by Ann Blair (History, Harvard)
Andrea Goethals, manager of digital preservation and repository services, gave a fascinating PowerPoint presentation outlining some of the main methods and challenges of archiving Web sites. She pointed out how much unique material is on the Web which is worth preserving, whether for its historical significance, its artistic and creative merits, its informational value, or as data worth studying (e.g. the behavior of players in World of Warcraft, known as a “massively multiplayer online role playing game” or mmorpg). After a brief history of the rise in popularity of the Web (which she dated to 1993 when Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser that could display images and text together), she noted that in 2008 there were an estimated 1 trillion unique URLs and the total amount of digital information in the world is now nearing 1.2 zettabytes (a zettabyte is 1021 bytes). Seventy percent of this information is generated by individuals, but stored on commercial Web sites. Each Website consists of multiple files, typically in html and javascript as well as text and image files. The average lifespace of a Website is 44–100 days, so there is often not much time to collect items of interest before they disappear.
Many entities archive from the Web: national libraries (like Australia for the Sydney Olympics) or companies documenting their own activities. Harvard archives much of its Web domain twice yearly, in mid-semester. Other organizations seek to archive from the Web on a theme. Selecting sites to copy and save is called “harvesting.” Archiving from the Web is usually done by automated crawlers who are given a place to start (a seed URI) and instructions on following the links they find (e.g. to provide context, it’s important to follow links at least once removed from the site one seeks to archive). The Internet Archive dates from the 1990s as a not-for-profit organization that seeks to archive the Web and make it publicly available in an interface called the “wayback machine.” They rely on a commercial company, Alexa Internet, to do a majority of their harvesting. Since 2003 the International Internet Preservation Consortium has been coordinating the efforts of all those involved in large-scale Web archiving. It started as a consortium of national governments and the Internet Archive and now includes many other large organizations. Harvard joined in 2010. But there are no common practices for what is done with the material archived: some entities archive without offering any access or only limited access; others offer full public access. The way in which the material is accessible also varies: from “browse as it was” to full text search capabilities. In any case there is not cross-Web archive access at this time (i.e. searching the whole Web as it was in the past).
The expert presentation and lively discussion it elicited made clear that there are many challenges for preserving on-line materials. For example: harvesting and preserving are expensive procedures; crawlers are always playing catch-up to new kinds of Web posts (currently streaming video is difficult to capture, for example); the material to select and save is so bulky that the process is automated and cannot entirely be checked by a human operator; and no proven strategy exists for making the material accessible in the future when current technologies are obsolete, although there are many archiving institutions, including Harvard, experimenting with potential solutions.
The Book as Art: The Future of Letters, Paper, and Ink
Leaders: Zachary Sifuentes, Preceptor, Harvard Writing Project; Visiting Lecturer, Visual and Environmental Studies; and Resident Tutor in Poetry and Arts, Adams House
Write-up by Alex Csiszar (History of Science, Harvard)
This site visit took place at the Bow & Arrow Press, a student-run letterpress shop that operates out of the basement of Adams House of Harvard University. Our host was Zachary Sifuentes, a poet who teaches writing at Harvard, and who manages the press as well. As Sifuentes explained, the Bow & Arrow is not only a working press, but it is also a functional museum. The front room is filled with a diverse array of machines, representing several different epochs, for turning blank sheets of paper into printed objects. All of these machines are in working order, although some are treacherous enough to operate that they are rarely called into action these days. There were even examples of the typewriter models used by writers such as John Ashbery and e. e. cummings.
Sifuentes reminded us that for much of its history, letterpress printing was most commonly used for producing ephemeral objects: posters, broadsides, pamphlets. These print formats were means of circulating news and opinions and were not usually perceived by contemporaries as being of much lasting value. They were the blogs of their time. In comparison with manuscript reproduction, printing allowed texts to be reproduced quickly and cheaply. Although it is the more expensive and durable works—Shakespeare’s First Folio is a famous early modern example—that many of us now think of when we think of printing, such works meant to stand the test of time were the exception rather than the rule. Today, however, as new formats and technologies through which to circulate words are constantly invented, letterpress printing—perhaps even the book itself—is increasingly becoming a specialized art object, designed to be enjoyed for its aesthetic qualities over the long term. The very format that once epitomized the ephemeral nature of print—the broadside—has become an eminently collectible object. (The walls of Bow & Arrow Press are filled with framed broadsides commemorating literary readings and other events, some of which are now worth a considerable sum.) Today, those who engage in letterpress printing bear little resemblance to the gruff journeymen printers that a young Benjamin Franklin encountered in a London printshop, who called him the “Water-American” since he astounded them by abstaining from beer while on the job. Printing is becoming an increasingly rarefied form of art.
But this site visit was as much about the practice as the history of printing. Thus, after warnings about the inherent dangers of using these older print technologies—it would be a mistake to get ink in one’s mouth, and we would need to watch out for fast-moving heavy machinery—we got to work. The task: To produce a “Why Books?” conference broadside in which we would attempt to answer the burning question: “Why Books?” We would tackle this not via some well-reasoned discursive tract, but instead through the short, pithy, adjectives and descriptive phrases that would be more likely to catch the eye of a passerby who might chance to see our broadside posted on a street corner.
Although it is easy to forget now—and for many readers, it might even have been easy to ignore in earlier periods—printing is a complex, multistep process. Many things might go awry, from layout mishaps, to insufficient quantities of type, to variations in ink quality. There is nothing automatic about setting the type of a page. Not only typeface, font size, and layout, but every little bit of blank space needs to be accounted for. In short, every step along the way requires a deliberate choice, everything is up for grabs. Fortunately for this group of (mostly) novice printers, our leader took care of some of these decisions, but the complexity of the process remained apparent. We had decided to use a mix of different fonts and sizes; but this would require careful coordination, for, as Sifuentes reminded us, the art of letterpress printing is all about “creativity under constraints.” Our specific role would be to think up appropriate phrases and to prepare the corresponding type. With compositor’s sticks in hand and job cases in reach, we began to compose. Our leader occasionally barked out orders: “we need more Caslon 24! Now Caslon 60! Something short in Caslon 18! We need more words!!” At some point someone noted that there were no more letter e’s in the case for Caslon 18. “So compose words without any e’s!” We became Georges Perecs of broadside printing.
Our text slowly took shape, and eventually a complete document emerged. It was time to ink up the press and start printing. The type was arranged in one of Bow & Arrow’s several Vandercook Proof Presses. For the ink, we used a technique that our host himself had not tried out in quite this way before: we applied a silver ink to half of the ink roller and a transparent ink to the other half, and let the two inks blend progressively together. Each of us took our turn setting up a new sheet and running it through the press. Success! By conventional standards, not every letter was aligned without flaw, but as Sifuentes put it, if you want mechanical perfection, “take it to Kinko’s!” At the end of the day, each participant had a lasting memento, built from what was once a form of ephemera, of our collective investigation into the ever-changing kaleidoscope of responses to the question: “why books?”
By the end of the site visit, several participants were eager to continue their new apprenticeship in the art of letterpress printing. Fortunately for them, the Bow & Arrow runs several open press nights, 4-week crash courses, as well as longer advanced classes “for hardcore lovers of all things textual.”
Visit to the Houghton Library Printing Room
Leaders: Hope Mayo, Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library; Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Assistant Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts
Write-up by Elizabeth Cross (History, Harvard)
On October 28, 2010, a group of participants in the “Why Books?” conference gathered in the lobby of Lamont Library to visit the Houghton Printing Room. We were met by our guides: Hope Mayo, the Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts in Houghton Library, and Caroline Duroselle-Melish, the assistant curator. After being led down to the Houghton Printing Room, the presentation began with a quick overview of the equipment in the room and its origins. Dr. Mayo explained that while printing at Harvard goes back to the seventeenth century, the equipment we were observing was far more recent, owing to the gifts of former curator Philip Hofer. In the 1930s, Hofer had the idea that Harvard should set up a small print shop so that students could learn bibliography from hands-on experience in a working press. His original nineteenth century iron hand press, built on the model of an Albion press, remains the centerpiece of this collection. Other donors and new purchases have built upon his original generosity; for instance, a magnificent set of type ornaments was the gift of a press in Portland, Maine when it went out of business, and last year the printing room acquired a 1955 Vandercook press.
Dr. Mayo then demonstrated how typefaces were cast. The letter was cut into a steel bar called a punch, which was then struck into a copper piece called a matrix. The matrix was then placed into a hand mold, an example of which is in the printing room collection, into which molten metal was poured in order to cast the type. This molten mixture was made primarily of lead, tin, and antimony. Dr. Mayo said that while the process might appear labor intensive, an expert worker could cast 4,000 letters per day! After the type was cast and rough edges filed away, the pieces were placed in type cases, such as the California Job Case. We were reminded that the distinction between “upper case” and “lower case” letters in our modern jargon emerged from the ways printers organized their type in such cases.
After this introduction, the participants were invited to use the press themselves in order to produce a souvenir print to remember our visit. We began by setting our names into a composing stick. We were given a handout with a guide to the compartmentalization of type in a California Job Case to assist us in finding and placing the type. After each participant set and justified his or her name, we observed as Dr. Mayo gently moved the type we had set into a galley. We were then led to the press, where the amalgamated block of text with all our names was placed on the press underneath a pre-set text comprised of Benjamin Franklin’s self-composed epitaph and a note commemorating our meeting for the conference.
We then printed a basic proof to check for errors. Dr. Mayo then demonstrated how to place the paper and ink the type. We were shown images of the traditionally used ink balls, but we used a modern roller. We were then shown how to lower the frisket assembly and print. When our proof came out with no errors, each participant was allowed to produce his or her own copy of this souvenir document by repeating the same steps. In doing so, one of the participants commented that the paper seemed damp. Dr. Mayo explained that this was a technique commonly used by printers because it enhanced the clarity of the printed text.
Dr. Mayo prepared several additional handouts for the participants to take home. She drew our attention in particular to two Web sites: the Web site for Harvard’s Bow and Arrow Press and the Museum of Printing in North Andover, MA as resources for information about lectures, workshops, and interactive classes in case we wanted to try our hands at printing again!
How to Get Published
Leaders: Lindy Hess, Director, Columbia Publishing Course; Susan Ferber, Executive Editor, Oxford University Press; Janet Silver, Literary Agent, former publisher at Houghton Mifflin; Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor in the Humanities at Harvard University Press
Write-up by Meredith Quinn (History, Harvard)
At the beginning of a session on “How to Get Published,” Lindy Hess, director of the Columbia publishing course, noted that the publishing world is undergoing significant transformation. Still, the crowded room of participants at Radcliffe’s Fay House testified to the enduring importance of being published for many in academia and beyond.
Susan Ferber, executive editor for history at Oxford University Press, emphasized the book proposal as a key step in the publishing process. Noting that “writing short is more difficult than writing long,” she advised authors to craft proposals that allow editors to quickly grasp two things: the argument of the book and the author’s own voice. In her review of each of the elements of a book proposal, Ferber emphasized that editors need to understand why a particular book matters, and who comprises the book’s audience. She encouraged authors to think in terms of their “niche,” which she defined as the people who will feel that they need to own the book.
Lindsay Waters, executive editor in the humanities at Harvard University Press, acknowledged that it is difficult to follow editors’ prescriptions for proposals and for the writing itself. He humorously recounted his own experience writing a manuscript and working with editors. To illustrate the way that academic authors must reframe their project to communicate its vitality and interest, he encouraged participants to “imagine that you have been bumped up to business class on an airplane, and the very attractive person sitting next to you asks, ‘So, what do you work on?’”
Janet Silver, a prominent literary agent and former publisher at Houghton Mifflin, remarked that narrative nonfiction (distinguished from self-help, creative non-fiction, and practical non-fiction) has significant sales potential. However, she believes that the bigger publishing houses (with some exceptions) tend not to be interested in titles that speak to both trade and academic audiences. Academic titles—distinguished by their focus on analytics and positioning vis-à-vis other scholarship—are often better aligned with the goals of university presses and smaller publishers. Agents can help authors navigate this variegated publishing terrain and assist them in developing a proposal. Lindy Hess agreed that no author should make a contract with a trade house without an agent (though agents are less common in deals with university presses). Silver explained that both agents and publishing houses immediately assess the quality of an author’s writing, which for larger audiences, requires “élan, spirit. . . .a narrative drive that keeps readers engaged even if they aren’t specialists.” She also emphasized the importance of an author’s “platform.”
The concept of a “platform” seemed to resonate with many in the audience, who asked for further elaboration during the question-and-answer period. Silver defined a platform as an author’s credentials—such as institutional affiliations and awards—and overall visibility. While blogging is an important dimension of platform for some genres, Ferber noted that it was less important at this point for academic authors.
Participants asked questions about how to be published in specific genres, such as cookbooks, memoirs, and annotated literary texts. In each of these cases, the panelists agreed that a book proposal was necessary (a proposal for a memoir also requires several completed chapters). As in their general remarks, panelists underlined the importance of good writing, the author’s own platform, and a compelling reason for this particular book to be in print.
Over the course of the session, the panelists reflected in different ways on the role of publishers. One of the themes of the session was that the role of the author and the publisher is still fundamentally the same, even in a changed world. “It still is the words,” concluded Ferber.