All ten copies of STC 22344 in a row

Engraved portrait (fol. p1v) and the first title page (fol. *1r) from copy 1

The first edition appeared in 1609; the second one was presumably published around the end of 1639 with an imprint date of 1640, probably for marketing reasons, a practice which was not uncommon.¹ As Hyder Edward Rollins explains in his A new variorum edition of Shakespeare, this second edition of the sonnets was John Benson’s piracy of the text of Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 edition. Scholars have generally been unimpressed with Benson’s edition, in large part because of its reordering of the sonnet sequence: Benson  “jumble[d] together in a new, unauthorized, and deceptive order all but eight sonnets (18, 19, 43, 56, 75, 76, 96, 126)—some of them with verbal changes designed to make the verses apply to a woman instead of a man [...].”² (More recent scholarship has recuperated some aspects of Benson’s edition, however. See, for example, Megan Heffernan’s article in the current issue Shakespeare Quarterly, “Turning Sonnets into Poems: Textual Affect and John Benson’s Metaphysical Shakespeare.”³

John Benson was certainly tinkering with the text, but many owners have also been tampering with the physical book. That becomes clear when one begins to survey all ten of the Folger copies.

When the Folger collections have more than one copy of an edition, the one that is identified as “copy 1” is often the “best” one. And indeed STC 22344 copy 1 is, as George Daniel put it in pen on the front paste-down in July 1844, “a very fine copy.” It has all its parts: the engraved portrait by William Marshall, the preliminaries (*⁴), and the book proper (A-L⁸ M⁴). Both title pages, on fol. *1r and on A1r, are preserved (which is not always the case), and all is held by what looks a contemporary, simply blind-tooled leather binding, with the bookplate of former owner Thomas Jolley on the front paste-down right below Daniel’s little note. Those and other traces left by previous owners are still there and waiting to be studied.

George Daniel’s notes and Jolley’s bookplate from copy 1

In contrast to copy 1, copy 10 seems to be, as one could expect on the basis of its ordinal, in the worst condition of all copies. The leather binding already shows the wear and tear of an intensive usage, and when the book is opened, the damage to this object is obvious.

Front leather cover facing fol. A2 from copy 10

The copy-specific annotations in the Hamnet record for this copy sound like an understatement: “Imperfect: lacking the portrait, gathering *, leaves A1, B3, and D4-5.” Moreover, fol. M4 is partially torn away, and the entire object looks pretty shabby.

But what a wealth of information when one starts to survey this poor little object. It contains many notes of different owners, including some verses. From a scholar’s point of view, this copy deserves perhaps more attention than many of the other “perfect” ones in the Folger’s collection.

Annotations on fol. M3v and M4r in copy 10

Whereas the poorly rich tenth copy bears witness to a vast history of contemporary and later uses of the book, copy 2 represents the perfect example of a totally different world, the world of nineteenth-century bibliophilia. What looks like an impeccable copy—“Perfect, with original frontispiece & both titles”—in a splendid gold-tooled, red goatskin binding with gilt edges and opulent marbled paste-downs and flyleaves, may be in many ways richly poor in the eyes of present-day curators and scholars. However beautiful and intact the binding may be, the actual textblock is not any longer in a true pristine state. Of course, the margins have been trimmed down in order to gilt the edges. The original binding—starting from the assumption that there was one—has been removed along with the original flyleaves. In addition, the leaves show a number of repairs, and the portrait has been mounted. Not as “perfect” or “original” as the book lover James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820–1889) and his contemporaries may have believed.

But it could have been worse: the hand-written annotations in the book are preserved and not, as was so often the case, washed out by puristic men in the trade. As you can see on the following image, the first gatherings of copy 2 contains a series of corrections and alterations in a later hand.

Corrections in a later hand (?) on fol. B7r, copy 2

Copy five in the series is my favorite. Interestingly it comes in a very similar binding as the first copy. The edges are not painted red but a blue or green that has almost completely faded. The front flyleaf bears a fingerprint testifying to the men and women working in the book business, and the edges of this and the following leaves show the traces of the oil which was released by the leather turn-ins. What I also like is that you can still feel the dent caused by the moveable type. It has not been pressed out in this copy, as it was done by so many other copies that made it into the nineteenth century.

A fingerprint of someone working in the print shop? (front board and flyleaf from copy 5)

Possibly a reading lamp caused the burning away of the corners of the first leaves. Shakespeare’s sonnets themselves, however, survived the threatening fire. And we are treated to an object that carries with it marks of use as well as poetry.

Traces of a reader reading imprudently late at night?(fol. p1v and *1r copy 5)

1. H.E. Rollins (ed.), A new variorum of Shakespeare. The sonnets. Philadelphia & London, 1944. Vol. 2, pp. 18–19. We know that Christophe Plantin sometimes post-dated editions to make them appear more up to date, for instance when the books still had to be shipped to the Frankfurt book fair.
2. Rollins, A new variorum, vol. 2, p. 20.
3. Megan Heffernan, “Turning Sonnets into Poems: Textual Affect and John Benson’s Metaphysical Shakespeare” Shakespeare Quarterly 64 (2013): 71-98.

I’ll start by reminding you of what we saw:

leaves A3v-A4r of Josua Sylvester’s Lachrymae Lachrymarum

On the right is the text of Josua Sylvester’s poem Lachrymae Lachrymarum, mourning the death of Prince Henry. On the left is a black mourning page with Prince Henry’s arms. Last time I focused on the history of that leaf and the material conditions of its making. This time, I want to look at what happened after it was made. Take a closer look at the lower left-hand corner of that leaf, shown below with A3v on the left and its obverse, A3r, on the right:

a repaired corner (sig A3v on the left; A3r on the right)

At some point after the book was made, the bottom corner was torn off (that’s not an unusual bit of damage to happen to a book) and someone decided to repair it by adding in a new piece of paper (that’s also not an unusual repair). But since the page is black, the repair is black as well, and that’s what makes it stand out. The paper is different, and it has taken the ink differently—you can’t see the same lines running through it as we see elsewhere on the page. What you can see on the mourning page is the outline of what looks like a “C,” presumably a bit of watermark from the paper used to repair it, a watermark that, as you already know, doesn’t pick up the ink because on this side, the wire has left an imprint and the ink doesn’t reach down into the valleys. In looking at this page, Randall MacLeod sees not only the letter “C” but an upside-down “1″ above it and to the left, and an “8″ to the left of that.¹ He notes, too, that the paper is wove, rather than laid paper, as evidenced by the lack of chain and wirelines (see Erin’s post on paper-making for more on wove and laid paper). The “81″ in the watermark, suggests MacLeod, indicates that the repair was probably done around 1881.

This isn’t the only repaired page in the book. The last leaf has been similarly fixed:

repaired leaf (sig. I4v)

In the big swath at the bottom of the page, the difference between the original and the repair is even more obvious—the black is blotchy, and on the other side, the pen fill-in is crude:

repaired leaf (sig. I4r)

My point is not to mock but to note the desire to make whole. These two repairs were, I suspect, done at different times, or at least by different hands. The first one is carefully made, with the skeleton’s legs carefully inked in. The one at the back of the book seems differently intended: the skeleton’s legs aren’t supplied, the black border at the bottom is crosshatched rather than solidly filled in, and the printer’s name is inked over smaller pencil marks. I suspect that the hand that supplied the remainder of Humfrey Lownes’s name couldn’t do the same for the skeleton. But the visual impact of the page calls out for that bottom border, for the black at the bottom to balance the black at the top. The eye wants to see what it wants to see, and the hand supplies it as best it can.

Something similar happens when the book is filmed for University Microfilms International (UMI), the microfilms of which form the basis of Early English Books Online (EEBO). Here’s the title page to Lachrymae Lachrymarum, as it appears in EEBO:

The title page to Lachrymae Lachrymarum, as seen in EEBO (reel STC 677:08)

Looks right enough, yes? But here’s what the title page looks like, as seen from the Folger’s digitization:

Title page of Lachrymae Lachrymarum, as digitized by the Folger

The UMI image looks like what we might expect the book to look like, given our experiences with books in general: white paper with the title printed in black. But in this instance, the xylographic title page mourns along with the rest of the book, printed with a woodcut that creates a black base with the letters and coat of arms carved out to remain white. So why does UMI reproduce a negative image (with the white in the original appearing as black), not the positive? Given that UMI filmed two copies of this work and both show the title page as black words on a white background, it’s clearly not a one-time accident. And given that the rest of the book appears as it should, black mourning pages and all, it’s clearly not an accident that applies to the entire film.²

Here’s what we can reconstruct: Two Folger copies of Lachrymae Lachrymarum were filmed around 1952 for the UMI project. STC 23578 copy 4 has a torn title page and is missing the colophon (it’s UMI’s STC 667:04, although the EEBO record doesn’t make that clear). STC 23578 copy 2 (UMI’s STC 677:08) has a trimmed, but otherwise complete, title page and the colophon is present; it’s the copy that I showed above.³ The Folger’s copies of the microfilms are negatives and they show both books as they should be throughout; the UMI microfilms are positive and they also show the books as they should be throughout, with xylographic title pages. EEBO’s images are simply scans of the UMI microfilms, and so should show the title page in its proper state.

So where did the error get introduced? One possibility is that the scanning of the microfilm was entirely automated and was set to adjust backgrounds to white and writing to black (making it possible for the machine to work from either positive or negative microfilm). The machine transposed the title page to conform to its programmed understanding of what books were supposed to be. Another possibility is that a person checking the scans saw the black title page, noted its anomaly, and manually “corrected” it to conform to the more typical standard of white title pages.

Both possibilities have the same explanation at their root: the image was made to match what we expect to see, not what we actually see. If the all-black mourning page let us see the material history of its printing, a history that normally passes unobserved, this reversed title page lets us see how much our expectations drive what we observe.

My thanks to Ian Gadd, who first drew my attention to the oddity of the EEBO image; to Julie Ainsworth, Head of Photography and Digital Imaging at the Folger; and to William Davis, Senior Photography Associate at the Folger, who pulled out the records and films of the books and who provided the speculations about how the negative title page came to pass.

1. The numbers are more visible when backlit. R. MacGeddon [pseud. Randall MacLeod], “An Epilogue: Hammered” in Pete Langman, ed. Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book (Ashgate, 2011), pp 137-99.
2. EEBO is behind a paywall, but if you have access to it, you can find both copies of Lachrymae Lachrymarum by searing for STC 23578.
3. This copy is also bound with Du Bartas’s works, which explains why the title page isn’t shown in EEBO as part of a full-page opening: the verso facing the title page would actually belong to a separate work.

Hornbook (London?, 1630). Folger Shakespeare Library STC 13813.5. Click on this and all other images to enlarge.

Below are two plates from Jehan de Beau-Chesne’s and John Baildon’s A booke containing diuers sortes of hands, as well the English as French secretarie with the Italian, Roman, chancelry & court hands (London, 1602 [first ed. 1570]) (Folger STC 6450.2) that depict versions of secretary and italic hand:

“The secretarie Alphabete” from Jehan de Beau-Chesne and John Baildon, A booke containing diuers sortes of hands (London, 1602). This was the first English-language writing manual, first published in 1570.

“Italique hande”

On both of these leaves, someone has tried to imitate the letter forms. In the top example, the brand new writer got through some of the minuscule and majuscule forms of the letter A (“a a a A A [upside down!] a a a”) before smudging out his or her work. Further progress is made on the “Italique hande” leaf, where the letters A through J (and perhaps an attempt at the letter K) are awkwardly and painstakingly formed underneath the exemplar.²

Children learned their letters by repeatedly tracing and copying strokes, letters, alphabets, pangrams (sentences that contain all the letters of the alphabet), and aphorisms. Beau-Chesne’s copybook was not the only one to contain the verse instructions, “Rules made by E.B. for children to write by,” that describe the ideal quill, ink, and posture for a child’s first experiences with writing. The instructions even advise on how the teacher should prepare the paper:

… Scholler to learne, it may do you pleasure,
To rule him two lines iust of a measure:
Those two lines betweene to write very iust,
Not aboue or below write that he must:
The same to be done is best with blacke lead,
Which written betweene, is cleansed with bread.
Your pen from your booke, but seldome remoue,
To follow strange hand with drie pen first proue: (copied from Folger STC 6450.2)

That is, use a graphite pencil to rule a piece of paper with sets of double lines for the child to write between. Then write some exemplar letters for the child to copy. He or she can trace them with an inkless quill in the first instance, and then proceed to use ink. The pencil lines can be erased with bread.

The result might be something like below, in which one Stephen Poynting, possibly a student at the Free School in Gloucester, practices a pangram, “Job a Righteous man of uz waxed poor Quickly” (i/j and u/v counting as single graphs). He writes it twenty-one times, and his spacing between words grows larger and larger so that he can no longer fit the last word of the sentence (he appears to be writing one word of the sentence at a time, in columnar format). If you look closely at the piece of paper, you can see that it is blind-ruled; that is, guidelines have been made with an inkless quill to help him write in a straight line.

Stephen Poynting, “Job a Righteous Man.” Handwriting practice.

In two competing pamphlets printed within weeks of each other in 1591, the early writing masters William Panke and Peter Bales provide detailed instructions for learning to write the letters of the alphabets in terms of breaks (the individual strokes that make up each letter) and joins (the strokes required to connect letters to each other if one is writing in secretary hand).³ Breaking and joining instruction disappeared from copybooks in the first half of the seventeenth century, but was revived by Edward Cocker in the 1650s.

The example below shows how one Thomas Robinson, in 1698, used Cocker’s plate of “The Breakes of sett Secretary Letters” as a worksheet, completing the unfinished letters in ink, and making it up to the letter K in his imitation of the sample alphabet at the bottom of the leaf.

Edward Cocker, The tutor to writing ad arithmetick (London, 1664).

The number of surviving copybooks from the Elizabethan and Jacobean period is tiny, with scholars assuming that they were genres that were either “used to death” or discarded once they were no longer needed. Most surviving examples of  alphabet practice appear on blank spaces in printed and manuscript books and are usually not noted in catalog records. An advanced search in Hamnet for “alphabet” under “All notes” led to some good examples of what the very earliest attempts at an alphabet look like.⁴

This notebook from a barrister riding on the Midland circuit in 1610 includes alphabet practice by a member of the Jeffreys family of Acton, Denbighshire, ca. 1650-ca. 1660, on three separate leaves (Folger MS V.a.489). All examples are minuscule secretary letters, except for the initial majuscule A.

Thomas Blakesley’s secretary alphabet, copied in 1613, is slightly more practiced than the previous example. He practices in a heavily annotated copy of Girolamo Ruscelli’s The secretes of the reuerende Maister Alexis of Piemount. Containyng excellente remedies against diuers diseases, woundes, and other accidents, with the manner to make distillations, parfumes, confitures, diynges, colours, fusions and meltynges. … Translated out of Frenche into Englishe, by Wyllyam Warde (London, 1558) (Folger STC 293 copy 2). It is possible that the alphabet of minuscule and majuscule secretary letters was copied and spaced so that a younger learner could practice in between the lines.

Jeremiah Milles has added his alphabets and practice sentences to the backs of the front and rear covers and the endleaves of William Gouge’s Panoplia tou Theou. The vvhole-armor of God or The spirituall furniture which God hath prouided to keepe safe euery Christian souldier from all the assaults of Satan. First preached, and now published for the good of all such as well vse itt (Folger STC 12122 copy 2). His four attempts at the alphabet are either incomplete, or, as in the second example, missing the letter “p.” This causes problems for him in the fourth image, his transcription of Psalm 124 from the King James Bible, where he clearly thinks that the letter “q” is a “p”: see the words “up” (“uq”) and “proud” (“qroud”), for example. And in the third image, Milles’ transcription of the opening lines from John Fell’s The life of the most learned, reverend and pious Dr. H. Hammond (London, 1661), he somewhat corrects his initial confusion, although he still writes “attempted” as “attemqted.”

Another alphabet appears in a Folger copy of the 1605 edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London, 1605) (Folger STC 22543 copy 4), but in this instance it is acting as a key to a rather unsophisticated cipher.

For any of you who have taught young children to write, now is the moment to acknowledge how little has changed in handwriting instruction in the past four hundred years (well, except that early modern children had the added challenges of having to learn to cut a quill nib and make iron gall ink). Worksheets from the Zaner-Bloser handwriting program illustrate the order in which the strokes are made and how the letters are joined together, and provide top, bottom, and middle guide lines. Modern handwriting programs such as Zaner-Bloser, Handwriting without Tears, and the Peterson Directed Method, encourage tracing letters before forming them freestyle, just like ”Rules made by E.B. for children to write by” from 1570.⁵

I happen to live with a four year old who is just learning to write her name and the alphabet. Just like Elizabethan children, she had to learn to grip her pencil correctly, in the “dynamic tripod grasp,” a new-fangled phrase for the second hold on the left, below.

“How you ought to hold your penne”

I created double-ruled guidelines for her and an exemplar alphabet. She gamely copied the letters below, after tracing my lightly-written A and B. The results are one of those moments when the early modern and modern worlds seem to collide.

A 4-year-old’s efforts to copy the alphabet from models written by her mother.

1. See Herbert C. Schulz, “The Teaching of Handwriting in Tudor and Stuart Times,” The Huntington Library Quarterly (4), August 1943: 381-425.
2. By the way, the aphorism on this leaf is from Cicero.
3. Simran Thadani’s recently defended PhD dissertation, Penmanship in Print: English Copy-Books and their Makers, 1570-1763 (University of Pennsylvania, 2013), provides an account of the battle for authority between these two writing masters
4. I’m sure there are many other instances that haven’t yet been recorded, and that if one searched all the examples of “pen trials” under “All notes,” other examples of letter-formation practice would be revealed.
5. Despite the fact that the Common Core Standards no longer require elementary school students in the U.S. to learn cursive handwriting, many states are still opting to include it in the curriculum, and research highlights the many benefits of learning to write (in both print and cursive hands), in terms of cognitive development, motor skills, and reading comprehension. For a good general overview of the debate, see here and here, as well as the recent New York Times debate, “Is Cursive Dead?”

pen facsimile of the 1611 Authorized Bible (STC 2216), sig. ^2^2A6r

It’s telling that two of the three guesses focused not on the blackletter but on the roman font and the decorated initial. Both of those aspects, I think, are easier to spot as being somehow “off” in comparison to what we expect from print. But we’re not so used to looking at blackletter, and so a manuscript facsimile of that type isn’t quite as tell-tale. This is particularly true when the facsimile doesn’t have the print nearby as a point of comparison, but the difference isn’t necessarily glaring even looking across the gutter to the early printed page: 

opening contrasting print (on the left) with pen facsimile (right) sig. 2A5v- ^2^2A6r

The book in question is the Folger’s copy of the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible (commonly referred to as the King James Bible). The last leaves of the book are increasingly damaged—the corners are missing and repaired with blank paper—until the final original leaf is entirely gone. In its place is a pen facsimile, a hand-drawn copy of what the original leaf would have looked like.¹ As you can see by comparing the facsimile with the original leaf, here shown in the copy at the University of Pennsylvania, the facsimilist did a very good job:

comparison of the final leaf; pen facsimile (left) and original leaf (right, from Penn)

But you can also see, when you’re looking for it, that the pen facsimile is just a bit wobblier than the print original—the kerning is just slightly irregular, some of the long-s’s are missing their crossbar, and the three capital-G’s starting the instances of “God” in the third verse are all just slightly differently shaped.

Once you know which is which, it’s hard not to unsee the details that reveal it as a facsimile. So try turning your powers of observation to these leaves. Which is the pen facsimile and which is the original print leaf?

which is which? (click to go to a zoomable comparison)

Made up your mind? Here’s a comparison that makes it clearer:

Do you see the signature under the device on the left? That’s the indication that this leaf is a facsimile. (The work in question here is, of course, the First Folio; the leaf is the last leaf of text—the ending of Cymbeline—and the facsimile is in copy number 23; you can look at it in detail in our digital image collection. The print leaf I used for comparison comes from copy number 68 and it is also in our digital image collection.)

Adding pen facsimiles of missing or damaged leaves was not unusual in the nineteenth century for collectors who preferred their works to be pristine and perfect, a common preference. It’s not clear who the facsimilist was for the Folger’s King James Bible, or when it was done. There’s a note in the catalog of the former owner, W.T. Smedley, from nineteenth-century Bible expert Francis Fry attesting to the book’s good condition and noting that “The last leaf is repaired. It is very rare. They are so often lost.” Either Fry was using “repaired” as a euphemism for “facsimile” (although this seems unlikely, since he accurately describes the volume’s title page as a facsimile) or it was done after Fry examined the book.

The facsimilist of the First Folio leaf, by contrast, is a well-known figure and renowned for his skill in imitating early print. John Harris was even hired by Antonio Panizzi, then the Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, to “perfect” their early printed works.² Harris was so well practiced at imitating early print that it was apparently very difficult to differentiate his facsimiles from original leaves. Summarizing a contemporary’s account of Harris’s work, Toshiyuki Takamiya writes,

… Panizzi and two other librarians, failing to detect facsimiles in one of the perfected books, called in Harris to point out the leaves he had supplied; and it was only after considerable examination that he was able to detect them. Following this incident, on 8 July 1843, Panizzi persuaded the trustees of the Museum to order that Harris in future sign any leaf he recreated with the formula, ‘This is by J.H.—A.P.’ One can also encounter other signatures such as ‘F.S. by I.H.’, ‘by H’, and ‘Harris jur.’ used on facsimiles.³

Neither Harris nor Panizzi, nor the facsimilist of the KJV, were intending to deceive anyone by passing off copies as originals. Rather, the intent was to make as close to complete as possible copies of works that were missing leaves.

While I’m astounded by the talent of the facsimilists we just saw, my favorite pen facsimile reveals not remarkable skill, but remarkable desire. It’s not what I would do if I owned a First Folio with a torn title page, but then again, I can’t begrudge the desire of this owner to make clear what this book is.

perfecting the title page in a First Folio

1. A side note: the last leaf of this book is ²2A6, which means it’s the second occurrence of the AA series. Since the captions don’t display superscripts well, I’ve used carets to surround the initial 2. It is, I realize, not the most straightforward of signature marks. But the full sequence, which makes it slightly clearer, is A⁶ B² C⁶ D⁴; A-4Z⁶ 5A-5C⁶; ²A-²Z⁶ ²2A⁶.
2. “Perfect” is one of those odd bibliographical terms that shows how much standards and tastes have changed since we’ve been studying these objects. To “perfect” a book is to supply any missing or damaged leaves with leaves from another copy of that book or with facsimiles of those leaves. By our standards, this is far from a perfect practice and one that libraries today don’t follow.
3. Toshiuki Takamiya, “John Harris and the facsimile pages” in Caxton’s Chaucer (British Library) http://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/johnharris.html

May crocodile

Update 5 May: See the next post, “Pen facsimiles of early print,” for the answer and a discussion of this image!

1. Revelation 21:1-6

My intention is to use bold when a shared word appears in its book sense, and bold italics when a shared word appears in its picture sense. Let’s see if I can avoid getting them mixed up. If I do get mixed up, or if you can think of other examples, please speak up in the Comments.¹

In the picture world, an edition is the number of copies in a print run. The term usually only comes up when the number is artificially capped—for instance, “printed in an edition of ten” or “number fourteen of an edition of twenty-five” (which would be written simply “14/25″ in pencil on the print). [Updated to include the following image] See, for instance, the Folger’s copy of J.W. Winkelman’s 1994 etching “Early Stage,” which is number eighteen of an edition of one hundred:

J.W. Winkelman’s “Early Stage” (1994) showing its edition statement

For book people, an edition isn’t a number, it’s the collective noun for all of the copies resulting from (roughly) a single setting of type.² Deliberate changes to the settings of type constitute different editions (second edition; revised edition; annotated edition; etc.) and the publisher usually proclaims the difference on the title page.

So how do picture people describe deliberate changes to the same work? Simple. Each visually identifiable stage in the life of a picture’s printing surface is a different state (second state; state 1 of 3; early state; etc.). Prints from the early modern period frequently exist in more than one state, since the printing surfaces were often touched-up as they wore out, or altered to replace one printseller’s name with another’s when the plate (metal printing surface) or block (wooden printing surface) changed hands. The earliest state of this print by Martin Droeshout says “Sold by Roger Daniell at the Angell in lumbard Streete” in the oval near the bottom:

Detail of an engraved title page in the Folger collection (click to go to full image)

In a later state, the text in the oval has been changed to “Are to be sold by Thomas Johnson in Brittaynes Burse.”

Detail of an engraved title page in the British Museum collection (click to go to full image and catalog record)

On the other hand, a state in bibliography is a copy or group of copies within the same impression (i.e., print run) that differs from the others in some  way that the publisher does not want to proclaim as different.³

However, an impression in picture printing refers to a single copy of a print.

Detail of artist’s note in the margin of a printed image (click to go to full image)

And a copy in picture printing refers to a reproduction of a pre-existing picture. Sometimes a copy reproduces a picture in a different medium. The etching below is Wenceslaus Hollar’s copy of a painting by Hans Holbein:

Etching of a painting of Edward VI as Prince of Wales (click to go to zoomable image)

The original picture is a much larger, and very colorful, oil painting.

Painted portrait of Edward VI as Prince of Wales now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (click to go to catalog description)

Other times, a copy in the picture world is a replica. This plate⁴ of Boscobel House was removed from a copy of the second edition of Sir Thomas Blount’s Boscobel, or, The history of His Sacred Majesties most miraculous preservation after the battle of Worcester, which was published 1769. It is a close copy of a Wenceslaus Hollar print from the first edition of the book, published in 1660.

Illustration from the second edition of Thomas Blount’s Boscobel: or, the compleat history of His Sacred Majesty’s most miraculous preservation after the battle of Worcester. Worcester : printed for S. Gamidge, 1769 (Click to go to zoomable image)

Why was a copy used rather than additional impressions from the original plate? Presumably, the plate etched by Hollar was no longer available, so the plate in the book was made from a new plate.

Speaking of metal printing plates, sometimes picture terms are simply misunderstood in the book world. You know how an engraving is printed from a sheet of metal with lines cut into it, and how a woodcut is printed from a piece of wood with spaces between the lines cut out of it?  (See Woodcut, engraving, or what?.) Long ago, a policymaker at ESTC assumed that if early modern prints from wood are woodcuts, then early modern prints from metal must be metal cuts:

Screen shot from the English Short Title Catalogue (click to go to full record)

But in fact, prints made from metal or wood by cutting out the spaces between the lines are metal cuts and woodcuts, respectively (with metal cuts being quite rare, especially after the 16th century). And prints made by cutting lines into metal or wood are engravings  – copper engravings, steel engravings, wood engravings, etc. (with wood engravings being quite rare until the 19th century).

And THEN there’s the too-common assumption that “book” is synonymous with “codex of printed words,” despite the fact that bound manuscripts, bound prints, and bound hybrids of all three are also books… [Erin wanders off down the hall, muttering to herself. Again.]

1. On the assumption that most Collation readers are already familiar with the the book-world meanings of the terms, and because this post is overdue, I’m only illustrating the picture-world meanings.
2. Philip Gaskell describes an edition as “all the copies of a book printed at any time (or times) from substantially the same setting of type, and includes all the various impressions, issues, and states which may have derived from that setting.” He goes on to describe “substantially the same setting” as meaning, roughly, that less than half the type has been reset. (Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, Second Impression, Oak Knoll Press, 2006, p.313.
3. Again, here’s Gaskell for more nuanced definitions of impression—”all the copies of an edition printed at any one time” (p.314) which, in the hand-press period, essentially is the same as an edition—and state—”all other variants from the basic form of the ideal copy” (p.315) including stop-press corrections, inserting or removing preliminaries, adding errata leaves, inserting or removing text during the process of printing.
4. The standard manual for cataloging rare materials (commonly known as “DCRM(B)”) provides the following definition of plate: ”A leaf that is chiefly or entirely non-letterpress, or a folded leaf of any kind, inserted with letterpress gatherings of text. A plate usually contains illustrative matter, with or without accompanying text, but may contain only text, e.g., an engraved title page or a folded letterpress table.” (Association of College and Research Libraries, Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials: Books Washington (DC: Cataloging Distribution Services, 2007), p. 203.

But here we must pause a moment, in case there are some of you wondering a) why would one need a high-quality online facsimile of F1 and b) why would one be so excited that there were so many? And I can tell you the answer to this, as well, based on my own experience. Recently I was working on an edition of The Taming of the Shrew and was comparing my text with that of the Folio to make sure I’d caught and listed all the emendations that had been made. That right there is a good reason to want to consult a First Folio: if you are reading (or editing) a play and you want to understand how the edited text you’re working with compares with the early printed texts of the play (especially if you’re working with one of the 18 plays that appeared in print for the first time in the 1623 Folio),¹ you might want to look at F1 for yourself to identify those changes. In this case, I was reading through the fourth act of one of the Folger’s digitized First Folios when I came across this:

“ptove Mistresse of my heart” (sig. T3v) (click to enlarge in Luna)

To my eye, especially compared to the “prove” in the line above it, it certainly looks like Lucentio was suggesting that Bianca would “ptove Mistresse of my heart.” But I wanted to look at other copies to see if this was an idiosyncrasy of this copy, a stop-press change that wasn’t yet made, or if it showed up in more copies. And in all the copies I looked at, the text read “ptove.” While “ptove” seems to have gone uncorrected, other pages in other copies of the First Folio show a range of stop-press changes, so that one copy might vary from another. For instance, these two copies show a corrected and uncorrected state of Lucius’s name in a stage direction from Titus Andronicus:

variant settings of “Lucius” (sig. dd2r) (click on image to enlarge in Luna)

This isn’t a particularly exciting variant, although it does illustrate that mistakes were made in printing the First Folio and that someone acted as a proof-reader to correct those mistakes.²

To the point, now: Where can you find digital facsimiles of the First Folio to work with? I hope you’ll forgive me for starting off with two of my favorites, copies that are part of the Folger’s own collection of 82 First Folios. It’s not simply my bias in favor of my institution, but my bias in favor of high-quality, cover-to-cover digitization.

The Folger’s copy 5 was digitized by Octavo as part of its series of high-resolution facsimiles of early books and manuscripts. This means that copy is available both as part of the Folger’s Digital Image Collection and as a pdf (links to both are provided in the catalog record). The images in the Digital Image Collection have the advantage of being lightweight: you can read them online and can enlarge them to see details without loading the entire book. Conversely, the pdf is handy because you can download it and access it offline. It also comes with a rich body of paratextual material, including essays by Stephen Orgel, A.R. Braunmuller, and Arthur Freeman as well as Peter Blayney’s wonderful booklet on the First Folio from the Folger’s 1991 exhibit.³

The Folger’s copy 68 is also viewable in the Digital Image Collection and as a pdf (again, links to both are in the catalog record). The resolution of the images in Luna are higher than those of copy 5, but the pdf’s resolution is lower.⁴ I tend to work with copy 68 online, but to use copy 5 for offline consultation.

If you’re looking for other digital, open-access facsimiles of the First Folio, you can find copies from Meisei University (an amazing copy chock full of seventeenth-century marginalia), University of Pennsylvania (their Furness collection includes plenty of other digitized Shakespeare as well), Miami University of Ohio, and Brandeis University and New South Wales (both hosted at Internet Shakespeare Editions, along with other Shakespeares). It’s a boon to scholars to have so many rich resources available, and I’m sure other digital copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio will be added to this collection and that we’ll benefit from this ongoing access and increased range of interfaces for working with F1. UPDATE (22 April 3:50 pm): The Bodleian has just released their First Folio digitization. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but am excited to see it now available! UPDATE (20 May 2013): Stuttgart also has their First Folio online; thanks to H. J. Neuhaus for calling attention to this in the comments below.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about the First Folio, the Folger did an interesting exhibit on it in 2011, and you can find excerpts from that online; you can also buy Peter Blayney’s booklet in addition to finding it online or as a pdf. And if you ever find yourself the proud owner of a First Folio, may I suggest you take some inspiration from the owner of the Folger’s copy 5, Angela Bourdett-Coutts, and provide some fancy housing for it?

Happy Shakespearing!

Appendix 1:

Wondering which plays appeared only in the First Folio? All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, 1 Henry VI, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, Taming of the Shrew, Tempest, Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Winter’s Tale.

The following plays appeared in both quarto editions prior to F1 and in F1: Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, 2 Henry VI (as 1 Contention), 3 Henry VI (as Richard Duke of York), King Lear, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Merchant of Venice, Merry Wives of Windsor, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida.

Three plays that we now attribute to Shakespeare did not appear in the First Folio: Edward III (first published in quarto in 1596), Pericles (1609), and Two Noble Kinsmen (1634).

Appendix 2:

Because I looked it up and you might be wondering for your own research, here’s the list of uncorrected pages that can be found in the online facsimiles (taken from Rasmussen and West):

Folger copy 5 (West 63): D2, L5, d1, m3, dd2, dd2v, ee5, ff2, ff5v, ss3, zz6v (original leaf E5 missing)

Folger copy 68 (West 126): D2, H5v, L5, S2, S5v, V1, m3, v3, x6v, ee5, ff2, ff5v, zz6v

Meisei (West 201): D2, e1, d3v, q4v, aa6v, dd4, kk6v, x6v, zz4v

Penn (West 180): B3v, D2, e5, k5, m3, x6v, dd2v, dd6v, ff1v, ff6, ss3 (ΠA1+1, bbb6 missing)

Miami (West 174): B3v, C4, L5, S5v, V1, d1, d5, m3, x6v, y5v, dd6v, 335, gg1v, qq5v, rr2, ss3r, ss4, ss4v, x6 (ΠA1 missing)

Brandeis (West 153): A1v, D2, S5v, d1, m3, x6v, dd2, dd4, dd6v, ee5, kk6v, zz6v (ΠA1-6, aaa1, aaa6, bbb1, bbb5, bbb6 missing)

New South Wales (West 192): no uncorrected leaves listed (ΠA1, ΠA1+1 missing)

Update (29 April 2013): Bodleian (West 31): D2, V1, m3, qq5v, ss3; qq2v in third state (ΠA1 missing)

Update (20 May 2013): Stuttgart (West 197): D2, L5, S5v, V1, m3, q6v, ss3, vv2v, vv3, vv4v

1. See Appendix 1 below
2. See Peter Blayney’s The First Folio of Shakespeare (Folger 1991) (and linked below) for an overview of this, Charlton Hinman’s The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (Clarendon P, 1963) for a detailed explanation of such changes, and Eric Rasmussen and Anthony James West’s The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (Palgrave 2012) for a list of all such corrections and an account of which changes appear in which copies.
3. The pdf currently linked to in Hamnet seems to have been corrupted; while you can access the paratextual material, excepting Blayney’s, you cannot currently get to the First Folio. That’s in the process of being corrected, but in the meantime, you can continue to find copy 5 in Luna and you can also find Blayney’s work at the University of Pennsylvania’s Furness collection.
4. The pdf also needs to have most of its pages rotated; I like to use this resource to rotate  and split pdfs.

In Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, Partridge and his friends go to see a play. As they watch a man light the upper candles of the playhouse, the predictably inane Partridge cries out, “Look, look, madam, the very picture of the man in the end of the common-prayer book before the gunpowder treason service!”

The picture Partridge refers to is most likely this—

Guy Fawkes

—a widely circulated and often reproduced image of Guy Fawkes sneaking toward the House of Lords, matches and lantern in hand. (Click on any of the images in this post to enlarge them in Luna.) It’s easy to read Partridge’s bumbling analogy as a comedic misinterpretation of the seriousness of the Gunpowder Plot—after all, he seems to see no difference between a flame intended to ignite barrels of gunpowder and one used to light candles in a playhouse (!). There’s a second level to his comedy, though, lost to most modern readers: namely, that by the eighteenth century this iconic depiction of Fawkes simply was as common as lit chandeliers. Found interleaved in many (if not most) extant post-1662 copies of the Book of Common Prayer, this image, along with another showing Charles I’s execution and a third celebrating Charles II’s return, iconically punctuated the state services added to the end of the restored Prayer Book. 

While the Folger holds many fine examples of extra-illustrated Prayer Books, I’ve been researching a copy that makes particularly interesting use of the practice of interleaving liturgical texts with images. Like many others compiled in the seventeenth century, this Prayer Book is bound within a collected volume that includes several religious texts, including a Bible, a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalms, an Apocrypha, John Speed’s genealogical tables, and John Downame’s concordance. Unlike other composite volumes, however, this book—really, an aggregate of multiple printed books bound together—is heavily interleaved with loose prints, diagrams, maps, illustrations extracted from other texts, contemporaneous portraits of religious and political figures, even an elaborate (and as-yet unidentified) manuscript monogram. In fact, most of the leaves of the Bible in this copy have been removed and replaced with images culled from different sources, including William Slatyer’s illustrations of Genesis (a set of 40 plates published in the 1660s) and an unidentified German book, possibly some form of illustrated Bible that includes scriptural passages in both German and Latin. In short, the owner(s) of this volume went far beyond the standard practice of interleaving one’s Prayer Book with a few ready-made prints of Guy Fawkes!

In the process of weaving together these materials, the books owner(s) tended to recode textual information as visual iconography, and they did so in a way that narrated scripture and liturgy through seventeenth-century political history. A perfect example of this can be seen in a string of pages at the end of the Book of Common Prayer. Pasted on a blank leaf, interleaved after the prayer “After Victory or Deliverance from an Enemy,” is an illustration of the Battle of Downs, at which the Dutch navy defeated the Spanish in the English Channel:

Battle of Downs

Pasted on the verso is a thanksgiving prayer describing England’s second deliverance from the Spanish Armada.

a prayer of thanksgiving

(I haven’t yet attempted to source this, though text and image seem to be from the same book; if you know what it is, please leave a message in the comments!) Appropriately enough, this entire sequence comes at the end of the section on prayers to be used at sea. The inclusion here is unusual; perhaps the family that composed the book was involved in the Battle at Downs or was particularly invested in naval politics, a hypothesis supported by the inclusion of interleaved maps elsewhere in the book.

The Prayer Book continues with a thanksgiving for deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, illustrated with the typical engraving mentioned above, followed by the prayer to be said on the day of Charles I’s martyrdom. Rather than using the standard martyr illustration, however, the owners have interleaved an image of Charles I seated in front of a globe, a pen poised in his hand over Scotland.

Charles I

This engraving, by Marshall, is very similar to the same artist’s frontispiece to Reliquae Sacrae Carolinae, the collection of Charles I’s writings published immediately after his death. Next is interleaved a copy of Marshall’s famous frontispiece to the Eikon Basilike—

Charles I, from Eikon Basilike

—followed finally by the more standard engraving of Charles I’s execution, captioned with scripture.

execution of Charles I

The entire sequence ends with the prayer commemorating the Restoration, accompanied by a regal portrait of a crowned King Charles II. Far from simply inserting the usual imagery, the book’s owner(s) creatively use a variety of illustrations to narrate the collection of state services at the end of the Prayer Book as the story of Charles I’s martyrdom. Thus the Battle of the Downs—at the time, considered a political embarrassment for Charles—becomes a victorious “deliverance” equivalent with Elizabeth’s 1588 defeat of the Armada, while his execution becomes merely the full stop on a royal life that was always already martyred to the English church. Since some of the printed editions included in this composite book seem to predate Charles I’s execution, the positioning of images within the text, as well as the book’s remixing of pre- and post-execution materials, serves to renarrate and thereby restore Stuart religious politics.

I first came to this fascinating book through my research on the Little Gidding Harmonies, a set of cut-and-paste biblical concordances produced in the 1630s and 1640s at the religious community of Little Gidding. While I don’t have space to get into the connections between these books, it’s worth noting that both the Harmonies and the Folger’s volume share an interest in absorbing other printed materials—books, pamphlets, engravings—into their physical framework. The owner(s) of the Folger volume were careful to make their collection appear to be a unified single volume, going so far as to extend the margins of the Psalter and the German illustrations with pasted strips of paper in order to match the page width of the rest of the book. Prints that aren’t large enough to be interleaved are carefully cut out and pasted onto fresh paper, and each page is visually framed with red ink lines. Like the Little Gidding Harmonies, this book is invested in disguising its multiple origins, even as it trades on the excess signifying power of, for instance, the Marshall engravings it recycles.

If (returning to Tom Jones) Partridge’s offhand remark satirizes how common images of the Gunpowder Plot had become, then the volume at the Folger indicates how uncommonly such images could be used. Through a highly material process of cut-and-paste composition, the owners of this book transformed a set of mass-reproduced religious texts into a wholly new document that uniquely reflects—or perhaps carefully projects—their political and religious affiliations.

WHITNEY ANNE TRETTIEN (@whitneytrettien) is a PhD candidate in English at Duke University, where she is writing her dissertation on the Little Gidding Harmonies. She works on a variety of projects related to book history, digital humanities, and early modern material culture; for more, visit her website.

leaves A3v-A4r of Josua Sylvester’s Lachrymae Lacrymarum (click to enlarge in Luna)

It’s from Josuah Sylvester’s Lachrymae Lacrymarum, or The spirit of teares distilled for the untimely death of the incomparable prince, Panaretus (1613); specifically, it’s leaf A3v of the third edition in the third of the Folger’s four copies of this text (STC 23578 copy 3). Sylvester’s poem was occasioned by the November 1612 death of Prince Henry, King James I’s eldest son. The mourning is felt not only in the subject of the poem, but in its presentation: the verso of each page is entirely in black, with Henry’s coat of arms in white, and the recto of each page presents the poem’s text framed by black bars on the top and bottom and skeletons on the right and left.¹

While the genre of mourning pages is an interesting one,² what catches my attention about this example is how the black ink lets us see what we usually don’t. The page, as many of you noticed, is not simply black. There are lines going in multiple directions and even the suggestions of words.

your April crocodile (click to enlarge in a new window)

There are vertical lines, close together, running all the way across the image, and a few horizontal lines, although those are a bit harder to spot. My favorites are the slightly curved lines running diagonally from the bottom left up to the right and, barely visible in this image, running diagonally from the lower right up to the left. There’s also a shift from dark black on the outer edges to a lighter black in the middle, and the little dark blobs with light halos scattered around. And then there are shapes that look like letters and words running horizontally, especially noticeable at the top and in the middle of the image towards the left-hand side.

So what are these things? One key to working this out is remembering that the black page is made by printing a block of wood covered with black ink, with the coat of arms carved out so that it remains white. (See Erin’s post on illustration techniques for a refresher on how that works.) Anything that’s not in flat contact with the block won’t receive the ink. The second key point is that sheets of paper aren’t actually flat. Since paper in this period was made by dipping wire screens into vats of rag-and-water stuff, with the solid stuff settling onto the screen as the water passes through it, the resulting paper bore the imprint of the wires on its surface (see another post from Erin that helps show this process). And once a sheet of paper when through the press, the type debossed the surface of the paper as it was pressed down onto the type, marking it not only with ink but with impressions.

Put those two observations together, and you’ve got what you see above. The vertical lines are from the wire lines (the wires forming the body of the mold): the wires indent the paper, leaving tiny little hills between the impressions that pick up the ink. The difficult-to-see horizontal lines come from the chainlines, but since those come not from wires biting into the paper but from a series of knots sewn onto the wooden ribs stabilizing the frame, they don’t leave indentations and so don’t create valleys that escape the ink to the same degree.

After the paper was made, it ran through the press. The side of the sheet we’re looking at was the inner form and was printed second; the other side of the sheet (the outer form) was printed first, which means that the words from A3r are slightly raised from the vantage point of A3v (when they pressed into the paper on one side, they pushed out the paper on the reverse side). And because those words are raised, they pick up the ink more heavily, so that we can see them in reverse. At the top of the image, towards the left, are the reverse of the words “CHRISTIAN State”; in the middle, also towards the left, is the reverse of “Armes, or Art.” (Don’t be shocked at my ability to decipher those last ones. Take a look at the other side of this page and you’ll be able to connect the dots, too.)

And what’s happening with those lovely curved lines? Those, as Jan Kellett noticed, come from the grain of the wood that makes up that woodcut. Once there was a tree, and it grew according to the seasons, marking that growth in its rings. When the tree became a piece of wood that was used to print a book, it carried along those signs of its life, a slightly uneven surface that left its secret story behind in the ink.

It was that combination of mourning and secret stories of growth that reminded me of Eliot’s opening to The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

This is a book of poems mourning the death of an eighteen-year-old prince, a book that wears its heart on its sleeve. And yet underneath that surface are signs of growth and life. Can we bring that life back to the surface? How do we mix what we read with what we see, and what we see with what is underneath its surface? I don’t have the answers, but I love that this image makes me ask those questions.

Full credit should for recognizing the wood grain should go to Randy McLeod; the reason we have this image in Luna (where I’d seen it and deciphered most of it) is from his work on it, and it was reading his piece that led me to recognize the curved lines as wood grain. You can read more about this particular image and more broadly about the ways in which we can think about the depth of paper and books in R. MacGeddon’s “An Epilogue.”³

I focused here on the past of this book, the processes that it went through as it became a book, but there’s more to be said about what happened to its material life after it came into being. I’ll write about its (not-so-secret) future in another post!

1. For more on the outpouring of grief in print on Prince Henry’s death, see Cambridge University Library’s exhibit on “Mourning Prince Henry”.
2. See Whitney Trettien’s post for other examples of mourning pages, including the one in Tristram Shandy.
3. R. MacGeddon [pseud. Randall MacLeod], “An Epilogue: Hammered” in Pete Langman, ed. Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book (Ashgate, 2011), pp 137-99.

your April crocodile (click to enlarge)

What is this and what might we learn from it? Your speculations are welcome in the comments, and the answer will appear later this week!

UPDATE (10 April): Read the comments below for some thoughts that have been bandied about and some clues on what it might be.

Self portrait of the artist known as “Sem”

It all began February 15, with a reference question from a colleague in London, “I am currently researching two volumes of drawings by an artist using the monogram SEM,” wrote Marcus Risdell, the curator at the Garrick Club. Long story short, Marcus had figured out that this “SEM” couldn’t possibly be the French caricaturist Georges “Sem” Goursat (1863-1934) that all sorts of institutions’ catalogs—including Hamnet here at the Folger—said he was.

Marcus Risdell’s search had led him to some drawings at the National Portrait Gallery’s Heinz Library, in London. The caption “Sem’s Pantheon” appeared on two of these NPG drawings. That phrase, in turn, led to the Folger, thanks to a Google search that pointed to the OCLC WorldCat record for Folger manuscript W.b.94,  ”Sem’s Pantheon of celebrities of the day, 1876.”

Now, you might wonder how a cataloger could have mistaken the jaded man in the first picture with someone who was 13 years old in 1876. The answer is that she didn’t. [Nerdy details alert!] The woman who typed the original catalog card in the late 1950s transcribed what was on the title page, then filed the card by title:

Folger catalog card created in the late 1950s

The information on the card was later transcribed into Hamnet, with the addition of name and subject headings (the hotlinks that you can click in an online catalog record). The resulting record would have said “Main Author: Sem, 19th cent., artist.” So far, so good. However, it went off the rails when we ran newly-added records through “Automated Authority Control.” The computer algorithm should have reported that this person could not be found among the Authorized Headings used by American libraries. Instead, the algorithm matched our “Sem, 19th cent.” with “Sem, 1863-1934″ (pseudonym of French caricaturist Georges Goursat) and overwrote the heading. As soon as we figured that out, we switched it back.¹ We still didn’t know who “Sem” was, of course, just who he wasn’t .

While Marcus Risdell continued the ‘Search for Sem’ in London archives, I headed to the Folger vault to look at the actual volume.  The call number indicated that it was in the manuscript collection, and the catalog said “62 water-colors of notable persons, accompanied by 56 letters, mostly addressed to T.F.D. Croker, and dated 1852-1877. Letters are catalogued individually.”² Naturally, I assumed the volume was important because of the individually cataloged letters. For example, this letter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Folger catalog card created in the late 1950s

A letter by Longfellow could be a scholarly goldmine! Then I read the letter. Fool’s gold. No commentary on his poetry, nothing about  literary figures of the day, just a purchase order for a book:

Dear Sir,

It was only this morning that I received the Causeries VII. which will account for and excuse my delay in sending the enclosed.  Please send me a copy of the Anthologie Grecque traduite en français, noticed in this volume.

Yours truly,

Henry W. Longfellow

If such a dull letter was worth typing up a set of catalog cards, then the not-card-set-worthy “also a water-color sketch of Longfellow by Sem” must be even duller. But instead… goldmine! A portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as Uncle Sam, playing the banjo:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by “Sem”

The Shakespeare quotation in the lower right plays on the poet’s name: “A fellow in a long motley” King Henry VIII (prologue). Indeed, each of the sixty-three portraits (of fifty-six different people) has at least one Shakespeare quotation written on it.³ Several are also signed by the person portrayed. Each drawing measures about 23 x 14 cm, and is done in full color on blue-grey paper.

Who are these people? It seems that most or all are associated with literature, fine art, and the theater (exact proportion to be determined by a summer intern). Examples include James Robinson Planché (1796–1880), playwright and herald, resting against a stack of volumes representing his areas of achievement:

J.R. Planché, by “Sem”

Some people appear quite staid, like actor-manager Sir Henry Irving (1838–1905):

Sir Henry Irving, by “Sem”

Many are not so staid. Here is actor, playwright, and manager John Baldwin Buckstone (1802–1879) as Cupid:

J.B. Buckstone, by “Sem”

There are four women in the group. First come three actresses, one after the other: Mrs. Keely (1808-1899), Mrs. Stirling (1813–1895), and Mrs. Mellon (1824 – 1909). Then a little further on comes women’s rights activist, printer, and publisher Emily Faithfull (1835–1895):

Emily Faithfull, by “Sem”

Based on the letter attached to the facing page, Miss Faithfull was a personal friend of the presumed compiler, writer and editor T.F. Dillon Crocker (1831-1912). Most of the fifty-six letters were addressed to Crocker, and he stars in four of the individual drawings (no one else gets more than two). In addition, he appears at the top of the title page, with a pen tucked behind his ear.

Title page to Folger MS W.b.94

The letters were clearly inserted as tokens of the people portrayed, not for their actual content. So how did the volume come to be in the manuscript collection? Simple. At the Folger in the 1950s, only manuscripts and printed books were admitted into the queue for cataloging, and the volume was clearly not a printed book, so it was that or nothing.

Joining Mr. Crocker on the title page are James W. Lock, an art dealer in the Strand (holding up the sign), and Sem, the artist. But to return to the opening question, who is Sem? Marcus Risdell has uncovered enough evidence to show that he was professional illustrator Frederick Sem, born in France in the 1830s, living in London by the 1870s, and known simply as “Sem.” Clearly, more research remains to be done. At the very least, though, a Google search on ”Sem’s Pantheon” will now lead not only to the OCLC WorldCat record, but also to this blog post.

1. My favorite incorrect matching incident was in 2005, when geographic place names suddenly replaced names of literary characters at the Folger, so  ”Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 –Characters –Constance, depicted” became  ”Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 –Characters –Konstanz (Germany), depicted.”
2. Being from England, but living in the United States, the cataloger split the difference in spelling: American for “color” and English for “catalogued.”
3. Although the catalog card said there were sixty-two portraits, there are actually sixty-three.

This is a difficult question to answer if you are looking for the answers in special collections libraries, since by the time manuscripts and other “fileable” documents like printed blank forms make it through the front door, they are usually “defiled,” far removed from the context of their creation and immediate afterlife. If they were at one time part of a family’s archives, those archives have since been dispersed, processed, and conserved. The original boxes, chests, drawers, pouches, pins, spikes, thongs, and cords that helped keep material organized and safe have long since (largely) disappeared, or have been chewed apart by rodents. Sometimes intact collections have made it through the door only to be separated once they arrived because they contain mixed materials (a practice we now resist): the printed items go to the book collection, the manuscript items go to the manuscript collection, the graphic material goes to the art collection, everything re-connectable via the accession number alone. Nearly invisible clues, such as holes (see below), have often been repaired because the reason for the holes was not known or understood.

While this seems shocking and sad to us now, it is not at all surprising. We are constantly updating, revising, and improving the way we store and arrange information, and it was no different 400 years ago. I’m not the first or last person to point out that we are still struggling with finding the ideal filing system today, as various websites and advertisements in magazines attest. PaperTIGER, anyone? NeatReceipts? The similarities in the problems and solutions are striking–what do we do with all this paper and digital detritus?

I’ve always liked this print by Abraham Bosse at the Folger because it shows a number of filing systems at work.

Abraham Bosse, 1602-1676. [The prosecutor's study]. [Paris] : Le Blond, [not before 1633]. Folger ART 230- 993 (size M). Click to view in Luna.

Edward Collier, Trompe l’oeil with writing materials, ca. 1702. Victoria & Albert Museum P.23-1951.

Plenty of Dutch paintings from the early sixteenth century onwards show lawyers and others surrounded by papers and paper filing contraptions. The earliest early modern example is the familiar one at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, which shows a toll-collector (previously identified as a merchant) surrounded by the tools of his trade, including two groups of loose papers hanging behind him.

Jan Gossaert, Portrait of a Merchant, ca. 1530. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1967.4.1.

I had spent plenty of time looking at this painting with Peter Stallybrass, who was able to identify the exact nature of the book in the right foreground as an almanac with writing tables for erasable writing (described in an article in Shakespeare Quarterly). But it wasn’t until I came across references to filing in letters from Sir Thomas Temple to his steward Harry Rose from the 1620s-30s (at the Huntington in 2004) that I was suddenly reminded of the items hanging in the background of Gossaert’s painting.

Temple writes:

Harry Rose, at your next coming hither I pray yow bring my letters to yow on the pointe filed (Huntington Library, STT 2147)

That yow bring with you, whensoeuer yow come, all letters & notes filed on a pointe (as I haue appointed) … & by a pointe fastened the papers can not be lost… (Huntington STT 2284)

To thred this note & deliuer the same back to me ….  To file this note of remembrance with others upon a point a string… (Huntington STT Vol. 38, fol. 23v; I am grateful to Rosemary O’Day for this last reference)

It seems rather obvious now, but these passages (and a set of Temple’s acquittances for rents held together by a leather tie) sent me to the Oxford English Dictionary, where the historic connection between filing and “stringing” suddenly became clear (the Latin word filum means string or thread).

file: n.2.I.3.a. A string or wire, on which papers and documents are strung for preservation and reference…

file: v.3.1.a. To string upon a thread (obs.); to place (documents) on a file…

Going back to the Gossaert painting, I could now see that the documents were strung together and hanging from a peg. The leaves appear to be blank because they are hung upside down and back to front, with the oldest items adjacent to the thong and vellum label, and the most recent items near the reinforced point (which loops back over the top and hangs over the label). This technology allows quick access to relevant documents by flipping the file up from the bottom.

And suddenly, I saw files everywhere. Or, I should say, I started seeing filing holes everywhere, including at the Folger.

Folger MSS L.d.797-800. Brewer’s bills to Lady Jane (Stanhope) Townshend, 1590-1591. Note the holes!

If you line up all of the holes, it is easier to imagine what this file might have looked like with a string going through it. In the first image below, the bills are hanging upside down. In the second image, they are shown from the other side, which is the way they would have been viewed while strung up (like in the Gossaert painting), by flipping through the file from the bottom.

Folger MSS L.d.802-806. Mercers’ bills shown upside down, with holes aligned and visible at top of image.

Folger MSS L.d.802-806: Mercers’ bills with their holes aligned, upside down with blank sides showing.

Peter Stallybrass started seeing holes everywhere as well, particularly on printed blank forms at the National Archives, Kew, along with “shoelace”-type strings with reinforced metal points to facilitate the filing process.

National Archives, Kew, SP 28/296. A file of parliamentary tax receipts from 1649-1653.

But string filing was only one strategy for taming paper. As the Bosse print shows, bundles and pouches were other popular techniques, used by lawyers and government officials as well as families for their personal papers. And for manuscripts like deeds with seals, wooden boxes (often covered with leather and lined with waste paper) and drawers were essential for long-term storage and controlled retrieval. Large presses with drawers and pigeon holes still survive in the Muniment Room at Hardwick Hall, in the Oxford University Archives, and other places. Different households and different archives had different strategies for filing, and were not always consistent or methodical in their techniques. And later generations tended to “improve” the systems that they inherited.

I leave you with a few more images of early modern filing strategies. Peter and I are writing an essay that will discuss the various technologies in greater detail, and I’ll be showing more images of files at RSA next week.

Folger MS Z.e.6. Outside of deed box that once held Z.c.33 (22), an exemplification of a recovery by the Court of Common Pleas from 1542.

Folger MS Z.e.6. Inside of the deed box, lined with shorthand notes, which have not yet been deciphered.

Three bundles of documents in a private family archive in England: one is tied with string, one is loose, and the other is tied with parchment.

Loose papers held together by a metal hook (in the same private collection as the bundles, above).

The National Archives, Kew, E179/299/9. A leather bag with a certificate of residence for Staploe Hundred (Cambridgeshire), 1563, on paper.

The National Archives, Kew, E101/581/14. A canvas bag containing expenses of repairs to the gaol of Nottingham, 1572, on parchment.

Beginning of Melzo’s military treaty on the cavalry (sig. A1r)

The initial depicts a dramatic confrontation on the battlefield between a cavalry unit and an infantry regiment armed with spears:

Engraved initial depicting a battle scene (sig. A1r detail)

Interestingly, the headpiece at the top of the opening page seems to be specially produced for this work, as it represents a vivid—no pun intended—clash at a battlefield between infantrymen and soldiers on horseback. Other pages in this excellent book are also adorned with custom-made illustrated initials and headpieces, such as the beginning of the dedication to Archduke Albert VII of Austria, who with his wife Isabella, was sovereign of the Hapsburg Netherlands between 1598 and 1621:

Dedication for Archduke Albert VII of Austria (sig. *3r)

In two other military books we find comparable examples of ornamental decoration referring to the content of the work. The dedication to King Philip IV of Spain in Herman Hugo’s De militia equestri antiqua et nova (1630) features a delicately ornamental capital ‘T’  in which two rearing horses are presented:³

Dedication in Hugo’s De militia eqvestri antiqva et nova (sig. *2r)

Detail showing the ornamental initial T (sig. *2r)

Further embellishments of this kind are left behind in the body of the actual book. Not so in Diego Ufano’s Tratado dela artilleria, which was published in Brussels around 1613.⁴ This treatise opens with an appropriate dedication to Archduke Albert, which is topped with a headpiece in the form of an engraving depicting Albert’s successful siege of Hulst in 1596, a small but strategically important city at the border of the crucial river Scheld connecting Antwerp with the sea.⁵

Dedication to Archduke Albert, with a custom-made engraving as headpiece (sig. a1r)

And the ornamental woodcut initial at the beginning of the copy of the privilege is a modest tribute to the archduke, whose coat of arms is represented in the counter of the ‘P’.

The ornamental initial ‘P’ with a representation of the coats of arms of Archduke Albert. (sig. a4r)

The further example is connected with Albert’s wife, Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. After the death of her husband in 1621, she decided to enter the third order of St Francis. A year after Isabella’s death, the historiographer Jean Puget de la Serre published a book in remembrance of her funeral.⁶ Although it is a beautiful book including a number of well-executed engravings, it is not as lavishly illustrated as the work that commemorates her husband’s funeral.⁷ But a special engraving was produced for this work. For the first letter of the actual text of the book, Time is depicted with his attributes of scythe and hourglass, standing next to a clock face on which the pointers form the capital letter ‘I’. The headpiece was also custom-made for this special edition; whereas one usually finds a woodcut at the top of the opening page, here a copperplate engraving has been cut depicting death’s heads and bones.

Opening page of the Mavsolée, figuring a custom-made headpiece and capital initial, both engravings. (sig. A1r)

Detail of the opening page depicting Time.

The examples shown above are rather unusual. When texts began to be produced with moveable type around the middle of the fifteenth century, printers based their layout schemes on the manuscript model. The earliest printed books had no title pages and would often begin right away with the text itself.⁸ As in manuscripts, the first initial was often rendered in color and in a larger size than the rest of the text. Because of the complexity of this process, this was often done by hand by artists and rubricators.⁹ Traditionally, rubricators would fill in the blanks printers had intentionally left for this purpose at the beginning of new sections. The blanks would be larger at the beginning of a new text or book and more modest at the beginning of chapters and paragraphs. The compositor would enter a guide letter to ascertain that the craftsman would fill in the correct initial. For several reasons, not all copies would receive rubrication. Some owners did not want to spend the money on it, or they preferred to do it themselves, as may be supposed when one comes across a copy where the rubrication suddenly stops in the middle of a section.

In important manuscript books, first initials were “historiated”—the initial would depict a little scene referring to the content of the book or its context. In the majority of printed books, however, the initial capital at the beginning of the book proper rarely includes this kind of miniature story, although they are often embellished other ways, with by flora and fauna or more abstract ornamental patterns. To illustrate how initial capitals changed over time, I include here two images of pages (as jpgs) which give an overview of capital initials in one of the most successful bestsellers in the Western hemisphere, the Imitatio Christi by Thomas à Kempis. For the purpose of this blog post I selected 23 editions in the vernacular of this book published by Flemish printing shops between 1500 and 1815. The text itself remains more or less stable over time, and so are the language and region of publication, allowing a diachronic comparison. Can you find the most important moments of transition? (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

1. Bettie Payne and Amanda Daxon were trained to make physical descriptions of these imprints in October 2012 and they have been making collations of, up to now, about 500 items. My sincere thanks to both of them, for both their invaluable help and joy in carrying out this project together with me.
2. See the Short Title Catalogue Flanders, henceforth: STCV 6626406.
3. See STCV 6607570.
4. See STCV 12916845. Jean Peeters-Fontainas dates this work as 1612: ‘La date gravée 161z [sic] a été lue 1612, 1613 et même 1617. Or la B.N. [= Biblioteca Nacional] de Madrid possède deux exemplaires; le premier (R 3006) porte la date 161z; pour le second (R 4828), le cuivre du frontispice a été retravaillé à la date, dont on a fait 1612. On peut donc en conclure que 161z doit se lire 1612.’ See: J. Peeters-Fontainas, Bibliographie des impressions espagnoles des Pays-Bas méridionaux. Nieuwkoop 1965, 2 vols, vol. 2, no. 1328, pp. 681-682. The ‘Carta del avthor’ for the duke of Bucquoy (1571–1621; see fol. a3r-v) is dated 10 May 1611, his dedication to Don Luis de Velasco (1559–1625; fol. a4v-b1v) is dated 4 October 1611. Don Luis Velasco’s answer (fol. b2r-v) bears the date 30 January 1612. The ‘copia del privilegio’ (fol. a4r) refers to 10 September 1611. The Folger copy clearly has 1613 on the title page.
5. The engraving mentions the date 1597, but it is not clear to which event it refers.
6. See STCV 6599912.
7. The Folger has also a copy of that work; see STCV 6848945.
8. See Margareth M. Smith, The title-page. Its early development 1460–1510. London/New Castle 2000.
9. In the first decades of book production, printers like Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer in Mainz experimented with printed, ornamental initials in two colours. See e.g., ISTC ip01036000 (1457) or ISTC id00403000 (1459). With thanks to Daniel DeSimone, Curator of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection at Library of Congress, who delivered this information in a lecture entitled “Printing in Color: A Lesson in Technique,” Library of Congress, 7 March 2013.

For the Folger Institute, the recent happenings in St. Peter’s Square in Rome also sparked fond memories of our NEH Institute on Ritual and Ceremony, Late-Medieval Europe to Early America, directed by Claire Sponsler in 2010.  It was there that we were introduced to the concept of the sede vacante and other aspects of Rome’s festive culture. Most intriguingly, and to the point here, we studied examples of conclave maps—a remarkable genre of maps that laid out in precise detail the exclusive work of the conclave. Early modern Church-watchers were just as curious as we are today about what was happening, and these maps not only purported to let viewers peek inside the conclave, but they may well have been taken home as souvenirs by pilgrims to Rome. 

Giovanni Falda’s Nuova et essatta pianta del conclave

This example from around 1670 was likely to have been closely studied by its original purchaser, and it is just as carefully analysed (and translated!) by John Hunt, one of the college faculty participants in that NEH Institute (now an Assistant Professor of History at Utah Valley University). Hunt’s essay on “The Ceremonies of the Conclave and Print Culture in Baroque Rome” walks us around the map and its moment-by-moment account of choosing a new pope. His essay, and the others on the institute website, give us insight into what we can learn about the rituals and ceremonies of early modern Europe by studying the materials objects they left behind.¹

The fact that our collection could support such a study of the conclave was a delightful surprise to us all. The discoveries began months before the summer institute, in conversation with Erin Blake (Curator of Art and Special Collections at the Folger) and Barbara Wisch (Professor of Art History, SUNY Cortland). Professor Wisch was the member of the faculty who introduced us to an early modern Rome that was the center of pilgrimage, the primary locus of relics, and purveyor of indulgences. With her, we surveyed rituals (from Carnival season to Easter) as well as Holy Year ceremonies that created sacred and civic topographies evoking Rome as Caput Mundi, Eternal City, New Jerusalem, and even the New Babylon. Participants also got a preview of her work on confraternities, undertaken with Nerida Newbigin and now published by Saint Joseph’s University Press as Acting on Faith: The Confraternity of the Gonfalone in Renaissance Rome.

As we do while planning all Institute courses, we explored Folger holdings for relevant examples. What we found was a little known, and less examined, trove of more than 30 engravings and other graphics in Art Box R763. At the time (just three years ago), this set of engravings was not cataloged in Hamnet, and neither were digital images captured in Luna. Instead, the only information any of us had to go on was the vaguely promising description in the art card file: Collection of pamphlets and engravings relating to Rome and the papacy. Weeks of conversations between Erin Blake and Barbara Wisch ensued, resulting in a selection of a dozen or so of these engravings to be incorporated into her presentation. And this work led to these images being cataloged and digitized, so that you can now view them in Luna and find them in Hamnet.

These engravings from the Folger collection allowed us to explore how printed images of papal power—especially conclaves and coronation processions—reshaped ritual events in local and international memory. We examined how contestations over urban space, religious authority, political power, and social identities were refashioned and endowed with the allure of providential stability via the printed image and permanent art and architecture.

Our days working with the Roman materials were just one of a series of examinations of local and national traditions as they evolved over several centuries from a common liturgical conceptual framework. Our goal was to look beyond narrowly defined disciplinary and national boundaries to reconstruct the social roles of rituals and ceremonies, asking, among other questions, what it meant to participate in public or domestic performances of this sort, even as a spectator—questions that remain vital today.

1. The website includes not only essays from the participants but the syllabus for the institute and bibliographies for further study.