In The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge there is a pattern book for manuscript illuminators to practice (and copy) the various initials they’d need to use in the works they’d be called on to illuminate.
This exercise book dates from 1150 to 1175 and is believed to come from Florence. As the museum’s label says “The letters were constructed using a ruler and compass, outlined in lead, then ink, and painted with the pigments typically used by medieval book artists (illuminators). By copying, combining, and adapting models such as these, illuminators created an astonishing variety of decorative forms.” The book was bequeathed to the museum by Francis Wormald in 1972.
I see this as analogous to the books we used to get in primary school with words in script printed on every other widely spaced line. We were meant to copy each line in the space below, and as a result learn to write.
“We need to move from an environment where publishers attempt to prove wrongdoing at the point of publication to one in which researchers are expected, and are able, to document the provenance of their data and the integrity of their research processes.”
The Scholarly Kitchen discusses the scholarly supply chain, where publishers are reporting more and more material of questionable provenance. Scholarly communication has long been based on trust, and now the ease with which AI can generate fake copy is striking at the basis of that trust. Of course any publisher can try to detect fraudulent authorship, but there’s an inevitable cost involved: time costs money. It’s obviously “not fair” that the cost of policing the academy should fall on that part of the system designed to make the work public, but of course if an unscrupulous author insists on deception, there’s currently no alternative. Surely the people best qualified to detect fraudulent work are the immediate colleagues of the researchers involved. This sort of policing job is invidious — we’re all brought up not to tell tales — and turning a blind eye is understandable, but ultimately fatal to the entire discipline. For academics “to document the provenance of their data and the integrity of their research processes” sounds good, but when you begin to wonder just how that documentation might take place and who’s going to police it, you sort of end up back at trust.
The system of tenure and promotions involves noting the number and prestige of publications. As long as publication history is important for career prospects, the temptation to cheat will remain. You can’t expect hiring committees to read all an applicant’s journal papers, so of course, the option to try to fool them remains. Surely this is the point at which the control over deception has to be exercised. A number of fraudsters probably need to be publicly vilified and fired from their jobs before the message gets through to the short-cut-tempted that such a course is not a wise one. I expect publishers will have to keep on being the detectives for quite a long time before the academic world works out just how it’s going to ensure that research is reported honestly. If the system of scholarly communication degenerates into a largely fictitious body of work, those who labor at the advancement of knowledge will only be helping to advance the performative arts.
I’m not sure what this list tells us about the value or even the popularity of a book. After all if a book’s wildly popular won’t it end up being bought by lots of people who therefore won’t be going to the library to get it?
However New York Public Library provides us with the top take outs of 2025 in three categories. Maybe the most interesting is the fourth group where they suggest “If you loved X, you’ll probably also like these books”. That’s what librarians do.
For those reluctant to click on links, the number one checkout was Percival Everett’s James, (Doubleday, 2024) winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was also the most checked out audiobook. This novel is a recreation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, narrated by Jim rather than Huck.
The jacket design process for the second most popular book, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, was described in this earlier post.
Times have changed, of course, which reality is exemplified by the fact that this story comes from the Trinity College Library blog.
Visiting Cambridge in 1928 to deliver a lecture on “Women and Fiction” that evening, a lecture which would eventually form the basis of A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf visited Trinity College. “She describes ‘sitting on the banks of a river’, ‘strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls’, and moving ‘across the quadrangle to that famous library’, home to manuscripts of John Milton’s Lycidas (1637) and W. M. Thackeray’s Esmond (1852). The latter had been donated to Trinity by Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, whose first wife was Thackeray’s daughter. Though Woolf never names the library in A Room of One’s Own, these facts confirm its identity as the Wren Library of Trinity College. In fact, the 1928 autograph manuscript of A Room of One’s Own gives the name as ‘Trinity Library’.”
When she arrived at the door of the Wren Library, she relates “I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.”
Library regulations dating from 1899
Jacob’s Room (1922) contains scenes from Trinity College which her two brothers (and her husband) had attended, showing that she was quite familiar with the place. Ms Woolf was not amused by her ejection from the library: “Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger.” “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon my freedom of mind,”
The Library’s blog post contains a reproduction of Woolf’s letter to the Master of Trinity in 1932, declining his invitation to her to deliver the Clark Lectures (a College foundation). Leslie Stephen had in fact been the first Clark lecturer in 1884. It was not until 1949 that a woman, Helen Darbishire, finally did deliver the Clark Lectures.
As so often is the case the headline may represent a little hyperventilation — is global publishing really on the verge of transformation? As Mr Williams tells it the plan from “India’s Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade is elegantly simple yet radical. AI developers would gain access to all lawfully published copyrighted works for training through a mandatory blanket licence. Copyright holders cannot opt out. Instead, they receive statutory remuneration through a centralised non-profit entity, with payments linked to AI companies’ revenues.”
This seems admirably straightforward and sensible. We have over here fallen into the habit of looking at copyright more as a branch of property law than as the “encouragement of science and learning” which was its original intention. While of course there is an outside chance that AI could generate an exact copy of a copyright work, I hope and trust that that would be a fairly remote possibility — and I dare say there are easier ways to rip off a copyright. There’ll always be someone to object to any plan about any thing, so force majeure may be the least bad solution, though perhaps the Indian version sounds like it might not be overly generous. Some sort of general license with agreed levels of compensation does at least get over the problem of granting of rights. (And, let’s admit it, does represent an unexpected windfall.)
Whether what the AI produces as a result of all its studying ends up being worthwhile is a separate issue, and calls for critical not legal judgement.
PRINT Magazine brings us 23 book covers which they regard as the best of the year. Not sure I’m wild about this trio though.
It looks to me that consensus in publishing has gone for a lighter, airier look than in years gone by — but of course this could merely be selection bias, as I’ve no way of judging the entirety of 2025’s output — and it’s not true of their composite image which I reproduce above.
Why do birds get on book jackets so often?
When we get to LitHub though it seems that at twenty-three PRINT just wasn’t trying. Lit Hub hits us with the 173 best covers of 2025. Fewer birds here than animals, despite there being three books with the word “swallow” or “swallows” in their title. I rather liked this one, the first in their piece:
Joe Brainard’s I Remember; cover design by David Pearson (Daunt Books, July 2025). This is the UK cover — the US version, to which that link will take you, is, to put it mildly, somewhat disappointing.
It may come as no surprise that the cover design for James Frey’s Next to Heaven doesn’t make it into these lists. I thought the idea was that the jacket should make readers want to pick up the book, not throw up. It would seem that the inside matches: the book is featured in The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2025, also from Lit Hub. The reviewer at The New Yorker reported that “while reading Next to Heaven, I sometimes thought I could feel individual cells in my body trying to die.”
Here’s a photo of my mother and her two children. Obviously it’s a studio portrait. It was made by Mr Frater, who before he had the chemists shop across the street in Galashiels, conducted a photography business in a sort of sports-pavilion-like structure in the middle of what’s now Bank Street Gardens. It was then allotments.
What age do you think my sister is? I’m guessing one, which would put us in 1949 and make me seven. I’m wearing a kilt — you can just see the chain holding up my sporran. Wee boys had kilts which were attached to a sort of bodice which enabled you to keep the thing up. Whether this bodice went over or under the shirt I don’t know — I assume over, as otherwise the shirt couldn’t have tucked in; though things do seem to be a bit lumpy around my midriff. So under my sweater I am effectively wearing a sleeveless dress, the top portion in white, and the bottom in Logan tartan, which you can admire here. In order to prevent me from spoiling the scene Mr Frater has given me a jigsaw puzzle which you just about make out in front of me.
Why however is my (step-) father not in the picture? I have no idea. Maybe the photo was intended primarily for my mother’s family — Grampa Logan, though he did die that year, seems to have taken violently against the foreign interloper* that was Jerzy Michał Larissa Łastowietz Łastowiecki,† so perhaps he had to be excluded from the image. Or maybe that day he was just off at work, though we all look so smart that this can’t have been a spur of the moment thing. Whatever; click, click and there you are — at the start of the process. Because in those almost prehistoric days photographs were a bit of a procedure. Obviously you had to buy the film — if you owned a camera, and lots of people did not — and then after taking the twenty or so exposures there were on the roll of film which you had personally mounted inside your camera, you then, avoiding any risk of exposure to the light, had to take it to a shop where it would be developed and printed in a dark room. Obviously this meant that every picture cost a significant bit of money, and you’d not be just clicking away as you would nowadays.
Photos have now become basically a costless commodity, so we take as many as we feel like. Don’t like this one — just delete it. But photography used to be quite demanding. I dare say when photography was introduced, at first to the professional and then to the general public, there may have been a little bit of rumbling about how this new technology was going to impact the earning ability of the portrait painter!
Here’s Sir Henry Raeburn’s 1863 portrait of Mrs Alexander Allan with her granddaughter. Now while Mr Frater maybe got £10 (?) for his 1949 portrait, I dare say Sir Henry got £250 or so, or would we think more? It’d probably be guineas anyway. Nowadays, when you take a picture of your family using your iPhone, nobody makes any money. Portraits have become a commodity — though I guess there are still a few photo studios where one could go and pay for a photograph. Just of course as there are still a few portrait painters who can arrange for sittings for you. Still, here’s a new technology upending an art.
Of course nothing is ever exactly the same as anything else, but let us be cautious in decrying the use of AI and LLMs in writing. Authors, just like painters and photographers before them, may indeed find that they can’t keep up with the new technology when it comes to the production of popular fiction. These are early days — we have no idea how things will change, and almost more importantly we have no idea how we will end up coping with these changes and how we’ll regard their outcomes. All our concern and vigilance just go to show that we are very capable of judging between good and bad. Even if most of the books on the bestseller list end up being penned by robots, we have no reason to fear that we’ll ever be unable to judge a great book when we meet it.
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* No interloper he; evacuee. The defeated Polish army left their homeland on bikes or on foot, and somehow managed to re-form in Scotland.
† The name sounds out as Yerzhy (which is George) Meehow (which is Michael) Larissa Wastóvietz Wastoviétzky. That barred ell, Ł, an extra Polish letter, is pronounced like W. And W of course is pronounced as V. I can’t really imagine that Ł doesn’t have a name in Polish, but Wikipedia fails to provide it. Galashiels seems to have managed the complicated name just fine — he was known either as Mr Last-week-ie or Mr Mish — Mis, or more fully Mishou, being his nickname, having the altogether appropriate force of teddy bear.
As part of this year’s Miami Art Week (1-7 December), Es Devlin’s contribution to the Faena Miami Beach art program was “Library of Us”, a 50-foot revolving library which, Valentina Di Liscia tells us at Hyperallergic, “betrays its aim of engaging us in the act of reading” by becoming more of a spectacle than a shelf off which you’d borrow a book.
The triangular series of bookshelves is itself inaccessible. The structure, on the beach, rotates in a reflecting pool but is surrounded by a ring of “individual stations” where you can sit and read a book. “The ‘reading table’ will be set each day by the artist with different books, and the idea is that participants seated on the static and moving elements will encounter each other as well as new texts.” This Observer article shows an aerial view of the installation which makes all this clearer.
That black blank shelf, fifth from the bottom, is a screen on which messages are displayed. The nighttime photo at Ms Di Liscia’s article tells us “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives” which comes from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. The sentiments expressed here cycle through a selection of 250 writers, many of them voiced as well as shown. Ms Devlin‘s inspiration comes apparently from Jorge Luis Borges. “I’m not even sure I really exist. I am all the books I have read” is what got it all going.
Ms Di Liscia suggests that the “Library of Us” was more successful as an encouragement to social media posting than to reading. The books, by 2,500 authors, are being donated after the show: the reports do not tell us who paid for them.
It’s become such a cliché that we don’t give the fatality of a deadline a second thought. According to David Crystal in his fertile LitHub post, an extract from his book Bookish Words & Their Surprising Stories (2025, Bodleian Library Publishing), the origin of the term was rather military: a deadline was “a boundary line around a prison which prisoners were not allowed to cross. If they did, they were liable to be shot. It was first used in the American Civil War, at the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp Andersonville. . . . by the 1920s it was being used in the publishing industry. A deadline was a time — a date or a time of day — by which a piece of writing had to be ready if it was to be included in a particular issue of a publication or to meet the demands of a publishing schedule.” I am not aware of any author ever being shot for failure to make an agreed delivery date, but no doubt a lot of metaphorical gunfire has been indulged in.
Professor Crystal quotes Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Behold what must have been the main entrance into the old Cambridge University Press Printing House in the middle of town It’s on Mill Lane right behind the Pitt Building. Above the gate, on either side of the shield, may be read the words Hinc lucem et pocula sacra (From here cometh forth light and sacred draughts) which are the words appearing around the Alma Mater Cantabrigia figure. You can just imagine that old lorry laden with lots of little packages of enlightenment setting out for the London warehouse.
The new University Printing House on Shaftesbury Road was opened in 1963. I do think that as an undergraduate I was just about aware of this change.
Making Book 