DNA

There’s a bit of a flurry just now in the book-discussion universe about testing old books for their DNA. Parchment, being derived from animals, is of course going to have DNA in it: though I wonder what useful information it could give you about the book. Of course, as The Atlantic article which seems to have gotten this ball rolling tells us, the DNA research is really into matters other than bibliography. It’s just that old books provide a nice source of information for DNA researchers, and one which has lived for a long time in that protective environment which we know of as libraries. Turns out that you don’t even have to chop up a page to get a DNA sample: just using the residue from the act of rubbing the parchment with an eraser will provide enough DNA for testing.

For a more metaphorical DNA test we have to welcome “Story DNA Machine Learning”, the tool Wattpad plan to use in their publishing program. Well, it had to happen I guess: we are finally getting into the 21st century. Wattpad is establishing a publishing division and will use software, not fallible folks, to determine what books deserve publication. The New York Times tells us the ominous tale (link via Book Riot).

“Whereas traditional publishing is based on individual editors’ tastes, Wattpad’s technology will scan and analyze the hundreds of millions of stories on the app to find themes or elements that might determine a story’s commercial success.” Enough of these silly editors and their individual tastes! At last a way to overcome the inherent inability of editors to understand what’s good, and more importantly what it is that makes a bestseller! We have no alternative but to look forward to Wattpad’s inevitable success.

See also DNA ink, and DNA books.

Scribal self portrait

This double page spread of the Bible of Yerevan (1338), on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Armenia! show, features an unusual image of the medieval artist at work.  At bottom left we see Sargis Pidzak painting the sponsor of the manuscript Catholicos Hakob II who is seen to the right of Pidzak in his official robes. Above him Saint Matthew is shown starting in on his gospel. (You can click on the picture to enlarge it.)

The manuscript was illuminated and partially written by Pidzak using ink, tempera, and gold on parchment. It normally lives at the Matenadaran, the Mesrop Mashtots Institute-Museum of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan, Armenia.

Mashtots at Matenadaran

Mesrop Mashtots was the inventor of the Armenian alphabet around 405 AD. His alphabet had 36 letters, but others have subsequently been added. There are some references to an Armenian alphabet prior to that, but no survivals have been discovered. The prototype for Mashtots’ alphabet is debated. According to Wikipedia, “Pahlavi [a Middle Iranian script] was the priestly script in Armenia before the introduction of Christianity, and Syriac, along with Greek, was one of the alphabets of Christian scripture. Armenian shows some similarities to both. However, the general consensus is that Armenian is modeled after the Greek alphabet.” Below is the ISO transliteration of the modern Armenian alphabet.

Bookbinder Jeff Peachey has a post about the Met exhibition with more pictures of books and book-related objects. The Armenia! exhibition closed on 19 January.

Another scribe may be seen at my earlier post Eadwine.

Quick brown dog

Boulogne-sur-Mer, BM, 0070

Erik Kwakkel sends us this picture of a 12th century letter Q, delivered by a happy, if thin, dog. As a Cap Q, it makes me think of dog quoits, predecessor of dog frisbee.

Medieval page design

Erik Kwakkel’s blog medievalbooks has an informative post on the design and layout of medieval manuscript books, entitled Architecture of the Medieval Page. When you are looking at a richly illuminated book you have narrow your eyes to detect behind the text and illustrations surviving evidence of the indentations of the grid pattern the scribe would start off by ruling into the surface of the parchment. Later on a lead “pencil” would be used and these lines might subsequently be erased.

The grid pattern is especially obvious in these examples.

This is sort of like that ruled sheet you used to get in a pad of Basildon Bond letter-writing paper. If you stuck one of these behind a sheet of parchment though you wouldn’t be able to see through to it. I am in fact using just such a ruled sheet from my insane handwritten version of The Dynasts. (Not as much progress as should have been has been made on this since my last update. I took the last winter off for one reason or another. This has to be a seasonal activity: I don’t know if scribes were troubled by drops of sweat from their brows — but this is obviously incompatible with pen and ink production. Thus activity has to stop during the humid summer months in New York. I think it should be safe to start up again now.)

The Rosenbach

In Philadelphia there’s a nice handsome Georgian house on Delancey Place, a few blocks from Rittenhouse Square.

Here lived the Rosenbach brothers, one an antiques dealer, the other the biggest rare book dealer in the world.

The house (plus the building next door) has been turned into a fascinating small museum. In addition to furniture and pictures you can see bookcases full of rare books and manuscripts, with pages from some of them on display in a glass-topped display case. The manuscript of Ulysses, most of Conrad’s manuscripts, several Dickens originals, a Chaucer manuscript. There’s also a recreation of Marianne Moore’s living room in New York. Her complete library, with many personally inscribed and annotated books from her friends such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop, is part of the Rosenbach collections as well as all of her correspondence and drafts of her poetry and unpublished memoirs.

Although much stuff has been deeded and donated to the museum subsequently, one almost gets the impression that the basis of the display may in fact be what was left unsold when the music stopped and these dealers in antiquities sloughed off their mortal coils.

Dr Abraham Rosenbach got into the book trade by hanging about in the antiquarian bookstore of his maternal uncle Moses Polock, and started book dealing while still an undergraduate. But what really established him as the go-to book dealer for the quality was the commission he got to build up the Widener collection after Henry Elkins Widener had gone down with the Titanic. The library Dr Rosenbach compiled formed the basis of the Widener Library at Harvard. Rosenbach also worked for Mr & Mrs Folger, J. P. Morgan, Henry Huntington.

The Library and Museum, which is affiliated with the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation but independently run offers an interesting series of events, including Hands-On events which feature early editions and manuscripts, which obviously you can get really close to. Edward G. Pettit, Sunstein Manager of Public Programs at the Rosenbach, comes up with a varied list of activities. When we were there he let us see a copy of The Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed (1640) in British North America. They had recently arranged for a concert featuring a choir singing psalms from the book. The Rosenbach also runs a Bibliococktails series, held almost every second Friday, which include light refreshments and themed cocktails provided by Quaker City Mercantile, as well as a rotation of activities such as readings, music, and games. So if you’re planning a weekend in Philly, book your place.

They have a blog, The Rosenblog, which often carries reports on their events, plus research activities and exhibitions. They welcome researchers: make an appointment.

Transcription

Transcription Services Ltd., based on the Isle of Man, will make plain that old handwritten document that’s driving you mad because you can’t read it — after all it obviously must contain your patent of nobility or at least a claim on riches beyond  your wildest. As well as English documents they’ll tackle Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German or Dutch.

This seems like a fairly specialized business, and I hope the piece about them at Atlas Obscura will help drum up customers. Maybe they’re doing OK — they’ve done a bit of transcribing for the British Library.

Earliest bookplate

Photo: Rosenbach Museum & Library

The first known printed bookplate, as Hyperallergic boldly claims, dates from 1480. You can see from the photo of that bookplate that this label, printed in black only and hand-colored, was pasted into a manuscript book.

Hilprand Brandenburg, clearly a 15th century early adopter, stuck at least 450 of these bookplates into volumes he donated to the Buxheim Carthusian monastery near Memmingen. The book illustrated is from the collection of The Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, who last year organized a bookplate show called “The Art of Ownership: Bookplates and Book Collectors from 1480 to the Present”. Probably because the exhibition closed in March 2017, the link in Hyperallergic‘s article no longer works. You can find the Rosenbach’s note about the exhibition here.

You’ve got to have some fairly valuable books, I’d think, to want to put a bookplate in them. Of course in the early days of book production books were exactly that: rather expensive, thus valuable objects. Sticking a bookplate in a mass market paperback would surely make you look slightly foolish.

Apparently as a security device the bookplate was preceded by book curses, often added to a manuscript as by the scribe an awful warning. Here’s an example from Bibliomania and the Medieval Book Curse: “Whoever steals this book let him die the death; let be him be frizzled in a pan; may the falling sickness rage within him; may he be broken on the wheel and be hanged.” That should do it. Of course chaining the book to the shelf was another satisfactory security method.

Link to Hyperallergic‘s story thanks to Kathy Sandler.

See also Plates/inserts.

Parchment patching

Atlas Obscura provides a gallery of neat fixes to tears and holes in parchment. The team of artist and scribe who did this one were obviously an amusing pair. The guy looks like he’s cranking an old car.

We live today in a throw-away society and this makes this sort of meticulous repair work utterly incomprehensible. Who has the time? I guess we should be happy that the value of human life, as expressed in wages, has gone up relative to commodities.

See also Parchment.

Two books in one

We’re all perhaps aware that scribes writing manuscripts, especially on parchment, had (have) the ability to erase errors simply by scraping the ink off the writing surface. Unamazingly, traces of the original remain even after a correction has been overwritten. This often involved the erasure of entire manuscripts so that the parchment could be reused for another book. The word palimpsest (from the Greek meaning, apparently, scraped again) floats back into the memory. Several ancient works are known only as palimpsests; we only know the work from a copy overwritten with a different text. Wikipedia has a list of examples.

This excellent YouTube video from the Getty Museum shows all the steps involved in creating a manuscript, including a brief scene showing the erasing of a letter by use of a pen knife (the origin of whose name becomes obvious as you watch this film). If you see no video here, please click on the title of this post in order to view it in your browser.

Mental Floss brings the story of this recently discovered palimpsest. High-powered X-rays reveal this erased text, which you can just see with the naked eye was in fact there. Ten hours of processing for each of the 26 pages may well be worth while if it yields a new book we’ve never seen before.

In olden days scholars strained their eyes trying to read this sort of stuff. We now have the help of no end of sci-tech whizzbangery. Below is a Library of Congress image showing the revealing  via hyperspectral imaging of an overwritten section of a letter by Alexander Hamilton.

Domesday Book

Photo BBC

Every schoolchild knows about The Domesday Book (at least every British schoolchild) but few know much about it or have ever seen it. Now we can all get the chance to examine it with its loan to the British Library where it will be part of their Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition which opens in October and runs through next March. The Library’s Medieval Manuscripts Blog carries the news.

The Domesday Book (yes, Domesday does mean Doomsday: it got its nickname because its decisions, like those of the last judgement, were said to be unalterable) contains the results of a survey ordered by William the Conqueror in 1085 to figure out what it was he’d conquered in England and Wales nineteen years previously, and most importantly how much in taxes could be milked from it. The parts of England not covered are by and large places exempt from taxes like London and Winchester, or which owed taxes to someone else (e.g. County Durham whose taxpayers remitted to the Bishop of Durham), and Cumberland and Westmoreland, which were not fully conquered by 1086 when the survey was completed. Domesday contains records about 13,418 places.

The book is actually in two volumes, Great Domesday and Little Domesday. Great Domesday was apparently written by a single hand. Little Domesday, which covers Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, is more detailed, listing assets down to the level of head of cattle. Both parts normally live at Kew in The National Archives whose website tells us that the books were actually rebound in the 1980s into five volumes in order to reduce the strains on the parchment pages in the fatter bindings. During the Second World War the books were evacuated to Shepton Mallet prison where they escaped the bombing but fortunately not the gaol. It’s not altogether clear whether one or all the volumes are now making the trip downtown. Both the Library and The Guardian consistently refer to it as “the book” so maybe it is the entire work that is being lent.