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The Historian s Scarlet Letter Reading Nathaniel
Hawthorne s Masterpiece as Social and Cultural History
Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good Third International Conference GOODTECHS 2017 Pisa Italy November 29 30 2017 Proceedings 1st Edition Barbara Guidi
As a vital feld of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish monographs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new frontiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars. Its scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds and to all historical periods from antiquity to the 21st century, including studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives, debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic felds. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiography of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book scholarship. New Directions in Book History will be published in three formats: single-author monographs; edited collections of essays in single or multiple volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave’s e-book (EPUB2) ‘Pivot’ stream. Book proposals should emphasize the innovative aspects of the work, and should be sent to either of the two series editors.
Editorial board:
Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Brazil
Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, USA
Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14749
Evanghelia Stead Editor Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects
Editor
Evanghelia Stead
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Guyancourt, France & Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France
New Directions in Book History
ISBN 978-3-319-53831-0 ISBN 978-3-319-53832-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53832-7
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.
Cover credit: Claudio Parmiggiani, Campo dei fori [Field of Flowers] and Delocazione [Displacement], San Giorgio in Poggiale, Bologna; from the collections of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, Biblioteca d’Arte e di Storia di San Giorgio in Poggiale, Genus Bononiae - Musei nella Città
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1 Introduction 1 Evanghelia Stead Part I Manuscripts as Cultural Objects
2 From Devotional Aids to Antiquarian Objects: The Prayer Books of Medingen 33
Henrike Lähnemann
3 How to Read the “Andachtsbüchlein aus der Sammlung Bouhier” (Montpellier, BU Médecine, H 396)? On Cultural Techniques Related to a Fourteenth-Century Devotional Manuscript 57
Henrike Manuwald
4 “Otium et Negotium”: Reading Processes in Early Italian and German Humanism 81
Michael Stolz
5 The Fluidity of Images or the Compression of Media Diversity in Books: Galeriewerke and Histoires Métalliques
Christina Posselt-Kuhli 6 Change of Use, Change of Public, Change of Meaning: Printed Images Travelling Through Europe
Milano (†)
7 The Promotion of the Heroic Woman in Victorian and Edwardian Gift Books
Barbara Korte
Pinocchio: An Adventure Illustrated Over More Than a Century (1883–2005)
9 Illustration and the Book as Cultural Object: Arthur Schnitzler’s Works in German and English Editions
Norbert Bachleitner
10 Two Peas in a Pod: Book Sales Clubs and Book Ownership in the Twentieth Century
Corinna Norrick-Rühl
11 E-Readers and Polytextual Critique: On Some Emerging Material Conditions in the Early Age of Digital Reading
C ontributors
Giorgio Bacci Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy
Norbert Bachleitner Vienna University, Vienna, Austria
Barbara Korte University of Freiburg, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany
Henrike Lähnemann Oxford University, Oxford, UK
Henrike Manuwald Georg August University, Göttingen, Germany
Alberto Milano (†) Museo Per Via, Pieve Tesino‚ Provincia di Trento, Italy
Corinna Norrick-Rühl Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany
Stephan Packard Universität zu Köln, Köln, Germany
Christina Posselt-Kuhli Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Evanghelia Stead Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Guyancourt, France & Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France
Michael Stolz University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
L ist of f igures and t ab L es
Fig. 1.1 Claudio Parmiggiani, Campo dei Fiori (Field of Flowers) and Delocazione (Displacement)
Fig. 2.1 Intensity map of the distribution of the Medingen manuscripts in 1542 (ringed) and in 2017
Fig. 3.1 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine, H 396, fol. 29r: Saint Calendar (1–14 January)
Fig. 3.2 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine, H 396, fol. 45v/46r: Flagellation and Crowning with Thorns
Fig. 3.3 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine, H 396, fol. 19r: Jesus and the Canaanite Woman
Fig. 3.4 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine, H 396, fol. 6r: Ask, Seek, Knock
Fig. 4.1 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 504, fol. 59v: codex owned by the German humanists Hermann and Hartmann Schedel
Fig. 4.2 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 3941, fol. 13r: codex from Gossembrot’s library, with two-column register on the “inventors of the arts”
Fig. 4.3 a Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, 2° Cod. 217, fol. 175v: codex from Gossembrot’s library, references on Sibylline Oracles also pointing to Boccaccio’s book on Famous Men. b Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, 36.19 Aug. 2°, fol. 188v: codex newly attributed to Gossembrot’s library, detail with numerous cross-references
Fig. 5.1 Theatrum Pictorium, 1660, frontispiece
3
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63
67
88
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112
Fig. 5.2 Nicolas de Pigage, La Galerie Électorale de Dusseldorff ou catalogue raisonné et fguré de ses tableaux, 1778, mural display 115
Fig. 5.3 Nicolas de Pigage, La Galerie Électorale de Dusseldorff ou catalogue raisonné et fguré de ses tableaux, 1778, title-page engraving drawn by Nicolas Guibal 116
Fig. 5.4 Thesaurus Brandenburgicus, 1696, frontispiece, vol. I 119
Fig. 5.5 Thesaurus Brandenburgicus, c. 1696, frontispiece, vol. II 120
Fig. 5.6 Thesaurus Brandenburgicus, 1701, frontispiece, vol. III 121
Fig. 5.7 Romeyn de Hooghes, title-page engraving for Nicolas Chevalier, Histoire Guillaume III par Medailles, Inscriptions, Arc de Triomphe, & autres monumens Publics, Amsterdam 1692 124
Fig. 6.1 Ventola engraving, after Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s La Grasse Cuisine and La Maigre Cuisine, published by Luca Bertelli, Venice 140
Fig. 6.2 La Grasse Cuisine, second edition, reversed engraving after Pieter van der Heyden (after Pieter Brueghel the Elder) by Hieronymus Cock 141
Fig. 6.3 Francesco Villamena, Il Bruttobuono, engraving, Rome, 1601
Fig. 6.4 Crédit est mort, engraving, anonymous copy of Il Bruttobuono by Francesco Villamena, Lyon, last quarter of the seventeenth century
Fig. 6.5 Francesco Villamena, Geminiano caldarrostaro, copy by Charles David, published by Pierre Firens, Paris, 1620–1630
Fig. 6.6 Portrait de M.r Ramponeau [sic] cabartier [sic] de la basse Courtille en bonet [sic] de nuit, etching and chisel engraving, published by Charpentier, Paris, March 1760
144
145
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147
Fig. 6.7 The Surpreising Bett Decided, etching, published by Carington Bowles, London, c. 1751 149
Fig. 7.1 Frank Mundell, Heroines of Daily Life. London: The Sunday School Union, 1886 168
Fig. 7.2 Alfred H. Miles (compiler), A Book of Brave Girls at Home and Abroad: True Stories of Courage and Heroism Shown in Modern Life by Women and Girls. London: Stanley Paul, (1909)
172
Fig. 8.1 Enrico Mazzanti, frontispiece for Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino, 1883 181
Fig. 8.2 Carlo Chiostri, drawing illustration for Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino, 1901 184
Fig. 8.3 Attilio Mussino, original drawing for Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino, 1911 187
Fig. 8.4 Piero Bernardini, blue cover with Pinocchio silhouette for Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino, 1942 192
Fig. 8.5 Lorenzo Mattotti, full-page plate, Pinocchio’s meeting with the Cat and the Fox. In Carlo Collodi, Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino, 2008 196
Fig. 8.6 Mimmo Paladino, serigraphy for the Cat and the Fox, In Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio. Le Avventure di Pinocchio, 2004 198
Table 9.1 Diagram of the narrator’s and the illustrator’s perspectives in Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl 216
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Evanghelia Stead
CuLturaL stories and Libraries
In central Bologna, the deconsecrated church of San Giorgio in Poggiale provides a long and eventful chronicle. Its many features also nourish a fascinating cultural allegory.
First recorded in writing in 1237, the church was founded in much older times, and is most probably of Longobard origin. The edifce, rebuilt in late Mannerist style under the mendicant order of the Servite friars between 1589 and 1633, is still preserved today. A monastery, added between 1641 and 1642, met with the fate of many other religious institutions in the Napoleonic wars, along with the church: it was suppressed, never to retrieve its sacred vocation either under private or public ownership. The church was, however, reconsecrated several times over the course of the nineteenth century. It re-opened intermittently, from 1824 to 1842, under the Franciscan order of the Frati Minori Conventuali (the Minorites or Greyfriars), and again after 1882 under the Jesuits. The coup de grâce came with the Second World War.
E. Stead (*)
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Guyancourt, France e-mail: evanghelia.stead@uvsq.fr
E. Stead (ed.), Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects, New Directions in Book History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53832-7_1
On 25 September 1943 it was heavily bombed and many of the splendid artworks it housed were either lost or destroyed. Desecrated, and even effaced from Bologna’s cultural memory, it faced demolition, but in recent years it has undergone two restorations, before fnally reopening as a library in 2009.1
Currently installed in the San Giorgio sanctuary, two artworks by the contemporary unclassifable Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani (1943–) mirror this turbulent storyline. The frst is a delocazione (“displacement”), the name Parmiggiani bestows on the traces of dust, soot, and smoke left by books or objects on the walls of memorable places.2 In San Giorgio’s semi-circular apse, shadowy outlines of books and shelves form three insubstantial bookcases looming from between slim Ionian pilasters. They were torched, imprinted with fre, and only the trace of their presence remains on the walls, impeccably restored and fnished in 2010. Resembling oversized silver-based photographs, or silver-plated daguerreotypes, they form Parmiggiani’s frst permanently visible displacement—former installations having never survived beyond their temporary exhibition. This ethereal, white-and-grey “fresco” serves as a backdrop to the second artwork, a portentous installation, now standing on the site of the vanished altar. A bell weighs down upon a squat, square bed of charred books. Christened Campo dei fori (Field of Flowers), the monumental tribute alludes, among other things, to the death of Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake.3
The ghostly “bookcases” and the hefty sculpture, materialized in space as vast metaphors in subtle dialogue with each other and with us, commemorate the bombing and gutting of the church, the silencing of the bell, all the while affrming their presence and renewed existence. In their contrast and tension, they remind us that books are as much solid bricks as they are symbolic voices and evocative spirits. In this volume, we look at them as objects, as media, as metaphors, and as symbols. By transferring ideas and structuring worlds through their rich materiality, they are seminal agents in the construction and reconstruction of culture. Just as the inside of San Giorgio was obliterated but today accommodates a library, the original shapes and forms of books may survive and undergo many transformations (Fig. 1.1).
Parmiggiani’s artworks not only refect upon time, wreckage, and change, they also invoke the mutability of books, both conceptually and materially. As a twinned gesture in a desecrated space, they evoke a rich cultural story of traceable deposits that bind the works of art to the refurbished space
Fig. 1.1 Claudio Parmiggiani, Campo dei Fiori (Field of Flowers) and Delocazione (Displacement), courtesy of the artist. Collections Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, Biblioteca d’Arte e di Storia di San Giorgio in Poggiale, Genus Bononiae Musei nella Città
and to its books and prints suggesting novel uses and virtual potential. San Giorgio in Poggiale today houses: Bologna’s Art and History Library, totalling 100,000 volumes from the 1500s to modern times; a periodical and newspaper collection from the eighteenth century to the present; and a photographic archive of some 60,000 prints pertaining to Bologna before it underwent major urban change. Access from the street is through a circular wooden drum that was conceived by the architect Michele De Lucchi (1951–) as a tower of books to exclude the city’s noise. The material and spiritual life cycle of a printed book from production to destruction is here complete: from paper, traditionally derived from lumber and rags, to volumes kindled, then conceptualized. The whole building reads as a vast metaphor, or, as Garrett Stewart would have it, a remarkable “bookwork” (Stewart 2011). Yet these volumes are no longer orphaned codex forms violently hijacked from their normal use, as in most of the cases studied by Stewart. In San Giorgio, materially wrecked objects and their conceptual reinterpretation have been relocated within a modern library’s collections.
Yet, San Giorgio is more than just an empty, echoing, cultural cell turned operational library. The lateral walls of the ex-church shelter a cycle of altar-like paintings by Piero Pizzi Cannella (1955–) baptised Cathedrals, alluding to other landmarks, either imaginary cities or real places. The library hosts conferences, talks, and cultural events, and is today one of Bologna’s important cultural venues. As such, it is part of the Genus Bononiae virtual network of urban museography, Bologna’s streets serving as hallways, and its historical edifces working as exhibition spaces with exhibits, all of which attest to the city’s contribution to the arts and sciences.4
From a rugged past there emerges a multi-layered identity and history. Both the San Giorgio library and Parmiggiani’s material and conceptual artworks address factual, physical, and symbolic representations of cultural objects. They feature as strong emblems the way this collective volume engages with books and prints as objects, media and metaphors. Hence the referential analogy, by way of introduction, to the recurrent phenomena this book investigates.
We set out to retrace here, across books and prints, cultural stories analysed in context and retold. The extreme, the growing value, even the perishable quality of cultural objects, all register and refect the passage of time, the rise and fall of trends, the changes in purpose, the shifting functions. As tangible and symbolic embodiments of culture, books and prints both mean and matter. They point to many uses, whether factual,
intellectual, or imaginary. Our particular interest is in addressing their past value and current heritage, textual, visual and object-specifc, from the fall of the Roman Empire to Amazon’s e-reader hardware.
The parable of San Giorgio in Poggiale, rife with intellectual and mythical reconstruction, takes us back to the practices of convent scriptoria, brings us through the deposits of a remembered past, the many layers of present physical printed matter, to suggest fnally translation into digital media through the Genus Bononiae network. Similarly, this book starts with medieval manuscripts, then turns to prints, investigates meanings and uses of printed matter, and closes with e-readership and digital books.
As a cornerstone of European culture, Bologna symbolizes the birth and building of universities in the Western world. Over the last 18 years, the “Bologna process”, adopted in 1999 by 29 countries with the aim of creating a European Higher Education Area, has brought students, academics, and educational systems into durable contact. It has fostered multi-disciplinary, life-long, and linguistic education through the promotion of circulation and exchange across Europe, thanks to information technologies and despite a dismissal as “Humboldt’s nightmare”.5 Likewise, events prior to this book brought together scholars from 6 European countries (Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Austria), cutting across specialities and felds of interest: medievalists encountered sixteenth-century experts, baroque connoisseurs and modernists; literary historians rubbed elbows with professionals of book and media studies; academics mingled with a collector (since sadly departed); literature scholars engaged with art historians; and all in answer to the preoccupations of cultural history. Research institutes for advanced studies provide such platforms as are necessary for interdisciplinary encounters, and the venture resulting in this publication originated as a conference held at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at Freiburg-im-Breisgau in July 2015.
Within this book’s wide, interdisciplinary perspective, we adopt no conventional divisions of language, country-specifc practices or print categories (collectable fne art versus the cheap and popular, for example). The editor is of course aware that the selection of chapters proposed here is mainly European-focussed with a few extensions reaching across the Atlantic to the USA in the West, and stretching in one case to Russia in the East. This, however, stems from the participants’ subject matter, not from
oversight. Many outstanding studies have opened new ways of investigating cultural history outside Europe and across the globe. Several Panizzi lectures have considered manuscripts and prints worldwide, from comparing Hebrew manuscripts between East and West (Beit-Arié 1993) to Arabic learning introduced into England (Burnett 1997), one turning to books in medieval China (Dudbridge 2000). To mention but two scholarly inquiries, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s Toward a Geography of Art (2004) has straddled the geographical dimension of art history in Europe, Latin America, and Asia during the early modern period, opening methodological vistas not only in art history but also in cultural geography. Equally stemming from geography, Sean Roberts’s Printing in a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography (2013) shows how political and intellectual culture renegotiated the heritage of classical antiquity when manuscripts turned into printed books, copperplate engraving emerged, and remarkable tailored copies travelled from Quattrocento Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici to Bayezid II’s court in Constantinople. Although Roberts does not refer primarily to Ottoman sources, he revisits relations between early modern Italy and the Ottoman state in their respective views of the world. And I would have been keen to add to the present volume a chapter on the travels of The Arabian Nights around the globe across manuscripts as well as printed and illustrated matter—a fascinating topic that is only just being investigated.6
However, although grounded in Europe, this volume’s interest and scope lies beyond its specifc subject matter in the way it can be relevant to future research both inside and outside Europe. Many of its particular chapters could be case studies to be continued, carried over, or renewed in other parts of the world, as they build not only on new research material, but, more importantly, on an interdisciplinary methodological stance, each author enhancing his or her home discipline with a broader approach.
Several moments chart threshold periods: the late Middle Ages, early humanism, early precursors of art publications, illustrated books from the industrial age, book consumerism in the twentieth century, contemporary e-reading. Just as Parmiggiani’s works of art are both material and conceptual, our aim for this book is to conceptualize how “the material culture of ideas” (Sharpe 2000, 39) relates to reading; how physical books and prints reveal tendencies and developments, past and present,
while disclosing their changing signifcance over time. To what extent do form and content, message and medium, respond to material, conceptual, symbolic and imaginary use? How do they point to specifc cultural narratives or tales?
the driLL of disCipLine
Our wide-angle approach encompasses a feld rich in accomplishments, rife with debate. From the 1980s, intense disciplinary discussions have sought the best path towards writing “the history of books” (Darnton 1982)—a translation of the French term histoire du livre, not always engaging to anglophone ears.7 There are three major competing disciplines in this arena: History (privileging cultural transactions), Bibliography (focussing on material artefacts), and Literary Studies (prioritizing literary texts). Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit of the book”, epitomizing the transactions between author, publisher, shippers and agents, booksellers and readers, is a well-known attempt to formalize the feld and prevent the disciplines from “running riot”. The role of reading however, was wanting in this model, as Darnton himself acknowledged: “reading remains the most diffcult stage to study in the circuit that books follow” (Darnton 1982, 16). Several innovative contributions have since made reading studies a leading area in contemporary research, from Roger Chartier’s work constructed around four constants—authors, texts, books, and readers8— to Martyn Lyons’s A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World (2010), Palgrave Macmillan’s series on The History of Reading (2011), and an identical title in the “Routledge Literature Readers” series (Towheed et al. 2011).
Eleven years after Darnton’s infuential essay, analytical bibliography made its own claim to recognition. Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker promoted an alternative model of circulation, arguing compellingly that the life of a book does not begin with writing any more than it ends with reading. Signifcantly, their book cycle begins with publication and goes on to reception and survival, but does not end there. It is graphically set at the very heart of “the whole socio-economic conjuncture”, seen as four spheres exerting radial pressure on the core life cycle of the book. The spheres correspond to: (a) intellectual infuences; (b) political, legal, and religious infuences; (c) commercial pressures; and (d) social behaviour and taste. This counter-model, aiming to capture the total signifcance of books, mainly privileges print culture,
“something printed or written in multiple copies”, produced “for public consumption” (Adams and Barker 1993, 51). In other words, it excludes manuscripts, be they medieval copyists’ productions or unique unpublished scripts, and was conceived in the pre-digital era. Akin to Darnton’s graph, it schematizes affairs and relationships diagrammatically. And models, though necessary to visualize, formalize, and represent theories, “have a way of freezing human beings out of history” (Darnton 1982, 11).
Peter D. McDonald would in turn emphasize human interactions in 1997 with his British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914, as Leslie Howsam notes (Howsam 2006, 38f). By applying Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural theory of the literary feld to book history, McDonald provides the cyclical actions with relationships and structures. Writers, critics, publishers, printers, distributors, and readers endow Darnton’s circuit with genuine life; texts are not only meanings and ideas to be interpreted, but “radically situated, for Bourdieu, as material forms with a specifc status in the [literary] feld” (McDonald 1997, 13, quoted by Howsam 2006, 38). Transitory commercial, cultural, and intellectual situations take on a new signifcance.
Mapping the feld, discussing its methodological principles, and identifying key notions, these useful contributions also reveal the diffculty in providing a full portrayal of books and prints as cultural objects, and in rendering their roles or agency. While the historian’s and the bibliographer’s grids capture crucial aspects of the book industry and technology, they are based either on the book as product, commodity, or artefact (Darnton), or on the book as object of inquiry, in an attempt to have Bibliography recognized as a sovereign academic discipline (Adams and Barker). The question of what books may achieve as cultural agents is not tackled. Leslie Howsam has importantly observed that, frstly, Darnton’s focus is on the book trade; his main interest lies in the book’s material production and distribution and he means to explore the history of communication, not develop a history of culture (Howsam 2006, 31–32). Secondly, still according to Howsam, by concentrating on events, Adams and Barker undertook to establish bibliographic truth, provide an accurate text, and follow its transmission. The “reading public or the broader culture is cast in passive terms”, and “the social context” in which the book emerged “drops to the background” (ibid., 15). Despite their ambitious approach, Adams and Barker deem that “understanding of reception is episodic and scattered”. Reception itself is
a “theme”, “a passive thing”, not a process (Adams and Barker 1993, 60 and 58). Their recurring comparison of Bibliography with Archaeology clearly does not favour the book’s impact or infuence. Lastly, McDonald intends “to re-think and re-write literary criticism” and, by reconstructing the literary feld, “stress the complexity of a literary culture” (Howsam 2006, 39).
This collection also builds on literary and artistic culture with a difference: by combining literary analysis and looking at how books and prints are shaped by design, format, uses, and, later, marketing, it investigates their impact on cultural trends; similarly, it explores how cultural trends shape the reading and deciphering of books and prints. Books and prints may well be the outcome or consequence of procedures, transactions, or trades (as well as a witness to the legitimacy and strength of Bibliography); still, they concern us here as active and complex representatives of culture through their manifold uses and many-sided reading processes.
Since McDonald, an alternative to the “History of Books” has emerged in the form of “Book Studies”. The breadth implied by the term has proved appropriate for this book. True, in Jonathan Rose’s words, Book Studies represents “a new academic feld to explore the past, present, and future of all forms of written and printed communications” that “would bring together, under one interdisciplinary umbrella, specialists in book history, the book arts, publishing education, textual studies, reading instruction, librarianship, journalism, and the Internet, and teach all these subjects as an integrated whole” (Rose 2003, 12, my emphasis). Admittedly, when Book Studies is merely understood as “a dual discipline”, encompassing “Book History and Book Arts” (Stepanova 2007), signifcant phenomena, such as the effects of reading or the complexity of literary culture, are still sidelined. And it has been asked whether Book Studies is not “merely an interdisciplinary academic program” rather than a “free-standing discipline” (Stepanova 2007). The latter question, however, concerns more the structure of academia than Book Studies as the research stance we propose here. This book aims to show its research benefts. As I have already argued regarding periodicals, it may not be necessary to establish yet another free-standing discipline. “Discipline” implies rules and sanction. Books (and, in the broadest sense, manuscripts, periodicals, and prints) invite switching disciplines in order to cross-exchange views and interrelate objects, uses, and fashions. Should yet another specialist feld emerge, it would, in the
effort to be peer-recognized, necessarily generate rules, scopes, aims, issues, and so on, and diligently so. We are suffciently supplied with disciplines to be able to explore books, prints, and periodicals, and understand how they work as cultural objects. More pertinently, should we not consider how books and prints challenge our disciplinary criteria (Stead 2015)?
This challenge is addressed here by asking more modestly “What do books and prints do as cultural objects?” while moving from constructive dialogue between disciplines to interdisciplinarity. We attempt this without promoting yet another scheme or study model, or giving ourselves a further scientifc identity. Commercial, cultural, and intellectual exchanges are transitory: our approach needs to be supple enough to adapt and remain fexible. An approach is not a fxed attitude, and research is not a position (a location, rank, posture, or set argument), even if it often leads to academic appointment, status, or employment. It may, however, gain strength and fnesse by adjusting to objects—starting with a close examination of their materiality. Conversely, disciplinary discussion may simply derive from an anxiety of academia as an institution, rather than being a search for interpretative improvement. Bonnie Mak argues that systems of classifcation may be “transformed into representatives of different categories of knowledge, and even come to signify knowledge itself” (Mak 2011, 56). Since Book Studies covers substantially different historical periods, dissimilar media and varied situations, it is crucial not to fx and batten down its means of investigation and the directions it may take. The authors in this collection, challenged by their very objects of study, have adopted interdisciplinary approaches while striving to provide a comprehensive survey in each particular historical context. Books and prints are already demonstrable cultural agents in this sense.
Book Studies implies a long list of felds well implemented and investigated by specialists: Book History; Materiality and Printing Studies (frequently called Analytical or Descriptive Bibliography); Book Arts; Media History and Internet Studies; Literature and Publishing Histories; Histories of Education, Librarianship and Journalism; Social, Economic and Political History affecting the book trade and interacting with it; Digital Humanities; the Social History of Reading, and Textual Studies—to name but the most prominent. We have chosen a broad chronological approach here, with each study calling on two disciplines, if not three. Is this cross-disciplinary approach “poaching” (Howsam
2006, 37)? Admittedly, Michel de Certeau did not disdain braconnage (“poaching”) in his elaborations on cultural theory and everyday life (De Certeau 1980, 279–296).
Such an approach informs a book published in 2012 under the title La Chair du Livre: Matérialité, Imaginaire et Poétique du Livre Fin-desiècle (The Flesh of the Book: Materiality, Imagination and Poetics of the Fin-de-Siècle Book). In this, thanks to the productive metaphor of the book as fesh, it is argued that print culture is based on much more than the reader’s intellect: it relies on his or her senses and imagination. Print and visual culture is explored in relation to the rich materiality of fn de siècle publications and inserted in “a network of cultural and metaphorical associations woven into nineteenth-century book culture” (Arnar 2014, 474). When print culture is probed both literally and fguratively, and an iconographical or metaphorical analysis combines with critical discourse, books and prints prove to be much more than a depository of formats, techniques, materials, or illustration styles: they are the very hub of cultural metaphors that throw light onto visual and literary experimentation. Starting from a plurality of methodologies, materiality, fgurative imagination, and poetics have thus proved a threefold way to look at books and prints as telling objects of cultural history. Addressing sophisticated and mechanical printing, deluxe and low-priced realizations, that study even extended to writing instruments in Suetonius’s The Lives of the Twelve Caesars; Marcel Schwob’s bust, modelled as book-ends that defned the breadth of his private library; as well as Schwob’s medieval and early modern books, which creatively informed his modern writing, anticipating Borges. The question thus arose: Could books and prints then be studied in similar ways across periods and in other media than those proper to the fn de siècle? FRIAS welcomed this idea in the broader context of the ongoing project on Goethe’s Faust I print culture.9
This volume is one consecutive answer. In the wake of James O’Donnell’s and Roger Chartier’s previous contributions,10 traditional boundaries according to media and periodicity have here been suspended. Manuscripts, prints, printed matter and digital media are considered as silent but powerful European, and sometimes transatlantic, messengers, as cultural objects “bearing in their pages the boundaries of their possible reception”.11 Intersemiotic relationships arise from the ways their parts combine: content with container, inside with outside, text with image and ornament, binding with ideas and purport,
contextuality with intertextuality, genotype with phenotype. Grounded in materiality, the chapters offered look at reading processes, imaginary representations, and circulation.
MateriaLity, reading, representation, and CirCuLation
Each study starts from the material forms in which wording and art are constituted and transmitted. The material characteristics of prints and books are consistently central to their meaning—this is a key methodological stance. Accordingly, the detailed examination of the physical constitution of written and printed matter leads, in a few cases, to deciphering specifc objects; in other, more numerous cases, the material characteristics of prints and books become the connective tissue between communities of readers. But the anatomy of an object would fall short of the mark, if it did not release its imaginative energy. Materiality may be intimately bound to the ideas it expresses and carries. Careful, conscious designs may converge to constitute trends, and these change signifcantly over time. Investigations conducted in archives, or the anchoring of material relationships, thus allow for restaging activities in new intellectual, political and social contexts, thanks to the numerous connections between readers and objects of study.
We look at reading frstly by deciphering books through use, and by pairing materiality and concept. In this process, reading, whether of manuscripts, prints, or tablets, is seen as the vibrant part of the intellectual pursuit. Object matter engages with immaterial meaning in a mutually dynamic relationship. From the book’s implementation (books as objects) to its energy released through individual or collective reading (books coming to life), books and prints engage “with the aesthetics of reception but by displacing and enlarging its aim” (Chartier 1985, 81).12 Secondly, we follow the changing roles of books over time. They are not only historical documents bearing the traces of the past, but agents of knowledge, aesthetic import, and imaginative intellect. Thirdly, the wealth of humanist culture from antiquity to modern times is represented by interrelated reading. Michael Stolz underlines the density of humanist reading: not just the mind’s encounters with texts while reading, but also with remembered reading, and reading circumstances rooted in previous reading scenes. Similarly, our title, Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects, combines internal and external reading processes: the researcher’s gaze, the readers’ experience, and
the multi-layered scenes that are read involving other readings. Reading embedded in material culture is prolonged by electronic reading: on the one hand, digital texts are consumed by contemporary readers; on the other, e-text providers monitor this very readership in turn to constitute reading communities or gather representative samples for advertisement campaigns from the information collected electronically.
Furthermore, this book extends former publications on books studied alongside images. The 2002 special issue “Reading with Images in Nineteenth-Century Europe” showed that images in books fully partake in literary reading: they enable the author to write with images; they empower the reader through visual spurs; and they endow the book itself with a spectacular dimension (Stead ed. 2002). Images may relate to the text structurally, indicate peak moments, or connect with other images (just as texts do in intertextuality). The 2014 special issue of Word & Image on “Imago & Translatio” looked into the translation of literary works in Europe alongside artistic rendition, simultaneously considering transfer from language to language and from language to images from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, while discussing circulation patterns and publishing tendencies. This gave rise to a self-imposed methodology, at the crossroads of Literature and Art History, Semiotics and Translation Studies, as well as Visual Culture and Literature Studies (Stead and Védrine eds. 2014).
Expanding on these investigations, several chapters in this volume explore reading with images from the Middle Ages to modern times, while one chapter examines how prestige prints encounter the book. Reading with images depends on additions (ornament, insert plates, in-text images) or self-standing prints. It may give rise to various book genres. Frequently understood as illustration (i.e. explanation, demonstration, or illumination), such limitative branding may be misleading when texts decked with images produce intricate intersemiotic relations, expand or contradict textual meaning. The relevance of the term “illustration” may also be challenged. There may be many books within a single book, as there are many meanings and dimensions within a given print. And when “artworks on paper” (drawings, engravings, lithographs, reproductions) circulate extensively between countries, then media and art history are further enriched.
Books and prints are, however, not just objects or media. An important part of their life relates to the imagination. As Ernst Robert Curtius famously showed, books and writing, as symbols, play a seminal part in
Western culture from antiquity to the end of the Enlightenment (Curtius 1953). This argument has been taken further in the mass-printing age and recast in Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012). Large-scale changes and a new cultural status drive books into other uses than reading: they become fashion accessories, wastepaper, wrapping for food or props—a medium for social interaction. They involve “rejection theory” (rather than reception theory). In this collection we attempt to look at several sides of the metaphorical and symbolic associations involved.
This complex process may lie in the book’s very materiality: to insert valuable materials in a volume (such as a bone plaque much later added in a medieval manuscript psalter, as H. Lähnemann shows) is to imagine a modest book’s other self by imitating the ivory of representational manuscripts’ lavish bindings. Material embellishment could have connoted spiritual devotion, the soul’s commitment; but, in the case of this particular object, at the time it is inserted, it refects instead antiquarian infatuation. Moreover, books function as metaphors. They partake of the way humans construct notions of truth, existence, the world, life itself. As Kevin Sharpe argues, “the texts, discourses and performances by which a culture structures the chaos of experience are the representations of the world that become the only reality that human beings can know” (Sharpe 2000, 11). As bearers of such phenomena, books and prints epitomize “cultural history” “between practices and representations”—to echo an eloquent title by Roger Chartier (Chartier 1988). If the “world as representation” is “fashioned by means of the series of discourses” (ibid., 11), books are a central means to fathoming and understanding a culture. Equally essential to representation, prints act as clusters of images that structure the imagination and bear on the psyche. They carry innovation, established conventions, or revolutionary belief. Reading and picturing processes are the channels through which texts, myths, and imaginary patterns are transmitted, read, re-read, and remediated in different contexts and over time. Their twin energies stimulate the imagination, just as they transform and shape experience, belief, or confgurations of the world.
Such processes depend largely on circulation and dissemination. In this book, we investigate inter alia the movement of prayer books from the Medingen convents across lands and centuries; the reinterpretation (and displacement) of texts through illustrated and translated editions of Schnitzler’s works across Austria, Great Britain, and the USA; as well
as the transformation of prints between genres and cultures, thanks to pedlars and hawkers. European cultural exchanges existed very early, well before our global digitized culture. To show books and prints as agents between cultures is seminal. Traditional nationally based approaches to documentation limit reception, restrict investigation, and distort perception, since they prevent dissimilarities, distinctions, or even disparities from exerting their refning infuence on the elaboration of theory. This volume shows that prints and books refect the encounter, divergence, and overlapping of cultures. Questions of production, reception, transformation, and circulation of aesthetic and cultural models are brought to the fore. Rather than putting the emphasis on a unifed feld, this volume stresses journeys, movement, and changing categories. Reading itself is both a spiritual and a physical movement. Early modern readers engage with negotiation, that is textual and remembered interchange that transcends barriers of origin, space, and time. Similarly, quality categories and hierarchies are tested: we take into account originals, variants, replicas, and serialization processes. Finally, we turn to books and prints as complex and self-referential cultural agents that change from cultural objects into cultural emblems. Cultural emblems nourish the mythical dimension of the book object itself, and the last two chapters challenge this mythifcation of the book.
reading CuLturaL objeCts over tiMe
Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects extends its reach from the Middle Ages to the twenty-frst century, and is divided into four parts according to questions of media: manuscripts, prints, mechanically printed books, and e-readers. Each part contains two to four chapters. Part IV serves as an ample conclusion, more speculative in nature, and which may also be read as a foreword to digital reading practices. This arrangement works more as reversible counterpoint than strict chronology. As will be immediately obvious to the reader, chronological order is not always strictly respected within a section. For instance, Part I, on manuscript culture, might have begun with a piece on a fourteenth-century devotional booklet rather than with the ffteenth-century Medingen prayer books. By the same token, Part II, on prints, ought to have opened with the circulation of cheap print culture from the sixteenth century onwards rather than with baroque reproductions of princely galleries. In both cases, the chronological inversion is the consequence
of the methodological questions raised by this volume. By encompassing three media-driven periods, the scope of Lähnemann’s study on the Medingen manuscripts announces our investigation from medieval times to the digital age. To examine prestigious copperplates glorifying political personalities before derivative, far-travelling imagery, infnitely adjustable to use and context, works counteractively to the status of such worthies’ galleries. The inverse contrapuntal order in Part II mirrors rival, yet complementary, categories. In Part I, the profusion of cultural practices around the Medingen manuscripts is apt justifcation. In both instances, inversions echo our wide-ranging approach to book and print culture. Put differently, chapters in each part engage with specifc media in complementary ways and address questions relevant to specialist dialogue. Nevertheless, they articulate problems that clearly transcend periodicity, medium-specifcity, and specialisms.
Part I focusses on manuscripts while addressing reading practices in contexts that are monastic and antiquarian (H. Lähnemann), devotional (H. Manuwald), or early humanist (M. Stolz). In Chap. 2, Henrike Lähnemann follows the prayer books made by ffteenth-century Cistercian nuns in the Medingen convents through to the twentyfrst century. The nuns individually plied script, ornament, prayers, and hymns to express worship, although common devotional features may also be discerned. In their material and spiritual identities, these booklets are cultural handbooks: not only manuals in the current sense, but strong expressions of personal soul and body devotion by the handmaidens of God, schooled and trained in the convent. To be fully grasped, their rich materiality transcends descriptive bibliography. It points to symbolic uses. Materializing the word thus employs parchment, for animal skin best befts the word made fesh, just as scraping the manuscript to use it anew embodies conventual reform and renewal. That a patchwork—a motley of cloth and sewn-on scrolls forming an antependium (altar cloth)—leads to the discovery of a rich array of prayer books now dispersed throughout Europe and also over the Atlantic, shows how deeply cultural history relies on textual heritage—texts and textiles, according to the etymology (“text” comes from “texere”, “to weave”). Such practices are not unique or exclusive to Medingen. In the frst half of the twentieth century, Clelia Marchi, a peasant woman from Poggio Rusco near Mantua, wrote her diary on a 2 m-wide bed sheet, now a jewel in the collection of the National Diary Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano near Arezzo, along a Memory Route.13 Her diary
is today available in print form.14 Textual culture transcends books, just as books are a part of broader cultural trends. That thread indeed leads a long way. The Medingen path of manuscripts winds through faith, doctrinal and historical ruptures, and emerging specialisms. Religious transformations and historical turning points encounter nascent academic disciplines: Antiquarianism, the building of museum collections, German Studies, Philology, Codicology, Linguistics, and Musicology. The prayer books encourage manifold perusal: they may be read as expressions of personal faith; mirrors of religious engagement and reform; collectors’ cherished treasures; items hoarded by museums to signal cultural shifts; pieces of disciplinary implementation; or as testimony to politics, institutionalization, and internationalization.
Not all manuscripts or books, however, provide such plentiful information. In research, abundance of evidence and scarcity may jostle, as at the opening of Part I, enhancing its contrapuntal structure. In Chap. 3, Henrike Manuwald discusses an enigmatic case, a minuscule picture book from central Germany dating from the frst half of the fourteenth century and now in one of the libraries in Montpellier, indecipherable by manuscript type, of unknown production, and pointing to unknown cultural practices—such as re-memorizing the Gospels through pictures and abbreviated texts in vernacular German. In many pages, images take the lead over text. To modern eyes, the meaning emerging from textual abbreviations and pictorial signs would make of the booklet a series of punning riddles or rebuses. Not so to the medievalist. Manuwald turns to modern theory, namely cultural accomplishments as discussed in media and cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken). The actor-network model, in which an object shapes or even creates an action, spurs comparison of the Montpellier manuscript with other objects of the period (folding calendars; almanacs; books of liturgy; collections of Gospel excerpts, known as pericopes). The three related parts of the booklet exemplify further dimensions of reading: the decoding of symbols or mnemonics; material signs alluding to an immaterial text; the function of textual and pictorial abbreviations; word and image complementing each other, and intertextually relating to the Gospels. Original and later uses point again to multilayered reading practices. Combinations of images and pericopes in the vernacular attest to both lay and clerical readings. The author stresses the shared cultural competences of the time, individual meditative or ruminative reading, and even emotional engagement
with the biblical stories (devils defaced). However small, the Montpellier booklet well refects the extensive power of books.
Chapter 4 leafs through depictions of reading in Italy and Germany. Michael Stolz considers reading scenarios in Europe from late antiquity to early humanism. His investigation extends from Saint Augustine (reading Saint Paul and Antonius’s vita) to early German humanists (reading in their libraries) via Petrarch returning to Saint Augustine and reading Boccaccio, who himself leads on to Chaucer and Christine de Pizan. Thanks to the contrapuntal pattern of otium/negotium, intimate considerations and private, self-reliant, intention supplement social exchange and the interaction of ideas in cultural representations of reading: remembered reading, reading embedded in other reading scenes, hasty reading accompanied by commentary, translation, public assessment, as well as multiple cross-referencing. This bustling activity highlights the antecedence of performances that current automated feats sometimes advertise as very modern. The swift interchange of ideas is not just mental but again also physical, as signalled by the use of the Latin verb currere (to run), pairing physicality and concept. As the common denominator of circulation and commerce (negotium), movement reminds us that Hermes, messenger of the gods, is equally the wingfooted god of trade. Interestingly, in the wake of early humanist transactions, a new awareness of fction emerges when Sigismund Gossembrot opts for the ‘other’ truth to be found in poets’ works and invention as opposed to religious verity. Is not Hermes, though, the god of wily fbbers as well? Should he not be seen as the deity of make-believe?
A detail in Stolz’s essay provides the transition from Part I to Part II, which turns to images and circulation. The humanist Hermann Schedel comments, when reading, on retexere (“weaving anew”—a further bond between textual reading and interlacing) by lining up functions commonly attributed to images, particularly illustration: retexere is explained as “clarifying”, “denuding”, or “exposing”, “reporting omitted things”, “making obvious” or “public”, and, most fttingly, as “opening”. What, then, would images add to reading processes? As already pointed out, the objects of study in Part II could not be more antithetical: on the one hand, pricey and elaborate engravings are seen to confer the highest praise and honour; on the other hand, studying low-cost, broadly distributed imagery can provide genuine insight into widespread uses and tendencies. Substantial material differences enhance the social and technical aspects: the expensive prints embrace the book format in
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And so he did.
Kind-hearted Grant first gave him a doze of something, which I know well but must not mention, then a tumblerful of good champagne, and in five minutes' time poor little Mr. Todd was wrapt in dreamless slumber.
There were two more of Neptune's young children who wanted seeing to. Having done so, Grant went aloft again.
Then Creggan went to his quarters.
"Come along, sir," cried one of three bold middies who sat around the gun-room table when Creggan drew back the curtain; "come along, and have a hand at whist."
"Thank you, messmates, but I must feed first."
"Steward!"
"Ay ay, sorr," said an unmistakably Irish voice. "That's me, myself, sorr;" and a tallish, smart fellow, with black buttons on his short jacket, and a blue ground to his beardless face, entered the mess.
"Bring in the beef, and all kinds of fixings."
"Any dhrink, sorr?"
"No drink, thanks. What's your name?"
"M'Carthy, sorr, sure enough."
"Well, Mac, heave round."
"Be back afore ye could say knife, sorr."
Creggan made a capital supper. Then he had just one game to please the youngsters.
"I'm dying with sleep, boys," he said, "so I'll turn in. Ta-ta, see you all in the morning."
He departed, leaving them singing, and, turning in, was soon sound and fast. And thus he slept till called to keep the morning watch.
It was a little cold, but Creggan had bent on his thickest pilot jacket, and the second lieutenant soon came stumping up, and he also had on his foulweather gear.
But the wind had gone down considerably, and with it the sea. She had lost way, too. So Mellor sent men aloft to loosen and shake out sails. The effect was magical, and with the wind well abaft the beam the Osprey pulled herself together, threw off dull sloth and went through the water like a thing of life. All along the top-gallant bulwarks forward, the spray was sprinkled as the good ship spurned the billows, but nothing came aft.
Mr. Mellor, the lieutenant, a round-faced, fair-haired young Cornishman, strode up and down the deck talking, and smoking a short clay. Creggan and he were swapping yarns—humorous yarns mostly—and exchanging experiences, and were soon as well acquainted as if they had known each other for years.
Soon after five bells, a light was seen gradually spreading over the eastern horizon, getting higher and higher momentarily. It looked at first like the reflection of a far-off city on a dark night.
But the light grew whiter and brighter.
It was gray dawn now. Then high up in the west a streak of a cloud began to glow with orange and crimson beauty. Rolling clouds on the horizon astern were lit up with a fringe of gold and carmine. Then all the east became a glory of colour that was almost dazzling, but very beautiful. The god of day was rising, and this dazzlingly-painted orient formed the curtains of his couch.
Soon now, red and fiery, his beams spread in a path of blood across the sea, and lo! it was day.
Both Creggan and Mellor spent that watch very pleasantly, and before going below the latter held out his hand, and Creggan gladly grasped it.
"Good-bye," said Mellor. "We're going to be friends, you know."
CHAPTER XVII.
MESS-ROOM FUN.
The gun-room mess of H.M.S. Osprey was by no means an overcrowded one—three middies, an assistant-paymaster, a clerk, another sub-lieutenant, Mr. Wickens,[1] and Creggan himself.
[1] My prototype for this young officer was Sydney Dickens, the son of the great novelist, with whom I was shipmate, the dearest little fellow I ever knew. G.S.
One middie did not really belong to the mess. He was a supernumerary, going out to join the flag-ship on the South American coast.
Midshipman Robertson was a funny little fellow. Not bad-looking, but choke-full of merriment and ideas for practical jokes, and when he talked to his messmates down below, he always screwed his face into puckers and dimples with the laughter he tried in vain to conceal. He was an Edinburgh boy, while young O'Callaghan, the supernumerary, came from Killarney, and was just as Irish as the steward.
Many a droll logomachy used to take place at dinner-time between little Scottie and this Killarney lad. All in fun, of course.
Young Bobbie, as he was called, delighted to tease Paddy O'Callaghan.
"Oh, don't give Paddy another morsel!" cried Bobbie one day at dinner, as the Irish boy passed his plate to sub-lieutenant Sidney Wickens for another slice of beef.
"And why not, you Dougal Crayture?"[2] cried O'Callaghan.
[2] The red-haired Highlander in Scott's tale of "Rob Roy"
"For your own sweet sake, Paddy. I really must look after you. Coming from a land of potatoes and buttermilk and—want and woe, overindulgence in the roast beef of Old England might have serious consequences. Indeed, indeed it might."
"Want yourself! I hurl the insinuation back. Sure, it wasn't for want that I came here."
"No, Paddy, no,—because you had too much of that at home, you know."
And the laugh was all against poor Paddy this time.
When the plum-pudding came on that day, again Bobbie held up a warning finger.
"Mind what I told you, Paddy," he said solemnly, "or I'll have to write to your mother, and she'll take you back home to look after the pigs."
"Sure it's yourself that should go home," retorted O'Callaghan. "If all reports be true, you'd make more money in bonnie Scotland than here."
"But how, Paddy darlint?"
"How? Is it yourself that asks? Didn't the Duke of Argyle—God bless him—put up rubbing-stones in every field? Well, you'd make a dacint living
if you just stood beside one and sold butter and brimstone. That's for you this time!"
After the first storm the weather became glorious. A splendid breeze, that filled every sail, blew over the sparkling sea—a breeze that made every sailor's heart beat with joy, a breeze that made every man-Jack lithe and active, ay, and happy, bringing merry laughter to the lips and song from the very heart.
Captain Leeward was very proud of his ship.
"She isn't much of a fighter perhaps, you know," he said, "and I dare say a shell or two from a big gun would speedily rip her up, but she is comfortable and dry and nice, and for all the world like a yacht, and so I love her."
"You wouldn't be a sailor if you didn't, sir," said Grant, whom he was addressing. "But I never saw a ship before so prettily finished, both on the upper and fighting decks. The Lords Commissioners have been good to you."
"Ha, ha!" laughed the captain. "It is little indeed you can get out of them. I did the decorations—extra paint and gilding, and all that—out of my own pocket, doctor."
"You have zeal for the Service, then?"
"Not a bit of it. The Admiralty hold out no encouragement for men to be zealous. But I have zeal for my own comfort, and you won't catch me in a box-heater (ironclad), or a torpedo-boat either, if I can help it."
In the captain's private cabin was a large sealed box of private despatches. This, on being opened, was found to contain letters for warships both at the Azores and Bermuda. So the vessel's course was changed to a more southerly direction, and on she sped, with stun'sails set.
Well might Leeward be proud of the appearance of his ship's decks. Brass-work shone like burnished gold; hard wood glittered like boatman beetles. Never a rope's-end was left uncoiled; the decks themselves, scrubbed early every morning, were as white as piano-keys, and so were even the capstan bars; while the sailors themselves, with their brown, hardy faces, were dressed in white trousers and jackets of blue.
It was not a temperance ship, yet, although the man who did the day's cooking for each mess of sixteen men had a plentiful allowance of rum, no one was ever reported by the master-at-arms as being even a trifle the worse of drink. On fine evenings Captain Leeward encouraged games. Ship's quoits was a favourite pastime, so was the running high-leap; hop-step-andjump; and leap-frog, once begun, would be kept up all round the deck till the men were ready to drop. Of course, with the swaying of the ship, the men had many a tumble, but this only added to the general mirth and merriment.
Don't imagine, dear reader, that the gun-room officers took no part in these sports. They couldn't keep out of them, and Paddy and little Scottie might have been seen vaulting over each other, time about, as if their very lives depended on it.
Dr. Grant must have his little joke at times, and one day he announced to the officers of the gun-room mess that he was in a mood to offer a first, second, and third prize for the winners at standing high-leap.
Next forenoon the sports came off. Well, the ship that day was rolling rather, so that it was a difficult thing to stand at all.
However, everyone had the same chance, so the game came off. Creggan made a fairly good third, but Paddy and Bobbie tied for first.
"It's you and me, old stupidnumerary," cried Scottie. "You first. Ignis via —fire away!"
The rod was lowered several pegs, and the "stupid-numerary" cleared it easily.
So did Bobbie.
Up another peg, again the same, and so on till some inches over four feet.
Now, as Paddy was about to leap, the ship gave a bit of a bob, and the poor "stupidnumerary" kicked off the rod and fell on the softest part of his body.
"Hurrah!" cried Bobbie. "Scotland's going to clear it!"
He waited a few seconds till the Osprey was on an even keel, then sprang over it like a bird.
He had won, and the cheering was deafening, even Hurricane Bob the Newfoundland and Oscar joined in and made the welkin ring, while Bobbie pretended to clap his wings and crow.
Then all hands, including the victorious trio, drew aft to be present at the distribution of the prizes.
"Midshipman Robertson—First Prize."
Bobby sprang forward with alacrity and received—a mustard leaf.
"What is this for?" he said, with a droll look.
"Damp it," said the doctor, "and put it on your face to make you blush. I'm sure nothing else can."
"Midshipman O'Callaghan—Second Prize."
Up came the supernumerary and received—an ounce of Epsom salts.
"But, doctor, dear," cried Paddy, "what am I to do with them, at all, at all?"
"Swallow them, lad, to draw the blood from your head.
"Third Prize—a box of rhubarb pills."
Creggan laughed.
"Pills," said Dr. Grant, "and medicine of nearly every sort, are the best things in the world for the inside—of a rat's hole."
Creggan thanked him, and retired.
That evening the captain gave a dinner-party, invited to which were Creggan, Grant, and the second lieutenant.
It was a pretty little dinner. The captain's cook was really a chef, and the steward a smart young fellow from Austria, whom he had picked up at a London hotel, and who now acted also in the capacity of valet and took the greatest interest in all his master said and did. They say that no man is ever a hero to his valet, but it is the exception that proves the rule.
Antonio Brisha was that exception.
Both Hurricane Bob and Oscar were among the invited guests to the dinner-party.
Now there was only one drawback to Hurricane Bob's presence either outside or inside the captain's quarters. He was so black that the steward, who, when the ship was rolling a bit had to keep his eye on the dish he was carrying so as to balance it, could not see him in the gloaming, and more than once he had tumbled right over the honest dog, while the dish was smashed and the joint of meat continued the journey on its own account.
On such occasions Antonio used to say "Bother!" only he said it more so.
But on this particular evening everything passed off delightfully. When told they must behave, "Oh, certainly, sir", the dogs seemed to reply, and Hurricane Bob at once jumped up and on to the captain's beautiful sofa— the room was furnished like a lady's boudoir.
But Oscar, with his bonnie face and long sable coat, was not going to lie on the deck any more than his companion. So he not only leapt upon the sofa, but from thence on to the top of the piano, there lying down on the loose sheets of music with his chin upon his fore-paws, so that he commanded a bird's-eye view of the table and everything thereon—the snow-white cloth, the bright silver, the sparkling cruets and crystal, the flowers, and the fairy-lights.
"Oh, sir," cried Creggan half-rising, "shall I turn him out?"
"Not a bit of it. Let poor Oscar lie there, he has more good qualities than many a Christian."
Oscar moved not. But he shook his bushy tail by way of thanks.
During this delightful little dinner-party, the conversation was quite untrammelled by anything like conventionality—free and easy, as a sailor's dinner should be. No one attempted to restrain himself from laughing, if there was a good thing said; and, as is the case wherever sailors meet, the conversation changed from one tack to another, often going right about, like a ship in a sea-way, if any new subject suggested itself.
"Yes, Captain Leeward," said Grant, "I believe I will have another small slice of that most delicious beef. Ah, sir," he added, "I fear we won't live like this all the cruise. Fighting cocks aren't in it, sir."
The captain laughed as he helped his doctor.
"Ever been nearly starved, sir?"
"I can't really say I have. You?"
"Oh yes," replied the Doctor, "more than once. But on one occasion, while slaver-hunting on the East Coast of Africa in the little P——, our mess ran into debt. The commander was honest to a fault, and determined we should live on ship's provisions—salt junk, pork, peas, &c., with rancid butter and barrelled eggs—ugh!—till we cleared off our debt. But this
wasn't the worst, for our ship's stores had run short, and it would be months before we could get another supply, so we were put six upon four."
Creggan looked inquiringly.
"I mean, Creggan," said Mr. Grant, "that six men—the number in our mess—had to live on the allowance of four, and share it as well as they could.
"We had plenty of biscuits, however, but so full of dust and weevils were they, and so black with the attentions the huge cockroaches had paid them, that before we could eat them they had to be fried in bacon fat.
"There was no growling or snarling, however, we were all very young, and formed as jolly a little mess as anyone could wish to be member of.
"I was caterer. It was a red-letter day, or two even, if, while on shore at say Mozambique, I could fall in with a sucking-pig."
"You requisitioned it?" said the captain.
"That's it. I used to say, Piggie, I arrest you in the Queen's name. Piggie spoke out, but I used to hand it to my marine, and he stopped the squealing.
"Huge yams roasted in the engine-room ashes, we thought a dish fit to set before a king. One yam, with pepper, salt, butter, and fried biscuit, would make a midnight supper for four of us. Then we could sleep.
"Sometimes on shore I stumbled across an Arab who had a few ostrich's eggs for sale, and again we were in clover."
"Are they very large, Grant?" said Creggan.
"Well, one broken and made into a kind of mash was all that six of us could eat for breakfast, flanked, of course, by a morsel of salt pork. After such a breakfast as this we would go singing on deck. We did manage to shoot some gulls now and then, and when skinned they didn't taste so very fishy.
"One day we caught a young shark; he made some trouble on deck, but gave up the ghost at last, and submitted to be cut up and shared with all the crew.
"Flying-fish wouldn't come near us, but a bonito was sometimes hooked, and when inshore we got bucketfuls of rock-oysters. So we didn't do so badly upon the whole, except when far out in the Indian Ocean making a long passage from one island to another.
"We took a Bishop of Central Africa[3] and a Doctor of Divinity down with us to the Cape—a three weeks' voyage from Zanzibar. It was then we suffered most, for even the skipper's "prog" ran short, and as we couldn't have the Church suffer, we used to give them some of our scanty allowance, in return for which Captain Mill never failed to send us a bottle of wine— we had no rum. We mulled that bottle of port at eventide, steeped weevily biscuits in it, then drank and yarned and sang.
[3] Bishop Tozer
"While eating our miserable dinner our chief conversation turned upon the 'spreads' we had enjoyed at English hotels, and the 'feeds' we meant to have when we once more reached
'The home of the brave and the free'."
"Well," said Captain Leeward, "your yarn, doctor, reminds me, that when I was a mite of a middle, only thirteen years of age, and that is longer ago than I like to believe, I was serving in the old flagship Princess Royal, on the China station, the ward-room mess, which contained some sprigs of nobility, got terribly into debt.
"This was a serious matter for the chief engineer, a plain-going old fellow, who had a wife and healthy family at home in England, and for the
staff-commander, or master also. But the latter undertook to cater for a time, so as to free the mess from debt. He was to cater on the most economical principles. I may tell you, however, that between the chief engineer and master there was almost a blood feud. But the former, although objecting to expenses, dearly loved a good luncheon, and this was the meanest meal of the day.
"The chief would come below, give one glance over the table, then sink into his chair as sulky as a badger. Then didn't the wags around the messtable tease him anyhow."
At this point of the yarn there was a smart knock at the ward-room door, the midshipman, or rather the midshipmite, of the watch entered, and, saluting the captain, told him that there was a clear light far away on the weather bow, and so low in the water was it, that the first lieutenant thought it must be in a boat, and that as the light was being waved about as if to attract attention, the men must be in distress.
"Is there much wind?"
"No, sir; we're not doing more than two knots an hour."
"Well, bear up towards the mysterious light, anyhow, and let me know again when you get alongside."
"Ay ay, sir," said Bobbie, backing astern and shutting the door carefully after him.
"Now, sir," said Grant, "perhaps you'll finish your yarn."
"Oh, certainly."
CHAPTER XVIII.
ST. ELMO'S FIRE.
"I was saying," he went on, "when Mr. Robertson came in, that knowing the chief engineer's weakness, they chaffed him unmercifully.
"'Dalison,'[1] one would say, 'allow me to send you some liver?'
[1] Not the chief's real name
"'No, thank 'ee,' gruffly from the chief, as he leant back in his chair and frowned.
"'May I help you to some tripe, Dalison?' This from another tormentor.
"'No, thank 'ee.'
"'A morsel of kidney or heart, Dalison?'
"'No, thank 'ee.'
"Then he would bang his fist on the table, shouting, 'None of your hoffals (offals) for me! Stooard, bring in a lump o' bread and the blue cheese!'"
After the rippling laughter ceased, the captain, cracking a walnut, continued:
"Chaff was much more common in the service in those days than it is now, and if a brother officer had any peculiarity, he was sure to catch it hot.
"Dr. R—— was a grumpy old surgeon that I was shipmate with. He was not only grumpy, but surly and uncongenial towards his fellows. He was
generally a little late for breakfast, and on his entering the ward-room detested being talked to.
"Here was food for game, and as soon as he came in, every officer all round the table had a kind word and inquiry for him.
"'Oh, good-morning, doctor.'
"'How have you slept, doctor?'
"'How do you feel on the whole, this morning?'
"'I trust I see you well?'
"At first he merely growled and grunted, but at last getting fully exasperated he would suddenly turn round and roar out:
"'Oh, good-morning! Good-morning! Good-morning! Hang the whole lot of you!'"
"Capital!" cried Grant. "Give us just one more doctor's yarn, Captain Leeward."
"Well, then, this next one hinges upon an admiral as well as a doctor. This gallant officer was always fancying himself ill, though there was never anything of the slightest importance the matter with him, and was never happy unless his fleet-surgeon, a dear little Irishman, paid him a daily visit and ordered medicine.
"A certain pill used to be prescribed, and was found to be most efficacious.
"But one day the admiral, or 'Ral', as he was called for short, gave a great dinner-party, and many mighty magnates, gentlemen and ladies as well, came off shore. Among the guests was, of course, the Irish fleet-surgeon.
"During the dinner the admiral somewhat inopportunely called out:
"Oh, doctor, those pills you gave me last are by far the best ever I've had. You must let me have the prescription when we pay off. What are they composed of?'
"Now, the good doctor did not half-relish the notion of 'shop' being brought on the tapis at so fashionable a dinner-party, so he answered with emphasis:
"'What are they made of? Why, bread! Bread, sir; nothing else!'
"There was a momentary silence around the table, and everyone looked aghast to see how the reply would be taken. But the admiral was a gentleman in the truest sense of the word, and always most considerate for the feelings of others. He saw that he had touched on a very unpleasant theme, so he smiled kindly, and passed it off by saying in his quiet way:
"'Well, well, well, such is Faith!'
"But the pills were really rhubarb after all."
So with pleasant chat a whole hour passed away, and then once more the midshipmite Bobbie knocked at the door.
"It is a boat, sir. Five poor men in it. Two lying apparently dead under the thwarts. The first lieutenant has hauled the fore-yard aback and is sending some men over the side."
The Osprey, I may say here, had already visited the lovely fairy isles called The Azores, and was now well out into the Atlantic, steering about west-sou'-west.
The captain's room was soon emptied now, all going on deck. The night was very clear and starry, with a bright scimitar of a moon slowly sinking in the west.
Yes, Bobbie was right. Two men were dead, and the other three could scarcely speak, owing to sheer exhaustion.
"We'll hear their story to-morrow. Dr. Grant, I'll leave them in your charge."
"I shall see to them, sir," said Grant.
Then he shouted "Sentry!"
"Ay ay, sir."
"Pass the word for the sick-bay man."
In another quarter of an hour the poor fellows, English merchantmen, were snug and warm in hammocks. Grant ordered some beef-tea, with a modicum of brandy, and they soon fell sound asleep.
But so weak were they next day that the doctor forbade their talking, and it was three whole days before they were strong enough to tell their story.
A TERRIBLE TALE OF THE SEA.
There was no false pride about Captain Leeward of H.M. paddle-frigate Osprey. Some commanding officers that I have known would have had one of these unfortunate castaways to tell his story in the sick-bay. But instead of this the captain told the doctor to bring him in to his quarters.
He was a brown-faced, hardy, bearded sailor, but his cheeks were hollow now from his want of food and terrible suffering.
One hand was tied up in a sling.
He bowed and scraped as he came in, and if ever a sailor looked shy he did.
He gave just one glance around him, and then looked at Leeward's pleasant smiling face. The glance reassured him.
"Why, jigger me," he said, hitching up his trousers with one hand, "jigger me, sir, if ever I cast anchor in such a pretty saloon as this afore. Easy chairs, sofa, piano, fiddle and all, to say nothing about flowers and fairy-lights. Cap'n Leeward, sir, I ain't in a dream, am I? Mebbe the doctor here will 'blige by sticking a pin in me, up to the blessed head, if I am."
"Never a dream, Mr. Goodwin. Well, if you will bring yourself to an anchor, we'd like to hear your story. Have a little wine, sir?"
"Purser's wine is the only sort as suits me, sir."
"Steward, the rum!"
A tumbler and wine-glass were placed before the good sailor. The latter he pushed aside. Then, while the castaway held the tumbler with all the four fingers turned towards the captain, the steward filled it fully four inches. This is what is called "a bo's'n's nip".
"A little water, my lad?"
"No, sir, no; not for me. This rum is too good to be drowned."
He quaffed it, sighed, and put down the empty tumbler.
"Ah, sir!" he said, "now that very word 'drowned' makes me shiver. I've been, on and off, boy and man, at sea for well-nigh twenty years. Just entered as a boy, a tow-headed lad of Liverpool. Nothing to do till I growed a bit 'cepting to empty cook's ashes and pail, look after the dogs and ship's cat, feed the monkeys, and get kicked about all over the deck by anybody who wanted to stretch his legs a bit.
"But I grew into an able seaman at last. After'n which I gets to be second mate o' a Newcastle collier. Then fust mate. Then I up and studies for my certificate. You wouldn't think it, mebbe, of a rough chap like me, but I passed with flying colours, and steered homewards, wi' stunsails 'low and aloft, jolly happy now.
"I meets some maties, and two more overhauled me. So what could I do but go with 'em to wet my certificate.
"Sakes alive, cap'n! but I'd blush like a wirgin even now, if I weren't so brown and weather-beaten that ye wouldn't notice it.
"For, sir, I awoke next morning with a two-horse headache, and a tongue like kippered salmon. Clothes all on too, boots and all. I'd turned in all standing, but couldn't remember who'd brought me into port.
"Never mind, sir. 'Twere a lesson to me I ain't going to forget. Thankee, sir, I will have just another nip.
"But I s'pect, cap'n, I'm a kind o' hinderin' you I always do take longer time to tune my fiddle than to play my tune.
"Well, sir, it ain't more'n six weeks since I sailed from Glasgow, in what I might call the sailing steamer-barque Ossian. Our orders were to visit Azores, Madeira, St. Helena, Ascension, on our way to the Cape and Madagascar, and our supercargo, a business Scot, was to deal everywhere, for cash or goods, for we were laden up with 'notions' as the Yank calls 'em.
"Well, cap'n, our ship was as nice a craft as ever I stepped on board of, and the crew, too, was on the whole fairish; only too many blessed foreigners among them to please me. Most o' these'll work, ay, and sing too, in fair weather and fair wind, but they ain't no hand, sir, at reefin' topsails in a dirty night, wi' green seas a-tumbling in, and mebbe the yard-arms 'most a-touching the water every time the ship leans over.
"And we had dirty weather all along; sometimes 'twould be blowin' so hard we wouldn't be doin' more'n two knots against wind and sea, full steam up.
"We dawdled about the islands a bit, and the fine weather sort o' come at last, cause we was told to sail all we could and save the coals.
"We weighed at last, and had made a good offing into the Atlantic, 'cause it had occurred to Brown, the supercargo, that he could do a bit of honest
biz at Bermuda, and the man was all in the interest of his owners.
"Some two or three hundred miles to the west here, we got into a circular storm and suffered severely. Our foremast was torn out of her, and two men slipped overboard in clearing away the wreck.
"Thankee, cap'n; but mind ye, this makes my third nip. Howsomedever, it's as mild as cocoa-nut milk.
"When we got clear away from that baby tornado, we was pretty nearly all wreck, gentleman. Bulwarks anyhow, mainyard even fallen (a rare accident), and our very winch half-throwed up on its end.
"But worse were to come, cap'n.
"First and foremost the weather got finer, but there was a strange kind o' a haze in the sky that I didn't like. That shortened the sunbeams considerable, and brought night and darkness aboard of us before they was due; and the moon couldn't well be 'xpected to shine through clouds that the sun hadn't been able to tackle. We managed to step jury-mast and bend new sails. But the wind was nothin' to signify now, and I made bold to tell the skipper that he ought to clue and get up steam.
"'There's no hurry, Jim," he answered; 'even if we be becalmed a bit, it's cheaper than burning tons o' coal."
"Well, gentlemen, becalmed we was just after tea-time.
"I went on deck arter this, and such a night I'd never seen afore. Never a puff o' wind, sails hangin' idle, and the waves, as much as we could see of them, just like glycerine. I expected to see dead fish floating about on their sides.
"The bo's'n was walkin' with me in the ship's waist; but none of us had very cheery yarns to spin, we just stuck to our pipes and spoke but little.
"I could feel the bo's'n's arm tremble a little, though, as more than once a long quavering cry came over the surface of that hazy, oily ocean, dyin'
away in a kind o' wail, like some poor creature in faintin' agony.
"Yes, I believe 'twere on'y a bird, sir; and there do be a shark that cries thus on windless nights near to the echoless ocean—the Sea of Weeds, or Sargasso. And 'twere there we were at this time. Every now and then we could observe long dark strips of the slimy stuff layin' along the rippleless waves' sides, dark and fearful, and looking for all the world like dead serpents.
"I'se a kind o' partial to pottery (poetry), cap'n, and lines from Coleridge's Ancient Mariner would keep risin' up in my mind, and didn't seem out o' place either on a night like that. 'Cause you see that, here and there, there was phosphorescence in the sea, and a shark had once or twice appeared on the surface, his sly eyes flashing, his fins dropping fire, and we could see him as he dived below getting smaller and smaller, till like a little wriggling worm of flame. Even little strips of weed that floated here and there looked like water-serpents.
"'The moving moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside.
But where the ship's huge shadow lay, The charmed water burned alway, A still and awful red.
"'Beyond the shadow of the ship I watched the water snakes; They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared—the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes.'
"But, cap'n, when ye looked horizon-way—and the horizon weren't far off,—at one moment only the moon haze was there, next moment the summer lightning played along fitful but incessant. Then you could see
