W

Wagner (Bettina)

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Germany

Incunabula from monastic libraries in Southern Germany : acquisition and dispersal.

The Bavarian State Library at Munich is the second largest library in Germany with rich historical collections comprising among others 12.500 Medieval manuscripts and 19.300 incunabula, see http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/handruck/handschr.htm#Allgemeines. The collection was formed largely as a result of the secularization of Bavarian monasteries in 1802/03. About 24.000 volumes of incunabula entered the library then. At the time, few librarians recognized the value of individual copies of incunables for bookhistorical research, and as a consequence, the library disposed of numerous "duplicate copies" of incunables in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, including two copies of the Gutenberg Bible. Many incunables from Munich ended up abroad: about 30% of the Bodleian Library's holdings of incunabula come from Southern Germany, and American libraries have also rich holdings.

Munich incunabula can serve as an example for the crossing of borders in two ways:

1) Many of them were printed in Italy and were acquired by South German monasteries already in the fifteenth century, thus showing the openness of monastic libraries to humanist ideas.

2) After the dispersal of the monastic collections, incunabula from South German provenances were bought by private and public collectors in a wide variety of countries; thus, they provide evidence for 19th-century antiquarian collection interests.

In my paper, I intend to present examples for the 15th-century acquisition policy of monasteries and then to outline the history the 19th-century duplicate sales, based on the surviving archival sources, focussing on a few examples of Munich provenances in collections abroad.

The five-volume incunable catalogue of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek which was published between 1988 and 2000 has recently been converted into a database which will become available online in 2004. Online access to the Munich incunable catalogue will make a rich variety of book-historical sources, both for the production of 15th-century books and for their distribution and reception, available to scholars. I am hoping to be able to demonstrate the database in the course of my paper or at the conference.

After having studied medieval and modern languages at Würzburg, Germany, and Oxford, GB, I worked from 1992-1996 on the incunable cataloguing project of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. SInce 1998, I have been holding a post in the department for manuscripts and rare books of the Bavarian State Library at Munich. My responsibilities include the supervision of a cataloguing project for the library's incunabula.

Waite (Noel)

University of Otago / Te Whare Wänanga o Otägo, Dunedin / Ötepoti, New Zealand / Aotearoa

"The best holidays on the Globe" : Charles Francis in New Zealand.

This paper will present a case study of the global traffic of print in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, embodied physically by the journey of Charles Francis from Dunedin, New Zealand to New York and intellectually by Robert Coupland Harding and the transmutation of typothetae in New Zealand. In this way I hope to locate the development ofa national print culture in New Zealand in an international context that speaks to a global history of communications.

Born in London in 1848, apprenticed to a printer in Hobart, Australia in 1862, Charles Francis completed his apprenticeship in New Zealand’s South Island before continuing on to England and finally America. He was a journey-man printer only in the contemporary sense of that prefixed word. His peregrinations and capacity for hard work in frontier conditions were not unusual for a tradesman during this period of colonial consolidation and infant global economy, but a strong business sense tempered by conciliatory purpose marked him out from his contemporaries. Described as the dean of American printers, he founded the Printers’ League of New York and helped establish the New York School of Printers’ Apprentices.

Francis’s experience in the new colonies of Australia and New Zealand, and perhaps more especially under the fluid conditions of labour and capital that prevailed in the goldfields, were to have a profound impact on his professional and ethical outlook. I will argue that his colonial familiarity with all aspects of the trade provided Francis with all the necessary attributes of an advance field engineer for a global communications network. His return to New Zealand in 1921 as a Conciliation Commissioner of the United States government can be seen as a homecoming of sorts, and the completion of a communication circuit about the division of labour in the printing industry.

Noel Waite is a Lecturer in the Design Studies Department at Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Warner (Lyndan)

Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

From 16th-century Paris to new and old worlds

De Paris au 16e siècle aux anciens et nouveaux mondes.

Abstract

This proposal stems from a study on private libraries in early modern Paris, which researched post mortem inventories in the Minutier Central at the Archives nationales, Paris. In examining the types of books available in noble, officeholder and bourgeois households, I began to notice the popularity of universal histories and travel literature in vernacular French. In this paper and with the conference theme in mind, I propose to take a closer look at the travel literature and cosmographies available to Parisian book collectors. The author of the Recueil de diverses histoires or the Collection of Diverse Histories, for example, invites the reader ‘without the leisure nor the expedients necessary to travel to distant lands’ to join him on a journey and gain knowledge of ‘diverse nations’ and the ‘delights and utility of diverse ways of life’. Joannes Boemus asks his reader to imagine being led by the hand from one place to another as if Boemus himself was pointing out for the reader’s eye the ‘ways of life’ of ancient and recent institutions. Booksellers from Paris and Lyon competed to display works such as the Recueil de diverses histoires at their stalls. Between 1529 and 1552 the purchaser of this Recueil could choose between at least seven French language reprints by five printers in which to read about and compare contemporary local morals and customs with past and distant cultures.

In this paper, I intend to examine the distribution of this type of literature and how frequently books on diverse customs and nations could be found in Parisian private libraries in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Can an analysis of Parisian libraries reveal anything about the early modern interest in tales of travel or distant cultures?

Résumé

Cette proposition de communication provient d’une étude des bibliothèques privées aux seizième et dix-septième siècles à Paris, dans laquelle on a recherché les inventaires-après-décès du Minutier central des notaires de Paris au CARAN. En analysant les livres disponibles dans les maisons de la noblesse de robe et des bourgeois de Paris, j’ai remarqué que les histoires universelles et les livres de voyage en français jouissaient d’une certaine popularité. Dans cette présentation, en tenant compte du thème du congrès, je vais me pencher sur la littérature de voyage et de cosmographie disponible à la clientèle des marchands de livres aux seizième siècle. Dans les livres tels que le Recueil de diverses histoires, l’auteur invite le lecteur qui n’a pas le loisir, ni les moyens de voyager aux pays lointains, à l’accompagner et à découvrir ‘la maniere de vivre’ qu’il trouve ‘de si grande volupte, & si grande utilité’. Joannes Boemus demande à son lecteur d’imaginer qu’il le mène d’un endroit à l’autre comme si Boemus lui-même montrait les ‘manières de vivre’ de ces pays et régions. Comme l’auteur explique: ‘Et ne fault sermerveiller si les hommes ne sont de semblables meurs, naturel & cõdition les ungs comme les aultres, veu la grande variete & difference…entre les pays & regions’. Les marchands-imprimeurs parisiens et lyonnais faisaient concurrence pour vendre les œuvres de ce genre. Entre 1529 et 1552, un bibliophile pouvait choisir entre au moins sept réimpressions de ce Recueil par cinq imprimeurs s’il voulait lire et refléchir sur le sujet de la ‘variété entre les pays et régions’.

Dans cette communication, je voudrais examiner la diffusion de ce genre de littérature dans les maisons parisiennes aux seizième et dix-septième siècles. Qu’est-ce qu’une analyse des bibliothèques privées et domestiques pourrait révéler de ce goût pour les histoires de voyage ou pour des pays lointains ou anciens?

Weedon (A.)

Chair

Wheatcroft (Andrew)

University of Stirling, Scotland

Imagining Occident and Orient / Comment on s'imagine l'Occident et l'Orient ? 1492 circa 1700.

Abstract

The discovery of the Islamic world to the east and the Americas to the west of Europe are normally regarded as quite separate processes. But between 1492 and c. 1700 the communication of ideas about the Americas in printed images was inextricably bound up with the same style of presentation for the Islamic east, to the same audience, by the same means. In both cases, word and images together were used to present an unknown world, about which readers (using the term in its broadest sense) had a few preconceptions but no detailed knowledge. Early texts, woodcuts and engravings defined how these two unknown worlds would be perceived in the future.

Résumé

La découverte du monde islamique à l'est et du continent américain à l'ouest de l'Europe est normalement considérée comme deux processus distincts. Or, entre 1492 et c. 1700, la transmission de l'information sur les deux Amériques à travers les images est liée inextricablement au même style de présentation, utilise les même moyens et se dirige à l'attention du même public.
Dans les deux cas l'on a employé des mots avec des images afin de représenter un monde inconnu dont le lecteur (dans le sens le plus large) possédait quelques notions mais aucune connaissance détaillée. Ces textes anciens et ces gravures ont déterminé la façon dont ces deux terres inconnues seront perçues dans l'avenir.

Images are at the heart of this paper. It will contrast images of the discovery of the West (from among others works, by Theodore de Bry and Hans Staden) and of the discovery of the East (by Erhard Schoen, Hans Beham, Pierre Coeck, Jan Luyken etc.) to illustrate both cruelty and culture.
Both Turks and Amerindians were depicted as cruel and savage. A dominant western theme of Turkish atrocity was impalement, while the Amerindians were given to cannibalism. Ottoman Turks like western Europeans regarded cannibalism (yamyam in Turkish) as barbaric. They saw impalement only as a humiliating punishment. Westerners associated impalement with sodomy, which perceived as an unalterable Turkish predilection.
The Amerindians' cruelties like their cannibalism, were only a sign that they were 'primitive'. Once brought within the frame of western culture, all these attributes would fall away. Implicitly, the easterners were essentially irredeemable, the western natives could be saved. Although there are surface similarities in the depiction of hostility I argue that different underlying attitudes emerged in both the images and the associated texts. While perceptions of the Other in the Old World coloured perceptions of the Other in the New World, two separate and distinctive patterns of presentation emerged. One primordial difference separated cruel and barbarous Turks from savage Amerindians. While the latter were capable of Christian conversion and redemption, the Muslims were much more intractable. This distinction influenced the way that they were depicted both in image and in word. The visual images in both cases created stereotypes, but those of the Indians of the West mutated into depictions of what later generations would call 'noble savages'. No such transformation took place with the images of the East and this paper suggests some reasons why this might be so.

[This paper is developed from a long-run research programme 'Imaging the enemy' at the Centre for Publishing Studies. The scope and development of the project will be outlined briefly at the end of the paper.]

Andrew Wheatcroft is the Director of the Centre for Publishing Studies in the University of Stirling, Scotland. His most recent book is Infidels : the conflict between 'Christendom' and 'Islam' 638-2002. London: Viking. 2003. A revised and extended edition will be published by Penguin in May 2004 in London, and by Random House in New York in June 2004; Swedish, Dutch, and Italian editions are currently in preparation. His earlier work extends to seventeen books as author or editor, most recently The Habsburgs: embodying empire. London: Penguin 1996, and The Ottomans : dissolving images. London: Penguin 1995. A second edition of The Habsburgs will be published by the Folio Society, London and New York in May 2004.

Wiegand (Shirley A.)

Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Books on trial : an Oklahoma City witch-hunt in the early 1940s

Wiegand (Wayne)

Florida State University

Books on trial : an Oklahoma City witch-hunt in the early 1940s

On August 17, 1940, five Oklahoma City [Oklahoma] policemen conducted a raid on the local Progressive Bookstore, and confiscated the entire inventory of 7,000 titles. On that same day, the police arrested sixteen people. Some were in the store, others (mostly the bookstore's proprietors) were at home. All of the proprietors were members of the Communist Party of America (CPA). Police held all in jail without bond or benefit of counsel for three days, when they charged nine of those arrested with violating a state criminal syndicalism law. On August 29, the state submitted evidence that essentially put a select number of these confiscated books on trial, and in particular prosecuted four CPA members for making these books available and for sale. All four underwent separate trials; all four were convicted, sentenced to ten years in prison, and fined $5,000.

This paper recounts the history of these trials and the appeals process used to ultimately reverse the decisions in August, 1943. During those three years, many publicly came to the defense of those prosecuted, including people like Woodie Guthrie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pete Seeger, Dashiell Hammett, and Theodore Dreiser, many members of the library community, and periodicals and newspapers like the ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, NEW REPUBLIC, and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. The authors draw much of their evidence from recently discovered trial transcripts to reconstruct a very colorful story of how state power was used to trample the civil rights of four American citizens during a period of time when much of the country worried about internal threats to the social order supported from outside by foreign sources. "Books on Trial" is a case study in the history of American print culture with many parallels to the present.

Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies (and Professor of American Studies) at Florida State University, and author of numerous books and scholarly articles in American print culture and library history.

Shirley A. Wiegand is Professor of Law at the Marquette University [Milwaukee, Wisconsin] Law School, and author of several scholarly articles and books that address issues of civil liberties and conflict resolution..

Wirten (Eva)

Uppsala University, Sweden

Round-table : “The international history of popular fiction 1850-1950”. Individual paper : Crossing the Borders of Book and History: On the Epistemologies of a Discipline

This paper seeks to interrogate some possible epistemological boundaries at work in the discipline/perspective of Book History. What I am especially interested in is the fluidity of the two terms ”Book” and ”History,” which are boundary objects in themselves and that in combination are constantly reworked in order to accommodate a wide variety of studies and scholarly directions within this research field. (In no way does this imply something negative, on the contrary, it may be taken in evidence of the vitality of the perspective).

To clarify even further, I will particularly focus on what this means when one might be labeled a ”book historian,” yet, 1) work with objects and expressions that in many cases do not even fall within the domain of print culture, even less so under the heading of the material ”Book”; and 2) when ”History” primarily takes the shape of studying the contemporary. In addition, I will also broaden the perspective to include issues regarding comparative and international aspects related to these two major terms.

In discussing some of these challenges, which I take to be primarily to reflect some methodological and theoretical underpinnings of Book History, I will try to exemplify by my on-going work on a book preliminarily entitled Abundant Realm: The Culture and the Nature of the Commons. This book represents the follow-up to No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization which will be published in the beginning of 2004 by the University of Toronto Press in their new series ”Studies in Book and Print Culture.” Both projects are interdisciplinary in nature and try to combine Literature studies, Book History, Cultural Studies, and the Law, a kind of border crossing from which some general observations regarding theory and method in the Humanities hopefully can be deducted.

Eva Hemmungs Wirtén : Ph.D. Department of Literature, Uppsala University, 1998 with Global Infatuation. Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts. The Case of Harlequin Enterprise and Sweden. Assistant Professor in Library and Information Science, esp. Cultural Policy, The University College of Borås and Gothenburg University 1999- (on leave of absence 2002-2006). Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow 2002-2006, The Department of ALM (Archives, Libraries, and Museums), Uppsala University. Associate Professor [Docent] in Literature, esp. Sociology of Literature, Uppsala University, 2003.

Williams (George H.)

University of Missouri, Kansas City

Print, manuscript, and speech practices in 18th-century Methodism.

I am proposing a paper that will explore a specific case study contributing to a better understanding of the oft-overlooked interplay of oral culture, manuscript culture, and print in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, this paper examines the preaching, marginal note taking, and Bible reading of one individual taken as representative of the larger religious movement of Methodism. Samuel Bradburn (1751-1815) became an itinerant Methodist preacher in 1774 and was soon so well known as an orator that he was called "the Methodist Demosthenes." Immersed as he was in the world of oral culture, Bradburn was still an avid reader, taking advantage of the hours of solitude available to him as he traveled from community to community, as he stayed up late at night, and as he followed Methodist leader John Wesley's instructions for pre-dawn study. Bradburn focused his reading on one book: the Bible. His copy of this text features a detailed reading calendar handwritten onto the endpapers, a schedule of study broken down day by day for the entire year such that in twelve months he would have read the Old Testament once and the New Testament three times. It is clear from the Bible's marginalia that he followed this reading schedule for many years.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this reading took place in the absence of contact or discussion with others, for as a preacher, Bradburn's duty was to explicate the Biblical texts he read so intensively. Incredibly, he kept in his "Memorandum" books a brief record for each of the roughly 13,000 sermons he preached over his multi-decade career, often with a note about how well the sermon was received. Furthermore, his Bible contains marginal notes about how best to present particular texts. Bradburn felt that the two practices of preaching and reading were productively interwoven, writing in May of 1778, "It is well for me that I have to preach so often, as it obliges me to read & study."

I am an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Kansas City specializing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature and culture. I have been a member of SHARP for three and a half years and have presented papers at the last three SHARP conferences. I am currently revising an article on John Wesley's magazine publishing career for the SHARP journal Book History.