S

Sallee (Denise)

Harrison Memorial Library, Carmel, Calfornia

Books on the California frontier : Anne Hadden and the Monterey County Library.

In 1891, at the age of seventeen, Anne Hadden immigrated from Ireland to California with her widowed mother, her brother, and her four sisters. Hadden attended Stanford University, but when she reached her late 30s she left the academic world behind and began her career as a frontier librarian. Both libraries and schools played a key role in bringing American cultural values to California. However by 1909, it became apparent to California state librarian, James Gillis, that a wider-ranging system of book distribution was needed to serve California’s growing rural population; Gillis therefore promoted the establishment of county libraries to met the needs of families who did not want their children “to grow-up in bookless homes”.

Anne Hadden was appointed as the first librarian for Monterey County in 1913. In order for Hadden to establish library branches in this scarcely-populated and wild place, she journeyed by foot, packhorse, and train. Among the unique documents that record her work is a film made by her brother that shows Hadden going into rugged terrain on horseback, accompanied by a mule carrying books to remote settlers. Monterey County extends both south and west from Salina, encompassing the rocky, secluded coastline of Big Sur as well as the city of Monterey. In the mid-1800’s the Big sur area was settled by Americans and Europeans who built homes among Spanish descendants and Native Americans already in the region. By the early 1900s, Big Sur had also become a haven for pioneers looking for inexpensive land and city dwellers looking for a few months each year of a more simple life close to nature. These are the people that were Hadden’s book readers –some in need of education, others in need of technical and scientific material to improve their day-to-day lives, and others, artists and writers, who as they do today, find solace and inspiration in the wilderness along the beautiful Pacific coastline.

Drawing upon original, archival material (manuscript notes, correspondence) and published primary sources (newspaper and journal articles, county and state library reports) this paper will examine Anne Hadden’s role as librarian and independent woman. She not only crossed geographical and social borders to assure books and other educational materials were brought to the people of the Big Sur area, but she expanded gender roles by being adventurous and dedicated enough to face the hardships found in this extremely remote area. Letters from residents reveal the impact Hadden had on these isolated communities. She was a powerful link for the families to the outside world. Often she was asked by her patrons to send household and farming items to the coast and she services the small one-room shools in the area. Hadden read to the students and brought in nurses and school inspectors to keep the schools current with modern practices.

Anne Hadden found immense satisfaction in her role as county librarian. Her reports manuscripts, and correspondence, indicate that she had a special dedication to her women patrons. It gave her great satisfaction to help these pioneering women. Hadden was drawn to the Big Sur area and early on purchased land in an area that is now part of California State Park. She held her position as county librarian for over twenty years, retiring in 1936. In those yers her life became entwined with the settlers in the remote coastal communities. Here she not only found friends but a chance to find pleasure in the unspoiled wilderness.

Denise Sallee is the librarian and archivist for the local history department of Harrison Memorial Library in Carmel, California. She earned her Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Calfornia at Los Angeles. While at UCLA she began her research on Anne Hadden and her master’s paper was revised and published as “Reconceptualizing Women’s History : Anne Hadden and the California County Library System”, Libraries and Culture, vol. 27 (4) Fall 1992. The proposed paper is based on further research in the Monterey area.

Salmi-Niklander (Kirsti)

University of Helsinki, Finland

Schoolgirls, students and seamstresses. Writing, conversation and publishing in the lives of young Finnish women of late 19th century.

Ecolières, étudiantes et coturières : l'écriture, la conversation et la publication dans la vie de jeunes femmes Finlandaises à la fin du 19e siècle.

Abstracts

Writing, conversation and publishing in the lives of young Finnish women of late 19th century.

The late 19th century was a period of great social, political and cultural progress for Finnish women. The university opened up to female students for the first time, and new voluntary organizations provided possibilities for informal self-education. New ideologies and scientific questions such as evolutionism and women´s rights were intensively discussed in these new conversational communities.

In my paper I discuss the meanings of writing, conversation and publishing for three groups of young women living in Helsinki during the late 19th century: daughters of middle class families, the first female university students and young women who belonged to temperance societies. All these young women wrote for handwritten newspapers, which was a popular tradition in families, among university students and within voluntary associations. The Wave, a family newspaper written by the daughters of the Forstén family, belongs to the family manuscript tradition which also included occasional poetry, biographies and letters. For the first female university students, the handwritten journal (The Lyre) was an important medium for discussing university life, political events and emotional matters. Progress, a handwritten paper of the temperance society known as ”The Star” was edited by young male students and artisans. Although many young women participated in the discussions of this organization, apparently only one of them actually wrote for the paper.

The texts written by young women are analysed in relation to the history of handwritten newspapers:

How dif the writers interpret new ideologies in relation to their own personal experiences? What genres and narrative strategies were utilized in this process?

Résumé

La fin du 19ème siècle fut pour les femmes Finlandaises un temps de grands changements sociaux, politiques et culturels. L´université était ouverte aux premières étudiantes, et les nouvelles organisations volontaires on donné des possibilités pour études non officielles. Les nouvelles idéologies et les questions scientifiques – par exemple l’évolution et les droits des femmes – étaient traitées intensivement dans ces communautés nouvelles de discussion.

J’étudierai l’importance de l’écriture, de la conversation et de la publication dans trois communautés de jeunes femmes à Helsinki à la fin de 19eme siècle. Ces sont les écolières de la classe moyenne, les premières étudiantes dans l’université et les jeunes femmes dans les sociétés anti-alcoliques. Toutes ces jeunes femmes se sont engagées à écrire des nouvelles à la main. C’était une tradition très appréciée dans les familles, parmi les étudiant(e)s et dans les organisations volontaires.

Kirsti Salmi-Niklander (b. 1957). Assistant lecturer (since 1989) at the department of Folklore Studies in University of Helsinki. MA 1988, Lic.Phil. 1991. My Doctoral thesis (Self-education and Rebellion. The Conversational Community of Working-Class Youth in Karkkila during the 1910s and the 1920s) will be published by Finnish Literature Society (in Finnish) in February 2004, and the doctoral defence will take place in March 2004. The paper proposed for the SHARP-conference is based on a post-doctoral article, which will be published in 2004 (in Finnish). It is the first part of a larger research project dealing with handwritten newspapers as an alternative medium in 19th and early 20th century Finland.

Sanchez-Eppler (Karen)

Amherst College

Child bookmakers : Speculations on the play of literacy.

During the middle decades of the Nineteenth Century that the American book market came to be dominated by fiction, and that the concept of childhood became associated with fantasy and fun. I will argue in this presentation that such changes in attitudes towards fiction and towards children are not merely simultaneous–diverse escapist responses to the same social stresses–but that they are profoundly implicated in each other. This presentation uses a variety of books made by children–diaries, composition books, handmade story-books, little papers produced on parlor presses (a popular novelty toy of the 1860s-80s) and privately printed anthologies–as a site for assessing these relations. Such child-made volumes demonstrate the extent to which books serve during this period as models and measures for identity: ethically, economically, socially. But even as they let us see how literary conventions inform what is to be desired and valued in the child, they also manifest the ways in which idealizations of childhood shape expectations of books.

Children who produce their own storybooks–like the whole library of tiny picture books penned by the Hale children, or the quite professional volume of stories culled from other publications and typeset by the 12 year old Frank Munsell–clearly see their efforts as a kind of training in the public sphere. Such work largely values itself for its conventionality, for its success in mimicking adult forms. An apprenticeship not only in literary style, but in structures of production and dissemination.

In these bookmaking efforts the sense of children as inadequate, needing to be taught, alternates with the idealization of childhood’s formlessness as a mark of freedom and a source of power allied with the value of the fictional. “The child is always something of a poet,” John Greenleaf Whittier avers. In these terms children no longer need books to teach them virtue, instead their very lack of conventional understanding makes them already poetry, thus John Bull’s preface to a privately printed collection of his daughter’s poetry insists on presenting these often pious hymns as a form of play.

If writing still largely figures in these volumes as something to worry about, a measure for reckoning moral and pedagogical worth, it is not only that. The glee, anxiety and drudgery of literacy collide on these pages, attesting to the contradictions in social attitudes towards both children and books.

Karen Sánchez-Eppler is Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College, where she Chairs the English Department. She is the author of Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (University of California Press, 1993) and the forthcoming These Dependent States: Childhood, Autonomy, and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century American literature and culture.

Sandler (Mark)

University of Michigan University Library

Round-table : New scholarship in the world's oldest printed books : research and instructional uses of Early English Books Online and the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership.

Presenters:

Mark Sandler (Moderator) : Collection Development Officer University of Michigan University Library

Mary Sauer-Games : Director of Publishing ProQuest and Chadwyck-Healey

Stuart Dempster : Programme Manager Joint Information Systems Committee

Panel Overview :

This panel will explore the innovative research and pedagogical uses being made of historic corpora such as Early English Books Online, Evans Digital Early American Imprints, Eighteenth Century Collection Online, Making of America, and other large collections of recently converted antiquarian materials. The primary focus of the session will be on the experience of undergraduate and graduate students working with the Early English Books collection, now in its fourth year of availability on many campuses and beginning to take hold as an instructional mainstay for those with a focus on the early modern and renaissance periods. The online collection is really two collections: 1) Early English Books Online (EEBO), offering digital facsimile page images of over 100,000 texts cited in the catalogs of Pollard and Redgrave, Wing, and Thomason; and 2) Early English Books Online—Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), presenting searchable full-text editions for a subset of approximately 6,000 texts, anticipated to grow to 25,000 texts by 2009. The functionality and corresponding uses of these differing forms of digitally converted texts, along with what we know about the use of the print originals and microfilm copies, provide an interesting comparative framework for analyzing the needs of students for studying corpora of historically significant texts.

The University of Michigan, Oxford University, and ProQuest, have each been serving up aspects of the EEBO corpus, and have several years of data regarding the use of page image and full-text editions. In the aggregate, these data afford interesting insights into the changing nature of text-based exploration of the early modern period. Complemented by anecdotal accounts of the use of the EEBO collection, we believe that are getting an early glimpse of future of textual analysis.

Presentations:

Mary Sauer-Games : Search strategies for accessing EEBO image and text content

Mary can share data about the use of the EEBO collection—both as a collection of book images and as corpus of searchable text. Is it the case that scholars and students are most interested in coming to the collection through known, individual titles—perhaps beginning with the title page and browsing forward, or are they more likely to search terms and jump quickly from title to title in a search for the most relevant snippets of text? Given this unique— albeit preliminary— opportunity for comparing the way this corpus is used, Mary is interested in engaging the SHARP audience in discussion of traditional and future textual study.

Mark Sandler : Democratizing aspects of full-text searchable corpora.

Mark is interested in the transformation of textual study of the early modern period as we move from access to distributed collections of a few hundred books that a scholar might reasonably access in a lifetime, to a universally accessible database of tens of thousands of full-text titles-- and perhaps a two to three billion words—faithfully captured from the original works. One obvious consequence, for good or ill, is that the disciplinary base for the study of the period is likely to expand, as the requirement for textual specialty is diminished. Rather than being limited to intense study by a relative handful of scholars in English, History, and Linguistics, the new modes of access to Early English Books—including ASCII font transcription and word-searchability—non-specialist scholars and students in a broad range of disciplines (Political Science, Sociology, Science, Philosophy, Mathematics, Medicine, Law, Education, Art, Music, etc.) can now penetrate the corpus with relatively little training or investment. While true scholars of the period may view such dilettantism with alarm, the increase in the number and perspectives brought to bear should produce a renewed and rich dialog about all aspects of life in early modern England. Indeed, because of the agreements underlying the creation of these full-text editions, it is anticipated that they will be widely shared beyond the academy, granting still further access to an international audience of independent scholars and amateur historians. (For fuller description of the University of Michigan’s Text Creation partnership, see http://www.lib.umich.edu/eebo.)

Stuart Dempster : Digital corpora as tools for curriculum enrichment: the case of EEBO/EEBO-TCP

Stuart is coordinating the roll-out of EEBO and EEBO TCP across 180 institutions of higher learning throughout the U.K. (England, Scotland and Wales). The JISC, in conjunction with colleagues at the Universities of Michigan and Oxford, is working to develop pedagogical materials that will encourage the incorporation of this database in the undergraduate classroom. This presentation will look at the proposed and actual instructional uses off this collection across different disciplines as well as across different institutional types: research universities, four-year colleges and further education (two-year) institutions. Stuart is aware of reported uses of EEBO in the U.S., and might by summer able to share thoughts about differences in the two countries. In any case, the U.K. roll-out for EEBO is much more planned and coordinated than in North America, and will undoubtedly produce pedagogical models to be applied elsewhere.

Satterley (Renae)

McGill University, Montréal, Canada

The Sunday School Library of Christ Church, St Andrews East, Quebec

L’école du dimanche à St André Est Québec.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of my research findings on an Anglican Sunday School Library once situated in St. Andrews East, Quebec. In 1881, the library contained 400 books, of which 182 have survived intact and now reside at McGill University's Rare Books and Special Collections Division. The church was founded in 1819, and the library was established circa 1850. The collection dates range from early-to-late 19th century. Very few Sunday school libraries from this period have survived intact. As this was a colonial church situated in a rural, English-speaking Quebec village, it presents a unique example of the crossing of Canadian, American, and British borders.

Sunday Schools were imported from England and became important institutions in English-speaking Canada during the 19th century. While English Sunday Schools paved the way for a generalized education (reading, writing, arithmetic) of the poor and orphaned, Canadian schools focused on religious education and conversion. Sunday schools, and their libraries, became one of the principal promoters of literacy, especially in rural locales.

The Canadian Sunday school became a cultural, religious, moral and political bridge between Canada and Britain, which is ideally exemplified in the reading material used to propagate these ideals. As no religious publishers existed in Lower Canada at this time, Sunday school books were imported. However, the high cost and low practicality involved in importing books from Britain meant that Canadian Sunday schools were forced to also import books from the United States. Although the American publishers tended to simply pirate English editions, they altered the texts in order to appeal to an American audience.

Thus this library, which is typical of Anglican Sunday school libraries throughout Canada, reflected and propagated not only an “old world” British sociocultural ideology, but also amalgamated American democratic ideals. This combination of materials and ideologies disseminated a particular political, moral, and cultural affinity unique to Canadian Sunday schools and their libraries.

This paper will present an overview of the more salient aspects connected to this collection:

– an introductory sketch of St. Andrew's East and its place in Canadian history

– the history of Sunday schools in Canada

– an overview of the books' publishers

It will conclude with an examination of how Sunday schools and their libraries propagated both British and American cultural, religious and political norms. They led to the establishment of a unique Anglo-Canadian identity, whose echoes continue to reverberate today.

Résumé

Ce rapport présente un aperçu des résultats de ma recherche sur une bibliothèque d’une école du dimanche anglicane (Christ Church) qui était située à St. André Est, Québec. En 1881, la bibliothèque contenait 400 livres, dont 182 existent encore, et se trouvent à la Bibliothèque des Livres Rares et Collections Spéciales de l’Université McGill. L’église a été fondée en 1819 et la bibliothèque vers 1850. Les dates de publication varient du début jusqu’à la fin du 19e siècle. Très peu de bibliothèques d’écoles du dimanche de cette période ont survécu jusqu’à nos jours. Comme c’était une église coloniale située dans un village anglophone au Québec, elle présente un exemple idéal pour discuter du croisement des frontières canadiennes, américaines, et britanniques.

Les écoles du dimanche ont été importées d’Angleterre, et sont devenues des institutions importantes au Canada-anglais pendant le 19e siècle. De plus, les écoles du dimanche, avec leurs bibliothèques, sont devenues un des outils principaux de promotion de l’alphabétisation, surtout dans les régions rurales. Tandis que les écoles du dimanche ont créé un système d’éducation générale en Angleterre pour les pauvres et les orphelins, au Canada, elles avaient comme mission principale l’éducation religieuse et la conversion.

L’école du dimanche canadienne a dévelopé un pont religeux, moral et politique entre le Canada et l’Angleterre, qui est exemplifé dans les publications utilisées pour propager ces idéaux. Puisqu’il n’existait aucun éditeur religieux au Bas Canada, les livres étaient importés. Comme il était très cher, et peu pratique, d’importer des livres d’Angleterre, les écoles étaient forcées d’importer des livres des Etats-Unis. Quoique les éditeurs américains aient eu tendance à pirater les éditions anglaises, ils les modifiaient cependant pour mieux s’adresser à leur audience américaine.

La bibliothèque de Christ Church, qui est alors une bibliothèque anglicane-canadienne typique, reflétait et propageait non seulement une idéologie britannique et conservatrice, mais aussi intégrait des idéologies américaines et démocratiques. Cette combinaison de matériels et d’idéologies a disséminé une affinité politique, morale et culturelle spécifique, qui était unique et partuculières aux écoles du dimanche canadiennes, et à leurs bibliothèques.

Ce rapport va présenter un aperçu des aspects les plus saillants de cette collection :

– Une introduction à St. André Est et à son importance dans l’histoire canadienne,

– Une brève histoire des écoles du dimanche au Canada,

– Un apperçu des éditeurs représentés dans cette collection

Il conclura avec un examen des façons par lesquelles les écoles du dimanche ont propagé les normes culturelles, religieuses et politiques d’Angleterre et des Etats-Unis. Ces normes ont établi une identité anglo-canadienne, qui perdure jusqu’à nos jours.

Sauer-Games (Mary)

Director of Publishing ProQuest and Chadwyck-Healey

Round-table : New scholarship in the world's oldest printed books : research and instructional Uses of Early English Books Online and the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership.

Presenters:

Mark Sandler (Moderator) : Collection Development Officer University of Michigan University Library

Mary Sauer-Games : Director of Publishing ProQuest and Chadwyck-Healey

Stuart Dempster : Programme Manager Joint Information Systems Committee

Panel Overview :

Presentations:

Mary Sauer-Games : Search strategies for accessing EEBO image and text content

Mark Sandler : Democratizing aspects of full-text searchable corpora.

Stuart Dempster : Digital corpora as tools for curriculum enrichment: the case of EEBO/EEBO-TCP

Selbach (Vanessa)

Enssib, Lyon, France.

La collection de bois gravés bibliques du musée de l'imprimerie de Lyon : Histoire d'un fonds d'atelier du 16e au 19e siècle

The collection of biblical Woodblocks of the printing Museum in Lyon as an example of workshop practices 16th-19th centuries.

Résumé

Le musée de l’imprimerie de Lyon a acquis en 1964 une exceptionnelle collection homogène de près de 600 petits bois gravés (ou dessinés pour certains) illustrant la Bible. Il s’agit de véritable séries, un peu moins de 400 bois du XVIe siècle, complétés harmonieusement par plus de 200 bois au début du XVIIIe siècle, que plusieurs éditeurs ont réunis pour illustrer des Bibles et des Figures de la Bible à Lyon, Paris, et en Bretagne, de 1569 à 1802. Il est ainsi possible de reconstituer partiellement l’histoire de ces bois, qui reflète les évolutions du goût en matière d’illustration et offre une chance rare d’étudier le travail d’imprimeurs qui, par accumulations successives, souvent difficiles à démêler, ont peu à peu rassemblé un grand nombre de matrices de provenances diverses, afin de constituer en leurs ateliers un stock important destiné à alimenter leurs futures réalisations.

Abstract

The printing museum in Lyon has acquired in 1964 an exceptionnal collection of nearly 600 small standard woodblocks (some of them only drawn and not yet cut out) illustrating the Bible. These are real series, 400 blocks from the XVIth c., harmoniously completed by 200 blocks at the beginning of the XVIIIth c., which were used to illustrate Bibles first in Lyon, then Paris and finally in Brittany, from 1569 to 1802. It has been possible to reconstruct part of the history of these woodblocks, what can put some light on the evolution of the taste for illustrated books over the centuries, and on the work of printers who successively collected old and new printing material in their workshops in order to supply their future work.

Vanessa Selbacj, Archiviste paléographe, Conservatrice des bibliothèques, Enseignante à l’enssib (documents anciens), Spécialité : histoire de l’estampe, Specialised in the history of prints. Orientation actuelle de recherche : histoire du collectionnisme d’estampes XVe-XVIIIe s. Current research : history of print collecting XVth-XVIIIth c. Membre du Centre de recherche d’histoire du livre de l’Enssib (Lyon).

Serrepuy (Virginie)

Ecole nationale des chartes, Paris

"Enflammer le soleil" : l'éditeur Georges Charpentier (1846-1905) mécène des Impressionnistes.

Les visiteurs du Metropolitan Museum de New York peuvent contempler le portrait de Madame Charpentier et ses enfants, peint par Renoir en 1878, représentant l’épouse de l’éditeur parisien Georges Charpentier, l’« éditeur des naturalistes » et ami intime de Zola.

C’est en 1875 que Georges Charpentier fait la connaissance de Renoir en achetant une de ses toiles à l'Hôtel Drouot. Très rapidement, il rencontre les amis de Renoir, Sisley, Manet, Monet et Pissarro, qui côtoient dans le salon Charpentier les auteurs de la maison et des personnalités républicaines. Cette vie mondaine est l’occasion de les soutenir: la maîtresse de maison fait réaliser ses menus par Renoir et convainc le Jury d’accepter son portrait au Salon de 1879.

Selon Renoir, « c’est elle qui donna l’idée à son mari de créer, pour défendre la cause de l’art impressionniste, La Vie Moderne ». Cette revue illustrée est ouverte aux auteurs de la maison d’édition et aux peintres, qui trouvent là une tribune et quelques subsides dans la rémunération des articles. L’aventure de La Vie moderne, dirigée par Emile Bergerat puis par Edmond Renoir, le frère du peintre, fut relativement éphémère, de 1879 à 1885, et extrêmement coûteuse pour l’éditeur.

Cette revue constitue ainsi le point de convergence entre ces activités à la fois artistiques et commerciales que constituent les mondes de l’édition, de la littérature et de la peinture. La revue est destinée d’une part au renforcement du prestige de la maison d’édition, constituant un type de publication couramment utilisé pour valoriser une production éditoriale, et d’autre part à la défense de conceptions artistiques rejetées : cette tension entre deux objectifs différents a pu constituer un facteur de fragilité.

Il conviendrait de s’interroger sur les conséquences de ce mécénat sur l’endettement chronique de l’éditeur, mais qui, paradoxalement, n’a pas débouché sur une collaboration plus étroite dans le domaine du livre, puisque Charpentier n’a pas fait appel à ses amis peintres pour illustrer ses ouvrages.

L’étude de ce « microcosme » permet également de s’interroger sur les relations entre auteurs naturalistes et peintres impressionnistes qui s’y fréquentent : opposition totale entre naturalistes qui dépeignent la vie « sous ses couleurs les plus sordides » et impressionnistes « amoureux de la lumière et de la joie de vivre », ou concordance de vue entre ces courants qui revendiquent une forme de « réalisme » ?

Virginie Serrepuy, est élève-fonctionnaire-stagiaire (3e année) à l’Ecole nationale des Chartes.

Shep (Sydney)

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Tracking migration and diaspora : the Australian Book Trade Index.

National history of the book projects worldwide recognise that the book as portable artefact does not exist or remain solely within national or even regional boundaries. Furthermore, the migration of personnel, technology, intellectual capital and raw material contributes to the book's inherent internationalism. The British Book Trade Index, the Scottish Book Trade Index, and the Canadian Book Trade and Library Index represent invaluable tools for researchers in Australia and New Zealand. Equally important, however, is the development of an Australasian Book Trade Index to facilitate local research and to propel our books and our book history into the international arena.

Like many settler societies of the nineteenth century, New Zealand and Australia were characterised by high mobility, ethnic diversity, and fragmented skill sets. This is never more evident than in the production of print and the development of local print cultures, English and non-English speaking alike. The Australasian Book Trade Index [ABTI] is designed to coordinate the current ad hoc data collection activities of an increasing number of antipodean book history researchers. It also addresses a number of significant challenges: interoperability with existing overseas databases; capturing the density and complexity of post-1850 book trade activity; balancing the role of an index with the need to provide rich biographical data to track individual migration patterns; documenting the multiplicity of ethnic communities and languages which characterise local print cultures.

Dr Sydney J Shep is Senior Lecturer in Print and Book Culture at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and The Printer at Wai-te-ata Press. She is currently working on a web-based electronic monograph The Print History Project: Wellington’s Book Trade 1840 – 2000 and researches topics in paper history and print cultures of the diaspora.

Shevlin (Eleanor F.)

West Chester University

The printing press as an agent of change, 25 years on : a roundtable.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Twenty-five Years On: A Roundtable

Within the field of book studies, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1979) stands as an undisputed foundational text, helping to set a significant and wide-ranging scholarly agenda. It has crossed disciplinary, geographical, and temporal borders as scholars from around the world have applied and reworked Eisenstein’s model to investigate the role of print in cultural transformations that have occurred outside the work’s original focus on print in early modern Europe. Yet from the outset it was a book that inspired debate and provoked controversy. (Most recently, Adrian Johns’s The Nature of the Book [1998] and David McKitterick’s Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 [2003] have challenged fundamental aspects of her work.) Such debates point to the continuing vitality and impact of Eisenstein’s arguments. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication, this session will examine the influence of the work, its current status within the interdisciplinary realm of book studies, the ongoing debates it has and continues to generate, and its potential future contributions to the field. The three organizers will open the session with brief presentations addressing the following topics:

– the role of Eisenstein’s pioneering study in the formation and development of print culture studies;

– the usefulness of her work both for understanding cultures of print beyond the geographic and temporal boundaries of early modern Europe;

– the applicability of Eisenstein’s work for interpreting the electronic culture of our own technologically revolutionary moment.

The organizers’ collaborative research in the reception of and current applications of Eisenstein’s work for a forthcoming collection of essays will inform their presentations.

These presentations, in turn, will set the stage for a general discussion of Eisenstein’s work at its quarter-century mark. Given the sustained interest in the issues raised by The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, we anticipate a lively exchange among audience members. Our ultimate goal for this session is to chart the paths pursued, redirected, and unexplored by this seminal work and its readers.

Sabrina A. Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin are cofounders of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies, a monthly forum that meets at the Library of Congress, and coeditors of the forthcoming Agent of Change: Twenty-five Years of Print Culture Studies (2005).

Eleanor F. Shevlin, an Assistant Professor of English at West Chester University, is working on a print culture account of the making of the British novel; support for this project includes grants from the The Bibliographical Society and the Bibliographical Society of America Panzer Fellowship (2003). A member of the organizing committee for the 2001 SHARP conference, she has served for the past nine years as SHARP’s liaison to the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her articles on print culture, postcolonial fiction, and eighteenth-century British literature have appeared in Book History, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Modern Fiction Studies, and elsewhere.

Slive (Daniel J.)

Rare Books Librarian Department of Special Collections UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library, Los Angeles

Extending the boundaries : illustrated science books with movable parts. “A New World of Words: Amerindian Languages in the Colonial World”

Abstract

The difficulties of communicating across cultural, ideological, and linguistic boundaries played a role in relations between natives and Europeans throughout the colonial period. In addition to negotiating practical matters such as trade and the control of territory, Europeans also wished to communicate theological concepts for the purpose of converting Indians to Christianity. These various aspects of colonization contributed to the documentation and utilization of Indian languages in texts printed both in Europe and the Americas.

The early publication of Amerindian languages, often in the form of word lists and brief vocabularies, appeared in accounts of voyages and travels and other documents of colonial expansion. Initial word-gatherings were eventually expanded into more comprehensive vocabularies and dictionaries. Missionaries, who often spent years in a region learning the local language, collaborated with native speakers to create these dictionaries as well as grammars. These texts were intended to train others in the indigenous languages in which they would proselytize. In addition to language-learning tools, a variety of religious works were printed in Indian languages to assist in the conversion of indigenous peoples. A small number of secular texts, such as government documents, were also printed in selected native languages.

In this paper, I propose to review the history of Amerindian language printing in Europe and the Americas during the colonial period. In doing so, I will discuss the ways in which the creation and production of these books reflect the theme of the preconference: crossing not only geographic and linguistic borders between Europeans and natives but also cultural and technological boundaries from oral language to written word to printed page.

"Extending the Boundaries: Illustrated Science Books with Movable Parts"

Beginning in the sixteenth century, the publishing of scientific texts preserved the writings of ancient and medieval writers concerned with the nature and mechanics of the human body, the world, and the universe. Since that time, printed books have contributed to the dissemination of new scientific knowledge and concepts. While some works are best known for their theoretical constructs, others served a different function by instructing students, scholars, and practitioners in the mechanical aspects of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and technology. Illustrations extended the pedagogical function of these books by providing the reader with a visual representation of the physical elements, techniques, and concepts explained in the texts. A small percentage of these illustrated scientific works also contained movable parts such as volvelles, flaps, and other mechanical elements. These mechanisms were intended to assist readers in understanding technical concepts and performing calculations. In doing so, these movable parts extended the reader’s engagement with the book as a written text and as a physical object.

This paper will review the history of illustrated scientific books constructed with movable parts. The chronological scope of the books to be discussed will extend from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, with the focus on books of the hand-press period. The books examined will include works of anatomy, astrology and astronomy, cosmology, geometry, obstetrics and opthalmology, navigation, and perspective. In surveying these types of books, this presentation will explore the different ways authors, printers, and publishers moved beyond the confines of the traditional book structure in the process of attempting to convey complex scientific information.

Résumé

Au début du XVIe siècle, les textes scientifiques imprimés perpétuaient les textes de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Age sur la nature, la fabrique du corps et l’univers. Depuis cette époque, les livres imprimés ont contribué à la diffusion de nouvelles connaissances scientifiques. Tandis que certains ouvrages étaient et sont restés célèbres pour leur construction théorique, d’autres avaient pour but d’instruire étudiants, savants et praticiens, aux divers aspects techniques des disciplines scientifiques telles que les mathématiques, la médecine et l’ingenieurie. Les illustrations contribuaient à la fonction pédagogique de ces ouvrages en offrant aux lecteurs une représentation visuelle des techniques et concepts développés dans les textes. Un faible pourcentage de ces illustrations étaient des « volvelles » et autres structures mobiles. Ces divers mécanismes permettaient aux lecteurs de mieux comprendre les problèmes posés et les aider à faire des calculs. Ainsi ces structures mobiles permettaient une relation à la fois intellectuelle et matérielle du lecteur au livre.

Cette communication étudiera l’histoire des livres scientifiques illustrés avec des structures mobiles entre le XVe et le XIXe siècle et se concentrera sur les livres imprimés de l’époque de la presse manuelle. Anatomie, astrologie et astronomie, cosmologie, géométrie, obstétrique et ophtalmologie, navigation et étude de la perspective, toutes ces disciplines seront incluses dans cette analyse. En passant en revue ces différents styles de livres, cet exposé examinera comment les auteurs, imprimeurs et éditeurs dépassèrent les limites de la structure traditionnelle du livre dans le but de transmettre des connaissances scientifiques complexes.

Daniel J. Slive is the Rare Books Librarian in the Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Los Angeles, a position he has held since 1988. Prior to that, he served as Reference Librarian and Coordinator of Reader and Bibliographic Services at the John Carter Brown Library for ten years. He is currently Past-Chair of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries of the American Library Association.

Smith, (Michelle)

University of Alberta

Continually confronted : articulating transitions in the cultural capital of Canadian pulp magazines.

I propose to approach the theme “Crossing Borders” with a slight twist. Rather than considering a cultural transfer between the old world and the new, my paper will address the transfer in cultural capital that surrounds a rare collection of pulp magazines. Pulp magazines, mass-produced periodicals that dominated the popular print trade throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, were meant to be consumed and discarded much like any other cheap commodity. As a result of their cultural status as “trash,” such periodicals have traditionally been excluded from most archival collections; they have also, until recently, been disregarded in academic research. In 1996, however, the National Library of Canada purchased an extremely rare collection of pulp magazines that were published in Canada during the Second World War. This costly purchase not only revealed the increased financial value of the pulps, it also assigned the magazines cultural capital because the magazines were newly designated as artifacts with the potential to illuminate the history of Canadian publishing and reading. That said, the pulp collection was located through the “ephemeral trade” rather than the rare book trade. The ephemeral status of the pulps, combined with the subject matter printed in them—sensational stories of strewn with corpses, clues, and wise-cracks—continues to make their status as cultural artifacts worthy of study questionable. The tension surrounding the critical study of pulps should not, according to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, be at all surprising. As he observes, an emerging field of inquiry is “distinct from a solidly legitimate activity […] an activity on the way to legitimation continually confronts its practitioners with the question of its own legitimacy” (131). With this in mind, my paper addresses two questions: first, how did the literary hierarchy of the 1940s shape the publication and reception of pulp magazines? and second, how can we understand the transitions in cultural capital that inform that the preservation and study of the pulp archive that is currently housed at the National Library?

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Market of Symbolic Goods.” Trans. R. Sawyer. The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 112-141.

I am a first-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alberta. I recently completed my M.A. thesis, Criminal Tales as Cultural Trade: the Production, Reception, and Preservation of Canadian Pulp Magazines. An expanded version of this paper is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed academic journal English Studies in Canada.

Squires (Claire)

Oxford Brookes University

"Helping me find the words" : ghostwritting, celebrity and autobiography in 20th/21st century publishing

Late twentieth and early twenty-first century publishing is strongly affected by celebrity culture: recent UK bestseller lists reveal chart-topping books by Madonna, Princess Diana’s butler, and actors, as well as titles drawing on celebrity fads, such as the Atkins’ diet. Publishing has joined other entertainment industries in exploiting celebrity brands, with biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, endorsed lifestyle and hobby books and even fiction extending the name of the celebrity into the literary marketplace.

This paper will analyse the place of celebrity books and authorial image in the marketplace, but will concentrate on the genre of autobiography and the role of the ghostwriter in this burgeoning publishing field. In the acknowledgements to one of the most successful recent celebrity autobiographies, My Side (2003), the footballer, international icon and ‘author’ David Beckham explicitly thanks his ghostwriter Tom Watt ‘for jogging my memory and helping me find the words I needed’. Beckham and Watt’s writing relationship is notable for the high-profile accorded to the ghost on the title page and in the media. Watt has written of the experience of working with Beckham as primarily one of ‘find[ing] a voice’ for ‘someone who would not have a literary voice’.

The paper will examine the creative and editorial processes by which these projects come about, including the crucial role of the agent and/or publisher in matchmaking ‘authors’ and ghostwriters. It will consider the various relationships of ‘author’, ghostwriter and reader brought about by these processes. Publishers and ghostwriters are investigated as the mediating – and transforming – force in celebrity autobiography, and a theory of ‘editorial continuum’ will be developed in order to understand the production processes of such titles.

The processes of writing, publication and reception of celebrity autobiographical material will then be set within the larger context of the theory of autobiography, the estranging act of life writing, and the crucial interventions made by writers and editors in lived experience.

Claire Squires is Senior Lecturer in Publishing at Oxford Brookes University. She has published reader’s guides to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy. Her doctoral thesis was on ‘Fiction in the Marketplace: The Literary Novel and the UK Publishing Industry 1990-2000’ (2003). At SHARP 2002, she gave a paper entitled ‘A “Carnival of Books”: World Book Day, Celebration and Sales’.

Steiner (Ann)

Lund University, Sweden

Across the Internet : English books in Sweden in the 1990's.

The introduction of Internet bookstores in Sweden in the late 1990’s changed the way in which books in foreign languages were distributed and consumed. The Internet bookstores increased the accessibility of books in foreign languages and transformed the Swedish book trade. The import of books in foreign languages into Sweden was during most of the 20th century less than 8% of the trade and about 40% of these fell into the category of scholarly publishing. Until the Second World War most of these books were written in German but since the 1950’s the number of Anglo-American books increased. Since English became mandatory in primary schools in the 1950’s higher language skills slowly created a demand for reading English texts in their original version. In this paper I intend to map out what happened in the late 1990’s when the Internet bookstores made Anglo-American literature easily accessible.

Already in the early 1990’s books in English sold more than before, but this was mainly due to increased marketing efforts by Anglo-American publishers. They were looking for new markets and the Swedish one, although small, was interesting in this perspective. But the local bookstores only bought a limited amount and the sales of books in English would not have increased the way it did during the following years had it not been for the introduction of the Internet bookstores. The launch of Amazon in 1995 and several Swedish followers in 1997 made books in English accessible in a completely new way. The significance of this new form of distribution for Swedish consumption of books in English was decisive and has not yet been discussed.

During their first years it was particularly in two areas that Internet bookstores like Amazon.com and the Swedish Bokus were successful; i.e. scholarly publishing and certain kinds of fiction. Scholars have always held an international perspective in their work but not having to wait three months for a new publication evidently made their work easier and even more international. The novels that sold well through the Internet were mainly science fiction and crime novels. The readers of these genres were well acquainted with Internet technology as well as the international market regarding these particular categories. That the Internet bookstores became the channel for such different kinds of books was surprising and the paper also discusses this unlikely mixture of academia and popular entertainment.

Stenhouse (William)

Yeshiva University, New York

Printing antiquities in the 16th Century.

This paper examines some of the practical steps taken by antiquarians and publishers to print representations of classical antiquities in the sixteenth century.

Résumé de la communication: Cette communication examine les façons des antiquaires et des éditeurs au seizième siècle d’imprimer les illustrations des antiquités classiques.

Full abstract: The sixteenth century witnessed an enormous growth of interest in reporting details of classical material remains, including buildings and ruins as well as coins, inscriptions, and statues. In many cases, the records that the antiquarian scholars of this period made are our only evidence for particular objects or sites, but even so, much of their work remains unpublished today. Some details of their undertakings, however, were printed in the sixteenth century, and in this paper I will examine some of the technical and practical steps taken by antiquarians, artists and printers to represent antiquities in this period. They were faced with a variety of difficulties, including the representation of fragmentary remains, the inclusion of text and non-textual details from the same monument, and the sheer expense of including a large number of engravings or woodcuts in a single volume. The solutions they devised demonstrate the persistence of the people involved, as well as the practical limitations on the early print medium, and the continued use of manuscripts alongside printed books. In one edition of the Capitoline Fasti (chronological lists of Roman magistrates found in Rome), for example, scholars’ supplements to the evidence provided by the fragmentary inscriptions were printed in red, whereas the actual surviving evidence was shown with black ink. In cases where printers tried to represent inscribed monuments, they often combined a woodcut to show the setting, and typescript for the words of the inscription. Both scholars and printers were keenly aware of the costs involved in producing books that featured illustrations, and of the relatively small market for such books. But some printers also recognized that the publication of antiquities was a worthwhile intellectual project. They tried to pay for it by including illustrations of antiquities as appendices to editions of classical texts, or sought out patrons who would subsidize the extra printing costs, or printed books in two editions, one without illustrations, and one, more expensive, which included representations of the monuments discussed. Despite their efforts, some scholars remained dissatisfied with the quality of the etchers and engravers, and continued to produce presentation manuscripts of their research for elite patrons, while seeking to print it as well. In general, however, the solutions discovered by authors and printers to the problems of illustrating antiquities represent early innovations with the possibilities of the young medium, and its potential for verbal and visual reproduction.

Szepe (Helena K.)

University of South Florida, Tampa, FL

Benedetto Bordon's Isolario of 1528 : printing and spatial consciousness.

Bordon’s Isolario, a Abook of islands@ illustrated with woodcuts, is known to historians of cartography for the prominence given to the transatlantic - it is the first of such books to include the Americas. Initially printed in Venice in 1528 with the title Libro di Benedetto Bordon, the Isolario has also been considered the most complete geography of its time, foreshadowing the great world atlases later in the century. But the Isolario is also sometimes criticized, like others of its genre, for being derivative and backwards. Why did such books of islands remained popular in the sixteenth century, after the discoveries of new continents, when they deliberately ignore great portions of the world?

As the direction of most recent scholarship points, one shortchanges the cultural significance of such an illustrated book if one merely positions it in a trajectory from lesser to greater accuracy of descriptions of the world. Tom Conley in particular has searched for the presence of a “signatory self” of the author in the Isolario tradition. The imaginative landscape of Columbus - his readings and its influence on what he expected the world to be like, has been well studied by Valerie Flint and others. Rather than examine the voices of famous voyagers, this paper explores some layers of the mentality of a man involved in the successful reformatting and re-framing of their accounts into print.

Central to Bordon’s construction of a world of islands is his native city of islands, Venice. His Isolario is the first printed book with images to place Venetian panegyric in a visually global, even cosmic context. This paper shows how the Isolario draws on the literature of Venetian chronicles and official histories, of geography and travel, to both visually and textually conceptualize Venice as the marvelous center of a marvelous world. In doing so, Bordon uniquely capitalized on the illustrated book format and market to create a new globally centralized image of Venice.

Helena Szépe is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of South Florida. She has published extensively on the links between early printing and manuscript production in Venice, and is currently completing a book on Venetian manuscript illumination. She is also collaborating with Professor Lilian Armstrong of Wellesley College on a book on the Venetian miniaturist, publisher, and author Benedetto Bordon.

Szir (Sandra)

University of Buenos Aires, Argentine

Text, image, ideology and consumption in children's periodicals in Buenos Aires 1886-1904.

Abstract

In the transition from 19th to 20th century the periodical publication field, expressed important transformations that implied the turn from illustrated cultural or satirical journal to the magazine format. The conditions of possibility for this kind of illustrated press appearance –urban changes; the increase of public education; new technologies; new forms of distribution, sales and advertising- established communicative changes and new cultural relationships that expressed in the material structure of the printed object. This paper deals with the periodical publications for children published in Buenos Aires between 1886 and 1904, understanding periodicals as producers of singular discoursive practices that use different expressive codes, both visual and textual. This discourses engaged with the more general social ones about childhood, education, religion, moral, nation, and the national identity.

This study includes material from La ilustración infantil (Children Illustrated) (1886-87) that presents its images as emblems, to Diario de los niños (Children’s Newspaper) (1898), where images intend to illustrate lessons in a visual interaction, like a children’s encyclopedia, up to Pulgarcito (1904) that modifies visual features in general, getting in an illustrated color cover, a varied and fragmented layout with a lot of bullets, half-tones and adds. The analysis focuses on material and visual aspects, particularly the images, and it inquires how those elements operate in the discoursive production.

The relationship between text and image examination, in the three cases studied, allows to analyze the different functions that the image may adopt in the printed object. It also permits to investigate about the possible relationships between the images and the strategies adapted to the new market needs, or the political presence showed in pedagogical theories addressed to the Argentinian child. On the other side the material aspects of a publication allow to find connections with the historical context through the study of the production process. In Argentina, it has a peculiarity because most of the illustrated images were imported from a different cultural context. That provoked, sometimes, contradictions between the moral and national values the text intended to transmit.

Résumé

Dans la transition du 19ème au 20 siècle des changements importants se sont manifestés dans le domaine des publications périodiques qui ont supposé le passage du journal illustré culturel ou satirique vers le format magazine. Les conditions de possibilité pour l´apparition de ce genre de presse illustrée -transformations urbaines ; augmentation de l’instruction ; nouvelles technologies ; nouvelles formes de diffusion et vente ; publicité- ont établi des changements communicatifs et de nouveaux rapports culturels qui se sont manifestés dans la structure matérielle de l´imprimé. Cette communication a pour sujet les publications périodiques pour l´enfance publiée à Buenos Aires entre les années 1886 et 1904. Les journaux sont des producteurs de pratiques discursives singulières qui utilisent différents codes expressifs, visuels et textuels. Ce discours s´articule avec les discours sociaux généraux sur l´enfance, l´éducation, la religion, la morale, la nation et l´identité nationale.

L’étude comprend depuis La ilustración infantil (L´illustration enfantine) (1886-87) qui offre ses images comme emblèmes, en passant pour le Diario de los niños (Le Journal des enfants) (1898), dans lequel les images prétendent illustrer les leçons dans une interaction visuelle, comme une encyclopédie enfantine, jusqu´à Pulgarcito (1904) qui modifie les éléments visuels en général, introduit une couverture illustrée en couleur, une mise en page variée et fragmentée avec beaucoup de vignettes, half-tones et publicité. Le centre de l’analyse se trouve dans les aspects matériels et visuels, particulièrement les images, et dans l´étude sur la manière par laquelle ces éléments interviennent dans la production discursive.

L´examen des rapports entre le texte et l´image dans le trois cas étudiés permet d´analyser les diverses fonctions que l´image peut adopter dans l´imprimé, et étudier les rapports possibles entre les images et les stratégies adaptées au nouvelles demandes du marché, ou la présence de la politique manifestée dans les théories pédagogiques qui ont l´enfant argentin comme destinataire des aspirations de la nation. Les aspects matérielles d´une publication permettent, d´ailleurs, d’établir des connections avec le contexte historique à travers l´étude du processus de production. En Argentina il y a une particularité parce que les images, en général importées, parvenaient de contextes culturels différents, et provoquaient, souvent, des contradictions avec les valeurs morales que le texte essayait de transmettre.