Last year I applied for and won a scholarship to Rare Book School. Since I’m hoping to take a palaeography course this summer at the University of New Mexico, the codicology course taught by Albert Derolez and offered in Baltimore this last week seemed like the best use of the scholarship to me. I’m quite glad I did.
The course was held at the Walters Art Museum, in Baltimore. We’d meet at the door of 5 Mount Vernon Place — which was the Walters mansion — instead of at the door of the Walters Art Gallery. From there, we would be escorted through the mansion and into the third floor of the museum, finally taking an elevator to the fifth floor. After this, we were escorted back into a curatorial conference room, where we sat around a collection of tables pushed together and surrounded by mesoamerican art in cabinets:
Our workspace at the Walters. You can see the mesoamerican pieces in the background
As you can see, each seat had a manuscript in front of it and two wooden blocks, covered in felt, to serve as supports. I have to say that the wooden blocks were an improvement over the foam wedges you generally work with to support a manuscript or book. They were less likely to slip out from under you. That said, I think it might have been better in the long run to execute the same general idea, but as wooden wedges, to keep there from being only a single point of contact with the covers of the book. Of course, old books are more resiliant than we give them credit for (which, now that I think about it, might be a result of the binding methods of the 19th century and our experiences with acidic wood pulp-based papers. If so, that would be an interesting data point concerning how we treat the book as an object now versus then), and their time being looked at was an hour and a half, tops, so I doubt any lasting harm could be done. We also had lights, tape measures, and loupes available to us should we need them.
Each day was structured in four discrete hour and a half blocks. The way it generally worked during the first part of the week is that we would have a lecture, with slides, discussing some aspect of codicology. We would then go on a break to the Engineering Society or to lunch, and return to find manuscripts in front of our work spaces. We would go around to each manuscript while Professor Derolez discussed various aspects of them. Once that had occurred, we would then take a look at them ourselves, noting anything that we thought of interest. During the second portion of the week, the pattern was changed slightly, in that the lecture portion of things became far less prominent and Professor Derolez provided only a few cursory notes about the manuscripts before turning us loose to do an analysis of each. After this, he would go around to each manuscript again, giving us a fuller analysis that we would compare our results against or take the time to inform him of anything interesting we had noted.
Monday through Wednesday, there were talks or tours that we could attend in the evenings. The first talk, by the incoming director of Rare Book School Michael Suarez, was really quite electifying. Basically, his premise was that there tends to be multiple camps that are interested in doing work with the history of the book, but that these camps tend to do work that focuses on their special interest. As a result of this, there are gaps in our knowledge of the history of the book that are a direct result of this humanities-based model of the single scholar working on a monograph. As an alternative, he proposed something more akin to the social sciences model, where a team of experts in different disciplines work together to concert. He also noted that there tends to be a divide between the way academics and special collections librarians think about the book. In the case of the latter, they tend to focus on the local — what they have in their collections. In the case of the latter the focus tends to be much more outward-looking, since what they’re interested in might be held by multiple collections. Likewise, people who are interested in digitization and the digital tend to speak a different jargon than people who are interested in the analog, physical object. Finally, there tends to be a shift in special collections librarianship from a model of the scholar/librarian to more of an exhibitor divested of much the scholarly role. This is a shame because of any group, the special collections librarians have the most intimate and longest time to work with manuscripts. His proposed solution is to get these various camps talking to each other and working with physical objects again.1
Tuesday night, we had a tour of the Walters’ digitization facilities and their book and manuscript room. Unfortunately I didn’t think to bring my camera with me or ask if I could take pictures, so this section is going to be a bit dry. Nevertheless, they’re doing some neat stuff.
They have a grant to digitize their Islamic manuscript collection and the way they’re doing it is quite nice. The metadata is available, but the images are being put up on flikr for anyone to take a look at and work with, at various sizes — an example is here. This puts the work into the hands of as many people as possible, but still provides the necessary data on the physical object for those who need that (and incidentally avoids two of my concerns about digitization — that the effort is in the coding and not in the manuscripts, and that hard data about the physical object is lost). This is all without having to write interfaces or really any coding at all. Which is something of a benefit in terms of grant money.
Their book room was, frankly, amazing. If you’ll excuse my geeking out for a moment, I got to hold a First Folio, they had a Kelmscott Chaucer (although not as nice as the Peabody’s — see below) and quite a lot of incanabulas, and that’s not even counting the manuscripts. We tended to look at bindings and illustrations, for the most part, since Terry Belanger was there with us and that was the focus of his class. With that said, just the appearance of the room itself was more than enough to spark some envy in me. It also made me decide to keep my camera in my bag, so I wouldn’t miss out on opportunities to take pictures provided they were allowed.
On Wednesday, we worked at the Peabody Library with manuscripts held either by the Peabody or one of the other Hopkins libraries.
Our workspace at the Peabody.
We were in a glassed in area at the far side of the Peabody as you walk in, in much the same setup as we had at the Walters. Again, we moved from manuscript to manuscript in a round-robin fashion, but in this case we got to work with some Flemish books in their original bindings, with the panel stamping.
My home station at the Peabody, with the manuscript-holding bookcart in the background
The look of the Peabody itself was distracting at first (I will have a post on it on one of my non-academic blogs, if you’re interested) but as we got into working with the manuscripts themselves the surroundings tended to fade away. i found it to be that way at the Walters as well — the mesoamerican art was a bit of a distraction at first but it soon became just so many pieces in the background.
That night, we were given a tour of the Peabody’s rare book holdings, which necessitated us going up into the stacks. This is a rare thing — the way the Peabody tends to work is that you stay on the ground floor and they bring you what you’re looking for. I also made sure to bring my camera and ask about pictures, so I have quite a few shots of what they showed us. I don’t have captions for everything, unfortuntely, so I’m going to leave this as a photodump and beg forgiveness. You can jump to the rest of the text here.
Kelmscott Chaucer, tooled pigskin binding
I also felt the need to take a few shots of the room itself, from our vantage point. The bookcase is a case full of rare bindings:
Thursday we were on our own in the evening and I managed to get to a couple of the rare booksellers in Charles Village. They were in their last hour of being open, so I didn’t get to browse, but I highly recommend the area if you’re interested in some neat gems. I ended up not buying anything (the book I was looking at turned out to be $3200 and that’s way too rich for my blood right now), but I had fun and got to see some more of the city on my walk back.
Friday was more manuscript work, and a reception where cards were exchanged, people chatted with each other, and it was generally nice.
In terms of my academic interests, I feel a lot more confident about looking at manuscripts authoritatively, and the books I’m reading for prelims make a lot more sense. I get what is being said in a way that I don’t think I would even with the numerous plates that are available. It is also useful because the tendency when looking at manuscripts is to see the high points, and this class wasn’t about the high points. It was about the more workmanlike, day-to-day items that usually go unnoticed in libraries and art museums. And I like the idea of putting them back to work, even if the work is simply to find out more about them.
It also made me feel that what I’d really like to do is become a manuscript curator, or ideally to do something where I’m working with manuscripts and early printed books in a teaching capacity. I don’t know, however, if my current academic path is realistically going to get me there. It’s a crap shoot in any case as far as jobs go, so I’m trying to figure out how best to construct myself in a way that’ll give me the ability to teach in the classroom or to do scholarship on manuscripts (or ideally, both). I’m not really sure how to do that yet.
One final note: Rare Book School isn’t just for manuscript folks. The class running concurrently with ours was on book illustration to 1900, and there are courses offered on childrens’ books, binding techniques, acquisitions, and a slew of other topics. I would heartily recommend it to anybody, if for no other reason than that you can become aware of how people thought about the book in the days before the kindle, when presentation mattered.
1.I see a couple of problems with the idea, while at the same time loving it in concept. The first is the books and manuscripts I’m interested in and want to work with. There simply aren’t enough at any American university I’m likely to be hired at to make handling them part of a curriculum. Secondly, I think the ascendance of theory (and here I am generalizing horribly — I’m not anti-theory but it’s going to sound like I am) tends to reinforce the logical divide we see between the text and the book, itself a result of the uniformity of modern publishing and its massive print runs. The value in seeing the book as a physical artifact with much to say about its own time in concert with the text it contains takes a back seat to transcriptions. In a sense, it’s all mediation between ourselves and the original manuscript copy, but I think the danger is that with modern books, that notion of it as mediation is lost whereas when you’re dealing with even a book published in the 19th century you have to consider bindings, illustration, size, and methods of production in a way that forces you to recognize that mediation overtly.
