The problem I’m running into, though, is that I’m still not sure about the best way to bring the watermark out and subsume the text. The long-term solution is to wait for someone to develop a 900nm infrared el-sheet equivalent and take all the photos with an IR filter over the camera lens, but I haven’t seen anything like that on the market. Then it occurred to me that I am taking digital photos, which means I can manipulate the raw files.

So I’m attaching four files to this post. They are image files of two separate leaves with identical camera settings except that one has an exposure time of 1/250 and one an exposure time of 1/80. I’m hoping someone can give me some hints on how I can manipulate the photos to bring out the watermark in such a way that I can take shots of a whole book, then run a batch on them before uploading. They’re nearly 20 meg files, so there will be four links (right click and hit save as) if you want to give it a shot. I would really appreciate it.

http://www.medievalgeek.com/Academic/IMG_0033.CR2
http://www.medievalgeek.com/Academic/IMG_0034.CR2
http://www.medievalgeek.com/Academic/IMG_0035.CR2
http://www.medievalgeek.com/Academic/IMG_0036.CR2

The problem, of course, is that the paper is used to print or write a book, and for that reason the watermark isn’t always visible. If the book is a quarto or octavo, then the watermark can be split in half or buried near the spine of the book. In addition, the paper is printed or written on, and that printing or writing can obscure the watermark. However, if you’re lucky and have a folio book with a relatively clear page, you can see the watermark.

This Zelco light can be purchased from Amazon for $35.10.

The issue with this, of course, is getting a light source behind a leaf which is still bound into the book, without causing undue stress on it. Usually, when working with books, the light you use is something like the Zelco light pictured here. It’s really useful to look at things close up. The flourescent light swings out on a pivet, and there is a small led bulb at the end to allow you to look at things, such as which side of a manuscript was ruled, where having direct light at an oblique angle is necessary. What it isn’t necessarily good at is showing watermarks. Even when the batteries are entirely fresh, the flourescent wand simply isn’t big enough to give you a nice solid light behind the page, and the unit itself is a bit bulky, making it less than ideal if you’re going to deal with something smaller than a folio book.

I ran into this problem when I was trying to do some work with two copies of the only really old book (old in this case being pre 1700) I own, a 1679 complete works of Edmund Spenser.  I could see the watermarks, but I couldn’t photograph them — which I wanted to be able to do for a couple of reasons.  First, while I own one copy, I was working with another on loan from a different university, and I couldn’t take that copy out of the special collections library at my institution.  Second, the general method of dealing with watermarks is to trace them, and I am nothing if not artistically incompetant.  Third, with a digital photograph you can attempt to manipulate the image to make the watermark stand out more, which is useful if you want to make it clear how it exists on the page as composed, rather than as a separate entity.

The ideal light source for photographing watermarks would have to be thin, wide, and put out enough light that you could see the watermark easily, but not so much light that the page itself might be damaged.  From what Terry Belanger at Rare Book School has told me, such items existed but they tended to be relatively bulky, rigid paddles that were not ideal for the situation.  And to be honest, if I’d known that those paddles existed I may have bought one and been done with it.  But I didn’t.

I did know that for the past ten years or so casemodders had been wrappng electroluminescent wire around their cables and the windows of their cases to try to create various lighting effects.  As time has gone on, the wire has become electroluminescent tape, which in turn has become electroluminescent sheets. I decided to use one of these sheets to take a look at watermarks.

The entire setup consists of an A4 size electroluminescent panel and an inverter to drive it, purchased from the people at electroluminescence-inc.com.  They offer many different types of inverters, but the easiest are two-pin inverters with a standrd plug.  Of these, three are offered  – one to run on 220 volt AC, one to run on 110 volt AC, and one to run on 12 volt DC.  I chose the 110 volt inverter so I could run it off standard household current.  The whole setup cost a little less than $100 including tax.

The sheet is very thin, roughly the same size and stiffness of a piece of cardstock.  Since if the sheet gets bent up too much, it loses its effectiveness, I keep mine inside a manila envelope.  You’ll also notice that the sheet when it is unlit is pink.  When its marketed, it is marketed as pink/white electroluminescent sheet.  There are other kinds, with different unlit/lit color combinations.

One nice thing about this particular setup is that the inverter comes with a rheostat to allow you to control the brightness of the sheet.  This may not be necessary — even at its brightest I was only able to measure about ten foot-candles of light being emitted by the unit at any given time.   However, in situations where you have to prove that the unit is not going to be detrimental to the books — say when dealing with a library or museum that may look kind of askance at your collection of wires and weird gadgets — it can be very useful to be able to say you’re going to use it on the absolute lowest setting.

As you can see, though, even at the lowest setting the light is visible even when the room is lit up.  With the picture on the left, in a lit room, you can see some of the pink from the natural color of the sheet — this is not noticeable if you look at it with the naked eye.  Likewise, with the naked eye the intensity of the light between the lower setting and the higher tends to be more visible.  Of course, in both cases the light is really visible while in a dim or dark room.

The way I set up the book to be photographed is fairly simple.  After selecting a page that has a good visible watermark, I place the book into a bookstand and set up my camera on a tripod, facing the page and focused in.  I also run a USB cable from the camera to my laptop, which has a piece of software that allows me to control the camera remotely.  This is to avoid any possibility of my finger on the shutter button moving the camera out of position.  I place the electroluminesent sheet behind the page whose watermark I want to take a look at and turn it on at the highest setting to make sure I can see the watermark.  I then turn the rheostat down.

As you can see from the picture to the right, (click on it for the enlarged version if you have difficulty) the watermark is barely visible even with the rheostat turned down.  It becomes even more visible as the room lights are dimmed, as you can see from the picture on the left.  The watermark as well as both the chainlines and the wirelines are clearly visible.  It is at this point, if necessary, that I’ll turn the lights back on and do any adjusting of focus or zooming in to make sure that I’m focused in on the watermark and that it is at the largest size I can possibly get.

Notice that the light as it comes from the sheet naturally tends to come across as very white.  This is an artifact of the way the camera takes the picture.  To the eye, it appears much closer to the undimmed shot and can be corrected if desired with the settings on your digital camera.  I tend to try to play with the apature rather than color correction, however, in order to attempt to get the watermark as visible as possible without the distraction of the text.  This is a process I am still experimenting with, but this is the final image of the watermark on this leaf after all of the corrections and adjustments have been made:

The nice thing is that once you have adjusted everything, you can easily take multiple pictures from different pages quickly, allowing you to do a catalog of all the watermarks in a particular book.

Once you have the watermark, then you need to look it up.  There are online sources to allow you to do this — the best one I feel is The Memory of Paper – but quite a lot of watermarks haven’t been catalogued online yet.  In those cases, you have to go to books of watermarks and look up the specifics of your particular watermark.  I will continue this post at another time to show you how you can do this.

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.

I think I have a fairly good circumstantial case that suggests involvement between the Katherine circle and the Digby Mary Magdalene, which certainly makes it possible for Bokenham to have been a source. What I don’t have is direct textual connections, other than the use of double quatrains in both — which is a form that is so ubiquitous in the 15th century as to be nearly useless. I think the way I could make a case with that is if the specific sections where the narrative follows what is in Bokenham use double quatrains and only double quatrains, which Bokenham uses in the third part of his Life.

One thing of note: Baker suggests the same source material makes up the play that Bokenham expressly states is his source material for his life — Luke and the Legenda Aurea — but doesn’t make the connection

Of course, the safe bet is to assume it’s the Legenda. We only have a single manuscript of Bokenham. But his connection to the Katherine circle and their connection to drama in East Anglia makes it a tantalizing possibility. It also clears up some questions about why certain changes are made to the play if you accept Gail McMurray Gibson’s suggestions about Bokenham’s life of Mary Magdalene and the issue of Richard of York’s succession.

All in all, I think it’s a good project. I just need to get that last little piece, which I think will come tomorrow during my research day.

Does this make sense? I’m not all that worried about the acme screw — even at a 3/4″ diameter the column won’t fail, but I don’t know if the rods will hold for sure or not. I want 2″ round stock, threaded, for those.

My Dad brought up the point tha I need to be worried about the top popping off due to the pressure from the screw, but I’m thinking reinforcement along one of the x/y axis will help with that. I’m not sure how to do both x and y with my pretty novice level of skill.

The other concern is flatness of the bottom and the pressing board (as well as any nipping boards that would go between), so that the book would remain flat. I’m not sure how to ensure that.

To do this, I figure I’ll need three things: knowledge, supplies, and equipment. Time, too, but that’s not something that I can do anything about and to be honest I suspect I’ll have more time now than I will after I graduate and get a job someplace. As far as knowledge goes, I’ve already picked up a couple of books on the subject. I’ve sent for sampler packs from suppliers to get an idea of what sort of supplies would work best. That leaves equipment.

I need, at minimum, a book press and board shears. Board shears aren’t happening but I can probably use a mat cutter for the same purpose. The book press, on the other hand, could happen but I haven’t seen any that are large enough for what I have in mind. I want to be able to press a coffee-table sized book, if needs be, and the largest I’ve seen and could afford would do a 12″ book.At heart, it seems like a relatively simple mechanism, so I’m thinking even I could build one, provided I had access to the tools and could find an acme threaded rod, a handle, and some very dense wood. That might be something to explore when I’m back in California in May, where I would have access to my father’s much more extensive collection of tools (and not incidentally, his much more mechanically-inclined self). I’ll need something to do while everyone is working during the week, after all, and if I can get his help on the weekend I can do the prepwork/construction at other times. It’ll also help me to narrow down what power tools I need to buy to be able to do something similar out here.

I’ve also been working on a base for the card press. I’ll put pictures up when it’s done, but the construction process isn’t really that exciting. That’s something else I should look into when I’m out there — I’m going to need bolts and nuts to attach the press to the base and I want to go with brass, which I can’t find at the big box home improvement stores.

To some extent, I suppose this is because this sort of library work isn’t seen as directly benefitting the customers, so gets shoved aside, but it still bothers me in the same way that a lot of our values as a society (money over knowledge, privileging of science over the humanities as being ‘practical’ when the science in question is anything but, education being only worthwhile in the service of a readily identifiable job) bothers me.

In other news, I’m going to see if I can get the department to pay for me to attend the week long book workshop here in May, and if it can be taken for credit. if I did that, and took another four class semester in the Fall, I’d be done with coursework insofar as the unit requirements go. I can also take the opportunity to find out about taking courses, say at Virginia’s Rare Books School or the Paleography course at New Mexico, outside of the department and getting them paid for.

 Most grants fall into two categories–the grant that is intended to make the undergrad want to go to grad school (I’ve already applied for one of these, the Javits Fellowship), and the grant intended to help with dissertation projects, travel to archives, and the like.  Most of the first category are to be applied for during the first year or before entering, and most of the second are to be applied for once you have a dissertation proposal you’re working on.  

What I’d like to find is something that will help with the development of the dissertation proposal, but nothing seems to work quite yet.  The IHR Mellon Fellowship seems like the best bet, but I wouldn’t be able to apply for it until this time next year, since I’ll still have three semesters of coursework after this one. 

And, of course, all of thse are very unlikely to be awarded to me, I think, but I’d kick myself if I didn’t try.