Our next major exhibition ‘Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination’ opening on 3 October 2014 will explore Gothic themes in art, architecture, literature, music, film and fashion. It will look at the impact British Gothic had, particularly in literature, on Europe and North America, and will explore our continuous fascination with the sublime, sinister and the supernatural in human nature – although ever present – first fully explored through the Gothic imagination.

The exhibition will be showcasing some key items from our collection including the first Gothic novel: The Castle of Otranto written by Horace Walpole* and published on Christmas Eve, 1764; hence the exhibition taking place this year on the 250th anniversary of its publication. It is rare that such classic items from our collection find their way to the conservation studio prior to major exhibitions as most such iconic items would have already undergone conservation in the past. I was therefore surprised, but at the same time very excited, when I saw The Castle of Otranto on the list of items requiring preparation for the exhibition.

The leather bound volume of The Castle of Otranto with the original gold tooling on the front board showing Walpole’s coat of arms.

 

Needless to say, the small leather bound book looked in pristine condition and the only work it
required was minor trimming of the guards (additional strips of paper attached to the spine side leaf edge) at the front of the book. The volume was probably re-backed about 25-30 years ago. The first few folia must have been loose, as they were re-sewn on guards which were left a little bit too long.

The volume with guards before trimming.

   

The volume with guards trimming.

 The volume with guards before and after trimming.

Other volumes for the exhibition required more conservation work including: boards, folia or spine
re-attachments, repair to binding edges or corners, and tear repairs to folia within the volumes. In
total, conservation received 35 items from our collection for preparation, and almost half of those
were volumes. For example, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho had a loose front board, while the spine had to be repaired and re-attached on Beardsley’s The Yellow Book.

The Mysteries of Udolpho with a loose front cover

 

The Yellow Book before conservation.

 

The Mysteries of Udolpho after conservation.

 

The Yellow Book after conservation.

 Both items after conservation.

The British Library has a rich collection of Gothic material, but a number of items, almost double the amount of items requiring conservation, will also be loaned for the exhibition from various museums, galleries, libraries and institutions across the United Kingdom. Conservation will be involved with condition checking prior to the exhibition for some of those items, while others will be checked on arrival. The key loans for the exhibition include paintings, posters, furniture, costume and film. Visitors can look forward to nearly 30 film posters, props from Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, photographs and investigative report from a haunted rectory, as well as a rare Limoges enamel casket belonging to Horace Walpole which depicts the murder of Thomas Becket.

On a personal level, I was very pleased to be asked to mount an engraving showing the view of
Strawberry Hill. Strawberry Hill was the eccentric and idiosyncratic home of Horace Walpole built in the Gothic revival style. His home was also the inspiration for his writings; most famously the
setting for The Castle of Otranto.

 The view of Strawberry Hill near Twickenham mounted in cream museum board.

 

I first visited Strawberry Hill when it was still in the first phase of restoration, and was  fascinated by its history, significance in the development of the architectural style, connection to the Gothic novel and… the papier mâché ceiling! Horace Walpole once famously said that his buildings, like his writings, were made of paper and would be blown away 10 years after his death.** He obviously underestimated both the strength of paper and his writings, not to mention his lasting contribution to the new literary genre and the Gothic Revival in architecture.

The current exhibition will bring the story of Gothic to the present times, showing our enduring and continuous fascination with the romance of the medieval past, as well as the darker side of human nature and the supernatural!

 

Iwona Jurkiewicz

I would like to thank Tanya Kirk and Tim Pye, the curators for the exhibition, for their help with
the blog and the invaluable information provided on the content of the exhibition, as well as
references for the quotations included.

Footnotes:

*Horace Walpole, the youngest son of Britain’s first Prime Minister, was a man of letters, historian,
collector and an influential social commentator and trendsetter of his times.

**Horace Walpole’s letter to his cousin, Henry Conway, on Aug 5 1761: 'My buildings are paper, like my writings, and both will be blown away in ten years after I am dead.' He also expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to Anne Fitzpatrick, Lady Ossory, on Aug 11 1778: 'I am no poet, and my castle is of paper, and my castle and my attachment and I, shall soon vanish and be forgotten together!'

In our last Adopt a Book conservators post, we introduced conservator Kim Mulder who has a special interest in large paper objects. Now, meet book conservator Rick Brown who joined the Library as an apprentice in 1984 and has been involved with the Adopt a Book scheme since it first began.

Rick Brown

I have been working in the conservation department on British Library collection items since September 1984: at the newspaper library in Colindale, at the Bloomsbury bindery (British Museum), on the 6th floor of St Pancras (British Library) and now in the purpose built Centre for Conservation situated at the back of the British Library St Pancras site.

I was taken on under an apprenticeship scheme which consisted of being taught by a journeyman (mentor) and attending a day release City and Guilds course at the Elephant and Castle London College of Printing.

In those days there was no such thing as a book conservator as the role was split into four disciplines; sewing, paper conservation, binding/box making and finishing (gold leaf lettering).

I was extremely lucky to be trained at the British Library (British Museum) at that time as the conservators, binders and finishers there were some of the most skilled in the profession. I have nothing but good memories of working with these people and I owe them so much.

We now undertake a minimal intervention approach; we conserve and repair just enough without removing any features of the item’s historical past. To do this you need to be fully skilled in all disciplines. Alongside scheduled work to treat items, we also undertake a programme of running repairs where items which have been identified as needing minor repairs come into the studio and are repaired in less than ten hours. One of the running repair items I’ve worked on is The Secret Garden (1911).

 

Watch Rick making repairs to The Secret Garden in this video about supporting the Library’s conservation work.

I have been involved in the Adopt a Book scheme since it first began; where a group of school children came to the Bloomsbury bindery for a visit and after seeing the work that was being carried out suggested that they fundraise for a particular book to be conserved. It was thought to be such a good concept that it was advertised as a gift idea. I remember seeing adverts for Adopt a Book on tube stations and inside tube train carriages. Books were conserved for the Adopt a Book scheme by all conservators until it was decided in 1998 to have a dedicated Adopt a Book team, for which I became manager.

Adopt a Book works in a different way now to when it started. The program now supports the work of our conservators rather than funding for an individual book to be repaired. This is a more sensible approach as it helps the future of conservation at the British Library and manages to conserve more items in the process.

Rick working on one of the maps in our collection.

 

From a memorial to a loved one who read a particular book to their children, to readers who used a book consistently whilst researching at the Library; I am still touched by some of the stories I hear for the reasons why people adopt books.

Rick Brown

J. Buckler, South East View of Wilton House, 1810. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

During the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, country houses in Britain emerged as significant tourist attractions. There was already a long tradition of expecting country houses to offer travellers hospitality, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, part of being a polite landowner was allowing tourists to visit your house and grounds. In theory, this standard applied to all houses, but only a handful, such as Wilton House (Wiltshire), were sites which routinely attracted hundreds of visitors. At houses like these, the huge increase in visitor numbers led to formal opening hours, standardized tours (typically given by housekeepers), inns which catered to tourists and the publication of guidebooks. The guidebooks published during this period are the best records of what an ideal visit to a house was intended to be like: they indicate what you were expected to appreciate and to ignore. Guidebooks were typically published only after a house had established itself as a popular site, and so in effect, they codified visiting practices that were already in place.

Illustration from Thomas Blore, A Guide to Burghley [abridged version], Stamford: John Drakard, 1815. (British Library, 10358.ccc.3)

Guidebooks’ content was typically organized to maximize convenience for visitors as they toured a property. This is a set of schematic plans which was bound near the beginning of one of the Burghley House (Lincolnshire) guidebooks, and these plans are numbered according to the order tourists typically viewed rooms in – beginning with the great hall, room 1, then the saloon, room 2, and so on – they are linked to a key, but the numbering is also linked to the subheadings in the text itself. Not all guidebooks were illustrated in this way, but a room-by-room organization was common, presumably because this made it easier to carry, read and view at the same time.

John Emes, The Lake, Hawkstone Park, Shropshire, 1790. (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

Guidebooks had tremendous potential as interpretive tools in that they could make a site more accessible and legible to its visitors. One of the main reasons people published guidebooks was to catalogue the art collections: this was not only a gracious gesture towards tourists, it was a clear signal that visitors were expected to carefully examine the individual works on display – many guidebooks, such as those describing Wilton, include entries about each painting and/or sculpture, directing readers to appreciate specific qualities. Outside the house, guidebooks were no less instructive: the guidebook to Hawkstone (Shropshire), for example, a house famous for its garden (and well-known for the comfort of its inn), provided information about the various views and spaces tourists would encounter as they toured the site and indicated what was to be admired at each stage.

As objects, guidebooks were designed to be functional, and book reviewers were very invested in how they were convenient for tourists. To that end, guidebooks are usually small, octavo volumes; and, while many of them are quite long, they are usually bound in paper covers, making them lightweight and inexpensive. Many, in fact, might reasonably be labelled pamphlets rather than books. Yet at the same time, guidebooks could function as mementos for tourists as well as practical aides.

Illustration of the frontispiece from John Britton, An Historical Account of Corsham House, London: Printed for the Author, 1806. (British Library, 796.e.19)

A guidebook’s appeal as a souvenir could be heightened by the addition of an illustrated frontispiece. The most common type of image was a view of the house itself, surrounded by the landscaped grounds, but it also depended on the particular attractions of the property. A number of the guides to Wilton, for example, illustrated one of the house’s sculptures on the frontispiece; that of Duncombe Park (North Yorkshire) displayed the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, a site visible from the estate’s terraces.

Illustration from William Mavor, New Description of Blenheim, 8th edn, Oxford: J. Munday, 1810. (British Library, 10351.f.6)

The most elaborate guidebooks included series of illustrations. Some editions of the guide to Blenheim Palace (Oxfordshire), for example, incorporated a fold-out map of the gardens (often with hand-coloured details) and a set of views of the house, one each from the north, south, east and west.

Considered as a group, these guidebooks, many of which were available in London bookstores as well as near the houses themselves, might be said to be appealing to readers as texts which might be read for their own sake, after the visit to the house was over. In doing so, they were in effect claiming a greater relevance for their content, and for the cultural significance of information about country houses, their art collections and their gardens.

Jocelyn Anderson

Jocelyn Anderson holds a PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, where she wrote a dissertation entitled 'Remaking the Country House: Country-House Guidebooks in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries'. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

You can see more images from the country-house guidebooks discussed here on the British Library's Flickr page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/

The Collection Care blog is a year old this week! It has been a wonderful 12 months for the blog, due largely to you, our loyal readers. Since fluid, food and flames are generally considered our nemeses, we'll hold off on the champagne and birthday cake. Instead, to celebrate, we have compiled a list of the top ten most popular posts. Boy, do we know how to party!

10. A-a-a-choo! Collection Care's Dust Busters: In this post we shared the work of our dust busting team who monitor dust in order to protect our collections. We took a look at what exactly dust is, and how to balance the benefits and risk of dust minimisation programs. Who you gonna call? Collection Care! 

 

9. Goldfinisher: He's the man, the man with the Midas Touch: Doug Mitchell is our book conservator and gold finisher extraordinaire. Doug demonstrated the blind tooling technique and showed us the variety of tools involved in the process.

8. Sea Snails & Purple Parchment: Did you know that the colour purple found in many of our manuscripts comes from sea snails? The snails are essentially "milked" to extract a gland secretion in a very labour intensive process. 

7. A Guide to BL book stamps: You've seen them on our collections and online, but what do they mean? Library stamps are generally divided into four types according to when they were in use, ranging from 1753 to the present day.

6. Digitisation as a preservation tool; some considerations: This post by Qatar Project conservator Flavio Marzo confronted the growing public expectation for online access. Marzo challenged the conservation community to use mass digitisation as an opportunity for the long term preservation of historical items and their features.

5. The Bookie Monster: attack of the creepy crawlies!: Here we delved into the underworld of pesky pests who seek to eat their way through our collections. We identified some of the primary culprits and showed examples of damage to look out for.

4. Cleaning and rehanging the Kitaj tapestry: What happens when creepy crawlies do successfully attack? This year we had to don our hard hats to remove the enormous R.B. Kitaj Tapestry If not, not from the St Pancras Entrance Hall for conservation cleaning. The tapestry was hoovered and frozen to remove all pests and surface dust before rehanging in the hall. It was a major operation and a complete success. We even made a time-lapse video!

3. Fail to prepare for digitisation, prepare to fail at digitising!: Digitisation is much more than just taking a picture. With mass digitisation projects being announced every month, we shared what we've learned when it comes to preparation. We listed five main outcomes of pre-digitisation checks, which highlighted the potential risks in each case.

2. Books depicted in art: Being surrounded by books everyday is all part of the day job for us here in Collection Care. As you can imagine, seeing books in paintings can be quite thrilling. In this lavishly illustrated post we saw that some historical paintings contain a wealth of information about bindings that were not well-documented in the trade.

1. Under the Microscope with the Lindisfarne Gospels: Finally, in our most popular post, we shared microscopy images of the Lindisfarne Gospels collected by our team during a condition assessment. At up to 200 times magnification the medieval artistry and attention to detail blew us all away.

Many thanks to all our readers from the Collection Care team. As ever, we are truly grateful for your following and are always keen to hear from you. Do let us know if there are any topics you'd like to read about, and don't forget you can subscribe to the blog at the top of this page, and follow us on Twitter: @BL_CollCare

Christina Duffy (@DuffyChristina)

This week we celebrate the 379th birthday of Robert Hooke, a Fellow of the Royal Society and key figure of early modern natural history and natural philosophy, born on 28 July 1635. Many of Hooke's innovations paved the way for a more rigorous scientific analysis of materials, for which we in Collection Care are very grateful. To mark the occasion we are thrilled to host a guest post from Puck Fletcher who has just completed a doctorate on space, spatiality, and epistemology in Hooke, Boyle, Newton, and Milton at the University of Sussex:

Hooke’s most famous work is the Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon, published in 1665 by the Royal Society. It is a descriptive work detailing sixty observations of specimens at magnification, starting with the point of a needle, ranging through silk, glass drops, hair, and various plants, seeds, and tiny insects, all viewed through a microscope. It closes with observations of the fixed stars and the moon as seen through a telescope. 

Two cross sections of cork and a ‘sensible’ plant. In his description of cork, Hooke coined the term ‘cell’ for biological contexts. Image source.

 

The project was a collaborative one started by Christopher Wren who, in 1661, so impressed Charles II with his drawings of magnified fleas and lice (possibly the ones on which the corresponding Micrographia engravings were based), that the King requested more. Wren persuaded Hooke to undertake the bulk of this work and over the next few years, Hooke amassed his collection of observations, regularly bringing new drawings to the meetings of the Royal Society for approval by the other members.  

Among the drawings and observations in Micrographia is this famous and extraordinarily detailed large-scale illustration of a flea. BL Shelfmark: 435.e.19, XXXIV. Image copyright The British Library Board. Read more.

 

The impressive folio volume contains thirty-eight highly detailed engravings, which turned the book into an instant bestseller and secured its reputation as the most beautiful and lavish work of early European microscopy. The sense of magnified scale is staggering. A head or body louse, for example, is just a few millimetres long, but the engraved image is 52 cm long, roughly two hundred times actual size, a level of exaggeration that is emphasized by the fact that, large as the volume is, the reader must still unfold the oversized plate to view it.

Engraved image of a head or body louse, roughly two hundred times actual size.

 Image source.

For his readers, Hooke’s illustrations brought a whole new world into view. Hooke captures this excitement in his preface, describing how, by means of instruments like the microscope, ‘the Earth it self, which lyes so neer us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us, and in every little particle of its matter; we now behold almost as great a variety of Creatures, as we were able before to reckon up in the whole Universe it self.’ Pepys was famously so enamoured of the book that the day after he brought home his copy, he stayed up until two in the morning reading it, describing Micrographia in his diary as, ‘the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life’. 

When looking at the large-scale, clear engravings in Micrographia, it is easy to imagine that this was the view Hooke had in his lens and that his task was simply that of looking and then recording what he saw. However, the practice was much more difficult and required considerable skill and experience – when Pepys looked through his microscope, he was disappointed to find that at first he couldn’t see anything at all! The lens making technology of the time meant that impediments to clear vision such as chromatic aberration or artefacts in the glass were not uncommon, and the view through a microscope was often blurred, distorted, and dark. It was difficult to make out true colours or to tell whether a shadow was a depression or protuberance, and the field of vision was quite small.¹

Part of Hooke’s contribution in Micrographia was his skill as an instrument maker and technician. Although, as he reports, he had difficulties in seeing through his microscope, Hooke made his own adaptations to the commercially manufactured instrument, in particular devising an improved light source, which he called his ‘scotoscope’.  

The microscope, featuring an improved light source.

 Image source.

Hooke also worked diligently and looked very carefully, making multiple observations from multiple angles, of multiple specimens, created with various preparation techniques, to gather enough visual information to be able to produce a single image of what the whole object looked like, as near as he could make out. For Hooke, the act of looking through the microscope and recording what he saw was an interpretive one.

Hooke’s observations have been praised by modern scientists for their accuracy, and Howard Gest even credits him with the first accurate description and depiction of a microorganism, the microfungus Mucor, described by Hooke as ‘blue mould’.² 

The microfungus Mucor (‘blue mould’).

 Image source.

In his preface to Micrographia, Hooke heralds ‘artificial Instruments’ such as the microscope and telescope, and the methods of the new science based on observation and the careful and rational scrutiny of results, as at least partial correctives for the failings of fallen man and his limited sensory faculties. He also looks forward to the technology of the future, which he believes will enable man to see even more clearly.

‘’Tis not unlikely, but that there may be yet invented several other helps for the eye, at much exceeding those already found, as those do the bare eye, such as by which we may perhaps be able to discover living Creatures in the Moon, or other Planets, the figures of the compounding Particles of matter, and the particular Schematisms and Textures of Bodies.’

Puck Fletcher

¹Brian Ford’s wonderful book, Images of Science: A History of Scientific Illustration (The British Library, 1992), pp. 182–83, contains a photograph of the partial and distorted view through the sort of lens used by Hooke.  

²Gest, Howard, ‘The Remarkable Vision of Robert Hooke (1635–1703): First Observer of the Microbial World, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 48.2 (2005), 266–72 (p. 267).

The Ramayana – “Rama’s journey” – is one of India’s oldest stories having first being written some two and a half thousand years ago. It follows the hero Rama from his birth and childhood in Ayodhya to his exile in the forest where his wife Sita is kidnapped by the wicked (and ten-headed!) demon king Ravana. With his valorous brother Lakshmana and helped by an army of monkeys and bears he leads the search for Sita, finally rescuing her from Ravana’s stronghold in Lanka. It is an epic story embodying the Hindu idea of dharma (duty). There are several thousand known surviving manuscripts and many different versions of the story across Asia. The Mewar Ramayana is one of the finest copies of the work, lavishly illustrated with over 450 paintings in large format. Recent digitisation by the British Library in partnership with leading Indian institutions has reunited the long-separated text and it can be viewed online featuring an introduction including links to contextual documents and high resolution images in ‘Turning the Pages’ with descriptive text and audio.

We recently examined two paintings from the Mewar Ramayana using multispectral imaging to investigate the methods and workflow of the artist. Images are captured over fourteen spectral bands from the ultraviolet (UV: 365 nm) to the infrared (IR: 1050 nm) revealing information about underdrawings and techniques that can’t be seen under normal light. The two full page paintings are illustrations from Book 6 (Yuddhakanda, Book of war) of the Mewar Ramayana manuscript.

Book 6 fol. 27r (Add. MS 15297(1), f.27r)

Book 6 fol. 27r depicting the siege of Lanka in colour, ultraviolet, infrared, and blue light with an orange filter. Rama’s army of monkeys takes control of the four gates of the city as the ten-headed Ravana leads the defence after consulting his ministers.

Book 6 fol. 27r: Rama’s army of monkeys and bears hurl stones at their enemies. White pigment, possibly added as a later touch up, is observed under ultraviolet light on the elbows, arms and tails of the attacking monkeys.

Book 6 fol. 27r: Colour, ultraviolet, infrared sequence. In front of the gates to Lanka, a man struggles with a monkey. Under ultraviolet light the rough application of paint is evident on the man's hand where no attempt is made to stay within the lines. In the infrared image, the guidelines used to initially draw the figure (chest, back, elbow) are observed.

Book 6 fol. 27r: An archer fends off the monkey army. Incorporating high levels of detail in these paintings often led to a change in design layout. In the painting the archer is shown to be sitting cross-legged on the cart, but in the infrared image he is standing. The late addition of the cart is evident by the over painting of the wheel in order to indicate its attachment to the main frame of the cart. Other alterations were made such as the size of the soldier's orange foot in the top left, and the painting over of an isolated monkey tail on the horse's body in the bottom left.

Book 6 fol. 142r (Add. MS 15297(1), f.142r)

As the battle escalates Rama’s brother Lakshmana is seriously wounded by a spear. Hanuman the monkeys’ army general is sent to the Himalayas to pick up medicinal herbs.

Book 6 fol. 142r: Colour, ultraviolet, infrared, and blue light with an orange filter sequence of the painting.

Book 6 fol. 142r: Colour, ultraviolet, infrared sequence. Rama’s loyal brother Lakshmana is seriously wounded by a spear. In the ultraviolet image we can see touch-ups on the hands, arms and legs of the two monkeys trying to take the spear off Lakshmana. Under infrared light we can see underdrawings of the far left monkey who was originally positioned higher up.

Book 6 fol. 142r: Colour, ultraviolet, infrared sequence. In the ultraviolet image alterations to Rama’s clothing and the direction of arrows is observed. Under infrared light, the boat at the top of the painting with the three figures is shown to have been altered. It may have started out as a representation of deities in the sky similar to those seen in Mughal Mahabharata (Razmnamah) Or. 12076 f.76r. Other arrow positions have also changed.

Book 6 fol. 142r: In the infrared image, a different position for the ten-headed Ravana is shown to the right, where a single face in profile is revealed adjacent to a vertical line. This is completely obscured by the green pigment which we now see.

Multispectral imaging has proven a wonderful technology in allowing us to study collection items in new and exciting ways. These are just some of the observations made and we hope to share more in the future.

Christina Duffy (Imaging Scientist) and Pasquale Manzo (Curator Sanskrit)

The valedictory symposium of this year’s Material Witness was recently held at the Art Workers' Guild, London. Material Witness is a programme for post-graduate Humanities researchers investigating the place of objects and first-hand experience in scholarship in today’s digital world. One of the papers by James Alexander Cameron, who is completing a PhD at the Courtauld Institute on sedilia in English churches, particularly brought out the importance of embracing both digital and physical study of objects, as we do at the British Library.

 Left: Cherry Hinton (Cambridgeshire)

Sedilia are the seats by the altar for the use of the priest, deacon and subdeacon celebrating Mass. In English churches they often take the form of three stone niches, built into the wall of the chancel. My research has shown they seem to be largely, but not exclusively an English phenomenon, becoming common in the thirteenth century and reaching their height of popularity in the early fourteenth century.

I have amassed a database of all the sedilia in England using the Pevsner Architectural Guides, supplemented by hyperlinked images gathered mainly from the website Flickr. There are over 1,300 items in my database, 800 being what I dub the so-called “classic” sedilia: the set of niches set in the thickness of the wall, surmounted by arches and divided by columns or shafts.

So in many ways my thesis is made possible by the new phenomenon of mass public-domain photo sharing, such as the British Library has recently begun. I also try to share my rather pedantic pictures of churches and their furnishings on Flickr as much as my time allows in the hope someone else might find something in them as useful as I found the pictures of sedilia.

 Right: Westminster Abbey

But I am quite eager to use not just my hands, but my whole body in my research. Very few sedilia have as luscious sculpture as those of the 1320s in Heckington church (Lincolnshire), microarchitectural canopies as fantastic as Exeter Cathedral or painting as top-whack as Westminster Abbey. The vast majority are just niches in the wall, more common proportionally in ordinary parish churches than cathedrals. There are rarely ever any signs of use in the form of traces of fittings such as hanging fabrics or cushions. It seems that quite simply, clergy sat in them during the points of the service when they weren’t doing anything else.

 Left: Morton (Lincolnshire)

So that’s what I do: I sit in them, with a tripod on a timer for three exposures 2 seconds apart. And then I make a montage of the resulting pictures when I get home. I have around 130 of these montages, which means I have sat in around 10% of all the sedilia in England (possibly sounds slightly more impressive than it is).

 

 Right: Castle Hedingham (Essex) 

This isn’t just a completist mania, as from the first time I did it (to be quite honest initially as the one-off gag everyone thinks it is) at Castle Hedingham in Essex back in 2011, I realised what an extraordinarily useful way it was of recording the scale of sedilia. Because even though they generally look very similar, sedilia come in such varied shapes and decorative forms, to gather their dimensions in any meaningful way with a tape measure would be nigh-on impossible. And to see at a glance the claustrophobic niches at Castle Hedingham, made me realise that although the current carving is 1873, you can see the traces of the original twelfth-century arches that they were placed inside of, resulting in their uniquely cramped proportions. Since then, unless the sedilia are stuck behind an immovable object, I’ve done this shot.

 Left: Kirkstall Abbey (West Yorkshire)

Seeing the scale at a glance is important, particularly for some of the earliest sedilia that do not have the demarcated niches, such as the Cistercian Abbey of Kirkstall near Leeds, probably built in the late 1150s. The austere Cistercians were a bit weird among the other great monastic abbeys at this time for just having chancels with blank walls around the altar: most orders would have aisles all the way round: the arches of which would be useful to put a bench between for the ministers of the high altar. When you actually visit Kirkstall, you see that the sedilia niche, one of the earliest in England, is much higher than it needs to be, and that the builders are actually creating a false bay of an arcade for the clergy to sit under, rather than the more identifiable genre of “classic” sedilia that came along later.

 Right: Heckington (Lincolnshire)

And then those sedilia at Heckington, often pictured in books on parish churches for their wonderful sculpture of everyday life and extraordinarily well-preserved Coronation of the Virgin, but if you sit in them you can demonstrate how high up this sculpture is, and how the men in the seats were not the primary audience of it. Instead, the Coronation of the Virgin represents Christ’s charge to Mary as Ecclesia, the representation of the Church, and interacts with the bodies below as a visual ensemble of the Church Militant on Earth and the Church Triumphant in Heaven.

See more about my project at my page on the Courtauld website, and how you can help by sending in my missing sedilia.

James Alexander Cameron

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Flavio Marzo ACR, Conservation Studio Manager for the British Library/Qatar Foundation digitisation project reflects on his visit to the Arab and Islamic Heritage Collection Library:

 Doha, Qatar

During a recent trip to Doha, Qatar, I was invited to speak at the ‘Past to Present: Art Conservation Conference’ at the Museum of Islamic Art, held on 28 November 2013. I was invited to visit the Arab and Islamic Heritage Collection Library by Dr Joachim Gierlichs, Associate Director for Special Collections and Archives at the Qatar National Library, and Mark T. Paul, Head of Partnerships at the Qatar National Library. As I presently manage the conservation studio that has been created for the British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership at the British Library, my trip to Doha was a chance for me to meet some of my colleagues for the first time.

I spent the morning after my arrival visiting one of the Library’s main collections, the private study library of Sheikh Hassan Bin Mohammed Bin Ali Al-Thani, founder of Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art, and a prominent scholar on the history and culture of Arabia. The collection includes rare and valuable texts and manuscripts relating to Arab-Islamic civilization, as well as books, periodicals and maps from European orientalists, travellers and explorers who were fascinated by Arab-Islamic cultural heritage.

Arab and Islamic Heritage Collection Library.

 

One of the highlights of the visit for me was the opportunity to meet the three conservators working at the library and to visit the conservation studio. The studio, although limited in space, is well equipped for carrying out full treatments of printed and manuscript items.

Chanaca Perera, conservator in charge of the studio, with his team.

Dr Stavroula Golfomitsou and Flavio Marzo.

 

The afternoon was spent visiting the new facilities of the UCL Qatar Centre for the Study of Cultural Heritage in Education City, opened in partnership with the Qatar Foundation and the Qatar Museums Authority in 2012.

Main studio in the UCL Qatar Centre for the Study of Cultural Heritage.

 

While there, I visited the classrooms, met some of the students and spent time with Dr Stavroula Golfomitsou, who has developed and led the Conservation Studies Programme at UCL Qatar since its beginning in 2012.

My impression of Doha and the different institutions and people I met there was very positive: while there are difficulties due to bureaucracy and the nature of the sometime unbearably hot local environment in summer, these difficulties have not restrained or threatened the hope for the future and the proactive spirit that I felt. This is in no small part due to the support given by this rich and fast-developing country, which is investing so much in the field of cultural heritage and research – perhaps something we might like to learn?! I really hope so.

Flavio Marzo

After a glorious week of studying European Bookbinding (1450-1820) at the London Rare Books School with Director of the Ligatus Research Centre, Professor Nicholas Pickwoad,  it quickly became apparent that works of art have been one of the best methods of recording details of techniques used in bookbinding.

The majority of books throughout history are not the heavily decorated and spectacular versions we tend to hear most about, but instead are plain, and fairly ordinary book blocks (which some people still find quite exciting - author included!). For this reason, the techniques are perhaps not as well understood or documented. Luckily the keen eye of the artist has captured precise details when depicting books throughout history, showing sewing structures, stitch types, supports, covers and even how they were stored. In this post we will look at some examples of books depicted in art.

Storage

While we now consider spine outwards as ‘the right way around’ to display books, this was not always the case. In the oil on canvas painting ‘Portrait of Lawyer Francesco Righetti’ by Guercino (1626- 28) we see doctor of laws Fracesco Righetti depicted in his library. His law books are tail-edge outwards showing endband detail with titles written on the volume.

Figure 1:  Guercino’s ‘Portrait of Lawyer Francesco Righetti’.

The engraved ‘Portrait of William Cartwright’ (from ‘Comedies, tragi-comedies, with other poems’) was printed in London for Humphrey Moseley in 1651. Cartwright is shown wearing a collar and gown leaning on an open book. The books on the wall behind him are shelved fore-edge out; a common practice in the 16th and early 17th century. Gilded-edge books stored spine away would gleam off the shelves quite spectacularly. Many medieval books have their title written in several places such as the spine, tail-edge or fore-edge as storage locations changed over time.

Figure 2:  ‘Portrait of William Cartwright’. See the full engraving digitised on the British Museum's Image Gallery.

 

How binderies operated

Hendrik de Haas’s print ‘De Boekbinder’ (1806) shows a bookbinder's workshop. On the left is the beating stone where gatherings were pounded with a mallet for compaction. Second from the left a man is shown bent over a special shaving knife which is drawn along the text block to trim the pages. The shavings are shown on the floor. In the centre on a stool a binder is sewing the gatherings next to a young boy taking a book to a client. The master of the workshop (as determined by his smart attire and rather dashing wig) burnishes the leather by working and smoothing it. The finisher, working for the aristocracy, made more money than the binder – it is unusual to see him wearing Hessian boots. (With tassels? On a binder? The outrage!)

Figure 3: Bookbinder’s workshop in print by Hendrik de Haas, ‘De Boekbinder’, Dordrect, 1806.

Figure 4: Left: Beating the gatherings. Right: Shaving the book block.

Figure 5: Pressing the books in Bookbinder’s workshop in print by Hendrik de Haas, ‘De Boekbinder’, Dordrect, 1806. 

Leaning against the shelving unit in the far right is a wooden book press where several books are packed tightly. It was possible to apply guilt edges to several books at a time when stored in this way.

Life and social status

Dutch painter Marinus van Reymerswale’s early 16th century oil on canvas painting ‘St Jerome in his Study’ shows St Jerome surrounded by curious objects which represent attributes referring to his life and status. St Jerome was famed for translating the Bible into Latin from Greek and Hebrew. The Vulgate, as his translation was known, became the official Latin version of the Holy Script in the Roman Catholic Church. For this reason he is nearly always depicted around books and in his study.

An expensively bound volume with clasps is shelved behind St Jerome, while on his table are several working copies with various sewing structures and tacketed bindings. A sewn book block is apparent which never had covers, adhesive, or a spine lining. The gatherings are visible with long stitch through separate supports rather than covering the whole spine. There is no adhesive used in long stitch bindings, making them very useful for music manuscripts as the book stays open easily and is very flexible. Long stitch was rare in England but common in the Low Countries as a cheap and quick way to produce almanacs. The variety of books in his study suggest St Jerome was highly-literate with a great depth of knowledge.

Figure 6: Marinus van Reymerswale’s ‘St Jerome in his Study’, 16th century.

Figure 7: Left: Leather bound volume with metal clasps. Right: Visible sewing structures, long stitch and tacketed binding. 

Textblocks could be sold without significant covers, just held together with an "endless cover". Jean Antoinette Poisson (Madame de Pompadour) was the mistress of King Louis XV, as well as a prominent patron of Francois Boucher. In Francois Boucher’s 1756 oil on canvas portrait ‘Madame de Pompadour’ the lady is sumptuously dressed and surrounded by opulent things - apart from the book she holds in her hand. The book has a drawn-on cover – a piece of paper or parchment put around the book-block. It was a cheap and quick way to bind books and there are a lot of French books bound in this way. Madame de Pompadour is displaying a casual relationship with literature, in a sense saying to the viewer ‘Look at me, I read books because they are interesting. If I like it, I will keep it” (and pay more money for the binding!).

Figure 8: Francois Boucher’s ‘Madame de Pompadour’, 1756, oil on canvas portrait.

Figure 9: Francois Boucher’s ‘Madame de Pompadour’, 1756, oil on canvas portrait. The book has a drawn-on cover – a piece of paper or parchment put around the book-block.

 

Street vendors/book peddlers

'Bealux abc belles heures’ is part of the ‘le Cris de Paris’ genre illustrating Parisian street vendors. It is a woodcut engraving ca 1500 showing a moment in time when prayer books, once restricted to the wealthy aristocracy, became affordable to the bourgeois with the advent of the printing press. Thin, printed copies were sold on the streets. In the vendor’s right hand is a Book of Hours showing a limp cover. Underneath his left hand we can see detail of a leather binding.

Figure 6: Street vendors and book peddlers were often depicted in artworks. Left: Beaulx abc belles heures. Right: Tavolette, e Libri per li putti.
 

Similarly in Annibale Carracci’s 1646 print ‘Tavolette, e Libri per li putti’ a man is depicted selling books from a basket that he carries over his shoulder. The book in his right hand has a cover which follows the spine when open and is bound using long-stitch.

Evidence-based research

While written documentation of binding styles and techniques is not always available, we can gather a lot of information from paintings, prints, engravings and illuminations. Sometimes they can tell us more than current literature on a subject – for example in Lorenzo Lotto’s oil on canvas ‘Portrait of a Young Man in his Study’ (c. 1530), the sitter is more likely to be a merchant than a student as the volume he is perusing is bound with a fore-edge flap – this style was used for account books and book-keeping, not for great works of literature.

Figure 7:  Lorenzo Lotto, ‘Portrait of a Young Man in his Study’ (c. 1530), oil on canvas.

Visual depictions can also be useful in filling in missing parts of our understanding. Folio 291v of the great 9th century illuminated gospel manuscript, the Book of Kells, shows Christ holding a red binding decorated with blind twilling. With the original binding of the manuscript now lost, it is possible that this is what it may have originally looked like.

Figure 8: The Book of Kells, f. 291v; a 9th century gospel manuscript containing the four Gospels in Latin based on the Vulgate text which St Jerome completed in 384AD. It has been fully digitised by Trinity College Dublin.

While bookbinding may be considered the Cinderella of the bibliographical trade (i.e. given little care or attention) it is a fascinating area of research, based on the logic of commerce – techniques and styles were not varied unless they needed to be. For more information on bookbindings see the British Library Database of Bookbindings or the Ligatus website.

Christina Duffy (@DuffyChristina)

Introduction

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Taylor, the Political Resident in Bussorah (Basra) in 1819 and in Baghdad in 1821, was well known for his personal interest in Arabic culture and for his remarkable collection of Arabic manuscripts and art pieces. Between 1850 and 1860, the British Museum acquired 355 books from his widow.

So far, 129 manuscripts from the British Library collection have been scoped and condition assessed by conservators working for the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership. This is so they can be digitised for a new digital portal that will be launched at the end of this year as part of the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership.

Ownership stamp

Amongst those manuscripts, there was a group of eight that particularly attracted my attention. The content of these manuscripts, all part of the Taylor collection, date from between 1248 to 1605, and have probably been bound or rebound after being acquired by him. Certain features of the bindings point to the same binder having been used, but some of the differences between their constructions are intriguing too. The following is a collection of observations I have made during my assessment of these fascinating items.  This printed annotation was added by the British Museum on each of the manuscripts recording the provenance and the date of the acquisition.

Covers

Starting with the most obvious similarity between these eight items, we shall look at the covers, which are all bound in full red goat leather (see images below). The boards have also been decorated with blind tooling. The tools used are often the same and used in similar patterns, for example, single tools repeated and combined to create the patterns that make the central decorations and the frames that you can see in the following images.

Add Ms 23393

 

Add Ms 23391

 Left board Add. Ms 23393                  Left board Add. Ms 23391

Add Ms 23390

 

Add Ms 23430

 Left board Add Ms. 23390                        Left board Add. Ms 23430

Add Ms 1523

 

Add Ms 23407

 Central decoration on left board of Add. Ms 1523 vs decoration of Add Ms 23393

Right board of Add Ms 1523

 

Right board of Add Ms 23407

 Decorated frame on right board of Add Ms 1523 vs decoration on right board of Add Ms 23407

The bindings also present other similarities within the structural features such as end band style and the style of sewing which I will discuss in the following sections.

Sewing

The sewing of Islamic style bindings, the style these bindings largely correlate to, is commonly characterised by the absence of supports. This means that the book block is not sewn around supports, which in Western bindings consist, in the main, of strips of leather or linen cord. The book block is held together with the thread alone. Strangely, in this case, four of these eight manuscripts would appear to be have been sewn on supports as visible on the following image. This does not correspond to the ‘rules’ of binding styles, creating a type of hybrid.

Leather cover

 The rows are pointing to the protruding areas on the spine where the supports, possibly strips of leather, bulge under the leather cover

Sewing diagram

Diagram indicating the sewing structures of four of the books, with three sewing stations sewn around supports, a traditionally Western feature.

This diagram, drawn after careful examination of the sewing only accessible from the inside of the book-blocks, shows a possible description of this unusual sewing technique. The head and tail chain-stitches (A) are most certainly supported with the sewing thread passing around the support. The sewing on the central support (B) has been done like it is normally, on tape with the sewing thread passing behind the support.

Cover leather overlapping on the spine

Three of these eight manuscripts exhibit the peculiar feature of overlapped cover leather on the spine. This feature consists of the leather covering the boards left longer at the inner joint. The extending parts of the leather are attached to the spine of the book block by overlapping them. This can be seen clearly in the following image that shows the detail, at the head edge, of the overlapping of the two layers of leather on the spine of manuscript Add.23387.

Cover construction

 The following drawing shows the construction of the cover where the two boards are prepared separately and attached to the spine of the book block by overlapping the two extensions of the covering leather.

Overlapping spine

In another manuscript, Add. Ms 23393, this feature initially appears identical, but is in fact the result of a completely different technique. By looking at the book carefully it is possible to see that the two pieces of leather, even if overlapping (see image below) on the spine, are not attached to the spine one on top of the other, but they have been attached together separately to create a fully formed case cover. Once formed, it was attached to the spine of the book-block.

Overlapping spine layers in raking light

 In the picture, taken in raking light, the line of the overlapping layers of leather is highlighted by the black arrows.

The shadow, indicated by arrows in the image below, shows that the piece of leather covering the right board is actually extending under the piece of leather covering the left board. The two separate pieces of leather are not only overlapping on the spine as previously recorded for this specific style, but they are used here to form a cover that had to be fully prepared separately before being attached to the book. This is an interesting twist on a well-documented style.

Shadow on overlapping covers

 The cover of Add. Ms 23393 was fully prepared before being attached to the book.

Further evidence that the cover was completed separately is that the leather from the left board at head and tail, where it forms the caps, has been turned in on top of the other piece. This can only be done before the cover was attached to the spine of the book because the folded leather is now pinched between the spine of the book and the spine leather of the cover.

Tail cap

 The arrow indicates the overlapping of the leather disappearing in the turn to form the tail cap.

End bands

In manuscript Add.Ms 23390 the end band (only the one at the head has survived) is actually made in a western style (see image below) whereas the other 7 manuscripts have end bands executed following techniques and aesthetics of ‘Islamic style’ bindings.

End band

 In this image of manuscript Add.Ms 23390 the technique used to make the end band is ‘western’ with the coloured silk threads (Pink, Yellow and Green) passed around a cylindrical core possibly made of cord.

Head band

 In this image showing the head of Ms Add. 23407 we can see a detail of a typical Islamic style end band. The secondary, extremely elaborated sewing has been created with cream and blue silk threads.

Conclusions

These manuscripts, all with contents dating from different periods (from 1248 until 1610) appear to have been bound or re-bound when acquired by Mr Taylor. If this is the case it would justify the very striking similarities and the consistency in the materials used for their construction and their appearance.

A systematic assessment of this group of manuscripts to collect more information about their bindings would be necessary to draw a better picture of the collection and of the similarities and unexpected differences between their physical features. This could lead us to identify the binder who executed them, giving an insight into the rich history of bookbinding. Further research about Lieutenant Colonel Taylor’s activity during his work as Political Resident could also be carried out within the India Office Records to find records relating to payments made during the acquisition process and possibly the re-binding of these manuscripts. The digitised images will become available online later this year, along with a short article on Taylor, researched by Jo Wright, Content Development Curator for the Qatar Partnership.

Flavio Marzo

Update (July 2017): See this Royal Asiatic Society blog post describing a bookplate suspected to be owned by Col. Robert Taylor. It depicts thirteen different renderings of "Robert Taylor" suggesting he had at least some knowledge of a variety of Indian and other languages.