by Jeremy Jenkins, Curator for Contemporary British Publications and Emerging Media.

 

                                      Frontispiece, Going Going Going

When I walk between the West End and the Euston Road I would cut through the British Museum galleries to vary my route. This would inevitably take me past the gigantic carved stone statue or moai, which were erected on Easter Island and looked over the villages on Rapa Nui. 

As I weave through the snakes of tourists and visitors in the British Museum’s Wellcome Gallery where Hoa Hakananai'a resides, I could not help thinking that if this stone monolith was imbued with some sort of consciousness what would he think?

It is likely he had seen it all before millennia earlier on his ancestral shore.  Indeed if, as is argued, he is representative of the pinnacle of  his society’s achievements it is likely he witnessed the slow  decline and collapse of  this home has there was a greater competition for the island’s limited resources. Another view is that it was the arrival of Europeans that began the decline.    

Contemporary British Publications recently took delivery of  three monographs from etcher, printmaker, and sculptor, D.R. Wakefield.  These works straddle the final steps documenting the transference of a range of mammals in the spectrum from endangered to extinct.

 An Alphabet of Endangered Mammals: A Collection of Etching Depicting Animals Considered Extinct in the Wild by 2050 takes the reader on an alphabetic journey starting with the Asian lion and ending Zubr, It includes the Nepalese giant elephant, the well-publicised precarious situation of the polar bear, and others, all of which are portrayed in tinted etching.  The etchings are pulled through a 19th century star wheel engraving press, while the type for each piece of text is assembled by hand, and pressed on an Albion press.

 

     A Polar Bear, An Alphabet of Endangered Mammals

The second volume in the package was Going, Going, Going: Some Thoughts on the Destiny of the Rhinoceros as an Icon of Natural History. The pages explore the predicament of an animal whose early representations and fossils were attributed to be evidence of the mythic unicorn, the rhinoceros. The level of detail and skill demonstrated in engraving and printing from the plates of this work is of the very highest standard and provide the reader with a detailed study of five different rhinoceros species including the Indian and black rhinoceros. 

The briefest of glimpses of the frontispiece leaves the reader in little doubt of the Wakefield’s view that poaching is responsible for the tragic decline in rhinoceros across the world.  This is further illustrated in the manner in which the book’s title has been printed, by simply embossing the final “Going” into the paper.  This echoes palaeontology where the only evidence of the existence of a creature is the imprint it made that subsequently became fossilised, such as the Tetrapod Trackway. 

 

           The Tetrapod Trackway, Valentia Island, County Kerry, Ireland. [permission, author]

These mental imprints reflect back on earlier representations of how the rhinoceros were perceived which in crude terms described it as a beast about the size of a horse with a horn. Combine this with archaeological evidence of knawel horns and third hand reports of beasts from the edge of imagination and there are fertile grounds for the conjuring of the image of the unicorn.  Indeed as late as the early eighteenth century the unicorn versus rhinoceros debate continued.   

                                            The Black Rhinoceros, Going Going Going

Finally, An Alphabet of Extinct Mammals almost seems to be the natural book end for this collection from Chevington Press. The fact that Wakefield illustrates the frontispiece of this work with a self-portrait which airs toward the creature-like seems to echo a warning to the reader about how closely our fate is intrinsically connected to mammals. 

Frontispiece, An Alphabet of Extinct Animals 

There is something unique and particularly individual and characterful about the illustrations which are all yet beautifully faithful representations of these once majestic creatures. One of the most powerful messages in this work is the fact that Wakefield can fill the alphabet with extinct species. Most of the species illustrated have slipped in to extinction in the since the age of exploration.  This work is certainly not a corpus of Victorian expeditionary corpulence although it does include such examples as the Warrah or Falkland Islands dog which was “eased into oblivion” by the “inevitable government bounty” in the mid nineteenth century.    

Because of the new security measures placed at the entrances it is now not so easy to pass through the British Museum. So I must find a new route through the pollution choked city to meetings in town.

Bibliography

D.R. Wakefield, Alphabet of endangered mammals: a collection of etchings depicting animals considered extinct in the wild 2050, The Chevington Press: Goole, 2010. [British Library Shelfmark: RF.2017.b.58]

D.R. Wakefield, An alphabet of extinct mammals; The Chevington Press: Goole, 2009 [British Library Shelfmark: RF.2017.b.59]

D.R. Wakefield, Going, going, going: some thoughts on the destiny of the rhinoceros as an icon of natural history with etchings, The Chevington Press: Goole, 2015 [British Library Shelfmark: HS.74/2322]

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Allen Lane: London 2005 [British Library Shelfmark: YC.2006.a.14921]

 

 

A guest blog by Rachel Brett, Humanities Reference Specialist

For those who believe in magic it’s reasonable to accept it can form in monochrome shades. Potentially the most infamous practitioner of the darker variety was Aleister Crowley (pictured below). Emerging from the Fin de siècle moment when, along with philosophers and psychoanalysists alike, he became interested in mysticism and the occult. Rebelling against his evangelical Christian upbringing causing his mother to dub him ‘The Beast’ a moniker amongst many he would adopt throughout his life as a magician.

Crowley began his magical apprentice training with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, other probationers included W.B.Yeats. Crowley however, developed an interest in goetia- the evocation of demons and would later believe Yeats was casting spells on him because he was jealous of his poetry… The clandestine life style Crowley was beginning to indulge in encompassing drug taking and sexual experiments cast a cloud over his progress with that magical order prompting him to seek wider magical landscapes.

He travelled extensively and studied a myriad amount of ancient eastern traditions from yoga, meditation to kabbalah. He married and shortly after in telepathic communication with his new wife made contact with the Egyptian god Aiwass, which resulted in him producing The Book of the Law which would serve as the basis for the magic system he dedicated his life to. The premises of his belief system was ‘Do What thy Will, Love is the Law’. Analogous to Nietzsche before him he believed that individuals held the power to be free and live according to their own desires, despite the effect of those desires. Having achieved top level magus status Crowley became head of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) he added a ‘k’ to the spelling of magic and set about establishing the religion of Thelema that would guide in the new Aeon.

One vital element to Crowley’s practice was the attainment of a magic diary. He had a strong interest in science and felt that magic should use the ‘method of science with the aim of religion’. In the age of enlightenment knowledge received by reason could be scientifically calculated. The practice of magic for Crowley had to be studied in the same manner; collect data and look for repeatable patterns and repetitions. The diary was key to this procedure.

He kept a diary from his initiation into the Golden Dawn and expected all his students to do likewise. The process of keeping a diary was to record and reflect on experiences and effective exercises. The recording allowed theories and methods to be tested but also a tool to aid his most profound motto; know thy self and ones limits.

He chronicled everything in his diary, from Astrological charts, concentration exercises, dreams, daily observations to what he ate and when. The resolution was to show life as a spell that is willed for a purpose. Evocations were his way of confronting obstacles to the self. By recording all his thoughts, feelings and activities and the reflecting upon these illuminated his perceptions. The practice of keeping the diary was a disciplined aspect of training for the aspirant. The diary would be maintained for a year then reflected upon by the teacher before a pupil could become adept. The principle was for the magician to record their past, where they came from and how they were brought to the gateway of magic. The diary would function as the writer’s conscience that could be used for further experiments. The recording of all activities meant that the mind could not forget or falsely remember.

Sometimes coded cipher might be used, and grammar was banished. There would be no full stops, or use of the word failure Crowley writes in The Book:

“This full stop may never be written anywhere else; for the writing of the Book goes on eternally; there is no way of closing the record until the goal of all has been attained.”

Picture showing Aleister Crowley as Osiris

For Crowley the maintenance of a magical diary was so vital to attainment that he wrote a novel based upon his own experiences. ‘The Diary of a Drug Fiend’ is a fictional account premised on his own experiences.

Magicians diaries rarely survive least of all become published, the full set are still waiting publications. John Dee who was the astrologer of Elizabeth 1 also kept a magical diary. Some of his original manuscript form part of the British Library collections.

Aleister Crowley had many faces, an iconoclast, a poet, a mountaineer, a mystic and popular culture icon. His cultural influence began as early as 1908 when Somerset Maugham wrote The Magician a novel caricaturing Crowley. During the revolutionary 1960’s Crowley would posthumously become an alternative inspiration for the new generation from magicians to pop stars. It seems that the subterranean world of the magician is an enduring mystery that looks set to remain in our popular consciousness for a long time to come. Just remember magic isn’t just one colour…  

References books on magic can be located on the open shelves in Humanities one reading room.

Guest blog by Travis Elborough author of  Our Twentieth Century: As Told in Diaries, Journals and Letters, published by Michael O’Mara.

 Diaries and journals as we know them now have been with us since at least the 16th century. But it wasn't until 1812 that the stationer John Letts first began selling a yearly almanack from his shop at the Royal Exchange in London – at that time home to numerous booksellers and coffeehouses and an area previously haunted by Pepys. The Letts Diary was an immediate success, attracting such devoted users as William Makepeace Thackeray who favoured the 'three shillings cloth boards' No 12 model, and continues to be published in a multitude of formats to this day.

I’ve never really kept a diary. But I am an inveterate reader of other people’s. For me, the appeal has always been their immediacy and intimacy. That unique sense of being addressed directly, and sometimes extremely candidly, by someone, perhaps from an age other than our own, is intensely seductive. At the British Library there is the added thrill of being able to consult the original diaries of the likes of Laurie Lee, Kenneth Williams, Alec Guinness, Beryl Bainbridge and Shiva Naipaul in the archives, their personalities coming across here in pen stroke and paper stock as well as in choice turns of phrase.

It has been an enormous pleasure and a real privilege to be able to consult such documents and the Library’s unparalleled collection of published diaries while putting together my latest anthology, Our History of the 20th Century. In this book I’ve used extracts from over a hundred different diarists, both the great and the good and the completely obscure, to present a kind of top down and bottom up account of Britain during the last century. My diarists range from politicians, heads of state, novelists, playwrights and celebrities to ordinary people and the largely unknown and unsung contributors to the Mass Observation Project.

But in any case, as an historian and author of books on vinyl records and the British seaside, diaries are where I go to try and find as instantaneous or unvarnished a reaction to events as possible. First impressions count because they tend to get superseded by the collectively agreed verdict of history. Take for example the funeral of Queen Victoria, an event which we condescendingly assume must have been greeted with great solemnity by the general public. And yet here is Arnold Bennett’s impression of the occasion from his journal on 2 February 1901:

This morning I saw what I could, over the heads of a vast crowd, of the funeral procession of the Queen. The people were not, on the whole, deeply moved, whatever journalists may say, but rather serene and cheerful.

Afterwards, Legge, Fred Terry and Hooley lunched with me at the Golden Cross Hotel, and all was very agreeable and merry.

Diaries are, of course, often far from authoritative and have no commitment to tell the truth or record incidents accurately. They are by their very nature subjective, and so subject to the egos, whims and biases of their writers. Bennett may, perhaps, have nursed a particular antipathy toward the old Queen, who knows? Elsewhere in his journals he denounces cocktails, admires Lyons Corner House restaurants and records meeting T S Eliot and asking the American-born poet if The Wasteland was intended as a joke.

This is another joy of diaries, they can often supply frank (and sometimes amusingly wrong-headed) assessments of artworks long since judged canonical. It is in her diary that Virginia Woolf famously confessed on reading James Joyce’s Ulysses to feeling ‘puzzled, bored, irritated, and disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’. In turn Beatrice Webb writes off To the Lighthouse in her diary, deeming the ‘stream of consciousness’ narrative of Woolf’s 1927 novel ‘objectionable’ on the grounds that ‘even one’s own consciousness defies description’.

 Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman might well have won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 and is widely regarded as a classic of post-war American theatre. One that continues to be studied and regularly performed all over the world but after seeing its first London run, Malcolm Muggeridge judged it ‘a wholly sentimental affair’, concluding in a diary entry for the 27 September 1949 that it was little more than ‘a glorified hard-luck story.’ He was similarly damning of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger too.

Anyone familiar with the work of the film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson, leading light of the Free Cinema movement who produced politically-charged movies like If and Britannia Hospital, might have expected him to take a rather dim view of Star Wars. And indeed he does, with the robots C3P0 and R2D2 in George Lucas’s cinematic space epic coming in for particular criticism. But it is also in the pages of his diary we learn, rather surprisingly, that in 1978 he was a committed viewer of the American television series The Incredible Hulk.

Armed with this knowledge is it tempting to imagine what Anderson, who late in his career worked unhappily with the 80s pop group Wham! on a documentary of their tour of China, might possibly have done himself with a Marvel comics movie.

Anderson died in 1994, the year Tony Blair became leader of the Labour party. And there is, if anything, nothing more distant than that recent past. What seems like yesterday remains a period when news of Princess Diana’s death, for instance, reaches all the diarists in my book via landline telephone, radio, terrestrial television and inky newsprint rather than by text, the internet or social media.

Today, of course, many more people choose to document their lives with pictures on Instagram and comment publicly on events, personal and political, on Facebook or Twitter rather than privately in the leaves of a diary. It will be interesting to see what future historians might then use to construct a similar volume about our current century. 

Travis Elborough’s new book Our Twentieth Century: As Told in Diaries, Journals and Letters is published by Michael O’Mara.

Edward Thomas believed poetry to be the highest form of literature, yet it wasn’t until late in his life that he became a poet. For the greater part of his creative life he was a reviewer, critic and the author of a number of books on nature.  He was born on the 3 March 1878 in Lambeth to Welsh parents who instilled in him a strong sense of his Welsh heritage.  He was educated at St Paul’s School and then Oxford University. In 1899, while still an undergraduate, Thomas married Helen Berenice Noble, the daughter of an early mentor, James Ashcroft Noble, who had encouraged Thomas to publish essays based on the copious notes he took on his long country walks.  After Oxford, Thomas made a precarious living working as a reviewer on the Daily Chronicle much to the dismay of his father, who had hoped his son would follow in his footsteps by joining the Civil Service.  Thomas’s determination to earn his living as a writer was to cause a major rift between father and son.

 

Edward Thomas photograph circa 1905 Wikimedia Commons

In order to support his growing family Thomas had to take on more and more reviewing – leading him to declare to a friend that “I am burning my candle at three ends”, despite his dislike of what he referred to as his “hack work” he became a prominent and influential literary critic. It was through his growing status as a reviewer that Thomas became acquainted with Harold Monro, whose Poetry Bookshop was the centre for an emerging group of poets who became known as the Georgian Poets. The key members of the group at the time were Lascelles Abercrombie, W W Gibson, Rupert Brooke and John Drinkwater.

In 1911 Abercrombie moved to ‘The Gallows’ a house at Ryton, just outside the village of Dymock in Gloucestershire; he was soon followed to the area by Gibson who, with Abercrombie, persuaded the American poet Robert Frost to move to a house in Ledington called ‘Little Iddens’. The three of them formed what became known as the Dymock triangle.  The Dymock colony is looked back on today as an idyll, a short-lived golden time, brought to an end by the First World War.

Thomas first met Frost in October 1913 and was subsequently a frequent visitor to ‘Little Iddens’, often staying with Frost until he too rented rooms for his family in a nearby farmhouse. Other visitors to Dymock included Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, Eleanor Farjeon, Ivor Gurney and W H Davies.  Thomas’s friendship with Frost was to prove a pivotal moment in Thomas’s life.  The two men would go for long walks in the surrounding countryside discussing poetry and life.  Frost has been credited as the catalyst in Thomas becoming a poet.  He suggested that Thomas take his prose and turn it into poetry. In the final two years of his life, Thomas was extremely prolific, writing over 140 poems.  One of his most famous is ‘Adelstrop’, written on the 24 June 1914, on a train journey to visit Frost.  The poem recounts an unscheduled stop that captures a moment of peace and tranquillity on a summer’s day, which later took on an extra poignancy for those about to be slaughtered in the coming war

There has been much speculation as to why Thomas enlisted in the army. Certainly we know he spent many hours deliberating over whether he should join up.  As a married man in his late thirties with three children to support he would not have been expected to enlist.  But enlist he did, on the 19 July 1915 as a private in the Artists’ Rifles.  A little over a year later he was promoted to corporal and worked as a map reading instructor, an occupation for which he was entirely suited and a position he could have retained for the duration of the war.  Ironically, it was the army that gave him the freedom to write, free from the financial worries of how to provide for his family.  In November 1916 he was commissioned into the Royal Garrison Artillery as a second lieutenant, the following month he volunteered for active service.

Thomas arrived in France a few months before the commencement of a major Allied offensive, aimed at breaking through the German defences at Arras. The day before the battle, a shell landed near Thomas but failed to detonate.  That evening he was toasted in the Officers’ Mess for being blessed with luck.  The battle began on Easter Monday 9 April 1917, within the first hour Thomas was dead.  Some biographical accounts suggest he was killed by the concussive blast of a shell which left his body unmarked.  However, a letter from his commanding officer, which lay undiscovered in the New York Public Library for many years, reveals that he was killed by a direct hit through the chest.  The poems that were to make his name were published a few months after his death.

Perhaps his work has been overshadowed by the dominance of modernism, but many poets point to Thomas as an inspiration and he is seen by some as the bridge between Thomas Hardy and Ted Hughes. Hughes described him as “the father of us all”.  On Armistice Day in 1985, Hughes unveiled a memorial to First World War poets in Westminster Abbey, which included Edward Thomas among those commemorated.

 

Duncan Heyes, Curator, Printed Heritage and Contemporary British Publications.

This is a guest blog from QI elf Anne Miller. Join Anne, fellow elf James Harkin and QI founder John Lloyd for a  QI Christmas Quiz on 18 December at the British Library. This event will celebrate the publication of 1,423 Facts To Bowl You Over, the latest eye-popping, gobsmacking, over-bowling book from the top QI team. 

Get your best team together and be in with a chance of winning a Quite Interesting prize!

QI Towers is an office of bookworms. We love all facts but have a soft spot for bookish ones such as there being a German airline which allows an extra kilo of hand luggage so long as it’s books, that there’s a bookshop in Shanghai which sells books by the kilo and that the British Library keeps its collection of over 60 million newspapers in an airtight building with low oxygen so they can’t catch fire.

The QI office is covered with towering stacks of intriguing books such as William Donaldson’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics: An A-Z of Roguish Britons Through The Ages, Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy’s The Geometry of Pasta and Fran Beauman’s The Pineapple which just make you want to stop everything until you’ve read them from cover to cover.

Some of our favourite titles include:

Tolstoy’s Bicycle

Jeremy Baker

This book takes its name from the fact that Tolstoy decided to learn to ride a bicycle (then a modern contraption) when he was 67-years-old. The book is full of facts about the great and the good (and the not so good) but with the facts divided up by the age people were when they happened. For example at two-years-old Hercules strangled two snakes in his crib, Judy Garland sang Jingle Bells on stage and that’s also generally the age when you become too old to travel for free on aeroplanes.

 

Consider The Fork: A History of Invention in the Kitchen

Bee Wilson

Interesting nuggets in Bee Wilson’s history of kitchens include that swingers, pinchers, tippers, perchers and floppers are all types of toaster. We were also fascinated to discover that there are actually precise measurements for quantities such as a 'dash' (1/8 of a teaspoon), a 'pinch' (1/16 of a teaspoon) and a ‘drop’ (1/72 of a teaspoon or 0.069ml). 

 

Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals

Steve Young and Sport Murphy

1950-80 was the golden age of ‘industrial musicals’ - bespoke Broadway-style shows performed by companies to promote their products and to motivate employees. This book gathers the best together including such gems as 1969’s The Bathrooms Are Coming which was only ever seen by people in the bathroom trade.  

One of the songs on the soundtrack was Look At This Tub! which included the lyrics ‘Look at this tub! It’s dangerous and certainly a hazard! It’s positively lower than substandard! Everything here is lower class, Why, I could slip, I could fall right on my... nose.’

 

The Oxford English Dictionary(OED)

The OED is one of our favourite reference books and where we found out that the word ‘omnilegent’ means being addicted to reading, ‘obdormition’ is when your arm falls asleep after you lean on it and ‘onomatomania’ is frustration at being unable to think of the appropriate word.

There are also some great facts about the OED itself. It was originally offered to Cambridge not Oxford and their first editorial assistant was sacked for industrial espionage.

With so many incredible books to get through we’re hopeful of avoiding alogotransiphobia which is the fear of being caught on public transport without a book to read.

Anne Miller, QI Elf

by Callum McKean, Curator, Contemporary Literary and Creative Archives. The British Library holds the Angela Carter Archive and you can explore some digitised manuscripts on our Discovering Literature website.

For Angela Carter, many of our apparently banal daily practices orbit around ancient and largely invisible centres of gravity; they are the result of rituals repeated and folk narratives re-told across generations, often unconsciously. Her work looks askance at these invisible – or naturalised – narrative and behavioural forces, and then proceeds to take them apart to see how they work. In her hands, myths and fairy-tales are re-told in such a way as to drag them from the dark, invisible world of the habitual into the lighter realm of the thinkable.

Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that Carter is interested in the idea of the Festival as a rupture in the procession of the Everyday; a moment when social norms are stretched and even overturned, at least temporarily. In her posthumously published ‘Ghost Ships: a Christmas Story’, this conflict takes place in a burgeoning 17^th century New England colony which finds itself under silent attack from a larger-than-life pagan armada, where the titular ships re-call a contemporaneous Christmas carol of unknown origin. 

 
This reproduction of a 19^th Century wood-engraving illustrating the famous Christmas carol, ‘I Saw Three Ships’, shows three intensely colourful and oversized figures aboard ships, bringing music and festivity to the shore in a way comparable to the oversized figures aboard the ships in Carter’s story. (Walter Crane’s Painting Book [1889] YK.2000.b.3201)

 This re-imagination of the folk-song as an attack on puritan sensibilities, where the anticipatory joy of the original song becomes a kind of subliminal violence, is symptomatic of what Carter sees as the paranoid world-view of the New England settlers. The function of music in puritan societies was to help the congregation attain a higher religious ideal. Purely sensual enjoyment was discouraged and severely punished. Songs without basis in scripture, such as carols, came under immediate suspicion; the settlers preferred instead to chant psalms in unison, without instrumentation. ‘The greatest genius of the puritans lay in their ability to sniff out a pagan survival’, Carter writes, ‘they were the stuff of which social anthropologists would be made’.

The irony here, of course, is that peculiarly sensitive noses are at increased risk of ‘sniffing out’ more alluring scents too. Protection from the dangers of the purely sensual came, more often than not in the early colonies, through top-down legislation. ‘Ghost Ships’ begins with such a piece of legislation, an excerpt from a Statute Enacted by the General Court of Massachusetts in May 1659. The Statute itself is real, and still viewable in the Massachussets State Archives. 

Such top-down attempts to purge the so-called New World of its Old World traditions are particularly feeble for Carter. No penalty, however large or strictly enforced, can pry a culture from its origins. The Boston Bay which her pilgrims inhabit – described as being ‘as calm as milk, as black as ink, smooth as silk’ – is a paradoxically fantastical space; an imaginary clean slate constructed as a bulwark against the infinite reproducibility of a folk-culture which some of the more elite or pious settlers had hoped to leave behind, but which could not be forgotten by force. When reading Carter’s annotated typescripts for ‘Ghost Ships’, one is struck by how forcefully this conflict is encoded into the physicality of the text. Her typescript is draped in richly descriptive pen annotations which indulge sensual, onomatopoetic ruminations and asides – one reads simply, ‘slurp, slurp, slurp’:

 

 This typescript page from a draft of ‘Ghost Ships’ shows heavy annotations which never made it into the published version of the story, but which throw light on Carter’s sense of the titular ships as overflowing with rich and sensuous imagery. (Add MS 88899/1/39).

However, to focus too strongly on the emancipatory potential of Festival in this story is to forget its ending, where the Lord of Misrule (a precursor to modern Father Christmas whose body is a catalogue of obscene comedy) is thrown back into the sea in defeat. Carter read the work of Mikhail Bakhtin -- a Russian cultural theorist and literary critic whose sense of the Carnivalesque as possessing the potential to liberate us from oppressive structures -- with more than a pinch of salt. In ‘Pantoland’, another story from the same collection, she writes that, ‘the essence of the carnival, the festival, the Feast of Fools, is transience. It is here today and gone tomorrow, a release of tension not a reconstitution of order, refreshment… after which everything can go on again exactly as if nothing had happened’. Rather than overthrowing the puritans of Boston Bay, Carter’s Lord of Misrule leaves only a parting gift, a ‘juicy resistance’ which turns out to be, ‘to their amazed and secret glee, […] a raisin the size of your thumb, wrinkled with its own sweetness, plump as if it had been soaked in brandy, that came from who knows where but might have easily dropped out of the sky during the flight overhead of a disintegrating Christmas pudding’. Rather than a full-scale overthrow of the status-quo, then, Carter leaves us with only an exceedingly ripe kernel, a single transitional object which can move, inexplicably, from the world of magic to the world of the everyday. This saturated raisin, soaked in brandy, is all that remains of the night’s assault, but it is all that is needed to permit the imagination– in the smallest way – to re-think the world.

A guest post by Carolyn Trant.

James and I met at Schumacher College, at a week-long event combining poetry and bookbinding workshops, and soon realised our creative inspiration came from similar sources. We enjoyed discussing our ideas from a position of intuitive understanding. This was quite special, enabling us to get down to the nitty-gritty and fine-tune our arguments without time-consuming explanations, to push ideas forward without tedious back-stories.

Since I was a small child I had always loved poetry but was forced to choose between writing and painting by the tenor of the times (art school in late 60’s/early 70’s); James also makes wood engravings and pots. We respect each other’s judgments and feel free to criticise constructively. Our discussions inspire us each in our own medium, passing images and words between us.

We see the books as parallel texts, word and image, which we develop in tandem; neither ‘illustrates’ the other and a book is gradually extruded, together with the physical processes of its’ making, like red white and blue striped toothpaste from a tube. For me the physicality of the finished book is a major consideration from the start.

As an artist I have always been inspired by words, music, storytelling and the natural world; gradually the Artists Book seemed the natural gesamtkunstwerk I had dreamed of as a child. Although single-minded in pursuing the vision of my books, collaboration urges one to push oneself even further, with the benefits, if one finds the right person, of moral support – creativity can also be a tough and lonely business. I do also continue to make my own personal books, sometimes using texts of my own.

 

My first book Gawain was inspired by Harrison Birtwistle’s music, the operatic production premiered at Covent Garden and the libretto by poet David Harsent – a fait accompli but very much chiming in with my own preoccupations of links between medieval and contemporary concerns. Similarly my book Winterreise used Schubert’s music and Wilhem Mueller’s words, in both English and German, plus my own text, all layered on top of each other with images underneath. I’ve also made a dual language edition of Llorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love with both texts and images cut in wood. Cutting texts by hand gives them a new dimension.

 

Working closely with a contemporary poet was an exciting step forward. To date James and I have made Hunting the Wren and Love Poems and Curses; The Untenanted Room – published by Agenda Editions and soon to be re-thought and hand-made as The Ruin; The Rhyme of the Reddleman’s Daughter (2015) and Some Light Remains (2017). Some of these books have also later been developed into more three dimensional forms, cut-out leporellos, peepshows etc.

 

For a poet, editions are regrettably small as they are very ‘hand-made’ but they find their way to important public collections here and abroad, where there is the potential to be looked read by a large number of people. We also show them at book fairs where many people come by to look, handle and often stand to read them. James also has the poems published in magazines such as the London Magazine, and Agenda, often with an image included. It all feels a worthwhile enough way to get them out into the world.

In terms of art practice, an Artists Book is for me like a little time capsule when deposited in a collection like the British Library. At the same time, when displayed, however briefly, or seen by a ‘reader’, it contrastingly becomes a transitory event – fugitive and volatile - and like a piece of land-art or a theatrical experience it can live on in the mind afterwards, with a variety of meanings for the possibly wider and more varied audience than the regular gallery-goer; a poetic event in itself which the text concentrates and refines even further.

I prefer this idea to the fixed image on a gallery wall. Book Fairs, with a democratic marketplace of tables and stands (and hopefully without curated interventions) leave room for varying kinds of interactions with the ‘the public’ by both poet and image maker, including informal conversations, talks and readings.

Innovation exists in the ways the art takes place whilst embracing longstanding methods of human communication - narrative and storytelling, aesthetic appreciation and emotional response; emotion being not merely a wash of sentiment but something that takes one from one place to another, whether comfortable or not, in a situation where the audience can talk back, critique, discuss. Working with another artist/poet places feedback at the centre of the creative process from the start, keeps one grounded and provides a sounding board at every stage.

 Any halfway attempt to reproduce our work digitally always leaves us dissatisfied. For Hunting the Wren we used silk-screened text printed by a local expert; many people thought it looked it like letterpress, which is hugely costly and time-consuming and although lovely, irrevocably linked to a historic aesthetic. Although meticulous within our parameters, we prefer to try to work fast, so that new ideas don’t go ‘off the boil’, and we can move on. I made a point of being trained by a wonderful ‘trade’ bookbinder when the need arose. Sometimes pragmatism is a virtue.

 Print runs, like the measure of the ‘acre’, are contingent on how many images for each page can be printed in a day. For Gawain I actually set myself the same task as in the story of the Green Knight, of finishing the whole project within a year and a day. The next impending important book fair often has some bearing on the case, or at least on how many hours sleep I allow myself.

 

 

Latterly, the use of magnesium line-blocks, made by a helpful company called Metallic Elephant, has opened up new possibilities for texts; they are tricky to handle on my etching press, which is what I use for the woodcuts, but any imperfections are part of the process – something I always love about medieval technologies which are often working right up to the edge of possibilities.

In other words materiality, ‘words made flesh’ as it were, seems exciting and important alongside the digital world, a sort of ‘slow bookmaking’ for a fast age, within which James and I can keep up the pace of excitement about further collaborations, and battle to get things done with heads full of ideas stretching into the future. The Ruin, with hand-cut texts, is to be finished for the Oxford Fine Press Book Fair in spring 2018.

 

Further information:

http://carolyntrant.co.uk/  

http://carolyntrantparvenu.blogspot.com

 

James Simpson

https://jamessimpsonactaeon.wordpress.com

 

 

As a sixth form student already practically fossilised under the pressure of A Levels, I remember my school’s decision to have a Year 12 work experience week (just after exams) was met with an overwhelming shout of fury throughout my year. A week on my grandad’s farm moving cattle through muddy fields‒ No Thank You! So, I took it upon myself to leave sleepy Dorset and find somewhere far, far away from any cows, where I would be genuinely fascinated with the work and the people (not that my grandad isn't interesting, you understand). Therefore, when I discovered that the British Library provided a work experience opportunity, I was utterly determined to surround myself with all things literature and history. Up at the crack of dawn (or what felt like the crack of dawn - 9.00 am feels unnaturally early for a teenager), I was ready for applications to open. By 9.30, my application had been sent ‒ the irrevocable action complete. All that was left to do was to wait as somebody decided my fate: cows or codices. I was pessimistic. It felt entirely impossible that I should be so lucky as to be accepted. So, naturally when I received an email from the British Library saying, ‘We are pleased to confirm that we will be able to offer you a placement’, I was overjoyed.

I was placed in the Learning team, with the people who make Discovering Literature, the Library’s excellent literature website. These were resources that I had used personally for school work, and in my extra-curricular reading. ‘What an amazing opportunity!’ I thought, ‘to be involved in the research behind one of my favourite websites for the subject I love most ‒ perfect!’

 
Oliver and Andrea by the King’s Library

I entered the British Library like a puppy, excited to an almost embarrassing degree, gawking at the deep browns, reds and greens that seemed to radiate from the tower of King George III’s books. My line manager Andrea Varney made me feel welcome immediately, giving me an opportunity to discuss what I had been reading, and why I love literature.

My tasks throughout the placement included: helping with school workshops; providing feedback on the Discovering Literature website; creating a guide for the ongoing Russian Revolution exhibition. I decided that my guide would be targeted towards students who had just finished their GCSEs and were looking to begin A Level History next year. I used the sources in the exhibition to form the basis of A Level style questions that would challenge students, and encourage historical debate, with an emphasis on analysis and evaluation. To my giddy pleasure, my guide was quite a success, and I was fortunate enough to have it read by the exhibition curators themselves. In the school workshops I was given the opportunity to experience the way the Library inspires young people with its amazing collection. It was a particular pleasure to see the awestruck faces of students surrounding an original version of the Magna Carta from 1215. Providing my perspective on the Discovering Literature website was also very enjoyable, as I was able to witness first-hand the work that goes into producing these extensive resources.

There were many highlights during my work experience. One was a Library tour, where I learned all kinds of pithy statements which I would later reel off to impress relatives and my dad’s work colleagues in London, such as: ‘The Library boasts a collection of 150 million items’, and ‘Every year the shelf-space required for new publications increases by 12 kilometres’. Another was to peruse an early dictionary with edits by Dr Samuel Johnson himself ‒- being the child that I am, I was quick to note down the definition of ‘belch’ and ‘belly-worm’.

Bellygods, Bellyrolls and Belly-worms in Samuel Johnson’s annotated Dictionary C_45_k_3_vol1_BEL_BEL

Also, leafing through the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost from 1688 was particularly thrilling. However, perhaps what I enjoyed most was the opportunity to discuss literature and art with a group of people who were equally obsessed with books. Everybody was so welcoming and lovely, and certainly made me feel at home far away from the fields of Dorset.

 
Satan in the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost, 1688

My week at the British Library has to be one of the best weeks in my life so far (and I am making every effort not to exaggerate to a ridiculous extent). The opportunity to be independent in London, immerse myself in what I love, and surround myself with wonderful and interesting people, has given me a definite idea of what I want to do in the future. I can't wait to return for my own research.

Oliver Stockley