TREND ALERT: BOOKS AND/AS FURNITURE

via AvecLivres.Tumblr.Com

In any given week’s news about books, there are always 2-3 elegant uses that have nothing to do with reading them, but make great pictures, so I thought I’d consolidate the references in one place, with some conveniently located reading on the subject.

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of
all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts
will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice
it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired
his library and then finished with the standard question, ‘‘And you
have read all these books, Monsieur France?’’ ‘‘Not one-tenth of them. I
don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?’’ —Walter Benjamin

Walking into Persephone Books one day, my partner was congratulated on her appreciation of their content, since, the cashier claimed, most people only came in to buy the uniformly grey-bound titles to decorate their homes. While getting to know one of the booksellers from Classic Bindings Ltd. at the Olympia Fair, he told me how he was excited that his business was moving from the realm of interior decorating to “real” bookselling, that is, selling books to people who intend to read them rather than en bloc manorial furnishings, buying by the book rather than by the foot (and let us not forget to extend to books Edgar Allan Poe’s weighing in on the Philosophy of Furniture). And before either one of us could afford bookshelves in our flat, we built them out of our books– efficient for display but not recovery.

As long as books have been produced they’ve been left unread, from the 16th century ducal library with an inch of dust kept by the upper crust of society as a sign of gentility– surely that is what libraries like the largest floating library in the world on the Queen Mary II, or at the new W Hotel in London are going for to some extent. Jeffrey Todd Knight in his ‘‘Furnished’’ for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture”, expands things further, there are books in his essay that lie on desks as would carpets, or books written on for scrap paper, practice, accounting purposes, all totally ignorant of which Canterbury Tale or book of the Bible they may be obscuring. The spectrum of use is very wide. He writes:

[W]e might gain a more inclusive understanding of what lies behind modern
taxonomies by considering texts in relation to a different category of things:
‘‘furniture’’—books that furnish space and furnishings that, like books,
have the capacity to fill minds with information.

Sometimes unreading happens to a single book, for instance the odd copy of M. Merleau-Ponty, covers well worn but unread, spine uncracked– something I have been told by a certain student of the École Normale Supérieure used to be carried around as a kind of intimidation tactic. Books can take on functions that have nothing to do with their content and everything to do with their form. Sometimes you might just like the weight in your bag, or the silent reverence of a secular space like the library, sometimes they help you think independent from themselves. And the emphasis on form isn’t always bad thing: as I have reported here, evidence is now showing that books that are aesthetically pleasing and well made do not suffer the same ravages of digital culture that mass produced paper backs have.

On a personal level, in the past when I have attempted to organize books by their covers and not content, I’ve actually found that emphasizing the visual allows me to remember more easily where they are, especially by color. So sometimes you can have it both ways and organize your books in a way that will get the compliments AND play to your own particular ars memoriae.

Some ways of organizing books:

1. By color.
2. By size. (a la the Duke Humphrey Library, Oxford. Or Oprah)
3. Fore-edge out, chained.
4. Fore-edge out.
5. By sentences you can spell using their spines.

Some places to store books:

1. Shelves
2. Stairs
3. Shelves AND Stairs
4. Stairwells
5. Scrolls
6. Everywhere
7. Everywhere

Some non-books:

1. Fake Books
2. Bedside Lamp

How do you use books that is off the beaten path of what we might normally expect? I’d love to hear from you.

Finally, beyond the jump I have pasted the most useful/amusing commentary on books and furniture yet written– two short chapters from Jackson Holbrook’s Anatomy of Bibliomania on “Books as Furniture” and “A Digression of Dummy Books”.

WICCAPEDIA

Have you ever noticed that the internet is really good at providing translations and editions of books pertaining to magic, witchcraft, alchemy, divination, and really all else related to the occult? And we’re talking the height of old, esoterica here– Trithemius, Ficino, and onward, not to mention spanning Eastward. Off of the top of my head I can think of at least four sources with an exhaustive library spanning the ages that were founded within a few years of one another, and all have very similar fin de siècle website interface reminiscent of geocities, and a similarly benevolent mission to make provide accurate texts for free.

1. The Alchemy Web Site (c. 1995)
2. Esoterica Archive (c. 1997)
3. Sacred-Texts.com (c. 1999)
4. Renaissance Astrology (c. 2000)

Given the chronology, The Craft (1996) maybe plays a very important inspirational role in this constellation of 90s occultists keeping websites actively to this day. They’re all maintained by secular experts– I mean secular, in the sense that they manage to do this without academic appointments to keep them going– in their spare time, as independent scholars and freelance teachers, or alongside their legal practice among other things. But are they all friends? Do they know each other beyond the strength of weak ties i.e. linking to one another? It’s almost as if a subculture has been revived distinctly with the internet as its HQ, and it’s large enough and invested enough in digital archiving to have been around in the very beginning:

Many of the texts included here were originally posted in ftp archives or on bulletin boards before the growth of the World Wide Web and have been lost. In some cases, the texts were posted in such a form as to make them unusable by non-technically oriented users. Some of these texts were on the web at some point but have completely disappeared because the site they were posted on has closed. Thus the need for an archive which organizes this material in a persistent location. (Sacred-Texts.com)

I’d love to know what William Eamon thinks about this. It’s not only a subculture of belief systems dating back centuries, but a subculture of archival practices. It’s strange that something so committed, longstanding, and successful (via massive amounts of traffic), and also so outside the academy, should also remain fairly ignored by the digital humanities. There’s such a mindfulness in the ‘About’ section of each that they serve a purpose that is unique, and it goes beyond the website even, to the core of collecting (super relevant, given what’s happened to the Bibliotheca Hermetica Philosophica lately):

BW: Thank you for agreeing to another interview. I am surprised at the changes in your workplace, it is not quite as I remember things.
McLean: Yes, the hall is now a ‘Hall of Tarot’! Not quite that which the esotericists believe still lies hidden under the pyramids.
BW: You certainly now have a large collection of tarot cards.
McLean: Don’t worry. I am not about to tell your fortune! I recently became very engaged by the multiplicity of tarot card designs that had come into being in the past 50 years. These reflected all sorts of different ways of envisaging tarot imagery, in different art styles and interpretations, but which at the same time still held to the tarot structure. It reminded me of the 16th and 17th century emblems books, and I decided to investigate this aspect of tarot. I was immediately frustrated because there is no library that holds a collection of tarot cards. They seem to have been entirely ignored by libraries and archives and also by the art world. So in order to study them I knew I had to buy copies of the decks themselves. It has been quite a struggle but I have now amassed a collection of over 1000 actual decks with a hundred or more scans of decks on my computer.  (Link)

Hint hint, booksellers!

I’d love to do my part, although unfortunately it won’t go so far as an entire digital edition (yet) as much as a mere show-and-tell of solidarity. Here’s something that’s missing from these websites (as well as from Google Books) one of the books we’ve just got in is Hieronymus Cardanus/Girolamo Cardano’s Libelli Duo/Two Books (Nuremberg, 1543).  Cardano was generally a weird and prolific dude (even wikapedia will tell you, but Anthony Grafton’s Cardano’s Cosmosis much better). He thought he had magic powers including (1) to enter into a trance at will, (2) advanced imagination, allowing him to have any vision he wanted to and (3) foresight of his own future through examination of his dreams, or his fingernails.

He was a bestseller in his day, but his complete works were not printed until 1663, in twelve massive volumes collecting the various subjects he had written about during his lifetime: astrology, astronomy, medicine, educating the hearing impaired, gambling and probability, algebra, and even hereditary transmission in animals. [For instance in his De rerum varietate he argues that  his puppy learned to carry stones in only eight days because its parents had done so, whereas for others it would take months. Another oddity in this book is the argument that all Dolphins prefer to be called Simon because their forebears were called as much (De rerum varietate, VIII 40, Thorndike 577)]

This work includes an Almanack Supplement, a short treatise on the movement of the heavens, and most importantly a collection of astrological genitures of famous people, from Emperor Nero and Francesco Petrarch to celebrities and royals of his day, such as Erasmus and Henry VIII of England. A decade after the publication of this book (1554), Cardano published the horoscope of Jesus Christ which earned him several months in prison for heresy in 1570, under Pope Pius V — to give you a sense of the kind of trouble you can get into as an occult practitioner.  (Lest we forget, Hugh Trevor Roper has few compelling asides about this in Europe’s Physician: personal astrologer/alchemists were a must-have in many a civilized court, but for nobles like the Duke of Württemberg a misspoken horoscope or falsified ability to transmute metal into gold could land you in the gallows, as happened to Georg Honauer & later,  Muhlenfels.)

Starting later this week, I’ll be posting some of the best/juiciest parts of the book, maybe it will eventually grow toward something else, but who knows? But in the very least it might get us thinking about the history of digital archives and their habits– a fairly recent history but one with a lot of little corners of the internet that often don’t get the attention they deserve.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERNATIONAL ALT. PRESS FAIR (+ THOUGHTS ON THE PUBLISHING APOCALYPSE)

The Alternative Press Fair has come and gone this weekend, but it’s only added momentum to the larger Festival (much of which will now move down south to my [newly] native Peckham). Check out their list of events if you wanna get involved– I know I’ll definitely be taking them up on their Lino Print Workshop on Sat 4th June among other things.

Here’s what I bought and what I thought:

SELECTED PURCHASES:

via The Eel Zine

1. Splitting the Atom on Dalston Lane: The Birth of the Do-It-Yourself Punk Movement in March 1977 by Aaron Williamson (published by The Eel).

Performance poet Aaron Williamson completes the “punk diptych”and literally surveys the birthing ground of the DIY movement (map included). Where most histories of punk recall the Sex Pistols signing a contract worth 75,000 GBP, on the other side of town “the DIY-levellers the Desperate Bicycles, were detonating their sub-insurrectionary movement in Dalston for an outlay of just £12″. In the end, it’s the Desperate Bicycles whose aesthetic had more impact.

“No band– including the 1970′s legion of rebarbative ‘experimental/jazz’ collectives – had made the process of making a record both the conceptual purpose and the content of the work….The resulting vinul disc was as important a physical object as an instrumental one since it was the totem of an active rather than passive existence: ‘No more time for spectating/ tune it, count it/ let it blast/ cut it, press it/ distribute it/ Xerox music’s here at last’ they sang [in "Don't Back the Front"].”

I was told this quick & elegant history had almost totally sold out at the fair by the time I got to my copy– probably because it doubles as a manifesto and call-to-arms today just as much as it would have back in ’77.

2.  The Book Bindery by Sarah Royal (published by Microcosm)

If you want to know how books are made, read this, and if you want to know about the catalogue of crazies who make books, read this too. Royal parses fact from fiction in the modern bindery: for instance, binderies still use type, but only for gilt- or blind- stamping binding, not within the actual text block. And the typical textblock? There’s a reason I’m sticking with that word and not ‘book’:

These books we make…are not books. They have nothing to do with art. They’re compendiums of company mergers and deal closures. Boring law stuff. Dollars and nonsense. It’s all garbage that rich people spend their days arranging….I made the job legit right away by bitching about it. ‘My brain isn’t stimulated enough.’ Well no shit, you fucker, it’s 10 bucks an hour to make copies. It’s a glorified Kinkos, except without the homeless interaction or cash register.

The zine has good details of the rest of a bindery’s operations and a handy glossary, but the real treat is Royal’s knack for peeling the shitty patina off even the most mind-numbing of gigs and getting to the god-honest hilarious personalities that lie beneath.

3. Everything Past Tense Publications Publishes, Ever This imprint is based near my neighborhood and from afar I admire them & consider them my idols, so awesome are their publications on local history. As their about section says: “Past Tense is a publishing project based in South London, exploring London radical history. Initially it began as the work of one person, uncovering the subversive, hidden and esoteric past around the Elephant and Castle and Southwark.” As the London Zine Symposium a few months ago I first picked up the range of Christopher Jones’s zines: Nine Things That Aren’t There, Southwark Knives, I Saw a Tiger Running Wild, and his book Subterranean Southwark, all of which are HIGHLY recommended. This time around they happened to have a selection that went even further back than the 19th century to my very own 15th-17th bracket of choice! Burning Women: The European Witch hunts, Enclosure, and the Rise of Capitalism is available on their website to download in pdf., and A Glorious Liberty: The Ideas of the Ranters which is also available here.

via Bristol Radical History Group

In other words, the DIY publishing scene has a lot to offer anyone interested in the history of the book, bibliography, and rare books as broadly as that term can be used, both in content (obviously the people who would be interested in making their own books in similar curiosities as even folks like me who catalogue pre-1640 books, they’re knowledgeable and talented at making shit), and in form (limited publication & distro).

The big publishing industry has its back to the wall and everybody is worried about what that means for the ‘book’, but these guys are not beholden to the very corporate contingencies of that publishing apocalypse.

What threatens big publishers and big book chains? At first it was the Tesco Literati. When supermarkets started selling the bestsellers super-cheaply and with buy 1 get 1 deals around the checkout lines, people stopped popping into Borders and Waterstones. It was a big hit. Second: E-publishing created a totally different, much easier and cheaper way of getting through the New York Times Bestsellers list.

But DIY publishing never worked within these channels of retail anyway, so as the proverbial cockroaches after the nuclear fallout, they’ll be fine.

That being said I think the alliance between distribution of DIY print and independent bookstores is the most important thing. Both instill in the other a kind of local colour, a singularity that you need to go into this bookstore to find this author. That sets the small bookstore apart from Waterstones Down.  You can get the latest Cometbus more quickly at City Lights, because Aaron Cometbus is based in the Bay Area than anywhere else for instance. In the spirit of the Literary Tourist-Biblio team-up I mentioned in this week’s news update, I’d love to look into compiling   a directory of which independently produced books, comics, zines are sold at which independent bookstores, and make it search-able by topic as well. At the moment, this is usually something left for publishers to do on their own, which isn’t hugely helpful to getting the word out.

One Final Note, a Positive One: The British Library had a stand at the Fair this past weekend, not to sell anything, but just to offer samples of their extensive holdings of Music, Anarchist, and even Football-related zines, as well as a leaflet describing the breadth of their collection and encouraging use of it. Andy Simmons of the Historical Print Department writes:

[T]here is another school of printd matter that have come to prominence in our lifetimes, which usually merges text with uncredited graphic illustration. The British Library of course embraces everything, or at least tries to. The main reason for such publications is the partnership of less-commercial subject matter and full editorial control. That means no shackles of market forces or censorship of any kind. This manner of media is elusive by the British Library still need to document it.

I think that rounds out what I’m trying to say here more nicely than I can.

CATALOGUE MY LEFT ONE

One conspicuous absence I have noticed from the usual Rare Book News sources is the announcement that NYU’s Riot Grrrl Archive is now open, what Maggie Serota’s neat article fittingly calls Academia, Girl Style Now:

“Sure, handmade zines and master copies from the movement do comprise an important component of the archive, but the collection boasts a vast variety of equally relevant and defining artifacts. To illustrate her point, Darms unfolds a navy-blue baby doll dress, and identifies it as the dress worn on the cover of Bikini Kill’s seminal Pussy Whipped album. Perhaps the collection’s most prized object is the actual filing cabinet used by Riot Grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna to catalog the various clippings, documents, articles and reviews related to Bikini Kill and other prominent figures central to the movement. “