Text and Image in the City: Manuscript, Print and Visual Culture in Urban Space 1443879487, 9781443879484

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Text and Image in the City

Text and Image in the City: Manuscript, Print and Visual Culture in Urban Space Edited by

John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong

Text and Image in the City: Manuscript, Print and Visual Culture in Urban Space Edited by John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by John Hinks, Catherine Armstrong and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4388-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4388-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................... vii Text, Image and the Urban John Hinks Part 1: Cities in the Margin Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 Paris: Text and Image Underground Caroline Archer Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 25 Confusing the ‘Schema’: Flash Notes and Fraud in Late Georgian England Jack Mockford Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51 London’s Little Presses Rathna Ramanathan Part 2: Textual Topographies: Urban Space in Manuscript, Print and Visual Culture Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 81 Manuscript Book Production and Urban Landscape: Bologna during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Rosa Smurra Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 105 Defining the Scottish Chapbook: A Description of the ‘Typical Scottish Chapbook’ Daliah Bond Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 125 The Urban Context of Eighteenth-Century English Provincial Printing John Hinks

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 143 Birmingham’s Graphic DNA: Reading the City through Signage, Architectural Letterforms and Typographical Landscape Geraldine Marshall A Note on Sarah Kirby’s Prints: Drawing on History: the City in Print..................................................................................................... 161 Contributors ............................................................................................. 171

INTRODUCTION TEXT, IMAGE AND THE URBAN JOHN HINKS

Textualizing the city creates its own reality, becomes a way of seeing the city – but such textuality cannot substitute for the pavements and the buildings, for the physical city. Before the city is a construct, literary or cultural, it is a physical reality with a dynamics of its own…1

The essays in this collection discuss how the city is ‘textualized’. They address many aspects of how texts and images are written and produced in, and about, cities. They demonstrate how urban texts and images provoke reactions, in city-dwellers, visitors, civic and political actors, that, in turn, impact upon the shape of the city itself. Many kinds of urban texts – both manuscript and print – are discussed, including chapbooks, periodicals, poetry, graffiti and street-signs. The essays derive from a range of disciplines including book history, urban history, cultural history, literary studies, art history and urban planning. The essays may be wide-ranging but the cohesion of the collection as a whole is achieved by addressing some key questions in urban cultural history, including the relationship, changing over time, between text, image and the city; the function of the text or image within an urban environment; how urban texts and images have been used by those in positions of power and by those with little or no power; the ways in which urban identity and values have been reflected in ‘street literature’, graffiti and subversive texts and images; and whether theories of urban space can help us to understand the relationship between text, image and the city. These essays add to our understanding of the nature of urbanism from a historical perspective, the creation and representation of urban space, and the processes of urbanization. They explore how the creation, distribution and consumption of urban texts and images actively affect the shaping of 1 Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: an intellectual and cultural history (Berkeley, California UP, 1998), 291.

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the city itself – a symbiotic process whereby text, image and city create and sustain each other.

Text, Image and the Urban The critical perspective unifying this volume enables histories of the material text and image to begin to challenge established conceptions of urbanism, and to bridge textual practice and theoretical perceptions concerning the city. This collection opens up a valuable and original dialogue between disciplines, enabling the development of a new critical approach to ‘textualizing the city’: an exploration of the longstanding, but continually evolving, symbiotic relationship between text, image, urban life and landscape. Section One, ‘Cities in the Margin’, focuses on textual and writing spaces in the city for marginalized and subversive practices. It comprises essays by Caroline Archer, on Paris: Text and Image Underground, by Jack Mockford, on Confusing the ‘Schema’: Flash Notes and Fraud in Late-Georgian England and by Rathna Ramanathan, on London’s Little Presses. The section explores how the city provides space in which new kinds of document (using the term broadly) can be created, and, conversely, how the production of new texts and images creates spaces that form emancipatory, temporary or subversive practices to occur. The notion of ‘the margin’ connects text, image and city, and the essays in this section consider textual and urban boundaries, and their mutual exploitation. Section Two, ‘Textual Topographies: Urban Space in Manuscript, Print and Visual Culture’, discusses the production, imagination and politics of city space and place, in essays by Rosa Smurra, on ‘Studium’, Manuscript Books and Urban Landscape: Bologna, 13th/14th centuries, by Daliah Bond, on Defining the Scottish Chapbook: a description of the ‘typical Scottish chapbook’, by John Hinks, on The Urban Context of Eighteenth-Century English Provincial Printing, and by Geraldine Marshall, on Birmingham’s Graphic DNA: reading the ‘word city’ through signage, architectural letter forms and the typographic landscape. From the spatial geography of scribes of medieval romances, to the urban nature of most pre-industrial European print, this section highlights historical space and urban formations that allowed the growth of textual culture.

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The Literature of the ‘Urban’ A survey of the vast corpus of relevant literature soon reveals an underlying problem of definition. Scholars from several disciplines, especially (but not only) in the USA, tend to use ‘city’ and ‘urban’ to refer only to large metropolises, while others – including many who would describe themselves as urban historians – routinely extend the concept of ‘urban’ to include towns of all sizes (anything larger than a village), many of which have been especially significant, economically, culturally and socially, particularly in European history. As Peter Borsay rightly observes, in an essay on the creative potential of urban space, while there are obvious differences between large and small towns, the smaller ones should not be written off ‘as sterile backwaters’, as the evidence of much historical research indicates that ‘they were a remarkably buoyant group of settlements, perfectly capable of absorbing and contributing to the processes of change going on around them’.2 So long as we are clear about what a particular writer means by ‘urban’ and ‘city’, the problem is not insuperable, though it is essential to be constantly aware of it. Perhaps a more important and more interesting question is why urban spaces are so important historically. Peter Hall, writing about the ‘golden ages’ of great cities, asks: Why should the creative flame burn so especially in cities and not in the countryside? What makes a particular city, at a particular time, suddenly become immensely creative, exceptionally innovative? Why should this spirit flower for a few years, generally a decade or two at most, and then disappear as suddenly as it came?3

The innovative power of the city lies in several spheres, not least economic, social, political and cultural. Examining the city in its cultural context implies, as Agnew, Mercer and Sopher suggest: … an emphasis on the practices and ideas that arise from collective and individual experiences, and that are constitutive of urban life and form. The practices and ideas are not themselves uniquely urban but derive from

2

Peter Borsay, ‘Invention, Innovation and the “Creative Milieu” in Urban Britain: the Long Eighteenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Cultural Economy’ in Creative Urban Milieus: Historical Perspectives on Culture, Economy, and the City, ed. Martina Hessler and Clemens Zimmerman (Frankfurt, Campus Verlag, 2008), 91. 3 Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation and Urban Order (London, Phoenix, 1998), 3.

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Introduction the social, economic and political situations that have shaped group and individual existence. In turn the practices and ideas – in short ‘culture’ – have shaped urban worlds.4

The same authors further comment: In their form and in the lives of their inhabitants, cities have reflected the working of dominant, residual and emergent cultures. To study the city in cultural context therefore requires us to acknowledge that cities are cultural creations and that they are best understood as such.5

Of course, there are many differences, not simply increased scale, between the city of the past and the modern city. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift comment: The city is everywhere and in everything. If the urbanized world now is a chain of metropolitan areas connected by places/corridors of communication […] then what is not the urban? Is it the town, the village, the countryside? Maybe, but only to a limited degree. The footprints of the city are all over these places, in the form of city commuters, tourists, teleworking, the media, and the urbanization of lifestyles. The traditional divide between the city and the countryside has been perforated.6

They also make the important point that modern urban sprawl does not ‘negate the idea of cities as distinct spatial formations or imaginaries’.7 The naming of places is still important: The place called London, for example, has been fashioned and refashioned through commentaries, recollections, memories and erasures, and in a variety of media – monumental, official and vernacular, newspapers and magazines, guides and maps, photographs, films, newsreels and novels, street-level conversations and tales.8

Writing his song ‘London Pride’ in 1941, Noël Coward eulogized not only the determination of Londoners to carry on more or less normally during the Blitz but also the way in which the city itself acted as a powerful memorial text: ‘Cockney feet mark the beat of history; every street pins a 4 John A. Agnew, John Mercer and David E. Soper (eds.), The City in Cultural Context (London, Allen & Unwin, 1984), 1. 5 Agnew, Mercer and Soper, City in Cultural Context, 8. 6 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (London, Polity, 2002), 1 7 Amin and Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban, 2. 8 Amin and Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban, 2.

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memory down’. Paul Du Noyer comments: ‘A folk song with the cadence of a church hymn, “London Pride” begins amid the “coster barrows” and expands into a meditation on the city’s collective memory, preserved by tradition, imprinted in the very streets’.9 As Kevin Lynch observes, ‘Every citizen has had long association with some part of his city, and his image is soaked in memories and meanings’.10 Dianne Chisholm notes that ‘Memory is possible because it is collective. An individual knows herself or himself as a being of enduring, if evolving, character because she or he possesses memories that are collectively articulated, revised, and confirmed.’11 Despite memory, collective and individual, urban change on a considerable scale seems to be inevitable: … the fabric of a city is not only always in process of changing, and not only is this change normally visible, but even when it is not, it becomes part of collective memory both informally and in the written and rewritten official and unofficial histories of cities. In cities change is continual, and the city changing through time has been likened to a palimpsest…12

Maiken Umbach’s work on the historical significance of urban architecture is relevant here. Reflecting on how cultural historians used to aim to identify causes but now prefer to seek for meaning, she writes: Meaning is by definition fluid: traditions invented, remembered, halfforgotten; identities tried out and half-discarded; futures imagined, planned, defended, half-abandoned. In shedding light on this shifty terrain lies architectural history’s potentially greatest contribution to history at large.13

The visual history of the built urban environment helps us, just as does the broader cultural history of the city, to identify both continuities and discontinuities. The past is complex and the nuanced memories recorded 9

Paul Du Noyer, In the City: a Celebration of London Music (London, Virgin, 2009), 53. 10 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1960), 1. 11 Dianne Chisholm, ‘The City of Collective Memory’, GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7 (2001), 195-243 (196). 12 Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Looking Backward: Nostalgia and the City’, in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memories, edited by Sallie Westwood and John Williams, (London, Routledge, 1997), 129. 13 Maiken Umbach, ‘Urban History: What Architecture Does, Historically Speaking…’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 65 (2006), 14-15.

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in text and image do more than resonate in the present, they actually connect with the present. Amin and Thrift argue that the authentic modern city was ‘held together by face-to-face interaction whose coherence is now gone. If the authentic city exists, it is as a mere shadow of itself, one that serves only to underline what has been lost’.14 However, this argument fails to take sufficient account of the contribution of the culture of text and image, with its potential to preserve or recapture some of what has been lost, as well as its power to reflect, to stimulate and to reinforce new connections and interactions.

‘Reading’ the City Turning this around, can the city itself be ‘read’ in something like the same way as a text or image? Amin and Thrift discuss the ‘legibility of the city’15, as does (from a somewhat different angle) Kevin Lynch16, while Peter Fritzsche offers a persuasive case study of ‘reading’ Berlin during the years either side of 1900: This book is about the ‘word city’, the accumulation of small bits and rich streams of text that saturated the twentieth-century city, guided and misguided its inhabitants, and in large measure, fashioned the nature of metropolitan experience. In an age of urban mass literacy, the city as place and the city as text defined each other in mutually constitutive ways.17

To complicate matters, as Maiken Umbach observes, ‘What can be “read” almost by definition allows for multiple readings. And what is derived from real history, as opposed to a universal ideal, acknowledges the contingency of meaning, in the future as well as the past’.18 In addition to the possibility of ‘reading’ the city itself, through its built environment and, in a different way, through its cultural selfexpression, the city produced, notably during the long eighteenth century, a variety of information systems equally capable of being read in a more literal sense: ‘street numbering and naming; printed directories; guides;

14

Amin and Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban, 32. Amin and Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban, chapter 1. 16 Lynch, Image of the City, 2-3. 17 Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard, 1996), 1. 18 Maiken Umbach, ‘Memory and Historicism: Reading Between the Lines of the Built Environment, Germany, c.1900’, Representations, 88 (2004), 26-54 (31). 15

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urban histories; two-dimensional maps and prospects; the circulating library; the newspaper and journal press’.19 A tendency in recent years has been to ‘decentre’ the city, examining particular neighbourhoods within the urban area rather than treating the city as a whole: … much recent academic work on cities has concentrated upon specific localities within cities using ethnographic fieldwork data in order to elaborate narratives of city life that no longer claim to represent ‘the urban’ but, instead, are stories from the city.20

The collection of essays edited by Westwood and Williams specifically aims to disrupt the ‘real/imagined’ binary, in order to provide ‘novel ways in which theorisations of the city may be developed in the future’.21 The step from urban fieldwork ‘stories’ to imaginative literature about the city is a short one. Much has been written about the city in books and other media; Westwood and Williams comment that ‘novels and films are instructive and offer us another language in which to pose key questions and to search for answers’.22 In a rich field, Richard’s Lehan’s The City in Literature is outstanding23, as is the wider ranging work of James Donald: … I focus on the city as an attempt to imagine not only the way we live but above all the way we live together. That is only in part a sociological question. The city has always stood not only for the vanities, the squalor and the injustice of human society, but also for the aspiration to civilized sociation.24

Donald rightly identifies both the tension between ‘the city’ as a metaphor of urban life and specific stories about specific cities or neighbourhoods, and the way in which writing about the city actually helps to shape the city itself, at least in the imagination: My city is at the same time abstractly conceptual and intensely personal. It is the city, not a city. It is an imaginary space created and animated as 19

Borsay, ‘Invention, Innovation…’, 79. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (eds), Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory (London, Routledge, 1997), 7. 21 Westwood and Williams, Imagining Cities, 16. 22 Westwood and Williams, Imagining Cities, 13. 23 Lehan, City in Literature. 24 James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xi. 20

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Introduction much by the urban representations to be found in novels, films, and images as by any actual urban places. […] for me to write about the city is inevitably to invoke London.25

The relation between novel and city, then, is not merely one of representation. The text is actively constitutive of the city. Writing does not only record or reflect the fact of the city. It has its role in producing the city for a reading public.26 So, the city is simultaneously the producer and the product of cultural creations including texts and images. The role of the city or town in manufacturing urban knowledge is a key one, as Peter Borsay explains: Towns were the engines of the knowledge system, creating, collecting and circulating ideas and information. It was to the town that people came to trade not only in goods, but also knowledge.27

The Spatial Turn Many scholars recognize a recent ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities. The concept is particularly useful in cultural history and urban history: Recent works in the fields of literary and cultural studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, history and art history have become increasingly spatial in their orientation. From various perspectives, they assert that space is a social construction relevant to the understanding of the different histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena.28

Historians of the book – or, more broadly, of text and image – have responded positively to the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural history and in the humanities as a whole. A recent collection of essays explores many diverse facets of ‘the geographies of the book’, indicating ‘how deeply geography is involved in the production, distribution and consumption of 25

James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999), x. 26 James Donald, ‘Imagining the Modern City’, in Westwood and Williams, Imagining Cities, 187. 27 Borsay, ‘Invention, Innovation…’, 86. 28 Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds.), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London, Routledge, 2009), 18. A useful review essay on the ‘spatial turn’ is Ralph Kingston, ‘Mind over Matter: History and the Spatial Turn’, Cultural and Social History, 7 (2010), 111-121. On the ‘construction’ of space see also Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, Blackwell, 1991).

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books, and how that makes a difference to the ways in which books and their histories should be understood’.29 The work of Charles Withers and Miles Ogborn exemplifies this geographically inflected history of books and texts.30 The history of the book – a wide and naturally interdisciplinary field of study – has, in the wake of the spatial turn, drawn closer to urban history, which has served to refocus the work of a number of historians, myself included31, on the role of the city and town in producing and distributing both informative and imaginative texts and images which shape the understanding and image of the urban: The city is conceived less as something found or simply ‘out there’ and more as something constituted partially through representation and discourse and as a site of interlocking and conflicting meanings of cultural, political and economic relations. The wholeness of the city (often presented uncomplicatedly in conventional urban studies, using geographic boundaries to demarcate and define) is viewed not only as a physical entity but also as a narrative device and as a plethora of signs and symbols infused with power relations.32

This collection of essays aims to explore the intriguing ways in which texts and images interact with, and help to explain, the nature and meaning of urban space.

29

Miles Ogborn and Charles W.J. Withers (eds.), Geographies of the Book (Farnham, Ashgate, 2010), 5. 30 Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007); Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007). 31 See for example: John Hinks, ‘The Book Trade in Early Modern Britain: Centres, Peripheries and Networks’ in Benito Rial Costas (ed.), Print Culture and Peripheries in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2013), 101-126; John Hinks and Catherine Feely (eds.), Historical Networks in the Book Trade, (London, Routledge, 2017). 32 John Eade and Christopher Mele, Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives (Oxford, Blackwell, 2002), 11.

PART 1: CITIES IN THE MARGIN

CHAPTER ONE PARIS: TEXT AND IMAGE UNDERGROUND1 CAROLINE ARCHER

Janus would feel at home in Paris. The two-headed Roman god of doorways, passages and bridges would surely delight in the city with its thirty-seven river crossings and extensive labyrinth of little known entrances and tunnels buried below the boulevards, which give a fascinating and unique expression to the capital. At street level Paris is particularly Janus-faced. It is one of the world’s most multifaceted and diverse cities, a public and private metropolis made of reality and illusion, fact and mythology expressed through politics, art and architecture. It is a city of passion, of bloody histories and turbulent regimes that have produced a lifetime of stormings, terrors, revolutions, sieges, communes, occupations and liberations that have shaped it both physically and spiritually. The allure of Paris is so absolute that great men have been moved to great declarations: to secure the French throne Henri IV changed his religion for her; Napoléon Bonaparte proclaimed her the most beautiful city in the world; and Hitler would have had her burn rather than outshine Berlin. But it is not just emperors, kings and dictators that have influenced the complexion of Paris. The French capital, perhaps more than any other metropolis, has had a persistent and profound association with the development of art, literature and music, and arguably more text and images have been generated in, by and about Paris than any other city. Artists including Monet, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec have contributed to the Parisian illusion with work that is familiar the world over; writers from de Beauvoir and Colette, to Hemingway and Orwell have all added layers to the myth. Music has successfully perpetuated the fable: Piaf provides 1

This article is based on research into the art of the Paris underground carried out by the author between 2003 and 2005 and which culminated in the publication: Archer, Caroline and Parré, Alexandre, Paris Underground (New York, Mark Batty Publishers, 2005).

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countenance to the passion of Paris, the Folies-Bergère gives expression to its uncontrollable exuberance and the Moulin Rouge more than hints at the simmering sexuality of the French capital. But above all Paris is a city of romance and has hosted great love affairs from Héloïse and Abelard, to Napoléon and Josephine whose adventures with amour have been immortalized by the point of a pen or the stroke of a brush. The physical face of Paris is provided by the grandiose architecture of the great city planners from Phillipe Auguste, Louis XIV and Haussmann to Mitterand’s Grands Projects. There is a homogeneity to the city’s buildings, many of which have been constructed from locally excavated limestone, but despite architectural harmonization there is also diversity: the great Gothic structure of Notre-Dame; the red brick and stone of the sixteenth-century Place des Vosges; the sumptuously Baroque seventeenthcentury Eglise de Val-de-Grâce; the grandly neo-classical Place de la Concorde; and the emphatic Eiffel Tower. The twentieth century has also added its touch to the city with Nouvel’s Institute du Monde Arabe and Perrault’s Bibliothèque Nationale. The history of Paris is written, quite literally, on the face of these mansions and monuments, from the sonorous architectural letters incised in the stone of its civic buildings, to the spirited Art Nouveau fascia signs created by Hector Guimard for the Paris metro, and the quirky stencil letters of Therenon & Cie, used across the city to create improvised public notices of varying degrees of competence. Text and image not only contribute to how Paris works, they also influence how it looks. Whilst history, architecture and city planning shaped the structure of the French capital, the words and images on the streets are the most prominent detail of the City of Light. However, Paris is also a City of Shadows and there exists an alternative narrative which is discreet, subdued and hidden from view, a little known visual chronicle that is integral both to its physical structure as well as its spiritual being. It is Janus in introspective mood.

Paris sous les rues Below the graceful boulevards lie miles of dank, subterranean passages; they are a result of city planning every bit as impressive as that above the surface. These underground passages make their way through limestone and gypsum quarries that lie below the street of the capital. The excavation of these quarries began in about the twelfth century when they provided the raw material needed to build the city. Extractions were made indiscriminately and when a quarry had been stripped of its contents it was abandoned and vacuums developed below the city that caused potential

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danger to the people and buildings on the surface. In 1774 the inevitable happened: one of the city streets collapsed. The empty quarries threatened the stability of Paris and the Inspection des Carrières [Quarry Inspectorate] was established to explore, map and make safe those that were in bad condition. It was a colossal job. To do the work, inspection galleries had to be constructed that would allow the quarrymen to explore the basement and so a complex network of subterranean passages were built that extended approximately 285 kilometres across the city.2 It is forbidden to enter the underground without the permission of the Paris authorities and any violation can result in fines or imprisonment.3 However, this has not stopped either the tenacious or the curious from descending illegally and for more than 300 years these surreptitious visitors have marked the underground walls with a remarkable collection of words and images, which have been produced as evidence of their descent. Today the inspection galleries and abandoned quarries contain an extraordinary, incalculable and ever growing collection of visual material that has been amassing on the walls for over three centuries. And just as the cognoscenti have immortalized street level Paris in text and image, so Paris sous les rues has been the muse of Everyman, hundreds of thousands of unrecognized, undocumented individuals who have recorded their presence in, and response to the underground.

The writing on the wall From the beginning, the desire to mark the underground with a name and date was a common urge amongst labourers and visitors alike and the walls of the quarries read like a guest book that has been created in stone 2

There are a number of excellent books detailing the history, geology and making of the Parisian quarries from their formation up to and including the work of the Inspection des Carrières. The majority of these books are published only in French, the foremost of which is Emile Gérard Paris Souterrain (Paris, 1908). An excellent history of the catacombs (the Municipal Ossuary) is given by the second Chief Inspector of the Quarries, Héricart de Thury with Louis Etienne François, Description des Catacombes de Paris (Paris, 1815). The story of the Paris underground has been brought up-to-date with the publication of Alain Clementand & Gilles Thomas, Atlas du Paris Souterrain: la doublure somber de la ville lumiere (Paris, Parigramme, 2001). 3 In the course of this research, I made several forays into the underground: firstly, as an ‘illegal’ visitor under the care and direction of the quarries’ most avid guardian and careful historian, Gilles Thomas, and latterly with the full permission of the Paris authorities, without whose approval the publication of this research would not have been possible.

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and signed with a chisel or brush. The oldest entry bears the name and date of ‘Noe Camar, 1671’: his motivation for commemorating his presence can only be guessed at, but by signing the walls of the underground Noe Camar (and all subsequent visitors) followed a practice as old as lettering itself, when stone rather than paper was the common substrate and when writing on the fabric of a building was encouraged, not prohibited.4 But it is not just signatures that can be found on the walls; the underground is also home to many other genres of visual and audial art, which include paintings, sculptures, mosaics, cartoons, sketches, directional signs, art installations, graffiti, tags, printed tracts and music and performance. Some of the work is barely visible, whilst the largest paintings are in excess of sixty-five feet long. The topics are diverse: representations of quarrymen at work; observations of topical events; religious symbols or esoteric ciphers whose significance has faded with the years; some of the images are pornographic; others are politically motivated and made by generations of young Parisian agitators; whilst yet more are simply flights of fancy.

Fig. 1: When a quarry was consolidated a record of the work was carved on its walls. A figure indicated the chronological order of the reinforcements, and letters specified the engineer responsible for the work. ‘G’ indicates it was the work of Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the first engineer of the quarries. (Figures 1-13: photography © Alexandre Parré.)

4 Fleming, Juliet, Graffiti and the writing arts of early modern England (London, Reaktion Books, 2001).

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The earliest marks were made by the quarrymen of the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century labourers working for the Inspection des Carrières added to these signs with thousands of instructional inscriptions necessary for the execution of their work: technical engineering marks and topographical indicators created with the aim of dating, referencing and directing the labour.5

Fig. 2: The quarry works responsible for producing much of the official underground lettering were unfettered by preconceived notions of letter-carving. Word and letter spacing frequently caused problems and line lengths were often misjudged forcing the carver to render excess characters in a smaller size or place them indiscriminately on the stone.

In addition they created an abundance of street nameplates (which corresponded with the street names above ground) to indicate the location and orientation of the passages, and commemorative plaques by which to remember significant moments in the development of the quarries. Whilst most of these inscriptions are crudely rendered with little understanding of form, the lettering is not without charm and their sheer volume cannot fail to impress. These official marks are of great historical importance, an integral part of the quarries’ heritage and, for those interested in letterforms, a 5

Chardon, R., Inspections et graffiti dans les carriers de Paris (Paris, Editions Sehdacs, 1987).

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Chapter One

curious gallery of vernacular interpretations on the Roman alphabet.6 But the quarrymen did not simply make marks of necessity; they also made marks of fancy. ‘Liberty birds’ were drawn on the underground walls as rather poetic means of indicating exit points: the way the bird was facing showed the way out. The notion of the ‘liberty bird’ came from the early navigators who longed for the sight of a bird to indicate the approach of land and as many of the quarrymen were ex-seamen, they adopted this symbol to indicate the exit from the underground and thus freedom from the quarry.

Fig. 3: A quarry-worker’s plaque commemorating the internment of the remains of over six million people who were removed to the underground from the overflowing Paris cemeteries in 1786.

In the beginning there were few visitors beyond the workers of the Inspection des Carrières, because the underground was unknown, unmapped and uncharted. But as knowledge of the quarries spread, the number of illicit visitors increased and the underground began to provide a secure and welcome apparel for many covert actions and illegal events: 6

A useful commentary on, and collection of images relating to the quarrymen’s lettering can be found courtesy of French typeface designer Jean-Francois Porchez in his online article Parisian Type Underground: https://typofonderie.com/gazette/post/parisian-type-underground/

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criminals, cutpurses and bootleggers used the underground to hide from the authorities, and smugglers availed themselves of the network to transport contraband. The quarries also afforded physical and mental refuge to those in need, and a protection to fugitives seeking sanctuary from turmoil. War, revolution and siege have all played a major part in Parisian life and, whilst the city was ravaged above ground, the underground provided a shelter to many victims of war, death and destruction. Amidst political upheaval, text and image flourished in the quarries as those seeking sanctuary recorded decisive moments on the subterranean walls: the storming of the Bastille, 1789; the Grand Terreur, 1794; the declaration of the Republic, 1792; the Prussian siege, 1870; the Commune, 1871; the German occupation, 1940; the liberation of 1944; and the student riots and workers’ strikes of 1968.7 During the Revolution, those fleeing persecution left sketches of that most evocative symbol of their time: the guillotine. During the 1870 siege of Paris, invading Prussian soldiers made use of the quarries on the city’s southern periphery. Some of those soldiers, far from home and in a foreign land, left both textual and pictorial records of their visit: ‘E. Bochon, Potsdam, 18.11.70’; ‘Sachmeir 1879’; ‘Von fels zu Meer, L Baus I Comp 47 Reg, November 13, 1870’; or the exultant ‘Vive la Bavière’. Alongside the textual records are scarcely visible pictorial images of soldiers marching in their helmets, or civilians fleeing invasion. During the same period, the defending French Commune fighters established transport links in the quarries and their graffiti can also be seen: the simple ‘guérilla 1870’; or the romantic ‘souvenir des Communards’ [in memory of the Communards]; and the defiant ‘Les Prussiens ne passeront pas’ [the Prussians will not pass]. The occupation of 1940-4 saw both French and German forces take refuge in the underground. The Germans converted an old quarry in the north of the city into a civil defence shelter (now known as ‘Bunker Allemand’), located below the Lycée Montaigne, from which access passages were built linking it to the Senate used by Luftwaffe staff. The Germans equipped their bunkers with telephones and electric lighting and marked the walls with orderly and well-executed signs, which indicated entrance and exit points, and included directions and commands such as ‘Rauchen verboten’ [no smoking] or ‘Ruhe’ [silence]. The signs had a uniformity of presentation that created an instantly recognizable, cohesive political identity. Evidence of these marks is still visible today.

7

Horne, Alistair, Seven Ages of Paris: a portrait of a city (London, Macmillan, 2002).

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Fig. 4: One of many signs left in 1940-44 by occupying German forces. They are among the most methodical and considered signs in the quarries.

Whilst the Germans requisitioned the northern end of the underground, the Free French of the Interior (FFI) found sanctuary in the south of the network just below the Place Denfer-Rochereau in a shelter (now known as ‘Abri FFI’), which was fully furnished and equipped with all the material necessary to sustain a long-stay headquarters. It was from here, in 1944, that Rol-Tanguy, Head of the FFI of the Ile-de-France, directed the liberation forces. In the same year, the Inspection Générale des Carrières was instructed to convert another area of the quarries into habitable safe-houses for the collaborators Pierre Laval, Fernand de Brinon and Heinrich Otto Abetz. Posthumously named ‘Abri Laval’, the area was completed just days before the liberation and never gave shelter. However, the rooms of the Germans, the FFI and the collaborators still stand and their crumbling furnishings remain as a testimony to the past and are bespattered with the political graffiti of the present. Civilians also made use of the quarries during the War either to protect themselves from allied bombing and German patrols or to shield their nefarious dealings in black market contraband. In idle moments they too left words and images on the quarry walls: ‘En souvenir d’une charmante alerte qui a eu l’audace de me faire rater mon train’ [in memory of a charming siren that had the audacity to make me miss my train].However, not all visitors descended into the underground with the intention of hiding, others went in search of hidden treasure but rather than finding bounty, the plunderers simply found beer and mushrooms. The Carthusian monks of Paris produced beer of legendary quality, which they

Paris: Text and Image Underground

11

stored in the quarries below the Val-de-Grâce monastery, but during the Revolution the monks fled and abandoned their beer. In November 1793, Philibert Aspair, doorkeeper of the Val-de-Grâce, went in search of the cellar: he never reappeared. In the uneasy atmosphere of the Revolution, his disappearance caused little concern, but twelve years later his body was discovered and he was formally buried at the site where he died and a tomb was erected in his memory and an incised stone tells the story of his fate.8 The subterranean quarries have also been the gentle protectors of the champignon, and in the nineteenth century the quarry floor was transformed into mushroom beds when Monsieur Chambry, a marketgardener on the Rue de la Santé, realised their potential for fungi growing. The trade expanded, and Monsieur Chambry was joined by fellow mushroom growers all of whom appropriated the quarries for the cultivation of their produce and who marked the walls with their own particular symbols in order to record the stages in the development and harvesting of their extraordinary crop: evidence of the marks still remain. But not everyone found peace and tranquility; for many the quarries are full of fear, divorced as they are from life on the surface and detached from all references to time. It is not surprising, therefore, that many esoteric symbols can be found: stars of David, swastikas, yin and yan symbols, signs of peace and signs of the cross made to Christianize a godless place, to bring light into the dark, and provide protection to the visitors. There is some speculation that the quarries have been used as a rendezvous for secret societies such as the Knights Templar and there is evidence they have been used as meeting places for French Freemasons because on the quarry ceiling, under the Parc de Saint-Cloud, sketches can be found of traditional masonic symbols such as acacia trees and compasses, which are accompanied by the slogan ‘masson, 1838’.

The underground community From the mid-twentieth century the number of illicit visitors to the quarries increased dramatically; they came through curiosity or a sense of adventure. The rise in underground explorers started in the 1950s when students from the Ecole des Mines de Paris produced hand-drawn maps, 8

A la memoire de Philibert Aspair perdu dans cette carrier le III Novembre MDCCXCIII retrouve onze ans après et inhume en la meme place le XXX AVRIL MDCCCIV / In Memory of Philibert Aspair lost in the quarries 3 November 1793 found eleven years later and buried at the same place 30 April 1804.

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which were circulated to initiate friends.9 Gradually the number of initiates increased and an informal community of illicit visitors formed, which came together to smoke, drink, party and listen to music. A favourite meeting place was under the Val-de-Grâce, which was easy to access and spacious: an ideal venue for music festivals, which by the 1970s had reached their zenith. Gradually the explorations widened and the initiates discovered more of the network and began decorating the quarries and passages with paintings, mosaics, sculptures and unlikely art installations; hiding ephemeral paper tracts in the walls and filling the quarries with the sound of music. Today it is estimated there are in excess of 8,000 clandestine visitors venturing below ground each year, generally at the weekend or at night: many make regular descents. This is despite the fact that entering the quarries is illegal, that access points are limited, and visiting the quarries is both dangerous and requires stamina. Descending into the quarries is akin to pot holing: there is a total absence of light; the floor is uneven and unpredictable and in some areas the roof is just a foot or two from the ground; the walls are rough and running with water, and sometimes the floor floods and is transformed into a swimming pool; the risk of contracting leptospirosis—a fatal disease transmitted by rats—is real; the ground is unstable, there danger from collapsing quarries, and it is easy to become lost in the frequently turning passages. The illicit urban explorers are known as cataphiles,10 they are young (about seventy percent of them are under twenty-five years old) predominantly male (an estimated fifteen percent are women) and many, but not all, are students.11 Their reasons for exploring the quarries are diverse: some enjoy its history, its geology or architecture whilst less discerning individuals merely want to have fun, play music, drink and smoke in this novel party venue. Many cataphiles descend into the quarries to exercise their talents as artists whilst others derive spiritual sustenance and emotional balance from their underground 9

For many decades students from the Ecole de Pharmacie have, as part of their studies, legitimately raided the underground for skulls and bones, and students from the Ecole des Mines have accessed the quarries below their college whilst working on topographical projects. It is a custom for these graduating students to mark the quarry walls with elaborate, large-scale paintings celebrating the end of their studies. 10 For the purposes of this research I met and interviewed cataphiles about their reasons for descending into the quarries to make their art. To read more about this secret group of urban explorers, there are a number of cataphile-led websites, and a good starting point is http://paris.catacombes.free.fr/liens.htm 11 ‘Claustophile’, La fille des carriers (Paris & Montréal, L’Harmattan, 1999).

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forays, for there is a peace and silence in the underground that provides a counterbalance to the rigours of the streets above. But whatever their reasons, it is the singularity of the place that is the greatest attraction and many cataphiles descend simply to ‘enjoy the ignored inheritance of Paris, which most people do not know exists and which few are privileged to have seen.’12

Fig. 5: A hand-painted sign, roughly executed, welcomes visitors to the Rats Bar, a small room used by cataphiles, and which derives its name from a popular group of cata-artists.

Cataphiles are anonymous and below ground they adopt pseudonyms borrowed from mythology or literature, which reflect their interest in the occult, or show anarchic sympathies: Caton, Cavage, Clustrophile, Gandalf, Golem, Misticatafille, Morthicia, or Titan. But amid the individuality there is also unity; once initiated into the quarries, the cataphile becomes integrated into an underground community with its own system of communication, codes of behaviour and meeting places. Cataphiles have been illicitly producing words and images in the underground since the early 1980s and their work is found all over the quarry network. It is an 12

Anonymous cataphile, in interview with the author, 2004.

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Chapter One

environment that encourages introspective and very personal paintings on subjects that are always extraordinary and frequently bizarre: monsters and beasts, phantoms and ghouls are favourites; futuristic topics recur; and politics, religion and sex inevitably find wall space. The painters produce work that is highly stylized and graphic and which has been inspired by many genres: some have adopted the manner of comic-book art; others have been stimulated by Egyptian hieroglyphics or North America Indian symbols; punk has had its influence; whilst classical art has shaped other paintings. Some of the art is purely decorative, and colourful geometric shapes abound. The sculptors and ceramicists choose gentle themes and are often influenced by architecture and produce work inspired by masons of an earlier age. Alternatively, fantastic and mysterious creations of the imagination result in whimsical castles or extravagant gargoyles. The mosaic artists create the most delicate work in the quarries and their small pieces of coloured glass and stone are used to produce charming birds, butterflies and flowers.

Figs. 6 & 7: Ceramic images of bird and butterflies are popular symbols in the underground: symbols of freedom in a confined and restricted space.

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15

For those with no aptitude for art but who wish to make a creative statement, installations are the solution: one room is strewn with artificial flowers; another filled with CDs; and yet one more is equipped with an inflatable doll, sex toys and pages torn from pornographic magazines. But whatever the subject matter or method of production, cata-art is always executed with passion, humour, and wit. Most of the cata-artists are unknown and anonymous, but Jérôme Mesnager is an urban artist of international repute, whose work can be found on walls across Paris and major cities around the world: he is also a cataphile and his familiar creation ‘Corps Blanc’ (White Corpse) appears throughout the underground network.13 ‘Corps Blanc’ is the means by which Mesnager leaves his own unique and unmistakable directions in the quarries: ‘at night, I often go down into the underground to explore the huge labyrinth, I “arrow” my path so as not to get lost; I use the Corps Blanc to show the way with his stretched out arms’. The ‘Corps Blanc’ wanders the quarries, climbing, resting, dancing leaving its imprint on doors and walls, pointing the way, or, on occasions mischievously misdirecting people. Mesnager choose his sites with precision and had an eye for locations where his ‘Corps Blanc’ would surprise, amuse or confuse visitors to the quarries. Because much effort and risk goes into the making of cata-art it might be thought that the artists would wish for an audience commensurate in size with their labours. However, few are troubled by the paucity of audience because neither fame nor notoriety is part of the objective. The work of most cata-artists is executed as a private performance and made for personal enjoyment; however their work can also be viewed by those few individuals who have endured the same austere conditions as the artists themselves. The exclusivity of the audience is part of the appeal of working in the quarries, as one cata-artist remarked, ‘our goal is not to be seen by everyone, we work only for those who will come to see.’ For the modern graffiti writer, large walls, subversive attitudes, illegal situations and dangerous conditions are essential to their performance. The quarries provide an extensive wall space; a population of rebellious and alternative individuals and an illegal environment where danger is ever-present: they are a graffiti writers’ paradise and the cata-graffiti artists find the quarry stonewalls irresistible. Graffiti is a large-scale art form and the underground is accommodating with its space. Dedicated writers have the choice of prime spots that give good pay back for the risk, time and outlay, while smallscale graffiti tags appear in areas where cataphiles congregate and where 13 Mesnager, Veronique, Mesnager par Mesnager, doux murs murs (Paris, Criteres Editions, 2012).

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Chapter One

marking the wall is seen as a social activity, a sign of being part of a group. The subject matter is various but they are frequently harsh and thought provoking visual essays on death, politics and power, colourfully rendered on the dark and expansive canvas provided by the quarry walls. Whilst all wall writing is ephemeral, the longevity of art in the quarries is greater than that at street level: it is not subject to the vagaries of the weather or to removal by city councils and as a consequence there is much layering of one generation of art on top of another and three centuries of marks happily co-exist.

Fig. 8: ‘Corps Blanc’ (White Corpse), created by international urban artist Jerôme Mesnager, appears all over the underground, directing – and sometimes purposely misdirecting – visitors in the quarries.

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Fig. 9: Evidence of graffiti abounds in the underground; as none of the work every gets removed subsequent graffiti overlays previous work and creates dynamic and colourful effects in the quarries.

The underground press Whilst the art of the underground is made in full view of the illicit visitors, there is another more ephemeral form of subterranean art that is out of sight and buried in the fabric of the stone, and which is seen only by those that know where to look. For the past twenty years it has been the custom of cataphiles to leave small leaflets or pieces of folded paper known as ‘tracts’ across the quarries’ network. These tracts are hidden everywhere in the underground; some are stuck to the walls whilst the most beautiful, rare, or sought after are secreted in the cracks of the stone. The practice began in the early 1980s when paper notices were posted on the walls of popular quarry meeting rooms asking visitors to remove their rubbish when leaving. Today the purpose of the tracts remains primarily one of communication, however since their first appearance the leaflets have evolved significantly both in terms of content and presentation and have developed a distinct editorial, literary and visual style. Every weekend cataphiles descend into the quarries to explore the passages, but the network is so large that most never meet or know their fellow enthusiasts.

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Chapter One

Fig. 10: Arrows and other symbols appear all over the quarries, left by urban explorers to indicate entrances or exits, or simply a forward motion. Many have been adapted, personalized and modified with a variety of devices.

One way in which the underground community has become acquainted with itself has been through the dissemination of paper tracts, and over the years these leaflets have grown to be the cataphiles’ principal vehicle of communication. Paper tracts are now a quarry institution and they are a defining feature of the underground community. The tracts are made for many reasons and are used to convey all kinds of messages, impart specific information, or announce significant events: clandestine festivals, evenings of cleaning, ‘cata-sprints’ (a race between two designated points in the quarries), weddings or birthdays. Some of the leaflets are intended to transmit a message and many promulgate a personal opinion or broadcast propaganda; they have become a pulpit from which writers can express particular opinions, defend a point of view, rant against the world, or evolve a ‘cata-philosophy’. Some tracts are produced simply for entertainment and others are works of literature designed to impress and delight. Cata-publishers, are all amateur writers, editors and designers and their tracts can be good, bad or indifferent. But all the cata-publishers are motivated by passion and a need to share their opinions with the cataworld at large, and the tracts provide a platform for free expression that is

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subject to neither constraint nor judgement, and which is the occasion for some original writing and unbounded graphic expression. Tracts are self-conscious, amateur publications that form an important part of the cataphiles’ alternative culture. Some tracts are issued at regular or irregular intervals and might even be classified as periodicals or serials, but publishing schedules are non-existent. Some of the productions are dated and numbered and some are ascribed to a particular cataphile whilst others remain anonymous. The editorial style and content is often irreverent; they can be obscene, bizarre or downright funny, the tracts have attitude and a forthright vocabulary. But not all tracts are so idiosyncratic; some are sensitive with a touch of pathos whilst others are serious statements on meaningful subjects. But they all share the common characteristics of energy and spontaneity because their contents remain free from manipulation by owners, publishers or advertisers. Typically, a tract consists of personal observations, opinionated narratives, poems or short stories that are often accompanied by hand-drawn images or other crudely assembled illustrative matter. Because the tracts are a part of an active alternative culture their creators often exempt themselves from the traditional rules of publishing and ignore the conventions of grammar, spelling, punctuation and pagination, they pepper the text with plenty of expletives and frequently breach copyright laws. It is a form of publishing that is underground both literally and metaphorically. The early tracts were made by hand and then reproduced using stencil-duplicating machines, but with rapid developments in technology the producers quickly turned to other methods of replication, such as xerography and later desktop publishing. The increased accessibility to photocopying machines meant the tracts became progressively more egalitarian as the new technology made it possible for everyone to publish simply, speedily and comparatively cheaply. But despite ready access to new technology most of the tracts remain primitive, are produced in comparatively small numbers - from a few units to several tens of specimens depending on the required impact, the individual’s financial constraints, and their ability access to photocopying or laser printing facilities. Although the tracts are predominantly about the transmission of written messages, the text is often combined with images. Some of these contain original illustrations that have been drawn by hand and integrated with computer-generated text. Others have ‘borrowed’ images from the mainstream press, downloaded illustrations from the Internet, or cannibalized comic strips that have been edited to serve the purpose of the cata-writer. Photography is also a popular medium, either original or

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Figs. 11 & 12: Cata-tracts take many shapes and forms, but all are free, ephemeral and highly personal.

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‘stolen’ and it too is integrated with handwritten or computer-generated text. Some of the tracts employ a mixture of all mediums and handwritten methods appear alongside computer-generated text, line illustrations and photographs all of which are assembled together by a process of ‘cut-andpaste’. Amongst the homespun tracts there are some that are graphically dazzling and look as professional as any publication found on the surface with slick images and sharp design. However, these sophisticated publications appear out of place in the underground, at odds with the rough and ready environment in which they are placed and their physical appearance runs counter to the general principals behind the tracts. Tracts are short-lived as the moisture and humidity in the quarries quickly degrade the cheap paper on which most are produced. Discovering a tract is like finding a message in a bottle, and there is particular excitement in coming across an old leaflet as they are like relics that reveal tracks of a forbear. Tracts have a firm standing as bona fide non-commercial vehicles of expression in the quarries and they are tributes to a belief in freedom of expression, the power of the individual, the value of diversity. Their production shows the cataphile community to be large, vibrant, and thriving and for as long as there are passionate cataphiles or those with agendas the tracts will continue to flourish in the quarries. But why have so many individuals descended into the underground when few will see their traces and almost none will understand? Human vanity urges individuals to indelibly record their existence, to document for posterity their presence at great events. There is also the spirit of confrontation: the quarries are difficult to access, problematic to negotiate and a test of endurance, marking their walls is proof of having braved the environment. Whatever the reason for their presence, the tracts bring a human quality to an inhospitable world.

Underground art above ground Whilst the Parisian quarries have encouraged a wealth of text and image in the underground, they have also inspired words, pictures and performances at street-level. In 1873 the artist and architect Viktor Alexandrovich Hartmann died. Although a gifted artist who painted with vigour and flair, his name would not be so familiar if it were not for the inspiration his friendship gave to the Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky. Hartmann spent three years in France where he made a series of drawings and paintings that included one of the quarries beneath the streets of Paris. One of these paintings, entitled The Catacombs, is a self-portrait of Hartmann with the Russian architect Vasily Alexandrovich Kenel (1834–93) and a

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Chapter One

guide holding a lamp in the quarries. As a memorial to his friend, Mussorgsky composed Pictures at an Exhibition, a series of ten musical sketches for the piano inspired by ten of Hartmann’s paintings. One of the musical sketches is called The Catacombs, a slow mournful piece that describe the path taken by Hartmann and his two companions through the underground. Mussorgsky inscribed the original manuscript with the words Con mortuis in lingua mortua (with the dead in a dead language), followed in Russian by ‘Hartmann’s creative spirit leads me to the place of skulls, and calls to them—the skulls begin to glow faintly from within.’14 They are melancholic lines characteristic of much of the music from the underground. The underground has also been used as an unusual, if illicit, music venue. As early as 2 April 1897 a clandestine midnight concert took place in the quarries below Place Denfert-Rochereau. The event was attended by about 100 people and was made possible by the illicit cooperation of two workmen of the Inspection des Carrières. The chosen music was apposite and the programme included: Funeral March, Chopin; Danse Macabre, Saint-Saëns; Ave Maria, a poem written and recited by M. Alla; Choir and Funeral March from the ‘Perses’, Xavier Leroux; Aux Catacombs, a poem written and recited by M. Marlit; Funeral March from ‘Heroic Symphony’, Ludwig van Beethoven; and the evening was concluded with verse by Henri Cazalis for which Saint-Saëns composed the Danse Macabre. In 1998 Jean-Michel Jarre, French composer, performer and pioneer of electronic, ambient and New Age music, composed a score entitled Paris Underground, which was played on 14 July at a free concert held in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The event was a visual spectacle and the music was accompanied by projected images from the Parisian quarries. Cavage is a Paris-based record label and many of its artists are Cataphiles who use the quarries as inspiration for their music. The underground becomes a metaphor for their political beliefs, the subject of their CD covers, and a wonderful venue for the playing of their music. On the stage, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Phantom of the Opera (based on the infamous thriller of the same name by Gaston Leroux, 1868-1927) has played to over 58 million people in 109 cities in twenty countries around the world. The main character is Erik, a scarred fiend who lurks in the vacuums beneath the Paris Opera House and who serves as unseen mentor to the singer Christine. Whilst on the big screen, the quarries have provided the backdrop for Les Gaspards (The Holes) a 1973 film directed by Pierre Tchernia and staring Gérard Depardieu. It is an irresistible funny 14

Pictures at an Exhibition: http://www.stmoroky.com/reviews/music/pictures.htm

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story of a group of people living under Paris who kidnap a busload of tourists, most of the police force, and some of the choicest beauties in city in order to convince the administration to stop the works that were destroying Paris.

Fig. 13: Record label from the experimental breakcore imprint Cavage Records whose work is inspired by the visits to the underground.

Paris underground has also inspired the printed word; from classical writers to contemporary cataphiles, the literary output share the common themes of death, life everlasting, and the fragility of man. Most of the texts are darkly contemplative and introspective but there is also the occasional glimmer of humour. Victor-Marie Hugo (1802-85) poet and novelist and the leader of the French Romantic movement, wrote Les châtiments, (The punishments), in 1853, a violent satire against Louis Napoléon in which he used the quarries as a political symbol; but in Les contemplations, (The meditations) written in 1856, Hugo writes describes the quarries in more reflective and romantic tones. Franck Lozac’h an advocate of the French sonnet and admirer of Ronsard, Baudelaire and Mallarmé wrote Le Livre des Sonnets in 1996 in which he includes a verse entitled Les catacombs; and in March 2002 a sonnet entitled Catacombs, Paris by David Constantine [1944-], English poet, author and translator, appeared in The Guardian newspaper in London.

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Conclusion For many who know and love the quarries the greatest artistic creation in the underground is the rock itself and the fabulous structures that have been raised from the limestone. Each structure has its own beauty, its own reason for being and its own history that has been carved into it by the engineers responsible for its construction. However, the last thirty years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of illicit visitors to the quarries, which has resulted in a commensurate increase in the quantity of visual material appearing on the quarry walls. These words and images undoubtedly contribute to the identity of the underground, establish a sense of place, and influence the responses of visitors. The visual material is the result of individuality of expression, and varies greatly from the highly creative and expressive intervention to the utilitarian and functional. However, the words and images in the underground are undoubtedly part of its environmental texture, and provide both a visual and historical richness. Each era finds its own space on the quarry walls, which adds character and flavour to the environment, contributes a layer of history, and gives added pleasure to those exploring the quarries. Whilst its history, architecture, geology may have shaped the physical environment of Paris sous les rues, the texts and images on its walls are the most prominent aspect of the look, feel and function of the underground. Opinion is divided over the merits of the work. Some see it as an unwelcome presence that is defacing the city’s subterranean heritage. For others it brings humanity to an inhospitable place and provides evidence of life in an otherwise fossilized environment. But love it or hate it, the underground words, images and music are a testimony of Paris, and take their place in the history of the metropolis.

CHAPTER TWO CONFUSING THE ‘SCHEMA’: FLASH NOTES AND FRAUD IN LATE GEORGIAN ENGLAND JACK MOCKFORD

Today paper money largely occupies its own visual and material spheres. The design of a modern English bank note might be instantly recognizable, its paper may have a distinctive, even unique feel in the hand, yet in late Georgian England, banknotes were not always what they might first seem. From around 1750 banknotes of various designs started to become commonplace, as the number of private country banks outside of the capital began to grow exponentially.1 As a result of economic pressures brought about by the French revolutionary wars, William Pitt's ministry ordered that the Bank of England suspend the convertibility of its banknotes into gold in 1797, resulting in a national metallic currency shortage. The result was that the Bank had to issue its smallest denomination notes to date, for the values of £1 and £2.2 Largely as a result of this policy, banknotes started to come into the possession of significant numbers of people who had not previously handled them, something Hiroki Shin has recently argued helped to foster a new ‘culture

1

On the growth of country banking in England during the eighteenth century, see L. S. Pressnell, Country Banking in the Industrial Revolution, (Oxford, 1956), M. Dawes & C. N. Ward-Perkins, Country Banks of England and Wales: Private Provincial Banks and Bankers, 1688-1953, vols 1 and 2, (Canterbury, 2000). 2 For detailed accounts of the origins of the Bank Restriction Period or ‘suspension crisis’ see J. H. Clapham, The Bank of England: A History, vol.1, (Cambridge, 1944), 266-272; R. G. Hawtrey, ‘The Bank Restriction of 1797’, Economic Journal, 28 (1918), 52-65; E. V. Morgan, ‘Some Aspects of the Bank Restriction Period, 1797-1821’, Economic History, 14 (1939), 205-221.

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Chapter Two

of paper money’ in England at this time.3 The new banknotes circulated alongside an abundance of printed material, both of a valuable and ephemeral nature, which has for long now been of interest to scholars in a variety of fields. Historians have so far been cautious about analyzing banknotes alongside ordinary printed paper objects however, instead choosing to confine them almost exclusively to economic or numismatic contexts. This essay will suggest that this has been a significant oversight, and that both social and material understandings of paper money can in fact be viewed as having been closely intertwined with the sphere of popular print. No other single type of print highlights this close and often confusing relationship more succinctly than the ‘flash note’, a print that can be broadly defined as having resembled a banknote, yet at the same time not seeking to replicate any one particular genuine note precisely.4 Much like notes issued by actual banks at this time, including those of the Bank of England, flash notes were printed from engraved copper plates on thin banknote-like paper, and, as will be explored further below, this was something that could cause significant problems for those who handled them. The production of flash notes was evidently a controversial practice during a period in which not only was England’s paper money economy rapidly expanding, but was also experiencing what Randall McGowen has termed an ‘epidemic of forgery’.5 Furthermore, the existence of such prints significantly blurred the legal boundaries of what it meant to counterfeit paper money. Yet, despite their seeming ubiquity, these objects have been neglected by scholars of both paper money and its forgery. Banknote specialists Hewitt and Keyworth have summed up flash notes relatively concisely and accurately by referring to them as having been generally intended as a joke, used as a form of advertising, or for calling attention to a public issue, their appearance, copying banknotes, suggests the public were sufficiently familiar with banknotes to see the visual pun. They were not intended as a criminal fraud, but were sometimes used to deceive the unwary.6

3

See H. Shin, The Culture of Paper Money in Britain: The Bank of England During the Restriction Period, 1797-1821, (University of Cambridge, 2009). 4 Although commonly labelled as ‘skit notes’ in a number of museum and private collections not one recorded usage of this term to describe imitation notes has been located for the period 1784-1830. 5 R. McGowen, ‘Managing the Gallows: The Bank of England and the Death Penalty, 1797-1821’, Law and History Review, 25 (2007), 243. 6 V. H Hewitt & J. M Keyworth, As Good as Gold: 300 Years of British Bank Note Design, (London, 1987) 33.

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27

Building upon this analysis in what is perhaps the most thorough discussion of flash notes in the literature to date, Hiroki Shin has argued that, ‘[a flash note] might be used for tricking people when it was used in a dark room or on an illiterate person.’7 In addition to a proposed hierarchy of flash notes in which he suggests that examples that resembled Bank of England notes were treated most seriously by the law, in regards to the relationship between flash notes and forgeries he argues that if a note did not resemble the Bank Note, so that there was no tangible intention to pass it off as a Bank of England note, the Bank could not prosecute the person who committed the fraud. In terms of the law, forgery of the Bank Note needed to be committed against the Bank of England, just as the crime of coining was committed against the King.8

Two broad questions have therefore been raised by these works, both of which require closer scholarly attention. Firstly, how was it that flash notes were able to deceive people into believing that they were handling genuine money; and secondly what was their legal status when compared to both forged and genuine Bank Notes? Taking the latter of these two questions first, Shin has been correct to observe that it was most often the perceived intent that lay at the centre of whether or not a particular flash note was deemed an offensive item, but the line that separated what was supposed to constitute forged and ‘flash’ paper money at this time was in fact an exceedingly hazy one. This can partly be put down to the sheer multiplicity of banknotes of varying designs that circulated in England at this time, resulting in a situation whereby the State was, in effect, unable to pass legislation that distinguished clearly between these different categories of ‘paper money’. Although the Bank did treat flash notes that resembled its own money with greater severity, it also became involved in operations concerning notes that differed considerably from its own design. The second section of the essay will explore the very nature of the confusion caused by these prints, suggesting that whereas flash notes could be used to deceive people that were clearly ‘illiterate’, those that possessed a capacity to read could similarly be tricked into accepting them as genuine. Based upon research undertaken for my PhD thesis which has primarily centered around cases in the Old Bailey Proceedings as well as reports in the contemporary newspaper press, this essay will suggest that the evident confusion that these objects occasioned is something that can largely be put down to flash notes approximate visual and tactile similarity 7 8

Shin, Culture of Paper Money, 227. Shin, Culture of Paper Money, 227.

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to genuine banknotes of this period, which when presented in particular ways could be enough to trigger, or rather confuse, an individual’s socalled ‘banknote schema’.9 The ‘schema’ refers to a series of cognitive shortcuts, which when triggered, could be enough to make a person either viewing or holding a flash note believe that they were in the presence of a genuine currency instrument. The period of heavy public exposure to banknotes brought about by the expanding paper money economy of the later eighteenth century, helped to create a scenario whereby individuals who routinely interacted with banknotes began to do so in ways that went beyond the need to read their literate text word for word, but instead relied on individualized material and visual ‘schemas’ to help identify them as genuine. The existence of prints such as flash notes serves to highlight how it was not just forgers however that posed a threat the smooth circulation of paper money in this period, as the skills necessary to construct ‘banknotes’ were not confined merely to that industry alone, but were ubiquitous in the everyday print trade.10

Types of flash note The first prints that we might consider flash notes appeared in the early 1780s, with collectors generally recognizing the Newcastle-made Scale de Cross banknote of 1784 as the first proper example (Fig.1).11 Advertisements broadly resembling banknotes engraved in a similar design were also circulating in London at around this time, and the advertisement for tea in Figure 2 is taken from the personal ephemera collection of Sarah Sophia Banks held at the British Museum (BM).12

9

For a fuller discussion of the Banknote schema, see J. Mockford, ‘They are Exactly as Banknotes are’: Perceptions and Technologies of Bank Note Forgery during the Bank Restriction Period, 1797-1821, (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Hertfordshire, 2014), in particular chapter 4. 10 In 1819 it was estimated that at least ten thousand people in England possessed at least a rudimentary ability to engrave on copper, see, A. D. Mackenzie, The Bank of England Note: a History of its Printing, (Cambridge, 1953), 66. 11 BM: DCM, MS SSB I.21, f. 43r. 12 Based on examples in the British Museum collections, the oldest surviving example of a flash note is the Scale De Cross note first printed in 1784.

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Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Unlike the Scale de Cross note, this advertisement contains no numeric value, and the terms detailed on the note make no clear ‘promise to pay’. Its resemblance to a bank note is, therefore, purely aesthetic and as an advert, the print is arguably more comparable to the well-studied eighteenthcentury ‘trade card’, as were distributed by higher-class shopkeepers to their wealthy and more upwardly mobile middling clientele.13 The Newcastle-made Scale De Cross note was the first example to include 13 On the trade card see J. Stobart, ‘Selling (through) Politeness: Advertising Provincial Shops in Eighteenth-Century England’, Cultural and Social History, 5 (2008), 309-328; M. Berg & H. Clifford, ‘Selling Consumption in the Eighteenth Century: Advertising and the Trade Card in Britain and France’, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2007), 145-170.

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specific features found on actual banknotes of this time, such as the aforementioned promise to pay, the ‘sum piece’, as well an explicitly named ‘bank’. According to the nineteenth-century banking historian Maberly Phillips, the Scale De Cross notes were printed by a local man, James Potts, as a satire on the paper money issued by Newcastle’s newly opened Commercial Bank.14 The notes were publicly sold with much success, with the Gentleman’s Magazine remarking upon Potts’s death in 1791 that they had been in ‘wide circulation for some years past.'15 Large numbers of flash notes were printed over the course of the next century, many within London. Yet this, and other examples analyzed here, clearly suggest that flash notes were not an exclusively metropolitan phenomenon, as was evidently the case with much of the more famous satirical print material of the later-eighteenth century.16 How these prints came to take on the distinctive name of ‘flash’ has, in the past, been somewhat unclear. A common misunderstanding was highlighted by one Victorian newspaper correspondent, when he recalled that the phrase had come about as a general term for counterfeit money after the discovery of a gang of coiners in the village of Flash in Staffordshire during the early eighteenth century.17 More recently the legal historian Peter J. Cook has similarly used the term to refer to actual counterfeit banknotes.18 Based on the evidence presented here, however, this explanation seems unlikely, as not a single contemporary example of the word ‘flash’ being used to explicitly describe forged notes has been located in any of the sources used in this study. Coined during the early eighteenth century and relayed to the public via numerous dictionaries and treatises, ‘flash’ was a codified tongue readily associated in this period with rogues, criminals, and gangs of swindlers.19 Helen Berry, however, has argued that what was commonly termed ‘flash talk’ at this time could similarly be appropriated in spaces such as ale and coffee houses by a 14

M. Phillips, A History of Bankers & Banking in Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire (London, 1894), 43- 44. 15 Phillips, History of Bankers, 43. 16 See, V. A. C. Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London, (London, 2006). 17 Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, July 13, 1881. 18 P. J. Cook, ‘Flash Money and Old-England’s Agent in the Early 19th Century’, Cambrian Law Review, 24 (1993), 12-44. 19 For example see A New Flash Song-Book or the Bowman Priggs Delight. Being a Collection of Songs Adapted to the Humours of the Blades of the Town (London, 1725?); H. Shore, ‘Mean Streets: Criminality, Immorality and the Street in Early Nineteenth Century London’, in Hitchcock T., & Shore H., (eds), The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, (London, 2003), 151-164.

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more ‘respectable’ class of persons as a form of ‘dominant cultural subversion’.20 In addition flash notes were objects consumed by those at both ends of the social spectrum, and, as items of print, they not only transcended the rigid social barriers of this period, but could likewise be appropriated for modes of subversion that were both ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’. Some flash notes were evidently intended for the consumption of the ‘fashionable’ market, with two apparently popular examples being the notes of the Fort Montague Bank, and slightly later those of the Bank of Elegance.21 The Fort Montague notes were presented to visitors of the fashionable tea rooms at the unusual Fort Montague at Knaresborough in Yorkshire as a souvenir of their visit. One surviving example of this note is located in the Sarah Sophia Banks print collections, although the accompanying annotation suggests that she did not visit the fort herself, with the note having been given to her by a friend.22 The Montague notes first went into circulation in 1812, with one twentieth-century numismatic article estimating that over 100,000 were printed.23 There is also evidence to suggest that the Fort Montague notes continued to circulate well into the later-nineteenth century; the Leeds Mercury reported in 1860 that one such note had been found upon a suspected forged note utterer named Thomas Thackray.24 A surviving example within the British Museum collections is also marked with what appears to be an original pencil annotation indicating an issue date of 1889 (Fig. 3). The Bank of Elegance notes, promising to ‘cut any lady or gentleman’s hair superior to any man in England’, were also apparently handed out for free, in this case by London hairdressers as a form of advertising. One magistrate in 1827 referred to the Elegance notes as ‘flash notes which are distributed by Sundry frizeurs in town to those upon whose heads they operate’.25 Exactly who was behind the printing of the Elegance notes is difficult to determine, with one newspaper from the same year referring to 20 H. Berry, ‘Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth Century England: Moll King’s Coffee House and the Significance of “Flash Talk”’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 11 (2001), 65-81. 21 Although problematic, this assertion about these particular notes’ popularity is something that can be anecdotally backed up by the large numbers of surviving examples in the British Museum collections, as well as discussion in other sources, see BM: DCM, CIB.65. 22 BM, DCM, MS SSB I.21, f. 43r. 23 J. Casey, ‘The Fort Montague Bank’, Journal of the Institute of Bankers (1962), 408-410. 24 The Leeds Mercury, 23 February 1860. 25 The Times, 14 May 1827.

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them as ‘the shop bill of a puffing hairdresser... merely one of MacAlpin’s shop bills’.26 It is likely, however, that they were being distributed by more than just one tradesman, with a Times report from 1828 referring to them as, ‘notes of 50.l each, of the “Bank of Elegance”, issued, as is well known to our readers, in imitation of Bank of England notes’.27 A story in the same newspaper published later that year tells of an Elegance note found in the streets of London by a labourer, describing what appeared to be a Bank note was certainly picked up near Blackheath...but it proved to be nothing more than one of those mock promissory notes on a Bank of Elegance...barber shop.28

Fig. 3

A year prior to this, the Times had reported a note for ‘one thousand pounds’ being found in London by an ‘Irish Boy’, an unmistakable reference in this period to a low social status, and with such a value the note was most likely once again of the fictitious Bank of Elegance.29 Thus, these examples highlight effectively not only the status of these notes as items of printed ephemera, having been seemingly discarded by their 26 Bells Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, January 28, 1827; no other reference to a MacAlpin could be located. 27 The Times, 14 January 1828. 28 The Times, 2 September 1828. 29 The Times, 31 October 1827.

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original owners, but also the means by which they could transcend the social ladder by becoming the property of a person from the ‘lower orders’ even if they were originally intended to be received by a more elite audience. As items that were given away for free, or at least to those who had paid to access a particular service, both the Montague and the Elegance notes were not necessarily typical of this kind of print and individuals who had parted with their own money to possess flash notes may well have taken better care not to misplace them. Thomas Overall, who appeared at the Old Bailey in 1816, having been robbed of various items, described in court how on his arrival at the Bull public house in Aldgate, London he had been in possession of ‘a two penny flash note, which I had had for five or six years’.30 Overall’s recollection that he had kept his note for such a length of time, as well as the fact that he had taken the trouble to list it as one of his stolen possessions in court, suggests that he attached some personal as well as monetary value to this print. Overall’s mention of ‘two penny’ probably refers to the amount that the flash note was made out for, and a number of examples cited here were similarly printed displaying this ‘value’. In some cases the value printed on the note appears to have corresponded to the price for which it actually sold. Some of the best examples of this are from a series of twenty-five notes issued originally between 1803 and 1809 by the London print seller John Luffman, and subsequently re-issued by Samuel Fores of Piccadilly between 1818 and 1819 (Fig. 4).31 These mildly radical notes were all laid out in a uniform style, and covered a broad range of contemporary social and economic issues, including both domestic and foreign affairs, as well as religious matters, much like the written tracts found in the Parisian underground, as discussed by Caroline Archer in her essay in this volume. Significantly all of the notes in the series were made out for the value of two pence, a detail which, although not specified on the more commonly-surviving Fores reprints, was according to the Luffman copies the price for which they were also sold (Fig. 5). 30

OBP: t18160918-98, Joseph Gray and Thomas Wiggins, 18 September 1816. See D. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, VIII, (London, 1947), 209-945. John Luffman is listed in Ian Maxted's compendium of booksellers as an ‘engraver, printer and publisher’ who in this period worked from 277 InnerSweetings Alley, and later 377 Strand; Samuel William Fores is listed as a 'printseller, engraver, bookseller and stationer, based at 50 Piccadilly: I. Maxted, The London Book Trades, 1775-1800, A Preliminary Checklist of Members, (Old Woking, 1977), 142-143, 83. 31

34

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

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Flash Notes and Fraud in Late Georgian England

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Despite Luffman having issued his first note in 1803, an isolated example contained in an uncatalogued folio in the Chartered Institute of Bankers collections, held at the British Museum, printed by Jeremiah Jordan of Fleet Street in 1798, suggests that Luffman’s design for his notes was not entirely original (Fig. 6).32 Furthermore, not only did Luffman clearly take inspiration from the Jordan note for his own series, he also produced a note that in nearly every sense copied it. Such blatant plagiarism demonstrates the ease with which popular print designs could be replicated cheaply and easily by rivals. Despite a copyright act championed by Hogarth as early as 1735, it has been argued that this sort of protection was still only readily enforceable to those involved in the book trade at this time.33

Fig. 6

Little is known about the political orientation of Luffman. Samuel Fores, on the other hand, was a well-known figure considered by contemporaries 32

Jordan, Jerimiah Samuel, bookseller, Fleet Street 1802-1805, see Maxted, London Book Trades, 125. 33 J. Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics: A Historical Study of Copyright in Britain, (London, 1994), 6-7.

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to run one of the most radical London print shops of its day, although, as Gatrell has noted, ‘Fores issued many loyalist and anti-Jacobin prints in the 1790s, but…his track record as a critic of high-handed government was unmatched by any other printshop’.34 Moreover, Gatrell claims that this was not unusual at this time, as many ‘radical’ printshop proprietors still had to appeal to a more fashionable West End print market in order to make an adequate living.35 An important example of a flash note that in many ways crossed this apparent divide between ‘radical’ and ‘respectable’ satire, was George Cruikshank's Bank Restriction Note of 1819 (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7

Cruikshank claimed to have engraved the note after he had attended an execution on Ludgate Hill, becoming disgusted at what he perceived to be ‘poor’ people being hanged for a relatively minor property crime: the uttering of forged banknotes.36 The print was published by William Hone 34

Gatrell, City of Laughter, 491. Gatrell, City of Laughter, 493. 36 On the contemporary debates surrounding forgery and the use of capital punishment, see, P. Handler, ‘Forging the Agenda: The 1819 Select Committee on the Criminal Laws Revisited’, The Journal of Legal History 25:3 (2004), 249-268, and ‘Forgery and the End of the “Bloody Code” in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal, 48:3 (2005), 683-702. 35

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together with the larger Bank Restriction Barometer, selling together for the price of one shilling. The print proved so popular that it made over £700 in profit, with its copper plate having to be re-engraved.37 At the cost of one shilling the print was clearly not intended for such widespread circulation as the aforementioned Fores notes. There was clearly a high demand for the Restriction Note beyond its target audience, which might explain why there is some evidence that it was itself illicitly reprinted by other publishers. Much like the ‘little presses’ of early twentieth century London, as discussed by Rathna Ramanathan in her essay in this volume, publishers like Fores chose to keep their prices low so that the notes ‘were made accessible and affordable to the reading public’, a market that Hone was perhaps less concerned with.

Bank Notes, Prints and the Law For contemporaries who were presented with banknotes in payment during the Bank Restriction, distinguishing between notes that were ‘good’ and notes that were ‘bad’ was a process that may have involved much more than merely determining whether a particular note was a forgery or not. With so many different notes originating from legitimate banks across the country, it would not have been unusual for a London tradesman to have regularly encountered unfamiliar note designs, especially as a growing number of country banks began to establish partners in the capital where their notes could be paid.38 With their notable likeness to genuine banknotes, flash notes presented another potential barrier to the receiver of paper money: aside from their often ridiculously-worded promises to pay and obscenely small ‘values’, in many cases for just a matter of pence, many flash notes were otherwise both visibly and physically indistinguishable 37

Gatrell, City of Laughter, 215. William Hone became somewhat ironically involved in his own ‘forgery’ investigation concerning this very print; it emerged that the rogue prints were not forgeries, but rather unauthorized copies taken from Hone’s own plate, The Examiner, (14 February 1819). 38 For examples of this in the Proceedings, see, OBP: t18040912-21, Joseph Lloyd, (12 September 1804), t18100718-5, James Carpenter, (18 July 1810), t1815091382, John Binstead, (13 September 1815). Magistrate Patrick Colqhoun noted in 1800 how ‘forgery has been carried on to a considerable extent; suggested no doubt by the confidence which is established from the extensive circulation of country bankers’ notes and bills, now made payable in London; by which the deception is in some degree covered, and detection rendered more difficult’. P. Colqhoun, A Treatise On the Police of the Metropolis; The Sixth Edition, Corrected and Considerably Enlarged, (London, 1800), 112-113.

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from the real thing. From a legal perspective, distinguishing between real and fake notes could be equally difficult, a scenario brought about by the ambiguous nature of the wording of anti-forgery legislation. This lack of clarity stemmed from the fact that the government was only able to legislate on behalf of Bank of England notes with regard to what could and could not be copied. The laws that existed in relation to the private country notes were rather vague and merely prohibited the production of prints that ‘precisely’ imitated notes already being issued by existing banking houses.39 This meant that as long as an imitation note did not purport to be from an actual working bank, then it was not breaking the law in any way, regardless of how much it resembled a currency instrument. The laws relating to Bank of England notes did have a slightly broader remit, although they still did little to effectively suppress flash notes. Probably the most significant clause in the law was that which made illegal the reproduction of the ‘sum piece’, the value of the instrument spelled out in the bottom left hand corner of the note (Fig. 8). This feature was exclusively reserved for use on bank notes by an Act of 1812, although the suppression of prints that featured white text printed on a dark background in this style was evidently taking place before this date.40

Fig. 8

39

See, A Bill [as Amended by the Committee] for the Better Prevention of the Forgery of the Notes and Bills of Exchange of Persons Carrying on the Business of Bankers, (1801). 40 Hewitt & Keyworth, As Good as Gold, 54.

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Although introduced primarily to criminalize the act of producing forged notes, the law was technically applicable to any printed document within the public domain, and therefore applied equally to both the makers of country notes, as well as those who circulated more ephemeral kinds of print. Moreover, whereas forgery was by far the biggest problem that the Bank of England faced following the introduction of its small notes, material within its archive clearly demonstrates a shifting attitude during this period towards the production of these supposedly more innocent imitations. The first time the Bank appears to have received correspondence concerning a flash note was in June 1796, with the writer of the letter hoping that the note enclosed would be submitted to the consideration of the Bank directors.41 The wording suggests these types of prints were still relatively novel, and were not yet in wide circulation, dismissed by the writer as merely ‘an impudent attempt to keep up a spirit of Imitation, on a very delicate & important subject.' Despite a second letter to the Bank later that month claiming that the notes had been ‘lately circulated in this neighbourhood...[and] made a very improper use of by wicked and designing men,’ there is no further evidence to suggest that the Bank took any notice in this particular case. Unfortunately the enclosed note does not survive and can offer us no clues as to why the Bank decided not to take action. A key reason might have been the timing of the incident as, in 1796, the Bank might have assumed that such prints would only have had limited appeal. It is also possible that much like the large majority of flash notes that appeared later, this particular note did not infringe upon the antiforgery laws and, unlike in later cases, there is no specific mention of this note doing so. Whereas it might well have raised a few eyebrows amongst the directors, such an imitation was therefore clearly not considered a tangible threat at this time. With the onset of the suspension of gold payments and the mass issuing of the new small denomination bank notes, it is possible to observe a clear shift in the Bank’s attitude towards those who were printing and distributing flash notes. Just two years into the restriction period a letter from the Bank’s Birmingham agent William Spurrier described how flash notes were beginning to create problems for those attempting to police the production and circulation of forged bank notes in the town. Spurrier expressed his alarm at how publicly sold prints purporting to be bank notes were being ‘[circulated]...amongst the ignorant and illiterate for pound notes.'42 According to newspaper sources, after a prosecution led by 41 42

BE: F2/62. BE: F2/163.

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Spurrier on behalf of the Bank, the maker of the notes, William Pursall, was sentenced at the Warwick Quarter Sessions to three months imprisonment and hard labour.43 Further details of the notes were also provided, suggesting that they were in fact in direct breach of what would go on to form an important strand of the anti-forgery laws, Wm. Pursall, prosecuted by Mr. Spurrier... by direction of...the Bank of England... for selling in his shop a promissory note for “one round penny”, with the word ONE in white letters on a black ground (engraved similar to that word in the one pound notes of the Bank of England).

More remarkable, however, is the mention of a separate individual who had been prosecuted for his dealings with these notes, as was to twelve months imprisonment, in the said House [of correction], Thomas Sanders, also prosecuted by the Bank, for having uttered one of those notes as a one pound note, and fraudulently obtaining for it the value of 20s.

What is astonishing about the outcome of this case is that an individual who had committed a virtually identical act to that of a forged bank note utterer, an offence for which many at this time were being either hanged or transported, had managed to walk away with a relatively minor sentence. Despite this crime in effect being the same as that punishable by the capital statute, the legal technicality that may have saved Sanders’s life was the subtle alteration to the wording of the Bank’s name printed on the note.44 Although not specified in statute, this point of law had previously been raised by the barrister, William Garrow, in a case at the Old Bailey concerning Michael Druitt, on trial in 1785 for forging a bill of exchange.45 As part of Druitt’s defence, Garrow had cited a trial of 1784 at the court of the King's Bench, in which a man had been indicted on the charge of forgery for uttering an instrument headed with the words ‘My Bank Of England.’ As it was relevant to Druitt’s case, Garrow recalled that because of this detail the man was not prosecuted on the capital charge, as the note could not be classed as a counterfeit. As Garrow himself concluded of the outcome of that particular trial, ‘the court said the purporting must be on the face of the instrument itself, that every man 43

London Packet or New Lloyd’s Evening Post, 16-18 October 1799. See for example An Act for the Further Prevention of the Counterfeiting of Silver Tokens...and for the Further Prevention of Frauds Practised by the Imitation of the Notes or Bills of the said Governor and Company’, (1812). 45 OBP: t17851214-14, Michael Druitt, (14 December 1785). 44

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that looks at it may be able to say, this purports to be such a draft.’ It would appear, therefore, that even if a flash note broke the law, say by replicating white text on a dark ground in the form of a sum piece, it could not be treated as a forgery unless it replicated a bank note precisely, in which case it would presumably have been classed as a forged note from the outset. A case taken from the Proceedings slightly after the Spurrier incident, however, demonstrates how volatile the law could be, and in practice just how blurred and narrow the supposed division between flash and counterfeit bank notes actually was. The case in question was that of Henry and Mary Jenkinson, both of whom were sentenced to death in February 1805 for passing a ‘forged’ two pound bank note.46 The trial proceeded in a familiar style, with the prosecution systematically demonstrating where, when and how the instrument had been acquired and then paid away. Just before the jury were about to give their verdict however, it was observed by one juror that the note was in fact ‘not a banknote’, as the name of the bank appeared to read ‘Bank On England’. Remarkably however the prosecution appears to have been completely prepared for this, replying that, ‘there is a count in the indictment for a promissory note; it comes within that’, and the death sentence was duly administered. Such an incredible verdict throws open a whole debate over what actually constituted a ‘bank note’, and, more precisely, a forged bank note at this time. It is suggested here that rather than the objective wording of the statute, it was in fact subjective judicial discretion which provided the real key to determining how a note at this time would be legally classified. If we consider the production of flash notes solely from the Bank of England’s perspective, what the William Spurrier case suggests is that the Bank was much more likely to take these kinds of notes seriously if it was evident that they were being used for sinister means, regardless of whether or not a note was thought to have been printed intentionally to deceive. For example, William Pursall’s ‘One Round Penny’ note was evidently too illegal for the bank not to prosecute him, although it is important to observe once again that he received a considerably leaner sentence than the man caught attempting to circulate the note as genuine currency. Almost thirty years later, an elderly man from Yorkshire named James Hirst was investigated by the Bank for printing notes for his fictitious Bank of Rawcliffe. The correspondence between the Bank and its agent in this case again demonstrates a clear desire on behalf of the Bank for the production of the notes to be ceased, although not to prosecute Hirst 46

OBP: t18050220-78, Mary & Henry Jenkinson, (20 February 1805).

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himself. Although these notes were once again in breach of the antiforgery laws, it is apparent from descriptions of Hirst that he was not printing them with the intention of using them for criminal purposes, but was instead just an incredible eccentric who saw imitation paper currency as a form of amusement. The notes were brought to the Bank’s attention due to one them having once again been uttered illegally, this time by a man named Isaiah Brown as far away as the town of St Ives in Huntingdonshire.47 Upon writing to the Bank’s solicitor, a local Bank agent attempted to portray Hirst as a major dealer in imitation currency, claiming that [he] has during the last two years parted with a great number of these notes to persons going to his house which is resorted to by every stranger who comes into the town of Rawcliffe purely out of curiosity.

Evidence taken from Isaiah Brown similarly attested to this, he claiming to have seen ‘hundreds and thousands’ of the notes at Hirst’s home himself. The Bank eventually decided that the best course of action would be to demand that Hirst surrender the printing plates so that no more notes could be produced, and the chain of correspondence suggests that this was done. Upon his death in 1829 Hirst was remembered fondly by a number of local newspapers, a clear indication that he was never really considered by anyone as a serious currency criminal.48 Nevertheless, despite individuals such as Hirst printing imitation money for what were seemingly novel reasons, flash notes were also evidently closely associated with those who made it their business to deceive, a reputation that was fundamental to the very language used by their contemporaries to describe them.

Flash Notes and Fraud The small amount of literature that has considered flash notes has reinforced the idea that such objects could be used as items of deception, and that they were either used to fool people who were ‘illiterate’ or were presented in less than ideal conditions for the receiver. Shin has suggested that, if the intention was to deceive, then flash notes would most likely have been presented in the dark in order to obstruct one’s ability to examine the note properly.49 Whereas darker conditions could be used as a 47

BE: F2/63. The Sheffield Independent, and Yorkshire and Derbyshire Advertiser, 24 October 1829. 49 Shin, Culture of Paper Money, 227. 48

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cover to pass off spurious banknotes as a means of hiding imperfections in their construction, as items that resembled banknotes more imprecisely, flash notes were more commonly used to deceive in ways that involved a manipulation of either their visual or material components and, in some cases, both. Furthermore, when presented in particular ways, flash notes possessed an ability to deceive not only those who could not read, but also the ‘fully literate’. Like numerous material objects now lost in time, it is often difficult to locate examples of ordinary things being used in ways that did not involve some form of criminality. This is a particular problem for historians using sources such as newspapers and legal records.50 Sometimes criminal cases do reveal ordinary usages however: the aforementioned Thomas Overall had been on his way to the public house with a flash note in his possession, a space contemporaries clearly associated closely with these prints. This is perhaps unsurprising however given the important role played by pubs as arenas in which sums of hard money were frequently exchanged. In 1829 an amateur playwright named Coleman was made fool of in a pub by some prospective publishers, in a stunt involving what The Times described as ‘a well-folded 1.000l note of the Bank of Elegance.’ Upon Coleman offering to close a deal with a bookseller named Murray for the said note, one observer allegedly roared out with laughter ‘Close with Murray...I’m damned if you do!’51 Outside of the public house flash notes could evidently have more practical applications. A coachman in South Yorkshire was heavily disappointed in 1827, when hoping for a reward after handing in a pocketbook containing what he believed to be a number of high value banknotes, he was told by their owner that they were just ‘flash notes’, and that he kept them with him on his travels to give to any highwayman who might attempt to rob him.52 Although on the surface these two latter ‘non-criminal’ examples may appear somewhat mundane, a deeper reading of them could in fact suggest a more complex and overlapping relationship between perceptions of both the material and visual characteristics of banknotes at this time. The travelling man for instance was perhaps of the belief that should a robbery take place then it would do so very quickly, and was therefore relying on not just the visual but also the material or haptic qualities of his flash notes in order to fool the highwaymen for long enough before they made their getaway. To put it differently, the man might have hoped that a brief 50

E. Muir & G. Ruggiero, ‘Introduction: the Crime of History’, in, Muir E., & Ruggiero G., (ed.), History from Crime, (Baltimore, 1994), vii. 51 The Times, 29 January 1829. 52 The Times, 17 December 1827.

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exposure to both of these components would be enough to trigger a cognitive shortcut, or ’schema’, for genuine banknotes in the minds of the criminals, thus deceiving them into believing in the authenticity of the stolen ‘money’. The activation of such a ‘schema’ would presumably have relied on the intended receiver of the note being able to recognize the features of banknotes to which they were being exposed; this was a key element in flash notes’ ability to potentially deceive any person that came into contact with them. A good example of this is seen in a case of May 1827, in which a young man named Cole was in attendance at the Surrey theatre.53 According to a report in The Times, Cole had spotted a curious bundle of paper on a vacant seat, and had picked it up with little hesitation. He instantly believed himself to be in luck, as the papers appeared to be banknotes, some for values of up to one thousand pounds, or so he thought. Cole was not the only one to have spotted the notes, however, and a man claiming to be a constable soon approached him, demanding that they be returned to their rightful owner. An offer of half of the notes did little to cool the constable’s passions, he insisting that the men would both need to appear in front of a magistrate if Cole wished to claim a reward for finding them. At the magistrates hearing, the constable was ordered to produce the notes for examination, something which he accordingly did, much to the astonishment of those present in the chamber. Whilst attempting to hold back his laughter, the constable soon made it clear that Cole had been the dupe of an elaborate scam, and that the notes were in fact ‘not worth a groat’, revealing them to be Bank of Elegance notes. To the great amusement of all those present the magistrate soon confirmed this to be true, with Cole meanwhile proceeding to tear up the notes in a great fit of anger. From the description of this event provided by one newspaper, it is more than likely that Cole was fully ‘literate’ in the modern sense of the word. The theatre box, even at a provincial level, was hardly what might be considered a ‘plebeian’ space during this period.54 Cole was also alleged to admit at the hearing that he was ‘heartily ashamed of the exposure attached to the humbug that some knowing wag had played upon him’; whether he actually uttered these words or not, the impression given by the newspaper is that Cole really should have known better. The deception of Cole was therefore one clearly undertaken to humiliate him, and was not a malicious act intended to swindle him out of goods or 53

The Times, 14 May 1827. For a discussion of box subscriptions at London and provincial theatres in this period see J. Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880, (Lebanon, 2007). 54

Flash Notes and Fraud in Late Georgian England

45

money. As in the case of Coleman, the bookseller similarly tricked by a cleverly concealed Bank of Elegance note, this kind of ‘innocent’ trickery was perhaps a common way in which of these sorts of notes were used amongst friends and enemies alike. Due largely to the nature of the evidence, it is cases where flash notes were being appropriated for criminal purposes that are mostly visible. Despite this tendency towards illicit activity in the sources, however, it is still possible to identify both tactile and visual technologies of deception that could have been used in both a legitimate and an illicit capacity. Two clearly distinctive techniques of deception can be identified from the sources, and it is evident that the decision as to what sort of swindle should be utilized was one that was heavily dependent on the circumstances of the intended victim. The first of these, as seen in the case of Cole, allowed the receiver a short period of material, haptic contact, yet only minimal visual contact with the flash note. In an article from John Bull in 1829 entitled ‘A New Way to Play an Old Trick’, a story was relayed in which a man was fooled by a stunt involving a swindler pretending to pick up a one pound banknote after the two men had passed each other in a Leeds street.55 In what initially appeared an act of tremendous generosity, the swindler offered the man half the value of the note if he would give him the change for the other in coin, an offer which, remarkably, was readily accepted. The note was later revealed to the swindled man as a flash note, who was said to ‘produce various contortions of countenance’ upon being told. In referring to the victim as ‘Johnny-Raw’, the newspaper was perhaps implying that he was less than fully ‘literate’ in the modern sense. However, what with the apparent quickness of this transaction, as well as the fact that the man was seemingly more than happy to readily accept a banknote, this suggests that haptics may have played a significant role in this deception. In an earlier case from 1806 in which a London shopkeeper’s boy was reported to have mistakenly accepted a flash note in payment for a coat, the newspaper explains how the swindler, named Burke, gave the boy a bit of paper resembling a note, which the boy was about to read when Burke advised him to take care he did not lose it, snatching at it himself at the same time, which induced the boy to put it into his pocket.56

Again, much like in the previous example, it appears that although Burke had allowed the boy to touch the note, he wished at the same time to deny 55 56

John Bull, 4 May 1829. The Morning Chronicle, 18 September 1806.

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him prolonged visual contact with the object in order to minimize the opportunity for him to possibly identify it as bad. The alternative to this first kind of deception sees an almost complete reversal of technique, and involved presenting a flash note to the intended victim in a manner which allowed prolonged visual but not material access to the object. Indeed, when visual similarity was relied upon for success, touch appears not to have been significant. In order to be successful, this kind of trick may have involved manipulating the note so only certain features were visible, or more precisely, were only visible for limited period of time. Coleman, the aforementioned playwright, had been allowed no physical contact with the Bank of Elegance note whilst talking to the publishers, and had been fooled into thinking that the note was genuine after it had been folded over in a certain way and presented to him at a distance. This was evidently a common method used amongst flash note swindlers. Samuel Probart, who had been robbed in a public house of fifteen pounds worth of banknotes, explained at the Old Bailey in 1828 how, in his case, ‘the prisoner pulled out some notes, and folded them over his finger; one finger was at the top – I could see ‘Fifty’, but could not see what bank it was, as he held his hand over that.'57 James Cooper, a man who likewise had a ten pound note stolen, claimed at the Old Bailey in 1821 that he had not had an adequate chance to personally study the banknotes with which he was presented, but claimed that ‘the prisoners shewed their £10 notes – I do not know whether they were notes, they only showed them in their hands.'58 An Italian sailor named Antonio Bennia was similarly deceived in a pub in 1812, describing how his swindlers had ‘put down paper that had the appearance of bank-notes, and when I put down five one pound notes, the man took up the notes and ran away.'59 As well as revealing how flash notes were able to confuse, the reading of cases in which such prints were being used in place of either genuine or actual forged banknotes can offer us clues as to the kinds of methods adopted by contemporaries during this period to scrutinise the ‘goodness’ of banknotes, particularly those whose grasp of reading may have been limited. The recent work of Adam Fox, focusing on an earlier period, suggests that not only were figures for literacy rates across the early modern period largely unreliable, but more significantly, that there could be distinct differences between the ways in which individuals actually read both printed and handwritten texts.60 His research has suggested that so57

OBP: t18280529-45, Thomas Mills, (29 May 1828). OBP: t18210718-96, James Turner & Henry Hawkins, (18 July 1821). 59 OBP: t18121028-52, Charles Carlisle, (28 October 1812). 60 A. Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (Oxford, 2005). 58

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called ‘illiterate’ people were in fact often able to identify certain alphabetic and numeric characters when presented in the printed as opposed to the handwritten form. In establishing that the ubiquity of ephemeral prints such as ballads, broadsides and woodcuts could help to foster within individuals a sort of ‘semi-literacy’, through the complex interaction between oral, visual and literate print cultures, Fox’s work inadvertently implies that we should reassess previously subscribed notions surrounding the centrality of literacy and reading to the effective understanding of printed documents such as banknotes. Moreover, as Gatrell has similarly suggested in his own work on print we forget that these things enmeshed communities in shared understandings, teaching people how to see and think about themselves. Even those who could not read or write would be visually literate.61

One feature that may have been interpreted in such a way was the sum piece, which due to its similarity to both real and flash notes could easily have been mistaken for the genuine article. It was a large and more easily discernible printed characteristic found on banknotes, as opposed to the body text presented in a hand written-like font, the sum piece may well have been used by some individuals who possessed ‘semi-literate’ abilities in their attempt to identify genuine paper money. Doing so however may well have proven their downfall. When John Sawyer, the landlord of John Sturch, a sheep seller robbed at Warwick fair in 1828, was asked by Sturch to identify some flash notes handed to him that day, he did so by saying that he believed them to be notes for five pounds.62 Although Sawyer had probably never seen these particular notes, it is possible that with his limited reading ability he was able to make out the word FIVE printed as the sum piece, but not the words ‘half-pence’. Seventeen years earlier, another man also named John Sawyer, was similarly fooled into accepting a flash note in payment.63 Sawyer on this occasion had been tricked into giving change to Edward Payne for a twenty pence Bank In England note. Sawyer had asked Payne whether the note had come from his master, to which he replied ‘yes’, and it had been accepted accordingly. Nevertheless, as Sawyer asked Payne directly whether the instrument was a twenty pound note, it is fair to suggest that he may have once again been fooled by the very same detail as his namesake. 61

V. A. C Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 17701868, (Oxford, 1996), 112. 62 The Morning Chronicle, 27 July 1826. 63 OBP: t18110710-97, Edward Payne, (10 July 1811).

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Other vvisual and matterial characteristics which ddid not involv ve printed text, found oon both bank notes and flaash notes alikee, could similarly have been used byy ‘illiterate’ or o indeed ‘sem mi-literate’ inddividuals as a means of attempting tto authenticatte paper moneey with whichh they were presented. p Although haaving had his notes n snatched d from him att Warwick fairr in 1828, sheep sellerr John Sturch related in co ourt that, evenn though he could c not read, ‘I saw w the notes were w not like in i appearancee to those he snatched from me.'64 Edward Derbby, another man m swindled in a flash no ote scam, was more sppecific when he appeared as a defendannt at the Old Bailey in 1828. Derbyy claimed thhat he had co onfronted onee of his assaailants by shouting at him ‘this is not one of my m bills’, addding, ‘I knew my own paper by thee colour – it was w whiter than that was; I said, “I will not have these, give m me my own bills b – I want none n of yourss”’. He later in n the trial recalled receeiving his nottes back, ‘my notes were pproduced to me m – I had no mark on them, and didd not know th he numbers, bbut they were rolled up exactly as m mine were, andd were the sam me amounts, ffour of 10l, an nd two of 5l.’.65 Contem mporaries clearrly found it diifficult to entirrely avoid thee threat of being impossed upon by flash f notes, as a they were ooften presenteed in less than ideal conditions, thuus limiting thee opportunity for proper sccrutiny to be conducteed. This does not mean how wever that som me individualls did not at least maake an attem mpt at trying to defend thhemselves. Given G the emphasis pllaced by som me historians on o the role off ‘social-endo orsement’ (the practicee of marking one’s o name an nd address on a note’s reverrse) to the successful ccirculation of banknotes, it is perhaps unnsurprising to find that some flash nnotes were marked m by hand d in order to indicate theirr status as ‘imitations’:: two examplles held in th he British Mu Museum collecctions are shown in figgures 9 and 100.66

Fig. 9

64

The Morninng Chronicle, 27 2 July 1826. OBP: t182880221-26, Thom mas Robinson, (21 February 1 828). 66 On endorsing bank notes see s Shin, Culturre of Paper Mooney, 146. 65

Flash Notess and Fraud in Late L Georgian E England

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Fig. 10

These tw wo examples,, referring to the t notes in quuestion as ‘fleeet notes’, a term posssibly more common for theem around 18810-1811, maay in fact raise more qquestions thann they answerr. For instancee, the annotattions, and particularly the one show wn in Figure 9, 9 were clearlyy intended to warn off individuals from acceptinng these flash h notes as gennuine money. The key question hoowever is justt who were such s annotatioons intended for, as a presumably ‘literate’ persson would surrely be able tto identify a flash f note from a readiing of the notee’s body text. It is suggesteed here that th he answer lies in the ffact that contemporaries were w widely aw ware of the confusing c capacity of fflash notes, annd that such an n annotation w would act only y as a last line of defennce should suuch a note be presented p in ppayment in wh hat might be considereed a more straaightforward manner. m Furthhermore, the annotation shown in Figgure 10, statinng that the notte is payable aat ‘17 Fleet Lane’, was clearly neveer intended ass a serious deeterrent againnst accepting the note, and is perhaaps therefore more m consisteent with the roole of the flassh note as an item of vvisual and literrate printed hu umour. There iis some evideence to suggeest that handw written annotaations on flash notes may have heelped to proteect certain inndividuals from taking them in payyment. Alicee Robinson who w encounteered flash nottes while gambling inn a public houuse with her husband h Rodgger in 1822, claimed at the Old Bailey to have distinguished d her h own ‘genuuine’ notes frrom those given to her by a swindlerr: my notes were quite clean and new w, without anny writing on them whateverr; one of those he h gave me, I th hink was my ow wn; but the oth her had writing oon it, and I was w fearful it was w bad, and hhad him detain ned; it afterwardds proved to be a good one.67

Robinson’s testimony sits s somewhaat uncomfortaably with th he recent arguments m made by Shin,, namely that handwritten eendorsements found on 67

OBP: t182220703-38, Jamees Jones, (3 July y 1822).

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notes nearly always boosted their credibility. One can only really speculate as to the extent to which handwritten text on banknotes may in fact have confused rather than lent confidence, particularly to those individuals who did not possess the capacity to comfortably decipher handwritten script.

Conclusion By making a case study of the imitation or ‘flash’ notes of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this essay has considered more closely the relationship between banknotes and ‘ordinary’ objects of print. A boom in imitation banknotes during the first three decades of the nineteenth century was clearly one that coincided with a burgeoning culture of paper money in England during this same period. Whether through reading them directly oneself or instead via other people, a close interaction with the sorts of satirical ‘promises’ found on flash notes may have helped to foster more ‘modern’ readings and understandings of bank notes amongst the English people at this time. New perceptions were not confined merely to theoretical understandings however, and as items that not only visually but materially imitated banknotes, flash notes conceivably possessed an ability to act as a point of reference for genuine monetary instruments, thus further familiarizing contemporaries with their material and aesthetic forms. Some were clearly concerned at this similarity, however, and it has been shown how flash notes could be used to potentially deceive all persons regardless of social status or reading ability. Flash note deception was clearly not something which only the ‘illiterate’ were susceptible to, as swindlers could employ haptic technologies in combination with minimal visual contact in order to fool even those who were supposedly capable of telling otherwise. Finally, problematizing the contemporary picture of paper money further, paper money instruments in this period were highly ambiguous objects, both legally and socially. Moreover, there was effectively no tangible distinction between flash and forged banknotes, highlighted by the common contemporary blanket term ‘bad’ to describe notes that had no value. This may also perhaps explain why flash notes have so far failed to attract any serious attention by paper money scholars, as their very existence evidently makes its routine study and classification during this period considerably more problematic.

CHAPTER THREE LONDON’S LITTLE PRESSES RATHNA RAMANATHAN

During the three decades following World War II, a number of small-sized presses were formed in England whose primary intention was the publishing of literary work (particularly poetry) that they believed was not being published by mainstream trade publishers. The books were mostly designed and produced in-house by the publishers themselves. Scholars refer to these presses interchangeably as ‘small presses’ or ‘little presses’. This chapter highlights the publishing practice of four prominent Londonbased presses over a thirty-five-year period (1945–1979): Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press, Stefan and Franciszka Themerson’s Gaberbocchus Press, Asa Benveniste’s Trigram Press, and Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum. It draws upon a variety of sources, including interviews with many closely associated with the presses and archival material.1 It describes how the culture and environment of the city – London, in this instance – led to an incredible creative impetus that was realised through the form of ‘happenings’, books and peripatetic publications, and which impacted upon the nature of mainstream publishing at the time.

1

There are three London-based archives which have contributed to this study: The Themerson archive, a private archive related to the Themersons and Gaberbocchus Press (now housed in the National Library, Warsaw); the Bob Cobbing archive, a private archive now transferred to the British Library containing material related to the Writers Forum as well as the Association of Little Presses and the Poetry Society; and the Eric Mottram archive at King’s College (University of London) though not directly attached to any of the presses has correspondence with three of the publishers (Asa Benveniste, Bob Cobbing and Stuart Montgomery) as well as material on little press activities.

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Publishing in Britain 1945-1979 The dominant issue in Britain during the period 1945 to 1979 is that it witnessed a number of fundamental changes in people’s self-perception and worldview. British identity – of the people themselves and of the country – had radically changed by 1979. Political changes saw the disappearance of Britain’s status as a leading imperial and colonial power. London, the city where these little presses were based, changed from being the capital of an empire to a fast-growing international, multiracial, multicultural city. Another contributing factor was the rise in America’s status as an economic, military, and cultural power. This change of Britain’s status had its reflections in language: ‘From being the widely acknowledged fount and centre of English-language culture in the early 1900s, England, as the century developed, became more and more an Anglophone culture within an English-speaking world. […] England became in some senses one of many provinces within the Englishspeaking world’.2 Writers and poets at the beginning of this period were predominantly white, male, upper-middle class, and many were from a public school background. By 1980 writers increasingly came from varied cultural backgrounds and more women authors were being published. During this period the idea of an ‘English’ literature took on a broader, less exclusive definition. It was redefined to acknowledge the literature of the many European and non-European immigrants who had come to England after the War and were writing in English. It also included the voices of the ‘inner colonized of the First World – “minorities”, marginals, and women’.3 This period also saw a major change in the way books were made, as offset printing began to challenge letterpress in trade publishing. The paperback revolution of the 1950s irrevocably changed the cultural status of books and had a lasting impact on how books were read, published, and designed. Towards the latter part of this period, mainstream publishing shifted from being ‘an occupation for gentlemen’4 to a business for corporations. During and immediately after the war, however, the publishing industry was in crisis. By 1941, over 26 million books had been destroyed by German bombing. Paper rationing brought in during the war continued until the end of the decade. In 1947 paper mills were still subject to fuel rationing. Although the war had created an artificial demand for 2 Armitage, Simon and Crawford, Robert (eds.), The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1998), xxiii. 3 Jameson, Frederic, ‘Periodizing the 60s’ in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 197186. Volume 2: the Syntax of History (London, Routledge, 1988), 178–208 (181). 4 The title of a book by publisher Frederic Warburg (London, Hutchinson, 1959).

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books, this illusion had shattered by 1947. According to Robert Hewison, there were over 44,000 standard works out of print by the end of the War and publishers, having discovered that wartime reading habits leaned toward the English classics, played it safe by issuing reprints.5 The situation at the end of the War was probably best summed up by publisher Geoffrey Faber. In 1948, in an article titled ‘The Critical Moment’, he wrote of pressure from the government to produce technical, informative work rather than imaginative fiction, and of the difficulty of publishing books in the current economic circumstances. He also spoke about contemporary literature: Almost every book seemed to deal with some more or less specialized subject. […] Signs of exhaustion are only to be expected. As a nation, or an island group of nations we have suddenly exchanged riches for poverty, and power for insecurity. This change in our status and prospects has come as a reward for our ‘finest hour’. Until we have realistically and courageously adjusted ourselves to it, we are not likely to produce much worthwhile literature. The process of adjustment is going to be slow and painful.6

The shift in politics and history after World War II was also reflected in language and literature. In comparison to the poetry that was published on the Continent during this time, there were no major new voices in English poetry. Even if poets did find their voice, there were few outlets for publication. Editor and writer Alan Pryce-Jones wrote in the Listener: If you talk to any modern poet he will tell you – and rightly – that he has very few outlets for his work. Publishers and editors are wary of poetry, little reviews are few in number and they do not pay their contributors a living wage simply because they cannot. In the end the poet finds himself elbowed into a corner of some established weekly (if he is lucky) – sandwiched between an article on agrarian reform in Southern Italy and an argument in favour of raising the bank rate.7

Writers on the subject of poetry during the period 1945 to 1979 speak of two identifiable strands: conservatism or the ‘English line’ and Modernism.8 5 Hewison, Robert, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945–60 (rev. edn., London, Methuen, 1988). 6 Faber, Geoffrey, ‘The Critical Moment’, Spectator, 5 November 1948, 5. 7 Pryce-Jones, Alan. 1949 ‘Broadcasting and Literature’, Listener, 25 August 1949, 318. 8 See for example Lucie-Smith, Edward (ed.) British Poetry Since 1945 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970); Day, Gary and Docherty, Brian (eds.), British

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Mainstream poets during this period included the Neo-Romantics in the 1940s (Vernon Watkins, George Baker, John Heath-Stubbs, and others); the Movement poets in the 1950s (Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, D. J. Enright), and the Group in the late 1950s and early 1960s (George MacBeth, Alan Brownjohn, Edward Lucie-Smith). The period was summed up in three anthologies: Robert Conquest’s New Lines, Al Alvarez’s New Poetry and Morrison and Motion’s Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, none of which featured any non-mainstream poets.9 The Modernist strain featured young, contemporary poets from all across the country – London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Belfast – who often wrote in consciously international voices inspired by current poetic strains in Europe and in America. These poets, characterized by their plurality of voice, placed great emphasis not just on the publishing of poetry but also on its performance, attracting a young audience with their ‘happenings’.10 Poetry readings and spoken verse broadcast on radio and television became a popular phenomenon from the 1960s onwards. One of the most famous ‘happenings’ was at the Royal Albert Hall on 11 June 1965. Organized by poet and little magazine editor Michael Horovitz, the ‘First International Poetry Incarnation’ reading, which featured young British and American poets (amongst them most famously Allen Ginsberg), was attended by 8,000 people. Most writers herald this reading as a landmark of the rising popularity of experimental poetry and of poetry readings among the youth in Britain in the 1960s. In an article in the Guardian, Nuttall described the situation from his perspective: The reasons for this are surely […]. The increase in public literacy is one important factor. Another is the odious creed of self-expression and the misunderstanding of free verse as something geared to the unfettered soul. It is obviously not widely understood among both the amateurs and the conservative literati that form and tradition are not the same thing. […] The conservative’s mistake of dismissing free verse as mere self-

poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: politics and art (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1997). 9 Conquest, Robert (ed.), New Lines (London, Macmillan, 1956); Alvarez, Al, The New Poetry (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962); Morrison, Blake and Motion, Andrew (eds.), The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982). 10 A happening is a performance, event, or situation intended to be considered as art. Happenings lack a narrative, are often multi-disciplinary, and frequently seek to involve the audience in the performance in some way. Their elements may be planned while retaining room for improvisation. In Britain, the poet–painter Adrian Henri, organized the first happenings in Liverpool.

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expression is extended to an inclination similarly to dismiss all small press publications.11

The conservative mainstream domination of the alternative manifested in other ways: in publishing practice, with mainstream bodies, including the Poetry Society, and in universities. The late 1950s and 1960s witnessed an explosion in poetry, both mainstream and alternative. Several mainstream publishers including Cape, Macmillan, Secker & Warburg, expanded their poetry lists during this time. Of the mainstream publishers, Faber & Faber was a premier poetry publisher, though Chatto & Windus and Oxford University Press also had well-established lists. Series of note were Faber’s ‘Poetry: Introduction’ Series featuring new poets and Penguin’s Modern Poets Series. Despite these expansions, poetry still remained a minor priority on publisher’s agendas (for example, Oxford University Press, according to Jacqueline Simms,12 published only eight poetry books a year), and the poets published by mainstream publishers were ‘established’ or recognized poets, who were likely to sell. According to Simms, inexperienced poets were often recommended to first publish with little presses and magazines, and to come back when they had a few publications credited to their name. It seems clear that mainstream publishing options were too few to publish the many rising contemporary voices in poetry. Additionally, because of their own agendas, much of the experimental poetry written by these poets –concrete and visual poetry in particular – was disregarded. It was in publishing these poets’ work that little presses and magazines found their primary role. In an article in Encounter in 1977, Douglas Dunn wrote: We know how important that minority press was for modern literature. One result has been status handed down to the little-magazine and smallpress movements as testing-grounds for new writers, or for those notably against the grain of prevailing taste. Several decades on, we have a state of affairs in which little is not only beautiful, but is the exclusive medium of what many call ‘real poetry’ as opposed to what is passed off as poetry elsewhere.13

11

Nuttall, Jeff, ‘The Odious Creed of Self-Expression’, Guardian, 23 August 1980, 13. 12 Jacqueline Simms was poetry editor at Oxford University Press from 1977 to 1999. 13 Dunn, Douglas, ‘Coteries & commitments: little magazines’, Encounter 48 (1977), 58-65 (58).

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P Books inn Print Publish hed in the Fig. 1: Frontt cover, Cataloogue of Little Press United Kingddom (London: Association of o Little Pressees, 1970). Designed and printed by Assa Benveniste, Trigram T Press.

In 1972, there were over one o hundred little presses inn Britain; by 1975, 1 this number hadd increased to t two hundred.14 By 19980, accordin ng to the Association of Little Presses P (ALP)), eighty perr cent of th he poetry published inn Britain wass by little presses and maggazines. The ALP A was founded in 1966 by publlishers Stuart Montgomeryy and Bob Cob bbing for ‘the welfaree of little prresses, especially those ppublishing po oetry and creative liteerature’.15 It sought s to hellp little pressses with troub bles they 14

Schmidt, M M. and Lindop, G. (eds), Britissh Poetry Sincee 1960: a Criticcal Survey (Oxford, Carccanet, 1972). 15 Griffiths, B Bill and Cobbinng Bob, ALP th he First 22 andd a Half Years.. (London, Association oof Little Pressess, 1988), 3.

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faced particularly on matters of sales and distribution, as well as funding. These manifested as an annual catalogue, newsletters, how-to-publish guides, the organization of book fairs and exhibitions to help promote sales, as well as the establishment of the Poets’ Conference to discuss issues important to poets, including the modernization of the post of Poet Laureate, and petitioning the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) for larger grants. Although they were unsuccessful, the Poets’ Conference did bring the financial plight of poet-publishers to the attention of the general public. The ALP’s first catalogue, printed in 1970, carried details of over five hundred publications from sixty-five member presses.16 Other organizations set up to support poets and little presses in London were the London Poetry Secretariat and the Consortium of Little Presses. The two biggest problems faced by little presses were distribution and funding. As poet and academic Eric Mottram remarked: It is a question of hawking stuff round the shops and see if they will take it. Try to get some place to distribute it, and basically speaking, at the poetry readings, I think. It is very difficult and I don’t think there is any solution, unless there are centres of this kind for selling this stuff.17

Very few bookshops would stock little press books. In London, these were primarily Better Books, New Compton Street; Compendium, Camden High Street; and Turret Bookshop, Kensington Church Walk.18 Better Books was owned by Tony Godwin, editorial adviser at Penguin Books. Godwin’s intention when he opened the shop in the late 1940s was to make it a bookshop with a social dimension where readings and events could be held. Poets who worked at Better Books included Barry Miles and Bob Cobbing. During Cobbing’s time, Better Books (which had already begun to make a name for itself as an outlet for specialist and avant-garde literature) became the main distributor for little press, underground newspaper, and little magazine publications. Cobbing also encouraged the use of the Better Books basement as an impromptu arts 16 Catalogue of Little Press Books in Print Published in the United Kingdom (London, Association of Little Presses, 1970). 17 Mottram, Eric, ‘Our education is political’, in Görstschacher, W. (ed.), Contemporary views on the little magazine scene (Salzburg, Poetry Salzburg, 2000), 48–94 (90). 18 By the end of the 1970s, this list had expanded to include other bookshops. Mottram listed them out in his Foreword to the Catalogue of little press books published in the United Kingdom (1979) as Basilisk, England’s Lane; Books Plus, Lewisham Way; Dillon’s, Malet Street; Poole’s, Charing Cross Road and the ICA Bookshop.

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venue and regularly held poetry readings, happenings, exhibitions, and installations and even screened international experimental films. Better Books became the meeting place for experimental poets, writers, and artists and was the birthplace of the London Filmmaker’s Co-operative.

Fig. 2: Asa Benveniste, in Better Books bookshop, London, c.1969. Photograph by Pip Benveniste.

Turret Bookshop was run by poet, writer, and publisher Bernard Stone who took a personal interest in supporting the titles published by little presses and magazines. As Sheppard remarked, ‘these sorts of personal contact were vital in order to sustain a poetry different from established forms and unwelcome at conventional institutions.’19 One of the unexpected effects of the war had been a ‘heightened awareness of the importance of the arts’, and part of the Welfare State’s commitment to a better Britain was seen in its patronage of the Arts. 20 In May 1946 the ACGB was empowered to give grants and interest-free loans to support those in the Arts. A number of little presses relied on these 19

Sheppard, Robert, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950–2000. (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2005), 38. 20 Hewison, Robert, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945–60 (rev. edn., London, Methuen, 1988), 7.

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grants from the ACGB for their survival. However, the allocation of this money (a large part of which went to the ‘high’ arts, including opera and ballet) led to accusations of the Arts Council as ‘elitist, centralized, and conservative’.21 Although poetry benefited more greatly than any other area of publishing, literature was a low priority with the ACGB. The Literature Department that was established in 1965 never received more than 1.5 per cent of the overall budget. The Poetry Society was an ACGB-funded body whose stated aim was to promote the study, use, and enjoyment of poetry. Two ways in which the Society did encourage this was through the periodical Poetry Review, and by their recommendation of titles through the award of ‘Poetry Book Society Choice’ and ‘Poetry Book Society Recommendation’ to certain titles. The former meant that the Society would purchase outright 1,000 copies for its members (thereby warranting a much higher print run), whereas the latter meant that the book could carry a label of recommendation on the front cover, which could assist in its sales to the public.

Fig. 3: Dom Silvester Houédard doing a reading in Better Books bookshop, c.1969. Seated behind Houédard are Franciszka Themerson and Ernst Jandl. Photograph by Pip Benveniste.

21 Day, Gary. (ed.), Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, volume two: 1930– 1955. (Harlow, Longman, 1977), 20.

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One issue that new and rising poets had with the Society was that it extended support only for poets in the English tradition, and that it did not recognize international or Modernist strains that were current in most contemporary poetics. In the early 1970s, these sentiments led poets, including Montgomery and Cobbing, to seek election to the Council of the Poetry Society ‘as one of the few ways in which they could attempt to influence the course and direction of poetry affairs’.22 By 1974 a number of these poets had been elected to the board, and they implemented ways in which poetry could be more accessible. These included a change in the editorship of the Poetry Review that allowed for the inclusion of nonBritish poets writing in English (in particular Americans), installing a print shop in the basement for the use of poets to print their own work, a bookshop and events (including workshops, lectures, reading, exhibitions) to aid in distribution and sales. These changes were opposed by the more conservative poets and, importantly, by Charles Osborne, then Literature Director of the ACGB. After much struggle between poets and Osborne, the poets resigned en masse in 1977. According to Jeff Nuttall: It was a particularly subtle alienation by this time. […] The rebels styles in literature were blocked out of publishing, out of libraries, out of serious discussion, by the extensive influence of the universities who are too idle to reform their critical axioms and therefore try to preserve the critical status quo.23

The constant struggle on the part of the little presses for funding, distribution, reviews, and mere survival resulted in a situation where many little presses saw themselves as working against rather than alongside the establishment. The dissolution of the Poetry Society Council in the late 1970s was suggestive of the book trade’s declining fortunes at the time and of poetry’s in particular. When publisher Collins bought out Better Books in 1974, an important venue for ‘happenings’ in London as well as a bookstore for poetry books was shut down. There was also less money available as grants from the ACGB. The end of the 1970s also saw a dramatic inflation in printing and paper costs. At the end of the decade a number of mainstream publishers, including Macmillan, Chatto & Windus and Cape, wound down their poetry lists ‘in response to commercial exigencies’.24 The period also witnessed the demise of the important 22 ‘How the Poetry Society Lost its Democratic Status’, State of Poetry, 2 (London, Poets Conference, 1979), 1. 23 Nuttall, Jeff, Bomb Culture. London, Paladin, 1971), 160-161. 24 Jones, Peter and Schmidt, Michael, British Poetry Since 1970: a Critical Survey (Manchester, Carcanet Press, 1980), xxv.

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Penguin Modern Poets Series. By the end of the 1970s, three premier little presses – Fulcrum, Gaberbocchus, and Trigram – had closed down, mainly due to financial difficulties.

Stuart Montgomery and Fulcrum Press (1965 to 1974) Fulcrum Press was founded and run by Stuart Montgomery, a doctor from Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), who came to London in 1955 to study medicine. Although a doctor by profession, Montgomery was keenly interested in poetry and was influenced particularly by the work of Ezra Pound. While Montgomery was studying at the University of London he became involved with the poetry and little press scene. He helped Barry Miles and Bob Cobbing at Better Books to stock little press titles and little magazines and introduced himself to Geoffrey Soar, then librarian of the Poetry Store at University College London. Along with Bob Cobbing, Montgomery later became very involved in little press activities. He was co-founder of the ALP, its Chairman in 1967, and served as an Executive Committee member on the Council of the Poetry Society in the early 1970s. In 1961, Montgomery went to Tirolo, Italy, to meet Ezra Pound. He was in the process of writing ‘Circe’, a long poem loosely based on the Odyssey that was greatly influenced by Pound. When Montgomery returned to England he developed the notion of starting a magazine that would present Bunting’s work and that of like-minded poets to the English public. He founded a little press instead. As Montgomery described to Mottram, when he wrote to poets (including Edward Dorn and Gary Snyder) asking them to publish their work, their response was that they had published their poems in enough magazines and would rather have their work consolidated and presented in a book. These ‘one-author magazines’ developed into a book-publishing venture overnight when Montgomery finally met Bunting. In 1965, Bunting made a trip to London and Montgomery offered to publish ‘Briggflatts’, Bunting’s poem autobiography as the poet had no other takers. This was the impetus behind the actual founding of the press. Montgomery named the press Fulcrum. The press operated from Montgomery’s home and had two locations in London during its lifetime: 12 Ormonde Mansions and 106 Southampton Row, WC1. The press’s registered office address, 20 Fitzroy Square, W1, appears in some imprints. If Fulcrum had an agenda, it was to publish neglected poets of worth. As Montgomery described it, he was ‘creating volumes of work which were desperately needed in this country

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and in America.’25 The press was virtually a full-time occupation though Montgomery continued to pursue his career in medicine. Montgomery was the mainstay of the press. He dealt with all editorial matters and was the final decision maker. His wife Deirdre assisted him with administrative matters and they brought in part-time helpers to assist when necessary. The production of their books was completely outsourced. For Montgomery the movement from poet to publisher seems to have been a natural progression. As he stated in an interview in The Times: Every poet has at some time to become his own publisher, arrange his own readings, be involved in production. Bunting brought out his own first book, Pound his first two. Creeley ran the Divers Press. […] The whole concrete poetry thing came out of direct involvement. Poets have to be adaptable, infiltrate the media and find out what suits them best.26

In many ways, Montgomery’s approach was more business-like than other little presses. Fulcrum books resembled the output of a mainstream publishing house rather that of a small press operating out of the publisher’s home. As Fulcrum poet Lee Harwood explained: ‘Fulcrum Press wasn’t so ‘little’! He published ‘proper’ printed books, not the usual duplicated/mimeo-ed publications we were used to then’.27 In the nine years of its existence, Fulcrum Press published forty-nine titles. The press brought out the work of Modernist British and American poets, including Basil Bunting, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jeff Nuttall, Gary Snyder, Roy Fisher, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg, amongst others. For many of the American poets, this was their first publication in England. Fulcrum Press was amongst the rare few whose work was seen to be acceptable by the establishment and whose reviews were featured in more mainstream publications such as The Times. Fulcrum was certainly the most successful and well known of the little presses in England during this period. As a reviewer in the London Review of Books remarked, more recently: ‘I don’t know of a more important or influential publisher of poetry in recent history, or one which achieved so much in so narrow a window of time’.28 One of the press’s biggest achievement was its role in 25

Montgomery interview typescript. [Eric Mottram archive: Ref 5/167/1–4 1969– [1975]] 26 ‘Pooter’, The Times Saturday Review, 2 August 1969, 20. 27 Harwood, pers. comm., 21 September, 2005. 28 Kleinzahler, August, ‘Toss the Monkey Wrench’, London Review of Books 27:10 (2005), 29–30.

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re-establishing Bunting’s reputation as a poet, and putting him back ‘on the map’.29 Montgomery also importantly provided a link by bringing the work of contemporary American poets to England and taking the work of English poets to America. One of the reasons that could be attributed to its success was Montgomery’s clear editorial intention that differentiated it from most little presses publishing experimental or avant-garde poetry. As the poet Roy Fisher, whose work was published by Fulcrum remarked: It knew very well what it thought was quality. And it knew very well what it thought was going to be part of the literary history of the times. So it could reach out for Americans at full stretch, or in full flight, as [Robert] Duncan was at that time, and say ‘This we can endorse. This we can use.’30

The press closed down abruptly in 1974, declaring bankruptcy. In 1969, Montgomery became involved in an expensive legal dispute with poet Ian Hamilton Finlay over the publication of one of Finlay’s books. The press was also in debt due to payment defaults from American distributors. In addition to these problems, there was a flood in the basement where the books were stored, and the stock was completely destroyed. The books were all pulped and Montgomery abandoned publishing to pursue his career as a full-time psychiatrist.

The Themersons and Gaberbocchus Press (1948 to 1979) Gaberbocchus Press was founded and run by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, a Polish émigré couple who came to London after World War II. Stefan and Franciszka met in 1929 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, where she was studying. Two years later they wed, beginning a partnership that would span fifty-seven years. The Themersons’ first collaboration was Apteka [Pharmacy] (1930), an experimental film. From 1930 to 1937, they produced a further four films and played a key role in the development of avant-garde cinema in pre-war Poland. They also collaborated on a number of children’s books in Polish, written by Stefan and illustrated by Franciszka. Their first independent foray into publishing was the journal Film Artystyczny (Artistic Film) for the filmmaker’s cooperative (Spóldzielni Autorów Filmowych) that they founded. The journal was edited by Stefan and designed by Franciszka. In 1937, the Themersons 29

‘Basil Bunting: poet of unique strengths’, The Times, 19 April 1985, 14. Fisher, Roy, ‘Roy Fisher in conversation with John Tranter’ Jacket Magazine 1 (2001): http://jacketmagazine.com/01/fisher-iv.html

30

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left Warsaw for Paris in search of a new artistic environment. When World War II broke out in 1939, Stefan joined the Polish Armed Forces in France. Franciszka worked briefly as a cartographer for the Polish Embassy in Paris and later in Normandy. In 1940 she escaped to England on a Polish troop ship. The couple were reunited in London in 1942. Themerson’s first book (privately published in 1944) had his longest poem written in French: Croquis dans les ténèbres (Sketches in darkness). The couple worked for the Polish government-in-exile in London: Franciszka in the cartographic unit and Stefan in the film unit of the Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation. The Ministry sponsored their last two films: Calling Mr Smith (1943), an anti-war film protesting against the destruction of Polish culture by the Nazis, and The Eye and the Ear (1944–1945). Although they continued to write and illustrate in England, neither found publishers for their own work. This was one of the reasons behind the founding of their own press in 1948. Towards the end of the war, the Themersons moved to the Maida Vale district of London where they lived for the rest of their lives, first at 49 Randolph Avenue, W9, and from 1968, at 28 Warrington Crescent, W9. In 1954, they became British citizens. Themerson subscribed to the notion of ‘internationality’ and spoke of his cultural heritage as the world at large. He affirmed this, both in his own work and in writings to others. In response to the idea that writers who live outside their home countries live in ‘statelessness’, Themerson replied: Writers are never, writers are nowhere in exile, for they carry within themselves their own kingdom, or republic, or city of refuge, or whatever it is that they carry within themselves. And at the same time, every writer, ever, everywhere is in exile, because he is squeezed out from the kingdom, or republic, or city, or whatever it is that squeezes itself dry.31

This lack of nostalgia, a sense of detachment and the Themersons’ publishing of writers based on their work rather than on their heritage are what differentiated Gaberbocchus from that of other smaller émigré publishers of the time. Stefan and Franciszka Themerson founded Gaberbocchus Press in September 1948. The press had two locations in its lifetime: for the first few years the press operated from the Themersons’ own home at 49 Randolph Avenue, W9. In 1955 the press relocated to 42a Formosa Street, W9. The reasons for the Themersons starting their own press were two-fold: it not only gave them an outlet for their own work but 31 Letter from Themerson to the ‘Committee of Writers in Exile’ of International PEN. [Themerson archive: Ref letter/ST/PEN/29.1.51]

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also provided them with an opportunity to put forward work that had been previously unpublished in England and which they believed might remain so. In some ways, it did not matter whether the book sold well or not. What was important was that it ‘exist as a document’, so future readers would have access to it.32 The name ‘Gaberbocchus’ was Latin for Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky (‘rather difficult to pronounce. […] Yet, the strange thing about it is that nobody who has once got it straight can ever forget it again’).33 The Gaberbocchus logo was a drawing of a literate, amicable dragon often found reclining and enjoying a book. Franciszka re-invented the dragon many times over the years. For the Themersons publishing was a full-time occupation. In the beginning the press also did design work and supervised production for clients, including the Polish embassy. The editorial, design, and paste-up were done in-house by the Themersons. As for the printing, except for the first two books which they typeset and printed themselves on a hand press, all other books were typeset and printed outside. In 1955 the artist Gwen Barnard and author/translator Barbara Wright joined the press on a voluntary part-time basis; neither Barnard nor Wright was paid.34 Friends and authors also informally assisted the Themersons on occasion. In the thirty-one years of its existence Gaberbocchus Press published fifty-nine titles. The press published the first English translations of European writers Apollinaire, Christian-Dietrich Grabbe, Raoul Hausmann, Alfred Jarry, Pol-Dives, Raymond Queneau, Kurt Schwitters, and Anatol Stern. Gaberbocchus authors also included Bertrand Russell, Hugo Manning, Oswell Blakeston and Stevie Smith. Publishers in Poland, Sweden, Holland, Italy, America and Germany took on a number of the books published by Gaberbocchus. In addition to their publishing activities the Themersons also ran the ‘Gaberbocchus Common Room’ in the basement of their Formosa Street office from 1957 to 1959. The Common Room was a club aimed at providing ‘artists and scientists and people interested in both the philosophy of science and the philosophy of art’ with a space where they could meet and exchange thoughts.35 The members of the Common Room met informally on a weekly basis; there were 149 members in all, each of whom paid a subscription of 10s. According to Wadley: 32 Themerson cited by Blakeston, Oswell, ‘Gaberbocchus: a Small Way-out Press Fights a Perennial Squeeze’, Books and Bookmen, 12:6 (1967), 67–69. 33 Gaberbocchus Press, ‘Gaberbocchiana’, Bookseller, 5 November 1955, 1557. 34 Wright, interview, 21 August 2003. 35 Gaberbocchus Common Room pamphlet. [Themerson archive: Ref pamphlet/GCR]

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Chapter Three Memberss were addresssed by writers,, painters, poetts, actors, scieentists, musicianss, film-makerss, philosopherss. There weree talks on ph hysics, metaphyssics and pataphhysics; reading gs of Jarry, Shhakespeare, Beeckett, Strindberrg, Queneau annd Schwitters; performances p oof modern music and scientific film. Among other contributors: Sean Coonnery and Bernard w read O’Neill; Dudley Mooree accompaniedd Michael Horo ovitz’s Bresslaw poetry reeading; Konni Zilliacus spoke on the im mmorality of nuclear n weapons..36

59. (Image Fig. 4: An innvitation to a Gaberbocchus Common Rooom event, 195 courtesy of Themerson Archhive, London.)

Eighty-two eevents took pllace during th he two years thhat the Comm mon Room was active. The programm me, like the Gaberbocchus G s list of titles, reflected Themerson’s eclectic tasttes and his inteerest in the coommon philossophies of art and sciience. The Common C Room closed iin 1959 beccause the Themersonss felt it was taking too mu uch of their w working time. Like the Common R Room, Gaberbbocchus titles which weree not intended d for the common reaader evoked mixed m reactions. The Themers rsons and Gabeerbocchus were hailed as ‘an isolatedd case of genius in low-buddget book prod duction’.37 38 Others referrred to them as a ‘works of art’ publishedd by the presss whereas some otherss found the tittles to be of ‘ssuch bizarre nnature’.39 Perh haps what

36

Wadley, N Nick, ‘On Stefann Themerson’, Comparative C Criticism 12 (19 990), 223– 262. 37 Woods, G Gerald, Thompson, Philip an nd Williams, JJohn. (eds), ‘S Stefan and Franciszka Thhemerson’. In Art A Without Bo oundaries 19500–1970 (London n, Thames & Hudson, 19972), 182–187 (184). ( 38 Nye, Roberrt, ‘Pick of the Paperbacks’, P Trribune, 29 (50),, 10 December,, 1965, 13. 39 Letter froom William R Maidment, Chief Librariaan for the Bo orough of Hampstead too Gwen Barnardd. [Themerson archive: a Ref lettter/WRM/GB/17.12.62]

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is telling is Themerson’s own identification of what was the press’s greatest strength – its refusal to conform – which he also cited as its greatest weakness. In 1979, as both Stefan and Franciszka’s health was in decline, the press was sold to Stefan’s Dutch editor and friend Jaco Groot. Themerson wrote to his friend, and Gaberbocchus author George Buchanan about this: ‘Gaberbocchus has been forced (voluntarily!) to close down. (31 years of being less equal than others has been quite enough). But we have found a new ‘home’ in […] Holland!௘40 The Gaberbocchus imprint exists today alongside Groot’s own publishing house Uitgeverij De Harmonie, Amsterdam and issues reprints of Gaberbocchus books.

Asa Benveniste and the Trigram Press (1965 to 1980) Trigram Press was founded and run by Asa Benveniste, a Sephardic Jew from New York’s Bronx who came to London after World War II. Benveniste joined the American Armed Forces as a radio operator in 1943 and was sent to Europe. In 1946, he left the Armed Forces for Paris on an army grant to study French literature at the Sorbonne. He spent most of his time in Paris with American expatriates. In the autumn of 1948 Benveniste started Zero Press with G. P. Solomos (also known as Themistocles Hoetis), another ex-Army American, of Turkish-Greek descent. The press’s early output was a little magazine, also called Zero, which was a quarterly review of art and literature. It had the distinction of being the first such journal in English to be published in Paris. The first issue that came out in Spring 1949 had new work of fellow expatriates, poet William Carlos Williams and African American author James Baldwin among others. By his ex-wife Pip’s account, Baldwin introduced her to Benveniste in 1948. Pip, then Pip Walker, was an English artist and photographer who had come to Paris to pursue an artistic career. Benveniste’s involvement with Zero lasted only two issues. Benveniste was a member of the circle that surrounded William Burroughs in Tangiers; the Benvenistes attempted to relocate to Tangiers but according to Pip this did not work out as they were unable to place her sons in French schools. In 1950 they left for England. According to Pip they had many financial difficulties and life in Britain was unsettled. Benveniste took on any work he could find. He wrote of his early days in England as a time where he was ‘straightening ice cream bricks on a conveyor belt, character acting in the provinces, 40 Letter from Themerson to George Buchanan. [Themerson archive: Ref letter/ST/GB/8.4.79]

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market gardening, rearing chickens and pedigree dogs’.41 In 1957 Benveniste returned to New York to work as a copy editor at Doubleday but living in New York did not suit him and he returned to England for good after a year. Benveniste took on other publishing work in London. Working with mainstream publishers provided him with enough experience when he wished to start his own press. In 1962 they bought a house in Camden Square. The year that Benveniste became a British citizen, 1965, his dream finally bore fruit, and Trigram Press was founded. Benveniste described himself in a Trigram catalogue as: ‘the grey eminent cabbalist poet/printer’.42 He was enthusiastic about language and the word. He had a Kabbalistic fascination with language and kept returning to this theme throughout his life.43 Benveniste wrote in some detail about this in his book, Language: Enemy, Pursuit: Gematria.44 A fierce confrontation with word, one of the best ways to barricade oneself against the confused inlay. Linguistics is not language. No one ‘understands’ language. Communication is the last word to use to describe its purpose. Though to every poet, as to every Kabbalist, there must be more to those words than their beauty. That their meaninglessness itself is part of the divine (linguistic) fabric.45

When Trigram Press was founded in February 1965 it was due to Pip’s family inheritance that Benveniste was able to afford premises separate from their home.46 The extra room also gave him space to house all the equipment and machinery required for them to print the books themselves. During its lifetime the press had several different locations: 148 King’s Cross Road, London WC1 (1965-71) and 15 Southwark Street, London SE1 (1971-73); these were both business premises. After 1973 the press operated from Benveniste’s homes: Blue Tile House, Stibbard, Fakenham,

41

Benveniste, Asa, Language: Enemy, Pursuit (Berkeley, Poltroon Press, 1980). Books in Print (London, Trigram Press, 1973). 43 Johnston, Alistair, ‘Asa Benveniste: Poet of a Unique Type’, Ampersand 10:3 (1990), 1, 4–6. The term Kabbalah (which comes from a Hebrew word that means reception) usually denotes a tradition within Judaism that focuses on mystical interpretations of scripture and esoteric doctrines about the being of God. 44 ‘A cabbalistic method of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures by interchanging words whose letters have the same numerical value when added.’ [OED] 45 Benveniste, Language: Enemy, Pursuit. 46 The fact that Gaberbocchus and Trigram had separate office premises was unusual practice for a little press. To minimize costs, most operated from the publisher’s home. 42

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Fig. 5: Doubble-page spreadd, Trigram Preess catalogue, 1973.The catallogue was designed and printed by Asaa Benveniste at Trigram Press, London.

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Norfolk (1973-75) and for the last five years until the press closed in 1980 at 22 Leverton Street, London NW5. The 1969 catalogue stated the reasons behind the origins of the press: On the presumption that no one else can do the books as well as they. The press was started in 1965, & the intention was, and still is, to publish and print the most significant poetry/art being produced at this time, in a style which would clarify and illuminate the meaning of the text/image.47

The Benvenistes named the press Trigram, after the trigrams in I–Ching, the classical Chinese text.48 Trigram’s logo had bold graphic lines reminiscent of the form of I–Ching trigrams. Paul Vaughan, who designed the logo explained: ‘It’s a way of letting other people know “what” you are. It’s a way of showing that there are a lot of other important ideas in the world: Oriental, African, American Indians’.49 Trigram Press was a full-time operation. Trigram printed what they published during the formative years of the press. The quality of their typography, design and production was of a high standard. When the press was not involved in the publishing of poetry books they designed and printed books for other little presses, notably Bernard Stone’s Turret Books, Tom Raworth and Barry Hall’s Goliard Press, Peter Jay’s Anvil Press and Fulcrum. Although Benveniste was instrumental in setting up Trigram, and it was he who solely dealt with editorial matters and made final decisions, he was not alone. Pip provided financial backing. She was involved in the design and illustration of the books during the early years, managed the accounts, and helped with collating and binding books. The other person integrally involved with the press from the beginning was Pip’s son Paul Vaughan. It is interesting to note that Benveniste makes no mention of the involvement of either his wife or of Vaughan in the aforementioned article, nor is there any reference in other published literature.50 The impression that the reader is left with is of Trigram being a one-man operation. The only acknowledgement is Vaughan’s name (as joint designer and co-printer) in the colophon of some of the books. Benveniste was unable to pay Vaughan or himself for working at the press. In 1969 Vaughan left the company to take up a job in Tunisia. Benveniste struggled to manage the production of books without Vaughan. In 1970 Trigram published only one title, Raworth’s Lion, lion, printed by Daedalus Press. After Vaughan’s 47

Trigram Press London: Poetry 1969. (London, Trigram Press, 1969). ‘The name of an ancient Chinese divination manual, based on symbols known as the eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams.’ [OED] 49 Vaughan, pers. comm., 18 June, 2005. 50 The only writer who does mention them is Alastair Johnston (1990). 48

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departure Benveniste turned more and more to outside typesetters and printers for help; on occasion, other people undertook the designing.51 As with other little presses, poets (such as John Parsons and Brian Marley), friends, and students assisted Benveniste on an informal basis doing anything that was required at the time, from vetting unsolicited manuscripts to helping with printing, collating, binding and packing books. When businessman David Wolton joined Trigram in 1971 he invested in the press, moving the concern to larger, better premises that he owned on Southwark Street, in South London. He provided financial support but his involvement in the day-to-day workings of the press was peripheral. Wolton and Benveniste did not get along and Wolton’s involvement with the press was short-lived. Trigram moved out of the Southwark Street premises by the end of 1973; Benveniste sold all his printing machines and equipment because he had no place to store them. In the fifteen years of its existence, Trigram published forty-seven books and six poster poems (a single poem with accompanying illustration printed on a broadside). Trigram’s list could be seen as a reflection of Benveniste’s own background as a Jewish American émigré living in London. The press published the work of a mixture of British, American, and European poets, including George Barker, Gavin Ewart, Tom Raworth, Jeff Nuttall, B. S. Johnson, Jeremy Reed, Ivor Culter, Barry MacSweeney, Jack Hirschman, Louis Zukofsky, David Meltzer, Piero Heliczer, Anselm Hollo, Tristan Tzara (translated by Lee Harwood) and Nathaniel Tarn. According to Benveniste, these were men who appear to work in acute conditions of exile, living & thinking on the edges of society, some outside their own countries, others within, hallucinated by a series of mental doorways. In common they have striven for an individual voice which in any circumstance has to be heard.52

Some of the work published by Trigram was quite eclectic, and evidence of Benveniste’s personal taste and passion for language. Writings pertaining to the little press scene in Britain usually make mention of Trigram Press, both for the poets published and also for the quality of the production and design. The press was also one of the few little presses that received continued support from the ACGB over a period of time. In Benveniste’s obituary in the Guardian, Jeff Nuttall said of Trigram that it 51

For example, Vanessa in the City (1971) was designed by Juliet Standing of Daedalus Press and Imaginary Postcards (1975) was designed by Donato Cinicolo 3, fellow poet and designer. 52 Trigram Press, Trigram Press London.

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In 1980 Trigram closed down due to financial reasons; when Benveniste was unable to persuade the ACGB to give a further grant he shut down operations. He married poet and artist Agneta Falk and the couple moved to Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, where he lived until his death in 1990.

Bob Cobbing and the Writers’ Forum (1963 to 2002) Bob Cobbing’s obituary in the Guardian referred to him as Britain’s ‘major exponent of concrete and sound poetry in Britain’.54 On finishing school Cobbing trained as an accountant and school teacher and took on various odd jobs to make ends meet. He resigned his final teaching post on 31 December 1964. As Cobbing recounts the story in his interviews, experimental poet Bill Butler, who was managing the Better Books paperback department at the time called Cobbing the next day and asked him to assist at the bookshop because all his staff had suddenly resigned. Cobbing joined Better Books temporarily as an assistant. When Butler left another experimental poet, Barry Miles, took over the department for a few months. By July 1965 Miles had also left (to open the Indica bookshop and gallery and found the underground paper International Times) and Cobbing was made manager of both the paperback and poetry departments at the Charing Cross bookstore, He remained there until 1967. After Cobbing’s stint at Better Books, he gave up working and concentrated on his career as a poet/artist. In his résumé, he stated: I became a full-time poet in November 1967. Since then I have earned my living from poetry, my income being mainly from poetry performances. My literary work since 1942 has included linear, concrete, visual and language poetry.55

However, while he was working, Cobbing was also pursuing his career as an artist, and later as a sound and performance poet. He described himself as being an abstract painter in the early 1940s, who later gravitated towards poetry, influenced by French poet-performers such as Henri Chopin 53

Nuttall, ‘A Poet of His Type’, Guardian, 23 April 1990, 39. Sheppard, Robert, ‘Bob Cobbing’, Guardian, 7 October 2002, 20. 55 See typescript of Cobbing’s resumé. [Bob Cobbing archive: Ref resumé/BC] 54

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and François Dufrêne. His obituary refers to his work in researching and reenergising lost performance works by Dada and Surrealist poets including Kurt Schwitters, Alfred Jarry, and Apollinaire. Cobbing began making monotype poems56 in the early 1940s: My first visual poem in 1942 was done on a Roneo. I was the steward’s clerk at a hospital and my job was to keep track of all the supplies in the hospital. In the store room was a Roneo 170 and I played around on it a bit and that’s how my first visual poem occurred.57

In addition to his own activities as a poet, Cobbing was also a founding member of an experimental arts group Hendon Arts Together (later known as Arts Together) which eventually led to the formation of Writers’ Forum. When Cobbing moved to Hendon to take on a teaching job he found that there were no cultural activities or events of interest. Together with Lewis Cook, a member of the local dramatic society and local painting group, he started Hendon Arts Together with the aim of helping to help fill the gaps in the range of arts activities in Hendon. The group met every fortnight, mostly in Bob Cobbing’s home, and the discussion focused largely on visual arts. As the group expanded to include members from all over London, a number of subgroups began to emerge to cater to various artistic interests. In December 1952 a writers’ group was formed (Hendon Writers’ Group, later known as Writers’ Forum). The writers’ group was founded and run by Cobbing and poet John Rowan. Although a committee officially ran Arts Together, Cobbing functioned as the organizing secretary, ensuring its continuance and co-ordinating all the different subgroups. In July 1954, the group, instigated by Cobbing, brought out their first publication, And magazine (subtitled ‘Hendon Arts Review’), which was jointly edited by Bob Cobbing and Mary Levien, and featured work from the group. And was a sporadic publication, the second issue (co-edited by Cobbing and poet John Rowan) taking a further seven years to appear in 1961.

56

A monotype is a print taken from oil colour or printer’s ink painted on a sheet of glass or metal. It is also the process by which such prints are produced. The process is so called because, strictly speaking, only one print can be taken from each plate. Although the artist may choose to take subsequent prints, often by adding pigment between printings, this produces changes in texture, colour, and effect. The process therefore always yields unique, unrepeatable prints. 57 Sutherland, M,, ‘The point about criticism is that it is frequently wrong’, 2001: http://www.ubu.com/papers/cobbing_sutherland.html

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Fig. 6: Typescript announcement for a Writers’ Forum poetry workshop created by Bob Cobbing, c.1973. Image courtesy: Jennifer Cobbing

Cobbing’s obituary in the Independent declared that he ‘exemplified the collective optimism which separates society in pre- and post-war Britain’.58 Cobbing was at the centre of poetry and little press activities in Britain. Having set up the Association of Little Presses along with Stuart Montgomery he was at different times Chairman, Vice President and Secretary of the organization which was essentially run from his home in Maida Vale. Cobbing also served as a member of the General Council of the Poetry Society in the 1970s and was the treasurer of the Poetry Society. Cobbing was instrumental in launching the little magazine Poetry and Little Press Information. In 1973 he was awarded a Cecil Day Lewis Fellowship at Goldsmiths College and was also awarded a Civil List

58

Johnson, Nicholas, ‘Bob Cobbing: Experimental Sound and Visual Poet’, Independent, 2 October 2002, 22.

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pension.59 Cobbing died in London on 29 September 2002, aged eightytwo. He gave his last performance at a local pub in Hackney, ten days before he died. Peter Finch, the well-known experimental poet, said of him: Bob Cobbing is the archetypal British experimenter, an enthusiast for the alternative, left-handed and non-traditional in most things. His reputation is international and he is one of the few poets in Britain to make his living entirely from his poetry.60

Bob Cobbing and John Rowan founded the Hendon Writers’ Group in December 1952 as a place for writers to meet and discuss their work with their contemporaries. As the group expanded to embrace poets from other parts of London, Rowan changed the name to Writers’ Forum, a title more descriptive of its purpose. According to Cobbing, when the group began to bring out some of the material written by those in the group (in And) poet Jeff Nuttall (a literary advisor to the group) suggested that they begin to publish individual work. The press Writers’ Forum was founded alongside the poetry gatherings in 1963.61 In And 3, of that same year, Cobbing described the press’s purpose: The poems and other writings that interest us are unacceptable to publishers, editors and programme planners. And at least some of the writing is utterly unacceptable to almost everybody. That is why we put it in. It seems to us that one of the functions of a magazine (or press) that doesn’t reckon to make a profit to print stuff which is incomplete, tentative, naïve, idiosyncratic and thoroughly irritating – as long as it has enough life to stand up and answer for itself.62

Writers’ Forum was never intended as a profit-making venture but rather as a service to poets or as Mottram called it, a ‘campaign’,63 with Cobbing’s main intention being to provide an opportunity for young poets to publish their work. It was also important that the publications were 59

‘Civil List Pensions may be awarded to persons who have achieved national distinction in the fields of literature, the arts and sciences, but who are nevertheless in financial need.’ 60 Finch, Peter, ‘Introduction’, Sockless in Sandals: Collected Poems 6 (Cardiff, Second Aeon, 1985). 61 See Cobbing’s letter to Jeff Nuttall. [Bob Cobbing archive: letter/BC/JN/ 15.2.01] 62 Cobbing, Bob, [Untitled]. And, 3 (1963). 63 Mottram’s (1974) article on the press is titled ‘Writers’ Forum: a successful campaign’.

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made accessible and affordable to the reading public, many of whom were fellow poets or students. The press operated from Cobbing’s kitchen table. It had three locations in London during this period: 29a Litchfield Grove, Finchley; 28 Redbourne Avenue, Barnet, and finally 262 Randolph Avenue, Maida Vale. Although Cobbing and Rowan started the press together, it was very much a one-man operation run by Cobbing. When asked about his involvement with the press, Rowan remarked: I did nothing apart from writing the odd poem or book of poems. Bob did everything. There is a basic misunderstanding here, deliberately fostered by Bob and me. It was useful for him to have a co-editor in theory, so he could say to poets and artists, ‘I liked it myself, but John Rowan didn’t think it was suitable.’ In fact, he never asked me for my opinion on anything, nor did he ask for any other contribution.64

Cobbing worked at the press full-time and remained the mainstay of Writers’ Forum. He was assisted on occasion by a number of people. In the 1960s Jeff Nuttall was literary adviser to the press and also contributed to the design and illustration of book covers. Jennifer Pike assisted with the design, illustration and printing of book covers, particularly in the early years. In the 1970s poets Bill Griffiths and Lawrence Upton assisted with editing and printing. As with most little presses, poets would come in and lend a hand from time to time. With most books, everything was done in-house, including printing. In rare cases where Cobbing did receive funding for a book, he would use outside printers and binders. In the thirty-seven years of its existence under Cobbing, the press published a record 1,170 publications. Among the poets published by Writers’ Forum were Jeff Nuttall, Lee Harwood, Paula Claire, Peter Manson, Bill Butler, Peter Finch, Geraldine Monk, Aaron Williamson and Jeremy Adler. The press also published work by poets from abroad, notably being the first to publish Allen Ginsberg in England. Other international poets included Eric Mottram, Canadian poets B. P. Nichol (known as bpNichol) and Bill Bisset, and European poets Anselm Hollo, Ernst Jandl, Jiri Valoch, Claude Pelieu and Hugo Ball. Although the poetry was experimental in nature the range was as varied as the nationalities of Writers’ Forum poets. In his article on the press, Mottram summed up the principal features of the press: Writers Forum became a centre for concrete poetry in this country, at one time exclusively: that is, it represented an international movement at a 64

Rowan, 2005, pers. comm., 13 September.

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time when the Establishment refused to recognise its significance. […] Writers’ Forum, from the beginning, stood for high standard of innovative work, inexpensive material production, and rapid distribution to a reading public who wished to buy poetry but had restricted budgets to balance.65

When Cobbing died in 2002 the press (and poets’ workshop) was taken over by poets Lawrence Upton and Adrian Clarke, who attempted to follow Cobbing’s campaign, though the press was not as prolific as during Cobbing’s lifetime. At present the press sporadically publishes reprints of some of its early work as well as some new work by young or unknown poets. What can be established is that each of the four London little presses featured in this study had a unique approach to publishing and was run in a distinct, individual manner based on the publishers’ personality and agenda. Each had a characteristic approach, bringing their previous experiences and personal interpretations to bear upon the book. The approach of a press was dependent on the publisher’s available resources and connections, and it contributed to the unique identity of its imprints. At the height of little press activity, these presses found their voice in a changing city by forming a community of dissent, sometimes battling against all odds – all based on the belief, as Stefan Themerson noted, that it was important for some books to simply exist so that ‘so that someone can have access to it... some day.’66

65

Mottram, Eric, ‘Writers’ Forum: a Successful Campaign’, in Mayer. P. (ed.) Bob Cobbing and Writers’ Forum (Sunderland, Ceolfrith Press, 1974), 15–24 (18-19). 66 Themerson cited by Blakeston, ‘Gaberbocchus’, 69.

PART 2: TEXTUAL TOPOGRAPHIES: URBAN SPACE IN MANUSCRIPT, PRINT AND VISUAL CULTURE

CHAPTER FOUR MANUSCRIPT BOOK PRODUCTION AND URBAN LANDSCAPE: BOLOGNA DURING THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES ROSA SMURRA

In memory of Giovanni Feo, colleague and friend In the Middle Ages, Bologna was famous all over Europe for its Studium, as the present-day University was known at that time. The student population was significant in quantity and in the quality of the people, especially regarding students of civil and canon law. It has been estimated that, in the years between 1265 and 1269 and in the year 1286, more than 2,000 students were present in the city and more than half of them (1,363) were foreigners.1 This means that two-thirds of the student population was not Italian.2 The students were a substantial group of people compared to I would like to express my sincere thanks to Sarah Rubin Blanshei for her generous help with the English translation. 1 Among the most numerous of the ultramontane students were the French, then the Germans, Spaniards, Englishmen, Hungarians, Poles and Czechs, Dutch and Scandinavians, cf. Hilde De Ridder Symoens, ‘La place de l’Université de Bologne dans la mobilité des étudiants européens,’ in Universitates e Università, (Bologna, Bologna University Press, 1995), 83-92. On John of Pontoise, English student at Bologna then bishop of Winchester, see Rosa Smurra, Iohannes de Pontissara, vescovo di Winchester (1282-1304), studente a Bologna, professore a Modena e gli altri anglici suoi compagni di studio (Bologna, Bononia University Press, 2012). 2 Sante Bortolami, ‘Gli studenti delle università italiane: numero, mobilità, distribuzione, vita studentesca dalle origini al XV secolo’, in Gian Paolo Brizzi, Piero Del Negro, and Andrea Romano (eds.), Storia delle università in Italia (Messina, Sicania, 2007), 65-115.

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the inhabitants of the city (about 50,000 people) and were an important factor in the local economy. Many businesses profited from the presence of students, such as the sectors of finance, credit, clothing, hospitality and publishing. The production of textbooks was a very complex and profitable business, typically tied to the Studium’s presence in the city; textbooks on law were an especially important section of the business. Thousands of texts for the law curriculum were made available to students in a short period of time in a mass market for books.3 This process of book production culminated in the stationer’s shop; the stationer was an intermediary between the students (who requested copies of textbooks) and the scribes (who copied the texts onto the parchment prepared by the parchment makers).4 The starting point for the production of university textbooks was the exemplar, the manuscript of the text which would be taught. This manuscript was available in the shops of accredited stationers. The exemplar was the official text, written by the Master of the Studium and validated by the academic authorities.5 The complete list of exemplaria was displayed in the stationers’ shops. These official texts were divided into pecie (pieces), each numbered separately, generally four pages long, and distributed among the scribes, who could copy them after paying a tax (recorded in the regulations of the Universitas scholarium).The pecie of a book would be given to the scribe one at a time, or would be distributed to several scribes at once, so that a large volume could be copied in a shorter time. The parchment was prepared in advance with two columns for the text and the scribes knew exactly how many words to write in each line.6 This work was also carried out by some women in their own home. The loose pages were then put in the correct order and delivered to the illuminators and the rubricators and then to the bookbinders. Some of the stationers would keep the exemplaria, which were the base of the entire book production process, in their shops (called stationes librorum). Others would keep only the pecie for the scribes in their shops (called stationes 3

Book production (manuscript and printed) has been for centuries an urban activity, but illegal printing, as John Hinks’s essay in this volume shows, was rather a rural activity. 4 Key figures in book production, they are numerous in the late thirteenth-century fiscal declarations, but there are also other sources which are illuminating in this regard. 5 Control took place through a commission (called peciari) created ad hoc in order to prevent forgery and spurious texts. 6 Giovanna Murano, Opere diffuse per exemplar e pecia (Turnhout, Brepols, 2005), 123.

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peciarum). Certain shops were both stationes librorum et peciarum. There were many skilled professionals working in the production of university textbooks. The division of labour among the craftsmen shows a significant level of specialization into four major professions, representing the main activities in manuscript book production: parchment production (parchment maker), writing (scribe), illuminating (illuminator) and bookbinding (binder). There is a great deal to be discovered about these groups. The parchment makers’ business involved a long sequence of operations, culminating in the creation of sheaves of pages (quaterni) and the marking of lines for the text.7 Among the scribes, who were mainly Italian, there were also a few foreigners but they were fully integrated into Bolognese society.

The scriptores in the Estimi of Bologna of 1296-97 While a matricula (list of members) containing the names of all the parchment makers inscribed in the guild from 1272 has survived, for the scriptores (scribes) no matricula has come down to us, since Bolognese legislation forbade the scribes from coming together to form a corporation. In the absence of an official document such as a matricula, some information can be gathered from other sources, even if none offers a complete list of the adherents to this category. Among the sources which permit us, even if indirectly, to gain evidence about the scriptores are those that are fiscal, such as for example the Estimi from the end of the thirteenth century. The Estimi of Bologna of 1296-97 consist of the declarations made by individual taxpayers, who were required to provide a written list of their properties and their value, the liquid money they possessed, their credits and debits. The taxpayers had to declare their names, the place in which they lived and whether they were new taxpayers or if they had previously presented their estimo declaration. It was not required that they declare their profession or work activity, however in some cases this information was inserted, sometimes perhaps to distinguish themselves from another person who had the same name. In other cases their work activity can be deduced when investments destined to the exercise of their work are specified.8 It has been possible thus to identify, among the Bolognese taxpayers of 1296-97, thirty-five persons 7

The level of specialization is verifiable also by the fact that to the first category (parchment production) there is ascribable a sequence of operations for the preparation of the parchment: washing, immersion in lime, depilation, a second washing in clean water, stretching on a frame and drying, trimming, bleaching. 8 Rosa Smurra, Città, cittadini e imposta diretta a Bologna alla fine del Duecento. Ricerche preliminari (Bologna, Clueb, 2007).

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who declared they were scribes, or the sons or widows of scribes. A detailed study of the Bolognese scribes by Giovanna Murano has identified 278 scribes between 1265 and 1270. That figure is very far from that which is recoverable from the Estimi of 1296-97, but one has to consider the fact that the source utilized for the present work is not comparable to those utilized by Murano whose work refers to a period almost thirty years earlier and covers a period of over five years.9 The nature of the source investigated for the present study does not permit us to have a complete picture of those exercising the activity of a scribe, but it does furnish other important information. It is therefore not on the number of scriptores identified in the Estimi, well below that which must have been the real figure in 1296-97, that our reflections can be developed; nevertheless this group, small as it is, furnishes us with an image of their social position, topographical distribution in the city, declared patrimonial status, as well as some details pertaining to their private life, which were furnished to the communal officials above all in the hope of mitigating the severity of the tax office.

Fig. 1: Number of scriptores divided into categories according to their declared valuation, expressed in Bolognese pounds (Estimi 1296-97). 9

Giovanna Murano, Copisti a Bologna (1265-1270) (Turnhout, Brepols, 2006). The sources utilized are the Memoriali which contain the registrations of all the notarial acts drawn up at Bologna having as the object of the transaction a value equal to or higher than 20 Bolognese pounds.

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From the declarations given by the scribes, it can be noted that a substantial group (ten persons) declared that they possessed nothing that would fall into the category of properties subject to taxation (see Appendix). Some of them added some details to justify their declaration of lacking property. Symon quondam Damiami wanted to specify that ‘nichil habet preter quam artem suam de qua vivit continue, silicet quia est scriptor qui scribit libros ad pretium et habet duos filios parvos. Et hec est rei veritas quod non habet nec possidet mobilia vel inmobilia’.10 Simon therefore clearly showed that he exercised the activity of a scribe for payment, a work that it seems was scarcely sufficient for him to support his two children who were still young. Franciscus specified to the officials of the Commune assigned to collect the fiscal declarations of the taxpayers that he ‘vocatur Franciscus Iacobi rasor minorum et habitat in via nova in domo monacharum monasteri Sancte Malgarite’. He described a very special kind of work; it is not clear from the source whether he was directly known as a rasor minorum, which involved a specific activity of a scriptor, that is, the insertion into the writing of the codex of capital letters in colour at the beginning of sentences, the minora. In his professional life some episodes had to have happened, unknown to us, in which he had not inserted the coloured letters but had to cancel those that were already present. He did not possess a home but lived with the monks of the Benedictine monastery of S. Margherita. Lambertus, the deceased husband of Flordelixia, also had been a scriptor. When she presented her declaration of properties, the widow Flordelixia had two older children in her care, who had not yet been emancipated: Cora, her daughter by her first husband Brunellus, and Iohannes, her son by Lambertus. In total, the nuclear family ‘non habet domum, vineam, nec terram […] nec massariam similiter’. Iacobus quondam Avançii had declared that he possessed nothing ’preter quam pauca supellectilia’ but the officials assigned to control the declarations had observed per inquisitionem that he had earned forty Bolognese pounds when working for the Commune. Among those who declared they had nothing appears also Iohannes quondam Dominici qui fuit de Massa, who had been captured during the Battle of Santerno, which had taken place 1 April 1296, during the war between the Commune of Bologna and the Estensi of Ferrara.11

10

In this text and in the following ones, it has been preferred to leave the Medieval Latin form of the document in order to preserve adherence to the given original, expression of a language trending to a vernacular Latin. 11 Smurra, Città, cittadini e imposta, 11, 163.

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Many Bolognesi had been taken prisoner while they tried to defend the Palazzo comunale of Imola from the attack of Maghinardo da Susinana, head of the enemy army. Iohannes quondam Dominici was not the only scribe imprisoned at Imola; the same misadventure fell also on Mathiolus de Ravone, who had declared a rather high taxable value (140 pounds) in relation to the other scribes. He possessed a house constructed on the land of the monastery of S. Felice, in the borgo delle Lame (today the Via Lame), evaluated by him at 100 pounds, and a small vineyard valued at forty pounds. He had two debts with different persons, one with Gabriel, who had loaned him a casetum [helmet], valued at eight pounds, which he had lost when he was captured ’ad schonfitam Ymole’; and another twenty-five pounds with Iacobo de Placentia who had loaned him ‘unum collarinum ferri quod amisi in dicta cavalcata’: the helmet and iron collar had not been sufficient to defend him in that circumstance but he had lost them and therefore had to reimburse the rightful owners. Also imprisoned at Imola was Albertus Richomani, a scribe who lived with his wife in his house, whose façade measured 9 Bolognese feet (3.45 metres), located in burgo Palee (today Via Belle Arti) and valued at eighteen pounds. The verifiers of the Commune corrected the valuation of the house to fifty pounds. He did not have debts contracted for ransoming himself from imprisonment but he had to return two pounds to Gratiadeo miniatori de cappella S. Ambroxii, a partner who had his workshop or residence exactly in the place in which during the thirteenth century were concentrated the stationers and others involved in book production. Gentil quondam Gualterii recorded in his fiscal declaration that he had already been registered in the estimi rolls of Bologna in 1270-1280 for the sum of 16 pounds, 13 soldi and 4 denari, adding that at that time ‘erat solum et modo est cum tribus filiis et uxore et maior ex filiis est VIII annorum, et lucratur, si est sanum, in anno ad plus XV libras bononinorum, qui habet unam domum in qua cum sua familia habitat et est domus pro dotibus sue uxoris, que domus […] extimat XXX libr. bon.’. Gentile sought to make the tax officials understand that some twenty years earlier, when he was assigned a tax rate of just over sixteen pounds, he was a single man, while now he had to support a family consisting of a wife and three small children; moreover, when his work went well, he earned at the most fifteen pounds a year. He had therefore a house in which he lived with his whole family, valued at thirty pounds, which however he had not bought with the earnings from his work, but which had been part of the dowry of his wife. Moreover he had to return seventeen pounds to Pietro, a Neapolitan student, and 3 pounds and 10 soldi to Raimuno Barocto, also a student at Bologna. The reason for such debts is not indicated but one could

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hypothesize that he had not carried out some copying work (or had not carried out such work correctly) for which he had received an advance payment. Iacobus scriptor quondam Iacobini scriptoris, owner of a house in burgo Argenti (today Via Arienti), belonged to a family of scribes and he also pursued the same craft. The quantity of work must not have been scarce, as one can assume from the fact that he had an apprentice or partner, who however had not yet received compensation: ‘debeo satisfacere scolari meo ultra IIII libr.’. Moreover he complained that he was not able to pay even his baker or a neighbour with whom he had debts of a few soldi (less than one Bolognese pound). Seven of the scribes identified in the Estimi of 1296-97 owned a house but not the land on which it was built; the land had been conceded by a contractual lease for a duration of twenty-nine years which was renewable. It was a widespread system not only at Bologna but also elsewhere, which permitted the owner of the land to retain ownership in exchange for an annual rent which in the twelfth century was very low, but which had been increasing over the course of time. In general this leasing system was applied for the most part to ecclesiastical properties. Canon law in fact forbade Church property being put on the open land market, since the rents from the properties were destined to works of charity. The contracts expected an annual rent proportionate to the measure of the surface of the lot, and carried an obligation to build a house in masonry. It was a widespread practice especially in periods of economic expansion when demographic growth favoured the demand for urban lands for building purposes. There was no lack, however, also of vast lands owned by lay proprietors, for the most part located at the edge of the city, which with urban growth became building sites. Some laymen also preferred to utilize such a method of renting land, rather than selling the lots. In every case, the leasing contracts permitted one who had a low income and was not able to acquire land to have a place of habitation, usually located in the peripheral areas but within the walls of the city. Thus Lupardus quondam Chalneti qui fuit de Pisis, Gulielmus Anclicus and Iohanes quondam Egidii had lands conceded to them by leasing contracts from the Benedictine monastery of S. Procolo. Gulielmus quondam Boniohannis paid rent for his land to the monastery of S. Giovanni in Monte, while another two scribes (Albertus Richomani and Guido quondam Gerardi Magnani) paid rent on their lands to lay proprietors. Finally Roçerius quondam Cavalcantis de Florencia paid an annual rent to the Commune of Bologna for the rent of land on which his house was constructed, located near Via Valdaposa. It was an area which had been part of the public zone near the most ancient walls of the city, but which at the end of the

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thirteenth century was by now in the heart of the urban centre. The Commune of Bologna had made those areas no longer useful for defence profitable through leasing contracts. Among the scribes identified in the Estimi of 1296-97 there were many who came from the Bolognese contado or from outside the region, but there also appear two of English origin: Iohannes Roberti Anglicus and Guillelmus Anclicus.12 Giovanni was the son of Roberto Anglico; father and son are recorded in documentation of the period with the label of scriptores.13 The tax declaration of Giovanni (Robert’s has not survived) offers us some information about him and the family which he had formed by marrying Bertolomea, daughter of Nicola di Unzola. The nuclear family lived in the parish of S. Giorgio in Poggiale, where he owned half of a house that had been assigned as part of her dowry to Bertolomea. It was a small building of seven and a half Bolognese feet in its façade, and thirty feet deep (= 2.85 m x11.40 m), located next to the houses belonging to the parochial church. The value attributed to the house (ten Bolognese pounds) leaves no doubt about the fact that half of the landed property of the couple was a modest habitation, although inserted in an environment in which were present dwellings of a medium-high level. According to what was required by the norms in effect, in the tax declaration it was also necessary to indicate the liquid money of which one was in possession: Giovanni di Roberto Anglico had six Bolognese pounds; the total estimo of his declaration was sixteen pounds, but the officials of the Commune raised the taxable rate to twenty-five pounds. As already noted, in the estimi there is a declaration containing the valuation of the properties of another English scribe, Guillelmus Anclicus. Just like almost all the other foreigners whose tax declarations are preserved from 1296-97, Guglielmo also presented his declaration for the first time in that general census.14 His landed patrimony consisted of half of a house, located in the parish of S. Procolo, on boundaries with Palmerius and the shoemaker Egidius. The house was not owned exclusively by him; he held it pro indiviso with a woman named Pina, who 12

I have dealt with these two personages also in Rosa Smurra, ‘Studiare e lavorare a Bologna nel Medioevo: forestieri/stranieri in città’, Rivista di Pedagogia e didattica – Journal of Theories and Research in Education 7:2 (2012), 70-110. 13 Archivio di Stato di Bologna (hereafter ASBo), Capitano del Popolo, Venticinquine, b. 16, fasc. 13. 14 ASBo, Comune, Estimi, Ufficio dei riformatori degli Estimi (hereafter Estimi 1296-97), s. II, b. 22, S. Procolo, c. 162. ‘d. Guillelmus anclicus scriptor de capella S. Proculi dicit non habere extimum et velle extimari in dicto quarterio et capella […]’.

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also was a resident of the same parish. Guglielmo valued his half of the house at fifteen pounds and added that he did not possess anything else. His total estimo was brought by the officials of the Commune up to thirtythree pounds.15 Other interesting information connected to Guillelmus Anclicus is found in Pina’s tax declaration.16 Pina was the daughter of Guglielmo who had immigrated from Parma, had married a second time, to Brunico, a Bolognese, and had two children, a male and a female: Salvino, son of the first marriage, was associated with her in the estimo declaration; Migliore had married the scribe Guglielmo Anglico. In the declaration relative to the half of the house, Pina specified that she possessed it pro indiviso with her daughter Migliore. In effect, her son-inlaw had declared the other half of the house among his own properties, in as much as it was registered to his wife, whose properties a husband had at his disposal according to the law. Guglielmo Anglico is also recognized in another important Bolognese source which concerns the leasing carried out by the monastery of S. Procolo between 1269 and 1271 and finished in 1272-1274.17 The area of the leases, consisting of vineyards and orchards of the monastery of S. Procolo, was located in the southern part of the city, between the monastery and the street that ran inside the thirteenth-century wall (Circla). In this way the monastery of S. Procolo made its land profitable by allocating 183 lots, almost all of small dimensions. Consequently, as in many other cities, the parcels of land were granted for rent (livello) for twenty-nine years with renewable contracts. Among those who were registered with a leasing contract was also Guilielmus Anglicus de civitate Heboracensi [York], scolaris; indeed two contiguous lots were assigned to him, located in the district de Piro sive de Medio, on the south side of the present-day Via Mirasole.18 The total surface of the lots (312 square metres in modern terms) included the courtyards behind the houses and the 15

Estimi 1296-97, ‘Et dicit habere medietatem unius domus positam in capella predicta Sancti Proculi, iuxta d. Egidium calçolarium et iuxta viam […] iuxta Palmerium, quam medietatem domus possidet cum domina Pina pro indiviso de dicta capella quam medietatem extimat XV libr. bon. Et nichil aliud habet in bonis’. 16 Estimi 1296-97, c. 278. 17 ASBo, Demaniale, S. Procolo, 1/5219. A study of this source has been done by Mario Fanti, ‘Le lottizzazioni monastiche e lo sviluppo urbano di Bologna nel Duecento. Spunti per una ricerca’, Atti e Memorie della Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Province di Romagna, n. s., 27 (1976): 120-144. 18 Fanti, ‘Le lottizzazioni monastiche’, 135-136; Francesca Bocchi, Il Duecento, Atlante storico delle città italiane. Emilia-Romagna 2, Bologna (Bologna, Grafis Edizioni, 1995), 40-41.

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porticoes in the facades which, as required by the contracts, had to be constructed on private land. At Bologna it was the practice that in areas of new urbanization it was obligatory to construct the house with a portico, whose use was public although it was constructed on private property.19 It is not noted whether Guglielmo Anglico kept the two lots separated, constructing two small houses, or whether he combined them in order to construct a large house but it is very likely that the construction was carried out since it was a binding clause of the contract. Perhaps it may have been his dwelling; perhaps he may have rented it, but he did not keep it forever. At the end of the thirteenth century, Guglielmo Anglico had another patrimonial location: the house declared in his tax declaration, as we have seen, came from properties from the dowry of his wife. In his youth he had come to Bologna to study; perhaps he had not finished his studies, but had found a modest arrangement, even one of dignity, using his knowledge of Latin and technical writing to earn a living. 20

Places of residence of the scribes present in the Estimi of 1296-97 Through the Estimi from the end of the thirteenth century it is possible to identify topographically the parishes in which the scribes lived, and give some brief consideration to the relationship between the properties declared and the place of residence. As one may note, in addition to the ten scribes who had declared they did not possess anything (nichil in bonis), there were also another fourteen who, while they had declared some property, were not proprietors of a house. Seven had a house constructed on the land of someone else and only five had both their own property as well as their own house. These factors suggest that one is in the presence of a quite fragile social class. Moreover only eleven lived within the twelfth-century walls (the civitas true and proper) or close to it, while twenty-three resided in the area of the burgi, that is, in the urbanized areas compressed between the walls of the twelfth century and that of the thirteenth; and one lived in an urban parish whose territory was however completely outside the walls (Ugolinus

19

Bocchi, Il Duecento, 15-18. Guillelmus Anglicus appears as a scolaris also in other documentation from 1268: Chartularium Studii Bononiensis (hereafter ChSB), VIII, ed. Guido Zaccagnini (Bologna: Istituto per la storia dell'Università di Bologna, 1927), 109, n. 213. 20

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quondam Iohannis, parish of S. Antonio de Savena).21 These reflections, relative only to the scriptores identified in the Estimi of 1296-97, show that there did not exist a neighbourhood particular to their activity. While the parchment makers were tied to the availability of water and the stationers were located near the areas greatly frequented by the students, the scribes instead were able to work in their homes, enabled to do so by a set of tools that could find space anywhere.22

Fig. 2: Map indicating the places of residence of scribes and types of house ownership. (© author)

21

It is advisable to indicate that the data could be corrected by three units for the areas of the parishes of S. Giorgio in Poggiale, S. Lucia, S. Maria Maggiore e S. Maria delle Muratelle, whose territory extended inside and outside the twelfthcentury walls. 22 See for example John Hinks’s essay in this volume. The business of printing has always been primarily an urban activity.

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Parchment makers in the Bolognese documentation Unlike other professionals in the city, who were organized in Guilds, scribes, stationers and illuminators were not permitted to join the Guilds. The prohibition was perhaps determined by the fact that the sector for the production and sale of books was under the direct control of the university rectors.23 Parchment makers, key figures in book production, were obliged to join the Guild.24 The list of members of the parchment makers, called the Matricula Cartholariorum, contains 241 names, recorded between the years 1294 and 1311. Unfortunately this membership list does not give, except in rare cases, information on where the members lived, though we know that they usually lived in their workshops. The information contained in the Matricula Cartholariorum can be added to other sources, such as the tax list from the 1280s, where the contributors are listed by residence.25 To be precise, in this list, in contrast to the individual tax declarations, the individual properties and incomes of the taxpayers are not specified, but only the tax-rate of each person. This precious source, dating from about fifteen years prior to the Matricula Cartholariorum, indicates that most of the parchment makers lived in the parish of S. Tommaso di Strada Maggiore, with a small number in the nearby parish of S. Biagio. It was an area close to the twelfth-century city walls (Mura dei Torresotti) and rich in water; in that area the city moat was fed by a canal (Savena) and therefore the water was particularly clean and suitable for the process of parchment making. Furthermore, the previously cited tax list giving information on their taxable income, enables us to estimate their wealth and assets.

23

Gina Fasoli, ‘Le Compagnie delle arti a Bologna fino al principio del secolo XV,’ L’Archiginnasio 30 (1935): 259. 24 The matricule of parchment makers refer to the years 1272-74, 1294-1311, 1378, 1379, 1410, with additions to 1786: ASBo, Comune, Capitano del Popolo, Libri Matricularum delle Società d’Arti e d’Armi (hereafter Libri Matricularum), vols. I-VI (years 1272-74, 1294, 1410); b. VI (years 1378 and 1379). Cf. Augusto Gaudenzi, ‘Le società delle arti in Bologna nel secolo XIII: i loro statuti e le loro matricole,’ Bullettino dell'Istituto Storico Italiano 21 (1889): 7-126. 25 On the dating of this important fiscal document, preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna, Fondo Gozzadini, MS 80, see Smurra, Città, cittadini e imposta diretta a Bologna alla fine del Duecento, 41-51.

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Famous parchment makers One of the most famous parchment making families was the da Villola family. They are present in records from the second half of the thirteenth century to the first half of the fourteenth century. In the thirteenth century there is evidence of Petrizolo, grandfather of the celebrated chronicler Pietro da Villola (1307-1360 circa).26 Petrizolo de Villola was a parchment maker; he lived in the parish of S. Tommaso of Strada Maggiore, and his taxable rate was fifty pounds. It is his inscription in the tax rolls of the 1280s that furnishes this information. Other information on this parchment maker can be gathered from the declaration of his own properties carried out for tax purposes by him in 1296-97.27 The cedola is no longer registered, as in the preceding document, to Petrizolus (a diminutive of Petrus), but to dominus Petrus cartolarius quondam Iohannis de Vilola. From this tax declaration we learn that he was a resident of the parish of S. Tommaso di Strada Maggiore, where, as noted above, a great number of parchment makers were concentrated during the Duecento. Petrus declared that he possessed a small piece of wooded and arable land in the hilly zone to the south of Bologna, valued at twelve pounds. It is not shown in the declaration whether he was proprietor of a house in Bologna, the city in which he lived and in which he exercised his craft as a parchment maker. From the same source we are informed of the fact that he had contracted a significant debt (twenty pounds) in order to invest it in his activity as a parchment maker (in arte cartolerie). The document concludes with the activity of verification carried out by the officials of the Commune who verified the final tax rate as thirty-six pounds. It is a question therefore of a modest patrimony which indicates that the parchment maker Petrus de Villola belonged to the trade of book production, holding a position that was not of the first level and which did not permit him to enrich himself. Also Pax and Lambertinus, sons of Petrus, were parchment makers, as is evidenced by the Matricula Cartholariorum of 1294.28 Fifteen years later the next generation appears in the matricula of the parchment-makers with Iohannes, son of Lambertinus de Villola.29 The chronicler Pietro, son of Lambertino, generated Floriano, 26

Antonio Ivan Pini, ‘Cronisti medievali e loro anno di nascita: un’ipotesi da verificare,’ in Società, istituzioni, spiritualità. Studi in onore di Cinzio Violante (Spoleto, Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1994), 677-706. 27 Estimi 1296-97, s. II, b. 31, Porta Ravennate, S. Tommaso di Strada Maggiore, c. 258. 28 Libri Matricularum, De Societate Cartholariorum, 1294, cc. CCLXXIv; CCLXXr 29 Libri Matricularum, 1309, c. CCLXXIIIr.

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continuer of his father’s work, both as a chronicler and as a parchment maker. Pietro and Floriano da Villola were the authors of the most ancient Cronaca of Bologna, which opens with this miniature, which illustrates the work and utensils of parchment makers and their workshops.

Fig. 3: A parchment-maker’s workshop depicted in the fourteenth-century ‘Cronaca Villola’ (© Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS. 1456, f. 4r).

As we can see, the workspace is emphasized compared to its building, to permit a wide vision of its workers and products. Two people are at work: one is trimming a stretched membrane with a knife; the other is smoothing another membrane with a pumice stone. On the table we can see work tools, and packs of sheets ready to be used. There are rolls of parchment and packs of sheets on the inside shelf. On the outside of the workshop, various objects are hung (brushes, fascine, dried pumpkins), and there is a shelf on which we can see some writing instruments.

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Stationes librorum and Stationes peciarum Other key figures in book production were the stationers who had the most contact with the students. The latter would request textbooks in the stationers’ shops which were mainly located near the areas in which the professors gave their lessons. Usually, ready-made books (as in a modern bookshop) were not available; the books were produced mainly on commission. Only rarely could a student buy a pre-made book; usually from someone who had already finished studying or from someone who wanted the newer version of a book. In this case the stationer was the intermediary. Ever since the beginning of the thirteenth century, stationes librorum and stationes peciarum were present in the heart of Bologna. The stationes peciarum would hire out the pecie to the scribes who would copy them out; this was the first step of the production of a university textbook, which was then sold in the stationes librorum. The workshops in which the production and the sale of books were negotiated have been the object of studies by Lodovico Frati in the twentieth century,30 and more recently by Frank Soetermeer.31 The latter author has researched the surviving sources with rigour, identifying, as far as possible, the places in which the workshops of the stationers were located. The valuable information gathered by him has permitted me to locate on a map of Bologna the locations of the workshops of the principally documented period, that is, from the second half of the thirteenth century to the first decades of the fourteenth century. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, the stationers’ shops, about ten of them, were located in the curia S. Ambroxii, that is in the area where an ancient church was located, which had hosted the meetings of citizens in the early years of the affirmation of the autonomous Commune and was the place which until the year 1200 was the seat of the first palazzo pubblico of Bologna. Thus it was a place that preserved the tradition and symbolism of the beginnings of urban autonomy, which corresponded chronologically also with that of the Studium. But, beyond that symbolic role, it was also significant as a central place of the city from the early Middle Ages. During the thirteenth century, there were several important Law schools in this area. Later, as we shall see, the Law schools moved to other areas.

30

Lodovico Frati, ‘Gli stazionari bolognesi nel Medio Evo,’ Archivio storico italiano s. 5, 45 (1910): 380-390. 31 Frank Soetermeer, Utrumque ius in peciis: aspetti della produzione libraria a Bologna fra Due e Trecento, trans. Giancarlo Errico (Milano, Giuffrè, 1997).

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Fig. 4: Map with the 13th-century Stationes librorum and stationes peciarum (© author).

The shop of Ardizzone di Guido da Milano in the curia S. Ambroxii The workshop of Alberto de Libris, seller of books designated for the Studium, was already established in the curia S. Ambroxi in the first quarter of the Duecento. Alberto had rented two lots and a few years later also acquired a building.32 Alberto’s workshop was so important and famous that it attracted the installation of other workshops of book production such as those of Bencevene da Firenze, Bonvesino and

32

Soetermeer, Utrumque ius in peciis, 33-34, 359-361.

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Bartolomeo, sons of the tailor Petrizolo di Zanne,33 and Guido of Milan, father of Ardizzone.34 Not far away was the house of Bulgaro, one of the four celebrated Masters, students of Irnerius, the famous jurist and imperial judge. 35 The curia S. Ambroxii was part of the urban area that for centuries was called ‘of the schools’ in which were located a large number of workshops for the sale and commerce of books, very easily identifiable for the students and consequently economically profitable for one who had the opportunity to carry out the production and commerce of books precisely in that place. Several important figures in the University were involved in the production and trade of books, such as the Stationarius Universitatis and the Bidellus generalis. It is interesting to note that even some Studium professors had important roles in this trade. An important statio librorum during the thirteenth century, in the curia S. Ambroxii, belonged to Ardizzone di Guido da Milano, who was both a stationer and Bidellus generalis of the Studium, a very prestigious office. The Bidellus generalis was the intermediary between the city and the students, especially foreign students; he would give them the necessary information to find money exchangers, merchants, stationers, money lenders and anything else they might need. The Bidellus would coordinate the Bolognese university system, and in the case of Ardizzone, would also be an intermediary, so that students could be supplied with books. His shop was very famous and strategically important for the Studium, and for the conservation of original books by the Masters (exemplaria). The fame of the statio Arditionis is due not only to the intrinsic quality of the books that were produced and sold there, or to its being the statio of the Bidellus generalis, but also to the fact that around 1274, during the tumults and clashes between the factions (Geremei and Lambertazzi) that ended with the banishment of the Lambertazzi, the 33 ChSB, XI, ed. Guido Zaccagnini (Bologna: Istituto per la storia dell'Università di Bologna 1937), 215, n. 505. 34 Soetermeer, Utrumque ius in peciis, 361-363. 35 On the complex figure of Irnerius, see Enrico Spagnesi, Wernerius Bononiensis iudex: la figura storica d’Irnerio (Firenze, Olschki, 1970); Francesca Roversi Monaco, ‘Il “circolo” giuridico di Matilde: da Bonizone a Irnerio,’ in Storia di Bologna, II, Bologna nel Medioevo, ed. Ovidio Capitani (Bologna, Bononia University Press, 2007), 387-409; Giuseppe Mazzanti, ‘Irnerio: contributo a una biografia,’ Rivista internazionale di diritto comune 11 (2000), 117-181; Andrea Padovani, ‘Irnerio, un dibattito attuale,’ Atti dell’Accademia delle Scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna. Classe di Scienze Morali. Rendiconti n. s., 1 (2008): 5762.

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workshop was burned and the book patrimony within it went up in smoke. The situation was at that time considered serious, so much so that a poet, perhaps a student from Provence36, not very long after sang thus of the disaster: ‘[…] tristat quin multis Arditionis codicibus spoliata domus; sua damna scolares Lombardi, Tusci, Galli flent ac Alamanni, Angligene, Siculi, Calabri, simul Appulienses, quos procul impulerat sitis ad mare philosophie...’. 37 ‘[...] it is sad to know that the house of Ardizzone has been stripped of many codices; the Lombard, Tuscan, French, German, English, Sicilian, Calabrian, and Apulian students weep over their destruction, those whom the thirst of knowledge drew to the sea of science.’

Contemporaries thus considered the workshop of Ardizzone a place for the international use of the Studium, where the students would have been able to find the tools necessary for their studies. Its value was also perceived by those who blindly, having in sight only their own political party and not the common good, had set fire to a symbol.38

The Odofredi shop (statio librorum), active from 1243 In the curia S. Ambroxii, the famous jurist Odofredo, whose mausoleum is situated in Piazza Malpighi, owned a stationer’s shop and the schools in which he taught. At his death, the workshop passed to his son Alberto, who also succeeded his father as a teacher. There worked as a stationer Ardizzone di Guido who as noted above, after the death of Odofredo (1265), began work in his own shop. Management of the workshop was taken over until 1283 by Petrizolo di Zanni the tailor, formerly the Bidellus of Odofredo. In the first two decades of the fourteenth century, the workshop inherited by the son Alberto (who died in 1300), passed successively to his son Francesco and then to Paolo doctor legum, son of Francesco, who employed another Bolognese stationer, Nicholaus di Virgilio de Suricis. 36

Giovanna Morelli, ‘L’editoria medievale bolognese,’ in Alma Mater Librorum. Nove secoli di editoria bolognese per l’Università, (Bologna, Clueb, 1988), 53-55. 37 Augusto Gaudenzi, ‘La storia del cognome a Bologna nel sec. XIII,’ Bullettino dell'Istituto Storico per il Medioevo e Archivio Muratoriano 19 (1898): 76-77. 38 Cf. Roberto Greci, ‘Il libro universitario nel Medioevo tra interessi economici e significati simbolici,’ in Dalla pecia all’e-book. Libri per l’Università: stampa, editoria, circolazione e lettura, ed. Gian Paolo Brizzi, Maria Gioia Tavoni (Bologna, Clueb, 2009), 91-101.

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Fig. 5: Map with the Schools and Stationes librorum et peciarum in the last quarter of 13th and 14th centuries (© author).

The Accursi shop The current Town Hall of Bologna is known as the Palazzo d’Accursio. Francesco, son of the famous jurist Accursio and a jurist himself, sold it to the Commune of Bologna in 1287, by which time it was used for administrative purposes. The main activity of the Accursio family shop, situated in the tower, was the renting of pecie, drawn from the exemplaria of the Masters that belonged to the family; the first was Accursio (11841263), perhaps the most important Bolognese glossator, whose texts were used for the education of many generations of jurists.39 In addition to the prevailing activity of the loan of pecie, in the workshop of the Accursi books also were produced which then were sold to the students. From 39

Murano, Copisti a Bologna (1265-1270), 84.

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1265 to 1269 the workshop, having passed by inheritance to the sons Francesco and Cervotto, was managed by Damiano di Bolognetto Rubeo, who was an exemplator, scriptor and stationarius. Zaccaria, special bidellus of Francesco d’Accursio, also worked in this workshop. In 1273 Francesco left Bologna to enter the service of Edward I, king of England.40 During this time, the workshop closed. On his return (in 1282) Francesco resumed teaching; at that time the Schools were located in the parish of S. Giacomo dei Carbonesi (via S. Mamolo), an area that, together with the neighbourhood of the parish of S. Andrea degli Ansaldi, at the end of the century was the new focus for the book trade.

The shop of Andreuccio de Libris In a fourteenth-century codex containing the Novella sextum decretalium by the renowned jurist Giovanni d’Andrea (c.1270-1348), there is a famous miniature, brightly and densely coloured, which depicts a shop of a stationer. The owner is a stationarius librorum, who I suggest may be identified as Andreutius Raynaldi Ricardi de Ybernia (fl. 1313-1361), also known as Andreutius de Libris. Giovanni d’Andrea remembered him using the pecie of some of his works.41 Andreutius, son of the Irish (de Ybernia) stationer Rainaldo (who died c.1325), is recorded as a stationer from 1325 to 1361. Just like his father, Andreutius had his shop near the church of S. Andrea degli Ansaldi,42 which was close to the church of S. Giacomo dei Carbonesi, near which Giovanni d’Andrea had moved his living quarters and his activity, as we learn from his 1315 tax declaration. In 1328-30 Andreutius’s shop was described in the fiscal declaration as the place where another jurist (Filippo Formaglini), son-in-law of Giovanni d'Andrea, would teach.43 40

Francesco d’Accursio served as the king’s principal ‘legal advisor’; the large salary he was paid and the palatial residences he occupied indicate his status. For the years that he spent in the service of Edward I, see Derek Keene, ‘Out of the Inferno: an Italian Lawyer in the Service of “Odovardo re de Anglia” and his London Connections’, in London and the kingdom: essays in honour of Caroline M. Barron, ed. Matthew Davies, Andrew Prescott (Donington, Shaun Tyas, 2008), 272-292. 41 Giovanni d’Andrea (Additiones ad Speculum Guillelmi Durantis: Additio s.v. Devote) states that in the workshop of Andreuccio were deposited pecie of the Novella in Decretales. 42 Soetermeer, Utriumque ius in peciis. 43 Giovanni Livi, Dante, suoi primi cultori, sua gente in Bologna: con documenti inediti facsimili e illustrazioni figurate (Bologna, Licinio Cappelli, 1918), 49.

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Fig. 6: A Bolognese Stationer’s shop depicted in the Novella Iohannis Andree super sextum decretalium (© Médiathèque de Cambrai, MS 620, c. 1r, first half 14th century).

The miniature, contained in the Novella sextum decretalium, depicts the moment in which Giovanni d’Andrea delivers the exemplar of the Novella in Decretales, one of his most famous university courses. The Master, dressed in a fur cape, is portrayed in the act of handing over the manuscript in the presence of a few people, mostly secular. Andreutius could be among them, as he was not only a stationer but also, between the years 1341-45, an important official in the Bolognese Studium (officialis universitatis iuris canonici et civilis Studii Bononiensis). The figure with the tall hat and short robe, holding a book, might be a bidellus of the master or a worker in the shop. The shop is furnished with a cupboard, a chest and a circular two-level stand, all for the storage of books. This miniature indicates that this kind of shop did not produce books; it was an intermediary space. These kinds of stationers were the link between the production and the trade of books.

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Conclusion The production of books was spread across various areas in medieval Bologna, in contrast to what happened in the early Middle Ages when all operations of book manufacture (from the preparation of the parchment to the binding of the manuscript) took place within a monastic or episcopal scriptorum. The areas for book trade were located near the areas of consumption, that is the Schools of Bologna where the living quarters and places in which the Masters carried out their teaching were concentrated. From the first decades of the fourteenth century onwards, we can see a change in the locations of the stationes. Indeed many of them moved away from the curia S. Ambroxii and many new shops opened in the area of the churches of S. Giacomo dei Carbonesi and S. Andrea degli Ansaldi, which was where the Law Schools were concentrated during the fourteenth century. So many shops opened in this area that, over the course of time, the street connecting the two churches became known as Via dei Libri (Books Street). Finding unpublished documentation relative to the fiscal declarations of the scribes (from the Estimi of Bologna of 1296-97) has permitted us to locate with precision not only the areas of the city in which they lived but also to analyze the nature of the properties in their declarations. While the number of declarations treated is not high, they are significant in as much as they permit us to conclude that the scriptores lived mainly in the peripheral neighbourhoods of the city, where the values of houses were generally more modest. This pattern of distribution confirms the fact that the scribes did not need to locate themselves either in urban areas rich in water (like the parchment makers), or near the places frequented by the students (as the stationers had to do), and so were able to perform their work at home. Moreover this source has enabled us to conclude that the documented group declared a patrimony whose value was, except in a few rare exceptions, usually low, and even that ten people had nothing to declare. Although work is still in progress that will compare the estimi of various workers in the book production industry, at this point by comparing the estimi of the stationers with those of the scribes, one can anticipate that the stationers identified in the same source declared evaluations of their properties that placed them in a medium-high taxable category. To know the patrimonial situation of workers in book production at Bologna contributes to enriching our understanding of the cultural aspects of their activity and to place them in the socio-economic context of the city.

Alanus q. Guillielmi Flordelixia uxor q. Lamberti scriptoris; Iohannes filius q. domini Lamberti de Flexo, Cora f. q. Brunelli fratres et filii dicte domine Flordelixie Symon q. Damiani Bonaventura filius q. Raynaldi qui fuit de Florentia Michilinus q. Petrizoli Francischus Iohannes q. Dominici qui fuit de Massa Iuxtus q. Syverii Iohannes q. Ventorini Iacobus q. Avançii Roçerius q. Cavalcantis de Florencia Gulielmus q. Boniohannis Guido q. Gerardi Benvenutus Rodaldini Guilielmus Anclicus Robertinus q. Alberti de Borçano Iohannes Roberti Anglicus, scriptor; Bertholomea Nicholai de Unçola uxor dicti Iohannis Albertus Richomani

S. Maria della Mascarella, 004 S. Tommaso del Mercato, 048

S. Maria Maddalena, 007

S. Damiano, 088 S. Lucia, 090 S. Lucia, 329 S. Margherita, 022 S. Margherita, 036 S. Felice, 453 S. Giorgio in Poggiale, 114 S. Martino dei Caccianemici, 008 S. Mamolo, 181 S. Lucia, 197 S. Margherita, 029 S. Procolo, 052 S. Procolo, 162 S. Felice, 105 S. Giorgio in Poggiale, 113

Name

Parish Residence

Appendix

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15.00.00

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Nothing

Nothing

16.00.00 18.00.00

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Nothing 10.00.00 13.03.00 15.00.00

Nothing Nothing Nothing

Nothing Nothing Nothing

Nothing

Estimo Total (Bolognese pounds)

103

S. Procolo, 199 S. Antonio di Savena, 051 S. Maria Maggiore, 499 S. Caterina di Saragozza, 287 S. Lucia, 232 S. Procolo, 233 S. Biagio, 087 S. Felice, 203 S. Caterina di Saragozza, 133 S. Maria del Tempio, 013 S. Felice, 306 S. Procolo, 044 S. Salvatore, 004 S. Felice, 321 S. Maria delle Muratelle, 126 S. Felice, 123 S. Maria Maggiore, 467

104 Iohanes q. Egidii Ugolinus q. Iohannis Benvenutus q. Ugolini Catanii Petrus q. Dominici Iacobus scriptor q. Iacobini scriptoris Lupardus q. Chalneti Iacobus f. Francischi Iacobi Longi Rodulfus q. Gandulfi Gentil q. Gualterii Bernardus q. Petri Guillielmus q. Thomaxis Testacalvatus de Mutina Bencevene Opizini Lambertinus q. Danieli notarii Guido Iohannis Bencevenis, scriptor et notarius Petrus q. Bernardini de Stiatico Mathiolus de Ravone Petrus q. Richardi

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27.00.00 30.00.00 30.00.00

18.00.00

31.00.00 35.00.00 42.00.00 45.00.00 87.00.00 90.00.00 120.00.00 140.00.00 176.00.00

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CHAPTER FIVE DEFINING THE SCOTTISH CHAPBOOK: A DESCRIPTION OF THE ‘TYPICAL SCOTTISH CHAPBOOK’ DALIAH BOND

Introduction When researching the Scottish chapbook, it is impossible to ignore the opposing views of the leading scholars in the field including John Fraser, William Harvey and Victor Neuberg. Their views, although not widely incompatible, differ enough to warrant clarification.1 Ideally, the definition would be allowed to form organically, based on the available material, but this is simply not a viable option when dealing with such a large corpus of material. One must have parameters in place, as not to do so could lead to the consultation of every ‘pamphlet’ between two and two hundred pages in the British Isles, and one would still be no further forward in the difficult task of defining the Scottish chapbook. This conclusion is not without practical consequences and problems, for it seems almost cavalier to discard chapbooks based on some seemingly rigid criteria. For instance, one could discount the inclusion of a chapbook that could not be contained in one sheet by reasoning that it could not therefore be literature of the ‘common man’ due to its paper consumption and cost.2 But to do so would be to attach an inflexible view of distribution and readership. Although the 1

For further information on the historiography of the Scottish chapbook see especially William Harvey, Scottish Chapbook Literature (Paisley, 1903), John Ashton, Scottish Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1882), John Fraser, The Humorous Chapbooks of Scotland, (New York, 1873) and F.W. Ratcliffe, ‘Chapbooks with Scottish Imprints in the Robert White Collection, The University Library’, The Bibliotheck, 4 (1964), 88-174. 2 Ratcliffe, ‘Chapbooks with Scottish Imprints’, 92.

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higher price could imply that these were aimed at the wealthier educated classes, the presumed price alone does not exclude the possibility that the lower literate working classes had access to such works. Also, this view presumes that certain works circulated exclusively within specific classes and that there was little or no crossover. It fails to take into account the prospect that those who bought it may have circulated such material in their locale or further afield, thus making it very difficult for the scholar to discern the exact audience while providing the poor the chance to read even more expensive works secondhand. Attempting to define a chapbook in this manner leads an attempt to fit exemplars to the definition, distorting the larger picture. This may seem insignificant but, for a body of material that largely survives through its preservation by collectors, definition has undoubtedly influenced the material that sits in the archives today. There is a danger in producing parameters to delineate a body of extant material which is itself the produce of idiosyncratic yet conscious patterns of collecting. Whilst endeavouring to define the chapbook, it is also imperative to question whether doing so loses the very essence of the genre. And if so how do we attempt it? On one hand we should aim to reach a definition that does not restrict our understanding but conversely it is important not to lose focus by attempting to analyze too many exemplars. The issue is further complicated by the chapbook’s dual nature. Encompassing two very different spheres of categorization: first, as items of literature and second as commodities, it does nonetheless lend itself to widely differing views of the chapbook, which must somehow be integrated into our definition. A final point concerns the significant term ‘Scottish’. Previous treatment of the chapbook has principally concentrated on English examples, with little attention given to possible differences in those produced in, or for, Scotland. This is particularly important since the chapbook survived in Scotland long after the end of its heyday in the rest of the British Isles. With this in mind, this chapter will aim to define what we mean by the Scottish chapbook or maybe more accurately the ‘typical Scottish chapbook’, before any attempt is made to analyze the genre and its significance in popular culture.

Origins: The Word Before discussing our understanding of the typical Scottish chapbook, it is useful briefly to understand the historic view. In 1873, John Fraser concluded that the most useful way to address the definition of the chapbook was to see it simply as an item carried by chapmen or pedlars, but, conceded that

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Originally, the word had a more limited signification; the earliest chapbooks being nearly uniform in size and price. Each volume consisted of a twenty-four page single sheet, duodecimo, execrably coarse in texture, dirty gray or whity-brown in colour, illustrated by one or more rough woodcuts, and printed in a rude and unfinished style of typography.’3

Over thirty years later in 1903, William Harvey concurred with Fraser’s view of the chapbook being essentially an item of literature carried by the chapman and supposed that the chapbook was anything from a broadside to a decent-sized volume, and it received its name ‘chapbook’ not on account of its size or its contents, but in virtue of the fact that it was chiefly circulated by the pedlars who sought to carry civilization and soft goods into hamlets and farm towns far from the madding crowd.4

Significantly, Fraser notes the changing definition of the chapbook, and comments on the dominance of the twenty-four-page exemplar in the eighteenth century. His statement suggests that the usage of the word became much looser with the passing of time. This must be borne in mind when we look at the data in more detail. Harvey’s assertion in 1903 that a chapbook was ‘anything from a broadside to a decent-sized volume’ implies that by this point in time, the original meaning had been expanded to include the majority of reading material carried by the chapman. F. W. Ratcliffe in Chapbooks with Scottish Imprints in the Robert White Collection, the University Library, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, categorically stated that The obvious characteristic of the chapbook is that it is contained in the sheet. It belongs to the same tradition as the broadsheets not with the signed sections of the book. It may be in 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 but it should not exceed one sheet.5

Here we have three differing views on the chapbook. To be contained in one sheet, the price of the publication would have greatly reduced the cost; this contributed to the belief that the chapbook was aimed at the lower literate working classes. But, to subscribe to Ratcliffe’s view would be to exclude numerous exemplars based on format alone. Conversely, Harvey’s assertion that it could be anything from a broadside to a decent-sized volume, may appear too vague at first glance, but is understandable if we 3

Fraser, Humorous Chapbooks, 3. Harvey, Scottish Chapbook Literature, 12. 5 Ratcliffe, ‘Chapbooks with Scottish Imprints’, 92. 4

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see the chapbook as merely a ‘small book’, carried by chapmen. This second option allows the researcher flexibility. If we return to the original meaning of the word, the actual word ‘chapbook’ originates from the term ‘cheap-man (chapman) book’. Douglas Harper recorded that the chapbook ‘[in] 1824, [as] shortened for chap (man) book, so called because of chapmen (see cheap) sold such books on the street’. He continued on the definition of cheap in this context, to mean ‘a purchase from a petty tradesman, huckster’. Reverend Walter W. Skeat writing in the nineteenth century described the chapman as, ‘a merchant, later a pedlar, haggler’.6 Consequently, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that at its most basic, a chapbook was simply an item of literature carried by a chapman. However, just because the chapman usually carried cheap goods, it does not by default rule out the likelihood that he also carried longer, more expensive works. Chapbooks were often provided on credit to chapmen, who carried them around the country, selling from door to door, at markets and fairs, and eventually returning to pay for the stock they had sold. An investigation of the accounts of English printer Edward Midwinter in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, details over £1000 that had to be written off as bad debt owing to his involvement in the chapbook trade.7 This system of credit enabled a wide distribution and large sales with minimum outlay and also provided the printers with feedback about what titles sold well. Moreover, it suggests that it was possible for a chapman to ‘test’ the market by carrying more expensive works with little risk. It may then be prudent in the future to research the inventories of printers to trace chapbooks sold on this basis to discern which titles sold best and where. We must remember that just as the term chapbook evolved, it is likely that the stock the chapman carried also evolved in the latter part of the nineteenth century as his role changed after the mechanization of the printing press and the improvement of transport links in Scotland. John Ashton noted in 1882, of the chapman that previous to the eighteenth century these men generally carried ballads. The chapman proper is now a thing of the past, although we have hawkers, travelling ‘credit drapers’ or ‘tallymen’ that penetrate every village, but the chapman in the strictest sense is no more.8

6

Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford, 1888), 103. 7 Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London, 1981), 91. 8 Ashton, Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century, vii-viii.

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This definition was coined in the nineteenth century by collectors, and not used when these works were at their most prolific. It is well documented that these works were instead referred to as ‘lyttle books’, ‘small books’ or garlands.9 It may seem pedantic to stress the point, but we must attempt to understand the differing interpretations across the life of the chapbook. For example in the early eighteenth century, the chapbook was a twenty-fourpage work. But, the current normative view of the chapbook is undoubtedly an eight-page exemplar. It is for this reason that the need to define the ‘typical Scottish chapbook’ is of such importance.

The Database With the decision made to define the ‘typical Scottish chapbook’, the next task was to determine how best this could be accomplished. After consideration, a database of chapbooks with a Scottish imprint held in major UK libraries was created. The primary aim was to document the main characteristics of as many ‘Scottish chapbooks’ as possible, so that one could speculate about the attributes of the ‘typical chapbook’. The database includes full title, author, place of publication, date, printer’s/publisher’s name, pagination, whether or not the item was illustrated and its theme and content. The notes column also records identifying marks or interesting information to aid further research. The database currently holds 5,781 records from fourteen UK libraries.10 For the sake of numbers and time, I had to make a decision about how chapbooks were categorized as ‘Scottish’. Chapbook printers were not overly concerned with date and location of printing and thus many do not possess an imprint. Consequently there may be a number of exemplars not 9

John Morris, ‘The Scottish Chapmen’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote (eds.), Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade (London, 2007), 159-86. Morris notes that the first recorded use of the word was in 1824 in Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Library Companion on p. 238: ‘It is a chapbook, printed in rather a neat black letter…’, 159. 10 The University of Aberdeen (AU), Edinburgh Public Library (EPL), Glasgow University Library (GUL), National Library of Scotland (NLS), Newcastle University Library (NUL), Manchester Rylands Library (MRL), The British Library (BL), The V&A(VA), Stirling University Library (SUL) Dundee University Library (DL), Cambridge University (CU), Oxford University (OU), Lauriston Castle (LC) and St Andrews University (STA). Information from the EPL, GUL, NLS (partially) and SUL has been adapted from the Glasgow Chapbook Database. Information for the V&A adapted from John Meriton, Small Books for the Common Man (London, 2010). The remaining database entries were derived from electronic or paper records.

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in the database that should have been queried. A number of records without an imprint have been included where they had already been verified as ‘Scottish’ by previous research.11 Third, some entries are dated ambiguously and noted as [-] or [18--] or [1820-1830]. In the case of the latter this refers to evidence from the Scottish Chapbook Project. Therefore when using the data, it is important to understand that there are a number of chapbooks that may well fit into the time period in question. Despite these caveats, the database is nonetheless a very useful tool when attempting to see the chapbook genre on a larger scale. From the data it is clear that the typical Scottish chapbook was a ballad, printed in Glasgow in the nineteenth century, eight pages long and in possession of a single illustration on the frontispiece. Not far removed from the generally accepted definition of the chapbook, the main difference is the emergence of this definition from the material itself, as well the significant minority of works that are ‘atypical’. The remainder of this study will look at each of these parameters in more detail and examine their limitations.

Content It is easy to become lost in the technical details of defining the chapbook. Harvey, Ashton and Neuberg compartmentalized the chapbook into neat themes: religious, instructional, trade, ballads, the occult and political satire. Indeed, from the database, the chapbooks fall very broadly into similar categories. The ballad stands out as the most dominant type of chapbook in our database. In fact over 80% of the chapbooks are ballads. The remaining 20% can be broken down into six main categories, these chiefly being histories, travel guides, religious, topical news, instructional works and stories, although it must be noted that these are very loosely conceived as most of the chapbooks overlap greatly. Indeed, many of the ballads could fit in three or more of the categories. Moreover, some classed as ‘topical’ were on further investigation found be to written decades after the event and thus may be more accurately classed as ‘stories’. The numbers are not surprising; it was clear from earlier smallscale test studies that the ballad appeared to be the most ‘popular’ type of chapbook. But the dominance of the ballad does suggest that those who purchased them had money to spend on entertainment and leisure. Printers were not producing many topical, practical or religious works, but items of 11

These records are from the Scottish Chapbook Project where many records without a clear Scottish imprint were classified as printed in Scotland from external research.

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enjoyment. Some would argue that their proliferation may imply that the chapbook was indeed aimed at the lower-class literate workers. Generally the ballad was not an item of high literature but it would be dangerous to presume that the wealthier classes did not also read ballads. There are many examples of ballad chapbooks that cost much more than the income of the lower literate working classes would allow for leisure purchases. Looking at the cost of the chapbooks surveyed, 205 (4%) list a price. Most of the chapbooks were priced at one penny (159), or three pence (22). This was followed by two pence (22) and six pence (8). Statistically speaking, nearly 40% of chapbooks with prices cost two pence or more. In fact, there was even a ninepenny work, ‘A Wheen Scraps For A Laugh Part First’, printed by Willie Smith in Edinburgh, which was fifty pages long and illustrated (with one illustration).12 Chapbooks were not just an earlier version of the penny dreadful. They could, and did, cost more than one might expect a poorer person to spend on something which was merely entertaining. Who then were the likely consumers? One could sensibly concur with the view of Rab Houston, that the stratification of those who read ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature was not as strict as one may be led to believe.13 Moreover, as we will see when looking at the twenty-fourpage exemplars later in the chapter, it is evident that a significant part of the market catered to longer and thus more expensive works. And although the majority of these works could be deemed to be more suited to those in the tradition this is not exclusively so. A good example of a chapbook that does not conform to the traditional view is Flyting betwixt Polwart and Montgomery. Printed in Edinburgh in 1688 this chapbook is an example of a thirty-two-page work in octavo. It has been attributed to Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth and Alexander Montgomerie after comparison with works known to be by Hume and Montgomerie.14 This was first printed in Edinburgh in 1621 by Andro Hart under the title The Flyting betwixt Montgomery and Polwart. Alexander Montgomerie (b. 1550) was a Scottish courtier and poet with Hume (b. 1557), a member of the Castalian Band. The Castalian Band was a select circle of favourite poets and musicians of James VI, and thus a reflection of the young king’s personal and literary tastes. It must be noted that there is some debate as to the authenticity of the term but their

12

Edinburgh Public Library, A Wheen Scraps for a Laugh First, Z 2014 C4 (394). Rab Houston, ‘The Literacy Myth: Illiteracy in Scotland 1630-1760,’ in Past and Present 96 (1982), 81-102. 14 Glasgow University Library, The Flyting Betwixt Polwart and Montgomery, Mu56-h.29 item 6. 13

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poetical work is not in dispute.15 Their works were principally written in Middle Scots. Alexander Montgomerie was already an established poet when he joined the band, claiming his membership through a victory in a literary joust in the Flyting betwixt Montgomerie and Polwart about 1583. Flyting was a contest consisting of the exchange of insults, often conducted in verse, between two parties. The chapbook opens with a message to the reader: ‘No cankering Envy, Malice nor despite, Stirred up these Men so eagerly to flyte. But generous Emulation: So in Playes Best Actors flyte and ra[i]l, and thousand ways Delight the itching Ears. So wanton Currs Wast with the gingling of a Courteous Spurrs. Bark all the Nicht and never seek to bite. Such bravery these Verses moved to write. Would all that now de flyte would flyte like these And laws were made that none durst [flyte] in prose, How calme were then the world; perhaps this law Might make some madding wives to stand in aw. And not in filfthy prose out-roar their Men. But read these Roundelayes to them till then, Flyting no reason hais, and at this time Here it not stands by reason, but by rime; Anger t’asswage make Melancholy lasse, This flyting first was wrote; now those the Press Who will not rest content with his Epistle. Let them sit down and fltye and stand and whistle.’16

There are four known surviving copies of this text, including one defective copy in the British Library. The lack of copies may be indicative of its destruction through extensive use but, in truth, it is difficult accurately to ascertain its popularity. Indeed from their other poems it is clear that the Castalians were popular with contemporaries for their wit and skill. This text is not simple unrefined verse and involves a lot of reading and understanding of poetic skill and licence not usually associated with the lower literate classes as they were precluded from the level of education implied in the work. Alternatively, it may suggest that the well-educated reader also had an interest in inexpensive, portable literature that contained 15

Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘James VI’s Castalian Band: A Modern Myth’, Scottish Historical Review 80:2 (2001), 251-259. Bawcutt argues that the term has become clichéd and does not refer to a singular set or poets. 16 Glasgow University Library, The Flyting, Mu56-h.29 item 6

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material relevant to them m which may y explain its rrelatively finee quality. This adds m much credencee to the argum ment that perhaaps the stratifi fication of intended auddience and reaadership was not n as strict ass assumed.

Locattion One of the first questionns asked wheen discussingg the definitio on of the typical Scotttish chapbookk is ‘what mak kes it Scottishh?’ In an ideal scenario, every chapbbook in the Brritish Isles wou uld be biblioggraphically surveyed to ascertain if it was printeed in Scotland d. This is sim mply not posssible. The decision waas taken only to t include tho ose which madde an explicitt claim in the imprint to having beeen printed in Scotland. Off the 5,781 ch hapbooks recorded, 2440 of them were w without location but w were included d as they have been vverified by ressearchers asso ociated who w worked on the Glasgow Chapbook P Project.17 Thee remaining ch hapbooks werre printed in six main locations, G Glasgow, Edinnburgh, Stirling, Falkirk, Paaisley and Kilmarnock. 2172 (40%)) of the chapbbooks were prrinted in Glassgow; then Ed dinburgh, 907(17%); S Stirling, 854 (15%); and Fallkirk, 581 (100%).

No. of Chaapbooks Prrinted per L Location N No. of Chapb books Printted 2172 907 854

581

211 172 2 89 57 46 43 40 4 35

mber of chap pbooks printeed in Scotland d by location Table 1 Num 17

Scottish Chhapbooks Inform mation: http://sp pecial.lib.gla.acc.uk/chapbookss

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The majorityy of chapbookks were producced in lowlandd Scotland, con ncentrated in Glasgow,, Edinburgh, Stirling and Paisley. P Aberddeen and Peterhead in the North E East are particularly notewo orthy. Althouggh they produ uced only 81 (1.4%) chapbooks thhey were the ninth and tw welfth (of 27 7) largest producers off them. This serves s dramatiically to highllight the predo ominance of lowland production, and a highlightss the need to research in detail d the production oof these centrres to see to what w extent thhey were publishers of specific gennres of chapbbook. When we look beyyond the maiin twelve locations off printing, we can see that the t locations are much more evenly spread. The majority are again a clustereed in the centrral belt of Scottland, but we do see m more in the Noorth East of Scotland, S incluuding Elgin, Banff B and Peterhead. The printers of chapbook ks, beyond tthe Central Belt, are confined to the east coasst though we know from thhe National Library L of Scotland Inddex of Printerrs that there were w presses iin the Westerrn Isles at this time. E Either they prroduced no ch hapbooks at aall or their nu umber of productions was so sm mall that no examples haave survived.18 Some were produceed as far sou uth as Kirkcuudbright and Newtonchapbooks w Stewart. However, to datee there are no o surviving chhapbooks from m north of Elgin.

Numberrs of Scottissh Chapboooks by Pagina ation 3762

Number off Chapbookss 1596 75

100

22 2

19

17

34

Table 2 Paggination of ch hapbooks held d in databasee 18

National Liibrary of Scotlaand (NLS), The Spread of Scotttish Printing http://digital.nnls.uk/printing//

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Pagination Of 5,781 chapbooks, 3,762 (65%) were eight pages long. Even at first glance, this coincides with the earlier hypothesis that chapbooks needed to be portable in bulk to maximize the number of titles and copies the chapman could carry at one time. However, the twenty-four-page chapbook was well represented, constituting over 27% of the total number and combined the eight- and twenty-four-page chapbooks constitute over 92% of all chapbooks in the database. This would seem to suggest that an optimum size for bulk sales was eight pages but that there was a market for a larger work which was both portable and priced at a level to attract sales. The remaining chapbooks were represented as follows: sixteen pages (1.7%), twelve pages (1.3%), thirty two pages (0.4%), thirty six pages (0.3%) and forty eight pages (0.3%). Let us first look in more detail at the eight-page exemplar. As an item of ephemera that survived mainly due to collectors, it is understood that its dominance in the database may be skewed. Collectors collect for a reason, thus it may be the case that many of the eight-page examples survive because they were easier to store, based on the collector’s definition of the chapbook or simply their proliferation at the time of collecting. However, even with that qualification in mind, the sheer number of chapbooks in this category leads one to conclude that this was indeed the most popular ‘type’ over the period. The quantity in the database combined with the earlier notion that a chapbook was first and foremost simply an item carried by a chapman and a ‘lyttle book’ reinforces this conclusion. At 27% of the sample, the twenty-four-page chapbook is interesting. Despite assertions that the chapman would have preferred to carry more copies of smaller works, to aid the variety of tastes he could cater to, it is clear that a significant part of his market had an interest in these longer works. It would be interesting in the future to explore the content and theme of these exemplars to ascertain whether there is a discernible difference in target audiences, which has already been suggested in the discussion above about The Flyting Betwixt Polwart and Montgomery. Just over three-quarters of the twenty-four-page chapbooks were religious in nature, such as A sermon preached at the opening of the synod of Perth and Stirling, written by John Bruce and printed by Thomas Lumisden in Edinburgh, 1735. The other quarter describe ‘travels’, such as John Hadding’s, A description of the four parts of the world,: viz. Europe, Asia, Africa, America. With the several kingdoms, &c. contained therein. Together with the religion, nature of the air, soil, and different traffick of each province or kingdom, printed in Stirling by C. Randall in 1800. There

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were also a number of compilation works which for the most part appear to be ‘classics’ such as Alibaba; or, the forty thieves destroyed by Morgiana, a female slave, On which is founded the new operatical Romance of the forty thieves printed by J. Morren in Edinburgh; many of these compilations were undated. These works were not for day-to-day sale but were items that the chapman knew he could occasionally sell and so carried a couple with him despite their extra weight, for the profit to be made if he sold one was substantial. Moreover, the majority of the twentyfour-page exemplars were printed in duodecimo to reduce their size and thus ensure ease of transportation for the chapman. Additionally, although it has been argued that the extra paper would have increased the cost of such a chapbook beyond the means of the lower literate classes (e.g., Flyting betwixt Polwart and Montgomery) the quality of the typography and paper must be assessed before this can be determined. A longer work produced very cheaply could cost more to print that a high-quality eightpage chapbook. It is therefore useful once again to distinguish between the typical chapbook of eight pages and the less typical twenty-four-page chapbook which was nonetheless recognizable as such. Moreover, this analysis has shown that further work should concentrate on looking at the dates of the twenty four page work versus the eight page works, to establish if the view of John Fraser, that the earlier chapbook was eight pages can be sustained.

Date Of the chapbooks recorded, 2,332 (40%) were dated. The remaining chapbooks were approximately dated within broad parameters based on printers’ known activity, printers’ marks and identifying features such as use of particular type. Just five exemplars were printed in the seventeenth century, 345 in the eighteenth century and the overwhelming majority in the nineteenth century. It is therefore easy to understand why much of the previous study has concentrated on the nineteenth century, since that is when most chapbooks were produced. By the time collectors became more interested in the chapbook as a tool of recreating the past during the nineteenth century, the majority of those chapbooks from earlier centuries had probably been lost, through neglect or recycling in an age when paper was often reused. Turning to the chapbooks of the seventeenth century, three of them are religious, and there are no ballads. Significantly, they are all over twenty four pages. First, The Christians daily practice of piety: or, Holy walking with God. As also, Scripture rules to be observed in buying and

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selling, printed in 1698 by the Heirs and Successors of Andrew Anderson in Edinburgh. Second, True Christian love. To be sung with any of the common tunes of the Psalms, [David Dickson] printed in 1680 also by the Heirs of Andrew Anderson. There was also Two sermons preached by Mr. William Guthry, minister of the Gospel, at Finnick…1662, printed in 1693 in Glasgow. The remaining two chapbooks were The flyting betwixt Polwart and Montgomery, [Alexander Hume]. Newly corrected and amended printed in 1688, supposedly printed in Edinburgh in 1688, and lastly, The way to true honour and happiness. A friendly address to all parents, masters of families and landlords... To which is added, A memorandum for mothers. By John Mitchel 1699, printed once again by the Heirs of Andrew Anderson in Edinburgh, 1699. Interestingly, both these non-religious seventeenth-century chapbooks were also atypical at thirty-two and thirty-six pages respectively. It is likely that these survived because they, along with the religious works, were not the typical later chapbook and they possessed content (poetry in the case of Alexander Hume’s work, and notes on a happy family) that was less ephemeral than their ballad counterparts. Another example of this is displayed in The Christian’s Daily Practice of Piety, printed by Robert Sanders in 1700 (see Fig. 1). Although this copy has no author it may have been written by Richard Alleine 1611-1681, an English Puritan divine born in Somerset who it appears wrote exclusively spiritual works. His work, Spiritual Piety was published in Edinburgh in 1703 and it is possible that this was an abridged form of his work for the chapbook market. There were a number of Christian manuals written in this period such as that by the ardent Puritan, Lewis Bayly. His The Practice of Pietie was extremely well received and was reprinted until 1821 in over seventy editions.19 The Practice of Piety is a daily instructional manual to ensure that one leads a good Christian life. The author sets out a number of ‘to dos’ in order to resist the Devil. Determining the importance of religious texts and determining why this one survived is difficult. However, looking to England, it must be noted that religious chapbooks in England were very popular and often warranted many reprints. Margaret Spufford states that religious books were bestsellers in seventeenth-century England with a ready market and continues that, ‘popular religion, like astrology, was an important phenomenon in the seventeenth century’.20

19

This is based on research conducted on the numbers of surviving copies of his works over a number of editions from the ESTC. 20 Spufford, Small Books, 197.

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Fig. 1: Glasgow University Library, Mu33-h.13, 2.

With the vast majority of surviving chapbooks coming from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it makes it is understandable that little work has been done on the seventeenth century. There are not enough exemplars to make any useful conclusions. By basing definition on numbers from the database, the term ‘chapbook’ is defined based principally on what survives. It is clear that most chapbooks survived because of collectors, and thus reflect their individual tastes. Ross Roy stated that, based on survival rate approximately 200,000 chapbooks must have been in circulation at their height of popularity in Scotland. But if we are honest, we simply will never know. Chapbook production and distribution were by and large not recorded, nor do we know exactly the extent of the piracy of such works, thus it is difficult to ascertain just how representative is what we have left for the seventeenth, eighteenth and even the nineteenth century. Therefore we must understand that the conclusions we draw are based on this corpus has inherent limitations. We are fortunate that we do have a reasonably large sample to work with, especially from the nineteenth century. Simply put, there is no alternative. This realization

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further reaffirms the need for a wide definition of the chapbook, as far as possible.

Printer/Publisher Chapbooks in Scotland appear to have been printed by a number of large printing families, some spanning many decades. Nine named printers stand out: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Booksellers - 1236 J & M Robertson of Glasgow - 671 Randalls of Stirling - 439 Johnstons of Falkirk - 399 J Morren of Edinburgh - 285 W Macnie of Stirling - 266 Hutchison & Co of Glasgow - 129 Miller of Dunfermline - 113 Caldwell’s of Paisley - 107

However, the most striking observation is that the largest ‘printer’ of chapbooks was the generic ‘bookseller’. This term is noted as either, ‘printed for the booksellers’ or ‘printed for the booksellers in town and country’. At first glance it is tempting to ignore the term simply as unimportant. But it is interesting that printers either chose not to disclose their identity or deemed it unnecessary to do so. If it was the former, what were the reasons for this absence? It may suggest that a number of these works were not printed legitimately and it therefore makes sense that the chapbook would not state the printer. It follows that one would prefer to simply avoid the name of the printer/bookseller than to state a name that could later be disputed by the named party. Moreover it implies that there was little importance placed upon who printed the item. Conversely, it may suggest that some printers did not want to associate with printing deemed of little importance. Where the printer was stated, the same names tend to recur, with the same printing families working over successive decades. A number of issues stand out when looking at the database, including the extent to which certain printers concentrated on particular genres of chapbooks, the ability to ascertain whether certain printers catered for particular audiences (or more correctly put, the production of supposed ‘high’ and ‘low literature’) and, maybe most interestingly, an analysis of the quality of chapbooks produced by individual printing houses. These questions may help to enlighten us about intended audience and consequently the ever-difficult task of determining readership.

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Authors Just over 736 of the chapbooks have an author recorded. As discussed above, the majority of chapbooks were ballads, deriving from Scotland’s vibrant oral tradition. Many of these stories did not have authors and it is not at all surprising that only 10% of those chapbooks list an author. The importance of the author simply was not of paramount importance; indeed, there may not have been an ‘author’ per se. Authorship did not sell chapbooks, content did. Moreover, since the majority of chapbooks were ballad compilations, the actual chapbook had no ‘author’. Of the chapbooks by a named author, most were religious works such as A choice drop of honey from the rock Christ: or, A short word of advice to all saints and sinners, by Tho. Wilcocks The forty-sixth edition, printed in 1761 in Edinburgh.21 When trying to understand the reasoning behind the presence of the author in religious chapbooks, two points come to mind. First, these were works published to spread their Christian teachings and in many cases were actual sermons previously delivered. Second, such works were popular enough to warrant recognition especially as in the case of Thomas Wilcocks. Another example contains Two Sermons of Mr William Guthry (or Guthrie), a minister of the Gospel given at Fenwick preached on the 17 August 1662, three years before his death in 1665.22 He was also the author of The Christian’s Great Interest. The religious situation at the time of giving the sermon was very dangerous and Guthrie himself was arrested on the charge of treason for denying the King’s ultimate dominion over the Church. The following excerpt is from Alexander Smellie’s Men of the Covenant. Supposedly, Guthry preached this in 1662 but Smellie does not provide the original source so this cannot be confirmed. I never knew that the human laws of the Prince made void all the divine laws of Christ. I never heard that doctrine taught but within these four years, God be thanked. Truly ye have a bonnie plea of it-a brave pretence of it forsooth! A man baptised into the name of the Father and the son and the Holy Ghost should think to instance such a pretext. You must comply, you must abjure the Covenant, that you may prove your loyalty and respect to His Majesty’s Grace! Let me tell it quietly betwixt me and you, there few good news in the land since the like of you came so loyal. If our King had been a man qualified with grace, as once was supposed him to 21

Glasgow University Library, A Choice Drop of Honey from the Rock Christ, Sp Coll 2355 item 9. 22 Glasgow University Library, Two sermons preached by Mr. William Guthry, minister of the Gospel, at Finnick... 1662, BG56-f.28 item 3.

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be, and had borne down vice and profanity, there had not been much loyalty in the breasts of a thousand of you. Always I thought it had been true loyalty to the Prince to have kept his own room, and given him his own due; to have kept him subordinate to and his laws subordinate to the law of Christ. Fear God and the honour the King, I judged that had stood in allthe world; but there is a generation now has turned it even contrary, Fear the King and then honour God. I never thought that that was true loyalty yet they make the role all wrong that put the King in the first place; he will never stand well there.23

It is clear from this (perhaps apocryphal) extract that Guthry resented the interference of the bishops in the Church of Scotland, promoted by King Charles II, and was forced from his charge in 1661, one year before the sermon he gave in Fenwick. A search on the ESTC highlights Guthry’s popularity. Even after the middle of the eighteenth century, a century after his death, his work was still being reprinted. Although we cannot presume to state if his work was popular in the sense of being enjoyed, we can conclude that it was of interest to the people. This text is not annotated and is in surprisingly good condition which suggests that it was not well-read, a view confirmed by the few creases and lack of stains. This may suggest that the purchaser either bought a work which one ought to own or that merely by possessing a copy the owner was making a political-religious statement which in no way required engaging with the actual text.

Illustration Chapbooks have been continually described as ‘crude’ and without refinement. This is one of many reasons that the intended audience of the chapbook has been considered to be the lower classes. Often seeming rushed or unfinished, the addition of the illustration to a genre that generally did not seem to possess much in the way of aesthetics is peculiar to say the least. Even at its crudest level, where they would have employed a second-hand chipped or poorly crafted woodblock, it was still an extra expense to an ephemeral, inexpensive item. Moreover the skill needed to set the woodblock correctly into the matrix would have been another added expense. Of those examined to date, 3,189 chapbooks possessed at least one illustration, while 1599 chapbooks (28%) were not illustrated. For the purposes of this study the term illustration does not include the use of any typographic ornamentation. The majority of the illustrations (72%) are in 23

Alexander Smellie, Men of the Covenant (London, 1904), 78.

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the 8-page exemplars, followed by the 24-page chapbooks (35%). What is more remarkable is the breakdown of the illustrations once we look at the chapbooks within the pagination categories. The 8-page exemplars usually had only one illustration (normally on the title page): 97%. The remaining 3% had up to four illustrations. Only 8 chapbooks had over 5 illustrations. Of the 24-page exemplars, 68% of had only one illustration. Significantly, 321 (29%) of 24-page chapbooks possessed up to 5 illustrations, with 37 (3%) having over 5 illustrations. This breakdown is roughly mirrored in the 12-page and 16-page categories where it is a 70:30 split between those with one illustration and those with multiple illustrations. It is clear from the figures that the chapbook was typically of eight pages with one illustration, but a significant minority of these were much longer 24-page works, with over a third in possession of more than one illustration (see Fig. 2). For so many examples to exist, there was a clear market for these works, despite their evident extra production costs. It cannot be denied that such a work may have cost more than the one penny thought to be the budget of the lower literate classes. Many chapbooks, regardless of production values, did not cost more than a penny (where stated).24 However is this sufficient to justify the notion that these longer, illustrated works were not chapbooks or is it necessary instead to reassess the generally accepted notion that the chapbook was first and foremost aimed at the lower literate classes?

24

A number of smaller studies into the notion of the ‘luxury Scottish chapbook’ suggest the probability that despite production values, the common price for the chapbook was one penny. From the database alone of the 4% of chapbooks that note a price, more than three quarters were priced at one penny or two pence.

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History of the Yellow Dwarf, f, Glasgow, 18552. (Glasgow University U Fig. 2: The H Library, Sp C Coll 2349-1)

Conclu usion There are m many questionns still to bee addressed bbut it is clearr that the typical Scoottish chapboook was a ballad, printedd in Glasgow w in the nineteenth century, eighht pages long and in poossession of a single illustration oon the frontisspiece. It mu ust be stressedd that althoug gh this is based on nearly 6,000 exeemplars, it do oes not yet takke into accoun nt the true nature of thhe Scottish chhapbook whicch must also consider con ntent and instantly recoognizable to most developmennt over time. Nonetheless, N m as a chapbook, thhe caveat of the t ‘typical ch hapbook’ mean ans that it is allso not so restrictive aas to exclude many outsidee these param meters. Inevitaably, it is necessary too define the Scottish chap pbook based oon what has survived, though whaat remains iss already skeewed by virttue of the whims w of individual nnineteenth-cenntury collectorrs. Additionallly, many of the t oldest chapbooks ddid not survivve to the age of collection.. The small number n of

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extant chapbooks from the seventeenth century simply hints at what has been lost; there are large gaps in our material and knowledge for the earliest period of the chapbook. Despite these limitations, the database allows us to develop parameters leading to a definition which is based on something more than preconceived ideas about the audience or the study of a small, limited sample. It is vital that we understand what we mean by the term ‘typical Scottish chapbook’ as well as the importance of taking into account the changing interpretation of the definition. We must remember that this was a collector’s term so, in the strictest sense, only what they collected individually were chapbooks. To the contemporary the chapbook simply did not exist; it was a ‘lyttle book’ or a ‘garland’. In reality it is not the origin of the word in itself which is most important but the ability to be flexible when analyzing these items of literature. The range of defining features alone highlights the range of works: size, pagination and content. As long as we are mindful of the significance of the ‘atypical’ chapbook, we are able truly to appreciate and study the chapbook in all its guises. Thus the general conclusion stands that Scottish chapbooks were chiefly printed in Glasgow, of eight pages long, with one illustration (on the front page), of poor quality, a ballad, printed by or for the Booksellers and one penny in price, though this is by no means the only recognizable definition. Strictly speaking this definition more accurately defines only the chapbook of the nineteenth century. It is for this reason that it is imperative for us to look at the chapbook both as an item of literature, as a luxury good and as the written embodiment of Scottish popular culture to truly harmonise the ‘lyttle book’ ‘garland’ and ‘Scottish chapbook’.

CHAPTER SIX THE URBAN CONTEXT OF EIGHTEENTHCENTURY PROVINCIAL PRINTING JOHN HINKS

The study of print and printing culture has naturally led historians to a concern with its urban context. The urban environment was fundamental to the development of printing from the outset, since it was in towns that the necessary combination of technical and entrepreneurial competencies were located, and where a growing demand for printed texts was to be found.1

The business of printing has always been primarily an urban activity. The same is true of the manuscript production trade that preceded printing and continued for a considerable time to operate in parallel with it.2 There were a few exceptions: illegal printing needed to be carried out in secret and this was often better suited to quieter rural areas than an urban location. Examples are the sixteenth-century ‘Martin Marprelate’ tracts and early Quaker presses which often operated in villages.3 The urban context of printing may be taken for granted but there are reasons for the phenomenon, and this essay aims to identify them, with particular reference to printing in English provincial towns in the eighteenth century. In doing so, we need to reflect not only upon the conditions which encouraged a printer to set up in business, in many cases not in his home town, but also the ways in which printers, once established in a town, related to their local community. Printers often played a role, sometimes a leading role, in civic governance, in local religious and political groups, in social and charitable ventures, as well as fitting in to their perceived place 1

Malcolm Gee and Tim Kirk (eds.), Printed matters: printing, publishing and urban culture in Europe in the modern period (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002), 1. 2 See for example Rosa Smurra’s essay in this volume. 3 For the latter, see Kate Peters, Print culture and the early Quakers (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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in the hierarchy of urban trade, through which they made their unique contribution to the local economy. The connections between printers are also of interest. A typical provincial printer would have connections, often both social and work-related, with other printers and booksellers in the town, as well as a wider network of contacts across a region and sometimes, importantly, with London, the centre of English book production. These points will be illustrated by examples mainly drawn from Leicester, which is a useful exemplar of a medium-rank market town during the ‘long eighteenth century’.4 The recent ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities5 has been applied fruitfully to book history6. Miles Ogborn, for example, poses the important question: ‘In what ways might the geography of a book affect its success?’ He suggests that if we take ‘the geography of the book’ to be ‘the nature of the places, spaces and networks of production, distribution and consumption we can try to gauge the ways in which they shape the book that is produced, where it goes, and what readers make of it’.7 The predominantly urban location of printing undoubtedly shapes the nature of books and also, not forgetting the importance of printed ephemera and ‘street literature’, virtually all the products of the printing press. Where those books and other texts go is determined by transport networks which are strongly dominated by urban centres, with port towns playing a particular role. As to what readers make of books printed in urban centres, it has long been recognized that, especially during the ‘long eighteenth century’ urban ideas and culture were disseminated into rural hinterlands by the distribution of books and other texts, including notably chapbooks, ballads, song-sheets, broadsides and other relatively cheap printed items. Print, as Gee and Kirk observe, ‘permeated urban experience at every level, and formed the chief means through which ideas, values 4

The Leicester examples are drawn from my The history of the book trade in Leicester to c.1850 (unpublished PhD thesis, Loughborough University, 2002), supplemented by my subsequent research on aspects of printing in Leicester. See also John Hinks, ‘Local and regional studies of printing history’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, NS 5, (2003), 3-15, and John Hinks, ‘The book trade in early modern Britain: centres, peripheries and networks’, in Benito Rial Costas (ed.), Print culture and peripheries in early modern Europe (Leiden, Brill, 2013), 101-126. 5 See for example Barney Warf and Santa Arias, The spatial turn: interdisciplinary perspectives (Abingdon, Routledge, 2009). 6 See for example: Miles Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers (eds.), Geographies of the book (Farnham, Ashgate, 2010) and Innes M. Keighren, ‘Geographies of the book: review and prospect’, Geography Compass 7/11 (2013), 745-758. 7 Miles Ogborn, ‘The amusements of posterity: print against Empire in late eighteenth-century Bengal’, in Geographies of the book, 29.

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and, indeed, facts created in cities have been exported to the rest of society’.8 There was a significant difference between setting up and trading in an incorporated town, such as Leicester, and a manorial town, such as Birmingham. In an incorporated town the Corporation would usually exercise its considerable power to control trade within its boundaries, mainly through the system of apprenticeship and freedom. Leicester’s system of apprenticeship and freedom was long-established, the Corporation having assumed the trade control functions of the medieval Merchant Guild. The arrangements were restated in the reign of Elizabeth I: the town’s charter of 1599 states: ‘We will that no merchant or any man who is not a freeman of the borough may use any trade or buy or sell other than in gross, except only in fair time, unless he has obtained the licence of the Mayor, bailiffs and burgesses’.9 This system had a positive side, encouraging the passing on of trade skills but also had a negative side in that it was sometimes difficult, and usually costly, to set up in business in a town as a ‘stranger’ – an incomer from another part of the country – who would be required to pay a ‘fine’, sometimes a substantial amount, before being permitted to trade within the borough. The earliest stationer (bookseller) recorded in Leicester is Godfrey Cowper, made free in 1577/58 (see Fig. 1). The system was typical of a provincial incorporated town, with apprentices being formally bound in the presence of the Mayor. If the apprenticeship, usually for a seven-year term, was completed (it frequently was not, for various reasons), the apprentice appeared again before the Mayor to be made free. Leicester’s town records were diligently kept and have survived better than most, although there are some gaps in the apprenticeship records. There was no effective central control of trade in a manorial town, such as Birmingham, but for an incorporated town, freedom and apprenticeship records are a valuable source of evidence for trade activity. They are obviously useful for identifying book-trade practitioners, some of whom do not appear elsewhere, but they can yield much more information. Used in conjunction with other records, such as parish registers and, later, published trade directories and newspaper advertisements, freedom and apprenticeship records can enable the identification of book-trade dynasties, providing valuable evidence for the passing on of trade skills between generations. The records also identify those who set up in business in the town having come from another part of the country. 8

Gee and Kirk, Printed matters, 1. Mary Bateson (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1905), 363. 9

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Fig. 1: Freedom entry (fourth line) for Godfrey Cowper, stationer, 1577-78. (Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland.)

In Leicester, the record of the place of origin of each ‘stranger’ is important evidence for patterns of migration – proof that some skilled individuals made a conscious choice to set up in business in a particular

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location. It is also often possible to identify the socio-economic background of those entering the book trade because the occupation or status, such as ‘gentleman’, of an apprentice’s father (or mother, if widowed) is often recorded. Apprenticeship was by far the most common method of becoming a Freeman of the Borough, though there were other ways: by patrimony – as the ‘freeborn’ son of a Freeman (that is, born after his father was made free); as a ‘stranger’ by payment of an entry ‘fine’; or, very rarely, by order of the Corporation, either to honour a person of distinction, or as a means of benefitting the Borough by admitting a person not otherwise eligible, for example to introduce a new trade or improved methods to the town. The apprenticeship system was taken seriously in Leicester: It is difficult to know how far exactly apprenticeship in the eighteenth century had a genuine educational value, as its Elisabethan and early Stuart promoters intended. The Leicester corporation appear to have valued it, and there were numerous charities in the town for apprenticing poor children… 10

Anyone wishing to set up a printing business in the eighteenth century would need to take account of a number of factors. Earlier in the century many would be able to choose a town that had no printer, though by midcentury most towns of any importance, even relatively small market towns, would be likely to have a printer, who would often also be the local bookseller and sometimes the proprietor and editor of a newspaper. As industrial and commercial activity increased and diversified throughout the century, new markets opened up for the printer: local traders needed printed stationery, advertising, packaging, labelling and much more. Social and cultural activities would necessitate the printing of programmes, posters and tickets for a wide range of events and organizations. Being the first printer in a town had obvious advantages but there were other factors to be considered. The size, location and nature of the town were obvious considerations. Inland transport, roads and waterways, improved as the century progressed. Ease of access to a rural hinterland was also important. Some printers and booksellers acted as wholesalers of chapbooks, ballad-sheets and other cheap items to pedlars and hawkers, who formed informal itinerant networks that carried urban-produced print into the backwaters of rural England. Many printers involved in newspaper publication ran their own networks of ‘newsmen’, many of them on 10 R. W. Greaves, The Corporation of Leicester, 1689-1836 (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1970), 53.

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horseback, delivering not only printed items including the newspaper, books and periodicals but also, to order, other goods sold in the base shop, such as stationery, patent medicines, household items, tea, coffee and other ‘fancy goods’. Some towns had to wait longer than others for a local printer. Leicester lagged some years behind Nottingham, its rival as capital of the East Midlands. While Nottingham already had several printers in the 1730s11, two of whom set up newspapers, Leicester had no printer until 1741, and no newspaper until 1752. The bookseller Matthew Unwin began printing in 1741, some years after he was made free in 1727, following his apprenticeship with local bookseller John Ward.12 (Ward was part of a major book-trade family, members of which traded in both Nottingham and Leicester.) Like many aspiring printers, Unwin probably could not afford to establish his own business when he was freed. Many became journeymen, working for established printers in various locations. Some would eventually amass enough capital to set up on their own; others spent their working lives as journeymen. This had been the case since the invention of printing. The apprentices of Gutenberg and other pioneers of printing had to be flexible and mobile: Their enterprise and spirit of adventure amazes us. They were willing to leave their master’s shop and travel the length and breadth of Europe, like many other journeymen of the period, carrying their equipment with them and practising and instructing in the new art. They must have led nomadic lives, their chief asset experience, their equipment of the most elementary sort; they would stop in a town, hope for orders locally, probably suffering poverty very often. What they sought was someone to provide capital so that they could establish themselves permanently, and a town which met the conditions for a successful printing shop.13

Unwin, having served his apprenticeship as a bookseller rather than as a printer, initially traded at market stalls in several towns – Loughborough and Ashby de la Zouch (both in Leicestershire) and Derby – before setting up his own bookshop in 1739, apparently not commencing printing until 1741. Having decided in which town to set up as a printer – or, in Unwin’s case initially as a bookseller – came the decision of exactly where within 11

W. J. Clarke, Early Nottingham printers and printing (2nd edn., Nottingham, Forman, 1953), 61. 12 John Hinks, ‘The coming of printing to Leicester’, Leicestershire Historian (2006), 3-6. 13 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The coming of the book: the impact of printing 1450-1800 (London, Verso, 1976; first published, Paris 1958), 167-67.

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Fig 2: Print of the Market Place, Leicester, sold by Matthew Unwin, 1745. (Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland.)

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the town to locate the business. Unwin’s choice of ‘over-against the Angel Inn’ was a sound one: the important Angel Inn was prominently situated in the Market Place, which was to become a major focal point for book-trade activity (see Fig. 2). The first extant item printed in Leicester by Matthew Unwin is an execution broadside dated 1741.14 Unwin continued to trade in Leicester until he died in 1750. A printer who was ready, and had amassed sufficient capital, to establish his own business, would have considered a number of factors before settling on a location. Many, perhaps most, printers at this period moved away from their home town to establish their business. By midcentury a major consideration might well be whether or not the town already had a newspaper. John Gregory was the second printer in Leicester but the first to produce a newspaper.15 He was not a local man, coming from the neighbouring county of Derbyshire. Gregory was typical of the more successful class of book-trade practitioner in that he was not only a printer but also a bookseller and, importantly, he gave the town its first newspaper. On his arrival in Leicester, Gregory set up as a bookseller but he soon added a printing press and commenced the Leicester Journal in 1752. The place of the printer in the local community is an interesting topic. His (or occasionally her) status would depend on a number of factors including the size and prestige of his business (especially when there were several in the same town), his actual or perceived wealth, his political stance and his religious inclinations. There was undoubtedly a perceived hierarchy of trades in any town. Printers and booksellers were, for the most part, considered quite ‘respectable’ and were regarded as belonging to the upper end of the pecking order. One very clear measure of a man’s status in his urban community was his participation in the governance of the town. In Leicester – although many of its prominent book-trade people were of a radical persuasion, and therefore very unlikely to become members of the Tory-dominated Corporation – a significant number of printers and booksellers were not only active in local politics but were also elected to high civic office. During the ‘long eighteenth century’ the very powerful office of Mayor was held by Francis Ward (bookseller and stationer, 1686), Thomas Hartshorne (bookseller, 1705), Simon Martin 14

The verso of the broadside (British Library, 1891.d.1.15) is reproduced in John Hinks, ‘Local and regional studies of printing history’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, NS 5 (2003), 13. 15 John Hinks, ‘John Gregory and the Leicester Journal’, in B. McKay, J. Hinks and M. Bell (eds.), Light on the book trade: essays in honour of Peter Isaac (New Castle, Delaware, Oak Knoll, and London, British Library, 2004), 85-94.

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(bookseller, 1728) and his son John (also a bookseller, 1750), John Gregory (printer, bookseller and newspaper proprietor/editor, 1779) and George Ireland (printer and bookseller, 1821). Like most successful book-trade people, John Gregory had good connections with printers and booksellers in other towns within his region and also with London, the undisputed focal point of the book trade in England. Regional connections were important too. Gregory established a partnership with Samuel Cresswell of Nottingham. As the Leicester Journal advertised in 1755: John Gregory of Leicester, and Samuel Cresswell of Nottingham, Printers: Take this Method of acquainting the Public that by the Advice of their Friends, they have lately enter’d into Partnership in the Mystery of Printing, and that they are determined to publish this Weekly Paper early every Saturday Morning, at their respective Shops in Leicester and Nottingham...16

In common with most provincial printers, Gregory depended on ‘jobbing’ work (commercial and private stationery etc.) in addition to the regular work of printing his newspaper. Typically, he also printed a few books of local importance: poll-books plus sermons and essays by local authors, who probably financed the printing of their own works. Gregory also – and this is much less common – did some good-quality book-printing work for London publishing booksellers.17 Gregory ran a large, successful and quite diverse business, which necessitated the employment of several apprentices; twelve of their names are recorded.18 Only one of Gregory’s recorded apprentices is known to have pursued a career of importance in the trade: Francis Hodson, originally from Burton-on-Trent, was made free in 1762 and then traded successfully in Cambridge, becoming coproprietor of the Cambridge Chronicle.19 16

Leicester and Nottingham Journal, 8 November 1755. The paper was previously the Leicester Journal, a title to which it reverted in February 1787, even though the partnership between Gregory and Cresswell had been dissolved in 1769. The paper was printed for Gregory by an unknown printer until January 1758; thereafter it was printed by Gregory himself. 17 Examples are to found in the collection of local printing at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland. 18 Henry Hartopp (ed.), Register of the freemen of Leicester 1197-1770, including the apprentices sworn before successive Mayors for certain periods, 1646-1770. Leicester, Backus, 1927; Register of the freemen of Leicester 1770-1930, including the apprentices sworn […] 1770-1926 (Leicester, Backus, 1933). 19 Michael J. Murphy, Cambridge newspapers and opinion 1780-1850 (Cambridge, Oleander, 1977).

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The trade of printer has often attracted people motivated by a radical political or religious cause. This tendency can be found in many towns during the long eighteenth century and beyond, through the various phases of radicalism up to and very much including the Chartists in the midnineteenth century. Radical book-trade people were particularly prominent in Leicester, which despite (perhaps partly because of) its Tory-dominated Corporation, had a well-deserved reputation as a radical town. Richard Phillips arrived in Leicester, from London, aged 21, in 1788.20 He began by running a small commercial school and also tried his hand in the local hosiery business, before turning to bookselling in 1790. He very soon added a printing press and a ‘pamphlet room’, and within two years had established his own newspaper, the Leicester Herald. All of his activities were biased towards a very radical standpoint. Phillips was a rather eccentric though consistently highly principled man. He made no secret of his radical, republican opinions – in fact he assiduously used his diverse book-trade activities to promote them. His bookshop and pamphlet room stocked a wide range of European radical literature and the Herald followed a strongly radical editorial position, with Phillips writing much of the content himself, even during his imprisonment in 1793, when he had been found guilty of selling the second part of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The ‘Adelphi Society’ which Phillips established for the young men of the town was primarily aimed at scientific discussion but, unsurprisingly, soon turned its attention to radical politics. The Corporation became highly agitated by the Adelphi’s politics and soon used its ‘dangerous’ experiments with electricity as an excuse to close it down. Nevertheless, Phillips took advantage of his urban location to promulgate his political opinions through a range of networks, even after the Adelphi had ended. Visitors to his bookshop formed one such network, no doubt overlapping with the network of regular readers of the Herald. Beyond Leicester, Phillips was part of a significant national network of radicals including Joseph Priestley, who apparently held a large financial stake in the Herald. In 1795, there was a disastrous fire at Phillips’s premises; his press and stock were destroyed. He at first planned to resume business in Leicester but for some reason now unclear he decided to move back to London, where he became a successful and prolific writer and publisher of books, largely for the growing educational market. He became one of the Sheriffs of London and was knighted in 1808. In 1796 he began publishing, in partnership with Joseph Johnson, the moderately radical Monthly Magazine, 20

John Hinks, ‘Richard Phillips, pioneer of radical print’, Leicestershire Historian (2011), 22-26.

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which ‘represented a new kind of ideological discursive community’.21 The Leicester examples so far discussed, Matthew Unwin, John Gregory and Richard Phillips, all had strong connections with the London book trade and with other local and regional printers and booksellers. We turn now to Leicester’s outstanding female book-trade practitioner, Ann Ireland. Widowed at an early age, in 1786, and with a son much too young to take over her late husband’s printing and bookselling business, she placed the following notice in the Leicester Journal: Ann Ireland widow of George Ireland, bookseller, printer, bookbinder and printseller, takes the Liberty of informing the friends of her late husband and the public in general, that the Business in its several branches, will be carried on by her as usual – a continuance of their favours will be thankfully acknowledged.22

George Ireland, making his will shortly before he died, had stipulated: And my mind and will is that my said Wife do carry on my several businesses of Bookseller Bookbinder and Printer during the minority of my son George Ireland (whom I would have brought up to my said businesses) the better to enable my said Wife in the meantime to maintain and support herself and Family…23

In fact, Ann Ireland continued to manage the business – and to diversify into a number of fashionable and doubtless profitable goods and services – even beyond her son’s coming of age. Although trading as Ann Ireland & Son, it is clear that Ann was the skilled entrepreneur and that George had little involvement in the business, being preoccupied with his various political and civic duties and, at least for a time, by his involvement in the local hosiery trade. In taking over her late husband’s business, Ann Ireland also took over his apprentice, Samuel Adams, son of the Loughborough bookseller William Adams.24

21

Jon Klancher, The making of English reading audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 39. 22 Leicester Journal, 20 May 1786. 23 Will of George Ireland, 1786. Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, PR/T/1786/94. 24 Samuel Adams had been bound to George Ireland on 3 May 1782. When he was made free, on 12 June 1790, it is recorded that he had been the apprentice of ‘George Ireland, late of Leicester, bookseller, and afterwards with his widow’. Hartopp, Register of the freemen [vol. 2], 461.

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Unwin and Gregory both traded in prominent positions in the Market Place, and Phillips traded at nearby Coal Hill.25 Ann Ireland originally traded in the Market Place but, within six months of the above advertisement, the lease of her house and shop reverted to a relative (see below) and she moved to a former apothecary’s premises opposite the Assembly Rooms, a magnet for the gentry of both the town and county, and thus an excellent choice for her increasingly fashionable business. In addition to her very successful printing and bookselling business, Ireland now sold musical instruments, sheet music, fine art prints, theatre tickets, new periodicals (‘direct from London’), and also opened a circulating library. An advertisement from her 1798 sale catalogue indicates the range of Ireland’s activities: At the Place of Sale may be had, Bibles and Common Prayer Books, in Morocco or other Bindings. Account Books and Ledgers of all Sorts, Rul’d or Plain, and Bound to any Pattern or Order. Stationary ware of all kinds. A Capital Collection of Maps and Prints. Magazines, Reviews, and all other periodical publications. Blank Warrants and Precedents for Coroners, High-Constables, Justices Clerks &c. &c. Music, Rul’d Music Paper, Harpsichord lessons, new songs, with every Article in the Musical Line. Letter Cases, Morocco, Spanish and Common Leather, with Straps or Clasps. Schoolmasters, and Country Shopkeepers, may be supplied with School books of all sorts – as also with Copy and Account Books, Quills, Pens, Black and Red Ink, Writing Paper of the best Quality &c. &c. On the Lowest Terms. Printing in General, executed with Neatness & Dispatch – And Books bound in a Neat and Firm Manner, or in Elegant Bindings, on Reasonable Terms.26

The reference to supplying ‘country shopkeepers’ is a useful reminder that, although printing – and most other aspects of the book trade – were primarily urban activities, they also served rural hinterlands by, as in this case, exercising a quasi-wholesaling role. Thus fashionable goods – and ideas – created in urban areas soon found their way into rural areas; printers and booksellers played a key role in this important cultural process.

25 Near the present-day clock tower. This was a prominent site, and Phillips’s premises were quite large, but it was perhaps a rather less expensive area than the nearby Market Place. 26 Ann Ireland, A Catalogue of Books… (Leicester, 1789), 1. Cambridge University Library, Munby Collection, d.136/2.

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Ann Ireland employed journeymen and apprentices to operate her printing press, the output of which was of a very high standard. One of her most important publishing ventures was William Carey’s An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, published in 1792, which was highly regarded in Baptist circles. Carey was the founder of the Baptist Missionary Society, which continued to publish the work in several modern editions and, on the anniversary of its author’s death in 1934, reproduced a facsimile edition of Ireland’s original edition. The imprint of Carey’s book (see Fig. 3) indicates Ann Ireland’s connections with the other booksellers of Leicester plus one in Sheffield and, importantly, with several members of the London book trade. In common with all the better printers and booksellers, she needed networks of trade contacts in order to operate successfully. The title-page of the 1798 sale catalogue, already mentioned, also indicates Ann Ireland’s links with local booksellers and with the London trade: ‘Catalogues may be had of the neighbouring booksellers, and of Mr. Crowder, Pater-NosterRow, London’.27 Two branches of the Ireland family were involved in Leicester’s book trade. Ann’s late husband, George, had been apprenticed to his uncle, John Ireland, a bookseller, bookbinder and printer, as had another nephew, the younger John Ireland. There is only sparse evidence for the elder John Ireland’s business activities, though newspaper advertisements indicate that he sold periodicals, such as The New London Jester, tickets for a series of performances by the Leicester Company of Comedians at the New Vauxhall Theatre, and subscriptions to the new edition of Thoroton’s The History and Antiquities of Nottinghamshire. These examples all date from 1777, the year after the elder John Ireland died and was succeeded by his widow, Elizabeth.28 His will left all of his goods, chattels, money and stock in trade to Elizabeth; on her death they were to pass to his nephew George. The business must have been quite lucrative, as the will also left several properties in trust to two Aldermen in order to provide a regular income for Elizabeth.29

27

Ireland, A Catalogue of Books, 1. Leicester Journal, 27 December 1777, 8 November 1777, and 27 December 1777. 29 Will of John Ireland, 1776. Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, PR/T/1776/112. 28

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Fig. 3: Title-page of William Carey’s An enquiry into the obligations of Christians…, Leicester, printed and sold by Ann Ireland, 1792.

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The evidence for the locations of the Ireland business is complicated. The elder John Ireland moved his business to the Market Place from the nearby East Gates in 1760: ‘John Ireland, Printer and Bookseller in Leicester, is removed from the East-Gates to the shop late Mr. Barnard Thickpenny’s, near the Conduit in the Market Place’.30 In 1778, an advertisement indicates that the business has moved again: ‘Elizabeth and John Ireland, widow and nephew of the late John Ireland, Printer, bookseller, binder […] have opened a shop next door to Mr. Nutt, Grocer in Gallowtree Gate where they intend carrying on the above mentioned business’.31 However, the Market Place premises appear to have been where Ann Ireland traded until she was forced to move in 1786. The most likely explanation is that Ann was trading in one of the properties left in trust by the elder John Ireland. On the death of his widow Elizabeth, the properties were to revert to his nephew John, who in 1786 (which is probably when Elizabeth died) placed this advertisement: John Ireland, Printer, bookseller & binder Wishes to inform his friends & the public in general that (according to the will of his uncle, Mr. John Ireland) he has entered upon the well accustomed shop opposite the Conduit in the Market Place; where he intends carrying on the printing, Bookselling & stationary business in all their various branches… He returns his sincere thanks to his numerous friends for their favours in his late shop in Gallowtree-gate and humbly hopes that he shall experience a continuance of them in his new situation.32

In addition to offering the typical range of provincial book-trade goods and services, including the sale of stationery and patent medicines, the younger John Ireland seems to have been a fairly prolific printer of chapbooks – one of only two known to have operated in Leicester. Only a few examples survive, in the British Library, but one of them includes a list of his chapbooks: ‘A CATALOGUE OF HISTORIES Printed and Sold, Wholesale or Retail, by JOHN IRELAND, in Leicester.33 The list comprises some thirty titles, typical of the usual subject range of English chapbooks: traditional stories (The London ‘Prentice, Fortunatus, Sleeping Beauty), along with heavily abridged versions of more substantial books and plays (Robinson Crusoe, Doctor Faustus), and humorous titles (Groatsworth of Wit for a Penny, Rochester’s Joaks). 30

Leicester Journal, 6 September 1760. Leicester Journal, 17 October 1778. 32 Leicester Journal, 7 October 1786. 33 The famous and renowned history of Hero and Leander… [1780?], p. [2]. British Library, 11621.b.4 (5). 31

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The younger John Ireland died in 1810 and, although he left everything to his widow Mary, there is no further trace of the business.34 There appears to have been a healthy mixture of competition and cooperation between the two branches of the Ireland family, both of which ran successful and wide-ranging book-trade businesses including two important circulating libraries. The business of Ann Ireland & Son seems to have been largely run by Ann. The extent of George’s involvement in the business is unclear but seems to have been minimal, perhaps until his mother’s death, the date of which is uncertain. He was certainly very active with civic duties, becoming a Councilman in 1802, one of the two Borough Chamberlains in 1805, and serving as Mayor in 1821. In addition, he seems to have had diverse business interests, being described variously as bookseller, bookbinder, printer and (in 1826, the year of his death at the age of 53) hosier. He is recorded as the master of two apprentices. John Fowler, bound in October 1799 and freed in April 1812, was to become an important figure in Leicester’s book trade, being described in local business directories as printer, bookseller, machine-ruler and circulating librarian. He is also the only Leicester printer besides John Ireland known to have printed chapbooks.35 The other apprentice, John Summerfield Stanhope, appears to have left the book trade to become a schoolmaster but was freed as George Ireland’s apprentice, in March 1803, which suggests that George himself may have been a schoolmaster in addition to his other activities.36 George Ireland appears to have been the first book-trade person in Leicester to live separately from his place of business: he had a house in Belgrave Gate, then on the edge of the town, though only a few minutes’ walk from the shop. The two branches of the Ireland family made a considerable contribution to the development of the book trade in Leicester in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The family’s impact on the growth of printing in the town is indicated by the fact that a single local printer, the elder John Ireland, was succeeded by his two nephews, George and John, both of whom practised as printers, each operating sizeable and diverse book-trade businesses. The family is notable also for Ann Ireland, by far the most important woman in the history of the book trade in Leicester.

34 Will of John Ireland. Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, PR/T/1810/107. 35 Several of Fowler’s chapbooks survive in a scrapbook in the library of Princeton University, GAX 2010-0016E. 36 Hartopp, Register of the freemen [vol. 2], 512, 132, 524.

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It is not the intention to give a complete history of printing in eighteenth-century Leicester but another family should be mentioned briefly. The Browns were a well-to-do family of hosiers and wool merchants of some standing in the town. The first of several bookseller-printers in the family was John Brown, who was born in 1755 on the site of the house and shop in the Market Place, which his grandson was to build in 1839/40, and which would be known as the sign of the ‘Bible and Crown’. Having been apprenticed to a Nottingham printer, Brown began trading in Leicester in 1776 and was printing by 1791, in which year he began printing John Throsby’s The History and Antiquities of the Ancient Town of Leicester. Brown’s grandson, John Garle Brown, was said to have ‘recalled with pride in his old age that the early portion of Throsby’s History and Antiquities, which had been printed at their press, had been said to resemble in a marked degree the work of the famous Baskerville.37 It is correct to say that only ‘the early portion’ of Throsby’s book was printed by Brown. The printer, having received no payment from the author, declined to print the remainder of the work. Nevertheless, given that this was apparently Brown’s first book-printing job, it was quite a remarkable achievement: ‘For a young man who had only recently started in business on his own, this was, by any standards, a daunting task. It was a volume of some 434 pages... generously illustrated from wood and steel engravings’.38 John Brown, usually described as a bookseller and printer, sometimes advertised himself as a copperplate printer.39 There are records of three apprentices being bound to John Brown, one of whom, George Calladine, went on to trade in his own right as a bookseller, bookbinder and stationer until 1831. John Brown’s eldest son, John Garle Brown, who succeeded him in 1815, carried out high quality printing for London publishers. Only two of the ten apprentices bound to him are recorded as having been freed. This may indicate that most did not complete their term, though in the early years of the nineteenth century the freedom and apprenticeship system was beginning to break down, so apprentices may not all have been formally made free. The grandson of the founder, also John Garle Brown, was made free in 1838, from which date he ran the family business. This takes us too far into the nineteenth century but it may be noted that the Brown family continued to trade successfully for many more years. In the 1860s, the business moved to larger premises 37

‘In Memoriam Thomas Spencer’, Spencer’s Leicester Almanack, 1893, 6. Raithby Lawrence: 1776-1876, 1876-1976 (Leicester, Raithby Lawrence, 1976), 21. 39 For example: Leicester Journal, 10 January 1793; Weston’s Directory of Leicestershire, 1794. 38

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in the Market Place, retaining the name of the ‘Bible and Crown’. To complete the story, in outline only, the Brown family business was acquired in 1876 by Henry Raithby and Joseph Lawrence. Within ten years, they were trading solely as printers, having moved out of the ‘Bible and Crown’. They adopted the name of the De Montfort Press in the late 1880s, when they also began to print the journal, The British Printer. The firm of Raithby & Lawrence continued to trade in Leicester until the present century but are currently listed as a dormant company. This essay has attempted to demonstrate the ways in which provincial printing – often associated with bookselling and sometimes also with newspaper production and other ventures – was primarily an urban activity. Printing played a key role in urbanization, especially in a cultural sense. We have seen how urban-produced print found its way into rural areas, distributing urban goods and ideas into rural hinterlands. Printing is thus a key component of the urban cultural infrastructure. However, lest we become carried away with these exalted thoughts, we should remember that printing was also a bread-and-butter trade. Most, probably all, provincial printers depended for their livelihood on ‘jobbing’ printing, meeting the day-to-day needs of the local community: handbills, tickets, posters, commercial stationery, packaging, labels, and suchlike. Of course, this quotidian activity also contributed to the local economy and played its part in the social and cultural life of the town. By the end of the eighteenth century provincial printers had become established as important members of the urban communities in which they had chosen to trade.

CHAPTER SEVEN BIRMINGHAM’S GRAPHIC DNA: READING THE CITY THROUGH SIGNAGE, ARCHITECTURAL LETTERFORMS AND TYPOGRAPHICAL LANDSCAPE GERALDINE MARSHALL

Although previous studies have recorded lettering on buildings photographically, this project is different as it uses the process of taxonomy to classify letterforms on buildings to assist in defining the identity and image of a British city. Nicolete Gray1, historian, art teacher, scholar and teacher of lettering and typography, was the first to initiate a photographic study of lettering as part of a city’s visual identity at various locations across the UK and in Lisbon, Portugal. Herbert Spencer, British designer and editor of Typographica2 introduced the art of street lettering when he presented the photographic practice of several graphic designers including Robert Brownjohn, who, in 1960, produced ‘Street Level’ a photo essay which captured London city street graphics and shop signage. Other significant studies of civic, public and vernacular street lettering include those of Alan Bartram, Jock Kinneir, Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon. Bartram took a documentary approach to presenting the cultural and historical impact of urban letters. In Lettering in Architecture, he notes ‘architectural lettering is arguably part of the environment texture, providing visual and historical richness’.3 In Fascia Lettering in the British Isles, he introduces an activist argument for the preservation of shop lettering as part of our cultural heritage: ‘I believe the values of any society are reflected in everyday aspects of it. Today it would be hard to 1

Gray, N., Lettering on Buildings (London, Architectural Press, 1960). Typographica: Journal of Typography and Visual Arts (London, Lund Humphries, 1949-67). 3 Bartram, A., Lettering in Architecture (London, Lund Humphries, 1975). 2

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get away with a proposal to pull down Blenheim Palace or Canterbury Cathedral…buildings have preservation orders on them, [not the signs].4 Kinneir argues that ‘the effect of the removal of shop names would not be very dramatic in practice, yet even in village streets words form a series of focal points because they speak while doors and windows remain mute, and the style of fascia can thus be a key note in the scene’5. Phil Baines and Catherine Dixon, both of Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, have collaborated in researching and recording street lettering and signs around the UK and have produced an on-line interactive tour of London’s sites of special lettering interest.6 They recognize the need for further research and a clear, methodical approach to the collection and examination of data relating to urban lettering. Their curatorial experience of the Central Lettering Record (CLR) has demonstrated the complex issues surrounding this research. Baines and Dixon note limited research funding has hindered the expansion of the CLR developing towards a national collection and suggest the possibilities such collection might offer: ‘it might even have interested social-cultural historians and encourage cross-disciplinary research within paleography, epigraphy and art history’7. More recently Anthony Harrington and the London Typographica Project, invites the public to assist in mapping the typographic landscape of London, which has further highlighted the interest in recording and reflecting on public lettering. The project aims ‘to photographically record publicly available lettering and type throughout the capital. London is an ever-changing city and we are losing many examples of its typographic history’.8 In a recent interview Harrington added: ‘the Project anchors a building to a time and function, whether it’s commercial or social, and this is heritage worth preserving’9. International studies include the documentation of Amsterdam’s urban lettering by Allessandro Colizzi and Ramiro Espinoza’s, which focuses on how the traditional Krulletters (curly letters) of Amsterdam cafés have

4 See Introduction to Bartram, A., Fascia Lettering in the British Isles, (London, Lund Humphries, 1978). 5 Kinneir, J., Words and Buildings: the Art and Practice of Public Lettering (London, Architectural Press, 1980). 6 www.publiclettering.org.uk 7 Baines, P. & Dixon, C, ‘Letters of Reference’, Craft Magazine, 186 (2004), 5053. 8 See welcome page: www.londontypographica.co.uk 9 Usbourne, S. ‘A new serif in town: the fonts used on London’s signs and shops have an army of fans’, The Independent (online-blog), 29 March 2012.

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contributed to the city’s visual identity10. Gouveia, Farias and Gatto’s study of Sao Paulo, Brazil, introduced various applied techniques such as psychology, geography, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, design, architecture and urban studies to ‘read’ the visual environment. They argue that the visual, aesthetic and cultural identity of the city is made up of, amongst other things, its graphic elements. These elements can act as indicators of urban ows (waynding) or as landmarks that identify and name city locations and therefore contribute to dening the city’s informational structure. Letters and numbers in the urban environment can thus be studied as part of the city’s identity and communicative efforts, and understood as a kind of discourse.11

Stephen Banham produced a pictorial record of the lettering and typography of Melbourne, Australia, which has instigated discussion of the cultural and social stories behind public lettering.12 Banham interviews sign-makers and residents to uncover the hidden stories behind the letterforms, to produce research that is predominantly qualitative.

Why do we classify type? Essentially the need to classify type has been to create order. A classification system can be helpful in identifying, choosing and combining typefaces. Many design scholars and typographers have published various techniques of classification of typography. Most notably in 1954 Maximilien Vox13 introduced a classification of type which was later adopted by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI). This rigid classification system was designed prior to the age of mass computer-generated type design and therefore did not allow for the evolution and variation of digitally designed typefaces that we have today. However, it is still widely referred to and this may be because the classification system conforms to a chronological order, which can be a useful structural tool in understanding 10

Colizzi, A. and Espinoza, R., ‘In Memoriam: Krulletters and Bruin Cafes in Amsterdam’, Design and Culture, 2:2 (2010), 217-219. 11 Gouvei, A. P. S., Farias, P. L. and Gatto, P. S., ‘Letters and Cities: Reading the Urban Environment with the help of Perception Theories’, Visual Communication, 8:3 (2009), 339-49. 12 Banham, S., Characters: Cultural Stories revealed through Typography (Thames and Hudson, 2011). 13 Vox, M., Vox-AtypI Classification (1954/1962); British Standards Classification of Typefaces. (BS 2961:1967).

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the historical development of type prior to digital media. As part of her PhD at Central Saint Martins, London, Catherine Dixon applied a ‘descriptive’ based system to create a visual overview of five centuries of type design.14 Dixon suggests that Vox’s approach to categorizing type was originally far more sophisticated than the British Standard classification system. The Vox system was intended to address the similarities and the variant contrasting differences within the categories. However, the British Standard re-developed the Vox system into a ‘top down’ approach, with a less comprehensive categorization system that effectively excluded many type categories. Professional taxonomist, indexer and lecturer Heather Hedden refers to this system as the ‘hierarchal taxonomy’ or ‘controlled vocabulary’ in which each term is connected to a designated broader term; for example, the indexing of a book or website search bar where one description is prominent over another.15

Classification: A taxonomy approach In general terms, taxonomy is a process of classification of a ‘type’. In the social sciences, it can be referred to as ‘typology’ but it is used more widely in the biological sciences to assemble and study species based on a common link, with the assumption that the greater the common similarity the closer the genetically related link. This citation of categories or ‘type’ would imply that one form of type is fixed and defined by its own characteristics. Classification systems are predominantly based on two schools of thought, ‘splitting’ or ‘lumping’ of similarities. Using taxonomy as a process of classification allows a combination of both approaches depending on the theme of the research. The data structure is flexible and can shift to display various hierarchical trends enabling the biological science to include the process of evolution and variation of genetic traits within, and across types of species. The case to produce taxonomy to record letters arose when I discovered that it had been suggested by Earl M. Herrick, professor of linguistics at the Texas A&M University, Kingsville.16 Herrick recognized the complexity of recording the variety of alphabets which cultural writing systems may produce, to which end he developed a guide for a linguistic taxonomy, which included 14 Can be viewed in Baines, P. and Haslam, A., Type and Typography (London, Laurence King, 2005). 15 Hedden, H., The Accidental Taxonomist (Information Today, 2010). 16 Herrick, E. M., ‘Taxonomy of Alphabets and Scripts’, Visible Language, 8:1 (1974), 5-32.

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(as with Dixon’s suggestion) a consideration of the characteristics of each letter of the alphabet. This guide was primarily applied to typography but Herrick noted the need for further investigation into the use of taxonomy in this way.

Classification: A theoretical debate The scientific approach to classification has been explored in much of the writing of social theorists, such as Michel Foucault, who refers to this as ‘the science of order’ to explain the science of life. Foucault refers to mathesis or mathematics as the simple model founded on the order of algebra; taxonomia or taxonomy is a far more complex classification system; not only does it have permanence, it also has foresight of evolution and adaptation to external influences and new discoveries: Taxonomia also implies a certain continuum of things (a nondiscontinuity, a plenitude of being) and a certain power of imagination that renders apparent what is not, but makes possible, by this very fact, the revelation of continuity… But understood in the strict sense mathesis is a science of equalities, and therefore of attributes and judgments; it is the science of truth. Taxonomia, on the other hand, treats identities and difference; it is the science of articulations and classifications; it is the knowledge of beings’.17

Foucault identifies that, in order to apply this approach, there must be an analysis of knowledge that defines the basis of order of the classification system, the theory that ‘money’ defines the individual to be classified. For example, as with a census, the individual classification of status is based on their income, however, their income may not necessarily reflect their actual wealth. Foucault also refers to general grammar and the order of language that communicates the structure of classification. Previous attempts to create classification systems for typography have exemplified difficulties in the shared knowledge of terminology. As with any specialist subject typography and lettering come with a code of communication that is relevant within its context. Thus, as with most classification systems, it is only able to clearly communicate and maintain its usefulness through the community that builds and responds to it. The lack of definitions to describe categories/taxon within classification structures has obstructed translation across professions. A clear, concise glossary or lexicon of terminology would be an essential addition to this taxonomy. 17

Foucault, M., The Archaeology of Knowledge (London, Routledge, 1989).

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David Bloor’s analysis of Durkheim and Mauss’s ‘classification and the sociology of knowledge’, echoes Foucault’s emphasis of the importance of understanding the knowledge that defines the classification and identifies a more flexible approach based on the network between classification strands.18 Bloor challenges Durkheim and Mauss’s theory that classification of objects forms the classification of our being which assists our understanding or knowledge of the world around us in an orderly form, whereby we choose either to include or exclude through classification. Bloor revisits this study and suggests philosopher of science Mary Hesse’s proposal of the ‘network model’ should be considered as it ‘is not built out of discrete, self-sufficient facts which maintain their individual status in isolation from one another. Rather, knowledge is organic, and the organization of a classificatory system is not, and cannot be, determined by the way the world is. There is no such thing as a natural or uniquely objective classification’.19 If we can establish classification to create order, teach, and record the development of typography through history, this may help us understand the visual order and choice of style and historical content of letters we use in the environment and how this reflects on the identity of the city. It will also give further context regarding why academics and enthusiasts alike have historically documented letters. Introducing a more systematic approach would remove the notion of documenting based on aesthetics and prompt a more significant informed debate on the subject of lettering on buildings.

Use, position and style of signage The study of public signage and communication has also been investigated within the context of linguistics and the placement of language on the street. Ron and Suzie Scollon refer to this study as ‘Geosemiotics’, whereby they argue there is a place of order when discussing public signage. They refer to an example of when Quebec asserted its wish to be independent from Canada: across the province the French language translation of the sign was placed over the English. They comment ‘whether it was a name of a post office, of a fashion boutique or food court hall how, where those words were placed, the letterforms of these words, and the materials out of which they were made were a central part of their

18

Bloor, D., ‘Durkheim and Mauss Revisited: Classification and the Sociology of Knowledge’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 13:4 (1982), 267-297. 19 Bloor, ‘Durkheim and Mauss’, 269

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socio-political meaning’20. The study of linguistics can identify the use of language and how it communicates and impacts that community; in the Scollons’ phrase, ‘to locate language in the physical world’.21 However, my approach to this research is also able to emphasize the more aesthetic choice and styles of letterforms and how they permeate the city’s identity. Lin Pan follows on from the Scollons’ study and refers to her own study in Beijing. In relation to China, Pan argues that international discourse produces horizontal linguistics diversity but also engenders a vertical scaling of domination: vertical scales that include the complex variation of social and political knowledge of region and population which resonates with both Bloor’s and Foucault’s discussion of the importance of understanding that not ‘one box fits all’ regarding classification and language.22 With such subjects we should therefore consider a more flexible classification model. Through my own study I have seen the emergence of letterforms that incorporate non-roman style. The following image (Fig.5) is in Ladypool Road, Birmingham, where there is evidence of a Hindi style of letter but with the language communicated being English. This sign is evidence of a multi-cultural shift in the style of letterform opted for by the business owner to entice customers into the premises; it therefore highlights the significance of the style of information and identity within urban commercial areas of a city such as Birmingham.

Birmingham: A case study The identities of British cities are continually evolving and Birmingham is typical of many of Britain’s industrial municipalities and representative of the changes taking place in cities across the country. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Birmingham was one of the country’s leading industrial centres. Its trades included brass, jewellery and gun-making. The city’s growth was led by pioneering industrialists such as Matthew Boulton and James Watt. During the first half of the twentieth century, Birmingham continued to grow with the introduction of new industries, including the manufacture of motorcars, bicycles and motorcycles. Birmingham prospered until the 1970s when the decline in manufacturing industries pushed the city into recession. Economic and industrial changes forced Birmingham to focus on service industries rather than manufacturing. 20 Scollon, R. & Wong Scollon, S., Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World (London, Routledge, 2003). 21 See Scollon, Discourses in Places, x. 22 Pan, L., ‘Dissecting Multilingual Beijing: The Space and Scale of Vernacular Globalization’, Visual Communication (2010), 67-90.

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Its position at the heart of the national road and rail network has made the city a natural choice for conventions, exhibitions, sport and entertainment, whilst the more recent redevelopment of the Bullring has made Birmingham a thriving retail centre.

Fig. 1: Ela Studios, Ladypool Road, Birmingham (2013)

The changes in Birmingham’s industry have been reflected in the city’s physical landscape: many manufacturing areas have been demolished and old factories and warehouses converted into retail, leisure and residential accommodation. Whilst the regeneration is complete in many areas, in other districts such as Digbeth the process of redevelopment continues and small independent manufacturing companies operate alongside artists’ studios and galleries. In addition to industrial and economic changes, Birmingham has also seen a large-scale influx of an immigrant population, particularly those from Pakistan, India and the Caribbean, which has given Birmingham a distinct identity23. These communities have brought their own strong cultural identities to the city in general, and to the districts 23

The National Statistics 2008-based Population Projections Report for Birmingham City Council Demographic Briefing 2010/4 expects Birmingham’s population to reach 1.02 million. The report states that the Office for National Statistics recorded a third of Birmingham’s population were classed as non-white: the largest minority group was Pakistani, followed by Indian and Black Caribbean (Birmingham City Council, 2010/4).

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such as Handsworth, Sparkhill and Sparkbrook. The commercial and domestic landscapes of these areas reflect specific ethnic markets and form landscapes distinct from that of the indigenous population. This influx has brought with it another aspect to the typographic panorama with the introduction of non-Western lettering directed towards the particular ethnic audience and adding another significant dimension to this research. The study focuses on three specific areas in Birmingham: Ladypool Road, Digbeth and Corporation Street. All three areas were an informed and carefully considered choice based on their particular form of service and community. I wanted to examine any obvious distinctions based purely on the letterforms between each area but at the same time examine any changes of letterforms within the areas over a three-year period. Ladypool Road was chosen for its representation of the immigration movement of the Asian community to the city. It forms one side of Birmingham’s ‘Balti Triangle’ and this culinary speciality reflects the fact the Sparkbrook has the second highest non-white population in Birmingham. Historically, Sparkbrook was completely rural before being swallowed up by the expanding Birmingham with traditional terraced housing built to accommodate city workers. During the 1960s and 1970s the influx of mainly Asian immigrants transformed the nature of the ethnic profile of the area, which in turn dramatically changed the commercial make up the area. Ladypool Road is now almost entirely populated by ‘Balti houses’ and shops catering to the Asian market. Digbeth was chosen for its historically independent industrial community, which remains today alongside a growing art and creative neighbourhood. Digbeth is an industrial area with many small, independent manufacturing businesses mixed with a vibrant art scene with artists and designers initially attracted by cheap rents and suitable spaces to work. It is in a state of transition and presents a unique opportunity to capture a dramatic change in usage and population. A consequence for Digbeth of the regeneration of the city’s Eastside is the gradual loss of small, independent businesses which, in turn, is having a distinct impact on the visual language of the area. This culturally and economically led regeneration is forcing out the old character of the area and gradually imposing a completely new visual language landscape and identity. Corporation Street in the city centre was selected for its civic led property and big brand retail stores and businesses. It is one of Birmingham’s main historic shopping streets and also contains offices and the law courts. However its traditional role as one of Birmingham’s flagship shopping destinations is under threat as retail outlets move to self-contained shopping malls and out of town retail parks as well as the massive increase

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in online shopping impacting hugely on traditional consumer buying habits. The cost of such premium rate city centre retail space means that its former glory is a thing of the past and its very existence, as it stands, is brought into question. I am interested in recording how it is adapting to these new challenges.

Tracing urban lettering through photography As the working week and trading in the UK is still predominantly active from a Monday to Friday I chose to stage the photography on a weekend early morning slot. Photographing in the early hours of spring and summer months would also ensure good lighting and little interruption from the public and equally from myself to the general business on the street. For data protection purposes no person(s) or number plates are made visible in any of the photographs to ensure full anonymity. Only the signage on the building is included, therefore street directional signs and street furniture, for example, are excluded. Although at times captured by camera the analysis of lettering excludes ephemeral examples (such as stickers and posters in shop windows) and graffiti. The buildings included are presently categorized as ‘commercial’ which includes locality franchise business chains to multi-national business chains, ‘public’ which includes local governing public buildings, ‘private’ which includes independently run businesses and ‘obsolete’ when the property occupancy is dormant.

Retracing through clear referencing and storage Each image is given four key reference codes; the first is the name of photographer, the second is the date the picture was taken, the third is the number of the picture taken in sequence, and the fourth refers to the map reference based on The National Grid Ordnance Survey grid reference e.g. GMarshall/060912/0094/SP 08067 86303. Every image will include meta tags24 with the key words applied from the dedicated taxon or category – such as ‘lettering’ ‘serif’, ‘stencil’, ‘painted’- to support a more useful, retracing on-line research tool. All photographs are then referenced again to correspond with the new date and this continues the following year totalling a three-year period of field study. The images are digitally enhanced and resized to allow easy access to upload to digital reference 24 Meta-tags in this instance refers to the ‘keyword’, which relates to an image that is embedded into the HTML or XHTML web document.

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facilities such as an on-line library, and backed-up to a series of external discs with the intention of storing them within the Typographic Hub Library, Birmingham City University Library and the Birmingham City Library Archive for future reference and retracing.

Composition In 2001 graphic designer Robin Fior attempted to re-trace Nicolete Gray’s documentation of the city of Lisbon and his images showed surprisingly little had changed – but as a research project it was of limited value due to Gray’s lack of recording of dates and locations.25 With this in mind, I am documenting and referencing the photography with a far more systematic and re-traceable approach compared to Gray’s. I noted during my research that many photographers of lettering, such as Nicolete Gray and Alan Bartram captured the direct letter on the building, often cropping out the building itself. This could contribute to the difficulty in retracing these images later as, in most cases, the letters are removed but the building remains in situ. For my own fieldwork, I photographed along a pre-defined section of map from a starting point ‘A’ to a finishing point ‘B’ using a digital SLR Nikon D40x with an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED II AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor lens. I decided the study would measure approximately one mile in length at each location. This decision was based on my photography experience and in covering this range I estimated I would capture a manageable 150-200 shots per location. Each image is carefully considered for composition before shooting to ensure the whole of the building from top to base is included within the frame. I then systematically work along the defined path to capture the next frame, one building frontage at a time with slight overlapping of each frame to ensure no details are missed; so, in theory, if the pictures were displayed and placed side by side it would produce a panoramic view of that area. An example of composition can be seen in Figure 2.

25

Baines, P., Dixon, C. & Fior, R., ‘Letter Rich Lisbon’, Eye Magazine, 14:54 (2004), 26-35.

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Fig. 2: Shoes 4 You, Corporation Street, Birmingham (2013)

Buildings and their signage Figure 3 is an example of a typical UK high street building giving clear reference to signage and its terminology. Some of the buildings photographed in my research do not conform to this very specific physical architectural structure. So, to create order with the data entered into the taxonomy, I used a hierarchical schedule of ‘use’ and ‘position’ of the signage applied to a building. I based this on a typical commercial printed format such as a newspaper using the hierarchical graphic positioning of notices; thus, the signage was dissected to the following categories or ‘taxon’ (Fig.4).

Taxonomy digital tool: How it works Working in collaboration with a database developer, a tailored system was constructed to accommodate the specifications of the project using a Microsoft Access database.26 This database consists of a matrix of rows and columns, which are able to store multiple records that can respond to 26

The database developer is Amreek Dhillon, Senior Data Warehouse Developer for the NHS, Birmingham and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit.

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queries, cross-reference data and produce reports from complex relationships between data fields. To ensure continuity of terms, and therefore quality control of data, the webpage data entry is controlled by a series of questions with drop-down box answers. The decision to create the taxonomy in a digital domain allows for more complex analysis of data, with the benefit of being able to display selected information in a proportionate view or stage, and therefore a less overwhelming overview, which is easier to digest and comprehend (Fig. 5).

Fig. 3: Example of a typical UK high street building.

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Fig. 4: Example of a typical UK high street building including Hierarchical Graphic Level

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Fig. 5: PhD Taxonomy database development, 2013-14.

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Figure 6 shows a hand painted sign situated on the former premises of Jones and Palmer printers that has been entered into the taxonomy. As may be seen from this image, the signage is split into two Graphic Level categories. ‘A’ is the name of the company ‘Jones and Palmer Ltd’ and ‘B’ is the supplementary heading/services offered. Also, the lettering style changes somewhat; in Graphic Level A, the lettering is roman capital, even-spaced whereas in Graphic Level B, the lettering is roman capital, wide-spaced. The spacing of the lettering is reminiscent of an old-style advertising layout in a broadsheet or newspaper. The lettering is spaced to the edge of the panel, maximising the space available, even repeating ‘ETC’ at the bottom to ensure the space is filled.

Fig. 6: Jones and Palmer Ltd, Albion Street, Birmingham.

In summary The taxonomy functions in a similar way to a population census. In this case the ‘census’ considers signage and letterforms rather than the occupants of a building. Therefore, like a census, the information has the potential to project, predict and support various commercial and private institutions understanding of the community it serves, such as the demographics of people’s spending habits and requirements, to property builds and expansions. The data collected has the potential to provide information that is available to public and private elements, at national and

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local level, for the purposes of research and decision-making in a variety of areas of the lives of residents of a city. For example, an architect could use the taxonomy database to investigate the traditional materials and lettering styles on the faded advertising in a specific area to allow for an informed decision in specifying the signage for a new building that would be sympathetic to its surroundings. Local and social historians would be able to use the taxonomy database to investigate the historical changes of use of buildings in specific areas and how the changes of use reflect economic, technological, social or cultural changes. This research is an opportunity to examine lettering and its impact on a city such as Birmingham and its urban visual landscape. In doing so the research will be able to contribute significantly to the documentation of the city history in lettering design. Photographic documentation normally focuses on portraits of residents or architectural structures destined for demolition, but the photographic detailing proposed by this project aims to capture signs and typographic forms to provide a significant contribution to defining what Birmingham means as a city. This study demonstrates the importance of street level research as a method for gaining a far deeper understanding of the nature of specific urban areas. It aims to produce a fully functional, transferable taxonomy of lettering on buildings within the urban environment creating a study which is comparative, both in terms of comparing three different areas but also studying changes in one specific area over a period. Photographically capturing the visual landscape of locations in transition will form part of a vital archive to record regeneration as it is happening but also, perhaps more importantly, to ‘rescue’ the visual graphic landscape, signs and typographic forms of specific areas before they are lost forever.

A NOTE ON SARAH KIRBY’S PRINTS: DRAWING ON HISTORY: THE CITY IN PRINT

A display of prints by Sarah Kirby, Leicester-based professional printmaker, formed an ideal backdrop to the workshop from which this volume sprang. Her introductory talk on the prints is briefly summarized below. During the academic year 2012/13 I was Artist in Residence at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester – one of the Leverhulmefunded residencies which aim to foster creative collaboration between artists and their host institution. My residency led me to focus my printmaking on the buildings of ‘Leicester‘s Manufacturing Past’ – a series of large linocut prints about the industrial architecture of the city. The initial impetus for the series did not come out of the blue: I have lived, worked and walked in the city for over twenty years. I am interested in the buildings around me and how particular buildings contribute to my own ‘sense of place and home’. It was a response to this desire to record, to make pictures, about things that mattered to me. The first buildings I focused on were those that were, very consciously, part of ‘my city’ – buildings that mattered to me, that I walked past every day – some that I had made a connection with because of what happened within the building, and others that I just found aesthetically pleasing or visually interesting – my personal landmarks about my part of Leicester. Every city is different and Leicester has its own beauty, its own history and its own particular character which has grown up around and because of that history. As the buildings series was exhibited, at various venues, I was able to interact with the public response to my images. I am very interested in the way people experience places and their emotional attachment to the built environment, the ‘heritage’ that forms the landscape of their everyday lives. People began to tell me their stories: how much they loved their city, how buildings had played a part in their own histories. Leicester is a modest town; its residents are generally unassuming about their city but these images seemed to prompt an uncharacteristic overt pride in Leicester and inspired freedom to talk about the city and its buildings. It became

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evident that architecture affects people’s lives. Buildings are social: not only do they reflect the spirit and history of the city at the time they were built, they continue to speak of the context and communities that have engaged with them since. There is a powerful emotional attachment to the urban past embodied in the buildings that each of us connects with. There seems to a renewed debate about living in cities: how our environment contributes to our lives, the ways we move around a city, the values we place on our heritage – and indeed what constitutes heritage – what is worth preserving for whom and why. This is an important debate for Leicester at a time of global interest in the discovery of the remains of King Richard III. My research began at the site of the former Corah’s factory in the St Margaret’s area of Leicester – a huge site, bordering Abbey Park and the inner ring road – which developed and grew over many decades but eventually ceased business at the end of the last century. Corah’s itself, having huge influence on the city, its St Margaret’s trademark and of course the many generations of Leicester people it employed. From Corah’s came the phrase ‘Leicester clothed the world’, and Leicester was known for having the best dressed workers in England. The statue of St Margaret that used to be a prominent feature of Corah’s factory has since been relocated outside the nearby medieval church from which it took its name. From Corah’s I was led to explore the nearby river and canal. I was also drawn to locate the old Donisthorpe factory site, though a recent serious fire had badly damaged the building.1 Together with the disused Great Central Railway station, the Donsithorpe site paradoxically sits in proximity to the gleaming horizon lines of the Showcase cinema, John Lewis’s and the new Highcross Shopping Centre, all forming a striking backdrop since 2008, and reflecting the rise, fall and re-invention of industry and commerce evident in the layers of the city as it grew away from the river. On another side of the city, I was drawn to St Saviour’s Road and Spinney Hill, to the former Gent’s clock factory – now buzzing with many small textile, import/export and packaging companies – and numerous other buildings from the Victorian period to the 1950s. Leicester was one of Britain’s richest cities in the 1930s and boasts many Art Deco and 1930s industrial buildings alongside the more stereotypical view of industrialization in Victorian red brick. This was an unfamiliar area, quite 1

The iconic building is currently being restored by Leicester City Council for use as offices. See https://www2.le.ac.uk/library/manufacturingpasts/resources/Donisthorpe%20%20Friars%20Mill%20Timeline.pdf

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self-contained yet with a distinct character, with many small to medium scale businesses running through a busy, closely terraced residential area of Leicester. Steep hills, distant views and many signs of a grander past show a vision of former times. Gilbert Scott’s St Saviour’s church has changed, along with local businesses and communities, reflecting new and more established immigration over recent decades. In my linocuts I am trying to tell the truth but they are not literal depictions. I cannot attempt to tell the whole story but my work is my response to places, to stories I hear, and information I learn. The residency has now ended but the series of prints carries on. Like most good research, the more you know, the more you want to know – and I have a continuing impulse to explore and to record my own gathering of information.2

2

Sarah Kirby’s work may be seen on her website - http://www.sarahkirby.co.uk/ and she also exhibits with Leicester Print Workshop – http://www.leicesterprintworkshop.com/

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Fig. 1: The Guildhall, Leicester (all images are linocuts © Sarah Kirby)

Text and Image in the City

Fig. 2: The engine house, Donisthorpe Mill, Leicester

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Fig. 3: St Margaret’s church, Leicester

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Fig. 4: Imperial building, Leicester

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Fig. 5: Former Gent’s factory, Leicester

Text and Image in the City

Fig. 6: Wygston’s House, Leicester

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CONTRIBUTORS

Caroline Archer is Professor of Typography, Birmingham City University. She is Co-Director of the Centre for Printing History and Culture (a joint venture between Birmingham City University and the University of Birmingham). She runs the Typographic Hub, in the School of Visual Communication at Birmingham City University; the Hub works to promote the history, theory and practice of typographic design. Although she has a particular interest in the typographic history of the Midlands, she is concerned with printing of all eras, from all nationalities and in all its guises. She maintains an active publishing programme, and articles on all aspects of the history, theory and practice of typography, printing and the allied trades are frequently published on and off-line. Her publishing output includes four monographs and eight co-authored titles. Catherine Armstrong (editor) is Lecturer in Modern History at Loughborough University. She works on the relationship between Britain and her North American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her latest monograph is Landscape and Identity in North America's Southern Colonies 1660-1745 (Ashgate, 2013). She is also a book historian and has chaired the Book History Research Network and the Print Networks conference committee. She is also, with Simon Eliot, co-editor of the journal Publishing History. Daliah Bond is a PhD student in the School of History, under the supervision of Professor William Naphy. Her thesis, about to be submitted, concerns the significance of Scottish chapbooks in relation to popular culture 1650-1800. Her research interests also broadly include cheap print and ephemeral literature in the early modern period. John Hinks (editor) is a former public library director, now an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, with research interests in early modern print culture and book-trade networks. He is also Chair of the Printing Historical Society, a member of the Council of the Bibliographical Society, Visiting Research Fellow in Printing History at Birmingham City University, and reviews editor of the journal Publishing History. His edited collection (with Catherine Feely),

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Historical Networks in the Book Trade, was published by Routledge in 2017. Sarah Kirby is a professional printmaker based in Leicester. During the academic year 2012/13 she was Artist in Residence at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester. Sarah Kirby’s work may be seen on her website - http://www.sarahkirby.co.uk/ - and she also exhibits with Leicester Print Workshop - http://www.leicesterprintworkshop.com/ Geraldine Marshall is a PhD student at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University. Her research on ‘Taxonomy of Birmingham (UK) Lettering’ is based on the study of public lettering and typography within the environment. She is developing and implementing a systematic taxonomy to record the typography and lettering of Birmingham the result of which will help broaden understanding of the city’s social, cultural, ethnic and historical visual identity. Her research is under the supervision of Prof. Caroline Archer (Birmingham City University) and Prof. Phil Baines (Central Saint Martins). Jack Mockford has a PhD from the University of Hertfordshire. The project has been undertaken in collaboration with the AHRC and the British Museum’s department of Coins and Medals. Rathna Ramanathan is a senior lecturer and graphic designer whose practice is inspired by the contexts of design history, culture and language. She has a PhD in the History of Typography and Graphic Communication and is Subject Lead for Design & Interaction at Central Saint Martins. She is currently completing a book on street and pirate booksellers in India. Rosa Smurra is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Bologna and Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Città, cittadini e imposta diretta a Bologna (2007) and Iohannes de Pontissara vescovo di Winchester (1282-1304) studente a Bologna, professore a Modena e gli altri anglici suoi compagni di studio (2012). Her co-edited books include Storia delle città italiane (2002) and The farsighted gaze of capital cities (2014).