The past week has seen an increase in
election material coming through the letterbox, all of which will ultimately go
into the recycling bin. But as it goes we should be conscious of the
ephemerality of so much printed material; when the next local elections come
around, will the incentives to vote this way or that be printed on the same
kind of paper or card, be full-colour, will they have glitter or 3D effects, or
something we have not yet thought of, or with they even be material at all? One
of the items the History of Printing class at the Bishopsgate Institute looked at in March was a flyer for a
Trades Union meeting in Hackney in 1983, printed on a duplicator, probably a
Gestetner, a stencilling machine that was common in offices through most of the
twentieth century, now superseded and rendered obsolete by a few generations of
office printing processes. The flyer is on a rough dark yellow paper, instantly
recognisable as cheap stock paper from those times, and has a shoeprint across
it – it would not have survived if I had not picked it up and used it as a
bookmark, in a book that remained closed for a few decades. And it stands as a
challenge to keep all those flyers urging me to vote this way or that, as a
record of print history as much as political history, since few things are as
irretrievable as a copy of yesterday’s newspaper.
There are many stories of creation, loss
and destruction in the world of print: Sherman Denton produced a wonderful book
of butterflies and moths of North America, published in 1900, containing
extraordinarily truthful prints of the species he was describing – truthful because
each illustration was made from the wings of a captured specimen, ‘transfers of species from
life’ as the book describes them. There is an apocryphal
story told of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress, his allegory of the Christian life, which was one of the most
read books in the English-speaking world for 300 years. Bunyan’s book was so
popular when it was first published in 1678 that a new edition was published
every year for ten years; people read it till it fell apart, and then bought a
replacement, to the extent that there was a story that only four copies have
survived from the first printing. Though this is not the case, it illustrates
the paradoxical fragility of successful print.
The Bishopsgate Institute Archives hold
several examples of printed material whose survival is a source of delight; the
recent History of Printing class examined a collection of nineteenth-century playbills
from the Grecian Theatre in Islington, block printed in exuberant designs and
colours, but intended to serve only to advertise a few performances, and then
to be pasted over with the following week’s playbill. We also handled material
which was produced in secret, and which the authorities surely wished had been
even more ephemeral: samizdat publishing from the former Czechoslovakia, novels
typed out by hand with five or six layers of carbon paper. Maybe a month’s
work, producing five or six copies, in a labour intensive process to rival that
of Gutenberg and his fifteenth-century followers.
The title page of a samizdat novel, Upilované MřÞe by
the Czech novelist and philosopher Jiřà Pechar
Such items are deeply precious, handled
with care (and wonder), and yet handling them is what they were made for. But walking
round the reading rooms of the British Library you can trace where people have
been reading material produced between 1870 and 1945 from the flakes of brittle
brown paper on the floor, as the process of reading is also a process of loss.
Every touch creates, in the encounter between printed word and image and the
eye and mind of the reader, but every touch wears away and unintentionally destroys. The
fibre laminating processes that were introduced to strengthen the pages of
fragile books frustrate the reading process, as the eye struggles with the loss
of contrast produced by the fibrous covering; but this is surely preferable to
the complete loss of physical contact that comes with digitisation. Except that
digitisation allows far greater access.
The items shown here illustrate how people in
earlier centuries struggled to keep up with the accidents and wear that
threatened to take from them their obviously much loved books. The immediacy
and care of the repairs and strengthenings show how much these books mattered
to their owners. As much as books allow the conquering of time by bringing us
the words and images of the past, they have their own struggles with time.
Repairs to a page of Bloomfield’s A Farmer’s Boy published in 1806,
showing a wood engraving attributed to Thomas Bewick
Repaired and/or strengthened children’s chapbooks
from the early nineteenth century
