AI is not eating antique books

It seems that the latest injection of disinformation, or "FUD" (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), into discussions about AI is that AI companies are "eating" physical copies of rare and antique books in the same way that data-centres are believed to be "drinking" water. (I asked Nano Banana to generate an appropriate image of this imagnined process—using the same starting prompt I used previously—to help my readers visualise this action. Please enjoy the result!)

This, somewhat alarmist, 25 July article by Frank Landymore, for instance, suggests that AI companies are purchasing antique books in large volumes (this is in the article title: "AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books…") to use as high-quality training data, as these texts are free from modern digital AI content. Because it is cheaper, destructive, high-speed automated scanning processes are being used to digitize the books (i.e., book spines are guillotined off, the covers removed, page-stacks are fed into scanner hoppers, then thrown away). The practice is facilitated by book database services that keep the tech company buyers anonymous. Rare booksellers have ethical concerns about selling books to these services, warning that it permanently destroys some of the last surviving copies of historic literature.

The FUD here is the "antique books" and "historic literature" claim. Once you read through the parent and grandparent linked articles (3 April essay by Val Giordano, promoting the practice, here; 25 June [anonymous] essay on the NL Times, reporting concerns of European book dealers, here; a 26 June article by Benj Edwards here; a solid, 21 July essay by Emanuel Maiberg here) it becomes clear that the books being hoovered up by Anthropic (and possibly others) all post-date 1969 (when ISBNs were introduced) and most, it seems likely, post-date 2006 (when ISBN barcodes became ubiquitous)—about the same time, coincidently, that the arrival of modern smart-phones ended civilisation as we knew it.

That the AI-company proxies are exclusively interested in books with an ISBN is made very clear from the following anecdote reported by Maiberg:

The seller told me that … Bulk purchases … usually reflect interest in a specific topic, whereas the recent, very large purchases were of books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases. (emphasis added)

That the bulk-purchase companies are likely to prefer later, bar-coded books, seems probable from the scale they are working on—it is simply easier and cheaper to scan the bar codes of hundreds of thousands of books, than it is to key in the ISBN (and then check for errors) on the same number.

From the articles I mention above, it seems that second-hand book dealers are getting what I take to be in-fill requests, for any ISBN that has not shown up in the literal truck-loads of books donated to charities, that are sold off to bulk-book dealers / waste-paper merchants (on this, see my post here concerning Mubin and Raza Ahmed's "Wrap Ltd."—a "printed matter," "waste and scrap paper" import/export business with an annual turnover of £6.5M "or more.")

It simply wouldn’t be economical to buy a book via ABE, Alibris etc. if you could buy the same book at a fraction of the price from parasites, excuse me, erm … paper-dealers like Mubin and Raza Ahmed. I.e., you'd start with whatever your local large-scale charity can wring from a well-meaning public, checked-off against a master-list of ISBNs via bar-code scanning, and then back-fill the gaps in that master-list via ABE, Alibris etc.

For me, this is where it gets interesting. Anthropic et al. have more money than they know what to do with, and have just been stung to the tune of USD3K per book, for all the digital books they stole, and then got sued for stealing. That being the case, the following observation should come as no surprise:

there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.

* * * * *

Since I was born before ISBNs were a thing, it is hard for me to think of books after 1970 as "antique" or "historic" ("rare," especially, "rare on market" is another matter completely). Perhaps, this is easier for Frank Landymore—who seems to be in his early 30s. In any event, I asked one of the water-guzzling, book-eating monsters (ChatGPT) to estimate how many books have been published since 1970 (and 2006) and the answer should be reassuring.

It seems likely that something like 80 million English-language ISBN editions have been released, or which approximately 60 million editions were printed with a barcode. The number of unique works (i.e., with Pride and Prejudice counting once) is obviously much smaller—perhaps 10–20 million, but the number of physical copies printed is much larger, likely "well over 100 billion copies since the 1980s."

So, it seems Anthropic is attempting to gobble up millions of recent books (emphatically-not antique you baby-faced ageists!), mostly comprised of unwanted donations, fenced by the likes of Messers Ahmed, and otherwise unsold obscuriana, laying heavily on the hands of dealers who once supplied libraries, out of a pool of something like 100 billion copies printed.

If it were possible to pile this 100-billion copies one atop the other, it seems that the pile would likely extend 2.5 million kilometres, or about 6.5 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Indeed, only 14.5 billion books would be need to reach the moon, or 14.5% of all books printed with an ISBN.

I would wager as many books as I could carry, that far, far more than this 14.5%—perhaps 80% of these 100 billion books—have already been pulped, without once raising the interest of Landymore et al., making this story a pretty good parallel to widely-disseminated concerns about the water consumption of data centres. (Which is mostly FUD too, since most new data centres consume no water—they use closed-loop cooling—and the water usage of older AI data centres that do use evaporative cooling etc., is dwarfed by the water consumption of golf-course and intensive cattle farms. I.e., this is a gnat on the arse of a flee in the grand scheme of things.)

And while most AI tokens will doubless go to things like generating fake security footage of President John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe in flagrante delicto, or self-insert versions of Terminator or Twilight, it is already clear that AI can, and probably soon will, cure every disease known to man and put a complete stop to the death and mutilation caused by badly-driven cars on the road—to name but two of life’s miseries. If they need to guillotine a copy of each my books to do this (**), they are welcome to do so.

(**) if AI can also restore my use of AdobeCaslonExpert in the later versions of Word, they can have all my essays too.

Ye Foolish Book Collector

Above and below are four versions of an image I generated using Google's free AI tool—i.e., via the Google browser. It used Nano Bannana to generate the images. My initial prompt was "Create an image in the style of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dance of Death series, for the type of book collector depicted in Sebastian Brant's Das Narrenschiff."

I refined the image by asking it to remove the top banner; then "[1] Remove the fools cap from the skeleton reaching for the book; [2] add a simple constellation symbol to the blank pages on book at bottom right (above the banner), such as those found in Hygini, Poeticon Astronomicon"

Of the four images, I like the most the second one above, and this last one below—which is closest to what I had in mind.

Although I was delighted with the images, I was most impressed by the persistence (?)—how well Nano Bannana maintained the integrity of the original image, while modifying small details. This is a huge improvement on what image generators could do only twelve months ago.

* * * * *

UPDATE 27 July 2026. I reused my initial prompt (as set out above) as a staring point for this new post on AI (not) eating antique books, and was so pleased with the resulting "Bibliomaniac versus Death" image that I thought I would add it here:

The Pain of a Bibliophile

At the moment, I am reading Hwang Bo-Reum's Every Day I Read, trs. Shanna Tan (2025)—a "warm and reflective collection of essays about reading, language and life." (Some Amazon reviews here.) The essays are all very short. And, although they strike me as quite uneven in quality, I like reading essays in general, and I have been particularly enjoying this (to me) outsider perspective on a topic I am deeply-familiar with.

For fairly-obvious reasons, I was amused by this passage in Chapter 45 (178–79):

  When I first learnt that the famed Japanese bibliophile Takashi Tachibana had a 'Cat Building' that housed more than 200,000 books, I was in awe. I can't afford a building, but I would love a spacious reading room lined with bookcases. Wouldn't it be awesome if I could find any book I wanted in my own home?
  But after reading several books written by bibliophiles, I realised that maybe that isn't the life for me. I love buying books, but bibliophiles take book-buying to the extreme.
  In The Pain of a Bibliophile (what a title!), it’s said that around half or maybe more of bibliophiles buy books every day, and because of that, they barely have space to walk in their own house. It takes about 10,000 books to open a secondhand bookshop, and Japanese author Takeshi Okazaki keeps about 20,000 or 30,000 books at home. One of the bibliophiles interviewed in the book estimated owning about 30,000 books, but when the actual count turned out to be 130,000, they chuckled shamefacedly.
  Despite owning a whole lot more books, the author claims that 500 is the ideal number of books to have at home. A true-blue bibliophile should have a sizeable collection, yet have the flexibility to adjust it according to one's changing preferences. The author quotes a literary scholar saying, More isn't better. I imagined a room filled with several hundred of my favourite books displayed neatly, with their spines visible. From then on, I stopped having the ridiculous idea to fill every inch of my house with books.

Wanting to know more about The Pain of a Bibliophile, I turned to the endnotes, and was disappointed to find the following (on p .221):

1 Translated from the Korean edition: 아즈마 가나코, (역) 박승희, 궁극의 미니멀라이프 (즐거운상상, 2016).

I haven't the remotest idea how to read Korean. I can't even break these lines of symbols into words, let alone work out which bit was the title and how to key this title into a search engine. I don’t know why the publisher didn't gloss each Korean title using something like the official "Revised Romanization" method. (Using this method, Hwang's Every Day I Read or 매일 읽겠습니다 can be Romanised as Maeil ikgetseumnida.) Better still would have been to give the name of the original work that was translated. If they had done this, it would have saved me a lot of wasted time, trying to identify The Pain of a Bibliophile—which, as Hwang says—has such a tantalising title.

* * * * *

Since I had no idea how to transcribe the Korean title, I used Hwang's translated title. I asked Google to identify a "Korean book, the title of which translates literally as 'the pain of the bibliophile'." Google search referred me to Hwang's previous book:

Based on the search results, it appears you may be referring to Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum, a popular Korean "healing fiction" novel that heavily features themes of bibliophilia, comforting reads, and self-discovery through literature.

Since Google search failed, I tried Google AI, which informed me that

The Korean book you are referring to is likely 애서가의 고통 (Aeseogaui Gotong), which is the Korean translation of the German book "Die Leiden des Bibliophilen" (literally "The Sufferings of the Bibliophile") by Wolfgang Hermann.

Google AI provided other useful facts about Hermann's Die Leiden des Bibliophilen; namely:

It explores the obsessive habits and inherent struggles of those who love books too much, such as:
  The overwhelming physical weight of a growing collection.
  The anxiety of having a "To Be Read" (TBR) pile that never shrinks.
  The psychological burden of finding shelf space and the "pain" of potentially losing or damaging a beloved book

Particularly astute readers may have already realised that this is complete hogwash, but I innocently searched for English translations of this work and, when that got me nowhere, for information about the author. This is when I discovered (on Wikipedia) that Wolfgang Hermann was "a German librarian and member of the Nazi Party, whose blacklist provided the template for the Nazi book burnings in May 1933."

Returning to Google AI's (entirely hallucinated) account of this book, I am not sure what "psychological burden" Herr Herrmann might have suffered as a result of "potentially losing or damaging a beloved book"; nor do I know whether this librarian cheered on the Nazi book-burning only to alleviate anxieties he experienced over the mass of good books he would be unable to read or shelve.

Still, it did strike me as unlikely that Herr Hermann would have would have penned a book on Die Leiden des Bibliophilen. And, since he died at the end of WW2, I doubted that Herr Hermann would have had much time to write a book on the subject of his bibliophilic sorrows. Since it was even less likely that he had anything to say about late twentieth-century Japanese book collectors, Tachibana's 'Cat Building' etc., I belatedly concluded that this was a pretty wild AI hallucination.

* * * * *

After a number of less-entertaining hallucinations—I got caught up in side-quests based on Hwang's reference to Tachibana Takashi and his four-story Cat Building.

Eventually, I gave in and went to the trouble of photographing the endnote, uploading the photo to my computer, screen capping the entry, and using Google Translate to transcribe and translate it.

As a result of doing this, I can now offer [1] the above pictures of "La maison du chat noir chez TACHIBANA" ["Tachibana's Black Cat House"] (exterior, interior, and plan) and [2] a translation and gloss, below, of Hwang's endnote):

Translated from the Korean edition: Kanako Azuma, (Translator) Seung-hee Park, Ultimate Minimal Life (Jeulgeoun Sangsang, 2016).

  궁극의 미니멀라이프 [Gunggeuk-ui Minimallaipeu]
  아즈마 가나코 [Kanako Azuma]
  박승희 [Seung-hee Park]
  즐거운상상 [Jeulgeoun Sangsang]

Further Googling revealed that Gunggeuk-ui Minimallaipeu is a translation of Kanako Azuma's Motanai Kurashi: Oheya Mo Kokoro Mo Sukkirisuru [A minimalist lifestyle: A clearer space and a more refreshed mind] (2006), which has not been translated into English. (And is no longer available in Japanese—although the old Amazon listing survives here.)

* * * * *

The first part of Azuma's book title—To live without waste—refers to a Japanese practice (Mottainai), which is rooted in Buddhist ideas that everything has a spirit (Tsukumogami). The phrase—which might be playfully translated as "the way without waste"—combines Kura (暮: to live/spend time) with Mottai (勿体: the dignity, essence, or proper form of an object) and Nai (無し: without, no, or not).

There is a lot to admire about the Mottainai Kurashi philosophy, which is based on a deep respect for both nature and objects, particularly older objects that are believed to acquire a soul and become self-aware after long periods of use. Although it is rooted in Edo-period frugality, Mottainai Kurashi has inspired a contemporary neo-Scandinavian, eco-friendly minimalism (i.e., minimizing the purchase of unnecessary items), which has recently inspired a multitude of books on Japanese minimalism.

I suspect that some of those attracted to the idea of Japanese minimalism (and the prospect of achieving a "more refreshed mind" via "a clearer space") do not fully-understand the emphasis on avoiding the acquisition of unnecessary items, rather than merely disposing of unnecessary items.

Japanese folklore is full of warnings about thoughtlessly disposing of objects, since spirits (yokai) can "embody the frustration of being discarded, causing mischief or haunting owners who treated them poorly." I.e., you will not achieve a "more refreshed mind" by thoughtlessly disposing of objects—instead, you are likely to incur the wrath of a host of yokai. You have a responsibility to every object: to value, care for and mend objects—to appreciate what you have.

* * * * *

Although I have a deep respect for my many books, particularly older books, and I am in no danger of being haunted as a result of thoughtlessly discarding any of them, I have no illusions that I am practicing Mottainai Kurashi. Perhaps for this reason, I was particularly amused to discover that Kanako has written many books on the subject of minimalism (is not the proliferation of her books … problematic?) as I was by the fact that Hwang bookends her reference to Motanai Kurashi: Oheya Mo Kokoro Mo Sukkirisuru with an explanation that she "pushed out ten boxes of books" from her library in two days after deciding to "trim [her] collection to 500 books." It seems that all three of us have something yet to learn about the Mottainai Kurashi philosophy.

Finally, I have to say that I was immensely disappointed to learn that The Pain of a Bibliophile was a pean to minimalism. And I was incredulous to discover that no book with this title has ever been published. (No such title appears on WorldCat.) In fact, I was so disappointed and incredulous that I am tempted to remedy this state of affairs by writing my own book under this title.

No sooner did I have this thought that Google AI leapt forth, like Achillies in battle, to suggest an outline for this putative title. Not to be outdone, ChatGPT responded by penning this description of the imagined book:

Patrick Spedding's The Pain of a Bibliophile (2026) reads like a wry, affectionate exploration of a reader's most relatable struggles—those peculiar tensions that arise from loving books a little too much. Framed as both cultural observation and personal reflection, the book examines the paradox at the heart of bibliophilia: that the very source of joy can also be a source of constant, if often humorous, distress.

The author begins with the most visible burden—space. Shelves overflow, then multiply, until books migrate into teetering stacks across floors, chairs, and hidden corners. This physical sprawl becomes a symbol of a deeper excess: the ever-growing "to-be-read" pile, which looms not as a promise, but as a quiet, persistent anxiety. Each new acquisition, however thrilling, adds to an unspoken awareness that no lifetime may be long enough.

From there, the narrative turns to the financial habits of devoted readers, capturing the near-compulsive pull of bookstores and the curious ability to justify "just one more" purchase. This is paired with a contrasting fragility: the acute heartbreak of physical damage—a cracked spine or stained page—treated with a seriousness that borders on the ceremonial.

Time, too, emerges as an adversary. The bibliophile, the book suggests, is perpetually outpaced by their own ambitions, forced to choose between unread volumes while often juggling several at once. This indecision becomes its own quiet torment, as starting a new book can feel like a small betrayal of the others waiting.

Interwoven throughout are moments of loss and longing: the misplaced tome, the narrowly missed rare find, the book that got away. Social life presents its own complications, as bibliophiles struggle to explain their habits—or quietly opt out of gatherings in favour of the written world.

Yet the book ultimately resists framing these experiences as true suffering. Instead, it presents them as inseparable from the pleasure itself. The weight of a book, the scent of its pages, the satisfaction of ownership and discovery—all are part of a deeply sensory and emotional relationship. In this light, the "pain" of a bibliophile is revealed not as a flaw, but as a testament to the depth of their devotion.

If I had the inclination, I could probably have an AI write this book, and publish it, so other AIs could read and review it—and write blog posts about it (**)—but I have a host of bookish yokai to care for, so I will content myself with the above AI-bait (which is, I hope, enough to have The Pain of a Bibliophile added to my list of recent publications).

(**) My version of the dead internet theory—which Wikipedia still labels as "a conspiracy theory." I wonder if PolyMarket is taking bets on how soon this label will be removed.

Compositor: Fleuron 2.0

In March of 2017, I mentioned Fleuron: A Database of Eighteenth-Century Printers' Ornaments as a “new and enticing method for identifying” items printed by Thomas Gardner. (I also mentioned my three articles on the Gardner printing business, and have since used the post to aggregate newly-identified Gardner items.)

The woman behind Fleuron, Hazel Wilkinson, has continued "developing methods of identifying unknown printers using digital imaging" (i.e., using image-recognition software to identify and match printer’s ornaments). The upshot is Compositor, a site that went live in the middle of 2020—according to its blog and Twitter accounts—unbeknown to me. (Thankfully, David Levy got wind of the new site and recently let me in on the secret.††)

What Compositor enables is a lot closer to what I had hoped might be possible with an image-searching approach, than that provided by Fleuron. Fleuron was very good; Compositor is better. Although there is a lot of unnecessary, mouse-operated, busy work which makes any extensive search a grind, it is now possible to cross-match images of cast-metal Fleurons and carved wooden printers ornaments—Headpieces, Tailpieces, Initials, and Factotums—quickly compare the Compositor-identified image matches (to weed out the more obvious false-positives), and to trace the matches back to the works in which they appear.

So, for instance, I can [1] search Compositor for an item that I know was printed by Gardner, get [2] a full list of his ornaments that appear in that item, and then [3] search Compositor for other instances of each individual ornament, leading me to [4] items that I did not previously know were printed by Gardner—something I am keen to do.**

Likewise, I can [1] search Compositor for an edition of a work written by Eliza Haywood, follow steps [2] and [3], to [4] lead me to other items printed by the same printer as the printer of the Haywood edition. And since I do not know who the printer was of many editions of the works by Haywood, this should help me identify them—something I am keen to do.

Apart from the grind of unnecessary mouse-operated, busy work, which discourages anyone from undertaking the sort of extensive searches I am keen to have the results of, there are some other limitations worth mentioning.

Compositor appears to contain ornament images only from a sub-set of items filmed for The Eighteenth Century microfilm series, and subsequently scanned for ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online). Also, the easiest way of locating an item on Compositor, is via an ESTC number. So, with a list of eighteenth century books in hand, you will be stymied if your candidate for a search

[1] the book isn’t on ESTC
[2] it is on ESTC, but not filmed for ECCO
[3] it is on ESTC, and on ECCO, but not on Compositor (!? I am not sure why this is the case)
[4] it is on ESTC, and on ECCO, and on Compositor, but the images captured by ECCOare so awful, that no match was possible
(*[5] it is on ESTC, and on ECCO, and on Compositor, but it has no ornaments! — obviously this is not the fault of Compositor, but it is easy to forget the basic, limiting, starting point for searches.)

It is a shame that Compositor does not allow you to upload your own images: even if you had to provide black-and-white images, of a certain number pixel density or size, include physical dimensions and so on, it would still be a huge improvement.

Even if Compositor only allowed you to source images from, say, the Internet Archive or Google Books, that would be an improvement, but I want to upload ornaments I have from other sources too, so I can identify the printer of such things as Sodom, or the Gentleman Instructed. A Comedy. By the E. of R. (Hague, Printed in the Year 1000000)—which is not on ESTC or ECCO or the Internet Archive or Google Books. The only known copy sold at Sotheby’s on 16 December 2004 and is now in private ownership.

Still, what Compositor does allow you to do is very impressive, and is a lot closer to what I imagined might be possible with an image-searching approach, when I explored getting such a project off the ground in 2004. If the search interface were to be improved (I might do a separate post on this) and if it were possible to search Compositor for user-sourced images, it would achieve all that I imagined in 2004.

Of course, it both changes were to be made, I would be unlikely to eat, drink or sleep until I had identified the printer of every item that survives from the first half of the eighteenth century. As things stand today, my main risk will be RSI. So, "Careful what you wish for"?

* * * * *

†† David has since done a post about Compositor here, giving an over-view of its use in his search for printers of works by or relating to Edmond Hoyle.

** Soon after writing the above I went ahead and did this search. I am not sure whether this blog is the best place to publish the full list of Gardner publications I have now identified—and my indecision is largely responsible for delaying the publication of the present post (which I wrote in January, about the same time as David was writing his post!).
[UPDATED 9 March 2021]

Identifying Eliza Haywood's Sources

I have just read Douglas Duhaime’s essay on “Digital Approaches to Intertextuality: The Case of Eliza Haywood,” which was published on his blog on 3 January this year (see here; for a profile of Duhaime, see here and here). I am in danger of developing a tick if I say the essay was “thought provoking,” but it was. Very.

Duhaime is interested in “the ways in which writers borrow language and ideas from other writers.” He has used his considerable computer skills to write a plagiarism-detection script, which he has used/tested/developed on Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless. As a result of his analysis, Duhaime is now able to suggest a source for almost all of Haywood’s quotations and paraphrases not previously identified by editors.

Like all editor of Haywood’s works, Christine Blouch was frequently forced to admit defeat with the statement "Source unidentified." And like all editors of Haywood’s works, I am sure she wished she had had access to Duhaime’s skills and his plagiarism-detection script before having to make such an admission in her Broadview edition of Betsy Thoughtless. Having edited a number of eighteenth-century texts myself, I know how much work is represented by these two words—"Source unidentified"—often much more work than is represented by a neat and succinct reference to the Bible, a Classical author, or a Canonical writer.

Having "set out to uncover the materials that informed Haywood's work," Duhaime used an API to search Literature Online's text-base. (An API is an Application Programming Interface. Duhaime used Python's Selenium package to create a script to “programatically investigate” the text-base. See here and here for details.) It emerged that “in many cases,” Haywood's unidentified literary borrowings were fairly easy to identify—though the source was occasionally mis-identified by Haywood. In this way Duhaime identifies quotations from Nathaniel Lee, Alexander the Great (1677), John Dryden, The Spanish Friar (1681), William Congreve, Love for Love (1695) and The Mourning Bride (1697).

Of course, since these works are easy to find on EEBO, ECCO, Google Books and the Internet Archive, there really is no difficulty doing this sort of search online without an API, although it is obviously more time-consuming. No matter how dodgy the OCR of each individual copy digitised, the multitude of copies and editions available online means that just about any short search string (any short sequence of words) is likely to lead you to the source of a quotation. I have done this myself, many times, with interesting results.

(In June of 2012 I did a post on a quotation repeatedly used and mis-identified by Haywood (see here), which I concluded with the words “in the Pickering & Chatto edition of Ab.64 Epistle for the Ladies, edited by Alexander Pettit and Christine Blouch, the verse is not identified … [this] edition was published in 2000, back in the before time, the long-long-ago. When the internet was young and you had to read whole books to find a quote, or miss one, as the case may be. Oh how far we have come in only a decade …)

So the really interesting part of Duhaime’s essay is not so much the “many cases” in which the source was easy to locate, but the discovery of many other “instances of intertextuality in Haywood's writing” where a given quotation—usually multiple lines of verse—“seems to derive from multiple sources.” This is where the API appears to really come into its own. By quickly chopping up any given Haywood quotation into segments, searching for those segments, and presenting the findings in a convenient spreadsheet, Duhaime’s API makes it possible to establish that Haywood “often combined lines from disparate literary works in order to forge her own ideas” (italics mine).

Duhaime argues that three of the following five lines, for example, are cobbled together from three sources:

  Pleas'd with destruction, proud to be undone,
  With open arms I to my ruin run,
  And sought the mischiefs I was bid to shun;
  Tempted that shame a virgin ought to dread,
  And had not the excuse of being betray.

[1] Richard Blackmore, “Advice to the Poets” (1718): “Let them this gen'rous Resolution own, / That they are pleas'd and proud to be undone”; [2] Mary Wortley Montagu, “The Basset Table” (1716): “I know the bite, yet to my ruin run, / And see the folly which I cannot shun”; [3] Aaron Hill, “The Excursion of Fancy: A Pindaric Ode” (1753): “Let us throw down this load of doubt, with which no race is won: / And, swift, to easier conquests, lighter, run, / The way, which reason is not bid to shun! ”

Although this is not—contrary to Duhaime’s claim—a clear case of Haywood “combin[ing] lines from disparate literary works,” like Lego blocks stacked one upon another, it is a particularly intriguing selection of works which Haywood appears to echo in her poetry. The third echo, from Hill, is perhaps the most interesting of all because it seems far less likely to me to be a source text than the Montagu text (which is much closer to Haywood's actual lines). Since Hill's influence on Haywood is well-established a critic who found the Hill echo first/alone could be forgiven for looking no further and use the echo to suppport the existing interpretation of Haywood as being heavily-influenced by Hill. Having multiple echo-texts simultaneously presented as possibilities, it is less likely that a critic will be side-tracked by a single, convenient partial-match, like that from Hill.

Duhaime’s second example is slightly more convincing:

  When puzzling doubts the anxious bosom seize,
  To know the worst is some degree of ease.

[1] Joseph Mitchell, “Poems on Several Grave and Important Subjects”: “When puzling Doubts invade my Breast, / And I am cloath'd in Shades of Night . . . "; [2] Davild Mallet, Eurydice (1731): “When others too / are miserable, not to know the worst / is some degree of bliss.”

Here, “invade my Breast” becomes “the anxious bosom seize,” and “degree of bliss” becomes “degree of ease”—the sole changes made being necessary to make the couplet rhyme.

* * * * *

Although I think the really interesting part of Duhaime’s essay is not the “many cases” in which the source was easy to locate, the fact is one could feed every snippet of verse quoted by Haywood into Duhaime’s API and produce a spreadsheet of Hawood’s sources, ranked by author, title and number of quotations, total number lines etc. Such a list would offer an intriguing insight into Haywood’s own “reading” and the major influences on her writing.

(I put “reading” in inverted commas because it is already clear that Haywood frequently quotes plays and often seems to do so from memory, suggesting that she spent a lot of time at the theatre—a suggestion supported by her own plays, acting, and her two volumes of drama criticism—The Dramatic Historiographer (1735) and A Companion to the Theatre (1747).)

If a spreadsheet of Hawood’s confirmed sources were used in conjunction with a spreadsheet of the works Haywood appears to echo, it may be possible that something like a reasonable or defensible judgement could be made between competing texts (in cases where there are two equally-possible origin-texts of similar constructions). That is, if a corpus-wide analysis of Haywood's sources shows a multitude of quotations from author A and none from author B, then it is more likely that Haywood is paraphrasing the former than the latter. (Though the example above with Montagu and Hill suggest that, even here, each case must be judged on its merits.)

I hope Duhaime decides to expand his work on Haywood and to publish his findings: I, for one, would love to have them on hand when editing her works.

Blogging and the Academy

This evening I read Marcy Willard and Dean Leffingwell's "Blogging to Accelerate Peer Review of Doctoral Dissertations" from e-Research Collaboration: Theory, Techniques and Challenges (2010). A search on Google for this chapter-title suggests nobody has either read it or commented on it. I am not really very surprised.

It is hard to imagine who the article is intended for. It is part new-tech. boosterism and part how-to guide. If you are a blogger already (like me) the how-to guide is not a lot of use and the boosterism will just raise a smile. (The same is probably true if you are a Web 2.0 and social-media technophobe, but the smile will mean "not in a thousand years.")

The only person the chapter might be useful to is someone about to start a PhD, but the boosterism seems to be intended to win over skeptical supervisors, rather than curious PhD students. Weird.

And, of course, as a regular blogger, Willard and Leffingwell's reference to articles from 2005 and 2007 seem pretty dated already. It is a bit like watching Mr Burns demanding that Marge "Fill up" his ancient automobile "with petroleum distillate, and re-vulcanize my tires!" And the boosterism just seems naïve.

Still, it is good to see something on blogging. I have plenty of colleagues, who will spend all day on email and web-searches, but would never dream of publishing a blog or setting up a Facebook page.

"How do you find the time?" I was asked recently. (How indeed.) "What is the point?" I guess now I have a chapter to give them which attempts an explanation. Peer-reviewed, in a book, with references (albeit, some of them already dated), so that you know that it is the real deal …

FWIIW this looks like a much more useful article on "Informal Writing, Blogging and the Academy."

The Adobe Caslon Apocalypse

I have been using Adobe Caslon Expert constantly since I bought it—at great expense—on the 26 June 1995. I used it first on my "Fat Mac"—the Macintosh 512—then my PowerBook 145 and then my iMacG5.

For fifteen years every time I've needed to transcribe an eighteenth-century text, particularly for the bibliographical descriptions in my Eliza Haywood Bibliography, I needed the Caslon Expert suit because it is/was the only font suit that generates most of the eighteenth-century sorts which were in use, such as the long-s, si, sl, st, ss, ct ligatures etc, as well as swash caps, ornaments and so on.

I first heard about the font suit from a Monash colleague, Brian McMullin, who used it for all of his bibliographical descriptions and I, in turn, mentioned it to and persuaded other book historians and bibliographers to get a copy of the suit for their work. I assume it is quite widely used by eighteenth-century scholars and book historians. And I gather, from the fact that (a) it has no competition and (b) many journals publish accurate transcriptions and bibliographical descriptions of pre-1800 texts using the sorts unique to this font, that journals such as The Library, PBSA, Studies in Bibliography etc all use Caslon Expert, just as Script & Print does—and so must all the book historians and bibliographers, who submit papers to these journals which use these eighteenth-century sorts.

At the start of 2010, when I got my newest Mac at Monash—an intel (Core 2, i5) iMac11.3—I started having problems using Caslon Expert. Serious problems. Some sorts simply started disappearing from files generated on my old computer (in Word 2004) when they are opened on the new computer (in Word 2008). I could not see some of the sorts, or print them, even when I generated a pdf at home on my old computer and tried to print it from my new computer.

I contacted the IT support people at Monash, and they were—frankly—useless. I sent queries, and got no replies; when I followed it up and was asked to re-send the query and supply files I did so, and still got no replies; and when I followed this up and was asked to supply files in person (emailing them wasn't enough) I trundled off and supplied the files, explained the problem at great length, and still got no answer. In the end I discovered that the the staff member working on this problem was on leave, or had left, and I was invited to start again!

By this time I had been doing a bit of searching on my own and discovered that Adobe were now selling "Adobe Caslon Pro"—an expanded Caslon suit in an OpenType font. But I wasn't sure I wanted to buy the font and upgrade the version of Word I was using (which I suspected was the root of the problem) unless I was sure it was going to work and that these changes would solve my problem. So, at this point, I decided to try the collective experience of the C18-List.

In December 2010 I asked whether anyone on the list had any experience using Adobe Caslon Pro and Caslon Expert. I also asked, because I was particularly concerned about it, whether a user has to manually change each sort (in Word files using Caslon Expert) to the equivalent sort in Caslon Pro, or whether the hidden IDs of each sort allowed Word (any version!) to automatically identify the correct sort in the new font. That is, whether you can simply open your old files and "hey presto" all the sorts have been updated from Expert to Pro.

Sadly, nobody had the experience of ether font to answer. And, I gather, few really understood the problem or question. I got answers relating to Caslon (i.e., the bog standard version with no ligatures) and how to instal it, other suggesting I try Caslon Pro, since it seemed to have the ligatures I needed, or asking whether Caslon Pro had the Welsh sorts they wanted—that is, they either misunderstand or ignored the question.

Having failed so spectacularly on the C18-List I gave up on the idea of trying the EXLIBRIS or SHARP lists too and decided to call in the support of my techie friends. I had been reluctant to do this at first, because I hate asking people to do their day-job for me when they are at home, and to do this for free! But, having asked those paid to help me (and failed) and those most likely to be in a very similar situation to me (and failed), I really had no choice. And I had limited success. Actually no success, but we did determine that the only way to get an answer to the question was to try it and to do that I need to get the font and the latest version of Word and see what happens.

I also tried Monash Arts IT again, and this time managed to find someone prepared to try to get an answer. He went away and scoured the net, I ordered both Word 2011 and Caslon Pro, and had them installed. And, having experimented with the new software and fonts and having heard back from Arts IT I now have my answer. And the answer is a lot worse than I imagined possible—and I am sometimes considered to be an apocalyptic pessimist!

It is not possible to open a Word 2004 file containing Caslon Expert sorts and have it open and work using that font in Word 2011, or to open, automatically identify identical Caslon Expert/Pro sorts and effect a substitution of the same. Moreover, you cannot manually effect a Expert/Pro sort-for-sort substitution and you cannot do this with a find>replace command.

Worse still, you cannot create a document in Word 2011 which uses the extended "Glyph Complement" at all—i.e., the many eighteenth-century ligatures such as si, sl, st, ss, ct etc which you expect to have access to because they are listed by Adobe in great detail in twelve pages of sorts here—on the basis of which you spent a small fortune to buy the font.

I should mention that Word 2011 is a very annoying program anyway, a lot worse than Word 2008, which was worse than Word 2004—which was such a poorly-designed piece of software itself that the designers of it ought to have been executed for crimes against humanity. So it takes a long time to go through the tortuous procedure necessary to turn "on" access to extended ligature sets in Word 2011, only to discover that this does not, in fact, give you access to the extended ligature set in Caslon Pro.

(And this only after you have discovered that the reason you cannot find any of the ligatures in any of the fonts you have installed is—after much hunting through the Word Help files and online forums—because the software designers have now added this multi-step process before you can use ligatures. I am not sure why I am surprised by this. In WriteNow only a single keystroke was needed to insert small caps. Word requires you to do a lot of mouse-activated busy-work do do the same. Which is part of the reason why I resisted for so long moving all my word processing files from WriteNow 3.0 to Word 2004 once the former was discontinued.)

It appears that the Microsoft-led transition from TrueType to OpenType fonts is part of the problem (i.e., the reason why you can't use Caslon Expert well in Word 2008 and cannot use it at all in Word 2011), but it is Word 2011 that precludes access to the full OpenType font set. What this means is that, with no access to the old font and no access to the new, Word has effectively blocked all access to both extended Caslon fonts.

The only solution seems to be to indefinitely maintain a ca.2008 computer running Word 2004 with Caslon Expert, with an attached printer, for all scholarly writing that requires transcriptions and bibliographical descriptions of eighteenth-century texts.

Unfortunately, said computers will be increasingly difficult to maintain, and increasingly useless for any other activity. (I have already had to block Flash on my home computer because my Internet browsers were crashing continuously.) And it is difficult to see what use any file will be that includes bibliographical descriptions using Caslon ligatures because—presumably—the dead-end that I am referring to will stop editors from reading, viewing or editing articles that contain these sorts and journals from publishing them.

The only possible escape from this dead-end that has been suggested to me by techie friends and by ArtsIT is via InDesign—a publishing program. However, so far I have had no success getting InDesign to open long files (and one of my files is five hundred pages long), and even short files open only as single pages. So I do not know whether font-substitution is possible, but I have established that no automatic substitution will occur. So any substitution will have to be set up manually, and may have to be undertaken via mouse-activated busy-work.

If that is the case it would not be worth doing in 90% of cases and, for me, certainly not possible on the file I am most concerned about: my Bibliography, which presently contains 372,326 words or 1,852,119 characters (excluding spaces). Since I use the full range of ligatures and other sorts the "updating" of my Bibliography in this way could require over half a million separate, manual font substitutions. That is, use the mouse to highlight a sort, use the mouse to go to the font menu, to follow the drop-down menu from Caslon Expert to Caslon Pro, and to identify the font (CaslonPro Regular, CaslonPro Bold etc). And then, if the character mapping isn't identical between Expert and Pro, go looking for the new key-stroke combination that generates the required sort. Repeated hundreds of thousands of times!!

As for creating new files in InDesign instead of Word, I have also not been able to generate or edit in InDesign with the Caslon Pro font set, but perhaps it is possible. The bottom line is, however, that bad as Word is, it is at least a word-processing program and so it is moderately-well adapted to writing and laying out an essay. InDesign is not. It is a publishing program and the only reason why it has access to the extended ligature sets in Caslon Pro is because it is the sort of program you might use to design a poster, or lay out a magazine. Using it to write an article would be like using your Mercedes Sports Coupe to transport a cubic meter of dirt—on the back seat.

And so it appears that this technological change will soon render unreadable all the files I have created in fifteen years of scholarship and will seriously impede any scholarship I might want to undertake in the future. How will anyone in future do a bibliographical description of an eighteenth-century text, or do a quasi-facsimile transcription of an eighteenth-century text? (Or a seventeenth- or sixteenth-century text?)

Bibliographers will be in a worse situation than we were prior to the advent of the personal computer and word processors, since we can no longer use typewriters (with the equivalent sort-set of Caslon Expert on a specialist golf-ball typewriter head) or even pen and ink—like some barbarian refugee from the days before the typewriter! And what will the editors of The Library, PBSA, Studies in Bibliography and Script & Print do, even if they were to accept submissions in pen and ink?

So, as you can see, O readers, the Adobe Caslon apocalypse approaches! The end is nigh! Woe to you, O scholars, for Microsoft has come down to you in great wrath …

Google Books and the National Library of Malta

I started 2011 by doing one of my regular internet searches for all things Haywood. This time, by checking Google Books for references to some of the more obscure European translations of Haywood's works. I have to do this regularly, as Google puts fresh material online all the time.

The last two posts contain the first fruits of these labours. I found an etext of Der übernatürliche Philosoph (Berlin, 1742), and decided to create a page of links to works not by Haywood, but which had been attributed to her, so that I would have somewhere to keep it (here). I also found a review of Jemmy et Sophie, ou les Méprises de l’Amour, and decided it deserved translation and a page of its own (here).

I have also located a short review of La Spectatrice (text and translation here) and a long review of Die Zuschauerin (see here for an earlier post of my copy of this book), which I am going to have to get someone else to help me translate (both are beyond my limited abilities). Once done, I will publish these translations here too.

* * * * *

These are finds are both interesting and useful, but the real find was this book, held at the Bodleian library and scanned by them for Google Books: Cesare Vassallo, Catalogo dei libri esistenti nella pubblica biblioteca di Malta (Valletta, Malta: 1843).

Malta is an amazing place. As Wikipedia explains: It is one of the world's smallest and most densely populated countries; it's strategic importance led to a sequence of colonisers including the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Fatimids, Sicilians, Knights of St John, French and the British!

The National Library of Malta was established in 1776; Malta officially became a part of the British Empire in 1814 and achieved its independence in 1964. (For more details about the library's history, see here.) Cesare Vassallo's Catalogo appeared, then, early in the period of British rule.

Vassallo was the librarian of the public library and "an enthusiastic antiquary" "possessing both zeal and knowledge." Having discovered that the National Library of Malta contains two very rare, and one quite rare, Eliza Haywood translations I contacted the library for more information and discovered that Ms Maroma Camilleri, Senior Assistant Librarian, possesses the same enthusiasm, zeal and knowledge as Vassallo.

The library does not have an online computer catalogue—they have limited resources and have wisely been spending their money on fire-proof doors and other safety equipment instead—but Ms Camilleri was able to supply call numbers and other details very quickly indeed. (In fact, as of August 2010, the library has no director and desperately needs funds for the restoration its early books—a situation that is covered in this article.)

Anyway, as the result of finding this 1844 catalogue, and with Ms Camilleri's assistance, I have been able to double the known copies of La Spettatrice (1753), a translation from the French into Italian of the first six books of The Female Spectator; increase from three to four the number of copies known of Memorie d’un Giovane Nobile Sventurato (1745), a translation into Italian of the first volume of Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman; and add a twelfth location for the third French edition of La Spectatrice (1751), the French translation of The Female Spectator.

I have also added another library, and another country to the coverage of my Bibliography, which means that one day—when I am preparing the second edition—I will have
an excusea reason to visit this beautiful library and fascinating country.

* * * * *

There is a lot that I could say about Google Books and online text bases right now. Positive and negative. I have stuck with the positive today. Because the Bodleian holds and Google Books has scanned and posted online Vassallo's 1844 catalogue—a book it never occurred to me to look into and, if it had occurred to me, I wouldn't have been able to look in without visiting Sydney (the only copy in Oz)—I have discovered that the National Library of Malta hold three important Haywood items.

It is not clear how long it will be before the National Library of Malta is able to completely catalogue its collection, and when those electronic catalogue records will become available online. Until they do, this 167 year old book is the only window into the collection for overseas researches like me. This window was not provided by the National Library of Malta, or by a philanthropic organisation, but by that monomaniacal monolith, Google.

Vassallo's Catalogo was dumped onto the internet—I am guessing—without the slightest idea (on the part of either Google or the Bodleian library) that they were producing a defacto online catalogue to the early printed books at the National Library of Malta. And—in all likelihood—the National Library of Malta were unaware that Google/Bodleian library was about to perform this service for them. But I am sure that the queries sent to the library, like those I sent, will have alerted them to this fact pretty quickly.

And, I can't resist a final, if somewhat clichéd reflection on what Cesare Vassallo would have made of this. He clearly intended his guide to publicise the collections of the National Library of Malta, of which he was, rightly, proud. No doubt, he wanted to make scholars (such as those consulting his Catalogo in the Bodleian library at Oxford) aware of the riches of this overlooked collection. Surely he would be pleased then that, after 167 years, this guide is still serving this purpose! How many works of scholarship have a shelf life that long?!

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared again I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]

Light Sources for Examining Paper

Matthew Davis has an excellent post on "How to photograph watermarks with an electroluminescent sheet" here.

Electroluminescent sheets can be any size, but the ones that David is talking about are about A4 in size and look and feel like a laminated manila folder. Being "electro-" and "luminescent" you won't be surprised to discover that you plug them into a power source and they glow.

[The power-brick (top) and Inverter (bottom) for a CeeLite™ Electroluminescent panel]

Flat, flexible, glowing A4 sheets are very useful in bibliography because they are moderately portable and you can use them to back-light a large page without moving the book it is in from the bookrest you are consulting it on (i.e., holding it up to a window or a light). Also, being a cool, large and uniform light source, unlike a incandescent bulb or a fluorescent tube, it is very easy to use them to illuminate (and photograph) large paper features such as watermarks.

I don't have a lot to add to Mark's post in terms of function and use of these sheets, but the supplier of these electroluminescent sheets, power supplies etc in Australasia is different from those he mentions, and so I suspect that my experience getting hold of the electroluminescent sheets will be of interest to Australasian bibliographers.

[Inverter and CeeLite™ Electroluminescent panel (back)]

* * * * *

Shef Rogers visited Monash University in September 2008 to give a paper on Pope's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (1712/1714). (The visit was organised by the Centre for the Book as a part of the Melbourne Bibliographical Circle series; details here.) He bought with him, and demonstrated the use of, an electroluminescent sheet that he had bought in New Zealand from the local representative of Flexalite.

Flexalite is—as their website will tell you—"the first and only authorised dealer of CeeLite™ LEC panels and Flatline Inverters in Australia." Unfortunately, CeeLite may be an award-winning product, but Flexalite is unlikely to ever become an award-winning retailer. Shef had some difficulty obtaining his CeeLite panel and Inverter in New Zealand, I had a lot of trouble obtaining my CeeLite panel and Inverter in Melbourne. I don't know of anyone else who has managed to get one in Australasia.

[Inverter and CeeLite™ Electroluminescent panel (front)]

The Melbourne distributor can only be contacted by mobile phone and was very "difficult" to reach by email (often not answering emails at all, or "answering" them at cross-purposes) and was only capable of sending orders by fax. I was unable to get the distributor to email me a jpeg or pdf purchase order or to post a hard copy. (It didn't help that Monash has effectively shut down its fax system and does not allow mobile calls from its phone system.)

After a very long series of frustrating emails I was eventually sent a pair of panels and inverters. I had asked for three panels—including one A5 panel—and two different inverters, one more powerful than the other. Some weeks after asking how I might return and replace the wrong inverter and obtain the A5 panel, I was sent the right inverter, but no A5 panel.

[CeeLite™ Electroluminescent panel (illuminated)]

At this point I gave up; and simply sent my money. A colleague—aware of my protracted and frustrating exchange with the local rep—was going to Sydney, which is where Flexalite is based, and was going to visit them in person. Unfortunately, when he turned up at their shop front he found that they were no longer there. They had moved! When I am next in Sydney I will try to locate their new premises and see if I can't get the "sample" (A5) panel.

Prices are similar to those reported by Matthew Davis ("the whole setup cost a little less than [US]$100"). A Ceelite Panel [AB100] 216 x 279mm [8.5 x 11 inches] is A$75.00; and a Ceelite Inverter [INV-US100-AB] is A$50.00: making A$125. The more powerful inverter [INV-FL300-AB], which puts out four amps instead of two, is the same price but makes no noticeable difference to the luminosity of the panels.

* * * * *

[CeeLite™ Electroluminescent panel (illuminating a sheet of paper)]

I have shown before how useful these panels are in illuminating watermarks in books, so I thought I would use the Ceelite to illuminate a much more complex watermark on a loose leaf of paper.

The leaf concerned is a single-page letter dated 16 September 1732 from James Leake (bookseller in Bath 1721–64) to John Nourse (bookseller in the Strand, London 1730–80). The leaf (310 x 190 mm) was folded once to make four pages, only one of which was used for writing, then had the four edges folded in before being addressed and sealed. The letter is stamped "18 / SE" (for 18 September) and "BATH," which is where it was posted from.

[The front of a letter from James Leake to John Nourse]

The text of the address is:

To Mr Nourse
Bookseller
at the Lamb
near Temple Bar
London

[The back of a letter from James Leake to John Nourse]

The text of the letter is:

Mr Nourse    Sept 16 1732

  On Saturday by 9 in ye
morning Pray Send to Mr Hazard
One Set of Ovid neatly b[oun]d G[il]t
Back & The Lovers Marbl'd. I
have not yet examin'd your Catalogue
but shall soon when you may
to hear from
  Y[ou]r Humble Ser[van]t
    James Leake

[The inside of a letter from James Leake to John Nourse]

As you can see, the watermark is a seal enclosing the Coat of Arms of the Kingdom of Great Britain (as it existed between The Acts of Union 1707 and 1801—see here) surmounted by the Imperial Crown of the Sovereign. The caption is the motto of the British Monarch Honi Soit | Mal Y Pense.

(BTW: This watermark appears in Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), 69 (Fig. 35), who cites Edward Heawood, Watermarks: Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries (1957), 448, where it is identified as "London, 1736." The letter is made up of one half of a "pot" sheet, the full sheet being at ca. 310 x 380 mm according to Gaskell (1972), 75, Table 3.)

Playing around with the contrast and colour-balance makes the watermark a little clearer (as here), and a high-definition camera with macro would probably be even more helpful. But, as you can see here, even the raw photograph off a bog-standard (and not very recent) digital camera provides a very clear image, certainly clear enough to make out all the features of the watermark.

[The watermark, view from inside the letter (watermark correctly oriented)]

More importantly, it is very easy to slip this panel under the page you are looking at, snap a picture and keep going. You can collate an entire volume like this and in a very short space of time build up a reference set of photographs of the watermarks in a volume, which you can then be used to compare to other copies of the same volume.

Of course, it is possible to record watermarks without the panels. But, like Matthew Davis, I have been reluctant to try to sketch/trace watermarks because I am "artistically incompetent," and these tracings take a long time to do. The resulting sketch would also be of no bibliographical value since my "Coat of Arms" would be indistinguishable from a Fool's Cap, a Fleur-de-lis or anything else for that matter. And the technological alternatives—like beta radiography—are expensive and available at few libraries. I suspect that this is why watermarks are still under-examined and under-recorded.

[The watermark, view from outside the letter (watermark reversed)]

As use of these cheap and relatively portable panels becomes more wide-spread I expect that bibliographers will be more inclined to record watermarks along with other bibliographical features. And as they become more widely used, and more evidence concerning the use of watermarks is recorded, the evidence that is collected will be of more use to the bibliographers, encouraging further recording etc.

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared (again) I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]

Prof. Stillman on Modern Communication

The following paragraph was sent to me by my colleague Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario:

America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence, […] the frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition." Journalist W. J. Stillman, writing in The Atlantic Monthly about the negative influence of the telegraph, 1891.

The point of this paragraph—the joke—is in the final fourteen characters: "telegraph" and "1891." This paragraph is circulating followed by this sentence:

Okay, if you didn't cheat and read to the end, you also thought it was another quote about the internet, right?

I didn't cheat and so my answer is "yes." But I was also interested in reading more. Google the first clause and you get 2150 hits, mostly on blogs, discussion boards and "odd spot" journalism. Flicking through a number of these I realised that they all have the same gap: "entire human existence, […] the frantic haste."

After some searching I found the reference in The Atlantic Monthly (Volume 68‎ - Page 689), but the text is unavailable online (due, no doubt, to some idiotic interpretation of copyright law). After a lot more searching I found the full text, or, at least, a lot more of it, in only one place here, in The Bruce Herald [Milton, New Zealand], Vol. 22, Issue 2343 (29 January 1892), 5: "A Result of American Journalism."

If I had the time it would be possible to untangle the complex descent of this snippet of text from The Atlantic Monthly, via Daniel J. Czitrom's 1979 thesis Media and the America Mind: The Intellectual and Cultural Reception of Modern Communication, 1838–1965 (published in 1982 as Media and the America Mind: From Morse to McLuhan) to Timothy W. Gleason's The Watchdog Concept: The Press and the Courts in Nineteenth-Century America (1990), to Wade Rowland's The Spirit of the Web: The Age of Information from Telegraph to Internet (1999) and Carla G. Surratt's The Internet and Social Change (2001). From one of the latter, no doubt, this snippet was launched into cyberspace where it has multiplied, like administrators at a university.

What amuses me, is that the full text is only available online one hundred and twenty years after it was published because a country newspaper in Milton, New Zealand (some fifty kilometres south of Dunedin—not exactly a metropolis itself) reprinted it. And then this newspaper was scanned and made available online free.

It seems that the circulation of information was more reliable in colonial times than it is now. Most likely it was a physical copy of The Atlantic Monthly that was received by steamer in Dunedin, and the snippet reprinted, all in a matter of months. Of course, it is possible that Professor W. J. Stillman's text reached Dunedin via telegraph, which would be pretty amusing given his sentiments.

Here then is the text that appears in The Bruce Herald

In an article on journalism and literature in the Atlantic, the writer, Professor W. J. Stillman, says:—As the journal of culture leads to scholarship and the sounder and broader general education of the public, its work passes under the classification of science and out of journalism proper; it is a branch and continuation of the university. We in the United States of America are proud of our educational system, and it is not an infrequent boast that we are the best educated people in the world. In fact, we are one of the worst. It may be true that in the United States there are more native boys of a given age who can read and write than in any other country, and that we have more colleges and universities than any two other countries combined; but the number of persons who are profoundly versed in any branch of learning, or who may be said to be really educated, is probably less than in most European countries. In such a question it is not the extent of the primary or secondary education that tells, but that of the superior. Nor is there any validity in the excuse that we are a young nation. We have all the advantages that heredity can give, and the concentrated results of all the culture the world has known, and the proof that we fully enjoy the advantages of this epoch and past epochs is that here and there an individual amongst us rises to the highest attainments of the culture of the day. But our education in any given branch out of the practical, the pursuit of the material, is extremely superficial, and we are content that it should be so. It is peculiarly and almost exclusively a newspaper education, and responds to the demands of the day—calls for information, not for knowledge—and it is almost inevitable that it should remain so, at least for a long time, for the newspaper is the readiest of all appliances for cramming, and cramming is the vice, not only of our own country, but of our race, though eminently of our nation as compared with other nations of our race. America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was—the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life—into an agency for collecting, condensing, and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence. In this chase of the day’s accidents we still keep the lead, as in the consequent neglect and oversight of what is permanent and therefore vital in its importance to intellectual character. The effect is disastrous, and affects the whole range of our mental activities. We develop hurry into a deliberate system, skimming of surfaces into a science, the pursuit of novelties and sensations into the normal business of our lives. Our travelling is a competition to see the most in the least time; our learning the collection of the greatest number of facts concerning the greatest number of things; and our pride the multitude of subjects we know something about, rather than the soundness and depth of the knowledge we possess of a few. We desire to be glib; we mistake glitter for luminousness; we force the note in whatever we undertake, for nothing is so repugnant to our standards as the calm of a serene philosophy. The most disastrous consequence of this condition of things is that even those of us who are earnest are driven into materialism in some of its shapes, if we would make an impression on contemporary development, and our lives are little by little deprived of the spiritual leaven that makes their true vitality. We are more proud of this electric-light brilliancy than we are of any of our real virtues, and strain to be sparkling until we but dimly perceive the difference between being funny and witty, more dimly that between being witty and wise. To sum up all that could be said on this score, we are more anxious to seem than to be. Our art, our literature, our politics, and our social organisation are infected with the passion of an ostentation often mendacious, always superficial.

Books as Social Markers

There was an article by Peter Munro in The Age on Sunday under the title Lost in Cyber Space in which Prof. Bob Cummins (Deakin University, convener of the Australian Centre on Quality of Life) lamented that he had "lost a social marker" after he emptied his shelves of books.

The fact is that I just never read those books and was never going to read them again—they were just academic props. But maybe they filled a function as that—as a prop for who Cummins is … probably shouldn't have done it … I guess walking into an academic's office and finding a wall of earnest books is quite consoling; it means at face value you look like the real deal. Someone sitting in their office with bare shelves—how odd, what's wrong with them?

It is surprising that Prof. Cummins, who has a Personal Chair in the School of Psychology uses words like maybe, guess and probably in the above quote. I would have thought it was reasonably obvious that he would lose not only his social markers but some of his academic credibility.

The article goes on:

Possessions help define us, brand us, but what happens when they start to hide away in boxes in top cupboards—CD stacks supplanted by iPod docks, film collections by downloads, libraries by wireless reading devices

It is an interesting question, but the answers proposed by the article are not very convincing. Sharing playlists, reading lists etc are not really the equivalent of letting someone look over your shelves or your cds. And for a true collector, or the conspicuous consumer, it isn't remotely the same. To know someone is "listening to" The Beatles (when, in fact, they are a collector of first pressings, and the singles and LPs on their shelves are worth more than your house) or that they have Dracula on their shelf of "favourite books" (when, in fact, they have a first edition in a dust-wrapper which is worth more than your house) tells you nothing. This is because, records or CDs and books are material objects which encode a myriad of social markers in their very materiality.

I recently helped sort through some of the books left behind by a retired academic. Many of the books had the name of the academic concerned, a date and a place neatly written in pen on the front free fly-leaf. Collectively, these "earnest books" were not just "academic props"—though that was undoubtedly part of their function—they marked the progress of an academic life over five decades and on three continents. Battered, filled with marginalia, with ticket-stubs and call-slips as place-markers, sorting through them was like reading a biography of their owner.

How anyone could leave so much of themselves behind is a mystery to me—I tend to be quite sentimental about such things—because the owner of these books left behind a substantial part of their own personal history, not just "a social marker."

Biblio-sentimentality aside, the article seems to ignore the fact that as an increasing number of the things in our life (books, music, film, photos) make the transition from physical to virtual we accumulate an increasing number of new things that store, use or manipulate our virtual books, music, films and photos: digital cameras, photo frames, mobile phones, PDAs and hybrid devices like PDA-phones, ipod-cameras, etc.

It is these objects that now carry social markers, and are the evidence of our conspicuous spending. So, if Bob Cummins really wants to impress his colleagues and students he need only install two side-by-side Macs on a long and spartan black desk, a wall-mounted ipod doc sound system, and a 46 inch flat-screen to display album-covers on or to display a virtual fish-tank. Easy-peasy.

Oh, and he can send me his book cases. Because I always need more of them.