Archival Manuscript and Printed

Basic Rules for Working in Archives: from hygiene to professional manners, archival research requires a physician's concern for procedures and protocols to protect the books from those who love and study them. Once you have adopted these habits, you will wonder at the barbaric obtuseness of other people's handling of old objects.

John Carter. ABC for Book Collectors. London 1952; 8th ed. by John Carter and Nicolas Barker. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2004.: A dictionary of bibliographic terms you may encounter in the MS and Print Text and Archives section of English 241. The link will open a PDF file containing the latest edition. If you think about the value of a copyright-protected book being broadcast for free on the Internet, then you will appreciate the inherent importance of this text for the bibliographic and book collecting community. The library also has a print copy if you wish to avoid surrogates.

WorldCat: a product of OCLC and Research Library Goup's merger, the WorldCat catalogue can be searched either from a free, publicly accessible interface, or from a membership-restricted portal accessible on Goucher's network through the Julia Rogers Library web site. In March 2007, when this web page was constructed, OCLC reports that the combined database represents the catalogs of 12,000 member libraries around the world. Use this resource first to check for other copies of your printed book's edition, especially if it was published in England or America.

The English Short Title Catalog: a specialized online catalog recording information on books printed in the U.K. between 1450 and 1800, covering about 460,000 individual volumes. Use this resource first to check for other copies of your printed book's edition, especially if it was published in England 1450-1800.

University of Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue: a research tool directed at collections of early books and manuscripts, especially strong in collections located in Germany and the rest of Eastern and Western Europe. Use this resource first to check for other copies of your printed book's edition, especially if it was published in Continental Europe.

Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology: A comprehensive list of terms, illustrated by Margaret R. Brown's drawings, maintained by Palimpsest, a listserve at Stanford.

Descriptive Bibliography Methods and Terms: a very condensed introduction to the art and science of bibliography, with apologies and grateful thanks to the students whose questions helped me develop it: Victoria Van Hyning (Goucher 2006); Jordana Frankel (Goucher 2006), Geoffrey Adelsberg (Goucher 2009), Cassie Brand (Goucher 2009), and Greg Bortnichak (Goucher 2009).

Words by William Whitaker: An online Latin-English dictionary that is less cranky than most and gives good results to searches which are careful about transcribing manuscript hands.

Vulgate (Latin) Bible: An online parallel-text edition which presents the Latin text (with every word glossed in hyperlinks) together with the Hebrew and Greek source texts and a Modern English translation. If an early printed or manuscript text is Latin, it very well may be biblical.

Rare Book School: "Rare Book School (RBS) is an independent non-profit educational institute supporting the study of the history of books and printing and related subjects. Founded in 1983, it moved to its present home at the University of Virginia in 1992." Not for the faint of heart, RBS trains librarians and scholars to handle, analyze, and understand early books. Their course offerings range from Medieval to Renaissance to machine-press era book manufacture, and they teach using a collection of presses and printing equipment, early books, and innumerable other artifacts relevant to the field. "Introduction to Descriptive Bibliography" (G-10) is RBS's "boot camp" of bibliographic analysis, recommended for upper-division students planning on graduate study in library science or the study of early literature (Medieval to 1800).

Preservation 101: Preservation Basics for Paper and Media Collections. Northeast Document Conservation Center. Available online at: http://www.preservation101.org/loggedin.asp An online course teaching conservation techniques, this site is mainly interested in paper, film, and electronic media, but its overview of building, environment, and collection factors provides valuable background on issues affecting the survival of all media collections.

English Handwriting 1500-1700: Andrew Zurcher's site is often recommended as the best online teach-yourself program to learn to decipher Renaissance manuscript hands. Renaissance hands tend to be tougher than Medieval hands because it became fashionable to personalize your script, and the proliferation of literacy led to variants in the construction of letter forms, so there were many ways to represent all the letters of the alphabet. Each writer used her/his own, so once you learn your author's hand, you can read it reliably, but until you become familiar with the typical variants, it can seem pretty hard. As always, practice makes good, if not perfect.

Dr. Dianne Tillotson's Medieval Writing Site: Tillotson is an independent scholar working on her own to develop a site that teaches "paleography," the reading of old manuscript hands from the Medieval period. In addition to her lucid explanations of manuscript production practices, she has accumulated a nice set of Medieval manuscript images whose scribal hands have been categorized chronologically with practice examples so that you can test and develop your ability to read them. (The are available directly at this page: Paleography exercises using Flash.) Letter forms change more slowly than during the Renaissance, but even Medieval scribes, over centuries, evolved new scripts. Changes often occurred when attitudes toward the accessibility of the text changed. Remember that there is nothing "natural" or "obvious" about the letter forms in which we code language. To one familiar with the script, a (to us) gnarly Gothic Textura hand would be far more legible than this web page's Times Roman, a descendant of the C16 Continental Humanist manuscript hand that was turned into type fonts by printers like Aldus Manutius. The illustrations of the scripts' alphabets and sample transcriptions of scribal hands into modern type fonts especially will help students working with the Manuscript Laboratory, Part 2.

French and Spanish Typography and Paleography Sites: These four sites will give basic handwriting recognition training to readers of late medieval and early modern French or Spanish documents. The Sorbonne site also includes early print typography, i.e., the type fonts from the C15-16 which were intentionally constructed to imitate Gothic book hands.

The National Archives of England and Wales Palaeography Site and Two Early Modern Palaeography Sites: The "TNA" site will train you to read modern (1500-1800) manuscript hands. Oddly enough, this is much harder than working with Medieval scribal hands, which were produced by trained professionals who strove for regularity. Once every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and every Elizabeth, Mary, and Jane, became literate, they learned handwriting from writing masters who taught a variety of Modern hands. On top of that variety of hands, there was a general increase in the individuality of hands as writers used them to express their identities (see Gloucester on Edmund's forgery of Edgar's "character" or hand in King Lear). Even more obscurity was added when authors intentionally complicated their handwriting so that it might not be read by any but their closest friends. What you write can be used in evidence against you more certainly than what you are alleged to have said. The most obscure writing is bureaucratic--the tenth and hardest example is an Eighteenth-Century (1760) Act of Parliament proclaiming that a road in Cornwall was now a turnpike where tolls would be collected from travelers. For Early Modern hands, the Cambridge University “English Handwriting 1500-1700” online course in Renaissance handwriting will be useful for learning to read, and to date (approximately) the earliest writing in the Bright Collection: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/index.html; “Early Modern Palaeography” (David Postles, Leicester U.) covers roughly the same era with different examples (http://paleo.anglo-norman.org/empfram.html).

CORSAIR: The Morgan Library (NYC) image bank of digital surrogates taken from their collection of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. "Current totals: 227 manuscripts, 9,609 page records, 20,285 images." Searching by manuscript types may help you zero in on the identify of a manuscript leaf by its layout/appearance.

Type Classification Systems: Type fonts, like scribes' hands, can be used to determine who printed a book, where, and when. This is a 1-page description of English and German scholars' development of typography studies to aid in the study of undated or un-"signed" editions by William Caxton and other printers of incunables (The National Diet Library, Japan). The English originators of the method are Henry Bradshaw, the Caxton scholar who originally had the idea to date/place books by their type fonts compared with known dated/placed books' type fonts, and Robert Proctor, of the British Museum, who took over Bradshaw's project when HB died. In Germany, Ernst Haebler had the brilliant idea to streamline our first guesses about what type font we're looking at by collecting on a page the capital "M" types of all the printers' fonts they had ("M" being unusually distinctive in most cases).

A Type Identification Exercise: Click and drag sample type images over a half-page sample of printed type to see which printer's type font matches the one on the page. This demonstrates the pattern-matching skills bibliographers develop with experience over time.

Bookbindings on Incunables in American Library Collections: An unfinished Princeton University site that, nevertheless, contains some excellent images of some spectacular old bindings. Note the distinguishing features of C15 and early C16 binding practices, like book metal clasps and leather thongs, decorative stamping and other tooling effects, and, on three of the Italian examples, protection in the form of metal bosses, corner guards, and other devices derived from military armor.

Publishers' Bindings Online, 1815-1930: University of Alabama and University of Wisconsin-Madison's imagebase of around 5,000 decorative bindings produced during this prolific period of machine-press printing on (mostly) non-hand-laid paper (i.e., no chainlines or watermarks unless made by the dandy roll).

Henry R. Plomer, A Short History of English Printing, 1475-1898 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900; reproduced in digital surrogate by Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20393/20393-h/20393-h.htm: How many early English printers can you name other than William Caxton? How did hand-press printing with moveable type evolve from a few independent intrepreneurs (viz., the "Home Brew Computer Club" in the 1970s) to become a national industry that changed the world? Plomer's book remains a highly readable source of the basic narrative. For more recent, and more advanced studies of individual English printers, see the essays in William Kuskin, ed., Caxton's Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing (Notre Dame, Ind.: U Notre Dame P, 2006), 686.2 C38Sk 2006

Latin Place Names in Books Printed Before 1801: early printers worked in a world of Latin texts, printing vernacular languages like Italian, French, German, or English only as the market supported it. Latin texts sold to clergy and literate worshipers, to scholars, to lawyers and doctors, to government clerks, and to the tiny fraction of the rest of the population that was litteratus (i.e., Latin literate). For this reason, printers' colophons and title pages listed the editions' place of origin by the city's Latinized name (e.g., London could be rendered "Londinum," "Londoni," or "Londoniae"). Some vernacular city names do not easily take to Latin, hence the need for a dictionary to translate them into their current, vernacular form.

Christopher Clarkson, "Rediscovering Parchment: The Nature of the Beast," The Paper Conservator 16 (1992), pp 5-26.: Unfortunately, you will have to see me to borrow my copy or buy a back issue from The Paper Conservator. It does not photocopy well, and much of its value lies in its half-tone close-up photographs of various types and conditions of parchment.

"Guidelines for the Conservation of Leather and Parchment Bookbindings," Koninklijke Bibliothek [National Library of the Netherlands]. Available online at: http://www.kb.nl/cons/leather/index-en.html. Students of Early Modern and Modern documents will encounter parchment in bindings, or (rarely) indentures. Medieval documents are far more often constructed entirely of various forms of prepared animal skin which, when they cannot identify its source for certain, bibliographers call "parchment." Its physical characteristics begin with the animal from which the skin was taken. Then chemical and physical processes were used to turn it into a flat and flexible sheet for writing. Finally, after binding and use, various other forces begin to damage the skin: oxidation, heat, intentional chemical treatments and pollution, mammalian or insect and mold damage, etc. (For forensic images of damage, see "Preservation 101" below.)

Amy Baker, "Common Medieval Pigments," Cochineal: A Forum for Student Work at the Kilgarlin Center for Preservation of the Cultural Record (U.Texas, Austin) November 2004, Available online at: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~cochinea/pdfs/a-baker-04-pigments.pdf Baker summarizes recent research on the materials from which pigments were made for the various colors used in the texts and illuminations of medieval manuscripts. She also describes destructive and non-destructive techniques for identifying them in a manuscript.

Alan Stevenson, "Watermarks Are Twins," Studies in Bibliography 4 (1951-52) 57-91. Available online at: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb/ (Use the "Browse by Volume" menu in the left frame and click on "4"--Stevenson's article is the fourth in the column. Using the online version instead of a photocopy gives you access to clearer reproductions of Stevenson's photoradiographic images of watermarks.) The article is somewhat dauntingly technical, but if you return to it when you have questions about watermarks in paper you are examining, his explanations will become more and more helpful as you grow to understand the relationship between the marks and the handmade paper processes that produced them.

Watermarks in Incunaula Printed in the Low Countries: Between 1450 and 1500, the earliest printed books have become known as "cradle books" or incunables. This image bank illustrates a wide range of watermarks common not just to books printed in the Netherlands, but also books printed elsewhere on the Continent and even later than 1500. The early paper market was based on exports from countries like France and Italy which grew large flax crops, and their low costs of production enabled them to capture the market in most places to which printing had spread. Choose the "browse by main group" option to see examples. For more information on and illustrations of watermarks, see the English language index of Watermarks.info.

Le Musée du Papier D'Angoumois--Le Moulin: A French paper mill site that illustrates, with moving images, the stages in the production of hand-laid paper such as that used in Medieval manuscripts and printed books until around 1800. If your French is a bit rusty, the first stage (Le Délissage) cuts linen or cotton rags into small pieces to ready it for the hammer mill ("La Pile à Maillets"). The hammer mill was driven by the water-wheel run by the nearby river, which also supplied water in which the resulting cotton or linen paste was soaked to prepare the "stuff" ("La pâte") from which the paper was made. (For early papers, you can forget "La Pile Hollandaise," which was a later invention. The two-man paper-making team consisted of the Drawer ("Le Puiseur "), who dipped the mould into the vat of stuff and shook it lightly left-to-right to strengthen the resulting leaves' structure, and the Coucher ("Le Coucheur " who "puts it to bed"), who delivered an empty mould and received the full one, turning it on to the stack of felts which would absorb its liquid and press out its shape. They traded full and empty pairs of paper moulds all day long. Dried paper had to be sized with gelatin to prevent the printing ink soaking deeply into the paper, and it had to be rewetted before being printed so that it would take the ink properly. Humidity control is one of the keys to high-quality printing.

The Paper Conservator: A peer-reviewed journal published since 1976 by ICON, The Institute of Conservation.

What Year Is It?: Medieval and Early Modern cultures did not yet agree on a single calendar, and even the time of day could be named differently from one monastery to another. The major European Medieval calendar systems are here linked to a calculator that converts modern dates into their corresponding Medieval equivalents.