Lifted from Ellie's Blog..the latest on her project and a heads up for her next workshop session at the cottage..https://www.eleanorchaney.com/
As my residency for Soft Drive continues, three strands of research and practise are emerging. The first is to created a ‘book’ of some form to house people’s memories of the cottage, inspired by the beautiful ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ which is in the Civic Society collection.
The second is informed from learning that the cottage used to be lived in by a glove maker, which I will discuss in a later post. Thirdly I have been looking into the challenges museum conservationists face when trying to preserve objects, including insects, damp and mould.
Today I’d like to write about the first aspect of this, which is the book as an object that both contains and communicates history. In particular this is inspired by the copy of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ in the collection which has marriage and birth dates written in it, used in the same way to house important family dates as a bible.
This has led me to looking at how books and book boxes are designed and constructed, and in turn this caused me to want to learn more about the history of the book as an object and considering what makes a ‘book’.
I thought it might be interesting to summarise what I’ve learnt so far:
If in the past you had asked me the the earliest forms of recorded writing are I would probably have guessed Egyptian papyrus. But of course, it is difficult for us to really know as for historians to study these the object upon which the text/symbols were written needs to have survived. ‘The History of the Book in 100 Books’ states 'Forms of record keeping: All societies turned to whatever materials were readily available. We might think that impressing marks into slabs of clay is a laborious method of writing, but had the advantage of durability - one of the reasons that we know as much of Babylonian history as we do. For peoples who used papyrus, its fragility meant that the texts had to be copied and recopied.'
Discussing when the first books were created depends on your definition of what a 'book' is. If we see it as an object of some form that is used to store or present symbols or writing, then this could include notched tally sticks used to document payments, or bones that are marked to represent the lunar cycle. Cuneiform tablets are clay tablets into which wedge-shaped symbols were made, and it thought to have been invented by Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia. These were used to document 'legal codes, medical guides, mathematical texts, astronomical studies, dictionaries and even an early cooking manual'. 5,000 years ago Inca's did not have a writing system that used symbols, but instead created records by dyeing and knotting cords. ,,,, write 'For writing surfaces, mankind used stone, clay, tablets, bark, leaves, papyrus, bones, animal skins and paper, and many other media. We discovered how to transfer marks to these surfaces using dyestuffs for ink, and sticks, reeds, quills and pieces of lead as 'pens'.
For the purpose of this project I am particularly interested in the identity of the book around the time of Sir John Barrow, which is roughly from the mid 18th - the mid 19th century. At this point some key technological developments had occured. In the mid 15th century Johannes Gutenberg, a German blacksmith, introduced printing to Europe with the printing press. Up to this point the written word had been the privilege of monks and the elite as scribes were needed to copy texts by hand. Paper had also been recently utilised in Europe. It was invented in China in 179 – 41 BC, but until the 16th century Europeans used thin sheets of wood or stretched animals skins as their writing surfaces. Inks until this point had been created by mixing plant or animal dyes with water or wine , but Gutenberg is also credited with inventing oil based inks, as the former water based inks would not adhere to the metal printing plates made from lead alloy stocks. Lampsoot, turpentine and walnut oil were all used as the base materials for oil based inks. There is a brilliant animated overview of this The Evolution of the Book by Julie Dreyfuss.
Despite the printing press being a revolutionary process that resulted in printing houses quickly spreading across Europe, production of books was still very costly. The type for each page had to be set and printed, pages had to be bound by hand and covers were made of wood or pasted layers of paper until the later 15th century. Rope fibre millboard then replaced these for high end books, and gradually became commonly used for all book covers.
Book covers play a few different roles - they protect the more delicate pages, they hold the pages together, and today they are a key aspect in how the book is marketed to the world. However, book cover designs haven’t always done this. Book covers would be highly decorated, often with gold tooling and edge decoration as a symbol of their value and a signifier of their owner’s status. The design would rarely relate to the content within the book, and followed it’s own conventions around ornamental decorative values of the time. In fact, the person purchasing the book was often expected to organise the binding themselves, meaning covers were designed to individual tastes. However as book-binding technology advanced the cost of book production lowered, making ownership of books accessible to new audiences. It was through this process that the book cover began to be used as a way of marketing the book, with designs reflecting the information within whilst still highly decorated to be appealing. The History and Evolution of the Book Cover is an interesting article about this with other beautiful examples.
However, in regards to ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ I think it’s important to note that the cover design of bibles and Christian texts has tended to remain more traditional over time, as the use of gold tooling and beautiful design reflects the value placed onto the book as a whole. This book would most likely have been something that was read to the family by the head of the house as an act of worship, with the dates written in showing it’s importance to this specific family.
As the book has become a cheaply produced and commonplace feature in our homes now, I have been thinking about what I could contribute to the collection that would be in some way useful, rather then simply replicating the existing books or only taking inspiration from their design properties. Rather then making a book that people have to write in, which I feel could be intimidating, especially one that is bound and decorated, I think creating a book inspired object would be more accessible. Using construction and decoration techniques similar to those of the books from Sir John Barrow’s time, my box/ book/ object to house memories. Many of the conversations in the cottage have revolved around this idea of everyone having their own memories of the cottage in it’s various recent incarnations as a shop, tuck shop and ‘museum’, a new collection of these written memories seems to be building. Therefore I will create a large, bound box of a similar size to the ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’. The lid of this will have a design which references the book, but will incorporate motifs and images relevant to the cottage. It will have a small letterbox where memories can be posted, and I’ll be designing some cards to go alongside this for people to write on.
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