Category: Section 4: Afterlife

Formulare Anglicanum: An Afterlife in Itself

The Formulare Anglicanum is a compilation of various British charters (referred to as ‘formulas’) and legal instruments from 1066 to 1647, gathered by Thomas Madox from archives such as that in the Office of Augmentations where he worked. This copy of Formulare Anglicanum hardly seems to have entered its afterlife stage. Interestingly, this book has remained in rather good condition. Its binding and spine remain intact with some evidence of the wear it has experienced over the centuries. Its leaves are mostly well-preserved, with the exception of some minuscule brown spots and fading on the words. Some leaves have tears in the borders from repeated creasing in the same area, presumably due to extensive use by its previous owners. Objectively, many modern books have fared worse.

Figure 1: Browning and spots on a leaf

Figure 2: A tear in the border

What is fascinating is that Formulare Anglicanum isn’t just well-preserved; it also seeks to preserve well. It is itself an exhibition of other books, considering that it collects legal instruments and charters from such an extensive period of time in Britain’s history and enables readers to identify original legal documents. Furthermore, it is not simply a compilation, as Madox had to make some additional editorial choices. For instance, he categorised the various charters by types, such as grants and wills, and by dates to document developments in the British legal scene over the years. However, he was also concerned that these headings were inadequate to classify all the documents and that he might have wrongly categorised some of them – given the differences in language used, it was not always clear which category they fell under.

Figure 3: The “Table of the Heads” (table of contents) which lists the categories in which Madox classified the documents, and their page and formula numbers

Formulare Anglicanum implicitly acknowledges the significant effect of time on a book. There are a few leaves that document the various official seals and scripts used over time from the reigns of different British monarchs.

Figure 4 (left): Examples of the official seals over the reigns of different monarchs

Figure 5 (right): Examples of the various scripts used over the reigns of different monarchs

These leaves help users of the book to identify important details of legal documents of the past as well as to verify their authenticity. These notable features take into account how the law is constantly updated and older documents may become unfamiliar to readers of the present. In the margins, Madox also included his own descriptions in English explaining the purpose of each charter, which are particularly helpful given that many of the charters are in Latin or French. Many of these documents also have notes detailing their physical characteristics. These additional descriptions enable easier comprehension of the documents and for documents that have since undergone physical changes, they record their original features. 

Figure 6: A document labelled as “A Certificate or Memoire”, with notes by Madox describing its physical details such as the green wax seal once used on it. “O. A.” refers to the Office of Augmentations. 

When we think of the afterlife of the book, we should note that it is not just its physical form that can disintegrate; its content can progressively lose its original purpose. By including detailed descriptions of the documents, Madox preserved the knowledge to ensure that the original documents never really enter their afterlives and can continue to be comprehended and identified. However, Madox also worried that he could not accurately capture the original meanings of the documents, which calls into question just how much of the book can be preserved, and how much of it will eventually find its way into its afterlife despite our best efforts.

Prepared by Nana

This book owes its striking appearance to the paper used to bind it: sheet music printed in red and black ink. This music is notated in neumes, a visually distinctive system traditionally used to represent the melodic contours of Christian plainchant. The chants represented here are in Latin and would originally have been sung in a context of religious worship.

While a modern reader might expect the contents of the book to be printed, as signalled by the printed material that forms its cover, the book’s interior is actually manuscript: handwritten text. A variety (or miscellany) of texts, with topics ranging from theology to medicine to the law, has been hand-copied into the book. Perhaps surprisingly, given the book’s distinctive appearance, none of the texts appears to be especially concerned with music.

Based on the consistent style of penmanship, the various texts in this book all appear to have been copied by the same person. Given their wide-ranging subjects, they were likely selected based on this individual’s tastes and interests; the owner also made personal notes on some of the content. Though the handwriting is consistent, the person who copied the texts used a range of devices to mark the end of any particular text (pictured below), including writing the word “Finis”, drawing seemingly random squiggles, and a series of shortening lines that form a kind of inverted triangle shape. These flourishes interrupt the monotony of the book’s many pages of neat blocks of writing, making the ending of each individual text distinctive.

The consistent layout of words on each page is guided by the impression of margins and individual lines upon the paper. Each page in the book is fairly thick, and the guiding rules appear to have been imprinted onto the pages. These impressions create a surface that is conveniently divided for the writer’s ease in laying out their content onto the page. As they are seemingly formed through pressure (perhaps upon the wet page as it is made) rather than through the application of ink, these lines are also unobtrusive for the book’s reader. The book includes some pages with no writing on them, strongly suggesting that the book was bound before its pages were written on. It is on these blank pages that we can most clearly appreciate the stamped margins.

While the books’ contents are handwritten rather than printed, the sheet music visible as its cover is not the only print element present in the book’s form. From the top of the book’s spine, we can just make out a few words of printed text – seemingly not music, as with the cover, but regular text. These scraps of paper seem to be smaller than the sheet music, and used specifically to reinforce the spine of the codex rather than to hold the whole structure together or decorate it. The contrast between the internally- and externally-facing print elements suggest a particular attention to aesthetics on the part of those who created this book, while signalling their interest in repurposing existing printed materials.

Prepared by Andrew

The Afterlife of the Afterlife of a Book

The Decameron is a collection of short stories by the Renaissance Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375), for which he is famous. Written in the years between 1349 to 1353, the Decameron consists of an overarching main narrative of ten Florentines, all of whom have escaped from the ongoing plague in the city of Florence to a villa in an Italian town called Fiesole. Each individual, pegged to a day, offers to tell a couple of short tales, and the Decameron contains all these stories told over ten days by the ten Florentines. Each day also concludes in a canzone (a type of Italian ballad), and these songs are representative of the best poetry by Boccaccio. This text that inspired countless other Renaissance writers, for dealing with humanist themes, and highly engaging narrative.

This copy is a dilapidated French edition of the Decameron, printed in 1603. Here, we are interested in the afterlife of books, and this copy of the Decameron is filled with clues that point beyond its intended shelf life.

Fig 1. Cover of the 1603 French edition of the “Decameron”. Both printed text and handwritten inscriptions are legible.

As we can see from just the cover page, the inside of the volume is in a fair condition: the ink is still extremely clear and legible. We also see signs of direct inscription – above the center of the crest, in slightly faded ink, handwritten cursive words spelling “Sum Pauli Prunmaisteri” (“I belong to Paul Prunmaister”). This gives us the name of one owner the book has had in its lifetime. Similar inscriptions in that color of ink were found on the first leaf of the codex, behind the front board, but nowhere else in the contents of the book. The lack of annotations suggest that the book was likely not used for scholarly purposes.

            Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this codex is in its binding, which has largely fallen into disarray:

Fig 2. The exposed binding.

Here, we see how scraps of waste print are used as part of the binding material, sewn together by cords (the rope-like threads wound across the spine). We can claim here that the afterlife of failed books has ironically been exposed in the extreme weathering that characterizes the afterlife of this particular codex. There is an ingenuity to be found in the binders’ use of waste print to bind complete texts, such that even waste print produced by the printers are not actually wasted. It is not clear as to what sort of physical trauma has led to the removal of a segment of the parchment that originally concealed the spine.

            One final major sign of decay is the presence of cavities towards the end of the codex:

Fig 3. Cavities in the later pages.

There can only be one cause for such damage: bookworms. These are not real worms, but the larvae of various species that may chew through books seeking food.

            Despite the literary significance of the text it was translated from, this codex has fallen into disrepair over many centuries, surviving long enough just to be a monument to poor bookkeeping.

Prepared by Lune

 The Floral Gift: A Thing of Beauty, A Joy For Ever

            Publications such as The Floral Gift were popular novelty pieces in mid-19^th century England. Decorated with floreated borders and embellished with illuminated initials, this particular book features a collection of poetry connected under the common theme of flowers, with some even attributed to popular literary figures such as Wordsworth and Shakespeare. Gift-books such as The Floral Gift were designed to attract buyers and impress their recipients, being typically bound with brightly-coloured cloth and intricate gilt patterns. Published in 1863, the first edition of this text was bound with both green and red Morroco-style binding (Fig. 1). Other common titles often included names of gemstones, holidays, special occasions, and anniversaries. While the publication of such books eventually declined by the 1860s, these works nevertheless stand as testaments to the development of sophisticated industrial techniques such as chromolithograph printing–a unique method of making multi-coloured images by numerous applications of stone plates, each using a different ink colour.  

Fig. 1: The green and red covers of the 1863 edition.

            Since most of the books belonging to this genre were lavishly illustrated and visually appealing, gift-books were more often than not prized for their extrinsic beauty. Indeed, some of them were even explicitly advertised as works of “fine art”. Illuminated by Samuel Stanesby, the accompanying illustrations within the margins of The Floral Gift bear thematic correspondence to their written contents, such as how the set of poems based on “Violets” are appropriately framed with motifs of that particular flower (Fig. 2). Designed for display and admiration rather than for heavy reading, the contents of such books tended to be derivative in nature, as seen here in the reproduction of poetic phrases taken from different literary sources such as P. V. de Montgomery’s Hours of Sun and Shade (1891) (Page 1) and Shakespeare’s sonnets (Page 2). It comes as no surprise, then, that Victorian gift-books acquired a reputation for being of low cerebral quality. 

Fig. 2: The page on “Violets”, with repeated motifs of violets in the margins (Page 2).

Fig. 3: Detail of the decorated initials.

Given that these titles were not regarded for the intellectual rigour of their content, these extant portions of The Floral Gift thus give credence to how certain books are able to survive purely based on their formal qualities. The contents of this copy, for instance, were removed from the original binding and sold as individual leaves or keepsakes–perhaps for greater profit. These highly decorative fragments would then have been framed and displayed as works of art in their own right, with collectors locating artistic value in the intricacy of the decorated initials and the quality of the printing (Fig. 3). While this practice of “breaking” or dismembering books often compromises the integrity and evidentiary value of the original texts, this idea that individual leaves contain aesthetic value in themselves nevertheless highlights an alternative way in which books survive into posterity. Although the trend of giving a book as a gift was originally focused on the lasting quality of the object, the process of systematic destruction exemplified by these remaining fragments of The Floral Gift ultimately points to other viable ways in which a book may last forever.

Prepared by Ina