huggy bear

London. That's me on the left, my friend and colleague Laurie Ellinghausen on the right, and an unidentified literary scholar in the middle. The three of us met at the British Library and then went out for coffee (and honey).

the september project

Many bloggers have been discussing an upcoming event called The September Project, "a collection of people, groups, and organizations working to create a day of engagement, a day of conversation, a day of democracy." More details are found on the project overview page.

Given that a number of KC people read my site, I was hoping to generate some interest and involvement in the project here in Kansas City. How about it? Please email me at ghw [at] wordherders [dot] net to discuss organizing events at local libraries and other public spaces. You might also mention this on your own blog to help spread the word.

David Silver, one of the project directors (along with Sarah Washburn), was recently interviewed (PDF) by the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"It's a response to the climate of silence that has seeped into this country, post-9/11," Mr. Silver says. "It's difficult to get a lot of information from the media and from the government, so we wanted to create safe spaces -- safe local spaces where we have free information."

The September Project has few requirements for participation. Mr. Silver is encouraging libraries to hold readings of the Bill of Rights and to set up voter-registration programs. He is also encouraging participants to take digital pictures on that day, with the hope of creating a huge photographic collage.

But beyond that, events and programs are up to the individual libraries. Because September 11 falls on a Saturday this year, when some academic libraries are closed and when students on many campuses have not yet arrived for the fall, some academic libraries are holding exhibitions that will last for weeks.

The Seattle Times also published an article with more details on the project.

newark-london

A quick post from the Newark airport, where I'm en route to KC. Last week I met Miriam from ScribblingWoman at the Starbucks (I know, I know) across the street from the British Library, and she has a brief entry on the meetup. It was great to meet her, and as she says, there's a strange kind of familiarity that comes from talking with someone whose life story you've been reading for a few months.

I have a backlog of information to share, dear reader, and a whole mess of photos, but that will have to wait for now because we are about to board. Look for more over the weekend. I see Sonic Youth this Saturday in Columbia, Missouri, and I'm quite happy about that fact.

an apple...or something

I'll blog more about SHARP 2004 when I'm back in KC. Right now there are too many fun things to do over here. Suffice it to say that the conference was great. I'm back in London, now, where the weather is mercifully cooler.

As I was leaving the British Library yesterday, I passed three Americans looking at the enormous statue of Isaac Newton in the library's courtyard.

Man with strong southern (American) accent: Issac Newton. Now what was he famous for?
Young Woman, looking at the compass Newton is using: Drawing a circle?
Other Young Woman: The laws of gravity.
Me: He invented calculus.*
Man: Yeah, or an apple fell on his head or somethin'.
Me: [blank stare]

*This is not entirely correct, it turns out. According to the Wikipedia entry "Newton ... shares credit with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for the development of differential calculus."

while you were sleeping

I am about to deliver my paper at SHARP 2004, dear reader, but you are probably asleep right now so I won't ask you to send me good vibes. Lyon, France is fun, but hot. I cannot seem to stop sweating. My French has held up remarkably well, thankfully.

The keyboards are not QWERTY, so typing is a challenge. I cannot find the necessary keys to create HTML tags, for example.

More later!

moochester to london

Posting some pics from earlier in my trip: ladies and gentlemen, the lovely ladies of Manchester.

I had a very productive day yesterday in the British Library. The staff are just top notch and very helpful. I must admit, though, that when I first arrived, I was treated a bit brusquely (the bluejeans and bleached-out hair probably don't help) until the "Dr." on my UMKC card was noticed. Then everything was peaches and cream. It's good to know my advanced education is good for something.

Last night we had a fantastic South Indian meal (I blogged a NY Times article about this cuisine back in April) and then headed to the Tate Modern, where we took in the sublimely eerie "Head to Head" before settling in at the bar on the top floor and gazing out at St. Paul's across the Thames while mocking the pretensions of our snooty French waiter.

i shake like a toothache

Manchester to London: three hours on a very Star Trek Virgin train with Sonic Youth in my ears. Rain and dark skies are exchanged for breezy warm blue. Meet Laurie at Euston Station. Walk for ten minutes to the Goodenough Club. Almost weep with pleasure at the posh, but tiny, room in which I'm staying. I've been in a dormitory for three weeks. Shower. Lie on the bed for a few minutes. Take the tube to Brick Lane, London's latest hip neighborhood (and the title of a recent novel). Delicious Bangladeshi food. Then a hookah bar for exotic and fruity drinks served by an Italian/Swedish server. Now for some sleep. Research in the morning: Calvinistic evangelical periodical.

research update: 18th-c bibles

Edit: Added more info later in the day. I saw Wilco perform last night, and they were great! A small club, and I was right next to the stage. An English band called Clearlake opened, and while they were a little rough around the edges in their performance, I think I'll probably check out some of their recordings. Nels Cline, the avant garde jazz guitarist touring with Wilco, used everything from a metal spring to (I think) a film canister to get sounds out of his guitar, plus he had about 20 effects pedals around him. Great stuff.

I spent today at the oldest public library in the English speaking world: Chetham's Library. I examined about a half dozen Bibles from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They contain a variety of marginalia, but nothing that compares to what I found in Bradburn's diary. What I'm after is the ways in which people used their Bibles, and in addition to sermons and essays on how best to read the scriptures, we have marks written on pages by readers. The sample size, so far, is way too small to come to any definite conclusions, however. I'm still trying to decide how best to construct the comparisons; I'd like to determine how unusual or common Bradburn's practice was. Suggestions are welcome.

Here are some research issues I'm dealing with:

• I could be wrong, but I think libraries with special collections are not so likely to have Bibles with a great deal of marginalia. Rare books may have been purchased because they do not have all the marks of reading that scholars like me are interested in. Books with a great deal of writing in them could have been considered less valuable when the purchases were made, unless the book belonged to someone famous. Then the marginalia would make the book more valuable. I'm looking for Bibles belonging to ordinary folks, although I certainly wouldn't turn down the opportunity to examine, say, Jonathan Swift's Bible.
• Even if I do find marginalia in an eighteenth-century Bible, I can't be sure who put them there. Libraries often, but not always, know who owned a particular book before they bought it (i.e. the book's provenance), but we can't be sure if that person is the one who wrote in it.
• Even if I do find marginalia in an eighteenth-century Bible, I can't be sure that they were put there in the eighteenth century. They may have been added in the nineteenth century, which will provide information about reading practices in that century, but not in the one I'm interested in.
• I am sure that eighteenth-century marginalia is sitting on the pages of Bibles published in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, but how to find those Bibles? I know of one example that I intend to examine, but library catalogues usually record the date of publication, not the dates of marginalia. I have to say, though, that Chetham's Library's online catalogue has excellent, detailed bibliographical notes on their rare books, and I was able to determine when, according to the archivists, the marginalia in particular books were created.
• Finally, marginalia require interpretation before they will yield information about reading practices. For example, what do all those crosses in Bradburn's Bible mean? Were they texts of sermons he heard? Or were they, as I am hypothesizing, texts of sermons he preached? These questions are only the tip of the iceberg.

Chetham's has on display one of only 5 seventeenth-century handpresses in England. There are only 70 in the world. I didn't realize they were so rare. Perhaps once new presses were developed, there was no reason to preserve the old ones. Of course, the fact that they were made out of wood, rather than the iron of later presses, probably didn't help their longevity, much.

In keeping with the day's early modern theme, I took a break for lunch and had oysters on the half shell at Sinclair's Oyster Bar, which dates from the 16th or 17th century (or 18th) depending on whom you ask.

Tomorrow I finish at the Methodist Archives (for this year), and then I'm off to the British Library in London. I'm meeting a colleague whose speciality is the Renaissance, and we're gonna party like it's 1688! (1688...anyone?...anyone?...Bueller?)