Some thoughts on how we compensate service to the academic profession and scholarship.

Russom's book, which
I exhibit here as an
additional tiny homage.

It was a pleasure, this past week, to review the proofs for a forthcoming essay of mine, a short piece written for a festschrift in honor of Rick Russom, whose own first book on Old English meter was the most influential book on my own thinking about meter. These proofs were a particular pleasure because the editors of the volume and the typesetter at the press had put the piece together so beautifully that I had only one minor request for a change. Reading the proofs hardly took more of my time than reading the essay did.

Unfortunately, this week I’ve also felt I needed to decline two recent invitations to serve as an academic reviewer, in one case for a critical edition of a short Anglo-Saxon text, and in the other as a reviewer of proposals for summer grant projects from a major national granting agency. I suppose I might have managed the smaller task, but in the case of the proposals, I figured reading two or three dozen multi-page proposals, evaluating and ranking them, and writing responses to them, would take me at least half a week to a week of solid work: 20 to 40 hours or more. I would like to feel like I can afford to give this amount of time to the grand collaborative enterprise that is scholarship, but the honest truth is that I felt I couldn’t take that much time out of my work week, even for the 250 dollar stipend I was offered.

One of my goals, when I left academic employment, was to do my best to continue to operate as an active scholar, even if not as active as when I was employed. And I have also wanted to be visible in doing this work, as a reminder to myself and to others that academic employment is only one of the routes towards being a valued scholar, and that one can write scholarship of value while engaged in other sorts of work or employment.

So I felt very much disappointed in feeling like I couldn’t afford to undertake this scholarly work, that the time I give to scholarship is now, more than ever, focused mostly upon my own writing. And I wondered, for the first time, how I had ever found the time to do this sort of work when I was working as an academic. That wondering, I must confess, got me to thinking about how the whole academic enterprise is financed and compensated.

So: let me try out some numbers. I’ll use my own examples of employment for when specific numbers are needed, but I hope my readers remember that those numbers are, perhaps, now out of date, and they might plug in their own numbers for clarity or comparison.

So I will assess how much I would have been paid (or compensated) for each of these kinds of work when I was academically employed: a published chapter; the review of an essay for a journal; the review of a set of grant proposals for a national agency.

Case Study 1: Reviewing a journal article. I don’t know how much time this takes, on average. My guess is that the very least I could spend in reviewing an article for a journal or collection would be half a day to a day: four to eight hours of uninterrupted reading, thinking, and writing (though I rarely do it all at once). In both of my academic jobs, my contracts specified 20% service, which means eight to ten hours a week, assuming I could keep my work limited to 40 to 50 work hours per week. Reviewing a journal article thus might take a full week’s worth of my contracted service, or as little as perhaps half of a week’s contracted service.

To keep the numbers simple, I’ll count my contracts as ten-month contracts, rather than nine, so that my monthly salary will be easy to calculate. As a tenured full professor, my (pre-tax) monthly salary was thus about 6000 dollars; as a non-tenure line instructor I ended up with a monthly salary of about 4000 dollars. Twenty percent of those salaries, of course, would be 1200 or 800 dollars: that’s the amount I was paid for service each month. One week’s worth of each of those would be one quarter of that: 200-300 dollars--20 to 30 dollars an hour, for 8 to 10 hours. Depending on whether a particular review took me the minimum of time or more, the range of compensation I received from my university would have been between 100 and 300 dollars, pre-tax. Calculated on a nine-month contract, of course, those numbers would go up by 11 percent.

Case Study 2: To read a full batch of roughly 30 grant proposals, I think a full month’s worth of service would be required: at the very least 15 hours, much more likely close to 30 hours of reading, evaluating, comparing, ranking, writing. Let’s call that fifteen hours, one and a half weeks' worth of service (if the work week is 50 hours); 32 hours would be a full month of service, if the work week is 40 hours. So that’s between 300 dollars and1200 dollars. This granting agency, to its credit, did offer me 250 dollars for the work, though for me that would have been my only pay. If it had taken me 30 hours, I would have been working for less than West Virginia's minimum wage of $8.75.

It is important to remember that, when I was employed academically, this was work that I always counted in my annual reviews as falling under the heading of service. That is, I was literally being paid for this work, and my universities were essentially subsidizing the publishers or granting agencies. When I undertook this kind of work while I had an academic job, and I was also paid by the granting agency, I was actually being paid twice for the same work. 

Case Study 3: As for writing an article or chapter, my goal as a working academic was always two acceptances for publication per year, plus, of course, the conference-going that would support that: usually two conferences. When I was working non-tenure track, my contract specified zero percent for scholarship, so that scholarship was work that I was literally doing for no compensation. No wonder I am willing to do such work now for the same pay! But when I was a tenured full professor, making 60,000 dollars a year, my annual compensation for scholarship (specified at 20% in my contract) was 12,000 dollars a year (plus re-imbursement for many conference expenses, of course).

Those were the days! 5000 dollars for an article, and 1000 for a conference! And if I’d published fewer articles and gone to fewer conferences, the dollar amounts would be even larger.

If you, dear reader, are a working academic with a percentage assigned to scholarship--ten percent, twenty, forty, fifty, whatever--it’s easy for you, too, to do the math. Figure out what that percentage of your annual salary that is in dollars, figure out how many articles you do (or are expected to) publish per year, and divide to get a sense of what you are being paid for that work. It seems important to understand this number, especially if it turns out you’re being paid thousands of dollars to write an article, as I was.

Somehow, in all the time I was employed as an academic, I never got around to working out any of these numbers. Now, however, I am always reminded of the value of my time, the value of my labor. The scholarly writing I do now, I am happy to say, is a work of love: I would do it for free, and I do. But how nice it was to be paid for it, and paid so handsomely, for a part of my career.

But the work of reviewing is not really done for the love of it: it is work, and valuable work, and the reliance of publishers and grant funding agencies on the subsidies of university salaries means that this work can really only be done by university employees, who are the only ones who get paid for it. I’ve recently seen on Facebook some academics suggesting that they should refuse to do reviewing work for for-profit publishers, unless they get paid by those publishers: but of course, they are probably already getting paid for that work by their universities.

And this is what’s important, in some sense: those who have academic employment (often? usually?) get financially compensated for service work, and those with a research component to their contracts get paid to produce scholarship. I don’t get paid for these things (except occasionally I do get a tiny check for royalties: probably totaling 2000 dollars or less over the last fifteen years). Grad students don’t really get paid for these things. Adjuncts don’t generally get paid to produce scholarship, and probably sometimes do not get paid for service to the profession. If we ever hope to have a more equitable and even inclusive scholarly world, finding a way to compensate those outside of academic employment for the value of their labor should be a priority.

I wish I didn’t feel like I cannot afford to include myself in the pool of potential reviewers for articles or grant proposals. I wish I didn’t worry that if the pool of reviewers includes only those in academic employment, then the process might be biased to award grants only to those in academic employment. Certainly, I felt like this granting agency’s habit of awarding summer-time grants served explicitly to identify likely grantees as those on the academic schedule.

I would like to think that my position outside of academic employment gives me a valuable perspective on the academic world: but at present I must generally be content to offer that perspective for free, though working academics generally get compensated for their service contributions. And as long as academic publishers and granting agencies—both those who operate for profit and those who are non-profit—rely upon the salaries of those with academic employment to do the work, the labor, of reviewing, I worry that they actively work to keep the insiders inside and the outsiders outside. Because no one should be asked to contribute their labor for free. Or for less than minimum wage.

Inexplicable

First edition of Alex Haley's Roots.

I recently described the kinds of books I deal in as largely consisting of "oddball" items. Fortunately, there seem to be others out there equally interested in at least some of the oddball things I buy, and I've been lucky to be able to sell a few oddball items here and there. What remains, I sometimes fear, is the oddest of the odd.

One broad category of oddball items I can't seem to resist is books that are damaged, especially if the damage is intentional or particularly interesting. I am always interested in medieval manuscripts (and early printed books) that have been recycled as binding materials, for example, and I have bought more than one printed book recycled as a scrapbook, its printed pages pasted over with other things. 

Condition, of course, is a key aspect of value in many areas of the rare and collectible book world, and damaged books are, from that perspective, the least valuable: yet mint condition books can almost never tell us about readers or users or even how owners valued them. In that sense, damaged books often tell us more about their own history as objects than books in collectible condition can ever do. 

And yet, once in a while I've bought a book with damage that I've despaired of ever understanding, and I ran across one of these recently as I've been working on a short catalogue on the general topic of African-American literature.  The book in question is a signed first edition of Alex Haley's Roots, an important book from the 1970s.

Signed copies are worth something, and when I had a chance to pick this signed copy up for under ten dollars, I bought it. But even as I did, I worried that I'd never be able to sell it, for some owner or bookseller, at some point in the book's history, did something incomprehensible: Haley's signature has been covered over with three sweeps of a wide black marker.

Haley's signature, just visible under the marker lines.

I have seen used books where owners have blacked out (or whited out) their own names and addresses before selling them on, but I don't think I've ever run across an author's signature treated this way before. Nor do I ever want to run into it again, of course. Perhaps a former owner of this book was running through a stack, before selling them, blacking out their own names, and accidentally blacked out Haley's signature too. Or maybe there is some other explanation.

But I find it inexplicable. Books, used books, damaged books, do tell us some of their history, and sometimes the stories they tell are fascinating. But sometimes they seem to raise questions that we probably can never answer. 

Family Manuscripts

My favorite picture of Rosemary as a child; Columbus, Ohio, ca. 1971 or so.

It was a truism of my mother's antiques business to acknowledge that, as she always put it, "everything is for sale someday." That is, while she and my father were always--and still are--collectors first, even items in their collections would, no doubt, be offered for sale sometime. And it is part of the nature of the antiques world: except for the very newest collectibles, everything we collect has been owned before, and passed out of someone else's collections, and none of us can take our collections with us, ultimately. The best we can do, I think, is to find homes for our treasures, after we are done with them. And one way to do that, of course, is to find someone who will buy them, their investment literally representing their own commitment to treasure these things and pass them along in turn.

Yet there are a few manuscript items in my little collection that I really plan never to sell. These are items that came not through my own collecting, but rather through family members. 

In the picture of Rosemary in her parents house above, for example, you might see, perched on the piano behind her, an even older picture of her. On the wall behind that, I can see what looks like a medieval or renaissance manuscript, with a large illuminated initial. For years, I have casually looked around her parents' house, to see if I could find that leaf, because I knew it had been there at the time of the photo. 

All I could ever find, however, was this other leaf, as shown in the image

Spanish or Italian monumental choir leaf

to the right. Without any illumination on either side, I knew this was not in the leaf pictured behind Rosemary. For years, when I first knew her family, this vellum leaf hung in the basement, in front of and (mercifully) covering a truly awful 1970s print. Eventually, when I started collecting medieval leaves and fragments myself, Rosemary's folks gave me this one, and I've been happy to keep it and hang it in my study ever since.

What became of the leaf in the picture was never clear: no one in Rosemary's family seemed to have any memory of it at all. But the last time I was in Columbus, Rosemary's mother had turned it up from somewhere in the house.

The leaf from Rosemary's picture

It had been rolled, of course, in the meantime, and probably stored in the basement. Perhaps some readers will have already noted its most important features: there are worries about the script here, which does not seem quite to work: in fact the whole thing is printed, on paper made to appear "antique," and it is printed on only one side. What I had long been able to see in the picture of Rosemary had never been a real manuscript at all. 

One can see, in the picture at the top of this blog post, that this leaf once had a dowel rod at the bottom, serving as a weight to allow it to hang flat; I am virtually certain that this dowel rod, and the one at the top, were recycled and attached to the authentic vellum leaf that I now own. Rose's father was a handy and enthusiastic recycler and saver: he must have replaced the printed leaf with a real one at some point, switched off the dowel rods onto the new leaf, and displayed the new treasure, while packing the no-longer-useful reproduction off to some out-of-sight corner.

The surprise of a vellum manuscript leaf turning up in Rosemary's family home, I have to add, was paralleled by an equally unsuspected manuscript passed on to me by my own parents a couple of years ago. In their time, my folks have collected US postage stamps, glassware, and various odds and ends that have engaged their interest, but books and manuscripts were never really in their collecting area. My dad's father had bought a few antiques (mostly furniture) around the 1950s that my dad still has, but books and manuscripts were not among them, either.

Photographic print folder, Hartford CT

So it was quite a surprise when my mother handed this little folder to me at one point. As one might able to see at the top of the folder, it reads "Page from the Koran/ E. M. H." The initials belong to Esther Mary Hirst, my father's aunt, who was, quite literally a world traveller: she was for a long time a nurse in Peru, and before that she had traveled to Europe and Turkey. If you search for her name on Google, only a few hits turn up, but one is a page from the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1929, noting that she had been selected to go to Turkey to teach English there. Presumably, the page from the Koran that is mentioned on this folder was acquired while she was there.

Esther Mary's Hirst's Arabic pages, probably
collected ca. 1930.

If you open the folder out, though, and see what is inside, you find not one, but four Arabic pages. I don't have the Arabic language or paleography skills to read or to date these pages, but presumably they all had some age around 1930, when she acquired them, though they might be as late as the 19th century, even so. All the time I was growing up, I have no memory of ever seeing these leaves.

All five of these leaves are dear to me; six if you count the printed leaf from the background of the picture of Rosemary reading. I am not, as I hope I have made clear on this blog before, in favor of the cutting up of books and fragments for the purposes of selling individual leaves. But these leaves have made their way into my own little collection by passing through the hands of family members, who bought them or collected them for reasons that had nothing to do with me. 

And it will not be long now before Esther Mary Hirst's Koran leaves (if, indeed, that is the text they derive from) will have survived as separate, individual leaves for a full century: they have passed from her, to her sister, to my father, and now to me, kept and treasured as keepsakes both during her own life and by others in the family since she died in 1958. In some ways, this family history has become important to these leaves, if only to suggest a date before which these leaves were separated from their books.

It is common among my academic medievalist colleagues to deplore the cutting up of books and the sale of cut leaves. Sometimes they seem to go so far as to deplore the people who purchase or even own such leaves. But all leaves have a story, and some cut leaves may be rightly and honorably treasured. Even by folks who are not themselves collectors of medieval manuscripts. Even professional medievalists might rightly treasure them.

Indeed, I treasure these items so much that I hope never to sell them. Far better, I think, to give them away, when the time comes.

A Review of Nicolas Barker's 'Visible Voices'

Nicolas Barker, Visible Voices: Translating Verse into Script & Print, 3000 BC – AD 2000. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2016. xii, 179. $23.95.

[A review by Tom Bredehoft] 

My friend Pat Conner recently lent his copy of Nicolas Barker’s new book to me, knowing that I have long been thinking about the topics of verse, and form, and writing, and that my own thinking has tried to cover almost two of the five millennia that Barker’s book attempts to survey. And while I think there is much to like about this new book, I also have doubts about it, at almost every level. As I once wrote about metrical study, it seems likely that experts should never take on the work of reviewing each others’ books: we have too much at stake in our own positions to be objective about the work of others. And yet, of course, a book on such a specialized topic can only be reviewed effectively by someone with a real depth of knowledge. It is a double bind from which there really is no escape.

           

So let me begin this brief review by noting what I think is especially strong about Barker’s book. First, it honestly tries to survey five thousand years or so of recorded verse, and it does so with a wealth of illustrative examples, many of which (though not all) are accompanied by clear and legible photographic facsimiles, often in color. The sheer range of examples is simply astonishing, and the numerous facsimiles offer opportunity for readers to evaluate many of the claims and descriptive passages relating to them. In this, the book takes seriously a position that is dear to my heart: that the visible presentation of texts can be, and often is, meaningful in its own right, above and beyond the linguistic content of the written characters. That this is often true of verse in particular is, I think, one of the theses of Barker’s book. If nothing else, the range of examples and facsimiles will give readers interested in similar ideas a wealth of starting points for considering how the visible component of texts might operate across a vast range of Western scripts and languages. And in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I have no real ability to comment on Barker’s comments about Egyptian or Akkadian or even Greek verse, to take just three examples; surely few authors or readers will attempt to span the range that this book attempts, and I must marvel even at the attempt.

And yet.

            

I think this book fails to either have or express a sufficiently clear understanding of exactly what verse is, as well as an understanding of what writing itself is. Since the book attempts a survey of the intersection of those two things across the full Western tradition of writing, it seems important to me to be clear and precise about these two important defining concepts. The remainder of my comments here will do what I can to articulate both where and why Barker’s positions are insufficient, and what might be done to address those insufficiencies.

1. The nature of verse. Barker’s position, I believe, is to claim that poetry is language adorned with features intended to improve its memorability. This book’s Preface, for example, begins with the claim “poetry is a memorial device, its purpose to remind audience or reader” (ix). Again, at the beginning of the first chapter, he writes “the verbal devices by which we recognize verse were originally memorial in function,” though adding “they came to have their own discipline” in time (3). Further, “verse had separated itself from all forms of prose long before the first preserved records of either came into existence” (3). But since the forms of prose Barker has been discussing were those used by orators and preachers, organized by what Barker characterizes as “mnemonic system[s] for recording words: rhetoric and theology” (3), he seems to be suggesting that it is verse’s particular focus on the specific mnemonic tools of alliteration, meter, and rhyme that define verse.

          

My anxiety about this definition or understanding of verse derives, in part, from the way Barker’s book appears to work upon a definition of writing as a technology designed also to supplement memory, a topic on which I will have more to say below. But here, it is important to note that defining the two phenomena this way aligns verse and writing as being analogous phenomena. Such an alignment may well give a book a valuable coherence: if writing’s purpose is the same as verse’s purpose, what could be more natural or appropriate than to look at the history of written verse?

            

Unfortunately, I am convinced that the central claim that the formal features of verse have a memorial function is simply untrue. Ignoring, for the moment, the complications of writing, it think it is more correct to understand the formal features of verse as artifice in language, the very precondition for at least some sorts of art in language. In oral contexts, verse is, specifically, an artificial subset of language more broadly. The fact, which I think all must acknowledge, that prose too may be adorned with rhythms, with alliteration, with rhyme, tells us that such artful adornment is not the distinguishing feature between verse and prose. The central difference lies, rather, in the structural (not memorial) form or function of such adornment in verse. Verse has a meter, a measure, by which an entire passage of verse (a poem, a section of a poem) has a defined structure. When what we once took for the adornments of prose turn out to be structural, after all, we know we have left the realm of prose behind. That those adornments (structural meter, as well as its elements, which may include rhythm, alliteration, or rhyme) may serve as aids to memory is a bonus, not a matter of definition.

            

I think we might actually go a step further. The artificiality of verse is, in fact, not originally or essentially mnemonic, but generative. This is certainly the case in oral-formulaic traditions (a topic Barker barely even mentions), where verbatim memorization is not at issue. And I suspect it is true in most other types of verse composition as well—except for those varieties of written verse that rely upon visibility for their effects.

            

As always, discussions of this topic are made more difficult by the common desire to also define or understand the difference between verse and poetry. And Barker’s book certainly often appears to restrict his range of interests to poets and poems in particular. I might be willing to accede to a claim that all verse is poetry, because it is all artificial and hence art-ful, but this additional level of definition is passed over entirely, I think, in Barker’s book, in part because of the problematic claim that poetry has a memorial function.

            

And, in the end, Barker’s book seems to operate on the widespread belief that we all know verse when we encounter it. Though an early passage of the book  admits the difficulty of sometimes recognizing whether or not a given passage is verse or prose, nowhere does the book offer any actual guidelines for distinguishing the genres, I think. And since the book is very good at saying (and providing numerous examples of) verse written in long lines, not lineated according to verse structure, the comparison to prose and a demonstration of how we can identify verse in such cases would have been very welcome. But maybe that’s just me.

2. The nature of writing. The very title of Barker’s book exemplifies an understanding that what writing makes visible is language, since we know the title does not refer to writing’s ability to preserve the unique auditory or acoustic qualities of a well-known, well-loved individual’s voice. Certainly, writing is not language, though it has often been held to represent language, or to represent pieces of language. And yet even if we assent to the claim that writing’s central purpose is to record language, to preserve it across time, that claim does not entail that all other properties of writing are ignorable, meaningless, or irrelevant. That is: even if the purpose we put writing to most often is to record language, it does not follow that writing is (merely) a record of language.

            

What other things writing is or might be are often hidden from us, I think, by our very willingness to treat writing as recorded language. And often enough, it is writers and poets themselves who have treated writing in this reductive fashion, encouraging readers to do the same. But a history of the intersection of writing and verse, I firmly believe, must attend both to cases where the written text does and does not do more than represent a passage of language.

            

This is a truth Barker knows well enough, and his book essentially ends with a discussion of concrete poetry, in which the texts we see cannot readily be spoken aloud. The implication, obviously, is that some poems are more than pieces of language, and their texts are more than or different from representations. Some poems are not about voices, or about reciting or reading out loud. For Barker this appears to be understood as a development of the (late) age of print, the end result of poets taking greater and greater control of the appearance of their words on the page. As a result, Hrabanus Maurus’s remarkable Carolingian multiple acrostics are mentioned only in the final chapter, standing as a kind of precursor to the concrete poets, and acrostics in general (though mentioned by Barker as being produced among both the Greeks and Akkadians) are referred to only briefly and vaguely. 

Adalstan Acrostic, from Oxford Bodleian Library C 697; 10th c.

Acrostics, of course, involve two-dimensional structures, as one reads all of the words in sequence as well as also reading the words spelled out (usually vertically) by initial or final elements in each line. But since spoken language is linear in time, such two-dimensional structures as acrostics always stand as examples of what writing can do that speech cannot: acrostics are always examples of writing that exceeds the representation of speech. Yet Barker seems tied to a perspective that wants to understand poetry as a genre of speech, and written poems as trying to capture “voices.” The long history of poems that are art in writing, as opposed to art in language, is thus a problem Barker’s book mostly ignores—until it can dispose of it as a late, print-mediated development.

But all along, writing has been more than a tool for representing language. The related notion that writing is somehow related to memory goes back at least to Plato, and perhaps a good deal further. Of course, one of the chief physical features of writing is its durability across time, so very much in contrast to the evanescence of spoken language. It is this durability, or endurance, that generates the comparison to the mental function of memory, which is so widespread in commentaries about writing as to need almost no justification. And the origins of Western writing, at least, in record keeping seem to suggest that the enduring record is what was valued in the earliest written texts. But the part of writing that preserves or records something preserves language, and definitely not memory, and this seems important to note and be clear about.

These critiques, about Barker’s largely unstated definitions and understandings of verse and of writing are not mere quibbles, I think: I think they reveal much about how this book builds itself. It is an appealing notion to imagine that poetry or verse is properly read or recited aloud, but it is, at best, a notion that applies to only some poems, and perhaps not always the best ones. Even Shakespeare, I think, writes some poems that cannot be read aloud, or that lose some of their meanings when they are read aloud. To understand the nature of verse expression we must always attend to whether a particular poem is a work of art in language, or a work of art in writing, or even a work of art in manuscript or in print. If we assume that “real” poetry is art-in-language, we must conclude that acrostics, to take only a kind of example that Barker refers to on a number of occasions, are mere writing games (Barker, writing of an Egyptian poem with numbered stanzas in which the numbers are repeated homophonically inside the first and last line of each stanza, suggests “These artifices, however, even the play of words, are all more scribal than authorial” (12) suggesting just what sorts of play an author or poet is allowed, in Barker’s view). But surely we should judge an acrostic on its merits, rather than assume or assert its use of a second dimension is merely a toy or a trick.

            

In the end, I am suggesting here that there is more than one kind of poem. Some poems are works of art in language. Some are works of art in writing. Some, I believe, are works of art in print, and some poems literally have two-dimensional or even three-dimensional spatial structures. A history of poetry, even a more limited survey of how poetry has been recorded in writing, needs, I think, to have a clear and effective understanding of what poetry is, what it consists of, and how these different kinds of poems make their different kinds of meanings—because writing is essential to some of these kinds of poems and irrelevant to one. Each time we read a poem, any poem from any period, it matters to the act of reading to know and understand which of these kinds of poem it truly is, in both the poem's essential nature, and in the instantiation of the poem we see before us.

And yet the kinds of poems I’ve described in the paragraph above have become clear to me (to the degree that they are clear) only after literal years of trying to understand how poems I’ve read have been recorded and represented across time, and it has been some of the hardest intellectual work I’ve ever engaged in. In some ways, I can hardly critique Nicolas Barker for not seeing what it is I think I have seen. And thus we return to the problem of an expert reviewing another expert’s book.

In the end, I found much to value in this book, and not only the profusion of facsimile images. Barker’s range of reference remains impressively and usefully broad: there is much to follow up here, in every chapter. It is a book that, in the best way, has much to teach: especially if the reader is willing, as all critical readers should be, to judge for herself which of its teachings to accept, and which to reject. This review attempts to articulate what I’d try to do better, if I were trying to write such a book: but I can only do so, of course, because the book exists in the first place. I hope it is read widely by all those interested in the materiality of text.  

Saxon Idols in America, 1837-38

Freya, or Friga.  Ladies' Garland 12, 1838.

I recently came across a bound volume of The Ladies' Garland, vol. 1 (1837-38), which, as the subtitle suggests, was "devoted to Literature, Amusement and Instruction," and contained "Original Essays, Female Biography" and a variety of other things. 

I was especially interested to get this volume because of the set of seven illustrations and brief essays on seven so-called "Saxon Idols," the supposed Anglo-Saxon dieties that gave us our modern English names for the days of the week. 

Nothing in the essays or illustrations, really, was new: much of it was derived directly from Richard Verstegen's 1605 book, A Restitvtion of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities, Concerning the Most Noble and Renovvmed English Nation (usefully discussed by Rolf Bremmer in his essay "The Anglo-Saxon Pantheon According to Richard Verstegen")

Tuisco.

But whoever wrote these essays for The Ladies' Garland also consulted Sharon Turner, a much more up-to-date historical source, though Verstegen's illustrations were almost certainly the direct source for these new cuts, which may well have been executed in America.

Thomas Jefferson, of course, promoted the study of Old English at

The Idol of the Moon

the University of Virginia, so there has long been an interest in Anglo-Saxon studies in America. But these brief essays and their illustrations must mark an early example of Anglo-Saxonism in American popular discourse: they are fascinating and strange, even if the volume I have is well worn, foxed, and with many of its pages browned. 

It is not really clear to me why this material was felt to be suitable for the audience of The Ladies' Garland, but the series did run through seven issues, and among the Female Biographies the magazine included was Joan of Arc, so perhaps the editors simply had a medieval bent. And unfortunately, neither the images nor the essays are accompanied by signatures or other identifiers. The identity of this early American antiquarian may no longer be recoverable.

Back from Vacation

Early twentieth-century memorial
cross, in the Anglo-Saxon style: Bamburgh.

Chancery Hill Books and Antiques (by which I mean me) was lucky to go on a kind of vacation recently, two-and-a-half weeks in Sweden, Estonia, and England, accompanied by two academic conferences: the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research conference, in Tallinn, where Rosemary gave a paper on students protesting at WVU after the Kent State shooting, and I gave a paper at the Leeds International Medieval Congress on Old English and Old Saxon verse. 

In the UK, we had a rental car, which we picked up from what the Manchester airport cheerfully called the "Rental Car Village," which made me think of nothing so much as a J. G. Ballard-style dystopic novel, in which the protagonist would find himself or herself stuck in such a village, with every opportunity to rent a car and escape, but somehow never managing to do so before all of civilization had collapsed. We, fortunately, escaped not once, but twice, though not without some dystopian moments of our own.

The highlight of our trip, we thought, was staying up in a tiny little village called "Brownieside" in Northumbria, though we never did see any brownies. But we went out each day, walking along the coast, at Dunstanburgh Castle, at Bamburgh, and on Lindisfarne. It was just what we wanted: a lot of walking, to find and see places we didn't know anything about (like the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, which we'd never heard of), with time, too, for reading and relaxing. 

Mary Elliott's grave marker, Bamburgh.

Though I went into a book store or antique store in every country we visited, I bought only three books, so you know it was a real vacation. Perhaps my favorite textual moment on the trip was in the churchyard in Bamburgh, where a variety of interesting headstones and monuments may be seen: not only the Anglo-Saxon-inspired cross pictured above, but the elaborate memorial for Grace Darling, an early-nineteenth-century lighthouse keeper's daughter, made famous by a daring rescue in the aftermath of a local shipwreck. My favorite, though, was a humbler stone, Mary Elliot's marker, from 1778.

The poem carved on Mary Elliott's headstone reads "It is my lost to rest me here/Till my Redeemer Christ appear/With troops of Angels from on high/Resounding loud his great Majesty."

Perhaps I have spent too much time, lately, thinking about textual identity and textual change, and perhaps I am far too focused on form and meter, but I could not help marveling, when I read this little poem, about the astonishing act of textual emendation perpetrated upon it:

The word "great," it appears, has been chiseled away, though incompletely. This change, of course, improves the meter of the poem, although the act of erasure leaves a legible trace, a Change that all readers can Track. The expunged word has not truly been expunged: we readers may choose, each time we read this, which form of the line we prefer.

It's no wonder I am fascinated with the materiality of texts: this stone gives us two poems for one, as the word "great" is both present and absent simultaneously. The inscription, as it stands today, does not need to choose between the readings at all. And neither, in truth, do we.