Gardner's Grendel

John Gardner's Grendel

So now that the big Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo is over, it's back to work for me, which often seems to be a matter of getting and spending. Certainly, I've already managed to spend at least some of the money I made at Kalamazoo.

One of the more interesting books I found in the last week or so was a copy of John Gardner's Grendel, a book well enough known among medieval scholars. This copy I was able to pick up in a bookstore in Columbus last Monday. It is not a first printing, and it lacks its original dust jacket, so it already has two strikes against it.

Gardner's Inscription

But it only cost me about five dollars, and it does have one important feature, being signed and inscribed by the author.

As I hope people can see (my photographic skills are not always as good as I might wish) the inscription is an interesting one: "To Andrew--Absolutely my favorite young poet--with the possible exception of Liz.  John Gardner."

So far, I have not been able to pin down who Andrew and Liz might be: the book is an eighth printing from 1979, and Gardner died in 1982, so even though the inscription isn't dated, it must have been written between those two dates. The use of the familiar names suggests that the two poets probably also knew each other. One wouldn't think it would be so hard to identify two young poets with those names from that time. But nothing has occurred to me yet.

There are literally only a handful of signed first edition copies of Grendel available online; they start at about a thousand dollars. This copy, of course, won't be worth nearly as much, but it's an interesting copy nonetheless, and it might be even more interesting if I can identify the Andrew of the inscription. It's just the kind of puzzle that reminds me that this is a business where I'm always learning, or at least trying to learn.

Post-Academic: Back from the ‘Zoo

Me at the Anglo-Saxonist Dinner at Kalamazoo.  Also visible: Larry Swain,
Robin Norris, Andy Scheil. Photo by Ilya Sverdlov.

The annual Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a strange and wonderful event. Thousands of medieval scholars and interested others gather for academic discussion, professional networking, and friendship and fellowship. I have attended, off and on (more on than off in recent years), since the early 1990s, and I have annual meet-ups with some of my dearest friends in the world. This year and last, I’ve been working in the exhibits hall, in a tiny little booth (three six-foot tables), where I try to sell books and manuscript items.

Two or three or four other dealers in medieval manuscript items regularly set up there, too, although we probably all have slightly different niches we fit into. Others also deal in used books more generally. My stock is mostly oddball items: I buy things I think are unusual and interesting, rather than typical and common, and I hope to find buyers intrigued by the unique. Many of the items I specifically bought to take to Kalamazoo have appeared here in previous blog posts. And some of them sold.

But I took out time, this year, to attend one panel and one round table, and I gave short little papers at each. At the round table, in particular, I was somewhat surprised and pleased to look at myself and my co-presenters and see that together we made a group of five serious scholars in their forties and fifties, and our task was to talk about the business of Old English. Somehow, without my really noticing or expecting it, I had found myself in a position to address the state of the field, as an insider, and as someone perceived to be capable of looking at some sort of big picture.

And one evening, I was invited by a close friend to tag along to a dinner she had organized at a local restaurant, at which a handful of Anglo-Saxonist mentors and mentees were meeting up. I felt, in some ways, like a ghost at the banquet: what advice could I possibly have for young people in the field who were hoping to have a better record of academic employment than I had managed? And yet, the people I talked to there were interested, among other things, in thinking about and addressing issues like what is called the “work-life balance.” Some of the professional choices I've made, I think, can be understood, perhaps even appreciated, through such a lens. And I got to tell some stories.

Both experiences were gratifying, of course: here on this blog, I’ve chronicled, in some ways, my personal frustrations in trying to work out an identity as a scholar and academic who works outside of what the MLA’s annual house-organ identifies as the Profession, in the singular. This year, at Kalamazoo, I felt more than ever that my hybrid identity was working, somehow: I felt more than ever that my scholarly identity and my professional work as a book and manuscript dealer were fitting together, rather than conflicting with one another.

I’m sure I’ll feel a tension between these roles again: I don’t really think that the academic world really has a comfortable place for folks with a career trajectory like mine. But it was a delight, for a few days, to feel like there might, after all, be room to make such a place. But we all have a role, I think, in making such places visible and habitable. Or not. For my part, part of my role, I think, must be to continue to try to be visible in my field, and in the academic world more generally.

So I guess I will continue to try to write these “post-academic” blog posts. Though the truth is, my academic life is not really in my past. I am “post academic employment,” but not really “post-academic.” It seems to be a meaningful distinction, to me at least.


And of course, for those who’ve known me a long time, I went to the Kalamazoo dance, but I did not dance.

Medieval Leaf as Christmas Card

French Missal Leaf, with musical notation. 

It's always a delightful day when the mail carrier brings me a medieval manuscript leaf or fragment. Last week, I was lucky enough to have this fine leaf brought my way. It is an attractive late-medieval missal leaf, about nine inches in height, and the musical setting you can see in the middle of the page is from the Song of Songs, which may suggest that the leaf is from a Cistercian missal, though my knowledge of the liturgy is probably less complete than it ought to be. The musical passage includes the Latin "stipate me malis," which has been beautifully, if somewhat freely, rendered as "Comfort me with apples."

The script is a solid Gothic Northern Textualis, though with some early erasures and corrections (two in the line immediately above the first musical stave in the middle of the page). A date between 1400 and 1450 seems possible, and France is at least a possible location.

In the second to last line, I hope readers can see that there is a little hole in the vellum that the original scribe has avoided in the act of writing: a hole so small was clearly not seen as reason to discard the whole leaf, even in a book as nice as this one.

I was especially eager to get this leaf, though, since I have always been interested in the various ways in which medieval manuscripts have been recycled. 

Leaf, Mat, and Frame

I've cropped the image above in such a way that you can look mostly at the leaf; in its frame, it has a different effect.

The mat surrounding the leaf has a printed text, identifying it as "An Original Manuscript Leaf from a 15th Century Missal" and giving its place of origin as France. Strikingly, the mat has been seriously browned in several places by what appears to be an acidic cardboard backing board. The outline of both the leaf and the pieces of tape holding the leaf to the mat are easily visible, these things coming between the backing board and the mat, and thus hindering the discoloration. 

Text on Reverse of Frame

The original paper backing on the frame is still present and it (fortunately) retains another printed description of this item, headed "A Leaf From a [15th C]entury Missal," the nail-head upon which it was hung having destroyed the letters in the middle (the hanging wire and its shadow are visible in my image). At the very bottom of the text are the words "Christmas 1953" and "Ross R. DeVean". 

DeVean seems to have been a Southern California art collector and dealer, best known, apparently, for dealing in prints. But in 1953, he must have had at least a few of these leaves, printed up the mats and descriptions, and had these framed leaves made up as gifts, either for friends or customers. 

Cleveland Ohio's Otto Ege, of course, is well known today as a dealer who broke up medieval manuscripts and sold individual leaves. But he was not the only one to do so in the middle twentieth century. Ross R DeVean is a less known figure, but a leaf like this one, in its "original" frame, gives us a valuable picture of the uses to which a medieval manuscript book might be put in that time. DeVean, like Ege, no doubt also thought of himself as a connoisseur, not a destroyer.

I worry, of course, that the acidic backing board that has so browned the mat has possibly also browned the side of the leaf it touches; but I also think it's important to preserve this frame and its printed texts as an important twentieth-century context for this medieval leaf. 

In its way, it is as revealing of the historical variations in how books were valued as is the recycling of other leaves for binding materials. And I find it just as fascinating.

Lost and Found

As I've told a number of people since I started in the business of selling manuscripts and fragments, one of the joys of the work lies in acquiring items that are under-appreciated and finding good homes for them, where they will be valued and appreciated. Here's a story of a moment when I found not just a good home for a manuscript, but its proper home.

1517 Low German Manuscript Charter on Vellum

Earlier this year, I purchased (online, where most of my manuscript items come from) an interesting little Low German charter, dated in the year 1517. It had been offered by an American seller as a parchment manuscript 300 or 400 years old, but I could see the correct date from the images given (see the last six words in the picture above), and I was immediately interested. I was able to buy it, and it shipped to me in January.

One of the things I do when I purchase something like this is to try, first of all, to learn more about it: I decipher the hand, read what I can, and try to find out something about the people involved. In short, I use the skills of paleography and historical research to add to my knowledge about the item. Any knowledge I add equates to added value so that I can try to sell such an item at a profit: I've literally added value to it in the form of knowledge.

In this case, however, my internet searches turned up something that I'd never encountered before: a charter very much like the one I had was listed online as part of the Lost Art Index, having gone missing during World War II. 

I emailed the contact person for this particular item, Dr. Peter Worm, at the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe in Münster. He quickly wrote back, identifying my charter on the basis of an old finding aid as certainly being their lost charter. It had probably been taken (or perhaps even looted) as a souvenir by an American serviceman, he suggested, during the war.

It never occurred to me to do anything other than return it, and so I mailed it right off to them; the archive is delighted to have it back. Coincidentally, the archive's current location in Münster is only a few miles from my maternal family's ancestral home in Ladbergen, though there was no obvious or direct connection to my own ancestors in the charter, of course.

The owner of the archive this charter belongs to, and thus the owner of my charter, turns out to be Prince Maximilian zu Bentheim-Tecklenburg. And it was a great surprise and delight to receive an email a couple of weeks ago ("Von meinem iPhone gesendet," it said) from Princess Marissa zuBentheim-Tecklenburg, thanking me for the return of the document. Probably the first and last email I will ever receive from a princess, complete with a Schloss as the return (postal) address!

Dr. Worm has posted an entry about the recovery of the charter (in German) on the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe's blog. But it seemed useful to tell the story from my side, too, if only to share one of the more unusual experiences I've had in the manuscript market. 

Post-Academic: Back to the Coal Mines

I had a rather long layoff from this blog until quite recently: the truth of the matter was that I was a finalist for an academic job at the associate professor level. It was, indeed, very nice to be taken seriously in the academic world again, even for a couple of days: I got to go to a new campus, talk about my academic work and writing, and feel like in insider, rather than an outsider, at least for a moment.

Of course, most academics who know me still do take me seriously, but the reality of the job market, I've known for a long time, is that they can't really get me a job. I mostly know Anglo-Saxonists, and rarely will a school be looking to hire a second one! But that means, of course, that hiring committees will almost always be made up entirely of folks from outside my specialty. Ah, well.

I did not get the job offer, of course, or I might be writing a very different blog post, announcing my return to academia. But the truth is, the amount of life-rearrangement that it would have involved could only have been undertaken with a fair amount of trepidation.  

But yesterday, I was out at a local antique mall and I purchased a few little books, including a very rough copy of Maud and Miska Petersham's elementary-level schoolbook, The Story Book of Coal (1935). The book suggests, just by its existence, how thoroughly the Appalachian coal industry  permeated the lives of West Virginians, even in the schoolroom. It still does so, in many ways, I think.

This book is filled with wonderful 1930s illustrations, and I was especially delighted to see a two-page opening with an illustration of a medieval English king, tidily linking my own presence in West Virginia with my work on the middle age. How wonderful to read: "There was a time in England . . . when people though that the smoke from coal poisoned the air. The English king, Edward the First, declared that if coal smoke were seen coming from a building, the building was to be destroyed. He also made the burning of coal an offense to be punished by death."

Thank goodness, of course, that we no long are subject to such medieval foolishness!

I very much liked this picture of a snow-white miner's mule, too: "Mules and horses are still used in many mines. They are taken down underground, and there they live in stables deep down under the earth. They spend their lives pulling the cars of coal."

I am sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere, but whether I am now returning to the coal mines, or whether I would rather have done so had I returned to academia, I am not entirely sure. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Breaking My Own Rules

Wharton's Age of Innocence.

When people ask me how I'm doing as a bookseller, I often tell them that I'm busy "getting and spending," trying with that to communicate that I am always keeping myself busy, but with all the Wordsworthian worry that I am also busily laying waste my own powers. But buying books is, at the same time, almost always a pleasant task, and it is almost always interesting.

One book I bought recently I thought might be interesting to share here, because when I bought it, I broke two of the rules of buying that I usually try to follow: Don't buy books that aren't first editions and Don't buy books with serious damage. Of course, when I buy manuscript fragments, I frequently break both rules, but they are still pretty good rules for buying twentieth-century literature, for example.

In this case, as I am sure the pictures have already revealed, the book I bought, knowingly breaking both of those rules, was Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. This particular book was one of the high spots of Wharton's career, and it is a high point of American twentieth-century literature in general. (It is not, however, a Merle Johnson "high spot", although Ethan Frome is). The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (then called the Columbia Prize) in 1921. 

My copy is, indeed, a second printing, with a second state dust jacket, and both the book and jacket have severe water damage. In my defense, I should perhaps note that a first state of the book and jacket, in collectible condition, would probably be worth at least ten thousand dollars, and most of the first editions in jackets currently available on the market appear to have jackets salvaged from (and thus transferred from) later printings. My copy, probably because of the water damage, confirms that even second printing copies of the book were subsequent to the Columbia Prize award, and that second printing copies featured the second state dust jacket. In that sense, this copy's damage has perhaps helped it preserve this bit of bibliographically important detail.

Even with its flaws, I think it's still a nice book to own.

Shelfie Wednesday: Shaped Like a Book

Well, we managed to make it through the holidays around here, and now that there's January snow on the ground, it seems like it's time to get back to the regular routines. So I'll try to start the year off right with a post showing off another couple new acquisitions.

1906 box of Yellowstone
Stereopticon Cards

First off is a nice little set of 30 stereopticon slides that I recently found dating from 1906 and showing scenes from a trip to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Such cards, of course, were designed to be used in a hand-held viewer, with lenses to let the two images combine as one in one's visual cortex, in order to generate a three-dimensional view. When I was a kid, my dad pointed out that you could get the same effect, with care, by crossing your eyes, and I am pleased to report that I can still do it: though it's a good bit harder to do with reading glasses on!

I should probably try to scan one, and let you try it out for yourselves, but like most old stereo cards, these are curved, and I am not sure I could get a precise enough scan or picture up on the web.

But of course, part of the appeal of the set for me was that the case for this little collection was designed to look like a book, even to the publisher's name at the base of the spine and the mock bands of the binding visible on the spine (the descriptive label, unfortunately, has perished).

Manuscript page peeling from the "cover"
of a tin box: a document box? It reads
HISTORIA along the spine. About 16" tall.

Amazingly, this set was one of two book-shaped objects I came across recently. The other is a very large (about 16" tall), tin hinged case in the shape of a book, with a piece of a medieval Italian manuscript glued on to complete the effect. There is no date on this item, but I suspect it was probably made in the first half of the twentieth century.

I am always interested in the recycling of books and manuscripts for non-textual purposes, even (as here) for their purely decorative effect. And so I was also interested, recently, to run across the following passage on the topic of recycled manuscripts, from the Rev. W C Boulter, in his short essay "Court-Rolls of Some East Riding Manors 1563-1573," published in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, volume 10.

As Boulter writes, "I have been told that the late Mr Gillyat Sumner . . . used to obtain many [such manuscript documents] from dealers in glue and size; others he secured from various local solicitors. . . . What becomes of old deeds? Some are converted into size, and are seen at least no more. some are cut up by bookbinders. But a vast number of them are again heard of, although they are not recognized on their re-appearance."

"Unfortunately," says Boulter, continuing in a new paragraph, "we have no returns from the toy-makers, showing the date when toy-drums were invented, and the number of them made from that time to this. Think of all the toy-shops, big and little, in England alone: add to them all the stalls at markets and fairs. Bewildered antiquary! perplexed about a missing link in the descent of a manor, or an omitted generation in the pedigree of a 'Visitation' family: perhaps the evidence you desiderate has gone at some time to form the resounding rounds of that mimic military music."

I've been fortunate to run across a whole spectrum of recycled manuscripts in my day, but I have yet to find one used as the head of a toy drum. But I'll be looking, now.