 The Personality of BooksbyGillian PolackThe last book I reviewed has got me thinking about handwriting. I had to guide a group of students through an exhibition about handwritten work recently, too, so that also had me thinking about handwriting. And every Medievalist under the sun has to address the issue of ancient writing at some point, for moveable type was not introduced into the West until the fifteenth century. The first books printed by Gutenberg and Caxton in the fifteenth century looked a lot like the handwritten books of the same place and period. The hand that was current at the time they worked with presses was the one that was translated into type. The page was formatted to look like the manuscript page people would have bought. The whole thing was on paper instead of parchment and it was a lot cheaper, but it would have looked comfortingly familiar to a fifteenth century bibliophile. The British Library shows a paper Gutenberg Bible and a vellum so it’s possible to compare the differences between the two media, page by page. The stuff that the page is made of makes a difference to the way a story reads. Vellum and parchment have hairy sides (that look beautifully polished, but occasionally have indentations or remnants of hair—it all depends on the treatment) and a much finer inner side. Paper is far more even and the print sits in the same way on both sides. It’s possible to razor off a layer of text and easier to chalk over text on parchment. As printing became standard, so did paper and so how a reader saw the page changed, simply because of the texture of the substance the page was made from. Eventually a lot more would change, as binding choices developed, but I like to look at any two versions of the same text, side by side, and see how they differed and how that difference reflect technological history and cultural history and perceptions of how that particular tale should look: I love it that an ideal thirteenth century romance had two columns, so that the reader could open a page at random and say confidently, “I’m reading this romance” and maybe add, “Look at the picture—it’s an Arthurian romance.” I love it that in the early Gutenberg texts there were added colours, by hand. This shows that the story was being copied from something that had a life of its own, that the manuscript was not a neutral vehicle for writing. When I teach this, I bring out de Hamel’s Scribes and Illuminators. It has some lovely illustrations (taken from manuscripts) of how people created the works, starting from preparation of the skin and ending with a finished book. When I want to introduce students to the scripts used by writers, however, the work of Michelle P. Brown falls off my bookshelf and into my hand, as if it belongs there. Which it does. I use her work a lot. Right now, in fact, my most-used book by Brown is sitting on my armchair, for I just checked something in it for my time travel novel. What do I love about ancient Western handwriting? I love the names that have been given to the different scripts. Those names set my imagination spinning: Square Capitals, Anglo-Saxon Square Miniscule, English Protogothic Book Script, Black Letter, Bastard Anglicana, Bastard Secretary. I love the forms of the letters. Some hands have a rounded quality while others are full of minims. Minims are one of my favourite things. They’re simple strokes that make up ‘i’s and ‘n’s and ‘m’s and in some hands one has to look very carefully to decipher the precise word. In some hands, in fact, the word ‘minim’ itself looks a bit like this (imagine it in lowercase, if you would, but with no dots) ‘llllllllll.’ The forms of the letters shape the page and give it a flavour that reaches far beyond those of all but the most interesting and carefully devised typeset pages. William Morris copied that sense of place and hand in his Kelmscott Press, but only a very few modern presses go that far. I love the things those hands bring me. I love the papal documentary script for the opinions and reflections and legislation it carries. I love Gothic book hands for the tales they carry and the stories they help tell. I love Caroline miniscule more than almost any other script for everything it brings me, I can read: it’s one of those rare and perfect scripts that is legible even when written badly. The cursive I was taught is, alas, not one of those perfect scripts. Any book I handwrote would be almost indecipherable. Half-uncial would be almost as easy to love, but it was a very early script and punctuation and spaces between words did not then exist, so manuscripts written in half-uncial feel rushed and a bit crowded. It’s possible to date a Medieval manuscript by the handwriting and to discover if it was written in Ireland or the south of France. This is because the writing and the format of the page and even the erasures and the binding have strong voices. These days I’m more likely to read a modern book, on paper, typeset in Garamond or Minion, but that time when I handled thirteenth and fourteenth century manuscripts is never far my mind when I read the modern books. Their shape and their content owe a lot to our early codices. Books mentioned in this column:
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