Comic Latin and other texts

A couple of extended out-takes from recent posts.

Further to Comic Grammars, check out The Comic Latin Grammar: A New and Facetious Introduction to the Latin Tongue (1840, Internet Archive comiclatingramm00leiggoog), by the same duo of Punch contributors, Percival Leigh and the illustrator John Leech, as The Comic English Grammar.  It too is a parody, in this case of The Eton Latin Grammar, first published in 1758 as An Introduction to the Latin Tongue, for the Use of Youth. (Most of the grammar is over my head - I know a deal of Latin at recognition level, via the sciences and general reading, but didn't study it as a language at school. However, it's still worth a look even if you don't know Latin well).

And also, check out Paradigm ("Journal of the Textbook Colloquium - Where any, and every, aspect of textbooks is, or are, investigated"). This was a fairly short-lived journal - it only ran to some 40 issues - but its archive is a rich lode of interesting articles and papers that look at how social history has manifested through textbooks:

Textbooks, Schools and Society

For the social historian the school textbook is a junction where many lines of interest meet. Its author, often a quirky teacher of merely local repute, nevertheless expresses a wider range of prejudices and assumptions than just his own. He or she represents a popular, unsophisticated, but sometimes innovative view of knowledge and conduct, the dissemination of which is controlled by the commercial considerations of the printer-publisher, who in turn is responding to wider social and economic forces. The influences which form the textbook are more easily seen than those which the textbook sets in motion, but "it is in school texts that we find the best evidence not only for the importance and spread of ideas at a particular time but also for the accomodation of particular ideas to the core of intelligibility" (Murray Cohen, Sensible Words, 1977, p. 144). This evidence, however, has until recently been little studied. We still need to discover how much has survived and where it is located.

Ian Michael

A few examples of the content:

• Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace: Comparative treatments in Soviet and post-Soviet textbooks.
• History, memory and the representation of Britain's experience of strategic bombing in survey textbooks
• 'Tom's Grammar'? The genesis of Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar revisited
• William Barnes's manuals of instruction
• Sexy ghosts and gay grammarians: Kennedy's Latin primer in Britten's Turn of the Screw (exploring the theory that a gender rhyme from a Latin primer is full of double entendre)
• Quaker science texts
• The textbook furore in the 1920s: The Irish-American angle
• Bias in school history textbooks: Representations of the British invasion of Zululand
• The "grammarians' battleground": Controversies surrounding the publication of John Holmes' Greek Grammar
• "Cloud Cuckoo Land? "Fact and fantasy in geographical readers,1870-1944
• Multiplication is vexation (maths teaching technique as revealed through Walkinghame's Tutor's Assistant)
• Barnes Wallis and mathematics with love (revealing a correspondence between Barnes Wallis and his cousin, later wife, Molly)

Fascinating stuff!

- Ray

Dispatches from Adanaland

I love retro craftsmanship, and just received an excellent package of it from the artist Alan Brignull of the Hedgehog Press, Colchester. Alan uses an Adana Letterpress machine to produce, among other artworks, an exquisitely-printed postcard-format series (I'm not quite sure what exactly you'd call it - keepsake, ephemera, miniature magazine?) called The Rambling Urchin. The image (right) shows four in the series: click the image to enlarge.

We got in discussion following a bit of Language Log whimsy, Eyjafjallajökull FTW, where posters were swapping ideas about what kind of sea-shanty might be inspired by the eruption of that Icelandic volcano. Alan asked if he could devote the current issue to my effort. Along the lines of English sailors' ship nicknames, such as the Bellerophon becoming the Billy Ruffian, I thought the oral tradition would blunt the name Eyjafjallajökull to Fat Yokel. The result - Rambling Urchin 44 - is very nice, and gives more posterity than deserved to a completely throwaway bit of verse: thanks, Alan.

"Adanaland" has no online presence, but via others equally impressed, a certain amount of Alan's other work is documented online: for instance, "Artistamps" - a genre I'd never heard of - including World Cup Winners, and some examples of Women of Adanaland in this post, Wayzgoose, at the blog Middle of Nowhere. Alan's Flickr Photostream is also worth a look for its pleasant selection of photographs, ephemera, fonts, type, and so on.

(The process of Googling for this topic in itself led in directions of typographical, printing and art blogs where I could browse for hours. See, for example, Typoretum and Woodtyper).

- RG

Anastatic blogging?

In the previous post, I briefly touched on anastatic printing (aka zincography), a form of facsimile printing invented in the 1840s. It involved moistening the printed original with nitric acid - which penetrated the paper but not the oil-based ink - and using it to etch a zinc printing plate. The plus side was that it produced an exact copy; the downside was that it destroyed the original (or at the least damaged it). This was fine if the original was created purely for the purpose of making the plate; not so good if it was a rare volume, especially as the process sometimes destroyed the original without producing a copy.

In the light of the controversy over the Google Books Agreement, it's interesting to look back and see analogous arguments about anastatic printing (arguments that have probably attended any new medium since cuneiform). The chief issue was that anastatic printing offered rapid and inexpensive print production compared to typesetting and hand-engraving of printing plates. In England, Michael Faraday showcased the technique in a lecture at the Royal Institution, showing that it took just twenty minutes to get from original to printing plate: Littell's Living Age enthused. Chambers' Journal, however, worried about the copyright implications in its commentary "New Graphic Wonders":

In contemplating the effect of these astonishing inventions, it is impossible to foresee their results upon the ordinary transactions of life. If any deed, negotiable security, or other legal instrument, can be so imitated that the writer of, and subscriber to it, cannot distinguish his own handwriting from that wliich is forged, new legislative enactments must be made, and new modes of representing money, and securing property by documentary record, must be resorted to. A paper currency and copyhold securities will be utterly useless, because they will no longer fulfil the objects, for which they, and instruments of a like nature, are employed. Again, the law of copyright as respects literary property will have to be thoroughly revised. Let us, for an instant, view the case in reference to ' The Times' newspaper. Suppose an early copy of that powerful journal to be some morning procured, and anastatyped in a quarter of an hour. The pirated pages may hereafter be subjected to printing machinery, and worked off at the rate of 4000 copies in each succeeding hour, and sold to the public, to the ruinous injury of the proprietors. The government newspaper stamp would be no protection, for of course that could be imitated as unerringly as the rest. This, too, is an extreme case against the imitators; for a newspaper would have to be done in a great hurry. Books, maps, prints, and music, could be pirated wholesale, and at leisure.

This proved a short-lived scare; anastatic printing simply didn't catch on. It did, however, have a brief flowering both as a copy process and for low-budget printing. See, for example, The Anastatic Facsimile of the Declaration of Independence ("A Case Study in Records Management in Early American Times") which tells the story of the anastatic copying - unthinkable nowadays - of an early copy of the Declaration. In Praise of Ephemera Fairs mentions the role of the process in creating ephemera. There were also the Anastatic Drawing Societies, which used the medium as a convenient way for amateur archaeology and antiquarian groups to publish and disseminate field notes and drawings (a kind of graphical Notes & Queries). The collections are of considerable historical value, and many of the journals are online, such as that of the Ilam Anastatic Drawing Society (see the Internet Archive) and the Anastatic Drawing Society (whose brief was

to delineate remains of Antiquity; e.g. ancient Ecclesiastical, Military, and Domestic Edifices, Sepulchral Monuments, Fonts, Brasses, Stained Glass, Tiles, Armour, Dress, Jewellery, Plate, Embroidery, Furniture, Carvings, Illuminations of ancient MSS., Copies of rare Prints, Portraits, Seals, Coins, Heraldry, &c. &c., illustrative of the early and middle ages.

A notable proponent of anastatic printing was Edgar Allan Poe, who also enthused about the process in Anastatic Printing, Broadway Journal, April 12, 1845, 1:229-231. A number of commentators have noted the passage ...

... authors will perceive the immense advantage of giving their own manuscripts directly to the public without the expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous intervention of the publisher. All that a man of letters need do, will be to pay some attention to legibility of MS., arrange his pages to suit himself, and stereotype them instantaneously, as arranged. He may intersperse them with his own drawings, or with anything to please his own fancy, in the certainty of being fairly brought before his readers, with all the freshness of his original conception about him.

... as prescient of blogging, although it's more prescient of self-publishing and samizdat, via technologies such as the mimeograph, hectograph and spirit duplicator. As John Ptak says at Ptak Science Books - Poe and the Internet, 1845 - "Poe’s technology was wrong, but his thought-prognosis was pretty spot-on".
- Ray

A book story

"Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?"

- Stanislav Lem: His Master's Voice

I borrowed this as one of the favourite quotations of Felix Grant at The Growlery, as it's especially pertinent to an interesting success story that's all over the papers in various forms at the moment: from the Mail on Sunday Author, 93, uses profits from first novel to buy massive house to spare friends misery of care home, or the Telegraph, First time author, 93, saves friends from care homes with book advance. This is the story of Lorna Page, who "has bought a five bedroom house for £310,000 after securing a significant advance for her thriller", A Dangerous Weakness, and plans to use the home to assist friends in getting out of care homes.

This is such a near-perfect news story - human interest, triumph against the odds, altruism in action, right-on social message - that it seems almost crafted to slip under the reality-check radar. It has a payload (a feelgood story) and shielding against critical analysis (only a nasty person would question the facts of a story of an old lady helping others out of unpleasant care homes).

However, I feel less nasty on seeing I'm not the only person to spot that the book is published by AuthorHouse: a print-on-demand self-publishing or author services publisher. Such publishers don't give advances. I suspected this would be the situation the moment I first saw the story in the Aug 9 Western Morning News: local press stories about unlikely first novelists almost invariably boil down to self-publishing in some form. So, to be blunt, it's vanity-published - which would make an advance, especially one significant enough to finance a new house, and becoming (as the Guardian story says) "suddenly prosperous on the advance and sales" extremely unusual. Elaboration of this point would be of interest; it doesn't appear in the June 26th PR Newswire press release. Somewhere, in the process of the press taking up this story, an exaggeration has crept in, and hardly a trivial one: portraying a self-published book of so far unknown prospects as a successful money-spinner.

The story seems to have spread worldwide; however, analysis of the logistics also has. See discussions of Tales of the Big Advance at Making Light. However, the exaggerated version trundles on, with papers recycling the same factoids, as in the Guardian's Michelle Hanson's If only Mavis had a Lorna Page with a big house to save her from the crushing doom of these homes (Tuesday, Aug 12 2008):

Three cheers for Lorna Page, aged 93, who has just written her first novel, a thriller, and with the proceeds has bought a large house

...This week Michele read Blackmoor, by Edward Hogan ... She watched World at War, UKTV History, day after day in dark glasses, with her new cataract-free eye

Ms Hanson presumably hadn't bothered to read the Web, where aspects of this press coverage have been repeatedly questioned. Same goes also for Ros Coward, whose Guardian Comment is free piece, Lorna Page: the write stuff, also also assumes the truth of this success story.

Wednesday Aug 13: gold star to Christina Patterson of The Independent - Where poetry still has power - for going against the general adulation, and doing the proper journalistic thing of actually fact-checking: "Heart-warming stuff. Except that the book is published by AuthorHouse, a company in which the traditional flow of money for publication, from publisher to author, is reversed".

Skimming blog commentary, a frequent comment in defence of the mistake is that no harm has been done and someone may benefit. However, Issendai's Superhero Training Journal points out the downside: "Meanwhile, the story is suctioning common sense out of novice writers' heads as we speak".

Addendum: another gold star to BBC Radio 4's iPM for The 93 year-old and the big advance.... by Chris Vallance, who contacted Lorna Page's publicist and daughter-in-law, Cate Allen, who confirms that the bloggers were right about there being no advance.

Cate tells me that instead of receiving an advance, they paid a small sum to have the novel published, as is usually the case with self-publishing. They chose AuthorHouse because Cate is herself published there. They are hopeful that the book will make money, and that this will enable Lorna to help her elderly friends, but it is early days ... Cate also told me that some media reports "just made up facts" ... As for what she has been doing to correct errors in coverage, Cate says she now makes it clear to journalists how the story has been misreported, and she's encouraged Lorna to go online herself to set the record straight.

iPM is, unfortunately, just a slightly more official grade of blog, it's hard to say if this will filter through to mainstream news.

August 15: the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column likewise reports:

In common with most other papers we reported that 93-year-old Lorna Page, "suddenly prosperous on the advance and sales" of her novel A Dangerous Weakness (93-year-old novelist gives home to friends from care homes, page 5, August 11), had been able to buy a big detached house for herself and three of her friends. Aspiring writers (and housebuyers) should note that her publisher, AuthorHouse, is a self-publishing company whose website states: "For a modest financial investment you can choose what you want for your book."

This correction, of course, will have no effect on writers who haven't seen it, such as the compiler of the Observer's Quotes of the week, August 17 2008, or the Calcutta Telegraph's Till dreams do us part.

Granted, the whole saga is a storm in a teacup with no major consequences whether the distortion of the story takes root or not. However, I'm interested in it as an example of how mistakes can propagate via the press and blogosphere. The next time, it could just as easily concern something important.

- Ray

Reader's block

I perhaps shouldn't admit it, working in a bookshop, but I find I like very few novels, especially contemporary literary ones. So I was pleased to see I'm not alone: Lost for words (Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, Friday July 25 2008) writes about what he calls "reader's block", a very common British disaffection with novels. The piece comes with recommendations on how to overcome the syndrome, such as The authors' view (various writers' advice) and quotations from Professor John Sutherland's How To Read a Novel: A User's Guide (Profile, 2007, 186197986X - introduced here and here). Sutherland's view is that you should browse, aggresively: dip into a book at page 69, and don't bother with the book if that random segment doesn't appeal.

The overall advice, including that at the associated Guardian Book Blog post, comes down to experimenting with genres: if novels don't do it for you, try poetry, plays, graphic novels, non-fiction, and so on. I wouldn't disagree: the best things I've read lately aren't mainstream adult novels, but Louis Sachar's Holes (nominally for young readership), Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (a graphic novel), and AK Dewdney's The Planiverse (SF that has more in common with Dewdney's Mathematical Recreations column than a conventional novel).

I couldn't identify personally what turns me off about contemporary literary novels. It's tempting to blame the publishing industry: various factors such as quality of work being only one factor behind publication, and one perhaps subordinate to authors being able to produce follow-up books to recover the publisher's investment, and having a marketable personality, youth especially helping (see Shock news: older writers can also be quite good). There's also the problem of authors tending to come from similar middle-class backgrounds that generate samey books. As Muriel Gray and and Kathryn Hughes say of Orange Prize entrants, many supposedly worthy novels are lightly embroidered autobiographies of their authors' uninteresting lives ("rural teacher syndrome" and "suburban social worker syndrome" - see Now this is the real catfight between the Orange judges, Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian, Thursday March 29 2007). In the past, there are equivalents: as Colin Wilson notes in his introduction to The Strength to Dream (see Google Books) in the early 20th century many "Little Percy" novels - as satirised by Aldous Huxley in Crome Yellow - similarly reflected a characteristic mindset of a generation of male arts-educated novelists ...

Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future."

... and Wilson takes it further back to the 19th century and its spate of clones of Young Werther and Turgenev-style heroes. Sutherland cites Sturgeon's Law - "90 per cent of everything is crap" - and probably this has always been the case for published novels, so there's no reason for guilt about finding it hard to pick ones you like.

- Ray

Children's books and other controversy

The Independent just reported Rowling joins revolt over age banding for children's books" a big-name author seriously raising the profile of an ongoing protest at a publishers' scheme to categorise children's books by age. The No to Age Banding site hosted by Philip Pullman lists signatories and explains the problems: for instance, how such categorisation would affect marketing and packaging, perhaps deterring a child from reading books of merit. The issue, in any case, is a broader one of label, as discussed by Felix Grant at The Growlery (Juvenilia, feminism, love, and other labels); there is great merit in the view that "children's fiction" is itself a stultifying categorisation. Many nominally juvenile books, such as Louis Sachar's Holes, are good reading by any standard - see the previous post Holes and other non-juvenilia.

Via MetaFilter, The New Yorker recently had an interesting article on a controversy in the same territory. The Lion and the Mouse by Jill Lepore tells of the career of Anne Carroll Moore, a pioneering New York librarian who came to exert massive influence over US children's books, then largely published in New York. In some ways it was a positive influence: in the early 1920s she introduced multicultural books, along with open shelves and many of the now-standard formats that make libraries friendly to children, and instituted the reviewing of children's books in mainstream publications. The downside was that she imposed her own taste: as Jill Lepore puts it, "Anne Carroll Moore did not like fangs. She loved what was precious, innocent, and sentimental". This eventually put her in head-on collision with the author EB White (who viewed her preferences as "mawkish, prudish, and daffy") leading to a showdown when she tried, unsuccessfully, to block his book Stuart Little. (Her stance seems daft in hindsight, but it needs to be remembered that the original book was not the same as the film - bizarrely, Mrs Little actually gives birth to Stuart the mouse).

The Lion and the Mouse touches on the age-banding issue, pointing out how many books now viewed as children's classics "Grimms’ Fairy Tales or Gulliver’s Travels or Huck Finn —were born as biting political satire, for adults" and argues that early 20th century writers and editors invented "children's literature" as a genre. I'm not sure how true that is overall; The Victorian Web's Children's Literature as a Victorian genre has plenty of links relating to the essentially didactic/moralistic genre fiction that targeted children in that period. The point of the non-childish nature of some such fiction is well-made, though; for example, Kingsley's The Water Babies is almost invariably abridged in modern imprints and adaptations, because the original is an intensely wacky Christian allegorical fantasy full of literary, cultural and scientific allusions way above heads of children. (More on this later maybe).

As to White, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, he wrote two other children's classics, Charlotte's Web and The Trumpet of the Swan. He was also one half of the Strunk & White, whose The Elements of Style has probably been the single most influential style guide for American writers in the 20th century. Like other century-old prescriptive guides, such as the relatively enlightened Fowler's Modern English Usage, Strunk & White is coming under increasing criticism nowadays, I think rightly, for advice that doesn't reflect real usage and, in some areas, doesn't seem particularly good stylistic advice and even disobeys its own rules. Language Log has regular snipes at it, where academic linguists have variously described it as a "stupid little book", a "horrid little compendium of unmotivated prejudices" and "a self-help book for social climbers".

- Ray