LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Events of the Time. Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1872.

      This group of annotated volumes constitutes a remarkably well-documented—and self-documenting—archive that enables us to map a series of activities centered on the presence and the use of books. Viewed cumulatively, these artifacts allow us to reconstruct moments of reading, a physical setting, and the variety of uses to which the books were put. These traces reveal a dedicated reader for whom the reading of religious works represents precious moments of privacy and intimacy, as well as the reinforcement of social bonds that exist within a closely knit circle of family and friends. For this farmer-bibliophile, books are, quite simply, a necessity of life. Working inside books—reading, annotating, decorating, and pasting notes into them—becomes a means of pious self-fashioning and a dramatization of lived spirituality.

      The following passage, found on a handwritten note dated February 12, 1890, and pasted in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, is an extraordinary statement about the powerful iconic status that books held for Connary. Written with his eccentric turn of phrase, it reads as a poignant, profound, and highly personal equivalent of Thomas Jefferson’s statement that “I cannot live without books,” or Jorge Luis Borges’s bibliophilic assertion, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”⁸

      I have many Books and cannot think that I can ever be really happy anywhere without them: you will see that I speak of happiness now in this small paper, and when I speak of happiness in it, I speak of eternal everlasting heavenly happiness alone in it. For this one business purpose alone I love my Books, and for no other business purpose, from time I was born to this Wednesday February 12, 1890, I have loved my Books well only for the power which they give to me to have a heavenly home with our divine Creator continually for unending eternity. This way alone of Book keeping is God’s way to prosperity and heavenly happiness unending.⁹

      This statement, found inside a book especially valued by its owner, is written late in life, as he looks back on his years of laborious accumulation and annotation. In it he begins to convey a sense of a redemptive culture of reading, in which material, utilitarian, and spiritual values are seen to enhance one another. It is this understanding of a redemptive discipline of reading which the following chapters will attempt to analyze in depth.

Studying Used Books: The Plan of the Argument

      This study examines fine details of annotation practices and what I shall refer to as book enhancement. It does so to explore how a strikingly opinionated reader-cum-annotator from a somewhat neglected demographic in American cultural and bibliographic history materially manipulated his books to reflect and develop his religious beliefs and practices.

      One might characterize the study of marginalia and annotation as microhistory that tends to focus overwhelmingly on what we might call (with an unhelpful epithet) elite culture and on the public and professional annotator. We have studies, for instance, of Gabriel Harvey, the quintessential Renaissance humanist reader, who read, admired, and annotated his classical authors as models of rhetoric in order to prepare himself for debate in the realm of political action. Much has been written about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s inherently social annotations—clearly an archive of shared events of reading—that were circulated among friends and collaborators and eventually published. And we know of the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard as a skilled exegete through his marginalia: we can follow him combing through his copy of the New Testament for useful references as he prepares his ammunition against the Danish state church, deemed by him to be compromised by decorum, moderation, and complacency.¹⁰ Marginalia can be public, assured, and produced by celebrated figures. But with Thomas Connary we have an example of “the common reader” (to use another unhelpful epithet) from a group that we too rarely regard as active creators or agents, often because so little evidence has survived. I will argue that in his library we witness a powerful statement of personal conviction not to be sneered at for its provincialism or for the simplicity—or, more accurately, rigor—of its theology. We see an intelligence purposefully staging itself, as books are imagined as instruments of social interaction in both domestic and public spheres.

      This study has benefited from the recent burgeoning of interest in bibliography, the material culture of the text, paratext, book history, and the social history of literacy. These flourishing areas of study have clearly come into maturity.¹¹ Two studies in particular have given new attention to manuscript annotation and moved bibliographic and readership studies in an exciting direction: Heather Jackson’s Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books and William Sherman’s Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Both are groundbreaking and absorbing books, and both have influenced my work with the Connary collection.¹²

      Jackson’s genre study of marginalia, based on more than two thousand annotated books from the past three centuries, provides a positive assessment of the phenomenon of writing in books. She argues that such intervention by readers may usefully be studied as documentation of varied social experiences of interest to historians, biographers, and critics. Countering a too-facile dismissal of the genre of marginalia as sporadic, individualistic, and often quixotic, Jackson shows it to be full of complex motivation and historical circumstance: it even emerges in her study as a genre with a distinct social history, indicative of different psychologies of reading, as indeed does the condemnation of marginalia (prohibitions against the marking of books abound from the mid-nineteenth century on, with the establishment of the public library system).¹³ In two case studies, Jackson demonstrates convincingly how marginalia by S. T. Coleridge and writing found in copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, when examined carefully and cumulatively, provide revealing insights into habits of reading and constitute valid evidence for the history of the book and reading.¹⁴

      Where Jackson largely focuses on the British reading culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sherman’s Used Books provides a welcome exploration of readers’ marks and writing from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth. With a preference for the more capacious term “book use” over “book reading,” Sherman offers rich evidence of an early modern culture of the book in which the recording of useful and meaningful notes in the blank spaces of a book was normative. This was a culture, he notes, in which the word “mark” (as in “mark my words”) meant “making books [one’s] own by making marks in and around them” long before it came to mean “noticing” or “observing.”¹⁵ As with Jackson’s Marginalia, Used Books presents two detailed case studies of specific readers’ creative book modification and annotation: the commonplace book of the prominent Elizabethan lawyer Sir Julius Caesar, used by him over six decades, and a 1571 copy of Ferdinand Columbus’s biography of his father, thoroughly annotated by the well-known Elizabethan scholar John Dee. These case studies examine hybrid forms of reading and writing that reveal both an “unexpected intimacy and vitality” of annotating habits as well as the centrality of such habits to scholarship and power politics in Tudor England.¹⁶

      Combining valuable case studies with pertinent methodological considerations, Jackson and Sherman thus reorient our understanding of the book culture of past centuries toward a dialogic relationship between books and readers, where books accommodate responses to text, and where readers regard their annotations less as private records than as conventional and public—and in some cases even collaborative. Both studies, it should be noted, prioritize certain modes of interaction with the printed book. First, they scrutinize remarkable volumes annotated by remarkable individuals, most often with a publicly performative dimension. For Jackson, who favors what she calls a “period of sociability,” Coleridge becomes the paradigm for the sociable or professional annotator in whose circle personally annotated volumes were exchanged, often to make a display of learning or critical skills, with annotations operating according to “well, if unconsciously, agreed conventions.” For Sherman, too, examining reading and writing practices of (mostly prominent or professional) book users in Renaissance England reveals shared codes of communication: whether designed to organize knowledge, to structure worship, or to cultivate a public persona in the realm of Elizabethan connections and politics, we see the traces of a consistent habit of annotating as part of a collective elite culture of

Скачать книгу