Rare Books and Manuscripts Library

The recently published catalog, Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection has received very positive reviews in three key publications: Umbrella, June 2008, says the book is “beautifully printed and designed, [and] belongs to every art as well as literature collection…anywhere”. The book review journal Rain Taxi, Winter 2008-2009, calls it a “stunning catalog” and discusses several aspects of it at some length; and the Small Press Review/Small Magazine Review, Nov-Dec 2008, calls it “a key vispo publication”, discusses it at length and the reviewer concludes that he would “be shocked if any other poetry publication of 2008 is half as important for poetry”.

Edited by John M. Bennett, the catalog is available for $30 at the RBMS Library, or can be seen as a PDF on the RBMS webpage, http://library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/, click on “Visual Poetry in the Avant Writing Collection” in the column on the right.

Blue Lion Books has just published a book by John M. Bennett, SPITTING DDREAMS. SPITTING DDREAMS consists of 2 books written in the late 1970’s through early 1980’s, “Spitting” and “Ddreams”, never before published. “Spitting” includes poems from Bennett’s “Spitter” period, and employs various lunatic repetitive and anaphoric techniques. “Ddreams” is very different: a series of minimalist visions, ranging from the bizarre to the mundane, arranged in an over-arching symmetrical pattern. The book includes 2 groups of visual poems from the period.

Available as a printed book on-demand or as a free download from http://www.lulu.com/content/4718619

Throughout November I had the privilege of working with our modest, but very impressive, collection of medieval manuscripts as I prepared for a series of lectures on medieval books and manuscript production and began surveying our holdings in relation to a variety of other possible projects (research, conservation, acquisitions strategizing, digitizing, etc.). As I worked with these magnificent materials, I began to think it might be nice to share them with our online readers. So, in an effort to familiarize you all with our medieval manuscripts, I decided to start an irregular and informal series of blog entries highlighting aspects of our holdings. This series won’t necessarily follow any set structure—instead I’ll just offer up bits and pieces at random and see where that gets us. In the meantime, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to see or hear about something in particular.

Writing supports—a technical term for any substance or object used as a surface for writing—have taken many shapes throughout history. The most familiar writing surface today is, of course, paper; but past scribblers have used papyrus, pottery shards, clay, slate, tree bark, wood, leaves, metal tablets, stone, wax, cloth, and many other materials to record information. Although medieval people used all of these substances, including paper (although it wasn’t widely used in the medieval west until the late-fourteenth/early-fifteenth century), the most popular writing support of the period was parchment, or animal skins (usually made from calf and goat skins). Parchment making was a long and tricky process, but essentially it consisted of soaking skins in a lime solution (to loosen the hair and any remaining flesh) followed by a lengthy period during which the skin was mounted on a frame (called a “herse”), methodically stretched (a process called “drying under tension”) and repeatedly scraped in order to smooth the skin, remove remaining hair, fat, and other tissues, and force the skin’s cells to realign themselves into a smooth, sheet-like structure that can be written on easily and absorb ink. Once dry, the skin would be cut from the drying frame and trimmed, providing a piece of parchment ready for the scribe’s pen.

Due to the difficulty and expense involved in making parchment, medieval scribes often had to deal with imperfections in the skin. Some of these flaws might be accidental punctures or tears made during the scraping and drying processes, while other blemishes could be vestiges of the skin’s pre-parchment life. OSU’s manuscripts collection is valuable, in part, because of the variety of defects it includes, all of which help teach us about the related processes of parchment making, writing, and book production. I’d now like to describe some of the more common imperfections inherent in manuscripts written on parchment, illustrating the descriptions with examples from OSU’s own collections.

If you look closely at most manuscripts (or not so closely if the parchment in question wasn’t prepared carefully), you can distinguish between the “hair side” (the external surface of the skin from which hair once grew) and “flesh side” (the internal surface of the skin) of single parchment leaves, or pages.

The flesh side is usually smoother and lighter than the hair side, while the hair side, in addition to being darker and rougher, is distinguishable by its visible follicles and former hair patterns (seen in the illustrations above). Such imperfections could be worn away or obscured with more rigorous—and expensive—preparation during the manufacturing process.

Parchment wasn’t always trimmed to conform to regular shapes. Often a scribe would use pages that on first glance might seem to include strange, rounded or curved cuts at their corners or in their margins.

Such “cuts,” however, weren’t the result of a parchment-maker’s shaky hand. Rather, they are neck or shoulder contours showing where the skin previously had been connected to leg or neck skin.

Another common imperfection, but one usually seen in “uterine vellum” (parchment made from unborn calves) or parchment produced from very young sheep and calves, is veining (visible in the top right corner of the photo below) . Such marks are the impressions or outlines of vein trails in skin in which there wasn’t much fatty, connective, or muscle tissue in the immediate subcutaneous layers of skin.

Scarring, or partially healed wounds, also left their mark on parchment. In some cases, medieval scribes would simply write over existing scars while in other instances the scar tissue might be too rough, thin, or even torn, to allow the scribe to write effectively on that portion of skin.

Holes in parchment that weren’t the product of scarring or wounds usually were the result of accidents during the manufacturing process. Such mishaps might include cutting the skin while scraping it, or overstretching the skin while it dried.

Regardless of whether tears or holes were the product of weak skin, scarring, or industrial accidents, however, parchment makers and scribes found ways to work around such imperfections. Tears could be sewn together or patched, and in the worst circumstances a scribe would simply write around the hole.

Understanding and seeing imperfections like these can help provide us with a more immediate and apparent understanding of what it was like to make books in the Middle Ages. In future installments of this irregular series on OSU’s manuscripts I hope to offer further insight into how we can learn about medieval book culture through the close, material analysis of medieval texts. Until next time…

Eric J. Johnson, Associate Curator