Owen Coggins blogs about the workshop ‘Text as Object 2: Printed Books and Pamphlets’ held at Canterbury Cathedral Library in January 2014

I’m studying religious discourses and mystical practices surrounding an extreme form of heavy metal music, in the Music and Religious Studies department at the Open University. So, heading to Canterbury Cathedral Library for the Material Witness event ‘Text as Object 2: Printed Books and Pamphlets,’ I was confident I’d be learning something new about medieval papers and marginalia, but wasn’t too sure how closely it would relate to my own project. Happily though, as is often the case with such interdisciplinary inquiries, it turned out there were some unexpected and thought-provoking points of contact between the heavy manuscripts and the heavy metal.

Arriving at the cathedral library through some invitingly confusing passageways, I found the group sat discussing all kinds of research interests under stained glass and carved stone. We were led into the Cathedral Library for the morning’s first session, with librarian Karen Brayshaw, and Tony Edwards, Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent. I took my seat near some imposing tomes about early modern fish husbandry, and we learned about the different kinds of physical construction of paper, from papyrus and other plant matter to boiled and pressed old rags. The relation between the mechanics of folding and the arrangement of print in fours, eights and sixteens was unravelled and gathered together, and previously opaque and esoteric numbering systems and personal inscriptions were decoded. Elaborate title pages, larger and larger decorative capital letters, and ornately inked plants that crept around margins and between columns reminded me of how album covers, picture discs and other ostensibly nonessential visual accompaniments to sound recordings, are anything but immaterial in affecting the ways texts are valued, assessed and interpreted.

Several leaves and pages, and large and tiny books were passed around so that we could see and touch (without gloves, of course) the details which betrayed clues about the construction and history of the objects: the rough needle marks where some pages had been sewn together; the repeated words at the end and beginning of a page which helped both reader and transcriber keep their places; the holes in vellum likely caused by insect bites to the animal which gave its skin for that particular literary endeavour, forcing the sentences to navigate around the scars. After hearing about some of the different strategies of preservation (as opposed to restoration) for old books and manuscripts, we discussed some interesting implications of treating book collections as material objects (not just each item individually), an approach that I could appreciate after interviewing music listeners in front of their record collections.

Then, with Paddy Bullard, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Kent, we continued on to the history of printing. In its early stages, details were often added by hand to make printed sheets look like manuscripts. I thought of the widespread but actually quite strange practice of adding the crackle of vinyl records to digitally-produced music, an imperfection of media which, when vinyl was the primary medium for music, people tried to get rid of as far as possible. Similarly, tales of copied printing of dubious legality, and illegitimate versions of Voltaire put me in mind of the same discussions and negotiations that now surround pirated music files and bootlegged live albums.

It was great to learn, and even better to see, examples of blackletter type used in medieval and early modern texts for reproducing lines from the Bible or other ancient sources. Using blackletter gave an authoritative sense of antiquity to the quotation, while surrounding commentary was in more contemporary lettering. A similar appeal to the power of archaic tradition is made by the thousands of heavy metal bands who use blackletter and Fraktur-style fonts, while another step in the semiotic chain is the use of similar lettering styles by pop musicians who wish to appropriate heavy metal’s perceived commitment and cultural authenticity.

Yet another link with the visual aesthetic of heavy metal was the icon, symbol or sigil of the printer that would often be found in prefatory matter or at the end of a book: a composite image made of the letters of a printers’ name, stamped on or otherwise included to mark the identity of who made (rather than wrote or transcribed) the book. In addition to echoing certain threads in religious art/writing such as Islamic calligraphy, where writing is made beautiful while image-making is discouraged, or in strands of esotericism where cryptic messages are hidden in plain sight, this also reminded me of the ever-more-extreme and abstract forms of the heavy metal band logo, as a form of inscribing identity intertwined with secrecy, which starts out as writing but becomes more image than word.

Finally, before a last look around the tombs and arches of the cathedral, we were given a particular item from the collection to investigate. Ours was a book of religious poetry, and we started by tracing where the book was made and had travelled, from the frontispiece marking its production at a London printer, to an insert which located it in a Chatham, Kent collection, a handwritten inscription which suggested the book was a gift, and finally to the Canterbury Cathedral library where we were sitting. Then we attempted to work out the method of printing and construction through counting the pages in groupings, but were quickly distracted by the curious lay-out of some of the poems. The first was about angels, and had been arranged sideways on the page in the shape of wings. Another was in the shape of an altar, again connecting with the subject of the poem. This, we thought, might have indicated a close relationship between the author and printer who might have worked together, or perhaps a creative printer who had taken it upon themselves to experiment with the typesetting. Other groups unlocked more secrets, mysteries and histories of uses in the books they had got their hands on.

I was particularly interested in exploring materiality and texts, having made use in my research of Michel de Certeau’s writing on mysticism in medieval texts and art. Certeau points to various instances where “mystical” writers drew attention to the materiality of the texts and symbols they use, precisely in order to show the limits of communication, and thus to imply (but not directly communicate) an impossible, ineffable sacred beyond the bounds of text and symbol. For me this resonates with a kind of extreme music that for listeners is all about feeling incredibly loud and extended physical vibrations rather than following musical structures: music to be experienced rather than understood. Certeau also cautions that attention need be paid to the historical specificity and construction of each text, and the Material Witness focus on text as object was a hands-on example of what can be learnt from such attention. Returning again to Certeau, an error in the cutting of a folded page is another reminder of the physical histories and material meanings that always structure our engagements of texts.

Owen Coggins
Open University