 And also, those of you who are joining us online by a team, thank you for being here. This is our roundtable discussion. William Morris, Counts at Press, and the book's beautiful. I'm Dr. Miriam Intritor. I'm the Rare Book Librarian at Ohio University Libraries. And today I will be moderating. I'm going to go over a few logistical details before I introduce each of our speakers, and then we'll get the conversation started. So once we begin, we're going to hear a short presentation from each faculty member. And then after each has spoken, we'll open up the floor to questions and discussion. So please hold any questions until the end. For those of you who are joining online, your cameras and your sound are muted. So any time you have a question, please enter it into the chat. Our wonderful events coordinator, Jen Harvey, will be moderating the chat. And she will read questions out loud so that everyone can hear them. If you have trouble hearing at any point, can be difficult with the math. If you're online, please let us know in the chat. If you're in the room, please, you know, wait on it. So with all that out of the way, I'd like to provide some introductory context as to how this roundtable came to be. William Morris, you may all know, was a famous 19th century English designer, social reformer, author, book collector, and bookmaker. He's so well known, or at least continues to be recognized for his still popular textile design, especially. Last summer, the William Morris Society of the United States put out a call for exhibit presentations and other content to be created to honor the June 26th, 2021, 130th anniversary of the founding of William Morris' Helmscott Proud. And 125 years since the publication of his magnum opus, the Helmscott edition of the works of Jeffrey Chaucer, considered by some to be the most beautiful book ever printed. Inspired by this call as an opportunity to showcase relevant items in our book collection, I created a digital exhibit, which some of you may have already seen. And then when we were back in person this fall, I created a physical exhibit as well. That is on the fifth floor of Alden Library, and I hope that some of you will go upstairs when we finish today to see it, or come back later in the semester to explore. To be more specific about my source of inspiration, the signature item in the script Latin Bible, which, as it happens, previously belonged to none other than William Morris. Even more important than it naturally is as an 800-year-old example of medieval European craftsmanship and religious tradition and practice. It also serves as a centipede for our celebration of William Morris' book and bookmaking that inspired and informed the beautiful works produced by him, which we also have in this way of staring. The faculty who are invited to speak today, will be presented with a brief introduction of the book, which is about the history of the world. So now we'll hear from all of you. And which they will offer us will be Miriam Shadis, Associate Professor of History and Medievalist. She is the author of, and excuse my pronunciation, Verdea of Castile, 1180-1246, a political women of the High Middle Ages. Her current research examines Portuguese queenship in the 12th and 13th century art. He is a cultural historian who specializes in early medieval manuscript elimination. Her tests include art and power, word and image, iconology and art and performance. Widely published internationally, Dr. Buchanan is just finishing a book entitled, Visual Polemics and Central Italian Manuscripts of the 11th Century Church Reform. Neil Bernstein is a professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies, where he's taught since 2004. He has been a distinguished scholar and resident at Western University in Ontario, a National Humanity Center fellow at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and a Fulbright lecturer at National Taiwan University in Taipei. Also author of multiple books, his most recent is, Pileas Italicus's Punica, Rums War with Animal. And his current project is a translation of Claudian's complete work for Rutledge. John McLaughlin is associate professor of English, specializing in Victorian literature. His research and teaching interests include serialized fiction, the history of the book, and written global entanglements. Among other publications, he is author of Writing the Urban Jungle, Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Elliott. And finally to round things off, Nicole Rannell is an associate professor of English and of women's gender and sexuality studies. Author of Building Romanticism, Literature and Architecture in the 19th Century, Britain. She teaches and researches in British literature and culture of the long 19th century, as well as in book history. So that's all of our speakers. Mary Chalice will start us off. I will invite the rest of you to sit so that you can see to the side. I will dim the light. I'll get it started. I'll take this. Yeah. Let's speak very briefly here about my experience of working with the Bible, the real Latinas, and my students. And I'm going to show you just a couple of things that I tend to show them when I bring them to the library to see the manuscripts. The courses that I have been able to bring to the library so far included kind of a general survey of medieval history. Sometimes I've been able to bring my medieval women's history class to the library. And my goal is always to have them just have some tactile experience of the medieval period, right? This is a really special opportunity for them and for me to kind of, you know, hold the medieval in your hands. I tell them you're going to hold this Bible and a lot of them won't touch it because they're afraid, because it's so valuable and precious, but they really have a great experience with it. So I'm going to sort of take four big points. One is to talk about the students for a moment. What I tell them, how to focus on with them is the construction of the book. We look at the parchment, the ink. They've been worrying about both gold ink, for example. We talk about just so in the application of the gold leaf in the Bible. We look at the content a little bit. You know, my Latin is not great and theirs is pretty much non-existent, but they know the Bible and so we look at how it's organized and put together in that way as a text. And then the extras. These are probably things that don't really fit into the William Morris aspect of our conversation, but that kind of make this particular volume stand out, things that are special about it, that I can show them. So the first thing, whoops, that's me. Okay, the first thing I'm going to show them, I'm going to talk about is the Prologue, which the first time I saw this was in this book and I was completely flabbergasted. I did not appreciate that many medieval Bibles included Jerome's Prologue, okay? You may or may not know that Saint Jerome in the 4th century put together and edited the Skollgate Bible, the Bible in Latin that we are used to working with today, at least the word medievalist. And so Jerome's Prologue, he writes an explanation of this task and he explains, you know, to the writes of the Pope of Demacus and says, in its long, in fact, I'm giving you a little quote here, you know, explains what he's about and how much pressure he's under to do this. He says, you urge me to revise the old Latin version and as it were, the same judgment on the copies of the Scriptures which are now scattered throughout the whole world by which he means, I think, you know, the Eastern Mediterranean. But the whole world, and it is about to stay different from one another, you would have me decide which of them agree with the Greek original. The labor is one of love, but at the same time we're perilous and presumptuous for injudging others I must be content to be just by all. And how can I dare to change language of the world in this quarry old age and carry it back to the early days of its infancy and at this point, my students are far from lost. They're like, you're crazy. Because this is so exciting to me that I think it's really interesting when we start out and I say, what do you know about the Bible and the tell me and what's the first book of the Bible and they all know Genesis in the beginning, I'm like, aha, this Bible has this element to it. And we can really think about how historically this thing was put together by a person and then multiple people over time, right? Created this particular edition of the Bible. So here's the program, I mean, you can see up here, it says, it's degraded as it would be prologous, right? That's the, just so we know. This is the first page of our Bible. The second piece that I talked to them about or that I like to talk about, and are the manicules, right? The manicules are those little pointy fingers that show you where a text is important. And this book, I don't, I'm trying to find out how many there are in it, but there are a lot. And there are some pages where there are as many as four or five, a very enthusiastic commenter has told us what key things are important here. I use the word key advisedly, almost certainly these were not working with this book and writing in it. I think that the discussion of the manicules is not, I don't think they're well studied, here's one here, here's one here, I'll show you a close up in a minute. There's one down here, one over here. These things possibly likely were added after the book was constructed, but they could be part of the actual construction of the book. I think that it's hard to tell because the ink, as far as I can tell, is the same, right? But well ink, which is the kind of ink that they're gonna use, would have been used repeatedly. So other people may know more about that than I did. The students love this, right? It's underlying in the book and it's a way to sort of appreciate what the reader appreciates. So here's just one example. This is from this page we just looked at. There's the close up of the manicule. I went to look at the text from the ball game and this happens to me, this is a random choice, but this commenter wanted us to know that we should not swear, this is bad, and we shouldn't be doing it. So extra emphasis on this passage, please, he asked me. Do not custom your mouth to coax, do not officially utter the name of the poem. The translation I have here is not precisely coordinated with the ball game, but I think it's not with somebody else's translation. Finally, Queen Esther, and I know that Charles is gonna talk about Esther in a minute. This is a really wonderful piece for me to show them and for the students, you know, they're flabbergasted by this book, it's amazing, it's beautiful, it's full of cool, it has so much weight, literally a history associated with it, and compared to many of the illuminated Bibles or other manuscripts. There are mostly little animals like this one here, this little dragon creature here, and very few humans and only one woman, and the woman is Queen Esther, and you can see it here, it's Esther, it's the book of Esther. What's interesting about this image out of the context of this book is that Esther is rarely imagined in medieval illumination, she doesn't show up as a typical choice, so that makes this book a little bit different. Also, Esther is carrying a sword, and I should take notes on the book of Esther, but Esther is a, she's a great Jewish heroine, she sings for people, but she's not sword wielding, that is Judah, and so I think there are some people that there could be some confusion here, whether the illuminator just kind of thought, powerful woman, gonna put a sword in her hand, she's a queen, she's a queen, she's got a sword, I'm interested in that idea because I study queens, I think that we underestimate the degree of their military and secular power. So here's an image that is confusing to us for a lot of reasons and also really, really interesting. And just for comparison, I'm gonna now leave the Bible and show you these images, because these are the kinds of images I think that we mostly expose our students to when we're looking at illuminated Bibles or manuscripts in general. These are both from a particular genre of Bible, which was the moralized Bible, it sort of told stories in full page limitations, and this is one I work with a lot, this is the Bible of San Lee, and I use it because it shows his mother's launch, she was one of my subjects of study, and it's super beautiful, and it has some elements of our Bible, as the bold leaf, for example, and then this one here of the resurrection has the sleeping soldiers down on the bottom and Christ emerging from the tomb. So these are other kinds of experiences that students might have that our Bible won't offer them, but my feeling is always very much that this particular manuscript is more maybe normal, more usual, less, it's deluxe, but it's not asked a lot into some other kinds of things, so it gives us a place to start thinking about how medieval people encountered the written word, how they constructed it, what they thought about it, and how they carried it around, because that's the other thing about our Bible, it is totally portable, so. I'm gonna stop there, and thank you very much, and thank you, Charles, for your thanks. So we're very curious to see how you're doing. Some of the comments that I'm gonna make to be back on yours, may be repetitious at the moment, so please bear with me. Just something that you mentioned about the fact that you bring your students in here, they're exposed to a Latin manuscript and how do you deal with that? Well, what I do is I cheat, I just bring my Bible along, and we're able to translate it right there, so this is the Vulgate, so that's the cheat sheet that we use. I use the Internet. There you go. That works. Vulgate.org has this. Yeah, so the title of this is Art, Gothic Bible, Cret, Context, and Decoration, and the things that I've chosen here have to do in part with the exhibition, in part with my personal interests. I know that William Morris was particularly interested in craftsmanship of medieval books, how they were constructed, the care that was given in their construction, and the fact that there are multiple individuals involved in their construction, so I'm gonna make some brief comments about that. And also, you're gonna see different fonts in my presentation. Most notably, the Gothic font here, which is, of course, what the manuscript is written in, and we're blowing up these images, but in general, we're looking at really small words and letters that are very difficult to read. Often one needs a magnifying glass to do that. So I'm blowing up the script, and when you're talking about a Gothic script, which by nature is difficult to read, it makes it really a challenge to read the text. So yeah, first I'll talk about the creation of the manuscript, which is a handwritten book. The parchment is prepared, in this case, eight rectangular units are prepared from animals, and then when they're folded over, it forms a gathering of 16 folios or pages. These are then handed to a scribe. The scribe has an exemplar in front of them, and they copy the exemplar of the book. Sometimes mistakes occur in the process of transcription. This book has lots of corrections that built throughout the book, indicating that the copyist made mistakes. So that's how the process begins. Next, one moves to what's referred to as the pricking and the scoring of the manuscript. So if you look here at the... Yeah, if you look here on the margins, you can see the pre-march you can't see, but there's a, you roll a wheel up the margins that have spokes on it to prick the lines, and then you score it with a ruler, and in this case, lead plummet, just lead point is make, create spokes, creates the lines, and then once that part is completed, the scrubs copy the text that I'm going to insert. This book we refer to as a pocket Bible because it's small in scale. Bibles like this were created for mass distribution at French cathedral universities in the 13th century. My belief is that this manuscript is a French manuscript, more than a French manuscript. And as I referred to earlier, there was this kind of assembly line production in the Gothic period in the 13th century for manuscripts like this. So the text is written initially, and then what happens is the book is passed on to the so-called Rupertator who inserted red and blue up, what are referred to as pen flourish initials, and this is what these things are on here, as well as little lubrications here. This is a chapter heading in the book of Ecclesiasticus. And one thing that's interesting about the production of the book is that on occasion where it has not been trimmed too much, you'll see little marginal notations like the letter five here as a guide to the Rupertator to include the number five, the chapter five of Ecclesiasticus right there. I'm an art historian by training some particularly interested in the style and the content of the images. And one thing that I think is characteristic of these pen flourish initials is what I call this tinsel-like linearity. And it parallels the delicate stonework known as bar tracery, but it bounds in contemporary neoscopic architecture like on the old 50s. Painted medieval manuscripts in general are referred to as illuminated from the French word illuminée or to light up. And the last part of the process of folio preparation was the insertion of these introductory painted initials that included gold leaf, the inspiration for the term illuminée. And after the text and illuminations were inserted, the gatherings were stacked, sewn together and finally banished. Morris would have been inspired by the organic vegetation that the banals in OU's Bible, which in its 13th century context connotes paradise. And back to the one representation of a figure in the manuscript whose name we know, which is Queen Esther, that Dr. Shad is referred to. Here I'm placing it within, again, the cultural context. Representations of Old Testament monarchs are often found in French Gothic manuscripts like the one that Dr. Shad has shown us, the moralized Bible. Esther with sword and trampling a dragon was considered a prefiguration of not only the Queen of France, but also the Virgin Mary or Notre Dame, whose cult inspired the many decorations for the decorations of so many French cathedrals. Text of the Bible, the word of God has an abundance of substitution, what I call substitution initials, that are formed by the dragons and hybrid monsters, which were intended for moral contemplation. So here on the left, let me see if I can zoom in here a little bit. Yeah, you'll see this is a hybrid monster with a human face, the hindquarters of an animal. And interestingly, at the groin of this monster, a dragon, you always can identify the dragon by these wings, bites the groin here, and then there's another dragon, I'll cut the image off, it bites the kind of belly of this figure here. And then on this side, is a cue substitution initial for the word code here. And what's represented here is another one of these hybrid monsters, a winged figure with a claw of, or the talent of a bird, one can often associate this with sirens from classical antiquity, which were moralized in the Middle Ages. And down here is another one of these dragons. And so in here, what I think of these, so-called marginal imagery, in the manuscript parallels contemporaneous marginal imagery that stemmed and got the cathedrals, like here's a gargoyle on the shark's epithelial, on the exterior shark's epithelial way above your head. So they operate in a similar fashion. And that's it. We do look at the illuminations and at the presentation information on the page. And there is certainly, if we went off that of being able to touch the thing, make sure to your nails first. This helps them see that Latin is not just something that occurs in their textbook, or on Marvel inscriptions that I happen to find around town, but is used in different formats by different people for different reasons. So before they look at this, thanks to Miriam and the collaborator of mine in Canada, Dr. Day, we put together a series of tutorials. There was this pandemic and we couldn't do a lot of this in the manuscript room. So they looked at who used Indica's collection and got sort of introduction before this moment of actually coming in contact with the book. So they were sensitized a little to the Gothic, which isn't the easiest to read. The outside is, this is a view that we write in our Gothic. If you have to suffer through Gothic, at least it's a Gothic, that's when the scribe has taken it easy on you. So we're gonna start, not quite at the beginning of the Bible. That's your own strategies, but with the first words of the actual text of Genesis in the beginning God created heaven and the earth. Okay, but the text that they're gonna learn in their textbook is gonna put an A in that word, title. And for a moment they'll be thrown off. They'll say, can I actually read with other words? Okay. Charles, how did you blow it up? I, how did you manage to blow it up? It's like a PowerPoint. So on the bottom there. Okay, so here it is. Oh yeah, okay, this is even better. Okay. So they don't trust their eyes at first. Did I really go from the word letter C to the letter E without A and for meaning? No, this is not an orthographical error that kind of Charles was talking about. There are plenty of those on this page. This is standard medieval spelling, but they're not used to it. And so that shock of, oh yeah, people, you know, over the course of 2000 plus years people spelled their Latin differently is one of those moments. Okay, next, I said this is a beautifully regular stroke, but it is, but that's necessarily A and at the kind of reader from where those were used to. So for example, enough stroke, enough stroke, enough stroke, enough stroke, enough stroke. And you gotta take my word for it, right? That you see a letter U and a letter M here. Because at first you just see a confusion of what are called minimals, the minimal stroke. If you don't know what you're looking for, if you don't know, be sensitive to the lack of a connector here and a connector there. Even to an experienced reader, it just looks like a bunch of little eyes, right? And so you can talk about minimum confusion, but not until you're actually noticed to page with manuscript will it actually come home to what that means. Next, not so much on the Morris Bible, but on some other elements of the Parkwell collection that are fun to look at. I want to talk about information presentation. I told them about the revolution and information consumption that I went through when I started being certainly attached to this thing. And so I asked them, well, what's weird about the way information is presented on this page? And trust me, there are pages that we look at that are far weirder than this, but it's weird enough for the minute to say, okay, here are my tags. There's a really large capital I all by someone large letter M. And I've got my first words. In the beginning, God created heaven. What's all this interfering with where my eye wants to go, right? That's not something we would normally do even on the wackiest website, right? Okay, furthermore, oh, I undo this now. Okay, furthermore, this heading does what initially looks like something a middle schooler might do. You, I got a middle schooler at home, so I know what it's like when you run out of room and you're like, hey, what are problems? And again, I have to reassure them. This is not a mistake, okay? This is not, oops, I go, right? This is, I use the margin for different purposes than you do, right? Like putting pointing hands, well, medicals in, for example. Okay, another thing that makes Gothic difficult is that this text has a wide variety of abbreviations. Such that, you know, you look at it, you look at it, you know, not on what it's like, you think it's a musical score, right? Are we putting notes in now? Okay, no, but it's forgivable when you see a forest of such super-linear markers, you say, I think it's the letters, right? Again, it's such, what I'm hoping to elicit by teaching with this page is the shock of this was something people, a number of people put a great deal effort into to produce something that's completely different from what I would associate with information presentation. So, is it a good, that the letter I, I think it is above the line, maybe not, but it is not because it happens pretty often that this little diamond point marks the E and the R of Taran of Earth, right? Because he's done it right again here, Taran of Taran. I can't decide whether this eye is a good, but I know this dot is not. Similarly, because of the forest of weird abbreviations that we've got here, it's sometimes useful to know where the sentence ends and our strategy has helped us out by lagging those in red, right? And I asked the students, do I sometimes catch you when we're face to face, taking out your highlighter and highlighting the beginnings of sentences? Is this something we do? No, I don't like my notes, but it seems that they do and they do it more promiscuously now that most of their books are electronic and it's not as ruinous to mark the beginnings and ends of sentences. So, as always, I'm asking, why is information presented in this way? What does it do about our understanding of how the difference when we move out of a classical Latin grammar book into a medieval book? So, these are the sort of things I would want them to get from this image. But yeah, it's okay to turn the corner, marking new sentences just as we do with our highlighters. It's beautiful and regular, but that doesn't mean you're spared from minimum confusion if minimum is your basic element. So, we're accustomed to see, again, middle schoolers are told finger stays between words, right? But, and we still use ligatures, for example, and most of your printed books will be of ligature between letters f and i, for example, and the word first, for example. But they're far more common in a manuscript like this. Again, the scribe doesn't want to have to raise his wrist more than he has to. Okay. From there, we go on to individual items. The Dr. Parkhol left to our library's collection leaves from a wide variety of Gothic and humanist manuscripts. Nothing is as difficult for them as the Morris Bible. We don't read anything more difficult than that. And then the sigh of relief when they reach and writing that looks like theirs by the humanists. And I'm deeply grateful to Mary and the Parkhols for making this possibility for students. Now again in person. Thank you very much. The century is now. I'd actually like to begin with an orienting quotation that is not about William Morris, but I think is absolutely about William Morris. And this was the first sentence of a lecture I once heard by the Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton, which was actually about Marx. And that sentence was simply this. Marx hated capitalism in the first instance because it was ugly. And I think if you keep that in mind, you're gonna really learn most of what you need to know about William Morris. So with Morris, whose dates are 1834 to 1896, his life almost perfectly overlaps the period of Victoria's reign between 1837 and 1902. Two things that really come together over the course of his life and remain a constant. And certainly feed into his enterprise of the Count Scott Press in the last decade of his life are the obsession of the Victorians with medievalism, but also Morris's commitments, especially in the last decades of his life to socialism. And those things very much overlap because of the influence of his guru, John Ruskin, who's somebody I'm gonna talk about in a couple of minutes. But very briefly, Morris came from a wealthy middle-class background. His father made a fortune in finance. He went to, as a young man, to Oxford University and fell in and became really lifelong friends with a couple of the major pre-Raphaelite figures, Edward Byrne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. And just to give you a little sense of that pre-Raphaelite that Morris aesthetic, here is a stainless window he designed in 1862 when he started his design firm. The Arthurian tales were very important for Morris throughout his career. Morris is perhaps best known to the Victorians as a poet. He wrote lots of long, epic-length poems on mythological subjects, Arthurian subjects. He did quote unquote translations of Icelandic sagas. And he was well enough known as a poet that late in his life in 1892, when Tennyson died, he was actually one of the people being considered to become the poet laureate. But at that point, he had a very well-known association with radical politics and that probably sunk his case. During the sixties and the seventies, Morris was very involved with the design firm, Morris Marshall-Falkner and company. They certainly did a lot with wallpaper and this look should be fairly familiar to you, but they also did much with embroidery, furniture, those kinds of things. I wanna go back to the, I mentioned Ruskin before and especially the sort of seminal influence of a brief essay by Ruskin called The Nature of the Gothic, which is extracted from a longer work of Ruskin. It's called The Stones of Venice. And there's a lot in this that it's important to Ruskin, but I really wanna isolate two things that become important for Morris. One is that the sort of overarching idea of that essay is to make a distinction between a set of aesthetic values that are associated with Northern Europe and the Gothic values of the Middle Ages in distinction to an aesthetic associated with Southern Europe and sort of classicist, classical kind of aesthetic, which fundamentally is important because Ruskin and then Morris will associate that with the values of slave-holding societies. And there's a real connection here to abolition work that's going on in the 19th century. But whether they were right or wrong about the Middle Ages, they saw the Middle Ages as a time in which workers had a relative degree of autonomy and freedom as opposed to those people who had built the pyramids and the classical structures in Greece and Rome. So the Middle Ages, for them, oh, and fundamentally important, those classical values associated with those slave-holding societies were things that they saw creeping back in with the rise of industrialism and industrial modernity and factory labor. So the fascination with the Middle Ages was in a very real sense an active critique of industrial modernity. The second thing I wanna highlight that he gets from Ruskin associated with what I was just talking about is Ruskin's really strong critique of the division of labor that starts to happen in industrial processes and especially the division between manual labor and mental labor. And again, there was this idealization of the Middle Ages as a time when the worker was doing things with their hands and doing things with their mind that was dropping out of modern industrial processes as you had people working on assembly lines and factories or people working on design issues but no longer working with their hands. And Ruskin and following him Morris saw this as a fundamental problem, certainly for workers who were working with their bodies but not their minds but also people involved in design and the arts and things like that who were increasingly brain workers but not working with their bodies. In the 1880s, Morris had very involved in socialism, he publishes a couple of essays based upon lectures. One, this one here, useful work versus useless toil where he talks a lot about alienated labor, about the ways in which in modern conditions work has been reduced to a kind of mindless luxury for most people in the world and really wants to advocate to a sort of more integrated existence in which people are using their minds and their bodies all at the same time and taking pleasure in the work process itself through this sort of integration of their physical and mental capacities. Another important essay of his is the lesser arts. Again, another key word for Morris following Ruskin is integration. He is somewhat dismissive of the fine arts but really wants to think about the decorative arts and the any arts of everyday life. So a really important thing for Morris is the idea that the objects that we encounter in our everyday life should not be just useful but should be beautiful as well. And he sees a kind of degradation that's taking place under industrial production ruled by a kind of utilitarian values in which people are sort of surrounded by ugliness in the sort of utilitarian pursuit of the sheet. This all comes together in the last decade of Morris' life with the founding of the Count Scott press in collaboration with a friend of his, Emery Walker, who I think Nicole is going to talk about maybe a little bit. A little bit. Morris had the capital, Morris had the enthusiasm. Walker knew a lot about books. But really from the 1880s, mid-1880s onward, Morris starts building a library and a collection of medieval manuscripts and early printed books that one of which, of course, is the Bible that people have been talking about today. So he owned this. So I'm not talking a lot about teaching in this presentation but it's really fascinating for students to look at the Bible that we've seen in the slides and then look at sort of the wonderful collection that we have of cheap books, early paperbacks, things sold in railway stations. You can call yellowback novels from the 19th century to look at those next to the Bible and then to look at the Count Scott books. And if we'd been coordinating better when I'd been seeing the slides earlier of the Bible, I probably should have put together some slides to let you look at a page of a Count Scott book. But even better, you can go upstairs after the presentation because they're in the cases out there. So very quickly and then I'll close, in addition to sort of immersing himself in this kind of visual environment, the kinds of things that Morris is trying to do at the Count Scott press was to sort of reintegrate the process in a small workshop once again. So in bookmaking, different parts of the book are getting fragmented into different factories and whatnot in the 19th century. He wanted it all in the workshop. He wanted to use handmade paper. He tried to make his own ink. That didn't go very well, but then he got a shop involved in that. He wanted to use a hand press. He used vellum bindings. He designed his own fonts, especially like some of the Gothic fonts that Charles was showing us. He became absolutely obsessed with the spacing of letters and the use of generous margins on the page and using red letters and things like that. And so I really encourage you when you go up to look at the Count Scott books, which you will do. So just think about the look at the page in relationship to some of the things that we've seen. A lot of the Count Scott books, and especially the Chaucer, he worked very closely with Byrne Jones on this. The Count Scott press in the course of the 90s published 53 books, most of those books they published before Morris died in 1896. As Miriam Intritor said, the Chaucer was the magnum opus, but it was by no means the only book they did at Count Scott that had a sort of medieval or medievalist kind of content. This book has 87 engravings in it by Byrne Jones. A lot of the borders, a lot of the initials that you see in here were done by Morris and they really worked on this project together over the course of six or seven years. We do not have a Count Scott Chaucer, we have a facsimile, but Miriam recently sent us a link of what it's for sale right now. So if we have a donor out there, we have 295,000 pounds. Get the Count Scott Chaucer. These were done in very small batches of around 300 each. So I guess I just want to conclude with thinking about the ways in which these books that Morris was producing, although they sort of harkened back to the aesthetic of medievalism and the Bible that we were kind of looking at, they were fundamentally a kind of criticism of commodity culture, of the industrialization of print, and particularly the effects of those processes on the bodies and minds of workers. So I think I will end there. I'm gonna turn things over to Nicole who's gonna sort of, I think, talk about the legacies of the Count Scott Chaucer. Now, our book is in after Morris and we're focused today on three bookmakers working within and against Morris' legacy. I'll start with TJ Cobb and Sanderson. We'll get Albert Hubbard and then Dard Hunter. The first two are roughly contemporaries of Morris and the last one represents a kind of younger generation extension of the hand-pressed book arts tradition well into the 20th century. So Morris and TJ Cobb and Sanderson, my first focus of Cobb and Sanderson was a book binder and an erstwhile lawyer. These two men were friends. They both promoted the aesthetics and politics of the arts and crafts movement. In 1893, Cobb and Sanderson opened his binary, the binary, the Dove's binary, in a house just opposite from Scott Press. He founded the Dove's Press. He moved from being a binder to a book printer and he founded that press in 1900 with Morris' partner, Emery Walker. So this is one reference to Emery Walker, the famous man. So this was four years after Morris' death and two years after the Kelmscott press had closed. So it's sort of like TJ Cobb and Sanderson would be waiting for his moment respectfully. Like Morris, Cobb and Sanderson worked to sustain the tradition of printing by hand. And I'm going to tell you, this is a book that the Dove's Press published in 1900. It's called the Ideal Book or Both Beautiful. Let's talk about the calligraphy printing and illustration. Cobb and Sanderson paid tribute to Morris as a calligrapher. So I just gave us this one page here. You can see William Morris left in the large, in the capital letters. He pays tribute to Morris as a calligrapher in particular and underscores the importance of calligraphy generally to the both beautiful, insisting that quote hand writing and hand decoration of letter and page are the root of typography. It's just a thing I haven't thought that much about. But the handwriting is the root of typography, woodcut and engravings. And Cobb and Sanderson urges every printer to ground themselves in the practice of calligraphy, letting quote both hand and soul luxuriate for a while in the art of illumination. So on this page, Morris and TJ Cobb and Sanderson credits Morris for the period's great revival of printing and links to successful typography to the traditions of the scriptorium. Which I think is lovely that this panel isn't available. So let us see how calligraphy becomes typography. Interestingly, in an earlier version of this book, that Cobb and Sanderson delivered as a lecture in 1892, Cobb and Sanderson respectfully made clear his objections to the master, as he referred to William Morris. As he called Morris, who was in the audience, he called him the master, and Morris was right there. In the lecture, Cobb and Sanderson find that Morris's typography gets in the way of the expression of Morris's ideas. And so if the reader can't get beyond the typography, Cobb and Sanderson says, the thing intended to be conveyed will never be conveyed. Cobb and Sanderson objects primarily to three things in Morris's books. One, he found the inner margins too small when spiders like Morris's concerted effort. Two, the type is too heavy. And three, Morris breaks words and lines of verse for the sake of decorative margins and initial letters. I mean, that's the worst thing of all to break up the lines of the verse for the sake of ornamentation. Cobb and Sanderson also objects to Morris's medievalism eventually. He writes in his journal in 1898, quote, we are the men of the middle and all other ages, but our setting, actual and acquired, is different. And consequently, our creations take other forms. To force ourselves into the forms of other times is to be effective and to be useless for our own time. Men of today who affect the forms of other times have their eyes wholly or partially closed. So this is an example of force. This was produced by the Dutch press. So you can get a sense of, if you can, yeah, I just suppose they too would have been right. So remember Joe's slide and then look at this. And then here's another, a Bible from Cobb and Sanderson. Now, if you use with John's, if you can think about the initials of the earlier Bibles that we saw, and the red lettering. And we can see what's different here about what Cobb and Sanderson is trying to do. The Dutch Bible is thought to be Cobb and Sanderson's a prelative achievement. We have a weave of the Bible in the farthole collection. It's another if and when, you know, I must buy a book for this one. In 1908, Cobb and Sanderson noted that he chose texts with the Dutch press, based on the particular typographical challenge that they presented, and also on the works Literary Achievement and Reflection of Community. He bought the Bible in English, which was exactly that. Another pushback, though, another place where Cobb and Sanderson continues to wrestle with Morris's influence right up to 1917. I do not believe in the doctrine of William Morris. I do not believe that pleasure in one's work reduces one's pain. Nor do I believe in ornament and any special privilege in the production of happiness, where it is born of faculty and where it may not be perceived at companies or all of us. And I think this is a response to the essay and that general point of this to the lecture of art. I think this is where, you know, so there we have E.J. Cobb and Sanderson sort of immediate contemporary of Morris is very much working in the shadow of Morris, but here he's in the space to do something very different. Yeah, so shifting or crossing the Atlantic. Hand and Brain, 1898, this is mostly an essay on socialism, including one by Morris under names we have recognized from George from the Shaw to the Coventry. And this is produced by the Roycrofters, the Roycrofters from the North. As you can see, this print in my hand made Tom Scott paper in the limited edition. The Roycroft Press was established five years earlier in 1893, a year after its founder, Albert Hubbard, a Morris Acolyte, had met the master, as well as T.J. Cobb and Sanderson at Combscott. Hubbard's hand press, I lost my spot in the notes. Hubbard's hand press sustained a transatlantic arts and crafts tradition. So he takes the Morris hand press tradition and revives it or sustains it in upstate New York. Hubbard went on to establish the Roycroft community, a group of artisans, printers, furniture makers, metalsmiths, leather workers, bookbunders, organized around arts and crafts, aesthetic and principles, political principles. By 1910, they numbered around 500 in the community and it became a site for meetings for radicals and political reformers of all stripes and the buildings are still there, the Roycroft community can be visited and the Ambulance, you know, but in breakfast type place and everything. Hubbard would later distance himself from socialism aiming to adhere to socialist ideals while also sort of embracing what he felt was a very kind of American free enterprise, entrepreneurship, innovative spirit. But this book signaled his allegiance to Morris's socialism at his earlier age. Another book that signaled his allegiance to Morris and this is part of the collection upstairs is The Little Journeys to the Holy New English Office. This is a 14-volume series published between 1895 and 1910. And again, if you can picture even Morris's chelsea, the Kelmscott chelsea, I think this border very clearly meant to remind readers of Morris's craft. This coffee, for those who have already said that, is upstairs. In this book, Hubbard describes the pilgrimage for Kelmscott press, where he meets Morris and across the way, he meets T.J. Cobbden-Standerson at the findery. And he witnesses an argument between the two and just humor me, I thought this was hilarious. So Hubbard reports that Morris, quote, silenced his opponent by smothering his batteries, all of which will be better understood when I explained that the old man was large in stature, bluff, bold, and strong voice, whereas Cobbden-Standerson was small, red-headed, meek, and worse, bicycle trousers. As you can see on this page, Hubbard spoke with Morris about American literature. Currently, I'm going to walk her in. The business man who connects of Morris to T.J. Cobbden-Standerson, he was expecting that William Morris had an opportunity for American art and small respect for art literature. But apparently, William Morris read Capillary Finn, and Uncle Venus, and, well, and Allison. So, as well as Hubbard's old book. I don't know what to say. Let's see. This is an example of Woodcroft and a Woodcroft title page. I just learned this to prepare this presentation. And Albert and Alice Hubbard co-authored this book. And it makes sense because Justinian and Theodore are a powerhouse political couple of the early Croman era, Byzantium. I had no idea, but it made it much sense to me that they would co-authored this book. And Alice Hubbard was a leader in the Morecroft community, an important leader in the community. She was an artist, feminist. She marched in the first Washington, D.C., suffered just parade, and it's worth noting Annie Cobbden-Standerson, and she did. Wife was also a part of it. But I wanted to point out, you know, this simplified sort of streamline our contrast style. The decorative border and the initial on this next page, I think is very beautiful here. The decorative border of the initial. But I wanted to point out, it didn't come out right in my picture, but this little D.H. in the corner is gonna lead us to our next. This is a figure on this journey of William Morris's influence. And you see the same thing, another title page from the Morecroft publication, a very reminiscent of William Morris's art. And then again, another little D.H. in the corner, right? And who might have to use it? That is Gary Hunter, who is a figure of local importance. His Mountain House Press was established in Chilli Coffee in 1922, and it's still in operation, producing prints on Hunter's original hand presses. Before I go on then, I'll refer you to the Dart Hunter website. I think it's darthunter.com for more information about Hunter, the Mountain House Press, and the Dart Hunter Studio, which is an outfit that is producing today as whole range of products based on Dart Hunter's art and on arts and crafts aesthetic more generally. Dart Hunter was born in Steubenville, Ohio in 1883. His father was a newspaper publisher, eventually moved his family to Chilli Coffee, and this is where Hunter had his earliest training in tight-setting and typography as a newspaper kid. In 1904, Hunter applied for a job with the Roycofters, and I guess it was turned down, but he was super enthusiastic and went up there anyway. This is all history, right? So apparently, within a few months, he was designed stained glass windows and title pages was already shown in the Hubbard's press. He also tied his hand at pottery, furniture, and jewelry. He left the Roycofters in 1910, objecting to Hubbard's increasing onto the commercialization of the recipes leaving behind the socialist mission. So in the book arts, Hubbard Hunter, excuse me, Hunter's interest was drawn to handmade paper and he became a sort of super paper specialist. He made paper according to 17th century methods and a mill that he built in New York. He also developed his own type font, cutting the punches entirely by hand and casting the font end by hand. So he positioned himself to make books entirely on his own, a one-man bookmaker. He describes these processes in great detail and his books of processes and color fonts, such as the one that I'll show you. You can see he moves to a little bit here. But the other one I wanted to show you because this title page indicates, right, to a coffee aisle, a mountain house, press. And I know this slide didn't come out really well, but the text over here is a very long note regarding the making of this book where he carefully detailed the time-intensive labor and the expense of producing a type font entirely by hand. He indicates the 17th century printer's manual that guided him in this effort. He's only used this type and he took so long to create on five books issued by his own press and he promises that this type font will be entirely destroyed when he decides not to use it. So I wanted to recognize that primitive, of course, is a colonizing term, it's one that he would not use today. Hunter is very interested in the history of the study of the book and book arts. He does this credit for thinking about book production in a global context and recognizing the value of non-European traditions at a time when bibliography and the study of the book arts generally were really focused on Europe and the European traditions. He traveled all over the world and collected samples. And I should have mentioned all along, these books are part of our collection. We have a whole bunch of dark printed books upstairs and we have all the boycrofters stuff. They're the very strong and it's time. Mary and it's time. He's all, I'm done. Thank you so much. Please join me in thanking all of our presenters. We still have some time. We hope to do Q and A. Yes. Thank you. We'll be just in the way. I'm gonna ask everyone here and again, if you're online, please feel free to put any questions into the chat. Then we'll read them for us. And I'd like to also invite all of you to respond to or ask each other questions if you have any. But would anybody like to get us back? There's nobody else. Sure, go ahead. That's my baseball. So we just built a bunch of triple ad integrations into the planning and the digital version of the scammed stuff in the digital markets. I was curious whether you all heard triple I am and whether you like the buttons. If you use them first off or if you want to add, nope. I've heard of it. And I have, if you haven't seen it and even touched the buttons that I haven't, I'm sorry, but I haven't spent that time thinking about it honestly. So taking the brand probably just the getting tips for. For everyone else, but the new, there are a lot of new technical development in what you can do online with digitized material. Triple I up is one pretty amazing option that was new to us. Thanks to Nick and work by him and others in the library and something that I should probably talk to all of you about at some point, but it really enables a lot of work that you can't really do otherwise. So a really great enhancement research tool. Thanks for bringing that up. Any other questions? Anything on one? I'll have a question. Yeah. I want to thank all of you for that. You for putting this together. And it was such a fascinating for each of your perspectives. Really, really great and interesting. I'm wondering more from a financial standpoint that I mean, Morris was obviously well off, but I was kind of surprised that I believe the Chaucer sold for 20 pounds. No, at the time. At the time, yes. Which really, I mean, for the number of years alive, I mean, he couldn't make any money. Could he? At price, do you think? I don't know about the Chaucer specifically, but I heard that he did actually make a slight profit through the Count Scott press, although I don't know that that was necessarily his intention. I mean, one thing that I did not build into my presentation, but which is the obvious perennial criticism of what he was doing is the expense. And thinking about that in relationship to his social politics, right? Because all of these sort of cheap, commercially produced books that he's railing against are also part of the story of the rise of literacy and getting books and information out to as many people as possible. Whereas, he's a socialist book producer, but he's producing books that can only be sold to a fairly limited market. So that's certainly the paradox here, but I think it was something he was willing to do because he was sort of just so fed up with what he saw as the, on the consumption side, the coarsening of modern life and its effect on taste. But then what that meant on the production end for the people who were making and producing these things. And perhaps that's one commonality that Darn Hunter and he had. I think neither really cared much about what the monetary renumeration was gonna be for years and years of order, but really driven by creating something truly beautiful and harmonious, which. Beautiful and harmonious, but also useful. And useful. I mean, I think it began as that integration and that SAI referred to the lesser arts. Both of those things were important to him. And he was just very upset as with Ruskin how in the 19th century those things seemed to be going their different ways. That there were things that were useful and cheap and there were things that were beautiful. So. That actually keeps into a question I have, if you don't mind. Rare and high point valuable items like the Bible, like Helmscott Press, Mounthouse Press, books, Deluxe, Miriam used the word, can be intimidating for a lot of students and other visitors. So something I'm always thinking about is helping me, including myself as a wee, sort of less of the intimidation factor when it comes to researching and accessing these items and providing more equitable access. Again, coming back to that sort of tension between wanting them to be useful and accessible to everyone, but in fact, they are not. So be curious for your thoughts on that. With the Bible, it's kind of easy because you can point out that this thing has lasted 800 years and it was made to be used. It's not a, it was never meant to be something that was admired the far or not touched. And even those most fabulous, you know, really, really less, with more less Bible space were used, right? They were touched, they were cast, they were read, you know, one of the, one of the, another book that I work on is completely different from the book that it's the pontifical. It's a book of rules for bishops, like how to do an exorcism and how to do this and that. And the big debate about that book is signs of use. Doesn't demonstrate that people used it. There's particular questions about that. But it's an interesting thing to think about that these books have been held in the hands of hundreds of people, maybe thousands and over hundreds of years, right? And so that's the first thing is to sort of mystify the fragility of the item. But the other part of the access, I wish Neil were here, because it's so much of that, that book is about the words in the book. And it is so sadly foreign to people in the middle that can't make that connection. On the other hand, again, the cool thing about Bible is that it is wider than one. So people can kind of look at it, but that's the first place that I go is that kind of sturdiness of that item. I could respond to that as well. What's interesting about this Bible is it's size and that these books were mass produced at these cathedral schools for students, for university students, clerics, and then exported around Europe. But they're called pocket Bibles and you could put them in your cloak. They were really more kind of personal books, unlike other Bibles, which are much more large scale. But I did want to say just one thing about teaching with the teaching this Bible in class, which has evolved from the, since I first started here, I would bring the students up to special collections. We would look at it, but it's a difficult thing to do when you have let's say 20 students in the class and such a small book and you're trying to talk about something and other students can't see what you're talking about, which really makes it a challenge. And so one of the great things that's happened in the study of books in the past five years, I would say is the digitization process and making these accessible. So now what happens is when I go in to teach this manuscript, the students have it right there on their laptops. The originals there, they can look at it up close and see it, that they can also follow what's going along on their laptops. And it's just so much easier to teach. And then the other great thing about it is it makes it accessible to everyone around the world. So that's completely transformed my scholarship, is the availability of books like this now. I mean, just quantities of medieval books I can look at in my office rather than traditionally having to write a grant, take it to a particular library, going over, I mean, it was a really time consuming thing. So it's been fantastic. That's really helpful. I think John had a question. I wish I had a comment online and a question for Dr. Reynolds to get rid of it. The comment first is the Don E. Adileta. I apologize if I'm asking. Thank you. Type shop in 222 Siegfried Hall here on campus contains a room full of printing presses and types from the era that Darn Hunter would have used graphic designer Darren Baker on the Chill Coffee campus is in communication with that press. And then the question for Dr. Reynolds, did Roy Croft have any connections with famous radical author agitators from the early 20th century, such as Upton Sinclair, Jack London, or Charlotte Perkins-Gammon? I'm sorry, internet audience, I don't know. But that was made perfect sense from what I understand. The Roy Croft community became a gathering place for all sorts of intellectuals and radicals and reformers, so that became entirely likely. I don't have any, just my knowledge of the catalog. I don't think he published or worked with any of them in the Roy Croft press. But that wouldn't surprise me at all. His dates are, he and Alice went down on the Elizabethanian in 1915, so if that helps us think about who they might have had contact with in terms of writers and so forth. But that's a great question. I don't know, sorry. I want to speak to the previous question, just really briefly. I think the digitization that you were talking about is very important, especially as a kind of supplement. I mean, it's not a substitute for students getting the actual books in their hands, which just totally sparks their curiosity and their passion for study and research. But it is good given the fragility of things that if they want to spend more time on it, that they have the digital access. Another thing is, I think that in my experience, the books that are most intimidating to students are the older books, which actually tend to be much better made and meant to last, and you can sort of demystify things for them. The real problem with students is when you put the late 19th and early 20th century crappy books in their hands made on paper with high acid content that flakes when you look at it, which are things that tend not to intimidate them. But I think the other answer to that question is we are a public university and they are citizens of Ohio who are paying tuition to come to this university. They are the people of these books and they shouldn't feel like this stuff is some kind of precious thing that they're gonna sort of violate. They need to have some ownership over them and then that just begins with letting them be with the objects. It is a really special thing to be able to bring them upstairs and I've been with different kinds of questions in different moments up there. Everything we can see is informative and inspiring and I think it really is a matter of taking the time to do it at the end of the day. I think the digitization thing is also really important. It is much as it helps contextualize these things so that they can look at a bunch of things online before we can and then they can come up to see one and hold it and look at it. And it just, when I go to archives, I like to use the digitalized documents because I can actually read them better. I can blow them up and understand them. But I can't appreciate the size of the document. I can't feel without seeing it. So I think the two things together really work well to make them accessible. Yeah, I could make a follow up comment about this. So the way that the transmission of writing began with the scroll in ancient Egypt, the Romans invented the book, the book continued to exist until really the rise of the internet, which is, so what's happened with the internet is that now we've returned to scroll rather than, and one of the things that I talk about in terms of demonstrating the appreciation of these books is that how much more user-friendly they are in terms of navigating them, moving from different parts of a particular book to another part is much more easy than the scrolling process, which can really brought you nuts. And so I talk with them about that. Traditionally, when you read a scroll, you would unfurl it and furl it and unfurl it and furl it. But you couldn't really kind of go to a particular part of a text the way you can with a book. And so in some ways, we're at this cusp now of the transmission of knowledge where a particular vessel like the book is, I think, ultimately much more user-friendly and maybe technological advancement isn't necessarily, I mean, this kind of panacea for folks. And interestingly, the students have been responding to this because they're used to the idea of scrolling and I think that it kind of drives them, it can drive you crazy, especially if you're spending a lot of time in front of a computer screen. Oh, really great, thank you all. Any other questions? There's no other follow-up. I have a good comment for Charles. I totally think that's the originary now. I've been sitting there all day thinking. Only because, but also it's really problematic. First of all, it isn't faster, but it makes sense that it's sort of a prefiguring so it's that, you know, super sectionist position. But also, Mary's not depicted very much in these vials. I mean, Mary doesn't play a big role in the Bible, really. And the cult of the Virgin Mary is super important in the 12th century and 13th century, and she, this would have been a thing. So it's still unique and unusual. But what's also interesting to me is that I did some research on Esther in the Bible and I didn't come up with, maybe not with this, but maybe some, the wrong people are talking to each other. I think about that image and the image of Esther. So it's super interesting. I'm not gonna say anything about it. And I can talk about Justinian Theodore all day. I don't know if that I would be associated with just with Theodore because she had a bad rap. Did she really? Yeah, she scandals. Charles, I wanted to respond to something you said about the scrolling and actually think about how in the work that I've done with students, there's this interesting kind of dialectic, right? So precisely because of the reading that students are doing now in digital environments, there's a lot more attention at least in literary studies these days to illustration, which was something that had been knocked for a long time because students are becoming much more used to being in environments where they're looking at text and image together. So that to return to books, they pay attention to the pictures. They pay attention to the look of the page or because platforms like Microsoft Word that they're used to working in, that they can manipulate fonts all the time. There is I think a kind of interest in typography and they notice those kinds of things that students might not have 20 or 25 years ago. So the kinds of reading practices that students are involved now in digital environments, I think are really making them canny observers of things in little books that students, you know, a generation ago might not have thought about. I'd like to respond to Miriam here. I think what's interesting about the image of Esther in this book is that that is the only so-called historian in the initial of an individual in the Bible. There are these monsters and some of them are women. But it's interesting that trying to think of for whom the book like that was produced and why they would actually have that one representation of Esther and then maybe this siren, which is kind of the opposite type of conception of womanhood in that particular manuscript. So I wonder if the original reader could have been a woman or maybe even the foundation of where it was produced that could have been for female readership. It could, yeah, yeah. I actually saw a manuscript online at the British Museum, I think, British Library, British Library. Recently it's placed in Northern France and it's contemporary and it's got that same people blue and red stuff in it. I know that that's like a dime of dozen, but it just seems like we could line up enough of these manuscripts. I've often thought if you could line up our book with some really more stuff, enough wallpaper, you would come up with one of these images, you know, or they could be, they could be the client for a spot. I print these three future dissertation projects. I think all of you, again, for really just fascinating, self-proposing presentations and discussion I learn from all of you all the time. I'm very grateful for that and I learned new things here today from questions also. Thanks to all of you for coming.