bibles for historical occasions

When Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, he will be using the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used at his first inauguration in 1861. Much has been made of the symbolism of the moment, and of the many connections between the two men from Illinois, the one who freed the slaves and the one who will be our first African-American President.

The physical presence of Lincoln's Bible is key to making that connection explicit. It's not a physically imposing bible, as you can see from pictures. It's easily held, bound in burgundy velvet with gilt edges.


What I find the most interesting about it is that although it holds a great deal of significance to us, it did not for Lincoln. Lincoln's own family Bible was still en route to Washington with the rest of his belongings, so Supreme Court Clerk William Thomas Carroll purchased this Bible for the swearing-in ceremony. The Bible itself (an 1853 Oxford edition) was opened to a random page when the oath was administered. (There's a compilation of inaugural Bibles used and scriptures chosen put together by the Library of Congress.) But the importance of this object is brought home in Carroll's inscription at the end, certifying that this is the copy of the Bible that was used to swear in President Lincoln.

(A full set of images of Lincoln's Bible is on flickr.)

Lincoln's Bible is in contrast to the one that Joe Biden will be using when he is sworn in as Vice-President. He'll be using the same Bible that he's used every time he was sworn in as a senator, and that his son has used as Delaware's Attorney General, a Bible that has been in the family since 1893. As you can see from this photo (taken for the New York Times by Stephen Crowley), in which his wife Jill pretends to be staggering under its weight, this is no easily carried book.

According to news reports, Biden almost didn't have the Bible with him for the Senate swearing-in, but made it in time, complete with jokes about its size. (There's a nice story about this in Delaware Online.) Jokes aside, though, it is clearly something that is important to Biden and an integral part of how he sees taking office.

I've been struck with these stories about the Bibles being used for this Presidential Inauguration, and for others, because they aren't about what the Bible means. That isn't irrelevant, by any means. I happen to be fond of the story about John Quincy Adams, who took his oath of office upon a "Volume of Laws" because it was the Constitution he was swearing to protect. But what is driving so many of these stories is an emphasis on the physical book itself. Biden's Bible has been passed on through his family for generations. When Obama lays his hand on the Bible to become our 44th President, he is touching the same book that our 16th President did. The physical book makes connections through the generations.

I'll close with a couple of images of historical Bibles in the Folger's collections. Neither will ever be chosen to swear in a new President, and that's just as well--I don't think their resonances will play as smoothly.

The first is a copy of the 1568 Great Bible presented to Queen Elizabeth and probably used in her private chapel. It is bound in a crimson velvet with silver clasps and bosses engraved with Tudor roses and her coat of arms. It's a lovely book. (Full catalogue record here.)


The second is less beautiful but perhaps more haunting. It's a Salisbury Book of Hours that was given to Henry VIII by Anne of Cleves, also known as wife number four. At the back of the book she has written, "I besiche your grace h[umble?] when ye loke on this remember me. yo[u]r gracis assured anne the dowgher of cleues." (See the catalogue record.)


What did Henry think when he looked upon this? I can't imagine. But I do like knowing that she got to keep her head long after his had been laid to rest. Perhaps her Book of Hours helped her navigate her way past him.

the Holocaust and libraries

A friend shared a recent article with me from Der Spiegel that touches directly on the subject of books and owners and their emotional and historical connections. The piece, "Retracing the Nazi Book Theft," examines the legacy of the Holocaust for German libraries: thousands of books that were stolen from Jewish owners and that remain in the collections of German libraries.

This photo (from the article) is of Detlaf Bockenkamm, a curator at Berlin's Central and State Library who been tracing the former owners of books stolen by the Nazis. Here he is standing with some of those books, part of the Accession J section, consisting of more than 1000 books acquired by the Nazis "from the private libraries of evacuated Jews" and then integrated into the Library's collection.

Just as paintings were systematically taken and claimed by the Nazis, so too were books and other cultural and valuable items. The stolen books have gotten significantly less attention in the media, however, perhaps because they are less spectacularly valuable than some of the paintings, perhaps because we are less used to thinking of books as important objects. But the repatriation of such paintings and books is less about their material worth and more about their emotional and memorial resonances:

Nevertheless, Germany's Federal Commissioner for Culture Bernd Neumann believes that museum employees and librarians have an obligation "to devote particular attention to the search for those cultural goods that were stolen or extorted from the victims of Nazi barbarism." Neumann points out that, more than just "material value," what is at issue here is "the invaluable emotional importance that these objects have when it comes to remembering the fates of individuals and families."

You can read the article for more information on how the search is going. It's painstaking, as you might imagine. Even aside from the reluctance of many libraries to focus on the task, there is the difficulty in going through the sheer volume of accession records, of looking through individual books for traces of their former owners, and then searching for those owners or their relatives today.

Given my recent posts on the social transactions of books, the timing of the Spiegel article reminds me that books bear witness to history in ways that are much larger than just a daughter's inheritance from her father, or a mother's gift to her son. And it opens up questions, too, of libraries and their obligations to books and owners. I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about libraries--what libraries do, about the tension for rare book collections between preserving the past and making it accessible. I'll post more about that in the future.

the intangibles of books

My recent posts have been focusing on books that have been handed down from one generation to the next, books that allow us to see evidence of the social transactions of books and the links they forge between family members. But we wouldn't be able to see that evidence if the books themselves weren't in such good shape to begin with.

The photo above is of one of my favorite books, and I mean that in a very material sense, not a textual sense: I love this particular book because it was my father's when he was a boy. I remember it sitting on his bookshelves in our house, and him telling me how fond he was of Robert Louis Stevenson. I've never actually read Kidnapped. And I'm not going to be able to read this copy. It's so fragile that the front cover came right off as I removed it from my bookshelf this afternoon. I'm not actually sure what year it was published--it was part of the Giant Junior Classics series, but there is no date on the book itself, and though my father was clearly young when he signed it, he didn't date his inscription. I could read a different copy, of course. It wouldn't be too hard to track one down, even another Giant Junior Classics issue. But it wouldn't be the same, I don't think. What I love about this book is knowing that he loved it when he was a child, and that he loved it enough to save it. Not being able to read this book doesn't make me any less fond of it.


It does, however, make me keenly aware of how unlikely it is that my children will have this book on their shelves, or their children. Or to have it someday be auctioned off at Sotheby's, as Frances Wolfreston's books were. That's okay, really. I don't think it's valuable to anyone other than me. There are plenty of mid-twentieth-century books that future readers and scholars and grandchildren could wish had stayed in good enough shape to hang on to. We're lucky that earlier books were made of comparatively sturdy stuff.

In my earlier posts about the Frances Wolfreston books and other books, I have been focused entirely on the material and social presences of books--how books are made, how they circulate between users. I have not dwelt on some of the other important aspects of books, including the emotional attachments that readers and owners form to them and with them. But I don't want to underplay the intangibles of books, either. My father's copy of Kidnapped is important because of those intangibles. And it is those intangibles that I share with my son when we read Charlotte's Web together. We actually each have our own: my childhood copy is on the right, only $1.25, and his is on the left, just released as a "major motion picture."

I was traveling while we were reading the book, so I bought him his own copy and took mine with me, so we could read it together over the phone. And because the book is still published by HarperCollins, we could read copies that were nearly identical, page for page. When we were on separated by hundreds of miles, being able to read together--to turn the pages at the same time and to look at the same Garth Williams drawings--made us feel as if we were sitting next to each other, reading our bedtime story. That closeness was possible through the material conditions and history of copyrights, publishing companies, printing processes, and marketing. But it was made possible first by the power not only of E.B. White's story, but of the very act of reading together. That's one of the amazing things about books and readings to which my posts in this blog have not always paid tribute. It's a hard thing to quantify, certainly, and hard even to put into words. But my relationship to books that I've been discussing here reminds me that the Chaucer that passed from Dorothy Egerton's hands to Anne Vernon's to Frances Wolfreston's isn't just a volume of paper in which readers inscribed their names. It's a book they sat with, and returned to, and passed on to others.

I've been negligent in posting recently, and this post has not dwelt at all on early modern books. But I'll be back up to speed again soon, with more posts on early books and book history. In the meantime, happy reading.

"Frances Wolfresston hor bouk"

My last post lamented pristine books that remained uncirculated and lonely on their shelves. This post is a teaser for future posts examining how very much we can learn about the ways that books circulate in readers' lives.

Above is a detail from a 1550 edition of Chaucer's collected works. On a leaf in the middle of the volume is carefully inscribed "Frances Wolfresston hor bouk geven her by her motherilaw Mary Wolfreston".

That in and of itself is a rich testament to the circulation of books. But there is more to be discovered. If you examine the Folger's catalogue entry for this volume, you will notice that one of the associated names is "Wolfreston, Frances, 1607-1677, inscriber". If you follow that link, you will discover that the Folger has an additional 10 books signed by Frances Wolfreston in its collections. Frances Wolfreston, you will soon realize, was an early modern book collector and her library of books, nearly all carefully inscribed with "Frances Wolfreston her bouk", can be found dispersed among some of the greatest library collections today. Another post will be devoted to exploring her and her collection.

One more tidbit teaser: you will also notice when looking at the catalogue entry that there are lots of other inscriptions recorded as being in this book. There are a number of other Wolfreston family members, suggesting that this volume was passed on down through the family; there are also a collection of other signatures from a different family suggesting that it was similarly passed down through their family. More about that, too, in the future.

In the meantime, two quick quirks that I like:

In her inscription, Frances spells her last name differently than how she spells her mother-in-law's. Her son Francis settled on yet a different spelling, choosing primarily to record his name as Wolferstan. We all know that early modern spelling was full of variants. But so, too, were early modern names. It seems very strange by our standards today: ask any other Sarah whether her name is spelled with an "h" or without the "h" and you'll discover that we are all very insistent on the importance of that difference.

Quirk two: when you follow the link for Frances Wolfreston to find other books that she owned in the Folger collection, what you actually find is that the Library appears to differentiate between those in which she is an "inscriber" and those in which she "signed". No difference in the books themselves. It's just a nice reminder of the many ways in which books are handled by many different people, and those human differences and foibles leave their traces everywhere.

do you write in books?

Some recent browsing on bibliophagia led me to (among many other things) a curious and disturbing discussion about writing in books. A sub-forum in a forum devoted to ChickLit, it consisted primarily of entries on how horrified posters were about people writing in books. I'm not talking about rare books, or library books, or even books borrowed from friends. I'm talking about people who won't write in their own books. Here's the words of one poster:

I am totally manic. I don't lend out my books. I don't write my name in books, nor do I write little comments in the margins. I don't break the spines. Ever. I won't even buy a book in a bookstore if the binding is the least bit damaged. I don't even highlight my college textbooks. The worst thing though: I refuse to buy "used" college textbooks that are highlighted/dogeared because it irks me so much. I will just pay full price. Sad, isn't it?

That's not so disturbing to me--I'm sympathetic with not wanting to buy a new book with a damaged binding, and I've never been convinced about highlighting as a useful reading strategy. Although how do you know you own a book if you don't write your name in it? And a number of posts confessed to being unable to lend their books out to friends because they were so bothered that they might be returned slightly dinged up. Isn't one of the great functions of books the way that they circulate socially? We bond over shared books, recommend them to each other, give them to one another. One of the great things about social network sites is that they allow you to share your bookshelves with your friends, and to discover new friends through their reading habits. The insistence on pristine books takes them out of our social networks, leaving them uncirculated and lonely on their shelves.

But here's the post that really got me going:

Last night, I looked over and my husband was writing in a library book. An [i]old[/] library book, circa 1880 or so. In pen. He tried to deny it but then sort of copped to it. I was so mad that I actually just left the room and went to sleep on the couch (and cold bitchy silence is not my usual MO with anger, honestly) until he came and apologized. I said that I know it's not actually my business, but that to me it seems like, I don't know, torturing a small animal or something just to see what happens. It's so completely arrogant and self-centered. Grrrr.

Writing in a book is akin to torturing a small animal? Put alongside the other posts in this thread, what comes across is a fetishization of the clean book, an idealization of books that seems to prioritize book form over book content. I of course think there is a great deal to be learned from the material form of a book. But don't the two work hand in hand? What's the value of a pristine book that has never been read? Especially in light of my last post about how readers make sense of their passages through books and about how necessary marking your book is, these posts to the ChickLit forum struck me as describing an impoverished relationship to books--for both their owners and for scholars of book history.

If those posts describe a near-exclusive focus on the form of the book, my husband tells a story that is the opposite. In grad school, one of his professors told a story about reading a Stanley Cavell book. As he was reading, he was finding Cavell more and more infuriating. And as he read further and further, the spine of the book began to crack and the pages began to fall out. Such was his fury that he took to literally discarding the pages as he read them--read a leaf, tear it out, throw it away.

It's a scenario that would probably kill those poor posters. And if those pristine books leave no traces of their readers in them for future scholars, the thrown-away text leaves neither readerly trace nor book. But there's a book that really mattered to its reader!

And in case you're wondering what those posts had to do with bibliophagia, here's the connection:

You're all going to hate me, but I promise, I don't do this any more (much). When I was younger, I used to eat books.

Really. Literally.

My copy of A Little Princess is more than well-loved, it's practically gone. I used to gnaw bits off the corners. It's incredibly annoying to me now. I haven't met anyone else who does that, probably for good reason. Still, as nervous habits go, I guess it's better than smoking. At least I always got my recommended daily allowance of fiber.

Here's to loving books.

(You can read these posts, and others, at the ChickLit Forums. There's much to be said about the term "chick lit" and what exactly it encompasses and what exactly it dismisses, but that's a topic for another blog.)