Inscription Part 1

You may think of me as one of the finest undiscovered artist-photographers, printmakers, book-artists, and bloggers in Britain (oh, go on, let's pretend), but in my previous life as a public-sector wage-slave, I was a professional academic librarian whose speciality was the bibliographic description of the diverse materials that find their way into the custody of a university library. These are books in the main, obviously, but also sound recordings, photographs, videos, audio-visual teaching aids, microform reproductions, and any other "non-book" format that human ingenuity has contrived for the transmission of knowledge and entertainment. Enabling people to find these things by looking them up in a catalogue was a dark art that I studied, practised, and taught for over 30 years. I also became an acknowledged expert in the creation, construction, and handling of large computerised bibliographic data-files.

One of the first Great Teachings that has to be imparted to a neophyte cataloguer is the ability to distinguish the content from the container. Which, as W.B. Yeats knew, is not as easy as it sounds [1]. To the naive user, what they hold in their hand is "Romeo and Juliet", a play by William Shakespeare. Sure, they may be aware that it's the only edition available in the bookshop, or the cheapest, or the one on their tutor's list of recommended reading, but the process of transmission and transmutation that has led from an inky manuscript to rehearsals and stage productions, then through successive printed incarnations to the actual copy of the particular edition they are about to read – new, second-hand, a battered library copy, heavily annotated, possibly even imperfect – is rarely their concern. In a "scholarly" edition this is the dry stuff about foul copy and folios and bad quartos that figures in the prefatory material that nobody reads.

But this is the ground where the dance of content and container is conducted, and it's a dance that can seem as protracted and bafflingly inventive as an episode of Strictly. Is Shakespeare really still the author of, say, a free translation of "Romeo and Juliet" into a foreign language, or the various graphic novel versions with the text rendered into "accessible" English? Who is primarily responsible for Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo + Juliet : Shakespeare or Luhrmann? How far is West Side Story a version of Shakespeare's play? And are we talking about the stage show, or the film? Staying with film, what about Shakespeare in Love: is it a sort of commentary on the play? How should Tom Stoppard's manuscript screenplay be distinguished from but linked to the published version, or indeed to the movie or the play itself? And to what extent is the DVD of any film the same thing as the actual cans of sprocketed reels, a TV broadcast of it recorded on VHS tape, or the version streamed from Amazon Prime? [2]

Disentangling this eternal dance of content and container is, from a cataloguer's point of view, an essentially practical matter, requiring a clear head, a good general and "subject" knowledge [3], a reading ability in a number of foreign languages, a thorough grasp of a dense handbook of rules and guidelines, and a steady eye on how any prospective user of the item in hand might search for it (or indeed be helped to stumble across it), and what aspects of it should be transcribed or described, not least to distinguish this particular copy of this particular manifestation of this particular "work" from any other. It's an important job, but not a role for anyone who wants to be noticed, applauded, or rewarded. Even librarians think cataloguers are a bit, um, odd special. But in recent years the study of this material aspect of culture has piqued the interest of literary academics (finally!) and I was pleased to notice in the emailed newsletter from my old college that one of the English tutors now there, Adam Smyth, has the enviable title of Professor of English Literature and The History of the Book.

My interest went up several notches when I read that Professor Smyth is jointly responsible for a new publication venture, a journal called Inscription, "the journal of material text – theory, practice, history", described as follows:

The journal combines work by practitioners – book artists, printmakers, poets, and artists – with academic discussion, to take the study of material texts in new directions. Inscription’s focus is not just on the meanings and uses of the codex book, but also the nature of writing surfaces (papery or otherwise), and the processes of mark-marking in the widest possible sense: from hand-press printing to vapour trails in the sky; from engraved stones to digital text; and from the ancient past, to today. Issue one contains articles about 18th century engraved epitaphs; Kafka’s notebooks and writing process; missing pages in 16th century Bibles; parchment making; hand-press printing; lithography; libraries and provenance; transcriptions of bird song; and more.

Inscription is also an experiment in format, design, and typography. Issue one comes with a vinyl LP, and a specially commissioned print; the journal is printed from both ends with pages that seem to spiral; and it has a hole drilled through the middle.

Now that has my name written all over it (not literally, obvs, even though that would seem fairly appropriate in the context, but you know what I mean) so I decided to subscribe to the first two issues. I have just received Issue One, and it is a magnificent object: not so much a journal as a thick, square-foot slab of artist's book, with accompanying LP record and, yes, a hole through the middle. That's just the container, of course: a review of the actual content and its relationship to the container will have to wait until I've read / looked at / played with / listened to it.

Now, as we know, (whisper it) academics do have a bad habit of locating the life-blood of a subject, then draining it away in order to measure, weigh, and analyse it, and book-artists also have a way of taking the idea of "the book" and re-arranging it into impractical bibliographic chimeras that serve no purpose beyond "challenging" the undisputed, self-effacing usefulness of the bog-standard codex. In both cases, there is the danger of overstating the neat but ultimately sterile idea that the container is the content, but I'm hoping for better from Inscription: we'll see! Part Two of this post will follow in due course. Meanwhile, if like me you find the idea of taking a punt on this enterprise compelling – there will only be 500 copies, so you may need to be quick – here is the Inscription flyer, with subscription details:

1. "O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, / Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? / O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?" (Among School Children). Extra points for knowing which song by The Eagles quotes (sorta) that famous last line.

2. As I often had to explain, for a library to have a photocopy of a Shakespeare First Folio is not the same thing as having a First Folio. No-one is going to want to fly from California to examine it.

3. Cataloguers are generally assigned specialist subject areas. Medical textbooks, however, are reserved as a punishment detail.