Jacqueline Reid-Walsh
This blog returns to the 17th century turn-up book, The Beginning, Progress and End Of Man held in Penn State Library Special Collections. I have long been fascinated by it for several reasons: its design as an interactive object, its broad range of implied reader-viewer-player including adult and child, semiliterate and literate, and its status as cheap print like the ballads, broadsides and chapbooks discussed by Tessa Watt (1991). I have focused on the design affordances and the visual-textual interactive engagements they invite. What fascinates me is the playful possibilities of the bi-modal text since an interactor may lift the flaps up and down according to the directions or against the “grain” of the conventional words. An interactor may also play with the accordion folds and arrange the panels differently.
What I never really considered was the paper and its qualities. My first engagements were in restricted conditions such as being attached to a large volume (1650,1688/9). Many times I work with paper facsimiles or digital copies. I have been able to learn about the interactivity-which is marvelous. But I never really thought about the substrate and how this impacts the interactivity. After COVID closures finished and we are working with the items again, I am re-encountering the turn-up anew.
I have been reading up a bit on papermaking (Hunter, 1947), and fortunate to have engaged in a paper making session with Bill Minter. I also listen to lectures by experts, most recently by Professor Timothy Barrett of the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa. In his fascinating lecture, he talked about the qualities of 15th century paper and also about paper that was not considered “good” quality. During the chat session after his lecture, he discussed the importance of all hand-made paper and how non-quality paper expanded the readership of different classes and ages. Emboldened by Dr. Barrett’s lecture, I had a question about 17th century cheap paper and was fortunate to have a zoom session with him. I asked about 17th century paper and I wondered if the affordances of the substrate provide fluidity to the strip and turnable flaps. I also explained I was intrigued by the color (which appears light tan) and what that might signify. Is this due to its age? Was this paper more durable? Was it whitened somehow when published? Or was it always not white?
I also consulted Philip Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography, 2nd edition (1972), where he talks about English hand-made paper. He writes that there was little English-made white paper in the mid-17th century so it was imported from abroad. Up to 1670, the paper English mills produced was brown and connected to the fact that English people wore mainly wool so there was a lack of linen rags (Gaskell, 60).
On the EBBA project site, there is an article called “Other Common Papers: Papermaking and Ballad Sheet Sizes” by Gerald Egan and Eric Nebeker (2007). They refer to Alfred Shorter who describes how “coarser rags, netting, cordage, canvas, bagging, and other materials of flax and hemp [were used] in the manufacture of brown and other common papers” (1971, 14; emphasis added). Egan and Nebeker continue, “Brown papers were used, as today, for wrapping objects and for other non-print purposes.” At the end they speculate about what paper was used for the cheapest of print products, broadsides: “To meet the needs of the lowest end of the print market, the broadside ballad market, papermakers probably used some combination of linen and the ‘coarser rags, netting, cordage, canvas, bagging, and other materials of flax and hemp’ that Shorter describes, in order to produce the cheapest “white” paper that was suitable for print.”
I have looked at Beginning, Progress and End of Man using a light and magnifier and noticed chain lines wires lines. It would be fascinating to examine the turn-up more closely to see if we can determine the paper’s original colour, make-up, and composition.
References
- Egan, Gerald and Eric Nebeker (2007). “Other Common Papers: Papermaking and Ballad Sheet Sizes.” https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/papermaking
- Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972.
- Hunter, Dard. Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. New York: Dover, 1978.
- Shorter, Alfred Henry. Paper Making in the British Isles: An Historical and Geographical Study. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971.
- Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1991.