Fabulously Illustrated and Easy to Carry

Just a quick post to direct readers to my colleague Nancy Shawcross’s write-up of a fascinating new acquisition here at Penn:

http://www.library.upenn.edu/rbm/featured/Janet.html

In the last decade of the eighteenth century–amid some of the most tumultuous political times in the history of France–Pierre-Étienne Janet publishes an almanac of love songs in a richly-decorated binding. There is nothing in the text, the plates, or the hand-wrought covers that bespeak the Revolution, the execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, or the war being waged against Austria. The miniature book for ladies offers love poems–to be sung to existing tunes–interspersed with engraved plates, some of which evoke classical or medieval themes…

Always check the endpapers

For years scholars (including many from Penn!) have reminded us that print and manuscript cultures are far from exclusive. Printed forms with handwritten additions, handwritten diaries within printed borders, printed books interleaved with as much manuscript as printed text, are just some examples of this inter-mixing. Despite this knowledge though, I’m always delighted to find print nesting within what we tend to describe as manuscript and vice versa. I was browsing through one of our eighteenth-century manuscript commonplace books (UPenn Ms. Codex 782) a few months ago trying to identify the text when I noticed several printed pieces pasted onto the endpapers and rear board of the manuscript. I snapped some pictures and moved on. Later, looking back at the picture and reading the text, I realized we had two remarkable and unique pieces of print.

UPenn Ms. Codex 782. Rear pastedown.

The first of these is a handy guide to arithmetic and weights and measures  engraved by William Chinnery in 1744 [1]. It was “design’d to be bind up with Cyphering Books” to assist a scribe with difficult calculations and to serve as a reference. Given the dual content of this manuscript book, primarily a copied text of the Philosophical Transactions but with accounting leaves excised at the end, it’s possible that it was sold with the printed Chinnery sheet already pasted in.

UPenn Ms. Codex 782, f.127r

An unrecorded engraved sheet doesn’t come around every day but I found myself even more fascinated by the second set of printed inclusions pasted in the manuscript. What first appeared as newspaper clippings turned out to be a typefounder’s advertisement or specimen. In the age of digital fonts and typesetting we often take for granted what a big deal a new type design could be in the hand-press era. In other words, type had to be physically created and designed mould by mould.

This particular type specimen comes from the type founder Joseph Jackson (1733-1792) who was especially known for his development of new typefaces to print Persian and Devanagari scripts, reflecting the growing interest in disseminating works in those languages from the British territories in South Asia.

Specimen of Devanagari type published by Joseph Jackson in 1785. ESTC T193655. Cambridge University copy (ECCO).

The specimen pasted into the manuscript here at Penn, though not of one of Jackson’s South Asian types is not in James Mosley’s list of British type specimens and is otherwise unknown.