VWB Lectures 2010: Belgium’s First Printers (24 February) - Color on 15th-century Title Pages (28 April)

Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience at Antwerp –formerly Stadsbibliotheek - I am constantly using EHC now to refer to this heritage library, and I invite my readership to do the same – has the biggest collection of rare books and documents in the Dutch speaking part of this country (not counting our Royal Library at Brussels). And this library has the added advantage of being located in proximity of the Museum Plantin-Moretus.

EHC fittingly took it upon itself to embrace the VWB lectures series, VWB as in Vlaamse Werkgroep Boekgeschiedenis, society of book historians in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. These lectures on current themes in book history have become part and parcel of EHC’s calendar.

Venue 4 times a year is Wednesday at 5 pm in EHC’s Nottebohmzaal, a 19^th-century hall filled with books which for every tourist in Antwerp is a must see.

Too much related to paper heritage in this country is still a best kept secret, and these pages are vibrantly trying to get much out of that category. We have in this country a paper heritage so fine, that I think foreign visitors should travel to us to become acquainted. Just like one should travel for Old Masters - Old Masters shouldn’t travel for us.

Now on to the first VWB lectures in 2010. On Wednesday 24 February, Renaud Adam, from the Rare Books Department at Belgium’s Royal Library (Brussels), is holding a lecture in French on Belgium’s first 15^th-century printers, entitled “Alost, le berceau de l'imprimerie en Belgique? Retour sur l'atelier de Jean de Westphalie et Thierry Martens (1473-1474).”

We have previously mentioned the new census on Dirk Martens that Renaud Adam and Alexandre Vanautgaerden have published (ISBN 978-2-503-53112-0 ; jointly with Passeurs de textes: 978-2-503-53118-2). Next to well-known bibliographies for incunabula and Van Iseghem for Martens, Adam & Vanautgaerden should become a new staple in reference libraries.

On Wednesday 28 April, Rémi Mathis (Bibliothèque de l'Université Paris Descartes/CNRS) will hold a talk in English entitled “Red in a black and white world. Coloured title-pages in early printed books.” He will no doubt summarize the most important findings about the use of colored ink on title pages in the earliest days of hand-printed books.

Venue: EHC – Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience - Hendrik Conscienceplein 4, 2000 Antwerp – Wednesdays, 5.00-6.30 pm. Entrance is free.

Marie-Claude Felton: To Publish and Perish: The Misadventures of Self-Publishing Authors in 18th Century Paris (Antwerp, 24 June 2009)

Vlaamse Werkgroep Boekgeschiedenis has the pleasure to announce its second lecture in book history: "To Publish and Perish: The misadventures of self-publishing authors in 18th-century Paris." Speaker is Marie-Claude Felton (EHESS, Paris/UQAM, Montreal).

Ms. Felton's abstract: In 18th-century Paris, the booksellers' guild maintained a well-established monopoly over the publishing business: no book was to be printed or sold by anyone outside of their corporation. During a century when authors sought more independence and began to assert their authority and rights over their work, however, some writers tried to get published on their own terms without having to relinquish their rights to a bookseller (and publisher), which was then the rule. The study of these authors' multiple endeavors allows us to examine the tensions that subsisted between authors and publishers in a world still dominated by privileges, and to realize just how far some writers would go to see their talent and knowledge be immortalized in print.

Venue: Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, Hendrik Conscienceplein 4, 2000 Antwerpen (Nottebohmzaal). Wednesday 24 June 2009 at 5 p.m. (until 6.30 p.m.).

Entrance free, but advance notification preferred. Lecture followed by drink. Notification: via Boekgeschiedenis.be, joint site of the Flemish chapter of Book researchers and practitioners, and of the Bibliophile Society at Antwerp.

"The Jewish Book in a Christian World": International Conference at Antwerp (25-27 June, 2008)

With the recently inaugurated exhibition "Hebraica veritas: Sprak God Hebreeuws? (did God Speak Hebrew, see our April 25, 2008 post)" up and running until August 17, 2008, the Plantin-Moretus Museum (MPM) is about to close its Spring season festively with the international conference "The Jewish Book in a Christian World" (25-27 June, 2008).

Apart from MPM and the University of Antwerp's IJS (Institute of Jewish Studies), co-organizers are the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), and the Universitair Centrum Sint-Ignatius at Antwerp (UCSIA).

Keynote lecturer at 5 pm on Wednesday at the City Hall of Antwerp is Princeton professor of Renaissance history and the history of scholarship, Anthony Grafton. Grafton's first book was an intellectual biography of Joseph Scaliger. He's been a frequent visitor at the University of Leiden, where he received an honorary doctorate in 2006, and where he has found colleagues to edit Scaliger's collected letters. The University of Leiden Library has a Scaliger Institute to promote research of its holdings.

This blogger has some interesting links in connection with Grafton's latest book, Codex in Crisis. It's a bibliophile edition limited to 250 copies based on an article from the New Yorker in which Grafton expresses to what extend some reserve is due about digitization.

On Thursday June 26, 2008, two sessions will be held at this conference: "The Printing of the Hebrew Bible and Judaica in Antwerp and the Low Countries" (morning) and "Christian Publishers and Readers of Hebrew Literature (afternoon). Location is the Print Room at the Plantin-Moretus Museum (morning) and University of Antwerp's Hof van Liere (afternoon).

A morning session on Friday June 27, 2008 will close the conference: "The Impact of Print on Jewish Culture." Location that day is the University of Antwerp's Hof van Liere. The conference will be held entirely in English. Admission is free, but registration is mandatory.

Illustration: cover of the exhibition catalogue of Hebraica veritas. Book design of the catalogue by Louis van den Eede, who drew the front cover's design by hand. Details: Hebraica veritas. Christoffel Plantijn en de Christelijke Hebraïsten. Catalogus bij de tentoonstelling: Hebraica veritas. Sprak God Hebreeuws? Antwerpen, Museum Plantin-Moretus/Prentenkabinet, 16 mei-17 augustus 2008. No ISBN. Inquiries should be made at the museum.

On an Anjou Bible, book surgeons and funding

Our cultural heritage is a commodity, one that draws researchers and tourists from abroad to our country. A source of pride, admiration and, come on, let's not be coy, envy. It is our country's duty to see economic value in that, a ruse to foster technical expertise long-term. Not only to keep know-how in our country to preserve this heritage in the most appropriate of ways, but perhaps also to offer expertise internationally as a viable enterprise.

This was more or less Professor Jan van der Stock's plea in 2005, at the inauguration of the "Van der Weyden Chair - Paul and Dora Janssen" for research on illumination. Jan Van der Stock is an able mix of the professorial with the entrepreneurial -to our knowledge, he's the only professor ever to have realised a named chair in Humanities, at least at Leuven.

We are very pleased that civic duty did not fall on deaf ears at the Inbev-Baillet Latour Fund. Recently, this Fund has awarded 80.000 € to a restauration project on the "Anjou-Bible", a mid 14th-century precious manuscript, kept in a vault at Leuven. In matters of culture, the Fund has chosen restoration projects as its focus.

Today's issue of Campuskrant, the magazine of the University of Leuven (KUL) (June 11, 2008, 19th year, no.10), opens with the story. We see color pictures of the richly illuminated manuscript, and of the conservator, Lieve Watteeuw, beaming.

The manuscript, we gather, was executed at the behest of Robert I of Anjou. In the early 16th century, the manuscript came to the Arras College of the university at Leuven, by the doings of the bishop of Arras. And today it still belongs to the university, as it is preserved at the Maurits Sabbe Library (Theology Department).

The conservation project is a co-production between llluminare at Leuven and KIK-IRPA, the Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium's Artistic Heritage, based at Brussels.
For Illuminare, Jan Van der Stock will supervise, and Lieve Watteeuw will execute.

The manuscript will receive a new conservation binding. All folia will be taken out of the old early 20th-century binding that was too tight and detrimental to the manuscript. The folia will be cleaned, and the color layers will be stabilized. Here are a few photos of damage to miniatures on Illuminare's website. The folia will also be digitized. Leuven plans to put the manuscripts on show in 2011 in the newly planned city museum "M" (Museum Leuven), where visitors will be able to leaf through the digital copy.

Lieve Watteeuw is one of these conservation specialists, whose importance can hardly be overrated, especially when they happen to be rather few. A "book surgeon", at home with parchment, paper, illumination and leather bindings, and it was excellent news that she received public accolade on February 21, 2005 in the shape of the Flemish Community Prize 2004 in the category of Cultural Heritage.

We planned to dwell somewhat longer on Watteeuw's doctoral thesis at Leuven (see June 6, 2008 post, "Hora est"), entitled "The Touch of Chronos: Caring for the Medieval Manuscript (1731-1937)." Our source is the recently promoted researcher's own summary.

Watteeuw undertakes investigation of how the material aspect of the medieval manuscript has been treated and altered throughout the ages, and how it was been viewed by art and library historians, and conservators-restorators. Apparently, it wasn't until recently that the link between the material appearance of a codex and its contents has been taken into account, which explains "complete acts of destruction", for instance when codices were rebound, and their old covers done away with, over a period of the last two hundred years.

Watteeuw's thesis has three parts. Part I offers a history of the preservation and restauration practices of manuscripts, bindings and miniatures, from the Middle Agens until the 19th century. Watteeuw is using traces of book care in archival material, the inventories of the Burgundian Ducal Collection at the Royal Library at Brussels, and the Chapter of the Church of Our Lady at Antwerp. This history touches upon a historiography of mentalities, to explain why certain practices were favored in certain epochs.

In no period has the medieval manuscript suffered so much as at the hands of the 19th century antiquarians, who nevertheless rekindled an interest in the Middle Ages. Part II explores the heritage conservation practices or that era. Watteeuw also develops a methodology for the intervention on book and manuscripts for this day. She does this at the hand of one single, very famous corpus at the Royal Library of Belgium: the 280 surviving manuscripts, out of an original 900, once in the library or librije of the Court of Burgundy. Watteeuw investigates the fate of this collection from 1731 onwards, when the Burgundian Library fell into desuetude, until 1937, marking the end of the career of Charles Weckesser as bookbinder in the service of the Royal Library.

In Part III, entitled "Fight Against Chronos," Watteeuw takes the material fate of four medieval manuscripts as a starting point to gather the contrasting responses of bookbinders, restorators, antiquarians, archivists and librarians to them. Both the exterior book cover as the interior illumination are considered. Watteeuw also discusses what present-day manipulations such as exhibiting and making photographic facsimiles do to such artefacts.

Jan Van der Stock is quoted in today's Campuskrant as saying that the history of how the Anjou-Bible actually originated at a French court, reads like a thriller. We have the feeling that in Watteeuw's PhD material sits a book that does too.

Annual convention of librarians and book researchers (Flanders chapter), May 30, 2008

The Dutch-speaking or Flemish chapter of rare book librarians and book history researchers, the Vlaamse Werkgroep Boekgeschiedenis (see: Book and Manuscript Research) convened at the city of Ghent on May 30, 2008.

Location was MIAT, museum voor industriële archeologie en textiel, an old textile factory with an historical approach to industrial technology. The museum simulates a walk through time from the 18th to the 20th century. As MIAT not only emphasizes textiles, but also printing technology, it houses a fair amount of printing presses and composition casters.

During a guided tour at the end of the day, the participants got to see a Blaeu wooden hand-press from the 18th century, the Stanhope, and other hand-presses in iron, among them one driven by steam. The two composition casters F4 and C4 came from the Harris Intertype Corporation of New York.

But first came the household meeting, with an overview of 2007, several announcements, and a lecture, followed by critical remarks from a referee, by a Dutch researcher currently working at Antwerp, Janneke Weijermars: Het literaire bedrijf in de Hollandse tijd 1815-1830 (The Literary Trade in the Dutch Period 1815-1830).

Weijermars' study is part of a large-scale project studying "Literature in Context" led by Dutch professor Lisa Kuitert (Amsterdam) and Belgian professor Piet Couttenier (Antwerp): De Nederlandse literatuur en het literaire bedrijf in het Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden 1815-1830: interactie en differentiatie, about Dutch literature and the literary trade in the fifteen years during which the Southern Netherlands (more or less Belgium shortly before its independence in 1830) were united once more with Holland, with Dutch king Willem I as ruler.

From more than one standpoint, this reunion fell uneasy on the South. In reaction to a Dutch society that was founded in the North in 1784 called Maatschappij tot 't Nut van 't Algemeen, also called "het Nut", and aimed at the edification of its population through education, social work, and good books, a society came to existence in the South in 1825 in the city of Mechelen (Malines) called the Society for the Distribution of Good Books. This society chose its "good books" to be of a catholic signature, partly in reaction to het Nut and its protestant stamp.

Weijermars presented one case in all its ramifications: a publishing project that lasted about three years (1825-1828), executed by Hanicq, printers at Mechelen, which consisted of printing religious books in series, in Dutch translation mostly from Latin, French and German, in a small format and aimed at a large audience.

Weijermars has so far researched a few case studies for the period, applying Pierre Bourdieu, but with a unifying idea for the study still lacking. The audience was quick with critical remarks and useful suggestions. As an overarching history of the book trade with regard to Flanders has yet to be written, this project seemed welcome indeed.

From the announcements during the household meeting, we retain many that deserve attention in separate posts. Here, we'd like to enumerate the Belgian researchers who are scheduled to deliver talks at SHARP 2008 on "Teaching and Text", the 16th annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, held at Brookes University, Oxford (24-28 June, 2008).

-Jürgen Pieters (professor of Dutch literature, University of Ghent) together with PhD students Christophe van der Vorst and Lise Gosseye, reporting on their project of reading Constantijn Huygens in a new historicist light;
-Chris Coppens (University of Leuven) on a topic in the 16th century Italian book trade;
-Pierre Delsaerdt (University of Antwerp) with typographic analysis of Christopher Plantin's dictionaries;
-Kevin Absilis (University of Antwerp), on Pascale Casanova's systemic model for studyingliterature, and its use for book publishing;
-Janneke Weijermars (University of Antwerp) on a systemic model by Siegfried Schmidt;
-And stretching it, professor of China Studies in the U.S. Hilde De Weerdt, who did her graduate work at Leuven.

In teasing reference to the speaker's topic and in mild jest -professor De Weerdt aside- it was said that for once Belgian speakers at SHARP outnumber the Dutch.