Breaking the shackles of time: Books, Writing, and Practical Paleography

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are printed lots of funny squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."   

                                                              - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)

You knew we'd get to this eventually, right? Before any other label I may affix to myself, I'm a novelist, a writer, a storyteller. The world I see around me isn't a world of atoms and elements, it's a world of stories waiting to be told.

And we have unfortunately forgotten more stories than we remember. Because we only remember what was recorded.

The constant struggle with this project isn't tracking down the right tool or the correct material. The real struggle can be forced into the old Journalistic construction of the W's: "What do we know? Who recorded it? When did they record it? How did they know it? Why was this saved when all else was lost?"

This was almost a "Thoughts from the peeler" post, but then I remembered that there was an actual guild or two involved in the transmission of the Elizabethan Culture from pen to posterity. The "Who" in the above question is primarily focused through the Worshipful Company of Stationers and the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks. These two groups are responsible for the lion's share of what we know about our period of study.

As Carl Sagan said at the top of the page, it all boils down to dark squiggles on dead trees (or dead animals in many cases).

Most of the information we have from the 16th century was recorded under the auspices of two groups: The Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks (who aren't really a livery company at this point), and the Worshipful Company of Stationers.

All records of births, deaths, and christenings were recorded by the local parish clerk. Books and broadsheets were printed on the presses of the Stationer's Company.

Yes, I'm working on a letterpress demonstration, but I'm not sure what form that will take. I've put some feelers out locally and will probably be working with someone who has already built up the necessary setup for printing with movable type. I'd wager though, that we're going to be extrapolating from a modern setup.

To keep things within the period constraints we've set for ourselves, I'll be binding a book in a manner that's correct for our period. There's an astonishing amount of gear involved in binding, though, so we'll be doing some preparatory projects in wood and metal just to get us to the starting point for that project.

In the meantime, I am at work preparing quills and teaching myself a new hand.

The preparation of a quill will be the focus for a near-term post, but I've demonstrated that craft many times at renaissance faires and events, so I'm not really learning anything new while doing it.

Yes, a new hand. This is where the "practical paleography" comes in. For our purposes, a hand is a method of rendering the alphabet in a culturally-specific way. I'll write more about this as I go along, but the method of writing used to record important documents in the 16th century was known as the Secretary Hand and it's damn near illegible to modern eyes.

Translating any manuscript documents from the period into is so time-consuming that the Folger Shakespeare Library and Oxford University have  put out a call for help from the internet to translate more period documents faster than they can alone. Part of my goal with this specific project will be to help in that effort. Not only will this effort increase the number of available records from the time of Shakespeare, you can also contribute to the new edition of the Oxford English dictionary!

You too can help out and learn more about this project at shakespearesworld.org

Anyway, that's where I am at the moment and what I'm working on during the rainy season which is in full effect hereabouts. My old back injury flared up this week as the result of a minor mishap, so I think I'll be spending some time indoors anyway, cutting quills and reading about the chemistry of ink and the denaturation of collagen in parchment... nerd heaven.

- Scott

Further Reading:

Advice for Reading Secretary Hand, Folger Shakepeare Library (PDF)
http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/mediawiki/media/images_pedia_folgerpedia_mw/2/21/Alphabet_Abbreviations.pdf

Bonus Video:

I thought this was especially appropriate since we kicked off this project with a quote from Anthony Bourdain. As part of a project he's working on with Balvenie Scotch Whiskey, he paid a visit to Arion Press in San Francisco. They are one of the last of their breed, printing and binding fine books with movable lead type. Their methods are modern by our measure, but very old fashioned and very cool by modern metrics.

What I did on my summer vacation, or "How this project got stepped on by a giant robot"

For the past little while, I've been distracted from this project by an overwhelming surge of The Other Things that make up my life. For this I apologize because I've been less than communicative. Sometimes I get so far into my own head that I'm out of cell range. My wife and I went on our first vacation in years and I saw parts of my own state that I've never had the privilege of exploring before.

Sometimes you just have to get in the car and go for a three-day drive.

No leather was worked, no wood was carved, no sheep were sheared. I did clean out my shop before it started raining and we built another oven and baked some bread, but that was revisiting a guild that already had its checkmark.

For all intents and purposes, the Renaissance Artisan was 'out' for most of the summer.

Which isn't the same as saying that I've been idle...

As you probably know that before anything else that I do, I am a writer. I make sense of the world by telling stories about it. Whether it's history or fantasy, it's all words to me. When I'm lucky, I get to share those stories with others. Writing is my vocation and my first love. This means that at any given moment, I have more than one project on the docket and often when a deal is being considered, it is confidential until all the papers are signed.

Which is a long way to go toward saying that this week, I signed a contract with a small UK-based publisher called Crooked Cat Publishing to bring my humorous science fiction novel Howard Carter Saves the World to bookstores. The official announcement was made by my publisher yesterday via social media.

I've been bouncing off the walls ever since.

Howard Carter is a novel that I just sat down and told the first story that occurred to me, taking it wherever my fancy led, no matter how bizarre. Aliens who learned about earth by watching Sesame Street? Done. Secretive government agencies? Mysterious universities? Mad scientists? Got it all. Giant robots? Oh, the giant robots...  I wrote it all in public (rather like I've been doing here) posting chapter-by-woefully-unedited-chapter on a blog, writing live and in front of a studio audience. No laugh tracks allowed!

If you want to read a bit of it, here's a free short story that gives you a general sense of the storytelling and characters from the novel. 

Which is a long way of going about telling you that I'm sorry I dropped this to run off and do that, but I will be back in the workshop in a week or so. I have a half-finished costrel and a shoemaking project in the wings. I've also been making connections to get a proper handle on the life of the Worshipful Company of Woolmen, plus the weavers, spinners, mercers, and tailors that lie at the end of that supply chain. 

In the meantime, I have some up-front work to do on getting Howard Carter ready for print and I'll be ducking in and out as my editor and publisher need me. If you would like to join me on that part of the journey as well as this one, I'm inviting you to come with me on the next step of the journey as we prepare Howard for his debut at Amazon and other online booksellers.

Side note: Would it be cheating to use this as part of a study of the Worshipful Companies of Stationers and Clerks?  Just a thought...

However it goes, my goal in that project and this one is to put out a story that is good enough for you to read and enjoy, one that you love enough to not only read but to recommend to your friends. I've worked in publishing at enough different levels to know one thing for certain: positive word of mouth is how success happens.

There will be much, much more later.

- Scott