The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun
in early texts to the point that they have become invisible to us. There are notable exceptions, however. Though most hairs in the pages of books are miniscule, and one has to look closely to see them, I find it hard to ignore long strands of hair that wind through the margins or printed areas of Renaissance books, even when the text on the page is not poeticizing the locks of a beloved. A feather embedded in a page of George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres is even harder to overlook; its placement in the margin points up a self-blazoning by the mourning lover in Dan Bartholomew.43 Are we licensed to read this into the lines? Or to comment on the appropriateness of a feather appearing here, in a volume so preoccupied with textual production and misproduction, with material integration and disintegration? We can agree that unique instances of human marginalia in Gabriel Harvey’s copy of Gascoigne are noteworthy and are representative of, or at least pertinent to, broader patterns of Renaissance book interactions; might we not argue the same for unique instances of avian marginalia?
Hairs are more common than feathers, but vegetable matter of two varieties is most commonly embedded in paper: (1) bits and pieces of vegetable fibers that made their way into clothing (during flax processing) and finally into paper, and (2) flecks of organic matter, presumably from riparian flora upstream, that were too small to filter out of the papermaker’s vat. (As with the silty brownness described above, seasons and weather patterns affect the flecking of paper.) When one searches for readers’ marks in books, flecks of organic matter can seem purposeful at first glance; in books where readers have used small, marginal tick marks as the primary method of highlighting passages, it is sometimes hard to tell (particularly in microfilm or digital reproductions) if a mark is made by pen on the paper or if the mark is organic matter in the paper. Occasionally a “knot” of organic matter embedded in the page will cause errors in the printed text, interrupting the type. Sometimes a large piece of flax appears in paper, a husky piece of the stalk of the flax plant known as a “shive.”44 An opening from a copy of the second edition of Hoby’s translation of The Book of the Courtier is particularly illustrative of the ecologies of textual production and consumption, and shows evidence of hair interrupting the impression of the typeface of a printed marginal note on the verso, a shive extending off the trimmed edge of the page from the margin of the recto, and a brown, iron gall ink manuscript note below the shive.45
The largest, most noticeable shive I have found, in a copy of the first printing of More’s collected English writings (1557), bears the ink of a printed marginal note. Shives and husks of flax are supposed to be eliminated in the process of converting plant to clothing. One might make the argument that while some bibliographers prefer to focus on textual accidentals and substantives in the printed area, actual readers may have been much more knowledgeable about this type of “ecological accidental.” There is no human intention to be uncovered here, but the unexpected visibility of the world of things on which words were printed in Renaissance England yields an ecologically and poetically playful juxtaposition: the husk of flax interrupts a printed marginal reference to John 14, calling attention to physical substance beneath the citation of a passage in which Jesus explains the metaphysics of his incarnation. More striking, even, than bits of flax are swatches of cloth embedded in paper, like the approximately 12 x 12 millimeter swatch in a copy of Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex: The Law and the Prince.46 Appearing, appropriately, in “The Table of the Contents of the Book,” the texture of the fabric, with threads unravelling into the text block, emphasizes the rag content of the book’s pages. We will never know if a remarkable flax shive or an unpulped rag in the pages of Vaughan’s Bible was the inspiration for his poem “The Book.” What we do know is that Vaughan, like his contemporaries, comprehended the natural origins of paper and understood that flax was literally inhabited—broken in as clothing—before it was used in papermaking.47
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