The Nature of the Page. Joshua Calhoun
how the language of blots seeps into the King James Bible, marking another well-known king, King David, with an indelible reminder of his past mistakes. Ultimately, I argue that metaphors for thinking about error and reformation are linked to common writing technologies, specifically to the fundamentally different affordances of parchment and paper.
Chapter 4, “Sizing Matters: Annotating Animals in Renaissance England,” reveals a surprising textual interaction between animals and readers. The most obscure natural ingredient in early printed books, and one that is almost uniformly overlooked despite scholarly interest in Renaissance reading practices, is “animal sizing,” a viscous mixture made from gelatinized animal parts and used to coat the surface of paper so that ink would not blot into its fibers. Animals were integral elements of the literary ecosystem. Demonstrating how Renaissance reading habits and reading habitats are systemically linked, my work breaks new ground by arguing that scholarly data on book use and book survival in the period are skewed—and that future studies can produce more reliable data by recognizing the role of animals in paper books.
Focusing on John Donne’s “A Valediction: Of the Book” and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Chapter 5, “This Book, as Long Lived as the Elements: Climate Control, Biodeterioration, and the Poetics of Decay,” explores book biodeterioration across time by considering how Renaissance writers imagined book decay then, and how Renaissance scholars imagine book decay now. Taking its cue from the Sonnets themselves, the chapter explores the husbandry of paper memorials—how writers imagined paper as a living and dying monument that could outlast its own unique copy text. I explore these concerns, penned in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from the point of view of a reader in an archival library in the twenty-first century, a century that if current environmental models prove true, could be the last full century in which original copies of Donne’s and Shakespeare’s poetry on paper can be preserved intact. The indistinct ecologies under consideration in this final chapter are the fossil fuels and nuclear energy used to create climate-controlled archival microbiomes where we can lose sight of the corruptible nature of books and of the poetics of decay.
Each of the five chapters explores a mode of negotiation with paper media: making paper (Chapter 1), reading paper (Chapter 2), editing on paper (Chapter 3), annotating printed paper (Chapter 4), preserving paper records (Chapter 5). And yet, focused as the chapters are on legibility and use—on readers and writers negotiating with an environment in order to record and transmit and store ideas—the chapter progression also works out the life arc of a paper text; this book’s two parts, “Legible Ecologies” and “Indistinct Ecologies,” describe the two broad phases in the ecological life of a handmade page: construction and destruction. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss details like cellulose and flax to show how a sheet of paper comes into existence in Renaissance England. Chapters 3–5 consider paper after its construction and examine how annotation and revision and nonhuman biodeterioration affect its contents and its uses (and users). But this work also suggests that we might pull the frame back even farther, revealing that the progression described above is not only about the life of a book, but also, and more fundamentally, about the lives of plants and animals and minerals as they move through society in textual form. Early handmade paper is a case study for a much broader methodology; I strive, in these pages, to use paper’s ephemeral form to call attention to the ecosystemic relationship that always exists between human ideas and nonhuman matter.
Always our readings of texts are broadened or narrowed by what we acknowledge as part of the creation process. When we consider how the human species seeks to make sense of the world by using the organisms around them to make records of the past, when we consider how many plants and animals and minerals are housed in archival libraries and how vital these records are and may be to humanities and environmental humanities scholars alike, we could call disinterest in the ecology of texts an embarrassing oversight. We could also call it a prelude to a singularly exciting future direction for collaborative scholarship. Whether or not there is an ethical obligation to, in McKenzie’s words, “show the human presence” in texts, we have long acknowledged that we cannot really make sense of texts in the world without accounting for human presence. And whether or not there is an ethical obligation to show the nonhuman presence in texts, I do not think we can make sense of the textual habits of humans without accounting for textual habitats, how the human species seeks to make sense of the world by using the organisms around them to make records of the past. Natural resources are provisional, seasonal, and geographically specific. To accept them as givens in the stories we tell about texts is to miss out on a vibrant history of the ecological negotiations and technological contrivances used to hold and share and save written records of human ideas.
PART I
LEGIBLE ECOLOGIES
CHAPTER 1
Substances Used to Convey Ideas: Ship Sails, Cellulose, and Spinning Wheels
The art of Paper-making ought to be regarded as one of the most useful which has ever been invented in any age or country; for it is manifest, that every other discovery must have continued useless to society, if it could not have been disseminated.
—Matthias Koops, Historical Account of the SubstancesWhich Have Been Used to Describe Events,and to Convey Ideas, from the Earliest Date,to the Invention of Paper
The lack of paper in England, due at first, no doubt, to the absence of any significant linen industry, meant that the Shakespearean text (like the vast majority of other English Renaissance texts) was a “foreign” body.
—Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass,
“The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”
In John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress, an allegorical representation of America (as Columbia) leads pioneer expansion westward (see Figure 2).1 Hovering above a river, she holds a large volume labeled “School Book” in her right hand, pressed against her breast; below the book and coiled around the crook of her right arm is a telegraph wire that strings along behind her.2 In the sunlit landscape at Columbia’s back, expectant trains cross open prairies westward toward cleared but train-trackless spaces. One of the trains appears to be set on a collision course with an enclave of teepees. Farther back and eastward, ships of different sizes sail around the tip of Manhattan and into the Hudson River, and the scene fades off in the upper right of the painting into rolling hills against a bright morning sky. It is the East, and Columbia is the sun. Before her, a shadowy landscape awaits refinement. Deeper into these shadows, Native Americans and buffalo and bear and deer flee. We cannot see the Pacific Ocean, a boundary that might suggest the limits of expansion.3
FIGURE 2. American Progress, chromolithograph by George A. Crofutt (ca. 1873) after 1872 painting by John Gast.
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