I love books. I love reading them, I love writing them, I love buying them, I love receiving them, I love giving them, I even love smelling them. But I don’t just love them for what’s inside: I am a definite judger of books by their covers. And their end-papers. And their margins. The book itself—not the text but the collection of pages between two boards—thrills and enthralls me. When I was an undergrad I used to go to the stacks of the library and delight in blowing the dust off of books that hadn’t been touched in a generation. (Here they’re too handy with the Swiffers to build up enough for a decent cloud.) I was thrilled to discover upon coming to graduate school that, even if they over-dusted their stacks, there were actually professors who thought these blockish things were a joy as well—and better than that, a legitimate subject of scholarly attention!
My very first year of grad school presented me with a course in scholarly editing that dramatically altered the trajectory of my studies (shifting from medieval language interactions to medieval manuscript culture may not seem like a sea change to anybody else, but to a grad student it’s practically a religious conversion). I followed it up with a course on bibliography (the description of physical books, not the writing of Works Cited pages) and had a ball measuring page thickness and counting quires in hundred-year-old printed vellum artist books. I then took paleography (the study of manuscripts) in Iceland, and let me tell you, you’ve never seen a room full of more excited people than our classroom on the day when we got to see the priceless manuscript of the Snorra Edda. I believe the instructor accused us of drooling.
Now that I’m working on my dissertation, I’m digging around in (mostly photocopies of) medieval books looking for marginalia—little comments and doodles made by scribes and readers wherever they found space in the manuscript. Nowadays they discourage us from writing in our library books, but it’s an age-old tradition. Even those naughty drawings that more prim-and-proper folks usually try to erase or scribble out have a long tradition; I remember seeing a medieval sketch of a nun picking unmentionable male body parts from a tree where they were growing. Truly, modern teenagers have not come up with anything that somebody didn’t already do more creatively 500 years ago. That’s not what I study myself, but you’d better bet that was the first thing that caught people’s eye when scholars started caring about marginalia a generation ago! I’m fascinated instead by the little complaints, the little notes-to-self, the verses of love poetry, and the random drawings of fish and flowers and creatures you might think the artist thought looked like a lion or an elephant only because he’d never seen a real one. They give us just a glimpse of what it was like to work in a medieval library. Turns out, it was a good deal like it is to work in a modern one now: it’s always too cold or too hot, your eyes get bleary, your hand cramps up, and pretty much anything you can think of seems abundantly more interesting than whatever it is you’re actually supposed to be doing.
Maybe that’s why we get so many mistakes in manuscripts. Interestingly enough, words like “not” tend to get skipped quite a bit. It makes a rather large difference whether “the king heard his prayer” or “heard not,” but half the time the mistake goes entirely unnoticed.
Not that the printing press has saved us from the plague of error, of course: for the clumsy phrase “slip of the pen” we simply now have the peppy little word “typo.” I make a habit of keeping an eye out for interesting typographical errors in books, especially in antique stores that sell books printed before the advent of the all-knowing Microsoft Word spell-check. I remember one old book that caught my eye by the title on the spine, which read, “John Donne’s Fright From Medievalism.” What was it about the medieval that so frightened Dr. Donne? I wondered, pulling the book off the shelf and opening it. The title page read—I assume correctly—“John Donne’s FLIGHT from Medievalism.” Eminently more comprehensible, but somehow sadly less intriguing.
You would think that at least modern typography would have saved us from the typical medieval problem of not being able to read the handwriting in the book you’re trying to copy, but it’s not so. Just recently, I had occasion to poke my nose into the French section of our library and encountered another mistake that amused me greatly. Here is what the book was actually titled:
(“Parler vulgairement” or “speaking vulgarly,” though it’s a pun because the book is about medieval French language, which was called “vulgar” that is, vernacular—like the Vulgate Bible, which just means that it’s translated from Hebrew and Greek.)
But the cover designer clearly thought, “Hey, it’s a book about medieval things. Let’s use a font on the cover that looks like a medieval manuscript hand.” Hence the cover and flyleaf:
And the poor book binder hired to add an institutional hard cover to protect the paperback one inside clearly looked at the title and thought, “Hmm, that’s not English. Oh well, guess I can figure it out.” Hence the title on the hardback spine:
Which all adds up to a very confused graduate student staring at the shelf saying, “Well, that’s the call number, but "Darler Gulgairement" is NOT the title I’m looking for!”
Typo-hunting is the great pastime of grammar geeks. This version of the game might well be considered the next level, both because examples are rarer and because they’re usually so amusing when you find them. It’s like Where’s Waldo in the library.
You know, for when you need a study break.
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