Engravers of the Lost Ark

I have been fascinated by tales of the Ark of the Covenant from the first time Indiana Jones strapped on his bullwhip and picked up his fedora for Raiders of the Lost Ark (never go on an adventure without your hat!), so I was thrilled to discover an 18th century depiction of the Ark in a book I was cataloguing from the Cardiff Rare Books Collection. Intrigued to see how other engravers depicted this fabled lost artefact, I set out on a quest to unearth some more illustrations from the early printed books in our extensive collections.

An unusual depiction of the Ark from a 1708 edition of Josephus’ “Jewish history” showing the cherubim supporting the mercy seat or “footstool” which appears in some later descriptions. Also surprising to note that the angels here are depicted with hooves.

Copper engraving by Bleyswyk showing Aaron’s rod and a vessel of manna said to be deposited with the Ark

According to the biblical account from the Book of Exodus, the Ark of the Covenant was built at the command of God as a coffer for storing the original stone tablets given to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Exodus provides detailed instructions on how the Ark was to be constructed: it was to be made of shittim (acacia) wood, 2.5 cubits long, 1.5 wide and 1.5 high, and plated entirely in gold with a ring attached to each foot so that it could be carried aloft on wooden poles. A cover of solid gold adorned with two golden cherubim with their wings outstretched was to be placed over the top.

The Ark, veiled with blue cloth and skins, at the head of the Israelite army, from Augustin Calmet’s “Historical, critical, geographical, chronological, and etymological dictionary of the Holy Bible” (1732)

The Ark was carried by the Israelites during their 40 years in the desert and many of their victories are attributed to its supernatural power, from parting the waters of the Jordan to bringing down the walls of Jericho. Priests carried the Ark, usually veiled in cloth and animal skins, in the vanguard of the army and when the host was encamped it had its own sacred tent, known as the Tabernacle. During the construction of King Solomon’s massive temple complex in Jerusalem, a special inner courtroom, called the Holy of Holies, was designed to house the Ark, where it stood as a throne for God’s rule on Earth.

The consecration of the Hebrew commonwealth with the Ark unveiled at the centre, from Calmet

The Ark is believed to have disappeared from Jerusalem after the Babylonians invaded and sacked the city in the sixth century A.D., but since then it  has continued to capture the imaginations of engravers, writers, film-makers, and even the occasional whip-wielding archaeologist!

Depiction of the Ark in the Holy of Holies and an inset showing the cloud between the two cherubim which was said to reveal God’s presence

Hidden killers of the Victorian home

Tonight’s BBC4 documentary, Hidden Killers of the Victorian Home (10pm) reveals just how many ‘innovative’ domestic products and gadgets harboured deadly poisons and diseases.

Researchers from Modern TV spent several days  in Special Collections and Archives consulting illustrated Victorian periodicals, gathering stills for the documentary. Many useful images, often adverts, were found in Punch, the Illustrated London News, The Graphic, and magazines aimed at the Victorian housewife, such as The Sketch, The Queen, and Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. Over 1000 images were gathered in the research process.

The documentary explores the presence of arsenic in Victorian wallpaper, lead in toys’ paint, the unsafe use of gas and electricity, and unsterilised babies’ feeding bottles. It also explores the detrimental effect that the introduction of metal eyelets had on corsetry. The eyelets allowed women’s corsets to be pulled even tighter in the indulgence of fashion, causing considerable damage to the back and internal organs, and increased the risk of miscarriage, as many women continued to wear restrictive corsets throughout pregnancy.

Hidden Killers of the Victorian Home is available on iPlayer until 11th April 2013.

Fore-edge paintings by John T. Beer in the Cardiff Rare Books Collection

I was delighted to discover this week that the Cardiff Rare Books Collection includes two books with fore-edge paintings by the artist John T. Beer. Fore-edge paintings are watercolour illustrations applied to the outside edges of a book’s pages; the technique dates back to before the invention of printing, possibly as early as the 10th century.

A painting of George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, arriving in Wales to a hostile reception appears on Cardiff’s copy of the third edition of Fox’s journals, published in 1765.

John T. Beer was a successful Merseyside clothier and an avid book collector, who turned to fore-edge painting after his retirement and produced hundreds of works between 1884 and 1900. As he was not a professional painter working on commission, Beer was able to select books from his own collection, including several incunabula, and decorate them to his own taste. As our examples show, he often took inspiration from the contents of the book.

“John preaching in the Wilderness”: Beer’s illustration on an early 16th century Latin Bible, printed at Lyon by Jacob Mareschal in 1514.

In the 1600s, some bookbinders even discovered they could paint just inside the fore-edges of a book then cover the outer edges with gilt to create a hidden illustration that was undetectable when the book was closed and visible only when the pages were fanned. Beer did not gild the fore-edges, but he did fan the pages before adding his illustration. Thus, the closed book shows a slightly squashed version of the scene, with the correct proportions only appearing with the pages are fanned open.

The “open” scene on Fox’s journal. The artist would have fanned the pages and gripped them in a vice before applying the watercolour.

Beer did not sell any of his works in his lifetime and left more than 200 fore-edge paintings and painted bindings when he died. His entire collection was sold by Sotheby’s auction house in November, 1903, when these two volumes were apparently purchased for Cardiff Library.

Fanning the pages of the Biblia Sacra to show the more “open” illustration.

Biblia Ectypa: Christoph Weigel’s remarkable engraved pictorial Bible (1695)

There are several hundred early printed Bibles in the Cardiff Rare Books Collection, but I was excited to find this very unusual edition as I was exploring our Early Continental works. The Biblia Ectypa is a fully engraved pictorial Bible, produced by the German artist Christoph Weigel and published in Augsburg in 1695. Instead of being an illustrated Bible (i.e. text embellished by illustrations), the Biblia Ectypa tells the whole Bible story entirely in beautifully-executed copper engravings.

More than 830 highly detailed engravings are employed to tell hundreds of Biblical tales, with authentic costumes, architecture and social customs all skillfully captured. Each illustration is also accompanied by a short caption in Latin and an engraved quotation from the German Bible.

Engraved Bibles attained wide circulation and great popularity in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries and southern Germany became a hub of copper engraving and Bible illustration. The Biblia Ectypa was a critical and commercial success for Weigel, who enjoyed a long career in Augsburg and Nuremburg as a map and print engraver and illustrator, and as publisher of at least seventy books.

Resource guide for women’s history launched for International Women’s Day

Special Collections and Archives is marking International Women’s Day 2013 with the launch of its latest resource guide on women’s history and gender studies. The guide covers sources from the 16th-21st centuries, including:

• Bibliographies and reference works on British women’s history and writing;
• Biographies of the lives of women;
• Gendered children’s literature and comics;
• Conduct, etiquette and advice manuals;
• Broadsides and ballads relating to women as both victims and perpetrators of crime;
• Memoirs, diaries and autobiographies of women;
• Sources relating to women teachers, and girl’s eduction;
• Journals, magazines and ballads on fashion and dress;
• Historical works on women’s health and medical treatment, including the history of midwifery, gynaecology and obstetrics; the history of nursing as a profession; and reports of the Medical Officer for Cardiff, including data on maternity and child welfare;
• A range of material relating to women’s lives around the world, including newspapers from Indian women’s organisations, Spanish Civil War sources related to women, sources relating to women in Australia, European Union and United Nations reports on women, and papers of female slavery abolitionists;
• A wide range of women’s journals and magazines, from society pages to radical suffragette publications;
• Literary works by women, including the papers of Ann Griffiths (poet), Joan Reeder (journalist), Maria Edgeworth (novelist), Felicia Hemans (poet), Mary Tighe (poet), and Lady Sidney Morgan (novelist). Information on female applicants to the Royal Literary Fund, and women writers published by Longmans;
• Musical scores and archives from Morfydd Llwyn Owen (1891-1918), Grace Williams (1906-1977), and Nancy Storace (1765-1817);
• Press cuttings from late 20th century Welsh newspapers on women’s issues;
• Political papers from the British Labour Party and Newport Labour Party on women’s issues; papers of the Labour MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Marion Phillips; the diary of social reformer Beatrice Webb; archives of the Women’s Labour League, journals by Sylvia Pankhurst, and a range of suffragette magazines;
• Books by and archives belonging to female travellers;
• Papers relating to the history of female students at Cardiff University and its predecessors;
• Sources on witchcraft and those accused of its practice (commonly women), in Europe and America;
• Sources on women’s societies

“To many tower’d Camelot”: introducing our illuminated manuscript of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’

One of my favourite discoveries so far from the Cardiff Rare Books Collection is this lovely little illuminated manuscript of The Lady of Shalott, the famous ballad by the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, loosely based on the Arthurian legend of Elaine of Astolat.

Probably created in the 1910s, the book is written on vellum and signed simply “Gilbert Pownall me fecit” (“Gilbert Pownall made me”). Pownall was an artist who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and also designed the mosaics for the Lady Chapel in Westminster Cathedral.

We have yet to learn how this unique manuscript came to Cardiff – it was perhaps purchased new at the same time as our private press books - but it is a treasure we are delighted to have.

The Lady of Shalott was one of many items from our rare books collections selected by Dr Juliette Wood for her recent lecture, “Illustrating the Arthurian Legend”, part of the Cardiff Rare Books and Music Lecture Series  hosted here in Special Collections and Archives.

New for 2012/13: SCOLAR Lunchtime Workshops

This year, SCOLAR is offering a pilot series of lunchtime workshops on subjects relevant to a range of disciplines. Workshops on illustrated sources and women’s studies will run this autumn, with sessions on historical travel literature and World War One sources in the spring. The workshops are intended to raise awareness of the breadth of material available to support research in these areas, and as a general introduction to using Special Collections and Archives.

The first workshop on illustrated sources will be led by Assistant Archivist, Alison Harvey. It will introduce a range of illustrated material from the SCOLAR collections, including literary, scientific, medical, and women’s periodicals and miscellanies, newspapers, children’s literature, art and architecture, novel, plays and poetry, travel literature, ballads and almanacs, and prints, posters and propaganda.

Workshops will be held in Special Collections and Archives, on the lower ground floor of the Arts and Social Studies Library, Corbett Road, Cardiff. The illustrated sources workshop is scheduled for 12-1pm on 22 November, and will be repeated at 1-2pm on 23 November. Places are limited, so if you would like to attend either session, please email HarveyAE@cf.ac.uk, stating your preferred time.

Download a copy of the workshop poster

Life through a lens: exploring the miniature world with Robert Hooke’s Micrographia

I was very happy to come across this 1667 edition of Robert Hooke’s fascinating Micrographia among our Early English collections. Micrographia: or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses was the first book in English about the microscope and comprises a detailed record of Hooke’s observations of plants, insects and fossils through his lenses, and a demonstration of the power of the emerging science of microscopy.

Robert Hooke was born in 1635 on the Isle of Wight and studied at Westminster School before becoming assistant to the chemist Robert Boyle in Oxford. He had very wide interests in astronomy, biology, physics, architecture and chemistry, and, after being appointed Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society in 1662, became arguably the greatest experimental scientist of the 17th century, although Hooke’s legacy has long been overshadowed by that of his more famous contemporary, Sir Isaac Newton.

First issued in 1665, Hooke’s Micrographia was the first major work to be published by the Royal Society and has claims to be the first scientific best-seller, inspiring much public interest in the unseen miniature world. Samuel Pepys went so far as to proclaim it “the most ingenious book that I have ever read in my life”.

Micrographia is best known for its detailed copperplate engravings of Hooke’s discoveries, including several magnificent fold-out plates such as the famous flea below. The book also describes a fly’s eye and a plant cell for the first time (Hooke himself coined the biological term “cell” because the walls in plant cells reminded him of monks’ cells in a monastery).

Hooke’s drawing of a flea viewed under his microscope, “adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suite of sable Armour, neatly jointed.”

Hooke was the first scientist to examine fossils under the microscope and the first to note the similarities between living shells and fossil shells, which had up to then been considered a type of stone rather than a once-living organism.

Robert Hooke devised and constructed his own compound microscope

He claimed in Micrographia that the fossils were really ”the Shells of certain Shel-fishes, which, either by some Deluge, Inundation, earthquake, or some such other means, came to be thrown to that place, and there to be fill’d with some kind of Mud or Clay, or petrifying Water, or some other substance.” More than 200 years before Darwin espoused the theory of evolution by natural selection, this remarkable man had discovered that changes in life on Earth were documented in the fossil record.

Mapping the heavens and earth: Apian’s Cosmographia in the Cardiff Rare Books Collection

Petrus Apianus (1495-1552), also known as Peter Apian, was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany and a pioneer in astronomical and mathematical instrumentation. Apian is best known for his studies in the science of cosmography and we hold several editions of his works here in the Cardiff Rare Books Collection.
 
Cosmography was a broad science which aimed to provide a mathematical basis for mapping the position of everything in the universe, and Apian’s work required not only his skill in mathematics but also expertise in geography, navigation, astronomy, and cartography. He published manuals for astronomical instruments, printed scientific works on his own press, and crafted volvelles, or “Apian wheels”, for the calculation of time and distance.

In 1524 Apian produced his first major work, Cosmographia, which provided readers with a guide to cosmography and an introduction to the disciplines of astronomy, geography, cartography, navigation and instrument making. Gemma Frisius (1508–1555), a Dutch mathematician and student of Apian, produced several expanded editions of the Cosmographia, including the 1545 and 1584 editions we have in SCOLAR. The book remained popular throughout the 16th century, being reprinted more than 30 times and in 14 languages.

Cosmographia describes various scientific instruments, but there are also several working paper examples of Apian’s volvelles included in the text, with which readers could find the positions of the sun, moon and planets, or calculate latitude using the sun’s height above the horizon. Interestingly, the moving parts in Cardiff’s copies of Cosmographia have been printed on the back of used paper – perhaps an early example of recycling to keep costs down. Considering the practical nature of the volvelles, it is also remarkable that these delicate instruments have survived in such good condition.

Community Engagement Grant funds Victorian Study Day

Three PhD students from the School of English, Communication and Philosophy have successfully bid for a grant from the Community Engagement Team to organise a Victorian Study Day for local sixth form college students. Laura Foster, Michael Goodman and Helen McKenzie, who are all writing their theses on aspects of Victorian literature and culture, intend to present their specialist research in a format which is relevant, accessible and engaging to a wider audience. Earlier this year, Laura and Helen gained related experience of translating their research visually, when they took part in SCOLAR’s annual Postgraduate Curators programme.

The day will begin with a visit to Special Collections and Archives, where the students will have an opportunity to handle and interact with original 19^th century texts. Led by archivist Alison Harvey, the workshop will encourage the students to consider the materiality of print culture and how books were read and produced. The session will focus on texts that have visual impact, such as the Illustrated London News, the collected works of Tennyson, and Victorian children’s literature. This practical session aims to engage and excite students early in the day, and to introduce concepts that will be developed in the afternoon workshops.

Laura, Michael and Helen will each lead a workshop on their subject area, designed to challenge students’ assumptions about reading, texts, and culture, both in the nineteenth century and today. Much of the literature selected for discussion will be informed by the A-level set texts, and students will be encouraged to reinterpret these in light of how they were actually published and read in the 19^th century. Workshops will be held in small groups of 10, introducing students to the seminar-style environment of university, and aim to build confidence in discussing ideas with their peers.

Laura, Michael and Helen will be contacting local schools to ask teachers to nominate students to attend the Study Day. To be held in October, sessions will take place in the Council Chambers of Cardiff University’s Main Building, with a visit to Special Collections and Archives.