A Season of Stories 6: Books

This special episode combines all of the stories from Season 6…

“African American Periodicals and Print History” – Dr. Brenna Wynn Greer, Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College

“Marketing Books with Peasant Models” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz

“A Late Medieval ‘How To’ Book” – Dr. Melissa Reynolds, Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University

“Paper and Books in Early Modern Europe” – Dr. Daniel Bellingradt, Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Book at Erlangen-Nuremberg University

“Creating the Images in Early Modern Printed Books” – Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, PhD candidate in the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University

“Books, Translations, and Audiences” – Dr. Samuel B. Keeley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz

“Religion and the Business of Books” – Dr. Scott McLaren, Faculty Member in the Graduate Programs in Humanities and History and Associate Librarian in the Scott Library at York University

Episode transcript:
https://skymichaeljohnston.com/90secnarratives/

Transcript

90 Second Narratives

Season 6: “Books”

Episode 8: “A Season of Stories 6: Books”

Sky Michael Johnston:

Hello and welcome to another special Season of Stories episode of 90 Second Narratives. I’m Sky Michael Johnston, the host and creator of 90 Second Narratives. Today’s episode brings together all the stories from Season 6 which has had the theme Books.

Our first pair of stories tell the history of two publishers who lived roughly 400 years apart. First, Dr. Brenna Wynn Greer shares about John H. Johnson, the founder of EBONY Magazine in the mid-twentieth century. Then, I share a story about Johann Schönsperger the Younger, a German printer from the early sixteenth century. Both of our stories recount how these publishers found commercial success thanks to their creative ingenuity, including novel representations of people on the printed page. It’s a history that we can still access today because of the preservation of those pages.

Here is Dr. Greer with the story, “African American Periodicals and Print History,” followed by my story, “Marketing Books with Peasant Models.”

Brenna Wynn Greer:

In 1942, John H. Johnson launched Negro Digest, which quickly became a bestselling periodical among African Americans AND building off its success, Johnson launched the black photo-magazine EBONY in 1945 and a slew of other titles subsequently. My work examines how black mediamakers like Johnson produced print media that popularized images of black citizenship useful to contemporary civil rights campaigns.

When doing research, I quickly realized that microfilmed and digitized replications of these mid-twentieth century black magazines were inadequate for understanding how people produced and experienced them. I needed to get my hands on the actual magazines. Because Johnson’s publications as material objects proved necessary to my recognizing the business decisions – among other things – behind his success as a publisher of commercial black magazines, when all those before him had failed. For example, formulating EBONY magazine, Johnson copied LIFE magazine in practically every way, but when comparing the magazines physically it becomes clear that he made his magazine a ¼ inch smaller in length and height, which made it perceptibly the same as the wildly popular white magazine, but less expensive to produce.

People tend to think of “rare books” as manuscripts printed centuries ago and housed in museums or special collections or locked away in private collections. By these standards, post-World War II commercial black magazines appear too modern and too plentiful to qualify and consumers and libraries alike have been jettisoning them for decades. But, as I learned in my research, as print objects, the actual magazines are essential to historians’ ability to reconstruct histories of Black culture, capitalism, and citizenship, not to mention histories of 20th century printing and publishing. It’s imperative, then, that scholars, archivists, and collectors recognize these magazines as the antiquities that they are – no less worthy of preservation and serious study than those books conventionally considered “rare.”

Sky Michael Johnston:

This story is about one of the earliest models to appear on the printed page: the sixteenth-century German peasant. Let me explain how this came about. Today we see images of models on just about anything that’s printed—newspapers, magazines, books, brochures, billboards, cereal boxes, endless digital media. Well, the idea for a print model was already put into practice during the first decades of mass printing in Europe. Printers put illustrations of people on the covers of books they were selling.

In the early 1500s, two small books were printed in German that offered information about the weather. To be more precise, these weather books, as they were known, contained instructions for how their users could gain knowledge about the weather using special techniques of natural observation. For instance, if the sky looks a certain way, it means rain is coming, and so forth.

In 1513, a savvy printer had a creative marketing idea. He was Johan Schönsperger the Younger and he came from a family of successful printers in Augsburg, one of Europe’s first centers of printing. And on the cover of one of the weather books he put a small woodcut image of two peasants, a woman and man, outside pointing and looking up at the sky. They were modeling everyday people putting the information in the book to use! Schönsperger’s marketing ploy was evidently a success, because as the books went on to be sixteenth-century bestsellers, many subsequent printers of the books copied Schönsperger’s strategy and also put images of peasants actively observing nature on their covers.

I have called the figure collectively portrayed in these books the “peasant naturalist”: a common person creating natural knowledge based on skillful observation. Depictions of early modern European peasants participating in this kind of activity broaden our perceptions of a class of people who are often remembered as being “superstitious” and seen in a pejorative light.

* * *

The subjects of our first stories today spanned hundreds of years of print production in Europe and the United States. But what were books like in Europe around the time that printing was first introduced there? Our next storyteller, Dr. Melissa Reynolds, is an expert on this very topic. Her story, “A Late Medieval ‘How To’ Book,” traces important developments in handwritten manuscripts in the fifteenth century.

Melissa Reynolds:

Nicholas Neesbett was an experienced healer in fifteenth-century England. He knew how to apply ointments for cuts or bruises, how to staunch a bleeding wound, and how to brew special drinks to cure ailing patients. Even so, his skills as a healer would be lost to time if he hadn’t chosen to put his knowledge in writing and compose a “how to” book of surgical techniques. He copied out the recipes for ointments and salves and special drinks that he used in his own practice—most of which we can trace back to earlier Latin medical manuals written by university faculty in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But he also added his own commentary to these recipes: he explained how to locate and harvest local herbal ingredients that were cheaper to use but just as effective as the original recipes. He described his special techniques for the application of salves or ointments. He recognized the limitations of his reader, describing for example what the chemical ingredient rock alum looked like, and how to get it from the apothecary. At one point, he even reflected on the work of writing, asking rhetorically, why he was copying more recipes when those he’d included already were good enough? Neesbett was a real pioneer at a time when book-learning was just beginning to move out of Latin and into the languages that people spoke. He recognized that writing was a means to elevate his status as an expert healer, and a means to preserve his knowledge for posterity. By some lucky chance, his small surgical manual survived for over five hundred years in the Ashmole Collection at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, where we can still read and appreciate his medical skill today.

Sky Michael Johnston:

In one way or another, all of these stories have emphasized that books are material objects. Our next two stories go into even more detail about the physical materials that books were made out of and the objects that were used to create them. Our next storytellers are Dr. Daniel Bellingradt with the story, “Paper and Books in Early Modern Europe,” and Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen with the story, “Creating the Images in Early Modern Printed Books.”

Daniel Bellingradt:

Almost every book from the fourteenth century onwards was made of paper, and every letter sent was a paper sheet folded. Early modern Europe was a paper age – an age of paper production, of paper usage, of paper consumption, and also of paper trading. When referring to the historiographical period of European “Early Modernity,” ranging from circa 1400 to 1800, it seems appropriate to name this timespan the first European paper age. In my research I challenge the well-known grand narratives of the period of being an “age of print” or “age of correspondence.” I do so with good reasons: after the artefact paper was invented in China and reached about 1300 years later Europe via Arab trade contacts around the twelfth century, a paper age started. And this European paper age is highlighted as paper revolution, a paper industry of lucrative paper mills producing millions and millions of paper sheets. These paper products became very fast a commonly known economic good. A man-made artefact that was transregionally moved, traded, and sold. Paper was increasingly used and consumed in more and more individual and public contexts including education, administration, correspondence, arts, transport, and of course within the burgeoning printing industries. In short: paper was one of the main artefacts of the period, a mass product that came in many formats and qualities for a variety of usages. The archives: paper worlds, the book business: paper worlds, the correspondences: paper businesses. By looking at the tradings of these goods a new paper history has recently started to become an alternative master narrative for the epoch in question. My own research is part of this looming new paper history, and combines book history with a focus on the material conditions of a paper using culture. The future of book history will have to engage with more paper flows.

Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen:

If a sixteenth-century European author, printer, or publisher wanted to include pictures in a book, they had several options. Woodcut, engraving, and etching are printmaking techniques that were already available to produce and reproduce printed images and book illustrations in the early modern period, approximately between the years 1400 to 1800. 

Although engraving and etching became the preferred forms for printed images during this period, the most copiously illustrated books still regularly employed woodcuts because text and images could be printed together, which saved production time and cost.  For example, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century herbals often include several hundred to more than a thousand woodcuts of plants in one book. Woodblocks are also highly durable and could be reused over and over again. The blocks of these botanical illustrations printed not only the woodcuts for the initial publications, but also for the reprints, new editions, or translations of the books, and sometimes for different titles altogether.

To see some examples of early modern European woodblocks, the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp recently digitized about 14,000 blocks in their collections. From decorative initials to emblematic or epistemic illustrations, these printing blocks adorned books that cover various subjects. While it is impressive that such a large number of blocks survived many historical events throughout the past centuries, this mass collection is only the tip of the iceberg of the tens of thousands of historical printing blocks that are now mostly lost, destroyed, or repurposed. 

When seeing pictures in early modern books next time, remember the blocks and plates that were hard at work to impress them.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Did you know that 90 Second Narratives and many of our storytellers, including Daniel Bellingradt and Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, are on Twitter? If you’re a Twitter person, please follow the podcast @90secNARRATIVES, that’s “nine” “zero” “S” “E” “C” “narratives.” And you can connect with me and all of the podcast’s storytellers who are on Twitter. That’s what the podcast is all about: connecting you with historians, creating a space for you to hear historians in their own voices. And Twitter is another great way to connect—and a place to access some of the visual content that our storytellers create.

Our last two stories today offer examples of the important relationship between Christianity and the printed book. It’s a fascinating relationship from whichever way you look at it. Even in these two stories it is tough to say…is print influencing Christianity? Is Christianity influencing print? It’s definitely both, and it’s an intertwined history.

Here are the stories “Books, Translations, and Audiences” told by Dr. Samuel B. Keeley and “Religion and the Business of Books” told by Dr. Scott McLaren.

Samuel Keeley:

In the nineteenth century, an ever-increasing volume of political and religious debates played out in the public sphere of printed books and journals. At the same time, more and more books were being translated and adapted for ever-expanding audiences in other countries. These translations could often give authors extra opportunities for success in new markets. Take the case of Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen, who was the Prussian ambassador to England between 1840 and 1854. A deeply pious Christian and Anglophile, Bunsen constantly attempted his career to bring Prussia and England closer together, not just at the level of diplomacy and statecraft, but also using strategies of cultural, religious, or literary exchange. Among other religiously-themed works, Bunsen had published a book of Germanic prayers and songs in 1833, the Versuch eines allgemeinen gesang und gebetbuchs (Attempt at a common book of prayer and song), influenced deeply by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in England. The book had sold a modest but unimpressive amount in the German States, so it was not until Bunsen met a pair of women in England that his work enjoyed true success.

Susanna and Catherine Winkworth had both studied in Germany as students, and shared Bunsen’s religious convictions as well as his motivations to bring Germanic sacred music, prayers, and poetry to English audiences. The Winkworth’s translation of Bunsen’s book was published as the Lyra Germanica in 1855 and the sisters worked closely with Bunsen in translating his other works into English as well. It is through the Winkworth sisters that Bunsen’s work probably had the most proliferation, with the Lyra Germanica selling out over 42 reprintings of 2 different editions by the end of the nineteenth century, including two reprintings in the United States. It is still available today, with recent editions being published in 2005 and 2013.

My research examines Bunsen’s career and the construction of his transnational network. I just think that it is fascinating to see how ideas, religious or otherwise, can find new audiences across time and space, through translation.

Scott McLaren:

When is a book not just a book? Well, as almost any cultural historian can tell you, a book is almost never just a book. In fact, defining what a book is, is no easy task. Which is funny, because most of us are surrounded by books all the time. So, what is a book? Obviously, a book is the text.  A book is also, at least most of the time, a material object.

But a book can also be seen as a form of cultural transaction. And as one of the first mass produced commodities, it can also open a window on early industrial business practices that have come to dominate the modern world.

For me, religious contexts are one of the best places to study book culture. After all, the relationship between religion and the recorded word is profound and ancient. My own work concentrates on a form of evangelicalism known as Methodism: a branch of Christianity that places an especially strong emphasis on the written word. Methodists were the first denomination in America to establish their own publishing house. And America was a tough market in which to succeed. But the Methodists did succeed: and how. By the middle of the nineteenth century their publishing house had grown to become the largest publisher in the world. How did they manage that? A powerful and early form of branding. Their book advertisements drew no attention to the prices, to the quality of manufacture, or even the spiritual value of their contents. Instead, they reminded customers that profits from the sale of their books went back into the charitable work of the wider church. Buying a book from anyone else wasn’t just disloyal. It was a kind of theft from God’s work. I explore this dynamic in my book pulpit press and politics in the United States and also Canada where these rhetorical strategies played out in strange ways that help shed light on why the religious cultures of these two countries are so different today.

Sky Michael Johnston:

Thank you for joining me on this season’s exploration of the history of the book. And thank you to all our storytellers for their fascinating and detailed investigation of print and book history.

Season 7 of 90 Second Narratives begins on Monday, one week from today. It’s theme? Community. It’s going to be a wide-ranging season. I hope you’ll join me and a whole new set of storytellers for what promises to be a fascinating journey.

As always, this is the podcast that brings you “little stories with BIG historical significance.”