Industrial Library

A little while ago, I ran across the intriguing “Industrial Library”, a series of small cheap hardback volumes (priced between a shilling and half-a-crown) published intermittently between the 1830s and 1880s. Each volume focused on a particular trade, generally giving a mixture of an outline of what the work might involve, some inevitable moralising about the need for good work ethic and religious devotion, and practical advice.

As a result, some of them are amazing fragments of social history – the “Housemaid” volume, for example, gives a detailed description of the daily routine of a servant in a moderately sized household, and just what some mundane tasks like cleaning candle-sticks might actually entail. (The didacticism is helpfully provided by an unexpected page explaining why servant girls really shouldn’t be spending their money on unwarranted luxuries like tea.)

A few of them are a bit differently oriented – the “Confectioner” volume, for example, is mostly a set of recipes and processes. (How to make chocolate starting from a bag of ripe cocoa beans – no problem, pages 35-37, make sure to have a roasting pot and an iron mortar and pestle handy. And if you need somewhere to store it afterwards, the later editions tell you how to build an ice-house.)

After a bit of digging, it seems the series was first produced in 1838 onwards (or so), as the “Guide to Service” and “Guide to Trade” series (collectively described as the “Industrial Series”, though this name was not on the volumes). This work was done under the auspices of the Poor Law Commissioners, who apparently wanted to help train children, particularly in workhouses, into various useful occupations. The series was published by Charles Knight – the publisher behind the Penny Magazine and Penny Cyclopedia, and a collaborator of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, so very much the sort of publisher keen on cheap-but-useful publications for a working-class audience.

I am not completely sure how many volumes were in these initial series, but I suspect most of the ones that we see later were initially published here. There is at least one volume (“The Farmer“, ed. George Nicholls, 1844) that fits the pattern of the “Industrial Series”, but does not reappear in the later issues and does not have a “Guide to Trade” label. An early advertisment for the series (published at the end of another Knight book, 1838) identified 31 volumes for “service” and 56 or 59 for “trade”, and anticipated publishing one of each per month, though there is a good chance not all of them were ever published, and a few (such as “Banker’s clerk” or “Governess”) were not mentioned here, but did in the end go on to be published in the first series.

Most volumes were unsigned, but we know some of the authors to be interesting figures. Knight himself wrote the “Publisher” volume, and his frequent collaborator, the writer and social theorist Harriet Martineau, wrote the “Dressmaker”, “Housemaid”, “Lady’s maid”, and “Maid of all work” volumes. James Devlin, who wrote the two “Shoemaker” volumes (the original edition, at least, seems to have been long enough to require two parts) later seems to have been influential in the early shoemakers unions and a prominent Chartist organiser, and wrapping up the set, Sir George Stephen, a prominent abolitionist, wrote the “Clerk”, “Governess”, and “Groom” volumes. An intriguing cross-section of early Victorian left-wing intellectuals.

Circa 1849, (some of?) these volumes were reissued by Houlston & Stoneman under the label of the “Industrial Library”, which seems to have been used on the covers and in advertising, but not the title pages. (It is possible that some of the Houlston volumes were new and not from the Knight series; I haven’t traced all of them yet. Intriguingly they seem to have used the same printer.)

They were all reissued in c. 1862-65 by Houlston & Wright, now as a coherent set with a series index listing 34 numbered volumes of the “Industrial Library”, priced between 1s and 2s6d (a bit less than the previous Houlston series). With the possible exception of “The Farmer” (noted above), all the volumes from the Knight series seem to reappear here.

Finally, in 1877-78, the entire series was reissued, again under the “Industrial Library” banner, by Houlston and Sons. These had a series device on the titlepage, and an appropriate quotation from Ecclesiastes (“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might”. Hard to argue.) They were also published with nice embossed “Industrial Library” covers, a little gilding on the title, and end-papers advertising other useful and improving Houlston titles.

(It is possible that some individual volumes were reissued independently of these series; the “Banker’s clerk” volume in the 1870s series is described as a fifth edition, not a fourth. This volume is also the only one I have definitely identified being republished by Houlston after the 1870s or early 1880s; there seems to have been a seventh edition in 1891.)

The fourth series, the 1870s publications, also had some slight tweaks to the line-up. One volume was removed outright – No. 28, “Ploughman”, was dropped and replaced with a new (out-of-sequence) No. 28, “Draper and haberdasher”, which probably says something interesting about what was seen to be important in the modern commercial world. No. 30 was also tweaked to be “Poultry keeper”, not “Poultry maid”, an unexpected moment of occupational gender-neutrality.

And thanks to the wonders of mass digitisation, of course, we can now read them. I think that 14 of the 35 total (34 plus one extra in 1878) have freely-available online editions; another three are available through Gale; and five are on HathiTrust or Google Books but currently unavailable due to presumed copyrights. That leaves us with 22 of 35 digitised in some form or another, which for something quite ephemeral like this is not bad at all.

In order, the currently available volumes are (updated!):

I will update this if I manage to track down open copies of any more of them. (Edit: “Governess”, “Nurse”, and “Tailor” added 11/1/20; “Butler” added 16/1/20.)


Long-s versus short-s

Tim Spalding notes an interesting detail in Googles books ngram viewer:

Google can’t tell between an f and an ſ, the “s without a bar” more properly known as a long, descending or medial s. … If nothing else we can now follow the demise of the ſ with precision.

So, I was curious. Some arbitrarily selected graphs:

curse vs. curfe

stall vs. ftall

search vs. fearch

In all three cases, there’s a general trend of ſ-dominance from approximately 1700 to 1800, but the pre-1700 period appears a lot more mixed. Some example results explain why:

All ſ, all correctly identified as “s” and not “f”. Why, I wonder, and why does it break down later? Are Google just better at training their OCR on “older” typefaces? Is there a threshold setting somewhere to look for unexpected “f”s and turn them into “s”s, which is mostly disabled for eighteenth-century and later material? And why do all three ſ-variant graphs show the same 1570-1610 step?

Questions, questions…

The Secret Battle

I was delighted recently to discover that A. P. Herbert’s The Secret Battle, a somewhat neglected First World War novel, had been digitised by archive.org and was made available as public domain. The 1919 British edition is here; Open Library links to a few more.

I talk about this book a lot. It’s mostly unknown now; it received some mild critical acclaim before falling prey to the fact that in the early 1920s, no-one really wanted to talk about the war. It wasn’t until five or ten years after it was published that the boom in war writing really began, by which time it was mostly old news and its author had become firmly established as a light humorist – dredging up a novel he wrote as an impassioned and scarred twenty-six year old was not high on the publishing agenda. It was the first novel to focus on Gallipoli as well as the Western Front, one of the first to openly challenge the practice of execution for desertion, and an early example of the trope of the veteran as a damaged victim of the war, rather than a hero emerging from it.

I am going to write down some of the history of Harry Penrose, because I do not think full justice has been done to him…

The protagonist, Harry Penrose, leaves Oxford in the summer of 1914 and enlists in the ranks, later taking a commission; he serves at Gallipoli as a junior subaltern, and on the Western Front. There, for years, his spirit is worn down; he wants to be a good soldier, and tries hard, but he is relentlessly put upon by circumstances. One day, he breaks a little more than usual and turns back in the face of shellfire. And the System then breaks him, completely and without feeling.

A court-martial is ordered, and it finds the bare facts of the case; he was leading his men to the front line, they were fired upon, and he turned back. Desertion in the face of the enemy, a clear and unarguable conviction. As an honest man, he cannot challenge the facts, and as a sensitive one, he cannot quite convince himself he is not, after all, actually a coward. Justice, such as it is, is served; a week later, a decision is taken by some high authority to “make an example”, and one fine spring morning he is taken to be shot, for the good of the nation’s moral fibre.

It is crushingly sad, all the more so when you realise that Penrose is – in surprising detail – drawn from the author. He knew of a case where an officer in his division had been shot like this, in similarly dubious circumstances, and asked himself – had I stayed on the front lines longer, had I not been sent home, wounded, to a safe job, would I have cracked like this? What would have become of me? But, of course, he feared he already knew the answer.

Churchill wrote that “like the poems of Siegfried Sassoon it should be read in each generation, so that men and women may rest under no illusions about what war means”, and as so often he seems to have put his finger on it. Penrose’s war is not glorious, not romantic, not successful, not admirable – but it is real, and stark, and honest, and final.

…[and] that is all I have tried to do. This book is not an attack on any person, on the death penalty, or on anything else, though if it makes people think about these things, so much the better. I think I believe in the death penalty — I do not know. But I did not believe in Harry being shot.
That is the gist of it; that my friend Harry was shot for cowardice — and he was one of the bravest men I ever knew.

The joy of indices

Today’s light entertainment: an old article from the Independent on the delights of book indices (indexes? You know what I mean, anyway).

One of my favourite sets of indices is from A.P. Herbert’s various collections of Misleading Cases, which if anything get more opinionated as time goes on. A short extract from Wigs at Work:

Barracuda, compared with surtax, 148
Big Ben, lying, a bad thing, 193. See also ‘Summer Time’
Blackmail, defined, 73. See also ‘Collector of Taxes’
Burglar: how much can a, be killed?, 165, 168, 169; use of garden fork against, commended, 165

Eggs: as negotiable instruments, 67; correct handling of, 71
Eton, regrettable incident at, traced to study of classics, 57

Haddock, Albert: [a full column of close-set type]
Intoxication, premature, attributed to Summer Time, 199
Jonah, wife of, her comments, unrecorded, 87
Lying, everyone presumed to be, in divorce court, 85

Right, first time: British Courts have little hope of being, 92
Rylands v. Fletcher: applies to computer, 209; does not apply to snails, 35
Swan, deplorable episode, 56. See also Leda
Thermometers, why not falsify? See ‘Summer Time’
Ultra Vires, to be pronounced in the good old English fashion, 128
Virtue, tax on, 97. See also Income Tax Acts
Wedding guests, harsh lot, 16

The enemies of books

Another old book on books, this time from Project Gutenberg:

The Enemies of Books, by William Blades [1888]

It breaks down the various threats to the survival of books by topic (fire, water, neglect, vermin, collectors, children…) and then lists a succession of anecdotes about collections destroyed in this way. Surprisingly interesting, in some cases, if a bit depressing; it’s interesting to know what has been lost over the years but is still known about. I wrote last month about the monastic libraries being dissolved at the Reformation; here is a contemporary writing about what happened to their contents:

A greate nombre of them whyche purchased those superstycyouse mansyons reserved of those librarye bookes some to serve their jakes, some to scoure theyr candelstyckes, and some to rubbe theyr bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and sope sellers, and some they sent over see to ye booke bynders, not in small nombre, but at tymes whole shyppes full, to ye wonderynge of foren nacyons. Yea ye Universytees of thys realme are not alle clere in thys detestable fact. But cursed is that bellye whyche seketh to be fedde with suche ungodlye gaynes, and so depelye shameth hys natural conterye.

I knowe a merchant manne, whych shall at thys tyme be namelesse, that boughte ye contentes of two noble lybraryes for forty shyllynges pryce: a shame it is to be spoken. Thys stuffe hathe heoccupyed in ye stede of greye paper, by ye space of more than these ten yeares, and yet he bathe store ynoughe for as manye years to come. A prodygyous example is thys, and to be abhorred of all men whyche love theyr nacyon as they shoulde do. The monkes kepte them undre dust, ye ydle-headed prestes regarded them not, theyr latter owners have most shamefully abused them, and ye covetouse merchantes have solde them away into foren nacyons for moneye

On the love of books

A book of which I am greatly fond is the Philobiblon of Richard de Bury, an early fourteenth-century clergyman who was Bishop of Durham and Lord Chancellor under Edward III. For a text written by such an imposing figure, it is remarkably sweet; Philobiblon is literally “the love of books”. de Bury collected an immense amount of literature during his life – according to his biographer, “more than all the other English bishops put together”.

People, of course, found this a little odd, so he had to do something about it:

…we have resigned all thoughts of other earthly things, and have given ourselves up to a passion for acquiring books. That our intent and purpose, therefore, may be known to posterity as well as to our contemporaries, and that we may for ever stop the perverse tongues of gossipers as far as we are concerned, we have published a little treatise written in the lightest style of the moderns; for it is ridiculous to find a slight matter treated of in a pompous style. … And because it principally treats of the love of books, we have chosen, after the fashion of the ancient Romans, fondly to name it by a Greek word, Philobiblon.

The first section is devoted to explaining the importance of reading and learning, as it appeared to him.

Books delight us, when prosperity smiles upon us; they comfort us inseparably when stormy fortune frowns on us. They lend validity to human compacts, and no serious judgments are propounded without their help. Arts and sciences, all the advantages of which no mind can enumerate, consist in books. How highly must we estimate the wondrous power of books, since through them we survey the utmost bounds of the world and time, and contemplate the things that are as well as those that are not, as it were in the mirror of eternity. In books we climb mountains and scan the deepest gulfs of the abyss; in books we behold the finny tribes that may not exist outside their native waters, distinguish the properties of streams and springs and of various lands; from books we dig out gems and metals and the materials of every kind of mineral, and learn the virtues of herbs and trees and plants, and survey at will the whole progeny of Neptune, Ceres, and Pluto.

He explains the merits of reading:

…what pleasantness of teaching there is in books, how easy, how secret! How safely we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to books without feeling any shame! They are masters who instruct us without rod or ferule, without angry words, without clothes or money. If you come to them they are not asleep; if you ask and inquire of them they do not withdraw themselves; they do not chide if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are ignorant.

and the terrible temptations of power:

…we were reported to burn with such desire for books, and especially old ones, that it was more easy for any man to gain our favour by means of books than of money. Wherefore, since supported by the goodness of the aforesaid prince of worthy memory, we were able to requite a man well or ill, to benefit or injure mightily great as well as small, there flowed in, instead of presents and guerdons, and instead of gifts and jewels, soiled tracts and battered codices, gladsome alike to our eye and heart.

After a while, it becomes apparent that what we’re reading is, in its way, a text on basic librarianship, filtered down from the fourteenth-century collector with an eye on the future.

He discusses collection management, explaining why he has collected books of poetry (because it is hard to understand the great authors if one cannot understand their allusions) and downplayed civil law; why he has preferred the classical authors but not neglected modern writings. He explains the need to provide standard reference works – Greek and Hebrew grammars, and perhaps even Arabic (for the “numerous astronomical treatises”); indeed, if they’re not available, to commission them and make them available.

He even deals with weeding and stock replacement, in a more direct way than we normally have to:

But because all the appliances of mortal men with the lapse of time suffer the decay of mortality, it is needful to replace the volumes that are worn out with age by fresh successors, that the perpetuity of which the individual is by its nature incapable may be secured to the species; and hence it is that the Preacher says: Of making many books there is no end.

But then we come to probably the best part: his lengthy rant near the end about The Scholars Of Today, and How They Are Just Really Vile.

But the race of scholars is commonly badly brought up, and unless they are bridled in by the rules of their elders they indulge in infinite puerilities. They behave with petulance, and are puffed up with presumption, judging of everything as if they were certain, though they are altogether inexperienced.

You may happen to see some headstrong youth lazily lounging over his studies, and when the winter’s frost is sharp, his nose running from the nipping cold drips down, nor does he think of wiping it with his pocket-handkerchief until he has bedewed the book before him with the ugly moisture. … But the handling of books is specially to be forbidden to those shameless youths, who as soon as they have learned to form the shapes of letters, straightway, if they have the opportunity, become unhappy commentators, and wherever they find an extra margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if any other frivolity strikes their fancy, at once their pen begins to write it. There the Latinist and sophister and every unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen, a practice that we have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and value of the most beautiful books.

Other hazards, apparently, included people filling books with pressed violets, dropping cheese into them, cutting the margins and flyleaves off to write letters on, laymen holding them upside down, children grubbying the illustrated capitals by touching them, and the vague horror of the “smutty scullion reeking from his stewpots”. (I have never had problems with people cutting the margins off, but every other one of these is familiar in some way…) Not quite the image of the silent, austere, medieval monastery we have in mind most of the time!

He then explains why he has collected these books – “to found in perpetual charity a Hall in the reverend university of Oxford, the chief nursing mother of all liberal arts, and to endow it with the necessary revenues, for the maintenance of a number of scholars” – and includes, presumably so it wouldn’t get misplaced, a copy of the charter for its library.

It’s quite an interesting set of rules, as a historical document; a committee of five was to run the library, three of whom could agree to lend out anything the library had a duplicate copy of, if they were given a pledge of equal value in response, and the borrower’s name was carefully written down. Once a year books were to be brought back so that they could be seen by the librarians, and they were not allowed to be taken outside of the city or its environs. And, every year, the librarians were to check every volume was accounted for… which, to my great amusement, is recommended to happen in the first week of July, high summer and – these days – prime stock-checking time.

Sadly, de Bury’s excessive collecting took its toll – he died in exceptional poverty, and his personal library was broken up and sold to pay his debts. The college at Oxford was formed – the plan completed by his successor – and lasted until the Reformation, when it ceased to exist; a small amount of its buildings are now absorbed into Trinity College, if you look carefully enough. His library never made it there, and its catalogue is now lost; we only know of two volumes from it, one at the Bodleian and one at the British Library.

The book survived, though; given its appeal, it’s not hard to see why. The full text was digitised by the University of Virginia Library or by Project Gutenberg, and is worth an hour’s reading; the edition I have, a lovely pocket-sized hardback from 1902, has also been digitised by the Internet Archive with page images, if you prefer that sort of thing.

Film novels

Way back in the mists of time, Jurassic Park was released. I was… let me see, ten. It should not be surprising that I loved it uncritically. Move forward fifteen years, and I happened to watch it again; it was still a pretty good film, even if parts began to look faintly dated. I ferreted out a copy of the novel and, all in all, not bad. Not quite my thing, a little heavy on the Clever Scientific Concepts – I like my fiction without detours into chaos theory – but it was enjoyable and rattled along nicely for an afternoon.

Yesterday, feeling particularly cold, I ducked into a charity shop; the only thing on the shelf that looked even vaguely interesting was, unexpectedly, a copy of the sequel, The Lost World. So, I paid a pound for it, and went back out into the snow to catch my bus home.

All I knew about this novel was that it was a sequel, it was somewhat hastily written to respond to the ravening demand for one, and that it would have been written with the expectation of being turned into a film. So, you’d expect a bit of sloppiness in the plotting, a few sections in need of editorial help, the usual signs of a book that did not quite get the attention it deserved. And we had them; moments where the plot leapt ahead without quite making logical connections, a character who seems entirely unsurprised to run into someone he thought he’d murdered three chapters earlier, and a Big Clever Scientific Explanation near the end which doesn’t quite make sense. (The entire plot doesn’t make sense in the context of the previous book’s events, either, come to think of it – but I can let that one slide.)

Despite this, it’s the film aspect that really leapt out. There are chase scenes in this; passages which don’t really work, seeming fast and clumsy, but when you re-read them you realise they’d look impressive on camera. Exposition is done in monologues in preference to narrative text. Characters are flat and hard to distinguish from their written speech alone. An obligatory pair of annoyingly competent children are shoehorned in, without any real attempt to explain how or why or if it makes sense. It all feels very forced, very much an attempt to make it punchier and more glossy at the expense of what plot there was before.

(It could have been worse, of course. Wikipedia notes, with what seems to be restrained amusement, that “the novel does not feature an adult Tyrannosaurus rampaging in San Diego, unlike in the film.”)

It’s a pity, really; it’s easy to dismiss this sort of quasi-tie-in novel as going to be terrible anyway, but we can see from the previous iteration that there was scope for something decent here. I wonder if it holds for other such sequels? The only example I can think of offhand is 2001 – where the first novel was written almost simultaneously with the film – but that’s such an odd case it’d be hard to draw any conclusions from it. 2010 was invariably going to seem brasher and punchier than 2001, because so would virtually anything else…

Stasiland

Today is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and – to a first approximation – the end of the German Democratic Republic. I don’t really have anything intelligent to say on the matter; I was seven at the time, and failed to notice much about it. I do remember, a couple of years later, visiting a relative with a little fragment of the Wall in the glass china case in their living room, and being duly impressed, but I’m not sure I could have explained why. (This is odd – I know I was aware of world news stories a year earlier, in 1988, perhaps even late ’87. Maybe my memory is at fault here, not my childish attention-spans.)

But it does reminds me, on the other hand, that I wanted to mention that:

  • there is a new discount bookshop open on St. Aldates;
  • it is selling copies of Stasiland for £2;
  • which is one of the best books I’ve read this year;
  • and you should be able to deduce #4 for yourself.

(Why, look at the tangential relevance. Classy, me.)

Stasiland is great. Absolutely, unqualifiedly, great. Well-written, moving, direct, vivid and detached; it describes horrors and terror without either dwelling on them or glossing over them, which is a rare skill. It’s a series of linked stories of daily life in East Germany – mostly East Berlin – told by former citizens, interspersed with a narrative of life in contemporary Berlin as the author tracked them down. She deliberately included interviews with ex-Stasi members, some devoted and some compelled, which provides an interesting second layer to the reminiscences.

Following on from Stasiland, I read Timothy Garton Ash’s The File a few months later. It was an interesting corollary, an attempt by a privileged observer – a Western historian – to trace back his time in East Germany through studying his file, to trace back the contacts with bystanders and informers. The problem is that neither is the book you’d really want to read; Funder tells a lot of stories second-hand, and Ash tells his own story and those entwined with his, but we never quite get a first-hand memoir of someone who actually lived under the regime and couldn’t, as Ash could, walk away.

Suggestions for further reading on East Germany, either from a social or a historic perspective, appreciated.

On a lighter note, Ben Lewis’s Hammer and Tickle was enjoyable as a jokebook and a vaguely serious study of humour in adversity – I did like his idea that you could follow the trajectory of people’s faith in The Whole Grand Communist Project by looking at the tone of their jokes about it – but could have done with cutting out the 20% of padding about the author’s private life. Perhaps best just to read the original essay.

And finally, I have not yet bought a copy of K Blows Top, but I expect it to be all you’d expect from a book detailing Khruschev’s wacky road-trip across fifties America. (This must be one of the few sentences where “wacky” is the only appropriate adjective.)