The Susan B. Anthony dollar, an Oxford comma, coquilles St. Jacques and Brexit

In 1980 I heard a commotion on 14^th Street below my office window in the National Press Building in Washington, D.C. I looked out and saw a woman standing on the roof of a parked car throwing coins from a large bag on to the sidewalk. Passers-by were competing to catch a coin or two. The coin in question was the Susan B. Anthony dollar, intended to replace the not very durable Eisenhower dollar bill. Susan was a 19^th-century Quaker advocate against slavery and in favour of women’s suffrage. Her likeness was chosen after a powerful lobbying campaign by a number of women’s rights groups. The public (and perhaps more significantly the vending machine industry) proved reluctant to accept the coin and it was withdrawn from circulation in 1981. The lone feminist atop her car on 14^th street was unable to sway public opinion.

 

The Susan B. Anthony dollar

Jan and I have discussed what we will do if we are presented with a commemorative Brexit 50p coin. She intends to state that she accepts it only to donate it to charity. My plan is politely to refuse it. The previous celebratory coin was dated 31 October 2019 and a large quantity of them had to be melted down when Brexit was delayed. A huge amount of public money has been wasted on failed preparations for Brexit over the last few years. The reverse of the coin reads: “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations 31 January 2020”. The author Phillip Pullman has drawn attention to a missing “Oxford comma” after the word “prosperity”. One assumes that the statement wishes that all nations should enjoy with the newly “liberated” UK the three benefits listed on the coin. However, the punctuation muddies the waters. The sentiment would seem to be “prosperity with all nations”, a clumsy and not terribly grammatical, if worthy, sentiment.

 

The Brexit 50p coin

Commas can matter. I was told that Bill Clinton once read a speech, handed to him without notice by a speechwriter, which read something like: “The United States has a common interest with Jamaica in fighting, crime and drugs”. The misplaced comma changed the meaning. Bill, ever the professional speaker, read exactly the text he was given.

I will not dwell at length on the many things that we collectively lose as a consequence of Brexit. One example will do. Since our son John lives in Germany I have tried to be informed of the complicated consequences for UK citizens living in the EU. For example, suppose that John were married to a German citizen whose parents were also German citizens and that the couple had children. While the UK was a member of the EU the entire family and the mother’s parents could have moved to the UK without any restrictions or immigration requirements. After 11pm today, the German family members can move to the UK without a visa until 29 March 2022. Should circumstances require the move to happen after that date visas will be required. You should note that our Home Office has made applications for immigration documents costly, and subject to rules which the Home Office frequently misinterprets. This is a small example of a change to rules that removes rights from one of our own citizens and her/his family. The negative tentacles of these kinds of changes to citizens’ rights extend to all areas of family life: work, the ability to function in one’s own profession, study at university, health insurance, pensions and other rights.

As to Brexit, there will be no celebration at 15 Upper Village Road. Jan has decided on a culinary statement (cooked by yours truly) of coquilles St. Jacques and Italian white wine. Jan will probably rage and may shed a tear or two. I will be saddened but probably more phlegmatic. A good American martini will ease the regrets for the evening.

Of St. Bride, Wynkyn de Worde, Mozart and Wren

One of the joys of London is to stroll its streets and alleyways and stumble across centuries of history. London also has a vibrant artistic life that few other cities in the world can match. Jan and I decided that today we would combine art, history, music and the history of printing and publishing in a day out in London.

 

King Charles I by Daniel Mytens, oil on canvas, 1631

Our first stop was the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery is about to be refurbished, so we are making sure that we see the galleries we are most interested before it closes in June for three years. This morning was the turn of Charles I, Thomas Cromwell and his Parliamentarians. The portraits of Charles convey his imperious certainty in his divine right to govern. He was also a spendthrift, or more charitably a connoisseur and creator of a great art collection. Cromwell proved too powerful an enemy for Charles to contend with. He lost his head on a scaffold outside Inigo Jones' Palace of Westminster in 1649. The Restoration brought his brother Charles II back from exile in France to reign from 1660-1685. This Charles married a Portuguese princess, but died without a legal heir, despite fathering some fifteen children – all with mistresses. To my surprise, his wife was devoted to him.

 

King Charles II, John Michael Wright, oil on canvas, 1661-1665

Our next stop was St Bride’s Church. Tucked down an alleyway off Fleet Street. The history of buildings on the site goes back to at least Roman times. A small piece of Roman paving can still be seen in the crypt. The church is named after Bride (or Brigid), a daughter of a Celtic prince and a druidic slave, born in 453AD. St Bride’s is known as the printer’s church because the splendidly named Wynkyn de Worde, the apprentice of William Caxton set up his printing business, using Caxton’s own press, in St Bride’s churchyard after his master’s death. Wynkyn was buried in the churchyard in 1535.

The Medieval church of St Bride was destroyed by the Fire of London in 1666. In 1671 the church wardens of St Bride’s took Christopher Wren to dinner in the Globe Tavern to persuade him to design a new church on the site. It took another year to convince Wren to take on the design of the church, which cost of £11,430 5 shillings and 11 pence. There are, of course, several famous Wren churches in London. But on the night of 29 December 1940, eight of them were destroyed by German bombs. St Bride’s was one of them. The restored church was dedicated on 19 December 1957.

 

Christopher Wren, St Bride's

Every Tuesday and Friday the church arranges free lunch-time concerts. Today’s musician was Nuno Lucas, a young Portuguese pianist with extraordinary technique. He played Mozart’s Piano Sonata No.18 in D. Since you can’t beat Mozart this was a great start. There followed the modern Australian composer Carl Vine’s Five Bagatelles, a wonderful introduction to a composer we had never hear of until today. Robert Schumann’s Abegg Variations op.1 conjured up images of elegant Viennese ladies being guided round the dance floor by plump Austrian’s in dinner jackets. However, it reminded Jan that yesterday she had heard on BBC Radio 4 a recording of a performance of a piece by Schumann by a Jewish pianist who had survived Auschwitz. Isaac Albéniz’s ‘El Albaicín’ was a fitting climax to the performance, full of dark Spanish power, lyricism and a Moorish/gypsy flavour that reminds the listener of Spain’s complicated history. We shall become more frequent attenders of these concerts.

St Bride by David McFall

Distressed or simply non-compliant: what’s in a word?

My sons, no doubt, will tell you that I  am frustratingly insistent about the precise use and meaning of words. That character trait came in quite handy when I was a reference publisher. Words, of course, can have multiple meanings, as can events. Events shape the words we use, the words we use shape events, and our choice of words can determine how history records events. I read a newspaper article last week in which very different words were used to describe a single event.

The article concerned a 48-year old Nigerian lady in Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre, an institution run by a government contractor, in which people who are not British nationals are “detained” before being deported. The period of detention can sometimes be longer than a sentence for criminal activity. Yarl's Wood is not a nice place to spend time.

The Nigerian lady was raped in Nigeria when she was 7 years old, and again aged 17. The second rape resulted in a pregnancy. Her baby died aged six months. She has been diagnosed with PTSD and is asthmatic. She was under constant supervision to prevent her harming herself. She is on trial for biting three guards at Yarl's Wood and for kicking a fourth. On the day in question (as a lawyer would say) she had been scheduled for deportation. However, she insists that she had been informed by her lawyer that her deportation had been “cancelled”. It seems that, indeed, her removal had been deferred, but that the information had not reached the guards at Yarl's Wood.

The Yarl's Wood staff spent three hours trying to persuade her to leave voluntarily. She refused. The manager then authorized the staff to use force. Her removal was filmed, and when the Nigerian lady saw staff approaching with a camera she responded by removing all her clothes. She was then wrestled to the ground by the staff and held face down, covered with a blanket. She was heard on the film to cry “Leave my neck, leave my neck, please leave my neck.” She is claiming self-defence, saying that she was “thrown like a bag of cement” to the floor.

The defence lawyer asked the detention operations manager at Yarl's Wood if the use of force was disproportionate. He replied that it was not because the Nigerian lady was “extremely resistant and aggressive”, and because a financial penalty would have been incurred for failure to deliver her to the flight. Asked whether the woman’s removal of her clothes was a sign of distress, he replied “It’s a sign of showing non-compliance.” I suspect that it was both. My dictionary provides two definitions of compliant. The first is: “tending to be excessively obedient or acquiescent”. I would agree with the manager that the Nigerian lady was not excessively obedient nor acquiescent, but if I were the lawyer I would also have argued that it is perfectly possible to be both distressed and non-compliant. Removing one’s clothes in front of strangers while being filmed suggests at the very least apprehension. The guards also testified that she was very resistant and aggressive, which again does not preclude her being distressed.

It is easy to consider the Yarl’s Wood manager and guards cruel and indifferent to the Nigerian lady’s fate, but they are employed by a company contracted by our elected government ro detain and deport people. Perhaps the responsibility for her treatment lies elsewhere. The newspaper reports reminded me of reading the text of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. I published the international edition in the 1990s. The report detailed appalling acts of cruelty and suffering. However, I was struck by a discussion of the effects of the murders, torture and other violations of human rights committed in the name of the South African state. This section of the report addressed the dehumanizing harm done to the murderers and torturers. The politicians who instructed them to carry out these acts suffered no such consequences. Nor did those members of the white community who elected the government. Those who carried out appalling acts on the instructions of the state, on the other hand, were severely damaged. This does not exempt them from responsibility, but it does set eh events in context.

The Report was the only book I had read for libel in my 40 years as a publisher. Macmillan’s libel lawyer called me to tell me that he recommended I not publish the report because it was full of libels. I replied that I failed to understand how I could libel men who had confessed to such crimes. The lawyer told me that the accusations in the book could damage the reputations of those named in the book and that they would be entitled to sue for reputational damage. My boss and I agreed that this was quite absurd and that se whould publish, but we did decide that it was prudent to obscure two brief mentions of the involvement of Prime Minister F. W. de Klerk, who had taken the Commission to court in South Africa. We ostentatiously blacked out the relevant text and added a note referring the reader to the uncensored South African edition. I later saw Mr de Klerk at a launch in Hatchards bookshop of his memoirs. During the speeches I stood behind Margaret and Dennis Thatcher, friends of F. W. I was tempted to mention the report to Mrs. T., but suspected that her guards might intervene, although probably less forcefully that the guards at Yarl’s Wood.

Royal Windsor (not Meghan and Harry), Leonardo Da Vinci and Ancient Mexico (via China and Syria)

In case you were wondering, Jan and I are not monarchists, nor are we all agog about Meghan and Harry. A much more interesting royal topic is our visit a year or two ago to Windsor Castle with a friend and former author Ralph Larmann, and his wife Ella Combs, from Evansville, Indiana. The castle houses the Royal collection of prints and drawings, one of the finest in the world.

 

Dürer, Holy Family

Leonardo, Man Tricked by Gypsies

In preparation for our visit we were required to pass a security check and to state what we would like to see. Ralph and Ella asked for Dürer prints and Leonardo drawings. Once the security office had issued our passes, we were able to enter the castle without paying the usual charge and (since we were early) to wander into St George’s Chapel for some free sightseeing.

St George's Chapel, Windsor

At the appointed time we rang the bell at a door which took us into an area where a police officer checked our passes. Our companion during our visit was a young Italian art historian, who asked who would volunteer to handle the book of Dürer prints. Ralph volunteered and was taken away to wash his hands (no gloves required). We four constituted a group, which meant that we had exclusive access to the collection for one hour and forty minutes.

 

Dürer, Virgin and Child with an Angel Playing a Viol

The Dürer prints are kept in large bound books. Many are on religious themes: The holy Family, the Virgin and Child with an Angel Playing a Viol, The Apocalypse.

Dürer, Apocalypse

But there were also subjects such as A Knight, Death and the Devil, The Bath House. The expressiveness and the fine detail of the prints is quite extraordinary: one landscape featured a tiny goat, depicted in great detail sitting on top of a remote hill.

 

Dürer, A Bath House

Not even Ralph with his washed hands was allowed to handle the Leonardos, which were brought to us by the Italian lady. She had selected a range of works for us: landscapes, anatomical studies, designs for military devices and statues, studies for paintings, grotesques.

Leonardo, Storm Over a Hilly Landscape

I remember particularly a small study of a storm over a town in a landscape, drawn seemingly a great speed to convey the feeling of wind and rain. There was a design for a commission for an equestrian monument, which Leonardo apparently never completed. He was not good at customer service. There was a wonderfully evocative drawing of a man being tricked by evil-looking gypsies. My favourite was a gorgeous study of the Virgin and child for the painting in the National Gallery, The Virgin of the Rocks, and almost as beautiful study of a head of Leda.

Leonardo, Head of Leda

As a former publisher, I was struck by the variety of sizes and textures of paper. Leonardo clearly did not carry around with him an A4 sketchbook. So, before writing this I contacted my friend and great expert on the history of paper, Jonathan Bloom. In Renaissance Italy paper was made from linen rags of varying quality, textures and cleanliness, which meant that sheets could vary in colour and texture. The rags were soaked in water and beaten into pulp by hammers, usually in water-powered mills. Then a mould was dipped in a vat of wet pulp, shaken to distribute the fibres evenly and left to dry. Thus, sheets were individually made, and the process required plentiful raw materials (rags), plenty of clean water, a good deal of manual labour, and time to dry the paper. Large sheets were difficult to make since they required large moulds which were heavy and difficult to handle. This made paper expensive. However, the alternatives were papyrus made in Egypt from reeds, which provided an inferior writing surface, or parchment which was expensive because an animal had to be killed to provide the raw material (skin).

Jonathan tells me that paper was made to standard sizes quite early on. There was a specification of paper sizes in Bologna in the 14^th century. Leonardo evidently had his eye on cost. He bought large sheets of cheap paper for his cartoons (designs for frescoes) but more expensive smaller sheets for other purposes. Therefore, he probably bought sheets of standard sizes. Perhaps the variety of sizes of Leonardo’s drawings was the result of cutting sheets to the size required so as not to waste an expensive surface.

Paper was invented in China where it was made from a variety of plant materials. Buddhist monks carried the technology to Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and probably to India. Paper making spread to the arid lands of Central Asia where the plants used in East Asia did not grow. Rags were a more suitable and available raw material. Paper manufacture reached Syria around 800AD. Muslim papermakers used both plant raw materials and recycled textiles to make paper. They spread the technology around the Mediterranean. Paper making using rags was established in the Iberian Peninsula by the 12^th century. Such was the strategic importance of rags that King Jaume of Aragón (who reigned from 1213-1276) banned its export. Manufacture in England began around 1500, but a decline of linen production because of the Civil War in the early 1640s temporarily interrupted paper making. Here too the government acted to preserve strategic rags: the dead could be buried only in woollen clothing or shrouds.

The peoples of ancient Mexico were already “peoples of the book” centuries before the Spaniards introduced their own paper. Mexican paper was made from fig bark using a beater to hammer it flat. Paper was used for recording taxes and for general administrative purposes to manage society and government. It was also used to document the history and genealogy of ruling elites and to  record religious texts. Paper also had sacred uses and was therefore highly prized. Mexican did not bind sheets of paper to make books of the kind we are accustomed to. They glued sheets together to make long folding paper “screens” (known as códices) that could be unfolded one page at a time or displayed opened to full length to be read or recited. The Mayans had an elaborate writing system, but in Central Mexico pictographic writing predominated. Scribes were experts in the meanings of pictographs and also served as expert readers and well as writers.

 

The Mixtec Codex Nuttall, British Museum, made before the 1519-1521 Conquest

We are accustomed to think of printing as the first revolutionary information technology, but Jonathan points out that paper existed long before printing. Paper and its use for drawing and writing was the first global “disrupter” technology. The arrival of paper stimulated the great flowering of Medieval Islamic literatures and learning. The Spaniards used paper as the instrument through which they administered a vast empire that spanned three continents. A government official sent to Mexico to inspect the work of a senior official could use almost 50,000 sheets of paper.

 

The Mixtec Codex Selden or Codex Añute, Mexico after 1556, Bodleian Library, Oxford

In Mexico, the paper-based culture of the Spaniards met another society for which paper was an essential technology. The indigenous people started producing their own documents on European (as well as Mexican) paper within a few years of the Conquest of 1519-1521. Scribes still wrote pictographically, but now added glosses in Náhuatl (the Aztec lingua franca) and Spanish, for use dealing with royal officials or in the courts. The Spanish legal system officially recognized these pinturas (“paintings”). In the hands of a resourceful indigenous leader (or in less than a century the odd Indian lawyer) paper became a tool to protect the community and resist abuses.

I wonder what Leonard would have made of the books of ancient Mexico.

If you would like to learn more about paper an excellent place to start would be Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print, The History and Impact of paper in the Islamic World, Yale University Press, 2001.  

Wheeling in the New Year in Sunninghill

To wish you all a Happy 2020, today's item is almost entirely pictorial. When we moved to Sunninghill in 1982 there were four pubs within less than a five minute walk from our house. Starting more than two decades ago, a group of drinkers decided to stage a wheelbarrow race which stopped at each pub for a pint. At some point the participants added a fancy dress element and collected money for charity. Here are some photos from this year's race. A Happy New Year to you all. Please stay in touch throughout 2020.

Our neighbours the Brewer family waiting for the start. Note the jelly fish

A local electrician Dilwyn Thomas and his wife

Can you spot the real vicar?

Looking for the Yellow Brick Road

Bananas on the run. Brits love bad puns (just ask my sons)

A team urging us all to Moove it moove it

 

 

British reserve disappears when we indulge in a little cross-dressing

Greta Thunberg makes her first appearance in Sunninghill