If These Pages Could Speak: Books Beyond Text

As graduate students, we spend a lot of time with books. Even in the digital age, each new project begins with the familiar routine of heading into the stacks at the Winterthur Library and staggering out with armloads of books. Books provide us with background, context, and comparisons for our studies, introducing us to other scholarship and new ideas. We use books to learn about objects.

Book stacks at the Winterthur Library

As material culture students, however, books couldn’t remain transparent sources of information forever. As tends to happen, an object made me reconsider. This time, it was a small, battered volume I received as a connoisseurship block project, a book that spoke more eloquently for its own importance than its text alone ever could.

Nathaniel Colson, The Mariners New Kalendar (London: W&J Mount and T Page, 1749).  Copy owned by the Winterthur Library

The book in question was a copy of The Mariners New Kalendar, published in 1749. It was written to teach basic navigation, a middle edition of a text that was in print, with minor changes, from the 1670s to the 1790s. The writing is resolutely practical, describing proven methods for guiding a ship to port, and making no concessions to the casual reader.

As I spent more time with this volume, however, I realized that there was a rich, vital human history built on the dry paragraphs. The state of the cover alone speaks to long, hard use. The plain leather binding has been scratched and worn, and the bottom section is torn away. But the cover also shows care in the careful, if clumsy, repairs stitched along the spine. The people responsible for this use-history appear as soon as the book is opened: the title page is filled with inscriptions from four separate owners, and thirteen more signed their names later in the text.

Title Page, Mariners New Kalendar (1749)

The young men that owned this book didn’t simply claim it, they used it. They filled the margins with mathematical notations, working out the text’s examples or inventing new problems. Past owners also cut and labeled their own tabs for a multi-page table of the latitude and departures, thus making their textbook a more useful tool for navigating in the future.

Mariner’s New Kalendar, page 11.  Note the signature at the bottom left.

In addition to practicing navigation, young men used this book, after a fashion, to invent themselves. In 1766, Thomas Greeno used the margins to experiment with spelling his name, trying out “Greenog” and “Greenoug” before settling, at the end of the book, on the more genteel “Greenough.” This volume’s pages thus became a stage for Greenough to literally make a name for himself.

The generations of men that owned this book left an unmistakable record on its pages and cover, a human history that we can recover by studying the physical volume itself. At the same time, the book left a mark on its owners. This particular material object, containing a text on navigation, enabled at least seventeen owners to learn important techniques; practice arithmetic, penmanship, and spelling; and, generally, to gain the skills they needed to advance in their careers. There were many similar texts available in 1749, but this particular book provided the tools for Thomas Greeno to (presumably) become Captain Greenough. It is a modest, battered object, but one that can give us a glimpse of how people navigated a past world.

“Midshipman”

R. Ackerman, after a drawing by Thomas Rowlandson

Hand-Colored Etching, London, 1799

Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England

By Elisabeth Meier, WPAMC Class of 2017