Boxes!
Boxes!
I’ve been opening lots of boxes recently, and finding surprising things inside. Here’s a snap-shot of two of them. The first is from the Bodleian Library in Oxford, dating from around 1700.
This is what archivists call a ‘coffret’ – a small coffer – and it served once as a document box, with a metal handle and a locking clasp, made of wood and covered in leather, leather which is tooled in gilt on the front and lid, and blind (meaning: without gold) on the sides and back. Coffrets like this were used for storing letters, books, documents, valuables, sometimes relics, often at home but also – that handle suggests – while travelling.
The interior has been lined with printed sheets – including the lips and edges.
These printed sheets come from editions of Horace and Virgil, in English and Latin, printed by Joseph Davidson at the Angel in Poultry: from 1742-3. I’m struck by just how non-bookish Virgil is, here: not folded, not bound, not a codex in a library or a tome on a desk but words coming at us in shards, from different angles, like overheard conversations, without the spatial logic of the book.
Here’s a second example.
This is a deeds box that came to Worcester College, Oxford, when it purchased lands from one Thomas Wrench in 1741, not long after the college’s founding.
The box was lined with pages from a text by William Howell, printed in 1679, Medulla Historiae Anglicanae: The Ancient and Present state of England – a popular, duodecimo text, printed in at least 11 editions up to 1701, providing a chronicle of English kings. What’s striking here is the rather ghostly presence of loops and curves, covering but not quite obscuring the written text, and converting what had once been sheets of historical narrative intended for a duodecimo book into something at least partly decorative – the pages carrying now the shapes of flowers and stalks and leaves.
Historians of print call this damasking – the name links the practice back to a kind of cloth associated with medieval Damascus, and it means the printing of ornamental patterns over already printed sheets. Damasking is often linked with censorship. In 1673, the Bishop of London issued an order to ‘Damask or obliterate whatsoever sheets you have seised of a Book, intitled Leviatan’, and a servant of the Stationer’s Company was paid 30 shillings for damasking 45 reams of the second edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. A ream at this point means 20 quires, or 480 sheets – so that’s 21,600 sheets of Hobbes, bedecked and partially obscured with swirls and patterns.
But damasked papers were used also as decorative objects – the practice has a fascinating double connotation of censorship and ornament – and produced book covers, pattern sheets, and also early wallpaper— in 1911, workmen pulling off a plaster ceiling at Christ’s College, Cambridge, found the beams and joists covered with sheets originally printed by Wynkyn de Worde (an Indulgence of Pope Julius II; a poem on the death of Henry VII) layered, on their reverse, with repeating patterns.
Damasked papers turn up quite frequently in deed boxes, too, and that’s what we’re looking at here. The pattern isn’t quite censorship, but it does designate that the sheets are no longer necessary – their textual comment beside the point.
Thanks to Sarah Wheale and Alex Franklin at the Bodleian, and to Emma Goodrum at Worcester Collee, Oxford. For some great recent thinking about boxes, see Lucy Razzall’s Boxes and Books in Early Modern England (2021).
I love boxes!