In an article called ‘Printers of the Mind’, published in 1969, the bibliographer D.F. McKenzie unraveled certain fundamental assumptions imagined and repeated by scholars who studied the production of books. Central to these mistakes was the idea that printers worked on one book after another, in tidy and separated sequence. Instead, McKenzie proposed a model of concurrent printing.
Cambridge University set up its press in 1696, and kept extremely full records. McKenzie buried himself in these records, particularly the years 1696 to 1712: the week-by-week accounts of compositors, correctors, pressmen, type-founders, carriers, suppliers, and others, conjured a richly detailed drama of a business bringing books into the world, and McKenzie was able to track the life-in-process of the books printed. His most important achievement was to show how print shop workers worked on multiple projects concurrently. Several books might pass through the printing house simultaneously, and each book might be shared between several workers. A book was not an isolated unit but an element within a larger system; if a print shop had a logic, it was a logic built around collections of books-in-production, not the single, separated works that had typically been the scale of operation for scholars. If we want to understand how Shakespeare’s First Folio was produced in 1623, we can’t assume, McKenzie writes, that the First Folio itself contains all the evidence of its production: we need to look at the other works that William Jaggard and his colleagues were printing around the time because, in print shop thinking, the First Folio hardly existed as a separate work: it was part of an atmosphere of book-making.
McKenzie was talking about printing houses, but I think the idea of concurrent production is helpful for thinking about the production of all kinds of cultural items – just as McKenzie is right that our tendency to try to understand novels or paintings or plays in isolation from the torrent that brought them into being is problematic.
What does concurrent production mean for writing? It might mean a writer working on two works at the same time: Charles Dickens started Oliver Twist while he was still finishing Pickwick Papers, in 1837, aged just 25, hitting monthly serialisation deadlines of about 7,500 words for each. For ten months, in Claire Tomalin’s words, ‘Dickens would have to work like a juggler to keep both spinning.’ Can we think of these two novels as one sustained, adrenalin-fuelled passage of writing? But more often, concurrent writing is writing across many different forms at once, and its writing in which a clear sense of demarcation between works is not yet clear. The poem that will one day be canonical emerges jostling alongside, and hardly distinct from, letters, shopping lists, book reviews, sometimes even sharing the page with scraps of correspondence, its boundaries not established from the start. One version of authorship might be the battle to suppress this torrent of the everyday to create space for the poem: a hacking away of everything else. Another would see the links between the poem and the scraps: would see them all as writing coming into being, a huge sprawling text which can later be pruned and sliced up into parts by editors and publishers and scholars.
On Wednesday, 16 August 1922, Virginia Woolf is writing what she at first called The Hours, and later Mrs Dalloway.
For my own part I am laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs Dalloway & bringing up light buckets. I don't like the feeling I'm writing too quickly. I must press it together. I wrote 4 thousand words of reading in record time, 10 days; but then it was merely a quick sketch of Pastons, supplied by books. Now I break off, according to my quick change theory, to write Mrs D. (who ushers in a host of others, I begin to perceive), then I do Chaucer, & finish the first chapter early in September.
Woolf’s ‘quick change theory’ – a sudden switch between kinds of writing when Woolf flipped her note-book the other way up – positions ‘Mrs D’ not as a separate work, but as writing that is formed in relation to these other pieces.
Dorothy Wordsworth's journals record her brother’s poems as one event in a day full of other things. Here is 26th and 27th March 1802 – a Friday and a Saturday.
[26th] A beautiful morning. William wrote to Annette then worked at the Cuckow. I was ill & in bad spirits — after dinner I sate 2 hours in the Orchard. William & I walked together after tea first to the top of White Moss, then to Mr Olliffs. I left Wm & while he was absent wrote out poems I grew alarmed & went to seek him — I met him at Mr Olliffs he had been trying without success to alter a passage, in Silver How poem — he had written a conclusion just before he went out. While I was getting into bed he wrote the Rainbow.
[27th] A divine morning — at Breakfast Wm wrote part of an ode — Mr Olliff sent the Dung & Wm went to work in the garden we sate all day in the Orchard.
William Wordsworth writes to Annette Vallon in France, the mother of his 10-year-old daughter, a daughter who doesn’t know him, and then he writes ‘To the Cuckoo’ (‘O blithe New-comer! I have heard, / I hear thee and rejoice’). On Saturday morning – a beautiful day – he writes the opening of ‘Intimations of Immortality’ (‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light…’), and then Mr Olliff sends the dung.
Thinking about concurrent writing means in part recognizing the importance of interruption as a condition of artistic production. You write a line of your libretto (you are writing a libretto, right?) – the email pings – you write a reply about the Norfolk campsite booking – you go back to your libretto, but now you’re not just writing a libretto, you’re writing a libretto after having confirmed a booking at a Norfolk campsite, which is a different thing.
Because a work of art, like a novel or a painting, ultimately assumes a discrete physical form – with a physical edge, a limit, distinct from other things – we easily transfer that physical separation into our thinking about the work. What if we thought of writing as one of a number of concurrent acts of expressions performed by a writer?
Further reading.
You can go here for D. F. McKenzie’s ‘Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices’ is in Studies in Bibliography, Vol. 22 (1969), 1-75.
On publishing Shakespeare, Ben Higgins’ brilliant Shakespeare's Syndicate: The First Folio, its Publishers, and the Early Modern Book Trade has this just been published with Oxford University Press.
Thanks to Dennis Duncan and Seamus Perry for talking about concurrent writing with me.
Interesting... I'm trying to imagine what a full-on, annotated, scholarly variorum edition of even a single poem would look like, bringing every retrievable concurrent, adjacent, and potentially contributory factor to bear in this way. Sort of internet sized, probably... I see the Treaty of Amiens was signed on 25th March 1802: could some version of "morphic resonance" or "six degrees of separation" link Napoleon to Mr. Ollif's dung? (Shakespeare got there first, of course: "Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away"...)
Apart from the fact that scholarly, annotated editions are already pretty distracting, when the footnotes outweigh the text, I'm wondering how anyone would retain their sanity, confronted with such an overwhelming sense of intertextuality? We could be entering into Borges territory here, and creating a 1:1 scale map. Help!
Mike