Books Without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture

Books Without Borders, Volume 1 The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture

Edited by

Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond

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Books Without Borders, Volume 1

10.1057/9780230289116 - Books Without Borders, Volume 1, Edited by Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond

Also by Robert Fraser BOOK HISTORY THROUGH POSTCOLONIAL EYES: Re-writing the Script

THE MAKING OF THE GOLDEN BOUGH: The Origins and Growth of an Argument LIFTING THE SENTENCE: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction VICTORIAN QUEST ROMANCE: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling and Conan Doyle WEST AFRICAN POETRY: A Critical History

Also by Mary Hammond READING, PUBLISHING AND THE FORMATION OF LITERARY TASTE IN ENGLAND, 1880–1914 PUBLISHING IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR: Essays in Book History (co-editor with Shafquat Towheed)

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PROUST AND THE VICTORIANS: The Lamp of Memory

The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture Edited by

Robert Fraser Open University, UK and

Mary Hammond University of Southampton, UK

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Books Without Borders, Volume 1

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond 2008 All chapters © Individual contributors 2008

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-21029-5 ISBN-10: 0-230-21029-5

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Books without borders / edited by Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-21029-5 (v. 1 : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-230-21029-5 (v. 1 : alk. paper) [etc.] 1. Books—History. 2. Book industries and trade—History. 3. Books and reading—History. 4. Literature and globalization. 5. Globalization. 6. Civilization, Modern. I. Fraser, Robert, 1947– II. Hammond, Mary, 1960– Z4.B648 2008 002.09—dc22

2008016739

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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For Mike and Catherine

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List of Figures

ix

List of Tables

xi

Notes on Contributors

xii

Acknowledgements

xv

Introduction Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond

1

1 Books Without Borders: The Transnational Turn in Book History Sydney J. Shep

13

2 Publishing under the Yoke: A Short History of the Bulgarian Book from Paisy of Hilendar to Peyo Yavorov Matthew Gibson

38

3 “After the Old; yet as agreeable … to the Newest”: British and American Almanacs in the Era of American Independence Lily Santoro

55

4 From Germany to Brazil: The History of the Fashion Magazine A Estação, an International Enterprise Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva

67

5 School Readers in the Empire and the Creation of Postcolonial Taste Robert Fraser

89

6 Origin and Growth of the White Fathers’ Press at Bukalasa, Uganda Ivan Page

107

7 A New Demand for Old Texts: Philippine Metrical Romances in the Early Twentieth Century Patricia May B. Jurilla

130

vii

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Contents

viii Contents

147

9 Africa Writes Back: Heinemann African Writers Series – A Publisher’s Memoir James Currey

159

10 Outside the Nation(al): ‘South African’ Print and Book Cultures, and Global ‘text-scapes’ Andrew van der Vlies

173

11 Shakespeare’s Postcolonial Journey Roshni Mooneeram

186

Select Bibliography

199

Index

205

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8 Greene, Waugh, and the Lure of Travel Lynda Prescott

Figure 4.1

Die Modenwelt, 1 October 1870, Berlin. Courtesy of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz and Lipperheidische Kostümbibliothek, Berlin, 2007. Photo by Dietmar Katz.

69

John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral, from Nelsons West Indian Readers, Book V

90

‘An Ocean Liner’ from Nelsons West Indian Readers, Book II

94

J. C. Dollman, Crusoe, from Nelsons West Indian Readers, Book II

95

‘Kaieteur Fall’, from Nelsons West Indian Readers ( Jamaica Edition), Book V

97

‘Catechism for Beginners’, 1911, printed at Bukalasa

113

The composing room at Bukalasa, with Brother Adéodat supervising the work

115

The press room at Bukalasa, again showing Brother Adéodat and some of the staff

115

Figure 6.4

Workers in the bindery at Bukalasa

116

Figure 7.1

Front cover of Búhay na pinagdaanan ni Emilio na anác ni Artemio at ni Ángela sa cahariang Europa (The Life of Emilio, son of Artemio and Angela, in the kingdom of Europe), second printing, 1914

135

Front cover of Calugod-lugod na búhay na pinagdaanan nang mag-asaua ni Adan at ni Eva (The Delightful Life of the Couple Adam and Eve), second printing, 1924

136

Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3

Figure 7.2

ix

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Figures

Figures

Figure 7.3

Figure 7.4

Figure 7.5

Figure 7.6

Inside front and back covers of Manga kahangahangang ualong pu at ualong himala ni S. Vicente Ferer (The Eighty-eight Wondrous Miracles of St Vicente Ferer), displaying advertisements listing books sold at the shops of Juan Martinez (‘Mga Aklat na Ipinagbibili sa mga Tindahan ni J. Martinez’)

137

Front cover and title page of Buhay na pinagdaanan nang tatlong binatang magcacaibigan na si Arturo, Lauro at Rosalio at nang isang dalaga na si Perpetua sa bayang Betania sa cahariang Egipto (The Life of the Three Young Friends Arturo, Lauro and Rosalio and the Maiden Perpetua in the Town of Bethany in the Kingdom of Egypt) Note the slight variation in the imprints.

138

Front cover of Salita at búhay na pinagdaanan nang dalawang mag-amá sa isang aldeang sacop nang reinong España (The Words and Life of Two Fathers and Sons in a Village under the Kingdom of Spain), published in 1918

141

Front cover of Ang marilag na Virgen nang Kapayapaan (The Beautiful Virgin of Peace), published after 1925 The books bear the censorship stamp of the Office of the Japanese Military Administration, dated 13 July 1943. 144

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x

Table 4.1

Different issues of Die Modenwelt

Table 6.1

Provisional list of books printed at Bukalasa

74 123

xi

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Tables

James Currey was an Editorial Director of Heinemann Educational Books in London, and was in charge of the African Writers Series from 1967 to 1984. He is now Chairman of James Currey Publishers in Oxford, which specialises in academic studies on Africa. Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. Her field of research is the Brazilian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its relations with writing and publishing practices, the history of book and press and, especially, the relationship between the serial and book publication of novels. She is also interested in translation studies and genetic criticism. She has edited a genetic and critical edition of Machado de Assis’s short story ‘Linha reta e linha curva’, and published articles on the Machado de Assis’s works in American, British and Brazilian journals. She is currently completing a bilingual edition of Victor Henaux’s De l’amour des femmes pour les sots. Robert Fraser, FRSL, is the author of Book History through Postcolonial Eyes (2008), The Making of the Golden Bough (1990), Proust and the Victorians (1994) and books on Ayi Kwei Armah (1980), Ben Okri (2002), West African Poetry (1986), Victorian Quest Romance (1998) and the poetics of postcolonial fiction (2000). He edited Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination (1990), and his biography The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker was Spectator Book of the Year for 2002. A Professor of English at the Open University, he is also a Fellow of both the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Literature. Matthew Gibson is Lecturer in Literature at the University of Surrey. Originally a Yeats scholar, his most recent book is Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East (2006). He is now embarking on a new collaborative project on the history of the Orthodox Slavonic Book. Mary Hammond is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (2006) and a number of articles on the print culture of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, including entries for The Cambridge Companion to Literature 1830–1914 and The History of Oxford University Press, Vol. II. She is also co-editor of Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History (2007). xii

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Notes on Contributors

xiii

Patricia May B. Jurilla is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines in Diliman. She earned her Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 2006. Her thesis ‘Tagalog Bestsellers and the History of the Book in the Philippines’ will be published shortly. Roshni Mooneeram is Lecturer in English at the University of Central England. Her research interests include Shakespeare in postcolonial contexts, language standardisation, stylistics and the language of postcolonial literature. Her most recent publications are From Creole to Standard: Shakespeare, Language and Literature in a Postcolonial Context (forthcoming) and a number of articles on postcolonial drama. Ivan Page is general archivist of the Society of Missionaries of Africa in Rome. His most recent publication is Learn the Language to Spread the Word: The Linguistic Work of the Missionaries of Africa (2007). Lynda Prescott is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Staff Tutor in Arts at the Open University. Her publications include essays and articles on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, from Conrad and Kipling to J. G. Farrell and Pat Barker. Her research interests have recently broadened to include life writing, and she is currently working on a study of writer-travellers. Lily Santoro is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Delaware. She was the curator of an exhibit at the New Castle Historical Society (New Castle DE, USA) entitled ‘Before We Were Historic: The Story of New Castle’s Preservation’. She is currently completing her dissertation research on the popularisation of the natural sciences in the early American republic and its influence upon American Christianity among the clergy and the laity. Sydney J. Shep is Senior Lecturer in Print & Book Culture at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and The Printer at VUW’s Wai-te-ata Press, a letterpress-teaching laboratory and printing/publishing house. Her research interests include various topics in typography and design, paper history, ethnographies of literacy and transnational print cultures. She is co-editor of Preservation Management for Libraries, Archives and Museums (2006), contributor to Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History (2006), and is presently working on The Printing Press for Book Historians. Andrew van der Vlies, a graduate of Rhodes University in South Africa, and the University of Oxford, is Lecturer in Anglophone Postcolonial Literature and Theory in the School of English Literature,

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Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield. His research interests include South African literatures and cultural studies, and colonial and postcolonial print, text and book histories. He is author of South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over (2007), and an associate editor of the Oxford Companion to the Book (2008).

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xiv

The editors would like to thank the Institute of English Studies (IES), University of London, for their support during the 2005 conference from which these volumes emerged, together with an accompanying exhibition, ‘The Colonial and Postcolonial History of the Book, 1765–2005: Reaching the Margins’, for which the Oxford University Press and the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London generously loaned materials. We are especially grateful to the IES’s director, Warwick Gould, for his role in smoothing the path through to publication. Our thanks are also due to the British Academy for sponsoring our keynote speakers at the conference, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the Open University’s Colonial/ Postcolonial History of the Book project of which the conference and this two-volume collection were long-anticipated outcomes. For permission to reproduce material in individual chapters, and for help and support in all sorts of other ways, the editors and chapter authors would like to thank the following: Jyrki Hakapää (Chapter 1); the Delaware Society for Colonial Wars (Chapter 3); Dietmar Katz, the Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz and the Lipperheidische Kostümbibliothek, Berlin (Chapter 4); Bill Bell, David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery and the Archives Section of Edinburgh University Library, particularly Sheila Noble and Tricia Boyd (Chapter 5); the Archivio Generale dei Missionari d’Africa, Rome (Chapter 6); The Damiana L. Eugenio Folklore Room of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines in Diliman, Filipiniana Section of the University of the Philippines (Diliman) Main Library, School of Oriental and African Studies Library (Chapter 7); Simon Gikandi, Richard Lister, Keith Sambrook, Tom Holzinger, and the Khama III Memorial Museum, Serowe, Botswana (Chapter 9); James Currey, Keith Sambrook, Ulli Beier, Special Collections at the University of Reading Library (especially Michael Bott), Harcourt Educational, the University of the Western Cape and Robben Island Mayibuye Archive (both in Cape Town), Nicole Leistikow for permission to cite her unpublished thesis on Bessie Head, Patrick Denman Flanery and Peter D. McDonald (Chapter 10). Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. xv

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Acknowledgements

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Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond

I The publication in 2003 of The Portable Bunyan: A transnational history of The Pilgrim’s Progress by the South African scholar Isabel Hofmeyr has opened a gate onto radically new ways of thinking and writing about the history of the book. Her title is neatly alliterative, and her case study almost unique in its breadth and applicability: only the Qu’ran and the Bible can have reached quite so far, or have entered so many countries, continents and consciousnesses as that doughty Pilgrim. Hofmeyr construes this quality of portability in broadly metaphorical senses, stemming from translation, transmutation or adaptation. There are, however, physical, literal but nonetheless equally fascinating ways in which to follow the global itineraries of texts. Two decades ago, in his The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (1989), Robert Darnton investigated the smuggling during the mid-eighteenth century of republicanist diatribes from the French-speaking Swiss canton of Neuchâtel across the border into still royal France. To cross borders, even to transgress ideological limits in doing so, books do not however need to be smuggled. Import and export are the life and soul of the book trade, and have been so since the post-exilic Hebrews ferried The Book of Esther back from Babylon to their homeland in Jerusalem. Texts have always travelled like this, by means of persuasion, pride or commerce. During the early Middle Ages, we know of a vigorous exchange in manuscripts between Lindisfarne and Echternach in present-day Luxembourg. Those who have read with delight George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain: Or the Journeys, Adventures and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula (1843) will know of Borrow’s many scrapes, his accident-prone experiments in 1

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Introduction

Introduction

colportage and his amused devotion to employers he constantly addresses simply as ‘The Bible Society’. They were, of course, the British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804 and still going strong, the polyglot papers of which now fill a large archive in Cambridge. Relevantly, the first complete Bibles to be printed in India, three years before that society’s founding and under the auspices of a rival organisation, the equally new Baptist Missionary Society, became exports just as soon as they were made. Owing to a then stringent ban by the East India Company on missionary publications, they could not be printed anywhere in the British-occupied East, and had to be run off by a motley brigade of pundits, holy men and printer’s devils in the Danish principality of Serampore (now Srirampur) by courtesy of an understanding governor. They were then, like Darnton’s subversive tracts, carried across the border so that they might be read by those for whom they were intended. The message was new but the method was old, since for well over a millennium manuscripts had been humped like this the length and breadth of the land: in earlier ages in Sanskrit and, after what Sheldon Pollock has termed ‘the vernacular revolution’ of the early second millennium CE, in a multitude of fresh-minted regional literary codes. Before we start on the subject of the inter-, trans- or crossnational nature of print – or whatever suffix we prettily select – it is as well to register the fact that, for by far the longest stretch of its history, the book has been blithely pre-national. The essays contained in this and the following volume of Books Without Borders are all contributions to an ongoing debate concerning the proper location of texts, and the artefacts that embody them. It has to be emphasised from the outset that the subject is an open, as well as an ideologically laden, one. The attempt to annex books to territories is – and always has been – an aspect of a wider programme of affiliation, identification and flag-waving. Authors are claimed by nations – sometimes even squabbled over – but so are individual titles, publishing enterprises, literary series, sometimes even the technicalities of production. Such jaunty commandeering rises to an audible pitch at certain periods, notably when a nation is on the rise, or when it is dominated or threatened, rarely when it is waning. In Europe it reached a collective zenith in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth century. It found expression in national anthologies (The Oxford Book of English Verse); in nationally earmarked series (‘Cassell’s National Library’, ‘The English Men of Letters’); in nationally bound reference books (The Dictionary of National Biography, The Oxford Companion to French Literature); and in courses at schools and universities

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2

on French, German or British Literature. A very late product of this spree of chauvinism can arguably be discerned in the vogue, during the latter decades of the twentieth century and spilling over into the present, for national histories of the book: in Britain, France, Scotland or Wales. In the meantime the autonomy of the dominions of erstwhile European empires, and the transition to statehood of practically all their former colonies, has led to a rash of projects bearing the same tell-tale signs: ‘The African Writers Series’; ‘The Encyclopaedia of African Biography’; ‘Books from India’; ‘Présence Africaine’; textbooks on Indian literature; book history projects in Canada, Australia or New Zealand; and courses on a variety of geographically demarcated literatures (too many of them studied simply in their Europhone form) throughout the world of learning, and currently a nexus of bold initiatives aimed at charting the variegated experience of once-dominated areas of the world in publishing, distribution and textual manufacture. All of these developments raise the same essential question: where does the book belong? It is a query that has too often been aired in a cosy literary-critical setting. The materialities of production and the realities of reception, by contrast, serve to position it, not just in one light, but in several intersecting crossbeams. If a writer was born in one place, writes in a second and publishes in a third, where do we locate the work? If, in addition, the paper on which that work is printed originates from a fourth place, the typeface from a fifth, the ink from a sixth, the gum or binding from a seventh, where do we look for a location? And if the firm whose colophon decorates the spine is based in an eighth, the distributor in a ninth, and if readers are to be found opening its front cover in every nation on earth, where shall this vagrant of a tome be lodged? The first of these runs of questions has been asked with some frequency, but the second and third have been urged far less often. For some decades now there has been much vigorous critical discussion of what we have come to call the intertextuality of literature. Perhaps we should supplement this with an extra term. The intertechnology of the book, after all, represents just as vital a facet of its existence, subsuming as it does a series of bodily and economic conditions without which it would never exist at all. Indeed, the outsourcing of basic publishing procedures such as copyediting, design and typesetting to countries far beyond a text’s point or points of origin is a reality to which by now most twenty-first century authors have become accustomed. Witness the present volumes, commissioned in Basingstoke, copyedited in Bangalore. In reality this is nothing new, since intertechnology of various sorts has been with us for centuries.

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Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond 3

Introduction

In our concern with interrelatedness we should not, however, let our rhetoric run away with us. If the topic is, as we suggested earlier, ideologically charged, the current does not invariably run in one direction, or equally, throughout the global system. We have already glanced at the peaks and troughs of this discourse: the ways in which national agendas of the book rise and fall. Arguably much of Europe and North America has now passed beyond the nationalist phase (though from the behaviour and talk of leaders, one occasionally finds this palpable fact difficult to believe). Meanwhile, the revulsion against Western hegemonies in the non-West has itself often adopted avowedly – even aggressively – nationalist forms. If the intelligentsia of the West, having dispatched their very own national book histories, now perceive a need to pass on to embrace conjunctions, flirtations, trysts and all manner of promiscuous dealings across borders, the intelligentsia of the non-West are entitled to resist by reasonably complaining that such ubiquitous elision is likely to pass them over. Some of the most engaging and engaged contributions in the pages that follow come from scholars anxious, in the absence of any coordinated and responsible account of book production in their places of origin, to wrest from the onrush of history a substantive reckoning of the indigenous cultures of communication in the Philippines, or in Assam. These are voices that need to be heard above the opportunistic babble of globalisation, and they need to be heard clearly. That is the premise on which these two volumes rest. They do not claim to be the first books to deal with the relationship between print, power and nationhood, or with the remarkable polygenesis of texts in history, or with their border-crossings, both literal and metaphorical. To the work of Isobel Hofmeyr we might add trenchant recent studies by Stephanie Newell, Priya Joshi, Anindita Ghosh and Kai-Wing Chow. What the present two volumes have tried to do, however, is to bring together scholarly approaches drawing their evidence from a range of geographical regions. By this means we aspire to further the ongoing academic discussion around ‘where the book belongs’ without tethering it to any single location: generic, geographical, methodological or disciplinary. Our contributors do not always agree among themselves, nor is it our purpose to impose any sort of closure on the debate. On the contrary, our contribution, so we believe, consists in the very breadth and richness enabled by our polyphonic scheme, one in which the very openness of borders – generic, geographical, methodological, disciplinary – is an organising principle.

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Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond 5

The present volume, the first, opens a broad vista across this important debate. Throughout, our authors return to certain key concerns, the consideration of which runs like a set of counter-pointed motifs across the collection. Perhaps we might sum them up as a series of materialities, each of which enjoys a marked cross-cultural dimension: production and manufacture, distribution, transit and integration. Manufacture is the leading theme of a provocative first chapter by Sydney Shep, who is that rare and estimable combination: a printerscholar. ‘Books Without Borders: The Transnational Turn in Book History’, draws inferences from her experience of teaching printing students at the Wai-te-ata Press in New Zealand applicable, she argues, to the wider, theoretical relationship between print and politics. In her reading, the ‘borderlands’ that bound any given text ‘are in and of themselves already potent statements which inextricably and uncompromisingly define the text’. However, the negotiation of textual spaces is not merely a matter of deciding where they begin and end. For Shep, the problem for book historians has been precisely one of a toobounded historiography, constrained, on the one hand, by the urge to construct ‘National’ Histories of the Book before the internet dissolves the developed world into a homogeneous linguistic mass and, on the other, by the impossibility of defining national print histories when books are themselves hybrid creatures by nature, whose influences reach far beyond the social, temporal and political borders bounding the nation state. Calling for a new type of historiography which moves beyond the national book, Shep lays down a challenge that is picked up in various ways and varying degrees by all subsequent contributors. Shep is far from being the only contributor who takes us inside the workshop. In Chapter 6 Ivan Page transports us to a Catholic mission press in the then remote and rural Uganda of the early twentieth century, an environment where Rome (the focus of the Fathers’ allegiance), Algiers (the location of their order), France (from where so many of these courageous priests originated), the Ancient Near East (the source of so many of their texts) and Africa intriguingly combined. In Chapter 5 Robert Fraser takes us inside the now demolished Parkside Works of Thomas Nelson and Sons alongside Holyrood Park in Edinburgh, from which, after they had been rolled out on the firm’s great rotary presses, textbooks were once ferried daily to the nearby port of Leith, and thence to young readers all over the Anglophone world.

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II

Introduction

Perhaps most vividly of all, James Currey – publisher for 50 years – invites us, in Chapter 9, inside the London offices in Charles Street, later in Bedford Square, of the directors of Heinemann Educational Books – of which for over 20 years Currey was one – where the rapidly expanding list of the African Writers Series (1962–2003) historically took shape, interlocking as it did so with subsidiaries and outlets the length and breadth of a continent. In Currey’s fascinating and personal account ideas, texts and books move beyond the dominant metropolis of London, beyond even the borders of post-independence nations. He writes with the enthusiasm of a pioneer, and you do not have to share his pioneer’s mythology to share and enjoy his adventure. In Currey’s memoir, production and distribution come resolutely together. But distribution, of course, has its own dynamic and is necessarily as versatile as modes of transportation permit, though often orchestrated by commanding ideologies. It may embody or incorporate the nation, or it may transcend it in the interests of some grand conception: religious (as in Page’s, Chapter 6), political (as in Van der Vlies’s, Chapter 10) or commercial (as in Currey’s, Chapter 9). Chapter 3, for example, examines the all-important transatlantic connection by delineating the relationship between Almanacs in Britain and the newly formed United States of the eighteenth century. Lily Santoro argues that through an examination of widely circulated texts published during a period of revolution, it is possible to trace the demise of conjoined colonial histories with shared sets of values, tracking the increasing division between content and tone in a period when nationalist concerns no longer coincided with one another. The result was a negotiation of separate, antithetical, potentially even hostile world views. While it would be naïve to consider such histories complete in themselves, Santoro’s chapter posits a useful by-product of nationalist historiography, one which, she suggests, it might be fruitful to pursue further. In clear contrast, Andrew Van der Vlies posits a view of textual allegiances which runs precisely counter to the recent ‘National’ book tendency in his examination of novels by banned South African writers during apartheid. In Van der Vlies’s analysis, protest books written by exiled, dissident writers such as Bessie Head and Alex La Guma are no less nationally constructed than their officially sanctioned counterparts in that they are dependent upon prevailing national conditions. Yet they escape – indeed by definition must escape – the dominant ideologies of their own nation states, and thus the narrow rubric of nationalist historical definition. In his examination of the interaction between official discourse and its alter ego, Van der Vlies provides a nuanced

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picture of a radical print culture and its international co-conspirators which should serve as a useful warning against over-simplifying the relationship between authors and the countries of their birth. In Chapter 2, Matthew Gibson presents an equally persuasive – though very different – case study demonstrating the naivety of National History of the Book projects, arguing that any such study of complex and relatively recent nation states such as Bulgaria is likely to ignore (and indeed has already ignored) the ways in which boundaries are frequently drawn and redrawn along linguistic rather than geopolitical lines. The circulation of texts does not always keep pace with these shifts. Nor is any potential national book history in the context of the Balkans likely to pay full tribute to the rich overlay of languages, writing systems, beliefs, customs and other affinities in this much contested corner of Europe, currently a welcome source of migration to the West. Reading Gibson’s pages we enter a world in which countless communities jostle, rub shoulders, thrive and occasionally – even disastrously – conflict. One is forcefully reminded of the haunting autochrome photography of Albert Kahn’s celebrated ‘Archives de la Planète’, much of it taken in the Balkans and Macedonia shortly before the First World War, where a world of differing, interacting physical and cultural entities is vividly on display, relatively unsimplified by nationalist ideology, by ethnic cleansing, war or time. Intellectually, materially, wholly or in part, a text like an image is seldom a single entity, and can seldom be contained for long within locally conscribed boundaries. Five of our chapters explore the diverse ways in which transitions across such boundaries occur. At certain periods and in certain places, for example, ideologies migrate across linguistic communities. In Chapter 4, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva examines how notions of fashion and taste embodied in the pre-Second World War German magazine Die Modenwelt were translated and exported to a dozen other non-German-speaking communities across the world via a single publishing enterprise, again using the shared language of photography. Transit may of course simply take the form of writers travelling, a theme explored by Lynda Prescott in Chapter 8, on travel writers of the 1930s. Basing her study on the writers Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, she investigates the relationship between British literary traditions, market forces and post-Empire British provincialism, arguing that the urge to travel and to write about it sprang from a combination of financial imperatives and – paradoxically for a genre all about crossing borders – a post-Empire fascination on the part of both writers and readers with far-flung cultures whose borders still appeared to be intact.

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Introduction

At other times and in other places, we confront the transit across worlds of shared readerly memories. In Chapter 5, for example, Robert Fraser explores the influence of Nelson’s School Readers on future West Indian writers between the 1920s and the 1960s, tracing the astonishing power and endurance of romanticised ‘educative’ images of Britain in their adult novels as well as the insinuation into the national psyche of mythic stereotypes – Greek, Indian, Amerindian – that were to feed into a literature. By such means texts emanating from one community are absorbed into another quite distant one, thereby taking on a quite fresh identity. Our eleventh chapter grants us Roshni Mooneeram’s fascinatingly intimate account of how, perhaps, the most iconic ‘national’ writer in history – Shakespeare – has been re-appropriated and revivified by playwright Dev Virahsawmy in post-independence Mauritius. In so doing she demonstrates how the transit of texts may help constitute new cultural wholes. As the people of Mauritius have recast the Swan of Avon, so they have fashioned a local yet integrated voice all their own. Mooneeram’s argument that transit and integration are sometimes two sides of the same coin is salutary, and it is a theme also taken up in Chapter 7, where Patricia May B. Jurilla returns us to the possibility of national histories as recovered memory, useful – if not necessary – in postcolonial contexts. In her investigation into the popularity of Metrical Romances in the Philippines, introduced by Spanish colonists but adopted and adapted by Filipinos during the struggle for independence, Jurilla argues (like Santoro in Chapter 3 and Mooneeram in Chapter 11) that the selective appropriation of texts is one of the ways in which a society comes to imagine the same things, and hence to define itself in relation to an oppressive history. For Jurilla there are methodological issues at stake as well: she argues that while for New Zealanders the construction and investigation of a national history might seem anachronistic, for Filipinos (denied independence for much longer) it is a necessary move towards self-awareness.

III So where does our debate lead us? Not to a motion assuredly, still less to a vote. Both are forms of closure, and it is openness that we are interested in. It is our keen conviction that each of the recurrent motifs whose presence we have sketched above introduces us to opportunities for further work, and avenues along which future research in this rapidly evolving field might well and usefully progress. Production and

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manufacture, as well as distribution, open up the prospect, not only of the conventional though still far from complete scrutiny of publishers’ archives, but of a more vigorous investment in oral history at every level, and in every relevant commercial and geographical sphere. These books touched lives: scholarly, professional and private. They caught within their net the staffs of large organisations possessing ample geographical reach. Compositors, illustrators, binders, paper-makers, warehousemen, drivers, sailors, dockers, booksellers, librarians, censors, policemen, teachers, pupils, even lowly people like company directors, were all involved in their making, circulation and dispatch. To chart the history of books in this kind of multivalent setting arguably requires a Mass Observation strategy. It certainly demands that we should attend to voices from far and wide, and in every walk of international cultural, educational and business life. Projects such as SAPPHIRE in Scotland, or the archive of publishers’ lives, currently being assembled in the National Sound Archive at the British library, have made a start in the old metropolis. A gesture towards a more inclusive view was recently made in a special issue of the journal of international writing Wasafiri, No. 52 (November 2007) entitled The Book in the World: Readers, Writers and Publishers. But there is much still to be done, and human memory is mortal. The dimension of transit promises to turn book history on its head by viewing it less from the perspective of its agents, as from the supposedly passive angle of its successive vehicles and vessels of conveyance. Exactly how, at various periods and in various zones, have books moved around the world, and what difference has this made to their size, their shape, their weight, their appearance, even their contents and manner of address? Is airport fiction the same sort of beast as railway or else seaboard fiction? Certainly these are recognisable genres and, as we shall see in the next part of this two-volume set which concentrates on South Asia, the second played a dynamic role in the evolution of English-language fiction in India, while the first may help us to understand why the most recent generation of Indian writers has so rapidly and so effectively been globalised. Standard accounts of our subject area sometimes fall back on those tired and ideology-laden periodic divisions of pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial. As the British Martian poet and wit Craig Raine once remarked, such cultural histories wear trousers that are flared. We have avoided them. Might it not be a more illuminating plan to think instead in terms of the procession of substantive vessels that have carried books to their destinations across the ages? Should we not speak of the Age of Land, the Age of Sea and

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Introduction

the Age of Air? In the second volume we carry an essay that demonstrates the alarming yet potentially liberating impact on Indian publishing of the closure of the Suez Canal during Second World War. This is but one local example of the international effects of transportation on cultural exchange. Of course the phenomenon goes back much further than that, but is illustrated by nothing so much as the imperial system itself. When people nowadays attempt to comprehend the extent of this polity, they sometimes consult pre-1947 atlases in which large areas of the world are coloured in blocks of red. This is an instructive, yet also a limiting, exercise. Far more effective guides to the ways in which culture operated during the high noon of imperialism are late Victorian, or early twentieth-century, charts of international telegraph cables, or else of shipping routes. The first transatlantic was laid from Valentia Island off the coast of Western Ireland to Heart’s Content in Newfoundland in 1858. It lasted for 28 days before it broke, long enough however for Queen Victoria to be able to chat to the President of the United States. Within a very few years, cables stretched all over the world carrying messages as far as New Zealand. Cable charts of the 1890s look like cobwebs radiating from London to every corner of the globe, with many intersections. Theirs is a more sufficient, a more kinetic and less static – therefore a far more faithful – image for the traffic of information and of books. Besides, authors write with transport in mind, and internationally minded authors do this most of all. One of the earliest descriptions in the New Testament of literary reception (Acts 8: 26–39) is a cameo of an Ethiopian eunuch sitting in the back of his chariot, reading. Wheeler’s Railway Library in India not only introduced the world to Kipling, but it furnished across many hundreds of miles a network of station stalls whose successors may be found today from Howrah Terminus in Kolkata to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai. All furnish travellers in every class with reading matter for the mode of conveyance that Kim’s friend the Teshu Lama was pleased to call the ‘ter-ain’. As Kipling himself was more than aware, as each ‘ter-ain’ puffed across its terrain, it carried with it a multitude of readers, and hence of stories on the go. The Victorian triple-decker novel was frequently read between the decks of a ship, often on the top one. Its length had the leisure of a sea voyage: its ‘passages’ being meant for passengers of a certain class. It was bulky enough to weigh down clothing, stout enough to withstand the wind. We forget how long sea voyages took – three months to India before the canal shortened the route in 1869 – and how many men,

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women and families took them repeatedly to their places of occupation. All shipping lines carried libraries, and in the early days many interminable hours must have been devoted to reading. ‘During the whole voyage’, wrote Thomas Babington Macaulay shortly after reaching Madras in June 1834, ‘I read with keen and increasing enjoyment. I devoured Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French and English; folios, quartos, octavos and duodecimos.’ His sister Hannah ‘read novels and sermons with the ladies in the mornings’. A sea voyage was long enough to acquire an intermediate knowledge of a new language. When George Augustus Selwyn, the first Bishop of New Zealand, set sail for his diocese in May 1842, he spent his journey acquiring the predominant language of his cure. By the time he landed in Auckland, he was capable of preaching in Maori from the quayside. But books did not just travel on laps or in luggage: they also made it as freight. Much attention has been devoted recently by scholar-enthusiasts such as Professor John Spiers to the proliferation of colonial series issued by Victorian publishing houses such as Murray, Macmillan or Bentley. All of these series travelled to their readerships along the shipping lanes; in fact in fixing their price, the cost of freight and marine insurance were routinely included. Contributors to the current research programme The Reading Experience Database (RED) are even now busily scrutinising the margins of historic books for readers’ comments. Should they also consider testing the pages chemically for sea salt, and maybe gannets’ droppings? Before the Second World War, the aptly named flying boats of the time assumed the literary culture of the ages of sail and steam. The first services provided by Imperial Airways in the 1930s carried with them complete sets of the World Writers Series for the use of those on board. Airport fiction is the most characteristic literary mode of our age, one that has influenced dramatically the ways in which authors of all origins – and those from exotic origins most of all – write, and the circumstances in which their readers absorb them. The results are there for all to see: in book length, sentence length, paragraph length, even the plots. Salman Rushdie’s notorious yet brilliant novel The Satanic Verses begins with two air travellers falling out of the sky. Rushdie’s fiction, discussed in our second volume by Sarah Broulliette, is one of rapid local and temporal transition: the world viewed from a porthole. Buoyancy breeds success. The best-selling The Da Vinci Code arguably owes its popularity less to residual anxieties about religion than to the fact that its extent is conveniently London to Los Angeles, with plenty of breaks for nibbles. When the celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking

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Introduction

was seeking the most appropriate showcase for his much-bought though less read work of popularised cosmology A Brief History of Time, he was approached by some of the most august academic publishers on earth. He turned them all down. And to the competitors who remained he put one question: ‘Will you sell it at Heathrow?’ These are the realities of our age, but they are also congruent with the ingredients that have long constituted literary traditions, where they have for the most part been integrated into apparently homogeneous wholes. At the beginning of this introduction we spoke of the many projects around the world that have inscribed – or are in the process of inscribing – on tablets of metaphorical stone various national histories of the book. These projects will continue, and are of course to be encouraged. It is well however that we bear in mind the salutary correctives that Roshni Mooneeram’s inscription of theatre in Mauritius, and the essays that accompany it, can provide to all such narrow processes of accounting. National book traditions are not elements, but organic compounds that for much of the time are quite busily reacting. Welcome to the lab.

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Books Without Borders: The Transnational Turn in Book History Sydney J. Shep

Defining the grid A while ago, in Wellington, New Zealand, I completed another instalment of letterpress workshops for visual communication design students from one of our local universities. Their task is to design and print a typographic assemblage using wood types from the Wai-te-ata Press collection. None of them have encountered letterpress before; their usual creative medium is the computer, though their tutors ensure they are also inducted into the foreign worlds of pencil and paper, scissors and tape. In introducing the students to the world of letterpress, I emphasise continuity, whether of design principles, human perception, or material culture. We talk about the disposition of typographic elements, discuss the nature of letterforms, and view examples of successful and not so successful compositional strategies. When students handle a piece of wood type, they are seduced by its weight, dimension, polish, temporal traces, and unapologetic tactility. Yet I have to remind them of the remarks of contemporary Dutch punchcutter Fred Smeijers: What makes a letter a letter, and a word a word? It is an old story, which one cannot avoid retelling. It all depends on an awareness of and a respect for the shapes between and within the letters. The white shapes make the background, the black shapes make the foreground. The background makes the foreground, and the other way round. Change one, and you change the other too. It really is a game of black and white.1 When the students finish composing their assemblages, I explain the jigsaw puzzle of ‘filling in the blanks’ between their design and the 13

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Books Without Borders

inner edge of the chase; that is, the process of constructing the white spaces. This is something their computer automatically does for them, yet in letterpress they not only have absolute control over the relationship between the black and the white but that constructed space functions as a compositional element in its own right, of greater mechanical importance for locking-up and printing than the type-high letterforms which comprise the cherished communication message. We will begin with Making Margins, or, in other words, of arranging the Dimension of Pages. It is a subject of great importance, and one which will to a large extent determine the elegance of the book when completed … A book may possess everything that is usually considered essential to good typography – the type may be new and clear, the paper good and suitable, the composition careful and correct, the presswork irreproachably neat, yet if it has not exact, well-arranged margins it is a failure.2 Margins are constructed spaces. Yet for Gerard Genette, they are the ‘blank’ canvas, the marge de silence,3 for the disposition of the many paratextual elements which mediate between the worlds of text, publishing, and reading. I would like to suggest that margins, far from being solely the pregnant spaces for colonising palimpsests – running heads, folios, footnotes, marginalia, and the like – are in and of themselves already potent statements which inextricably and uncompromisingly define the text. Margins ‘are’ the endgame of black and white. They are the grammar of what Mary Louise Pratt terms the ‘contact zone’.4 Let us see what her margins propose: class, ethnic, and gender differences should not be analysed in terms of people’s memberships in particular communities but in terms of the production and reproduction of those differences in the socially constructed contact between groups bound together in their separateness. Such a ‘contact perspective’ would assume the heterogeneity of a social group and would place in the foreground the relationality of meaning … borders are placed in effect at the center of concern while homogeneous centers move to the margins … a contact perspective decenters community to look at how signification works across and through lines of difference and hierarchy.5 Margins are structural ‘borderlands, sites of ongoing critical and inventive interaction with the dominant culture, as permeable contact zones

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Sydney J. Shep 15

The design elements Book history is at a watershed. As national projects are nearing completion and new publications hit the bookshelves with ever-increasing speed, everyone is asking the same question: what next? More of the same, bringing other countries and continents such as India, Africa, South America ‘into the fold’, ‘into the picture’, ‘into the centre’? Or, a comparative perspective, launching national histories into the international arena? Or, something different, in fact, something startlingly different? Agitation is mounting. In 2003, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén noted that not only national history of the book projects have moved forward the research agenda and secured a recognised place for the field of study in the academy, they have also ‘reinforced a particular form of knowledge that mirrors, rather than questions some of the basic presuppositions of book history’. Micro studies reinforce the empirical basis of the field, but ‘because they in most cases are records of national histories, they are also vehicles for nation-state construction, meaning that on a very basic level, scholarship on print culture becomes in this respect part of – perhaps at certain times one with – the project which it is set to investigate’.8 Such complicity is at odds with Robert Darnton’s famous 1980 declaration that printed works do not have frontiers: ‘books refuse to be contained within any discipline … they also refuse to respect national boundaries’.9 Wirtén concludes, ‘If the ongoing History of the Book projects have been benevolent, even inspired crusades, then I remain convinced that the next step involves a different kind of research warfare. Increasingly thematic and much more transnational, we need Book History to question old truths regarding method and theory as well as the basic requirement of the nation-state as our given investigative point of departure.’10 Despite claims that we are already doing international book history, there is little reflection on what that means and whether it is anything more or different from what is already embodied in the national histories of the book. In a recent electronic discussion about international book history coordinated by renowned book historian Simon Eliot in preparation for a symposium to be held in Sydney in 2005, Edinburgh

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across which significations move in many directions’.6 For the purposes of this chapter, they will represent a ‘transgressive, interruptive engagement with the official categories of nationhood and community’.7 It’s time to start composing the margins.

Books Without Borders

University’s Bill Bell, who is largely behind the History of the Book in Scotland project, observed that there are already significant contributions to an international book history both within and without the national book history context. His greater concern is that the term ‘international’ already embeds ‘national’ and that thinking ‘inter’- or ‘trans’-culturally would allow for ‘a more nuanced consideration of exchange and negotiation within and between linguistic traditions’.11 Juliet Gardiner reiterated that ‘the “comparable histories” model is now seen of limited use and cultural transmission and translation is of particular pertinence with regard to print culture’. She suggested that anthologies and translation are two thematic areas where the crossing of borders can be most fruitfully examined and sustained.12 Peter McDonald astutely remarked that ‘histories of textual culture … make special demands on how we construe the spaces of culture’.13 In McDonald’s estimation, defining those spaces is where book history can make its most original and productive contribution, and the process of definition requires, in the first instance, an interrogation of existing historiographical categories. If the nation is one of those spaces, it is paradoxical and poignant that the construction and deconstruction of nationhood and nationalism rarely appear to be central preoccupations for book historians, even in the context of the national history of the book projects. Despite postcolonial theory or subaltern studies, our dominant discourse does not significantly support or address contemporary historiographical themes such as race, class, gender, indigeneity, hybridity, migration, diaspora, or decolonisation; nor does it tend to engage critically with long-standing historiographical goalposts such as metropolis and frontier, centre and periphery, or imagined communities. I will return to the shade of Benedict Anderson later. If book history is to achieve scholarly credibility, it is not in the trappings of the Academy: the institutionalisation of the field, the creation of departments of book history, the named positions, etc. It will be in confronting key questions of theory and method, as we indigenise the imperative of hybridity to construct our interdisciplinary margins.

Composing the field Let us revisit the site of book history for a moment. In 1991, as a number of national histories of the book were being launched, Ian Willison, one of Book History’s senior statesmen, took the wider view and characterised history of the book as that field of study within the

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humanities which was positioned to solve the post-war crisis between theory and research, that is, cultural or literary theory and empiricism. Cultural Theory and History of the Book (all in upper case) would combine to produce a new constellation termed, echoing McKenzie, ‘History of Text’, or ‘History of Textuality’ (all in upper case). Willison acknowledged and indeed promoted the idea that the unit of study for history of the book could be the nation, but considered it more accurately as a ‘portmanteau concept: “the cultural nation” conceived as interacting with “the political nation” of conventional narrative historiography, yet with its own, dynamic, ambiguities’.14 In retrospect, it is ironic that Willison’s analysis of the crisis of the humanities continues to be replicated in the very book history circles that seemed to afford its solution. In 1996, prior to the fourth annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) held in Worcester, Patrick Leary opened a proverbial can of worms on the Society’s web list, SHARP-L, with ‘Whither Book History?’ Leary quoted a recent Times Literary Supplement review in which John Sutherland had suggested that book history was not a ticket into an academy still enamoured with literary theory and gender studies. The flurry of responses demonstrated that, even in the congenial atmosphere of SHARP, there were still firmly entrenched divisions between the literary theorists/critics and the empirically driven historians and bibliographers. In 1999, the ‘to be or not to be institutionalised’ debate reared its head once again as scholars sought to attain credibility in the academy and recognition from their peers. The catalyst was an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement (17 December 1999, 27) which quoted Bill Bell, who not only discouraged the creation of departments of book history and specific named positions but suggested that book history should ‘plan its disappearance as elegantly and effectively as possible … when cultural historians and literary theorists come to see the production, circulation and reception of texts as important to what they do, then our task will be done’.15 Not everyone agreed with Bell, but he highlighted how book history, at least to some, remained handmaiden or bridesmaid to the main event. Simon Eliot offered a salutary reminder that ‘we should make a distinction between the process of research and knowledge that the process creates. Knowledge will be absorbed into other subjects, but the research process that created it will remain – and should remain – distinct’.16 But what is this research process that should remain distinct? Is it simply the synthesis of historical, textual, and bibliographical disciplines,

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Sydney J. Shep 17

Books Without Borders

as Eliot suggests, or is it something more, a method as well as a theory? Andrew P. Carlin talks about an ‘ethics of interdisciplinarity’ in the library and information science field which, like book history, requires both importing research strategies from different contexts and engaging with the ethics (or politics) of doing so.17 During a 1994 interview with Krassimira Daskalova, Robert Darnton was questioned about discernible national approaches and preferences in the study of the book. He pointed out that despite the internationalisation of the field, one can still detect national accents among book historians. The English tend to emphasize analytical bibliography and printing; the French, quantification and socio-cultural history; the Germans, economics and the book trade. Those emphases derive from the erudite traditions of the nineteenth century, and to a large extent they correspond to the nature of the documents available in each country … In moments of pessimism I sometimes think that the pattern of book history looks different in each country simply because each country has preserved a different kind of source material.18 The French have a lovely word: terroir. Essentially untranslatable – the ultimate linguistic foreclosure – it suggests that the fundamental character of a wine is derived from local climate, soil, and methods of cultivation and management, rather than simple genetic sequencing. Hence the creation of les appellations controllées, at once the protection of a region’s character, and the international patenting of nature’s intellectual property. Can we view books and print through the same crystal goblet, or, in the context of national book history projects, is there a larger principle at work? The goal of the national book history projects is to describe and analyse the production, circulation, and reception of texts in historically and geographically delimited spaces. Because text/print/book is embedded in a larger unit of analysis – the space of the nation – these projects should be concerned with how print constructs and/or represents nationalism and/or how it contributes to the mythology of a nation. Most projects are not, however, or, if they are, the ‘literary’ is held up as the agent of cultural nationalism. Variations on the theme of implicit or explicit national exceptionalism can be surveyed in the published work to date, recognising that the forthcoming twentieth- and twenty-first-century volumes may offer significant refinements, if not revaluations, of approach.

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Sydney J. Shep 19

Our knowledge of the past derives from texts: manuscripts, printed books, maps, music, graphic images. The seven volumes of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain will help explain how these texts were created, why they took the forms they did, their relations with other media and what influence they had on the minds and actions of those who heard, read or viewed them. They investigate the creation, material production, dissemination and reception of texts, effectively plotting the intellectual history of Britain. The inner blurb extends this paean: ‘Inevitably its emphases will differ from volume to volume, partly because the definitions of Britain vary significantly over the centuries.’19 The Welsh project published in 1998 tackled that ‘definition of Britain’ head-on: Both editors believed that developments in Wales, despite links with the British book trade, were sufficiently distinctive to preclude the country from being considered merely as a region of Britain. The growing international interest in the history of the book and in publishing in minority languages also made the preparation of such a volume particularly timely.20 We now have the History of the Book in Scotland and the History of the Irish Book projects to reflect this, shall we say, ethnic-isation of book history. We don’t yet have the History of the Book in Euskadi, the History of the Acadian Book, or the History of the Book in Indigenous Cultures. The six volumes (three en français, three in English) from the Canadian project are now complete. My comments are based on reading Vol. 1 Beginnings to 1840 which opens thus: With the publication of Volume 1 of History of the Book in Canada / Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada, Canadian book historians take their place within the network of scholars writing national histories of the book to define a field of study, to set goals for further investigation, and to provide foundations for international exchange … This work is a collaborative history written in French and English which poses and seeks to answer a series of questions about the role of print in the lives of Canadians.21

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The dust jacket blurb for The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain notes:

Books Without Borders

Several assumptions are at work here: firstly, that ‘national’ projects are defining our field of study; secondly, that such projects provide the ‘foundation’ for international work; thirdly, that the French and English languages of composition are synonymous with the history and political definition of Canada to the exclusion of other linguistic formations; and finally, that Canadians are a definably homogeneous entity in this period as in others. The Editors’ Introduction outlines a scenario of progressive colonisation, transatlantic dialogue and circulation, and the development of local print and reading networks. But does an enumeration of printing and reading experiences make a culture of print? And perhaps more tellingly, is print culture synonymous with literary culture? Their celebration of the first issue of the Halifax Gazette (23 March 1752), the earliest known example of Canadian printing, ‘reminds us of the shifting nature of literary culture and the limits of print culture’.22 What is ‘Canadian printing?’ Does writing/reading create something inherently literary? How can print culture have ‘limits’ if its development and acceptance is in its infancy? Is print culture, like literary culture, being essentialised and rarefied, almost à la Eisenstein? Fleming et al. refer to the Gazette’s advertisements for writing implements for sale and relate writing to printing, literacy levels to literature. New, albeit ephemeral, publications such as newspapers like the Gazette ‘foster native genius’ and render the ‘boundaries of literary culture elastic’ because they are not the standard genres of the literary canon. In their choric reprise, they hymn: ‘It was authors, printers, and readers who created literary cultures from songs sung, tales told, works written and read in early Canada.’23 Print is identified with the ‘literary’, and location indigenises textual activity, except for one small detail: ‘Canada’ has not yet been created. Such nationalistic fervour is implicitly reinforced by the book’s use of Carl Dair’s Cartier types, commissioned for Canada’s centennial in 1967, and explicitly embodied in the extensive electronic bibliographic databases supporting the project. The problematic question of location, production, and culture has received a more nuanced hearing in the introduction to the first volume of the History of the Book in America project entitled The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. In wrestling with the archangel of nationalism, Hugh Amory is emphatic that the ‘“colonial book”, was what the colonists bought and read, as well as what they printed and reprinted, and no special importance was attached to its place of manufacture’.24 He refutes the kind of national exceptionalism operational in the work of, for example, a national retrospective bibliography with its assumption of ‘American-ness’ inhering in colonial imprints and suggests that

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‘the colonial trade is amphibious’, neither an isolable and uniform commerce that is distinctively ‘American’ nor a practice to be merely analogised with those of ‘British provincial culture’.25 However, as Matt Brown points out in his Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America (PBSA) review, ‘the editors cannot fully remove themselves from a proto-national account and thus cannot explore a thoroughly hemispheric definition of the Americas (understandably, “out of respect for the parallel British and Canadian Histories of Book”)’.26 The planning papers for the History of the Book in Australia project (HOBA) clearly signal a dual agenda: a national history within an international context. As with the Canadian project, literary nationalism both frames and drives the book history chariot; in this instance, however, there are discernable fissures. The opening anecdote in Vol. 2, A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, sets the scene: ‘For those who interpret Australian literary history according to a nationalist agenda, and who value creativity just as far as it contributes to something uniquely Australian, writers like Clive Bleeck are excluded from the story.’27 So far, so good. Knock the canon on the head, recuperate disenfranchised writers, celebrate the strong but hitherto silent types, expand the notion of ‘literary’, all the while acknowledging that in this period, ‘in spite of Australia’s colonial status as a market dependent on British publishers, a distinctly Australian literary culture was emerging’.28 In essence, HOBA rethinks Australian literary nationalism using a wider range of textual formations characteristic of book history studies. But, it still privileges the literary and the nation as communication forms and norms, which, tautologically, build those representations. New Zealand, too, has not been immune from contemplating a national history of the book project. Like much of the English-speaking world, we were carried along, if not away, by the vision of belonging to the family of book history nations. We received visitations from esteemed scholars and endeavoured to create an administrative structure to enable such a large-scale publishing venture. The History of Print Culture in New Zealand project, a research programme within the newly established Humanities Association of New Zealand, was set up in 1995 and a scoping study undertaken. It became all too obvious, however, that being a relatively young country, we had neither the bibliographic control of our tangible cultural heritage nor a density of New Zealand-specific scholarship to support and sustain such a project. So, instead, the result of our efforts was an extended bibliographical essay, Book & Print. A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa, published in 1997.29

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Book & Print sketched an outline of local book trades, reading habits, institutional practices, and cognate activities in New Zealand, at the same time as it gave an overview of existing research and gestured towards important gaps. As one of the players in these events, I soon started questioning whether a national history of the book was desirable, even possible, in and for New Zealand. And this had nothing to do with its biblio-density or scholarly activity. Because I was looking at the movement of paper, that essential commodity for the printed word, I soon saw the shape of that discursive space termed ‘New Zealand’ being significantly determined by powers, events, and systems entirely outside its geopolitical boundaries, and ones, moreover, which didn’t fit into the neat constructions of Empire and home. I found myself asking significantly different questions, ones that were rarely being addressed by New Zealand studies in general. What was the implication of shipping nodes which included Kolkata and Canton as well as London and Sydney? What was the impact of speculative cargoes, cargoes that often included paper to be onsold at a premium both to government officials and local printers? When printers refused to buy British, how did they access and sustain trading alliances with America and other overseas markets? In the wake of scarcity and idiosyncratic market demand, how did New Zealand’s local reading economy develop? Despite Rod Cave’s plea to consider New Zealand ‘part of the main’,30 some reputable scholars assumed that one couldn’t do international book history without mastering one’s own history first. In addition, the endorsement of New Zealand nationalism as a political force by the academy was everywhere apparent. Government grants were available to those who could claim distinctiveness about some aspect of New Zealand culture, society, history, or politics. The political uncertainty about New Zealand’s identity in an increasingly globalised world was reflected back to the country by research agenda and scholarly communities whose very existence depended upon them mirroring the government’s propaganda machine. To add insult to injury, New Zealand publishers wanted a New Zealand focus in a populist idiom; multinational publishers couldn’t guarantee enough sales on New Zealand topics to warrant going to press. Nevertheless there was for me a significant, redeeming feature. When the editors were putting together the subject brief for Book & Print, the relationship between indigenous orality and literacy was placed centre stage. They didn’t go so far as to ask what it would mean to ‘write’ ‘book’ history from a Maori perspective, but a last-minute addition signalled a timely recognition of New Zealand’s immigrant history

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and contemporary multiculturalisms. It also signalled a new way of conceptualising book history beyond the hitherto imperial-inflected ‘History of the Book in the English-speaking World’ model, and beyond the controversial domain of the ‘new imperial history’.31 The section fondly termed ‘LOTE’ – languages other than English – sketches the print legacy of several languages, including Tokelauan, Samoan, Cook Islands Maori, Chinese, Polish, Gaelic, Dutch, etc., and is a call for further scholarly engagement with the tangible and intangible cultural heritage archive of these diverse cultures. Forays into this brave new world have ensued, from an undergraduate student working on political cartoons in Chinese-New Zealand newspapers and a master’s student working on Croatian newspapers in New Zealand to a postdoctoral fellow in Print Culture working on ‘Print and the Construction of a Reading Public: The Australasian Irish Diaspora 1830–1914’ and a British Academyfunded project investigating New Zealand/Scots migration and book trade practices. How does the ‘nation’ figure in these and future book history projects – if at all? It is a timely question. As Simon Eliot reported from the Sydney Symposium entitled ‘The History of the Book: International Comparisons’, a round-table discussion from representatives of the various national history of the book projects ‘highlighted both radical differences and common problems. For some histories “the book” meant the printed codex, for others it meant everything from a manuscript pamphlet to a printed newspaper. Common problems included the danger of the histories being regarded as too monumental with the dangerous result of closing down rather than opening up debate’.32 Let’s put nation, nationalism, and nationhood under the microscope and turn up the magnification.

Imposing the text Nationalism has re-entered the critical discourse with a vengeance; despite well-intentioned postcolonial gambits, it probably never disappeared. The recent debate has been characterised as a face-off between Eric Hobsbawm and Anthony Smith: Hobsbawm argues that the current wave of nationalism will be shortlived. Nationalism, he suggests, is an anachronism best suited to an earlier historical period dominated by industrialisation and print technology … Anthony Smith takes the opposite view. He does not think that nations have been transcended in the global era. On the

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Benedict Anderson tells us that this ideology has been shaped by print capitalism, and is possible because when individual members of a community are, for example, reading the ‘same’ daily newspaper at the ‘same’ time, though not necessarily in the ‘same’ geographic location, they can imagine a sameness of activity if not commonality of linguistic expression and interpretation which binds them together in ‘homogeneous empty time’ into a cultural collective – both limited and sovereign – called the nation.34 Anderson has enabled book historians to speak quite authoritatively of culture and print and nation in the same breath. His concept of the ‘imagined community’ has given us a convenient doorstop to address lacunae in the archive, specifically with regard to reading practices. However, few have actually sat down and considered why Anderson furnishes such a compelling model to drive our book history discourse. Is it even accurate or robust? In other domains, Anderson’s work is not accepted so uncritically. As Pheng Cheah notes in the introduction to a recent issue of Diacritics, dedicated to the work of Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is one of the most widely cited works in the humanities. Anderson’s conceptualisation of the nation as an ‘imagined community’; his argument about the importance of ‘print capitalism’ to the rise of the national public sphere; and his suggestion that the novel and the nation-form are contemporaneous analogues of each other have not only become accepted ideas in contemporary political-theoretical discourse about nationalism. They have also exerted an enormous influence on thinking about a whole range of issues that reach across the humanities and the social sciences such as the role of literature and culture in the formation of the national public sphere; the connections between nationness and ethnic and racial violence; and the relationship between modernity and colonialism and postcoloniality in the Third World. However, Anderson’s ideas are rarely thoroughly discussed. His influence in literary theory and criticism primarily consists of the oft-quoted but much travestied dictum that the nation is an imagined community, the imagining of which is tied to the novel.35

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contrary, the current wave of nationalism to be observed in various parts of the world testifies to the enduring nature of the national idea. … Nationalism, the principle that the cultural and political unit is congruent, is a collective ideology.33

An American anthropologist, Brian Keith Axel, has recently explored the limits of Anderson’s model of the imagination. He suggests that the proposition ‘“all communities are imagined” seems compelled towards its own ethics of exclusion’,36 thereby reinforcing Robert Hefner’s criticism of Anderson’s ‘top-heavy and trickle-down theory of nationalism [where] the prototypical nationalist is the deracinated, transcultural, and posttraditional politician, writer, or intellectual’.37 Axel outlines several arguments: 1. ‘the imagination of Imagined Communities relies upon, and proliferates, certain principles of analysis that recuperate, and confuse, the presuppositions of Western metaphysics’; 2. ‘the Andersonian imagination, although presented as a universal quality constitutive of all communities, privileges only certain kinds of community and certain subjects’; 3. ‘the later Anderson texts make a spectacle of this privileging by narrating the discovery of what appear to be horrific, emergent forms of imagination – communities of fanatics’.38 Axel describes Anderson’s work as, ‘at its best, provocative and rhetorically seductive, and, at its worst theoretically inconsistent’,39 something Anderson has openly acknowledged and endeavoured to redress in his later works. However, Axel attributes much of Anderson’s success to the seductive power of his model of the imagination which explicates the seduction of the nation itself.40 Imagined Communities ‘has spawned a monumental scholarly industry that presumes, with Anderson, that all communities are imagined. This industry is intent upon addressing the basic question “What is the style in which community is imagined?”’ In fact, today ‘the terms “imagination” and “imagining” are ubiquitously deployed within the social sciences and humanities without citing Anderson – proof indeed of his text’s insinuation into general discourse as a form of convention or compulsive self-evidence’,41 an a-critical currency which should send warning bells to any scholar. This might be the place, but I do not have space to go into an extended critique of Anderson or into the politics of his canonisation in book history circles, along with de Certeau, Bourdieu, and Foucault, among others. However, unless we wish to expose our Achilles heel, book historians should reconsider – sooner rather than later – the terms of Anderson’s argument. We should reacquaint ourselves with his ‘analogic’ description of print and nationalism and its relationship to imagination, seriality, and homogeneous empty time. We should examine his self-revision in 1991 with the addition of the strategically important essay ‘Census, Map, Museum’.42 Finally, we should explore how nationalism – not a stable solidity but a universal grammar – is reconfigured in his latest work, Spectres of Comparison, as the constant negotiation across

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the entropic borders of homogeneous empty time informed by the ‘incessant movement and restless energy of contemporary mass migrations and revolutions in communications and technology’.43 Historians continue to wrestle with the actual and the imagined, the nation, the community, and the individual. Anthony Cohen talks about ‘personal nationalism’44 to emphasise that ideas of nation exist not as imposed state constructions but as internalised, naturalised, individuated, and active responses to nationalist messages; they are ‘multivocalic [in] character with an ability to mean different things to different people’.45 In his discussion of the new Scotland of the repatriated Parliament, David McCrone employs the concept of ‘cultural capital’ to replay arguments about imagined communities defined as smaller politicised entities or ‘self-styled nations’46 within a larger political whole. Such ‘ethnic nationalisms’ have significant cultural capital; they are a political force in the Bourdieu-ian sense and economically powerful in the global marketplace. ‘Banal nationalism’ is the phrase coined by Michael Billig to ‘describe the collection of ideological habits (including habits of practice and belief) which reproduce established nations as nations’:47 In established nations [and here he includes France, USA, UK, New Zealand – though it is arguable that NZ is an ‘established’ nation and should thus be included], there is a continual ‘flagging’, or reminding of nationhood … nationhood provides a continual background for their [political leaders] political discourses, for cultural products, and even for the structuring of newspapers. In so many little ways, the citizenry are daily reminded of their national place in a world of nations. However, this reminding is so familiar, so continual, that it is not consciously registered as reminding. The metonymic image of banal nationalism is not a flag which is being constantly waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building. National identity embraces all these forgotten reminders. Consequently, an identity is to be found in the embodied habits of social life.48 Have any of these ‘nationalisms’ entered our national history of the book discourse, and if not, do they afford a way of nuancing our collective studies? In 2003, Peter Gibbons, from the University of Waikato, called for ‘New Zealand historians to become less parochial and insular and to decentre or even dissolve “New Zealand” as a subject’.49 For him, ‘New Zealand’ like ‘New Zealand identity’ is a ‘discursive construction,

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a shorthand device for referring to a multiplicity of places, peoples, products, practices and histories’.50 He argued that ‘the construction by Pakeha of a New Zealand national identity [achieved primarily through print] was not a sign that the colonization phase of history was over, but an important part of the ongoing (and still uncompleted) processes of colonization’.51 Gibbons acknowledges the role cultural nationalism still plays in defining New Zealand identity politics at the highest level and recognises how such an inexorable colonisation machine has prevented much academic engagement with the richness of regional and global studies. He posits, for the sake of argument, a ‘world history approach’ as a suitable ‘non-national explicatory framework’:52 Before it was any kind of political and constitutional entity, or any kind of entity at all except a cartographic one, New Zealand was a series of opportunities for circulating artefacts within the world system and the ports were locations for exchanges of goods and services … a world history approach provides perspectives for reconceptualizing the histories that may be written about changes and continuities in these islands. The most obvious points are that structures are more important than events; that the geography of trade is more significant than nation-state boundaries, or many natural boundaries, for that matter; and that material culture, including its production, circulation, and consumption, is the proper primary focus for macrohistorical investigation, rather than the ideologies and national identities and imperial loyalties.53 Gibbons does not, in his view of a ‘new’ New Zealand historiography, dismiss the microhistorical. In fact, he celebrates a number of seminal studies that have recuperated gender, class, and race in the face of mainstream identity politics. Interestingly, again, he defers to the possibility of material culture, particularly the consumption of goods, in a world economic system framework as being the field of study best able to relate and/or converge the microhistorical with the macrohistorical. Although Gibbons does not refer to print culture per se, it is an obvious candidate for the construction of macrohistories of production, trade, and consumption [in order to] explore the convergences of experiences in these parts of the world with experiences of peoples in other parts of the world, emphasizing the exchanges and accumulations and redistributions of material culture … [along] with microhistories of

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New Zealand’s Pacific identity has received much academic press. Apart from ongoing discussions about immigration policy and xenophobia, however, New Zealand’s pre-twentieth-century relationship with Asia has been singularly under-researched and marginalised. This is all the more astounding, given the historic importance of trading networks with the ports of Canton and Kolkata, the legacy of migration and diaspora of Asian peoples, as well as the dynamics of cultural transmission, mediated through the material artefacts of everyday life such as porcelain, textiles, and books; essential colonial commodities such as tea, rum, rice, sugar, coffee, and tobacco; foodways, including curries, chutneys, and sherbets; garden aesthetics and botanical specimens. Tony Ballantyne and Brian Moloughney have recently embarked on a project to ‘re-materialise the centrality of Asia in the making of colonial culture’, focussing specifically on ‘the place of Asia in the economic networks, ecological exchanges, and discursive fields that enabled the colonisation of Murihiku’,55 the southern part of the South Island. Such rare studies should make us pause and reflect on how we can think through, if not beyond, the key analytical categories of ‘New Zealand’, ‘settler’, and ‘Pakeha’, which have hitherto populated, framed, and dominated our historiographical landscape. Isabel Hofmeyr’s landmark transnational history of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress exemplifies, as does Priya Joshi’s work on the colonial publishing market in India, a new kind of book history, underwritten by a deconstruction of the implicit models of centre/periphery and metropole/colony underlying the national book history projects: ‘[these models] have been supplanted by revisionist understandings in which the Imperial and post-Imperial world are understood as an intellectually integrated zone. Forms of influence consequently flow in more than one direction and developments are shaped in multiple sites’.56 The impetus for reframing the book history argument within such an intellectually integrated zone – Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ – derives from global trends manifested from the 1980s: ‘the transnationalization of culture at the global level has coincided with the dissolution of correspondence between culture and the national within the metropolitan nation-states … As an organizing principle for culture, the national has simultaneously exploded and imploded’.57

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individuals, households and neighbourhoods … It is time scholars in these lands were less preoccupied with asserting national identity and divining ‘New Zealand’s place in the world’ and paid much more attention to the world’s place in New Zealand.54

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As Gibbons suggests, ‘world’ history has some currency in reconfiguring the dialectic of national and international, macrohistory and microhistory. Under the influence of globalisation, we are witnessing the rise of ‘world’ music, ‘world’ literature, and ‘world’ art. Books and print are part of a global multinational industry, not restricted just to the contemporary moment, but historically a distributed network of production, dissemination, and reception. Nevertheless Pratt suggests that ‘world’ is a recuperative gesture ‘an attempt to heal the wounds of EuroImperialism, an often naïve effort to dissolve white ethnocentrism and break up the hegemony of first world (Euro-American) cultural norms. The label has a utopian panhumanist flavor in the domain of culture, connoting an integration beyond the pushes and pulls of geopolitics’.58 And as she goes on to note, it is held up as the ‘integrated and harmonious spheres of artistic expression and intercultural understanding’ in contradistinction to the conflict-based spheres of political and economic interaction termed ‘international’.59 Pratt does not recommend a ‘world’ construct to guide our agenda, but she proposes that we engage in aggressively transnational studies where we can ‘challenge the traditional homology of the cultural and national’ or even work as if no such homology exists, an approach that could be termed ‘postnational’.60 Sheldon Pollock affirms this position: The reexamination of the theory, practice, and history of area studies [that is, the study of politically bounded spaces or nations], driven in large part by the analysis of globalization, has made us more acutely aware of the artificiality of the geographical boundaries of inquiry … And attention has in fact begun to turn to how movements – whether of people, ideas, or texts – tend to ignore such boundaries altogether.61 So, if we want to move beyond the ‘national’, what would book history look like from / within the contact zone? What are some potential methods and approaches to guide us? Can we ‘naturalise’ them for our particular field of study? And by doing so, can we / do we want to develop our own structural grammar to shift book history from a field of study to a discipline with its own theory and methods? I’ll briefly run through three options – comparative, transfer, and entangled history – and outline some of their strengths and weaknesses.62

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Traditional comparative history requires two or more discrete units, often bounded by a spatial delimiter such as region or nation. However, as Phillip Ther points out: ‘nation-states and nationally homogeneous societies should not be taken as “normal” or given units of analysis. Moreover, it should be recognised that it is far more difficult to isolate them sufficiently in order to mark commonalities or differences and to permit generalizations than is presently acknowledged among comparative historians’.63 Dominic Sachsenmaier agrees that ‘merely amassing additional area perspectives will most certainly not internationalise historiography in any prolific way’.64 Transfer history should technically examine both sides of the equation, such as host to recipient, centre to periphery, and discuss, for example, how local conditions modify an import which is then re-exported in a changed modality back to the host. However, because it is underpinned by a diffusion and influence model, transfer history tends to highlight only one-way cultural and other transactions, and like comparative history, tends to be rooted in national history.65 Newer approaches, including l’histoire croisée or ‘entangled history’, take the idea of crossing one step further and examine the ‘complexity and mutuality of connections and transfers between societies … The relations work in both directions and they are multidimensional, which means that the emphasis is on interaction, adaptation and mutual dependencies instead of diffusion and influence’. With this approach, two types of history can be juggled at once: ‘One speaks of entanglements; is interested in travelling ideas, migrating people, and transnational commerce; mutually holds images of “the other”; and one talks about mental mapping, including aspects of power, subordination, and dominance.’66 Dominic Sachsenmaier proposes we call this combination ‘global history’ (German: ‘Globalgeschichte’ or Chinese: ‘quanqiushi’) and considers its impetus to be the result of increased interest among scholars in East Asia, India, and Latin America in what is termed ‘transcultural history’ or the ‘trans-cultural dimension of global history’. Sachsenmaier outlines three attractions of ‘Global’. For him, the term 1. avoids the Hegelianism and Western-centrism of the word ‘world’ 2. has currency in popular discourse as symbolising dynamic structures such as ‘flows, exchanges, and mutual reactions between different world regions’ 3. ‘In contrast to key words such as “inter”- national or “trans” national, global does not presuppose the nation state as a key unit of scholarly inquiry.’67

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Yet, despite gesturing towards the global, most historiography remains local, whether because of distinctive historiographical traditions characterised by an investment in nationhood (we have only to think of the 2001 Sherbrooke symposium and its insistence on a French publishing system, an English publishing system, a German publishing system), academic departments and scholarly training which impose both periodisation and geopolitical frames around areas of study, the enduring research problem of generalisability, or a general intellectual climate which privileges the local, regional, and national: ‘It is not without a certain irony that almost all over the world academic historiography has largely shied away from studying the past two centuries from transcultural perspectives … Arguably the origins of no other academic discipline are so closely tied to the program of the nation state as in the case of history.’68 But we need not sacrifice the local, or in Ther’s terms, the ‘meso’69 level, to undertake the global: ‘Any multi-polar and global perspective on the past has to find ways to remain sensitive for [sic: to] the local … Any historiographical research with a decidedly global perspective will be sensitive to both, the inner diversity of global structures and the global dimensions of many local forces.’ As Mary Kaldor remarks, ‘Globalisation processes do not only favour cultural interconnectedness, they favour cultural disconnectedness as well. Globalisation breaks down the homogeneity of the nation-state. Globalisation involves diversity as well as uniformity, the local as well as the global.’70 In order to retain the intellectual tradition of detailed microanalysis – one of book history’s strengths – while exploring global fields of inquiry, in a new ‘historiography of inter-cultural relations, transfers and exchanges’, Sachsenmaier calls for a collaborative, team approach, and group authorship: ‘It is possible to imagine different area experts jointly developing a shared set of questions and a common methodological framework.’ Book historians not constrained by a nationalist agenda need to sit around the table or in virtual (‘not’ imagined) communities and negotiate a range of methodologies including, for example, social science network analysis. We need to have robust dialogue about theories and approaches, and we need to entertain different ways of conceptualising our field of study. And we already have several projects to focus our thinking. The first is Palgrave Macmillan’s Dictionary of Transnational History, an initiative focussing on transnational concepts rather than an enumeration of examples. Having been asked to write the entries on book and periodical exchanges, and libraries, how should we frame these themes transnationally? The second is a new collaborative research

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programme at University of the Witswatersrand entitled South Africa–India: Connections and Comparisons. Isabel Hofmeyr and her team have taken the Indian Ocean World as their unit of analysis and in the process discovered some fascinating and long-standing synergies which bode well for regional book history. The third is Simon Eliot’s proposed International Book History (IBH) research programme which has been discussed in a number of fora and endorsed by SHARP and the Sherbrooke/Prato group. It has an exciting range of topics, ripe for a further refinement of scope. IBH requires an international team to initiate and sustain the necessary dialogue about suitable theories, methods, and themes and which takes account of the current historiographical and postcolonial landscape. Eliot has provided us with an ambitious programme of ‘content’. How we frame that content should be the highest priority in our discussions, both theoretically and methodologically, otherwise we will replicate all the enthusiasm of the national book history projects and all the attendant difficulties we now see in retrospect. If book history can, as Ian Willison foretold, truly solve the theory/empiricism crisis in the humanities, then it must delve deeply into the foundations of its interdisciplinary bricolage, interrogate its uncritical acceptance of imagined communities, and, above all, deconstruct nationalism and nationhood in order to reconcile the essential nature of our object of study: books without borders, les livres sans frontières.

The politics of resistance; or, beyond the 12-mile limit On census night 1981, the Wizard of Christchurch made a point of being aboard a boat beyond the territorial limits of New Zealand, so he would not have to be complicit in the political and social engineering of that constructed space called ‘New Zealand’. The census document and the mise-en-scène of its completion compromised the Wizard’s ‘status as a postmodern, postindividualist with no “rights.”’71 In the past, he had publicly burnt his census forms. In future, he would argue that he had vanished on census night by rehearsing a Rosicrucian spell. Not only did 1981 represent the ultimate act of print culture resistance, but it also made a mockery of any attempts to pigeonhole Ian Brackenbury Channell or New Zealand according to a Western-dominated ideology of nationalism and citizenship. Let the Wizard tell his story: Partly inspired by my beloved Hunting of the Snark, and partly by childhood reading of pirate tales, when the census of 1981 approached I decided to find another loophole through which to

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make my escape. I decided to hold a Noncensus Party at sea, just outside New Zealand’s twelve-mile zone of political control. I had found a yachtsman of strong character who was not easily intimidated by anyone, the legendary Albion Wright of Pegasus Press fame, who agreed to take me out the necessary distance in his famous boat, Pastime, which had carried the ashes of that wonderful character and talented poet Denis Glover to his final resting place … At midnight, surrounded by the blazing lights of Japanese squid boats, we took bearings to establish that we were more than twelve miles off the coast and I let off some fireworks, blew my bugle and celebrated our triumph over the evil census. Everyone, including the Statistics Department, seemed to think that, because New Zealand had a 200-mile exclusive economic zone for fishing rights and so on, I would still be in territorial waters and would have to fill in my census form or face prosecution. In a radio interview with me, census officials stated emphatically that, by going out to sea, I wasn’t avoiding my legal obligation to fill in the questionnaire. When we returned we found two shivering bureaucrats on the dock waiting for us. They thrust census forms into our hands and departed, their job done. But they didn’t stand a chance in court. After all, we were surrounded by Japanese squid boats and their crews weren’t obliged to fill in census forms. The irony was that everyone knew exactly who and where we were but they couldn’t put it down on a government form.72 The Wizard is also famous for his reconfiguration of the classic image of world history à la British Empire. His adoption and adaptation of McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World (made in 1979 by a disenfranchised Australian) suggests that New Zealand is situated centre stage and no longer exists on the margins. And as any good postcolonial scholar knows, New Zealand helps define the world, not the other way around. In a 1998 discussion paper entitled ‘Colonising the Field of Book History in Post-Colonial Commonwealth Countries’, Shef Rogers argued that ‘if we take seriously the claim that print shapes culture and culture shapes print, we have to acknowledge the conflicting trajectories of many of our colonial texts and of our post-colonial aims for social understanding and mutual respect in multi-racial post-colonial countries’. He goes on to suggest that it is clear that the structure of nationhood remains largely coterminous with the authority structures of a very large number of printed texts in all our countries and a first step towards collaboration would

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be to adopt a new construct for our discipline. Therefore, it seems to me, we as print culture historians in commonwealth countries have an ethical obligation to avoid or at the very least question nationalistic structures for our discipline, and should actively pursue models that seek more to create international connections than to construct an apparent national history as a means of affirming a country’s cultural independence … Unfortunately, arguing for a different structure for our discipline requires the discipline to oppose the prevailing drift of our cultures, so that as print culture historians we would actually work in opposition to the social logic of our subject matter.73 In 1882, John Southward wrote in his Practical Printing, ‘Making margin is defined to be the art of placing matter or pages in such a position that when printed in a sheet they will give the proper margin, as well as allow for the necessary “trimming” in binding the book. It is effected by using pieces of furniture of various sizes to separate the pages. The question of margin is therefore entirely one of Furniture.’74 It is imperative that we start rearranging book history’s furniture, consider its existing and potential frames of reference, and look beyond the national to contemplate the physical, intellectual, and spiritual mobilities and modalities of those material objects we call books.

Notes 1. Fred Smeijers, Counterpunch, ed. Robin Kinross (London: Hyphen Press, 1996), p. 24. 2. From Practical Printing by John Southward (1882) in Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress (New Castle, Delaware, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2004), vol. 1, p. 338. 3. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 34. 4. Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Criticism in the Contact Zone: Decentering Community and Nation’, in Critical Theory, Cultural Politics, and Latin American Narrative, ed. Steven M. Bell, Albert H. Le May, and Leonard Orr (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 83–102. 5. Pratt, ‘Criticism in the Contact Zone’, p. 88. 6. Ibid., p. 89. 7. Ibid., p. 101. 8. Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, ‘Surveying the (Battle) field: Book History, SHARP, and the Guerilla Tactics of Research’, SHARP News, 12.1 (2003), 3. 9. Robert Darnton, SHARP News (Summer 1994): 2; see also ‘What is the History of Books’, in Books and Society in History, ed. Kenneth E. Carpenter (New York & London: Bowker, 1983), p. 21.

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10. Wirtén, ‘Surveying the (Battle) field’, p. 4. 11. ‘International Book History’, IBH online discussion, 23 May 2005, archived on http://SHARPweb.org (accessed 23.01.06). 12. IBH, 24 May 2005. 13. IBH, 24 May 2005. 14. I. R. Willison, ‘Remarks on the History of the Book in Britain as a Field of Study within the Humanities, with a Synopsis and Select List of Current Literature’, The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 21, 3 & 4 (1991), 107. 15. SHARP-L archives, 23 December 1999. 16. SHARP-L archives, 24 December 1999. 17. Carlin expands his comments to talk about a logical grammar which interdisciplinary work should address: decontextualisation, suitability, transformation, traducement, and dissemination. See his ‘Disciplinary Debates and Bases of Interdisciplinary Studies: The Place of Research Ethics in Library and Information Science’, in Library and Information Science Research 25 (2003), 3–18. 18. Robert Darnton, SHARP News, Summer (1994): 3. In library and archives phraseology ‘research follows record’. See Michael Organ, ‘Ephemera in the Archives: What to Do?’, Archives and Manuscripts 15: 2 (1987), 105–18. 19. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1999: dust jacket and blurb. 20. Philip Henry Jones and Eiluned Rees, A Nation and Its Books: A History of the Book in Wales (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales in association with Aberystwyth Centre for the Book, 1998), p. xiii. 21. Patricia Lockhart Fleming, Gilles Gallichan, and Yvan Lamonde, eds, History of the Book in Canada/Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 3. 22. Ibid., p. 9. 23. Ibid. 24. Hugh Amory, ‘Introduction’, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 28. 25. Ibid., p. 54. 26. Matt Brown, ‘The Study and Story of Books in Early America’, Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 98: 4 (2004), 523. 27. Martyn Lyons and John Arnold, eds, A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2001), p. xiv. 28. Ibid., p. xviii. 29. Penny Griffith, Ross Harvey, Keith Maslen eds with Ross Somerville, Book & Print: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997). 30. Rod Cave, ‘Printing in Colonial New Zealand: An Insular History?’, in A Book in the Hand: Essays on the History of the Book in New Zealand, ed. Penny Griffith, Peter Hughes, and Alan Loney (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000), pp. 235–46. 31. See Antoinette Burton, ‘Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism and the Domains of History’, Social History 26: 1 ( January 2001), 60–71. 32. SHARP News 14.4 (2005), 9–10.

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33. Mary Kaldor, ‘Nationalism and Globalisation’, Nations and Nationalism 10: 1, 2 (2004), 161–3. 34. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 33–4. 35. Pheng Cheah, ‘Grounds of Comparison’, Diacritics 29: 4 (Winter 1999), 4. 36. Brian Keith Axel, ‘Poverty of the Imagination’, Anthropological Quarterly 76: 1 (Winter 2003), 128. 37. Robert W. Hefner, ‘Three Styles in the Study of Nation’, review essay in Current Anthropology 41: 5 (December 2000), 887. 38. Ibid., 113. 39. Ibid., 122. 40. Ibid., fn 15, 131. 41. Ibid., 122. 42. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 163–85. 43. Cheah, ‘Grounds of Comparison’, 5. 44. Anthony P. Cohen, ‘Personal Nationalism: A Scottish View of Some Rites, Rights, and Wrongs’, American Ethnologist 23: 4 (1996), 802–15. 45. In David McCrone, ‘Cultural Capital in an Understated Nation: The Case of Scotland’, paper presented at Symposium on Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion, Oxford, 2004, published 19 February 2004 at www.institute-ofgovernance.org/onlinepub/mccrone/culturalcapital.html (accessed 23.01.06), 4. 46. Ibid., 9. 47. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995), p. 6. 48. Ibid., p. 8. 49. Peter Gibbons, ‘The Far Side of the Search for Identity. Reconsidering New Zealand History’, New Zealand Journal of History 37: 1 (2003), 39. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 40. 53. Ibid., 41. 54. Ibid., 47. 55. Tony Ballantyne and Brian Moloughney, ‘Asia in Murihiku: Towards a Transnational History of Colonial Culture’, in Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand’s Pasts, ed. Ballantyne and Moloughney (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006), pp. 65–92. 56. Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘From Book Development to Book History – Some Observations on the History of the Book in Africa’, in SHARP News 13.3, 3. 57. Pratt, ‘Criticism in the Contact Zone’, p. 86. 58. Ibid., p. 85. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 84. 61. Sheldon Pollock, ‘Introduction’, in Literary Cultures in History. Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley & London: University of California Press, 2003), p. 13. 62. My thanks to Jyrki Hakapää for alerting me to current Central and East European historiographical discussions and sharing his unpublished paper, ‘Book History’s Recent Methodological Trend: National and International Outlines’, November 2004. See also Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, ‘Introduction’; Maura O’Connor, ‘Cross-National Travellers: Rethinking Comparisons and Representations’, in Deborah Cohen and Maura

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63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

O’Connor, eds, Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 133–44; Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History 14: 4 (2005), 421–39 where she uses the analogy of a honeycomb to describe the structural fluidity of institutions, individuals, and ideas over time. Philipp Ther, ‘Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe’, Central European History 36: 1 (2003), 67. Dominic Sachsenmaier, ‘Global History, Global Debates’, published online discussion forum http://geschichte-transnational.clio-online.net/transnat.asp (accessed 23.01.06). Ther, ‘Beyond the Nation’, 70. Jürgen Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond’, History and Theory 42 (February 2003), 42. For an additional perspective, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory 45 (2006), 30–50. Sachsenmaier, ‘Global History, Global Debates’, published online discussion forum http://geschichte-transnational.clio-online.net/transnat.asp (accessed 23.01.06). Ther, ‘Beyond the Nation’, 47, quoting Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘History and the Making of Nations’, 589. Ibid., 72. Kaldor, ‘Nationalism and Globalisation’, p. 166. The Wizard, My Life as a Miracle (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1998), p. 95. Ibid., pp. 97–8. Shef Rogers, ‘Colonising the Field of Book History in Post-Colonial Commonwealth Countries’, discussion paper presented to first (and last) meeting of CAHL (Canadian Association of l’Histoire du Livre), Vancouver, 15 July 1998. From Practical Printing by John Southward (1882) in Rummonds, vol. 1, p. 339.

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Publishing under the Yoke: A Short History of the Bulgarian Book from Paisy of Hilendar to Peyo Yavorov Matthew Gibson

Whoever wishes to describe the history of the Bulgarian book will be confronted with unusual problems. Indeed, the ethnic and religious realities of the Balkan region are such as to complicate and embarrass any simplistic model of national identity. While Bulgaria is the oldest surviving named ‘country’ or ‘kingdom’ in Europe, with one of the oldest established national Churches (926 CE), it is yet one of its youngest nation states, its modern ‘rebirth’ date being 1878. Moreover, while the old Kingdom of Bulgaria was the first Slavic Orthodox region to develop a major culture of Church Slavonic, which was also the language shared with Serbs, Moravians and Vlachs, the later Bulgarian ‘enlighteners’ only agreed upon a (controversial) print language by the middle of the nineteenth century. Thus historians of the national Book who describe printed works from the Bulgarian culture anterior to 1878 often include the books of Makarije (from 1493),1 or Bozhidar Vukovic (from 1519),2 the works which are claimed equally by Serbs.3 Much of the ‘Bulgarian revival’ occurred among bookmen from the region of Macedonia – most of which is now a separate country, its ‘dialect’ the officially separate Macedonian language. When Sydney Shep claims in the first essay in this volume that the recent questioning of naïve National Histories of the Book is already thwarted by the National Book History project itself, nowhere does there seem to be a more obvious potential for this naiveté than a history of the Bulgarian Book. The major reasons for these confusions are the late emergence of the distinct written vernaculars (Serbian and Bulgarian) from an earlier, shared Church language and the common penury and marginalisation of Slavic peoples under centuries of Ottoman rule, which destroyed 38

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most of the boundaries of sovereignty that had existed before. The Bulgaria which finally came into being as a fledging nation in 1878 was in fact moulded over a ‘crossnational’ cultural history and a plethora of different groups, which groups nevertheless were presumed to share a uniform national language imposed by zealous grammarians. Commenting on the arbitrarily divisive role played by ‘three distinct languages … formed in the northern Balkans’ in the first half of the nineteenth century, Benedict Anderson writes: ‘If in the 1830s, “Bulgarians” had been widely thought to be of the same nation as the Serbs and Croats, and had in fact shared in the Illyrian Movement, a separate Bulgarian national state was to come into existence by 1878.’4 Although by the 1830s there was already a sovereign Princedom of Serbia, with two competing literary languages, and some among the Bulgarian peoples were already beginning to develop a secular education system with a view to cultural nationalism, there were still ‘Bulgarians’ in the 1830s who printed ‘Slavonic’ books for religious, not secular purposes, and whose target audience were undifferentiated southern Slavs. In this sense the later proliferation of Bulgarian language schoolbooks and then standard language newspapers by commercial printers is an exemplary model of Anderson’s depiction of the rise of nationalism and the sense of a nation state through ‘print capitalism’ and a standardised vernacular. That said, there is evidence that Anderson’s understanding of the growth of ‘nationalism’ being an effect of the demise of religious ‘imagined communities’ and their exclusive ‘sacral languages’, and the rise of a literate bourgeoisie, does not apply easily to Bulgaria, thanks to constant ethnic rivalries within the Ottoman system of religious government and continuing contradistinctions with the Serbian Patriarchate. During the following historical outline of the Bulgarian book, three questions will be explored: (1) At what point and why does a modern Bulgarian identity emerge and how dependent is this on the printed book? (2) To what extent does the rise of the modern Bulgarian book serve to homogenise and demarcate Bulgarian identity arbitrarily? (3) To what extent did Bulgarian bookmen face colonial harassment? This chapter will hopefully demonstrate that a Bulgarian identity was emerging tentatively before the establishment of a vernacular and the proliferation of printed books, that the book’s later homogenising effect was frequently over plural, unresolved identities, but that the establishment of vernacular Bulgarian language books was an enormous achievement in the face of considerable harassment by the Turkish authorities.

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40

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Some may find it curious that this essay should start from the year 1762, with Paisy of Hilendar’s Slavo-Bulgarian History. It was not the first book to be written in something near the Turkified Slavonic known as New Bulgarian, although its few rivals, such as Philip StaniSlavov’s Abagar (1651) and Zheferovic’s’s Stematografia (1741), were written and printed outside the Turkish domain. Nor was Paisy’s History the first to be printed, since it was not in fact printed at all until the mid-nineteenth century.5 However, its importance as the seminal book of the modern Bulgarian nation – assumed by many still to be a point of origin for the ‘Bulgarian revival’ – and thus the beginning of this particular history, rests firmly on its being a work written by a Bulgarian living and residing in the Ottoman Empire, whose aims were quite self-consciously to foster notions of Bulgarian history and national identity through its subject and language, when his ‘nation’ was at its poorest and most fragmented. Paisy was a Bulgarian monk in the Greek Orthodox Church. While staying at Hilendar, a surviving Slavic monastery on Mt Athos established in times of the Bulgarian Kingdom, he was infuriated by the unpayable taxes imposed on the Abbot by the local Turkish ruler.6 After reading the works of Baronius and Mauro Orbini (an Italian who had written – and printed – a large history of all the Slavic nations in 1601), he wrote the first history of Bulgaria by a Bulgarian, and in something near to the modern Bulgarian language. Bulgaria as a recognised entity had not existed since the beginning of Ottoman rule, which had served to destroy whatever sense of unity and shared sovereignty the Bulgarian Tsars had attempted to foster. In 1393, when Bulgaria was finally overcome and divided into various sandjaks within the much-larger eyalet of Sofia, the Turks had imposed a crippling form of double ownership: the land was owned by both the Sultan and by the Muslim cavalrymen, or sipahis, to whom it was leased,7 effectively incurring double taxation. Bulgaria’s major towns were taken over by Turks and Greek merchants, with Bulgarians resettling in the countryside. The dismantling of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and its placement beneath the Greek Patriarchate in 1454,8 also contributed to this dislocation, as did the large number of Muslim conversions.9 Many books in Old Bulgarian (Church Slavonic) were destroyed by the Greek priests with Turkish consent in the fifteenth century as Greek became the official language of the Church10 (although in his History Paisy attributed this desecration to the Turks themselves).11 The placement beneath the Greek Patriarchate in the 1450s was an example of the peculiar ‘millet’ system by which the Ottomans organised

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Paisy of Hilendar

their different peoples, with religion, not ethnicity, being the major form of division. The head of each millet was the religious leader (in this case the Patriarch), to whom the lower clergy and finally local primates – normally the most important merchant or farmer within a community – were answerable. Central taxation was enforced within these religious millets, although local sipahi taxes were enforced by the cavalrymen.12 Owing to this system, Bulgarians and Serbs were part of the same administrative grouping as the Greeks. Despite this immolation, the ‘Bulgarian language’ liturgy was still tolerated at a local level,13 and there was still a separate Bulgarian Archbishopric based at Ohrid which organised the ministering to Slavic worshippers, although the Eparch in charge was Greek.14 In this period the Patriarch, supported by Greek Phanariots (i.e. Constantinople Greeks), attempted to ban the liturgy in Bulgarian and replace it with Greek and to disestablish the remaining Slavic monasteries. Religious schooling in the Orthodox millet – the only schooling at that time possible in the Ottoman Empire – was to be wholly in Greek, and the Bulgarian Archbishopric at Ohrid was eventually abolished in 1767.15 It was against this developing history that Paisy wrote his work in 1762. The fear that the ‘Bulgarian language’, and with it Bulgarian identity, would be subsumed by Greek was the major reason for Paisy writing his work. As he remonstrates in the introduction: But some do not care to know about their Bulgarian ancestry, but turn to foreign customs and a foreign language, and learn to read and speak in Greek and feel ashamed to call themselves Bulgarians. O, unreasonable and feeble-minded men! Why do you feel shame to call yourselves Bulgarians and not read and speak your language? Did the Bulgarians not have their own kingdom and state?16 He then continues to attack those Bulgarians who wish to become Greeks, maintaining this angry and proto-nationalist vein for several pages before beginning the historical sections. His motives in writing the work were thus twofold: to encourage a revival in a Bulgarian language and to foster a sense of pride in a common Bulgarian past. He informs his reader that the Bulgarians were a Slavic tribe who came down from the Volga river to settle in Thrace during the reign of the Emperor Valentinus in the fourth century, and that they quickly set about carving out a homeland and eventually a Tsardom for themselves,17 their first Tsar being ‘Assen the Great’, in the eighth century.18 Through the times of Tsars Terwel, Pagan and Murtagon

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they were successful, and eventually converted to Christianity in the ninth century. The last truly Bulgarian Tsar was defeated in battle by the Turkish Sultan Murad in 1370,19 with the kingdom finally being abolished in 1393, where Paisy’s History stops. Paisy also provides a separate, long section in which he praises the holy men of the Bulgarian Orthodox church. He stresses that the Bulgarians have immense cause to be proud since they were the first Slavic people to become a Christian nation, and the first to write in a Slavic language,20 Cyril and Methodius being Thessalonikan Greeks who developed Old Church Slavonic in Bulgaria for the Bulgarian king (before introducing it to Moravia).21 Much of the early part of his History is false: the Bulgars did not invade Thrace until 681 CE (under Asparuch). Paisy simply blended the complex patchwork of invasions into Thrace and Macedonia by different Slavic groups with the (actually non-Slavic) Bulgars to make it that of a single, unified people. This was not only due to the errors of his sources, Baronius and Orbini, but also because he wished to provide an uncomplicated past and rouse the nationalism of a single, unified people, with one language, ‘the Bulgarian and Slavic simple speech’.22 One can see aspects of nationalism (or proto-nationalism) emerging here in relation to factors which are entirely absent from Anderson’s understanding of nationalism’s development. To begin with, Paisy assumes a national commonality as a result of an ecclesiastical oppression, promoting an alternative ‘religious community’ which is also associated with an ethnic group. Indeed, the memory and history of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, in contradistinction to the Greek-dominated Orthodox millet, and the divinely sanctioned Bulgarian dynasty which created it, are an important part of the promotion of a wider, ethnic Bulgarian nationalism. This is counter to Anderson’s belief that modern nationalism arises from the demise of imagined ‘religious communities’ and dynastic powers.23 Paisy’s discussion of language presents another challenge to Anderson, who argues that the change from sacral languages to vernaculars is a central element in the breakdown of religious communities and the growth of nationalism.24 However, while Paisy promotes ‘the Bulgarian and Slavic simple speech’, which Bulgarians should ‘read and speak’ as part of a revived Bulgarian identity, this does not mean that he sees the ‘Bulgarian’ language as separate to Church Slavonic.25 Rather, he sees the progeny and ownership of Church Slavonic as Bulgarian not Serbian26 – despite the fact that it is a shared sacral rather than a national vernacular language (he actually believes it to have been artificially created, incorporating words from other Slavic languages).27 Again, this unprecedented national claim on a sacral

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language involves a rigid and hostile distinction between Serbs and Bulgarians, made during a time when southern Slavs were, according to Anderson, still involved in one linguistic community and were as yet undifferentiated nationally.28 Lastly, Paisy’s envisaging of a Bulgarian national identity occurs without the conditions of an extensive Bulgarian bourgeoisie or any traditions of print.29 Thus, in contrast to Anderson’s understanding that nationalism arose due to the fall of large imagined religious communities along with their sacral languages and the spread of a national vernacular due to ‘print capitalism’, Paisy envisages a national identity separate to that of fellow Slavs, based around a national religious identity and his own Slavic group’s right to ownership of a common sacral language, at a time when his people had no vernacular and no culture of printing. Beyond Paisy’s unusual knowledge of history, the obvious, reactive reason for his anomalous response to an ecclesiastical repression lies in the peculiar nature of the sacral languages of the Orthodox millet, and the Ottomans’ own use of ecclesiastical bodies to wield power. While Slavonic and Greek were both church languages, they were also linked to, and understood by, the Orthodox millet’s two major ethnic groups in a way that many other sacral languages were not, so that competing languages of religious truth were inextricably linked to rival ethnic identities. The curtailment of Church Slavonic and further exclusion of Slavonic speakers from privileges within the Orthodox Church (the Ohrid Archbishops were always Greeks) can only have fuelled resentment along ethnic rather than doctrinal lines, especially since the religious communities were simultaneously self-contained political organisations within the Ottoman Empire, the sacerdotal leaders predominating over whole millets. This sense of resentment that Slavonic speakers could not find preference within the Orthodox millet would have been further qualified by Paisy’s knowledge that in 1762 there was still a separate Serbian Patriarchate in Pec, responsible for various Eparchates which excluded his own area (Samokov), and occupied by Serbs rather than by Greeks.30 A Serbian-controlled Patriarchate gave those worshippers beneath it a greater sense of continuity with their own earlier national Church than that enjoyed by other Slavs (i.e. Bulgarians). More overtly, Paisy was aware of the religious and cultural freedoms of the ‘German Serbs’ (i.e. those in Vienna) who had already begun to ‘print Slavic books’ and to ‘sneer at and abuse the Bulgarians for being simple and illiterate’.31 This in turn may explain the more local and ‘modern’ elements in his own version of ‘the Bulgarian and Slavic simple speech’, which act as an obstinate reassertion that ‘Slavic’ is ‘Bulgarian’

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(although not actually ‘separate’ from the Church language). Thus the curtailment of a sacral language leading to the ecclesiastical and ultimately political marginalisation of an ethnic group within a crossethnic religious group, the continuing remains of distinct national Churches and earlier national ‘religious communities’, and the rise of an exclusive national identity among rival Serbs led Paisy to the idea of a national identity exclusive to Bulgarians long before the development of Bulgarian ‘print capitalism’ and a separate vernacular. Paisy’s own work appears to have been widely copied by hand and distributed for many decades among those who could read – although, as we shall see, his promotion of a Bulgarian national ideal was not universally adopted by later Slavic priests and bookmen. Whether the work was a major direct influence (as claimed by Marin Drinov,32 Velcho Velchev and others) or simply a symptom of economic and social changes, which it was subsequently used to explain, is debatable. However, the reason for its fame and proliferation was as much to do with fundamental changes in the Ottoman Empire as the resistance to Greek ecclesiastical repression. From the end of the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century there was a breakdown of the old eyalet and sipahi system, and the growth in the importance of local administrative leaders, called ayans, who took over almost independent control of their regions33 and were often far more aggressive and less tolerant towards the principles of the millet system than the central government itself.34 Hence the desire among Bulgarians for both a unitary national culture and Bulgarian language books grew not only due to the Greek repression of Slavs within the Orthodox millet but also due to the increasing sense of a more pronounced and aggressive Ottoman rule.

Cultural development 1806–78 One of Paisy’s most prominent followers was Sofronii – who met him in 1765 at Kotel and made a copy of the History for his church, fortunately recording Paisy’s visit and signing his own name to the copy.35 Sofronii later became Bishop of Vratsa after bribing Greek clerics, but was hounded out of the Ottoman Empire by the soldiers of the rebel ayan Osman Pazvantoglu (for his attempts to help the Russians invade). Sofronii’s collection of Greek sermons Nedelnik (1806), translated into the ‘simple Bulgarian tongue’,36 was actually printednot, however, in any of the Bulgarian sandjaks, but in the town of Rimnik, Wallachia, by a Serbian printer called Danilo Popovic. Others who followed Paisy in attempting to promote Bulgarian as the language of education were

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Hadj Joakim of Kritcheve (1819)37 and later Petar Beron, the author of Riben Bakhvar (1824)38 (Fish Primer), who also devised plans for the reform of education on secular and Bulgarian language lines (secular education was not encouraged by statute in the Ottoman Empire as a whole until 1845).39 These books, once again, were published outside the Ottoman realm, in Belgrade and Wallachia. In 1835 Neofit Ivan Rilski published his famous Bulgarska Grammatika in Belgrade, a work which stripped the written language of its heavy case inflections and helped establish the modern vernacular.40 This latter work became the major primer for the new Bulgarian schools that were also set up in 1835, in accordance with the Beron plan for secular education (the first was in Gabrovo), thanks to the bequest of a Bulgarian merchant of Odessa, Vassil Aprilov.41 This was part of the new drive for education by a growing Bulgarian bourgeoisie, who wished to see their children educated in their native language, and who were at last able to do so as the Greek hold on the Orthodox church and on education slowly began to withdraw before the increased power of the Bulgarian merchant class. The reasons for the new educational movement were various, but chief among them were the Ottoman reforms, or ‘Tanzimat’ (1839–76), whose aims were that ‘a condition of equality … be established between Muslims and Christians’:42 the result of incursions by a powerful Christian enemy. The Russians had briefly occupied parts of Bulgaria during the Napoleonic wars, with full support from the Bulgarians over whom the Tsar claimed sovereignty. They invaded again in the late 1820s,43 only to cede the land in return for other concessions, including the control of Wallachia and Moldova, at the Treaty of Adrianople (1829). After the failures at tentative modernisation by Sultan Mahmoud II,44 his more resourceful successor, Abdul Mecid II, declared the Hatti-Cherif of 3 September 1839, which abolished the sipahi system and privileges for Muslims, theoretically making all Muslims, Jews and Christians equal within the Empire.45 This important declaration effectively weakened the millet system and partly reduced the Greeks’ power of censorship and education over their Slavic co-religionists. However, a more immediate reason for the growth of Bulgarian education and book distribution at this time was the successful Greek revolt of 1827, which had lessened the power of the Phanariots over the disgruntled ‘Porte’ (government) in Constantinople. Furthermore, the loss of Ottoman control over Wallachia and Moldavia in 1829 had made the Bulgarian lands a more important source of supplies, which led to the increased economic power of the Bulgarian

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merchants.46 Thus a rise in secular and economic freedoms combined to allow a Bulgarian bourgeoisie to found their own schools in 1835 and to read books in ‘Bulgarian’ rather than Greek. This was later reinforced by the Sultan Abdul Aziz’s declaration of the ‘Rights of all Religions’ (1856), or Hatti-Humayun, which helped enforce equality before the law between Christians and Muslims as well as respect for property rights, finally ending the system of sacerdotal power.47 Bulgarian language journals also began to appear in Constantinople, including a Bulgarian edition of The Levant Times (from 1870). Quite apart from secular printing outside the Ottoman Empire, within it there were two notable Bulgarian printers of religious books in the inflected Church Slavonic or ‘Slavo-Bulgarian’ during the 1830s and 40s, namely Nikolai Karastoianov of Samokov48 and Hadj Teodosi of Solun (Thessaloniki), from 1838 to 1843. Karastoianov appears to have brushed off attempts by Neofit Rilski to make him print schoolbooks for Gabrovo.49 Although he was printing icons on a hand press from as early as 1828 and may have been printing books clandestinely, he only began to publish openly his religious works, like Chasoslov (‘Book of Hours’), once he had been granted permission in 1847.50 Teodosi printed dual-language prayer books in ‘Slavo-Bulgarian’51 and Greek in order to advance the religion among Slavic people, as he was at pains to make clear to the Patriarch of Constantinople.52 Karastoianov and Hadj Teodosi are examples of the problematic nature of identifying the ‘Bulgarian revival’ promoted by Paisy and Sofronii within what were officially still religious and cross-national groups. Karastoianov’s books were printed in ‘Slavic’ and sold all over the Balkans.53 Teodosi’s stated aims were purely religious and he also worked in an area that is now part of Macedonian Greece. Nevertheless S. Kutinchev, the earliest historian of Bulgarian printing, attested to Teodosi’s ‘historical significance … in that epoch, when the printed word has been one of the most powerful weapons in the spiritual revival of the Bulgarian people’ and further praised the ‘South-Bulgarian bookmen’,54 seamlessly blending Teodosi’s linguistic identity and religious aims with cultural nationalism, and entirely ignoring the problem of Macedonian identity. This approach was continued by the recent Bulgarian Book Encyclopedia (2004), which also describes Teodosi as having ‘founded the first Bulgarian Press at Solun’.55 While Church Slavonic and ‘Slavo-Bulgarian’ continued in the works published by these two, the development of the modern vernacular in schools was gathering pace, against the background of several insurrections in the 1840s. The local demand for educational books was

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eventually met by Hristo Gruev Danov, a Plovdiv (Phillipopolis) publisher who in 1855 began to print Bulgarian schoolbooks in Belgrade and Vienna under his own name56 and set up the first Bulgarian language bookshop in 1857.57 Although he wrote some 18 schoolbooks himself, he also published translations from works written in other Slavic languages. Between 1870 and 1873 he published seven in a series of booklets called, propitiously, Knizhnitsi za Naroda: ‘Booklets for the (national) People’, with titles such as Uchitel Dobre (‘The Good Teacher’) from Russian and Zemia i Nebo (‘Earth and Sky’) from Polish. The last of the series, called Mlada Maika, (‘Young Mother’), is a translation by Joakim Gruev of a maternity guide by a certain F. Kodima. On the front of each of these booklets is a picture of bookshelves and quills with the motto Rodu na Prosvushtenye, or ‘The Birth of Enlightenment/Education’, and at the bottom the name of the bookshop appears Knizhyarnitsata na Hr. G. Danov I S-ie, or (‘The bookshop of H. G. Danov and sons’), followed by the places where found (Plovdiv, Rousse and Velets), and finally the date. Danov’s show of nascent patriotism was compromised by the fact that he also sold books in the other languages of the Ottoman Empire,58 and was, of course, still officially living in the Phillipopolis Sandjak of Rumelia. By the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, when much of Bulgaria became actually, or largely, independent, Danov had published some 150 Bulgarian language books for his own bookshops,59 and had been joined by several other booksellers (such as Dragan Manchev) in both Plovdiv and other towns. What is most notable, however, is that neither he nor they published works of literature or politics. This does not mean, however, that historical and literary culture did not find itself in print in the era immediately before the Russo-Turkish War (1876–8), but it did so only over the border in Wallachia. Here resided a group of Bulgarian exiles headed by Marin Drinov (Moscow educated) and Ivan Stoianov (Prague educated), who later formed the Bulgarian Society of Letters and who from 1869 to 1876 were publishing works which incorporated the spirit of 1848 into the idea of a Bulgarian nation through a special press at the Rumanian town of Braila.60 Drinov himself wrote the first study of Paisy of Hilendar in exile,61 a pioneering work in nationalist historiography, and was later to reform the orthography system from 36 letters to the 32 of pre-1945 Bulgarian. The march towards a unified nation, in the standardisation of a vernacular language, its promotion by ‘print capitalists’ like Danov, the rise of nationalist historiography, and the further encouragement of

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nationalist identity by other Slavic countries accelerated in Bulgaria from the 1830s onwards, thanks to reforms in the Ottoman Empire. Despite this, forms of Slavonic printing continued which upheld the traditions of a religious, cross-national identity, in one case in a still disputed area (Macedonia). The rise of print-capitalism and linguistic uniformity in Bulgaria, and with it nationalist historiography, have often served to obfuscate these complexities for the sake of homogeneity and the demarcating of a unitary culture.

Prohibition and censorship 1829–78 We must stop at this point, just before the liberation, and concentrate on the third of our earlier questions: to what extent, and in what ways, was there a ‘colonial harassment’ and censorship of Bulgarian books in the Ottoman Empire from 1829 to 1878, the period in which printed Bulgarian books began to be disseminated more freely? Printing had never been greatly encouraged in the Ottoman Empire, even in the official language. Indeed, the Ottomans did not allow the printing of books in their own language until 172962 (and even then, only non-religious and practical books), since the Caliphate had seen printing as a means of degrading the message of both the Koran and other divinely inspired texts. In relation to books in the Cyrillic script, prohibition was much sharper due to the power of the Greek Church. Before the Hatti-Humayun of 1856 the Greek authorities held the right of both censorship and granting licences to print, although despite the earlier language repression both Hadj Teodosi, in 1838, and Karastoianov, in 1847, were granted permission to print books in Cyrillics by the Thessaloniki Metropolitans Meleti63 and Mathias64 respectively. The permitted distribution of Cyrillic books between 1856 and 1878 was subject to direct Turkish censorship, initially arbitrary and chaotic, but later more methodical. Danov’s experiences illustrate the earlier chaos. When he came back to Bulgaria with the first book printed in his name, the Staro-Planniche Kalendar (1856), he presented the contents of his boxes to the Turkish customs houses in Orechov and Shvistov, but kept some ‘anti-Turkish’ Serbian books, which he planned to sell secretly to friends, concealed beneath false bottoms.65 When he travelled through the Bulgarian Sandjaks selling his publications, he frequently aroused the suspicions of the authorities and so had to pretend to be a meat-driver from the Dobrudja.66 In 1859, when travelling to Vienna to print newt titles, he was arrested by Turkish customs men who confiscated his books and sent him to see the Pasha of Vidin. He in

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turn examined Danov’s books, retaining from among them a collection of ‘whorish’ Serbian verses, but returning all the others.67 The official policy on Cyrillic books was thus confusing and frequently arbitrary. Later, in reaction to the growth of newspapers and periodicals in Istanbul, Sultan Abdul Aziz introduced the Press Regulation of 1865, which declared ‘that no newspaper or periodical publication, with administrative or political content, can be published within the borders of the empire without the permission of the government’.68 Although ‘comparatively liberal’,69 it was not liberal enough to reward Danov’s constant requests to the Turkish authorities for a local printing licence, leading him eventually to set up his own press in Vienna in 1874.70 The law also ensured that the Bulgarian language journals published directly under the Porte’s gaze in Constantinople, the home of Bulgaria’s moderate faction, did not openly challenge Turkish rule in the same way as did journals such as the exiled Lyuben Karavelov’s Svoboda (Freedom), published in Bucharest from 1869.71 All in all, one can see that the Bulgarian language book was published in this era under threat of harassment, and that Greek churchmen and then the Turkish authorities contributed to its genesis merely by galvanising through repression.

After the Liberation (1878) At the Treaty of San Stefano on 3 March 3 1878, Bulgaria – incorporating Macedonia, Eastern Rumelia and Northern Roumelia – was granted its freedom. This victory was quickly reversed by British and Austrian intervention some months later at Berlin, with Macedonia (home of Teodosi, Kritcheve and others) being returned to full Ottoman rule. Northern Roumelia, whose centre was Sofia, became the independent Bulgarian Princedom under a new crown prince, Alexander Battenberg. Eastern Rumelia was permitted self-government under a titular Ottoman rule in which the Turks were allowed to keep a garrison of Janissaries.72 Drinov, who now returned home to be a Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Spiritual Affairs in the government, founded the National Library of Bulgaria in 1879 around the repatriated Bulgarian Literary Society. In the same year Joakim Gruev began the regional library of Eastern Rumelia in Plovdiv. A catalogue of all books to be found in this library was produced by the chief librarian I. C. Iovchov in 1885,73 with some three hundred thousand or so works detailed in the catalogue – although, unsurprisingly, still comparatively few in Bulgarian itself.

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The publishing of Bulgarian books and journals accelerated at this time in comparison with the paucity of previous years as new printing presses were established in both provinces. Man’o Stoianov counted some 1910 Bulgarian language books as having been published between 1806 and 1878,74 while by the turn of the century, the librarians at the National Library in Sofia computed that some 1500 were being produced annually in both regions.75 However, as Vasilka Tankova has shown, the initial constitutional right of ‘unlimited’ publishing freedom in the Bulgarian Princedom was watered down to a nebulous ‘larger’ freedom by a group of conservative deputies in March 1879.76 The Sultan’s titular rule and statute of censorship did little to affect press freedoms greatly in Eastern Rumelia, since the Bulgarian governor Krustevich did not enforce the Sultan’s will,77 and Danov began to print two newspapers from Plovdiv, Maritsa and Borba, which called for Bulgarian unification and were freely distributed throughout both provinces.78 After the Bulgarian annexation of Eastern Rumelia in 1885, and the setting of a new Crown Prince Ferdinand Saxe-Coburg-Gotha upon the throne, Bulgarian literary culture took off hugely. Classic works such as Vasov’s Pod Igoto (‘Under the Yoke’) were published in 1886, and there flourished a literary and book-publishing culture in Sofia. Literary influences also became more diverse. Whereas Vasov wrote a work heavily influenced by the style of Sienkiewicz and Lev Tolstoy, Peyo Yavorov (1878–1914), Bulgaria’s most cosmopolitan poet, was inspired by French Symbolism, reflecting the reach of contemporary Western European trends on the developing country’s literature.

Conclusion Returning to the questions posed at the beginning of this study, we can say the following: Firstly, that a sense of Bulgarian national identity precedes the growth of the bourgeoisie and print capitalism, largely due to the ethnic nature of the sacral language and continuing divisions between the Serbian and Bulgarian arch-bishoprics – although, this identity was in no way uniform. Secondly, that the proliferation of printed books established a normalised vernacular over disparate peoples, and that later historiographies of the Bulgarian book have served to obscure cross-ethnic and religious communities under the title ‘Bulgarian revival’. Finally, although the Turkish Tanzimat from 1839 helped the growth of the Bulgarian book by establishing rights

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that loosened Greek power, nevertheless, the Greek Orthodox millet until 1856 and an increasingly anxious Ottoman state thereafter, both tried to harass and impede the development of a Bulgarian book culture and with it a uniform, national identity, making the achievements of early bookmen such as Danov and Drinov appear truly remarkable.

Notes 1. Bulgarska Kniga Entsyclopedia, sustavitel Ani Gergova (Sofia-Moscow: Pensoft, 2004). Gergova stresses that Makarije’s printed books are in ‘Middle Bulgarian’ and bear all the hallmarks of the late Turnovo book school (p. 272). 2. A copy of Vukovic’s Sluzhebnik (lit. ‘Service Book’) is listed as an early Bulgarian printed book by Anna Angelova and Liliana Petkova on the webpage Biblioteca Slavica ‘Pechatni Izvori’ at the University of Sofia’s library website – www.libsu.uni-sofia.bg/Slavica/rarafrontes.html (accessed 24/3/07 at 14:52 hrs). 3. Ivic Pavlé and Mitar Pesikan, ‘Serbian Printing’, in The History of Serbian Culture, ed. Ivic Pavlé, trans. Randall A. Major (Edgeware: Porthill Publishers, 1999), p. 139. 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edn (London: New York, Verso, 1991), p. 74. 5. Printed in Budapest, 1841 – by which time the author’s identity had been lost. 6. Velcho Velchev, Paissi of Hilendar: Father of the Bulgarian Enlightenment (Sofia: Sofia Press, 1981), pp. 25–7. 7. Harold G. Evans, A Short History of Bulgaria (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1960), p. 76. 8. Kemal Karpat, ‘Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman Era’, in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural State, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, 2 vols (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, Inc., 1982), I, p. 145. 9. Robert J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 34. 10. Evans, p. 77. 11. Paisy Hilendarski, Slavyana -Bulgarska Istoria, pod redaksiata na Petar Dinekov (Sofia: Bulgarski Pisatel, 1946), p. 22. 12. Karpat, pp. 145–7. 13. Ibid., p. 160. 14. Ibid., p. 146. 15. Ibid., p. 160. 16. Paisy, p. 20. 17. Ibid., pp. 27–35. 18. Ibid., p. 35. 19. Ibid., p. 75. 20. Ibid., p. 20.

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21. Ibid., pp. 87–8. 22. Ibid., p. 241. 23. Anderson does, of course, argue that new nationalisms, once established, ‘build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation’. Anderson, p. 44. However, as this had not yet occurred, the memory of a Bulgarian sovereign related to a united people is an unusual association for a society which still had no extensive bourgeoisie or secular culture. 24. Anderson, p. 36. 25. Ivic Pavlé writes that Church Slavonic was basically one shared language, although within time regional differences arose so that ‘several different variants of Church Slavonic (no longer Old Church Slavonic) were produced – Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian.’ – Ivic Pavlé, ‘Standard Language as an Instrument of Culture and the Product of National History’, in Major, edn, pp. 42–3. 26. Paisy, p. 91. 27. Paisy, pp. 87–8. This is an example of the ‘Slavo-Bulgarian’ definition of the Slavonic language, which sees it as an incorporation of other Slavic languages into ‘Bulgarian’, as opposed to the ‘Church Slavonic’ definition, which understands it as being a resurrected language revealed to St Cyril (Hranova, pp. 219–20). The language was different to the later ‘New Bulgarian’ (p. 222). She also notes that this national definition is a later labelling for what had earlier never been seen as a national possession (p. 218). 28. Ibid., p. 74 29. Although by 1762 the slow breakdown of the Ottoman feudal economy and the ‘growth of the towns as centres of handicraft’ had begun (Velchev, p. 23) this change had not yet created the type of extensive literate merchant class which one normally equates with ‘bourgeois nationalism’. 30. Established in 1557, and abolished in 1766. The patriarchate extended as far as Sofia, but excluded most of the areas of modern Bulgaria and Macedonia. Paul Pavlovich, The History of the Orthodox Church (Toronto: Serbian Heritage Books, 1989), p. 91. 31. Paisy, p. 92. 32. See below, note 61. 33. Karpat, p. 153. 34. Ibid., p. 154. 35. Velchev, p. 47. 36. ‘bolgarski prosti yezik’, Mihail Arnaudov, Bulgarskoto knizhovno druzhestvo ve Braila, 1869–76 (Sofia: Izdateltsvo na Bulgarskata Akademia na Naukite, 1966), p. 7. 37. Evans, p. 86. 38. The first edition of Petar Beron’s Riben Bakhvar was printed in Serb town of Brashov ‘with the help of Antoniova Ivanicha’ (1824). 39. Edward Engelhardt, La Turquie et le Tanzimat ou Histoire des Reformes dans l’Empire Ottoman (Paris: A Cotillon et Cie, Imprimeurs-Editeurs, 1882), p. 77. 40. The vernacular ‘New Bulgarian’ only became universal around the 1870s (Hranova, p. 224). 41. Karpat, p. 156.

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42. Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), I, p. 340. 43. Evans, p. 89. 44. Engelhardt, p. 33. 45. Ibid., p. 37. 46. Jelavich, I, 338. 47. Engelhardt, pp. 139–40. 48. St Kutinchev, Pechatarsvoto vu Bulgaria do osvobozhdenieto: prinoc kum kulturnata istoria na (Sofia: Derzhabna pechatnitsa, 1920), p. 18. 49. Kutinchev, p. 20. 50. Ibid., p. 22. 51. See above, note 27. 52. Petar Atanasov, Nachalo na Bulgarskoto Knigo-Pechatane (Sofia: Durzhavno Izdatelstvo, Nauka I Izkustvo, 1959), p. 183. 53. Kutinchev, p. 19. 54. Ibid., p. 35. 55. Bulgarska Kniga Entsyclopedia, p. 425. 56. S Sht. Barutchiiski Hristo G. Danov, Biographeski Ocherk 1855–1905 (Polvdiv: Jubilee Committee, 1905), p. 33. This book was written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Danov’s first publication. 57. With Yacha Truvchev. Ibid., p. 45. 58. Alexander Kiossev, ‘Plovdiv: the Texts of the City vs the Texts of Literature’, in Nexus Research Project (Sofia: University of Sofia, 2003), p. 8. 59. Anna Ilieva, Hristo Gruev Danov, 1828–1911 (Plovdiv: Durzhavno Izdaltelstvo ‘Septembri’, Muzei na vuzrazhdaneto i natsionalno osvoboditelite borbi, 1977), p. 4. 60. Arnaudov, p. 8. 61. Marin Drinov, ‘Otets Paisy, negovoto vreme, negovata istoria I uchenitsite mu’ – Periodichesko spisanye na Bulgarskoto knizhovno druzhestvo. Braila, 1871, No. 4. 62. Orlin Subev, Purvoto Osmansko puteshestie vu sveta na pechatnata kniga (Sofia: Avangard Prima, 2004), p. 59. 63. Atanasov, p. 183. 64. Kutinchev, p. 22. 65. Barutchiicki, p. 37. 66. Ibid., pp. 53–4. 67. Ibid., p. 60. 68. Rashko Rangelov, Svobadata na Pechata (Sofia: Izdatelska Kushta, 1994), p. 17. 69. Ibid., p. 16. 70. Barutchiicki, p. 90. 71. With, apparently, such defiant statements in its editorial as ‘Bulgarskoto vuzprazhdenie e grob na Turskoto imperia’ (The Bulgarian revival is the grave of the Turkish Empire), 7 November 1869, quoted in Ivan Popivanov, Lyuben Karavelov (Sofia: Izdatelstvo na Ts K Na DKMS, 1975), p. 83. 72. Robert Seton Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 436. 73. I. C. Iovchov, Katalog na knigite ve oblastnata biblioteka (Postapali do purv januari 1885) (Plovdiv: Oblastna Pechatnitsa, 1885).

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74. Collected in Stoianov, Man’o, Bulgarska vuzrozhdenska knizhnina. Analitichen repertoar na bulgarskite knigi i periodichni izdanya 1806–78 (Sofia: Durzhavno Izdatelstvo, nauka i izkustvo, 1957–59), 2 vols, Cited in Pajic, Predrag P., ‘The South Slavic Collections at the Library of Congress’, in Overviews of the Collections at www.loc.gov/rr/european/coll/Slav.html (accessed 24/3/06 at 14:18hrs). 75. Bibliograficheski Biuletin (Sofia: DP. Narodna Biblioteka, 1897). 76. Vasilka Tankova, Svobodata na pechata ve Knyazhestvo Bulgaria i Iztochna Rumeli, 1879–1885 (Plovdiv: BB-Studios, 1994), p. 20. 77. Ibid., p. 232. 78. Ibid., p. 176.

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“After the Old; yet as agreeable … to the Newest”: British and American Almanacs in the Era of American Independence Lily Santoro In the English-speaking world of the late eighteenth century, most literate Britons and Americans owned and read an almanac. Today Americans are familiar with this genre through the Farmer’s Almanac – a book that most of us have never read, but know of for its surprisingly “accurate” weather predictions. Today’s Farmer’s Almanac is a nostalgic relic of what was a popular and lucrative genre in eighteenth-century print culture. Though they were big sellers in both America and Britain, almanacs on each side of the Atlantic had quite dissimilar contents. At the end of the eighteenth century, American almanacs changed much more dramatically than their British counterparts in ways that emphasized the growing difference in American identity caused by their War for Independence. While historians have often claimed that they were outnumbered only by bibles in Atlantic world households, almanacs have until quite recently been relegated to the margins of the historiography of print culture and book history. Perhaps this is because almanacs functioned as marginal texts even as they appeared in the majority of households in the eighteenth century;1 indeed, almanac makers themselves often referred to their works as marginal and unappreciated even as they pointed to the prevalence of the almanac in the household. For example, Daniel Sewall opened his 1784 Astronomical Diary, or Almanack by explaining that “the business of Almanac making is looked upon by many as low and vulgar.” Yet, he reminded his audience, no other publications were “so constantly purchased, and consulted” as the almanac. In fact, Sewall argued, many families whose “bibles lay on the shelf unopened till covered with dust, yet make a point of daily examining the Almanac.”2 The marginalization of these publications, both at the time and for many years afterwards, may have been due in part to the 55

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fragile nature and finite shelf life of the almanac (which was usually replaced annually) or perhaps because almanacs could rarely be considered as original works of literature. Almanacs annually offered compilations of stories and poetry, but their main content was comprised of wonder lore, jokes, recipes, home remedies, and farming advice, in addition to an ever-growing base of weather, geographical, and governmental information. Almanacs also served nationalist agendas, though, and this means that, all “literary” value aside, they are potential goldmines for the book historian interested in excavating print history for traces of developing nationalist concerns. It might not be possible – or desirable – to attempt to reconstruct a “national” history of the book, but in some cases and at certain periods (particularly in the West during the eighteenth century) print culture is so powerfully nationalist in its form and content that it would be reductive to ignore the fact in favor of an intrinsically ahistorical transnational methodology. Almanacs are one such case in point. By the 1770s, almanacs on both sides of the Atlantic reinforced separate national identities by emphasizing shared ideals, the otherness of certain groups, and the importance of a strong government. There were many similarities between them of course; British almanacs in the eighteenth century included interest and tide tables, court sessions, and calendars with holidays and weather predictions just like the American almanacs. But there were also crucial – and increasing – differences. Almanac themes and forms remained largely unchanged over the course of the late eighteenth century in Britain, and by its close readership had decreased.3 In America, however, almanacs changed significantly during the Revolution and their audience grew in the early United States. Their content expanded to include American political and governmental information as well as stories, humor, and anecdotes emphasizing American ideals and morals. At the height of their popularity, almanacs reached a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Local printers in America generally turned out 2000–3000 copies of their almanac every December. The London Stationers’ Company released at least as many of their titles in November every year. With a monopoly on almanac publication until 1774, the company published the majority to be had in England.4 Printers sold the almanacs in their own bookstores – often the printing office itself – and distributed them in rural areas with the assistance of peddlers.5 Despite the low selling price of 6–12 cents a copy in America and 9–16 pence in England, almanacs were big moneymakers for printers. Most households needed one. Since readers replaced their almanacs at

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the end of each year, there was little need to print them on quality paper, and printers saved money by using the lowest-quality paper available. The market for almanacs was reliable in Britain. But while the Stationers’ Company’s most popular almanacs ran for decades or even a century, most American almanacs were only published for a year or two and then either renamed and changed, or simply discontinued. American readers would not buy again from an author or publisher they did not find trustworthy, whether that be a result of their calculations, politics, or disagreeable content. Almanacs were widely read and advertised for a varying range of audiences in both old and New England. However, the more stringent social structure of British society created almanacs that differed more from each other than did American almanacs at the time. While the most lucrative almanacs for the Stationers’ Company were marketed to the lower orders, the company also offered almanacs for merchants, sailors, and members of parliament, including middling and gentry readers. Unlike the wide range of American almanacs that often copied each other’s content while advertising to different audiences, the various almanac titles available to British readers reflected the social stratification of their audiences: those marketed to elites differed greatly from those for the lower orders. They also differed markedly and in interesting ways from all American almanacs. Elite British publications such as Goldsmith’s included only holidays, price indices, interest tables, lists of government officials, tables for calculating various kinds of business and travel expenses, and the session dates for Parliament as well as local courts and city governments that would be most useful to such readers. Goldsmith’s served as a reference guide much like today’s phone book or informational almanac. Also aimed at elites, The Ladies Diary differed from both Goldsmith’s and more popular almanacs by including pages of puzzles and math problems; it was clearly an almanac for an educated and leisured class of women. But the most popular and most lucrative almanacs sold in Britain were marketed to a much poorer audience. Some of the longest running of these were John Partridge’s Merlinus Liberatus, Francis Moore’s Vox Stellarum, William Winstanley’s Old Poor Robin, and Tycho Wing’s Olympia Domata. These works were more widely sold than the more businessoriented almanacs like Goldsmith’s.6 Featuring prognostications and prefaces in conversational tones and poor English, the phony author claimed to be a journeyman or a farmer. By comparison, American almanacs offered less diversity of content to their various audiences. While many almanacs were advertised for

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farmers or as a “Gentleman and Lady’s Diary,” their subject matter tended toward homogeneity no matter what the price or intended audience.7 By the late colonial period, these almanacs had become the Reader’s Digest of their day. Interspersed with all the necessary information to be found in an almanac was a bounty of ephemera: stories, poems, anecdotes, jokes, agricultural advice, “receipts” for common maladies, and a vast array of instructional literature. Before the Revolution, most entries pertained to farming and agriculture. But they addressed other topics as well. Women could find not only recipes and common remedies for their families’ ills but also cautionary tales and stories of feminine virtue. There were even occasional humorous pieces aimed at female audiences.8 Men of all occupations and levels of education could also access and appreciate the literature found in the almanac. Artisans and merchants, who had little use for the agricultural advice, could have made use of the calendar, tide tables, and calculations of distances between towns and taverns on all the major roads in the region and sometimes throughout the nation. After Independence, compilers included many tables to calculate interest, the value of gold and foreign coins, lists of government officials, and court schedules. Unlike the nameless/faceless compilers and calculators of the pseudonymously published Stationers’ Company almanacs in Britain, named members of the American intellectual elite calculated and compiled the most popular almanacs on the other side of the Atlantic. American readers would have recognized men such as David Rittenhouse, Benjamin West, and Nathan Daboll as scientists and patriots. These men used their publications to advance the cause of independence and support the new government and republican ideology. During the war with Britain and as the young nation grew, almanac makers consciously employed almanacs to foster an American identity. David Rittenhouse was a noted instrument maker, inventor, astronomer, and surveyor, who succeeded Benjamin Franklin as president of the American Philosophical Society in 1791. As such, he was more than qualified to calculate and compile almanacs. And he did so prolifically. David Rittenhouse was responsible for calculating a number of almanacs (sometimes as many as four in one year). In 1782, he authored The Continental Almanack and Father Abraham’s Almanac – both published in Philadelphia – as well as Father Abraham’s New England Almanack out of Hartford, Connecticut, and Weatherwise’s Town and Country Almanack, published in Boston. Benjamin West was also a noted astronomer and mathematician, who taught both at Rhode Island (now Brown) University from 1786 to 1798 and had received

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acclaim as an astronomer when he published his observations of the transit of Venus in 1769 and a comet in 1770. Upon receiving his position at the university, West spent a year in Philadelphia at the Protestant Episcopal Academy, where he met Franklin and Rittenhouse. Nathan Daboll of Groton, Connecticut, was widely known as the author of The Schoolmaster’s Assistant in 1799, an arithmetic textbook commonly used throughout the United States. Similarly, he authored a navigation textbook – The Practical Navigator – that was published posthumously, featuring many of the lessons offered to his students as a teacher of navigation and nautical astronomy. In 1773, Daboll began writing almanacs. His almanacs became so popular that, upon his death in 1818, his son, Nathan Daboll Jr., continued the practice, and the Daboll family produced almanacs that were popular throughout New England for a century. Above all of these things, Rittenhouse, West, and Daboll were strong supporters of the new United States government. During the war, Rittenhouse served on the Philadelphia Committee of Safety and oversaw the manufacture of arms and munitions. In 1776, he also served in the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention and was state treasurer from 1777 to 1789. After the war he was a commissioner of the First Bank of the United States and the first director of the United States Mint. West also proved himself a strong Whig. During the Revolution, he manufactured clothing for the Continental Army. Being such a supporter of independence and the new nation, it is not surprising that Rittenhouse’s almanacs played a role in the formation of American nationalism. Like Rittenhouse’s, West’s almanacs emphasized republican virtue and showed support for independence during the war and for the new government afterward. Daboll did not hold a political office or overtly support independence. His almanacs did not often discuss political issues before or during the war. But thereafter they did show an interest in the workings and success of the new government, and his son supported the new government as a member of both the Connecticut House of Representatives and Senate, and as a probate judge. Because British almanacs were published under pseudonyms, the actual calculators were not as important to British readers as the traditional name under which they were titled. For example, Vox Stellarum and Merlinus Liberatus were – according to their cover – ostensibly calculated by Francis Moore and John Partridge as far back as the turn of the eighteenth century.9 It is in fact likely that scientific minds calculated Stationers’ Company almanacs, but they were rarely credited in the same manner as the Americans. Charles Hutton began calculating

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the Ladies Diary or Almanac for the Stationers’ Company in 1774. Much like Nathan Daboll, Hutton was a popular textbook author, his first being The School-Master’s Guide: Or, a Complete System of Practical Arithmetic, Adapted to the Use of Schools in 1766. In 1774 – the year of his first almanac publication – Hutton was named a member of the Royal Society and later delivered a paper entitled “Calculations to determine at what point in the side of a hill its attraction will be the greatest, &c.” and calculated an almanac annually through to the end of the eighteenth century.10 By 1786, he was responsible for compiling many of the Stationers’ Company almanacs, including Season on the Seasons, John Partridge’s Merlinus Liberatus, Francis Moore’s Vox Stellarum, White’s Coestial Atlas, as well as Goldsmith’s Almanac and Rider’s British Merlin. As an intellectual, he was very similar to the American almanac makers. However, unlike the American scientific elite, Hutton’s name never appeared on the cover of the Ladies Diary or any of the other almanacs he compiled. Instead, he was constrained by the Stationers’ Company to adjust the contents of each almanac according to the intended audience for each title.11 On both sides of the Atlantic, men such as Rittenhouse, West, Daboll, and even Hutton used the supplemental content of their almanacs to instill a national identity in their readers. Americans used humor, moral anecdotes, and stories to instruct their readers in American identity. The British, on the other hand, relied on the power of prognostications, poetry, and royalty. Initially, there were some similarities; both British and American almanacs regularly included a chronology of world events in the first few pages, for example, and before the 1770s the chronologies were nearly identical, beginning at the creation of the world and listing such dates as Noah’s Flood, the death of Christ, the Battle of Hastings, and the Glorious Revolution. British chronologies tended to include the births and deaths of English monarchs and a few popish plots, while American chronologies instead stayed with major international events. By the early 1770s, though, American chronologies left most of British history out in favor of American moments, beginning with the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492 and including dates such as the establishment of each colony, major battles fought in the Seven Years’ War and the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and later the election of presidents. Popular British almanacs usually featured a list of the kings and queens of Britain, and the top of each calendar page often carried a poem extolling Britannia, liberty, and Protestantism. Prefaces also included nationalistic rhetoric. For example, the 1766 edition of Vox Stellarum

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opened with verses singing praises to George III, inviting readers to “Admire the Virtues of our gracious King” and “pray for his long Reign and future Bliss.”12 Prognostications in popular British almanacs also generally predicted success for Britain and hard times for the French and Spanish but these were never included in American almanacs. When the heavens foretold troubles in the Empire, the author usually explained that Britain had previously avoided such woeful destinies and should glory in her ability to do so again in the coming year. For example, in June of 1770, the Vox Stellarum prognostication foretold troop movements and a possibility of war throughout Europe. Showing little concern for Britain’s danger, the author instead cautioned the Catholics: “Let Rome and Italy look to it.” The following month, the almanac predicted disease among the Turks.13 Similarly, Merlinus Liberatus foretold in May and June of 1800 that Spain and Portugal would face internal strife, while France would be stymied in her latest “greate design” by “dangers pressed on every side.” Meanwhile, London merchants receive some “welcome news from sea.”14 Central to these prognostications was the focus on the French or Catholic “other” who were so often cursed by even the stars. Linda Colley has discussed the role of “otherness” in creating British identity in the eighteenth century, arguing that religion and the French were used to identify Britishness by identifying what it was not. A third factor in British identity was the Empire. While the two histories – British and American – are subsequently demonstrably different, Colley’s model is nonetheless a useful one for the exploration of a nascent national identity in this same period, enabling a focus on the particular strategies of the new nation-builders.15 American almanac makers often used humor to identify their new nation’s “others.” Interestingly, though, this group changed over time. Through the early 1770s, the persons most often identified as foreign were the French. Almanac humor ridiculed Frenchmen for their effeminacy and false nobility, as well as for their poor English skills. The French were the first focus of ridicule because the Americans had fought against the French for nearly a century before the Revolution – and perhaps because a certain amount of the ridicule was borrowed from the British, their former rulers. But by the middle of the war, the English themselves became the focus of ridicule, chided for their lack of any true representation and their inability to govern even their own households.16 In the mid 1780s and early 1790s, this theme changed again to focus on the Irish, whom Americans considered of lesser intellect: for example, one anecdote related that three Irishmen on a journey learned that they had fifteen more miles to travel; their response

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was relief as they decided that this meant they only had to travel five more miles each. Another anecdote in the same almanac explained that the deficiencies of the Irish came from the tea they drank.17 Since they most likely drank the same tea as the British who ruled Ireland, this anecdote made fun of both groups. During and after the war, many Americans came to realize how similar their situation had been to that of the Irish. However, since Ireland did not rise up and overthrow its British rulers, the citizens of the new republic assumed that the Irish were inferior to the inhabitants of the United States. These humorous critiques had the effect of binding the Americans together and helping to form a national identity that patently cast off ties to the old countries, and the old influences. Men who did not display republican virtue and, as such, were not good Americans also came under attack. During the Revolution, noblemen became the focus of much ridicule, but there were as many jokes and anecdotes showing the intelligence and virtue of the noble over those of meaner circumstances. After the Revolution, lawyers, judges, and the legal system served as a main target of almanac humor. The expense of employing a lawyer, the corruptibility of judges, and the confusing nature of the judicial system emerged as popular themes. These jokes were less common before the war, but by 1800 an almanac was incomplete without one or two pokes at the law. This trend points to the insecurity of the new government of the early United States. As the new government was being installed, ordinary people felt that they could not control or comprehend the new system. One humorous line explained that though one went to court with “a heavy purse, clear case, good evidence, an impartial judge, an upright and intelligent jury, an able attorney … unless he have good luck, there’s a great danger of losing his case!”18 No matter how well prepared a person was going into court they could never foretell the outcome. At the heart of this kind of humor was a basic distrust of lawyers – one that is still held by many Americans today. Almanac humor portrayed lawyers as crafty men who had no morals but would argue for the highest bidder, no matter how they felt about their client’s guilt or innocence. Lawyers and the judicial system were portrayed as “the other” within the nation, because – much like the nobility outside the nation – they were seen as lacking in the republican virtue that was a defining feature of “good” Americans. An emphasis on republican virtue also dominated American almanac entertainments. Featuring allegories and stories from antiquity that celebrated the virtue of the ancients, these works brought the ideas and

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values of the intellectual elites to the common people. Notably, the writers seemed to presuppose a certain level of literacy and education among readers, even in those almanacs aimed at farmers and those living in more rural areas. Almanac makers quoted authors such as John Milton and Alexander Pope as well as such ancient philosophers as Socrates, Plato, and Aesop. These works often presented moral tales and anecdotes from antiquity as a historical support for American moral values and republican virtues. Particularly during the Revolution, there seemed to be much effort put into giving the struggle for independence and the ideals of Americans a longer and richer history. Readers found rulers and philosophers from antiquity and early Europe embracing ideals that were in fact products of American Enlightenment thought. For example, when asked by a merchant if he had discovered the Philosopher’s stone, causing him to become so wealthy and powerful so quickly, Cosimo di Medici related the recipe: “I never ask another to do that which I can do myself; I never put off till tomorrow what can be done today; nor do I think any gain so trivial as to despise it.”19 Anyone familiar with the rule of the Medicis in Florence would probably discount the truth of this story. Prior to the Revolution, American almanac makers tended to steer clear of political controversy. Unlike the patriotic poetry found in British almanacs, the verses on calendar pages in American almanacs in the colonial era tended to sing the beauty of seasons. During the war, almanacs began to post new laws that affected the lives of their readers, especially economic laws – taxes, duties and tariffs, depreciation of continental money for assessing debts after the war, etc. Newly included in northern almanacs, though they had always been in southern and British almanacs, were lists of government officials. After the Revolution, common Americans took a greater interest in their government, and almanacs offered information that would help them make sense of it. Almanac printers began incorporating lists of both state and federal government officials in all three branches – executive (including appointed officials such as the treasurer), judicial (all the Supreme Court judges), and legislative (a list of all the senators and representatives, and the states they represented). Almanacs supplied the same information for the state government and, in the case of some more rural areas (particularly Upstate New York, New Hampshire, and Vermont), for the county level as well. By 1800 almanacs contained more governmental information than entertaining stories, agricultural information, or other ephemera.

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Almanac makers clearly showed their political and nationalizing goals in the late 1780s and early 1790s when the nation was considering the new Constitution. While it was still being considered, almanacs printed in those states that had adopted the Constitution were very critical of the states that had not. In fact, the Virginia Almanac for 1790 referred to the states that had not passed the Constitution as “foreign.”20 In contrast to the increasing politicization of American almanacs, British authors’ attention for the political began to flag as the eighteenth century came to a close. Instead of political diatribes or celebrations of English Liberty, the opening pages increasingly focused attention on the changing view of astrology in the face of religious and scientific objections. In fact, the defense of astrology against scientific and Christian attacks became the dominant theme in British prefaces at the end of the 1770s and remained so through to the end of the century. As American almanacs grew more numerous, the publication of popular British almanacs decreased at the end of the eighteenth century and by the beginning of the nineteenth they had come under fire from elite groups such as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.21 Despite the rapid advance of religions such as Methodism in the United States during the 1780s, American almanac makers did not face similar attacks. While the general purpose of the almanac on both sides of the Atlantic had not changed, the evolving nature of the American content in the late eighteenth century reflected the changing national identity of readers. While almanacs became useful political tools in the new United States, British almanacs became increasingly defensive of their traditional content in the face of social change. At the opening of the nineteenth century, popular British almanacs became increasingly associated with superstition and backward thinking. Conversely, those sold in the early American republic increasingly offered the kinds of useful governmental information found in almanacs aimed at the British elite, while popularizing republican ideology through the sorts of entertainments that many found so distasteful in cheaper British almanacs. The changing content of almanacs in the early American republic provided the political, governmental, and cultural information that most people needed to be good citizens in the new nation of the United States of America – and took a crucial step toward creating and reinforcing ideas about what it was to be an American. This brief overview of an important part of early American print culture demonstrates that it might after all be useful to consider “national” histories of print insofar as they reflected and helped to create an imagined community at a specific, crucial, and definitive historical moment.

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Lily Santoro 65

Notes

1. Scholars such as Barber Stowell, Hugh Armory, David Hall, and William J. Gilmore have emphasized the prevalence of the almanac in American households, while Bernard Capp and Richard Altick have claimed the same to be true of British households in the eighteenth century. 2. Daniel Sewall, An Astronomical Diary, or Almanack for the Year of the Christian Era 1784 (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1783). 3. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); American Antiquarian Society, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Vol. 1, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (New York: Cambridge, 2000). 4. Though the Stationers’ Company officially lost its monopoly in 1695, it maintained a de facto monopoly through taxes imposed by the 1710 Revenue Act and 1712 Stamp Act that made publication of the cheaply sold almanac too costly for smaller publishers. The Stationers’ Company maintained this kind of monopoly on most kinds of texts until courts in Scotland declared perpetual copyright illegal in 1773. For more information, see William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 84–103; Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change 1775–1870 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 13–23. 5. For more information about numbers of imprints sold in the early American republic and how they were distributed between rural and urban centers, see William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), pp. 157–192. For similar information in Britain, see St. Clair, Reading, pp. 186–211 and Perkins, Visions, pp. 13–14. 6. Perkins, Visions, pp. 23–39. 7. For examples, see Benjamin West’s The New England Almanack or Lady’s and Gentleman’s Diary (Providence: Carter, 1774; 1777; 1781; and 1784), and Nathan Daboll’s The New England Almanack and Gentleman’s and Lady’s Diary (New London: Green, 1783; 1790; 1795; and 1800). 8. Almanacs often included humorous “advertisements” or letters from a lady describing the perfect husband or how best to please one’s husband. These usually prescribed impossible acts or characteristics. For example, see “The Mental and Personal Qualifications of a Husband” in Nathan Daboll, Freebetter’s New England Almanack for the Year of Our Lord Christ 1773 (New London, CT: Green, 1772). 9. While many American almanacs were also published under pseudonyms, the practice was much more common in Britain where the Stationers’ Company marketed their almanacs to varying audiences based upon “authorship.” 10. Charles Hutton, The School-Master’s Guide: Or, a Complete System of Practical Arithmetic, Adapted to the Use of School (Newcastle upon Tyne: 1766); Charles Hutton, Calculations to Determine at What Point in the Side of a Hill Its Attraction Will Be the Greatest, &c (London: 1780).

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William Winstanley, Old Poor Robin 1780 (London: Hawkins, 1779). Paginations are not listed for the almanacs referred to because they generally did not include numbered pages.

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11. Perkins, Visions, pp. 29–30. 12. Francis Moore (Pseud.), Vox Stellarum, or a Loyal Almanac for the Year of Human Redemption, 1766 (London: Bettenham, 1765). 13. Francis Moore (Pseud.), Vox Stellarum, or a Loyal Almanac for the Year of Human Redemption, 1770 (London: Bettenham, 1769). 14. John Partridge (Pseud.), Merlinus Liberatus, being an Almanack for the Year of Our Lord Christ, 1800 (London: Thorne, 1799). 15. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale, 1992). 16. Benjamin West, Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack for the Year of Our Redemption 1775 (Boston: Mills &Hicks, 1774); Nathan Hutchins, Hutchins’ Improved for the Year of Our Lord 1781 (New York: Gaine, 1780); David Rittenhouse (Pseud., Abraham Weatherwise), Father Abraham’s Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1775 (Philadelphia: Dunlap, 1774). 17. Robert Andrews, The Virginia Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1784 (Richmond: Nicolson & Prentis, 1783). 18. Eben W. Judd, Webster’s Calendar or the Albany, Montgomery, Washington & Columbia Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1790 (Albany: Webster, 1789). 19. Benjamin West, Bickerstaff’s New England Almanack for the Year of Our Redemption 1784 (Norwich: Trumbull, 1783). 20. Robert Andrews, The Virginia Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1790 (Richmond: Nicolson, 1789). 21. Perkins, Visions, pp. 46–88; 197–230.

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From Germany to Brazil: The History of the Fashion Magazine A Estação, an International Enterprise Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva The book Zum 25jährigen Bestehen der Modenwelt 1865–1890 is a rich source for the book historian interested in the vanished history of the German publisher Franz Lipperheide.1 As the title itself suggests, it is a commemorative edition for the 25th anniversary of the German fashion magazine Die Modenwelt: Illustrirte Zeitung für Toilette und Handarbeiten, published by Lipperheide in Berlin.2 Perhaps the case of Lipperheide’s publishing company has not been very different from that of most of the world’s publishers, who, as Robert Darnton explains, ‘treat[ed] their archives as garbage’,3 though, in fact, we cannot say for certain if the destruction of the archives coincides with the end of Lipperheide’s editorial career, when he sold his publishing company at the beginning of the twentieth century, or with the Second World War. The Lipperheide publishing house was situated in the heart of Berlin on Potsdamer Strasse, a street that was partially destroyed during the War. The façade of one of the houses the publisher occupied (no. 38, now no. 96) still exists today with its interior totally restored. The Kostümbibliothek in Berlin holds a private collection of Franz and Frieda Lipperheide’s books, paintings, engravings, drawings, fabric samples and photographs acquired by the couple with the profits from the publishing house.4 But the Lipperheide archives have apparently not survived. The loss of the archives certainly makes the task of book historians more difficult, but still not impossible. Lipperheide combined the production of periodicals centred in Berlin with a series of collaborations with other publishers in Europe and the Americas. His objective was to spread Parisian fashion and European etiquette further west. In order for us to study the exact extent of this international enterprise, we would need to search in several archives in Europe, Latin America and the 67

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From Germany to Brazil

United States for what has survived of the 20 journals linked to Die Modenwelt, published altogether in 13 different languages: German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Czech, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Polish and Hungarian. The present chapter is far narrower in scope, although one of my objectives is to understand how Lipperheide used to operate. I will make some assumptions about how this periodical disseminated material culture throughout Europe and the Americas and about the journal’s readership, and provide an overview of the production of the Lipperheide publishing house, mainly using the data available in Zum 25jähringen Bestehen der Modenwelt 1865–1890 and the journals themselves. Once the range of this international journalistic enterprise has been outlined, I will focus on the Brazilian, English and French journals that were linked to Die Modenwelt. What was the aspiring public of this transnational enterprise and which public did it most likely reach on a local scale? Can we consider the subscribers of Lipperheide’s magazine a global audience? Which literary genres did these journals choose to publish? What do their novels have in common and how much do they differ from each other? Rather than answering these questions in full and comparing single novels, my concern is to problematise the application of traditional categories of literary history, such as national literature, influence and canonic versus popular novels, in a comparative study of the literature published in these journals. I hope to show that these journals reinforce the argument that it is reductive to conceive material and therefore literary culture in national terms.

History Founded in October 1865, the objective of Die Modenwelt was to teach housewives how to make clothes for all the family, how to embroider and how to decorate their houses. In the beginning, Die Modenwelt was essentially a fashion magazine with six richly illustrated pages. The front page would show a large picture of two well-dressed women, sometimes accompanied by children (see Figure 4.1). The background would be a park, a lake, the inside of a house or even a hall decked out for a party. Depending on the position in which the women were drawn – sitting or standing, either in profile or from the back or from the front – the illustrator would show off the details of the collar or the neckline, the sleeves or the train of the dress. The leading article took up two

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Figure 4.1 Die Modenwelt, 1 October 1870, Berlin. Courtesy of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz and Lipperheidische Kostümbibliothek, Berlin, 2007. Photo by Dietmar Katz.

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Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva 69

From Germany to Brazil

columns on the first page and discussed, for instance, seasonal fashions, cooking, decoration and etiquette for the European family. The journal promised to keep its readers up to date with the latest Paris fashions and to help them keep their family budget low. Moreover, since the interest of the largest contingent of its readers – wives and daughters – lay predominantly in the instruction of the family, Die Modenwelt was also a magazine about principles, emphasising moral values. The editor, Frieda Lipperheide, also taught etiquette for table and assembly, using a conversational tone. The order of the day was discreet elegance without extravagance: It is not up to fashion to choose for each individual; each woman must, out of the great variety available, choose that which is appropriate to her circumstances, age and personality. She must, with true feminine tact, avoid exaggeration and impertinence. She must be able to distinguish what is correct and convenient in terms of shape, colour and fabric, in good taste, and know how to dress the right way.5 The internal pages contained yet more pictures. Marlyse Meyer’s description below of the Brazilian magazine A Estação (The Season) applies equally well to Die Modenwelt since both these periodicals, as we shall see in more detail later, were produced using the same typographic template. The great variety of items in the following quotation shows us that not only clothing was subject to periodical change but so too were general ornamentation and accessories: Dresses, hats, bonnets, table cloths, undergarments, smart aprons, pelisses, skirts, bodices etc etc in material for feminine clothing. Also, decorative pieces, needlework, footstools, cachepots, various furnishings – all the illustrations with external explanatory notes, following the monthly mould, that also come separately.6 The idea of publishing a periodical about Parisian fashion was not a novelty at all at the time; there had been other women’s periodicals before Die Modenwelt, dating back to the end of the seventeenth century, and Parisian cultural authority in the fashion market had been recognised long before. In Germany, for example, before Die Modenwelt there was the Pariser Damenkleider-Magazin, from Stuttgart. In Brazil, in 1840 Laemmert started to publish Correio das Modas, with illustrations and paper patterns printed in Paris. What appears to be novel about Lipperheide’s

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editorial enterprise is the creation of a standard format for Frenchoriented fashion magazines with an international circulation in several European languages. As with previous magazines, Die Modenwelt proposed and defended an international fashion with French leanings. It seems to me, too, that Lipperheide’s periodical was the first to reach readers in a larger number of countries. Lipperheide’s interest in expanding his business throughout Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic was probably, in part, an economic necessity since the cost of producing an illustrated journal was very high. After all, in agreement with Robert Gross, the trouble started with Gutenberg. His ingenious invention, with its interchangeable parts, was the model of the modern machine, costly to build, inexpensive to operate, demanding large scales to compensate for the heavy capital investment. In the relentless quest for market, succeeding generations of publishers pushed the dynamic logic of mass production to its limits.7 Lipperheide’s project of creating a multinational fashion periodical was accomplished through, what we could call, associations with other, already existing periodicals: ‘Already before the publication of the first issue, connections were established with foreign editors, so that Die Modenwelt could appear from the start in three languages.’8 The other two were the French L’Illustrateur des Dames, in Paris, and the English The Young Ladies’ Journal, in London. To guarantee an international readership, it seems that, from the first, Lipperheide had to free itself from a narrow national orientation. It is indicative that in an editorial from 1870 we find Frieda Lipperheide strengthening the international character of the journal. Let us not forget that 1870 was the year of the Franco-Prussian war. When Friedrich Melfort wrote about the increase in subscription of Die Modenwelt from 1865 to 1890, he stressed that the publication of the journal was never threatened by the war. It is true that there was a considerable decrease in the number of subscriptions from June 1870 (98,928) to October 1870 (82,110), but the journal nevertheless quickly recovered and reached the rate of 100,000 subscribers in May 1871.9 Up to the end of the 1880s, the journalistic format of Die Modenwelt was reproduced, as already stated here, in 13 different European languages. We begin to see that the creation of a Brazilian magazine in the mould of the German one falls within a wider commercial project. We therefore

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Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva 71

From Germany to Brazil

need to determine where and how the production and printing of the foreign editions of Die Modenwelt came about. The next step will be the construction of an overview of the collection of periodicals derived from Die Modenwelt. After that we will finally be able to evaluate the options Lombaerts took in making his product appropriate to Brazilian sociocultural circumstances. It appears as if there were three basic arrangements between Lipperheide and the foreign publishers. In the first case, Lipperheide would translate, edit and print the periodical, which was subsequently sent to the country of circulation. This seems to be the case for La Estación and The Season (New York). In the second case, the stereotypes of the pictorial content of each issue of the magazine or the whole template of pages (containing text and image) would be sent to the country of publication, where the issues would be edited and printed. It is difficult to be precise about whether the fashion descriptions and leading articles in Portuguese were translated in Germany or in Brazil. It may very well be the case that the typographic matrices for the images were sent to Lombaerts, who would have the texts translated, typeset and the magazine edited in his own publishing house. It may also be the case that the whole fashion part of the magazine was produced in Germany. Then the template would be sent to Lombaerts, who would just be in charge of printing the issues.10 This was the case for A Estação and La Saison most of the time. The British edition, The Young Ladies’ Journal, represents the third model. It maintained an independent format but shared characteristics with Die Modenwelt. In the weekly English magazine, as in the fortnightly German one, we find articles about clothing and needlework, apart from coloured printed pictures of fashions, always followed by a description. We can conclude from the information contained in Zum 25jährigen Bestehen der Modenwelt that Lipperheide concentrated mainly in Berlin and Leipzig the personnel in charge of the management of the firm and the production of the journal: administrators, accountants, editorial staff, typesetters, translators, proofreaders both for German and foreign languages, drawers, colourists, wood-engravers and lithographers. There were also lithographers working for Lipperheide in Konstanz to produce coloured embroidery patterns. The printing and distribution within Germany or the dispatch of periodicals to other countries in Europe or America took place in Leipzig. Lipperheide subcontracted the firm Otto Dürr for the production of the foreign editions of Die Modenwelt and of Illustrirte Frauen-Zeitung,11 an expanded edition of Die Modenwelt, as we shall see later. According to Zum 25jährigen Bestehen der Modenwelt, there

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were eight proofreaders, seven of whom were responsible for the foreign languages. Otto Dürr was also in charge of the printing and distribution of a part of the magazine. The firm K F Koehler, Leipzig, was the one mostly in charge of the wrapping and distribution of Illustrirte FrauenZeitung and the foreign editions of Die Modenwelt. Other firms or persons that Lipperheide subcontracted were, for example, Julius Eule, A. Müller, Alexander Schauer, C. Kloberg, Herm Gaebler and C. Kloberg. Altogether there were 398 people working for Lipperheide, including librarians, machine operators, bookbinders, carriers and distributors. Women numbered 173 of these. The commemorative edition for the 25th anniversary of Die Modenwelt also registers how many were located where: Berlin (99), Leipzig (283), Erfurt (1), Konstanz (6), Vienna (4), Paris (3), London (1) and Rome (1).12 As the editor of La Saison writes in the leading article of the third year of the magazine’s circulation: To make a journal is a very difficult and complicated business, of which only the initiated know the secret. The illustrated journals are more finespun than the former, which applies to the fashion journals even more than to the illustrated journals. They need numerous female and male editors, draughtsmen, illustrators, artists of all kinds, who are not found in an ordinary journal, to strengthen the team of typesetters, printers, stationers that are already very difficult to manage. It takes a huge effort to make a homogeneous ensemble out of those various dissociated tasks, assigned to foreign hands, and a harmonious and merged whole, closely united and correct: in one word what one can call a journal! (La Saison, 1 October 1869) Hence we see that Lipperheide was exploiting the new possibilities offered by progress in transport and by innovations in the journalistic industry. His company benefited at the same time from European rail routes, transatlantic steamer lines, the professionalisation of the press, the development of graphic art and printing techniques to multiply the number of copies and expand the geographical area of circulation of the foreign issues of his magazine, which constituted altogether one single edition. Table 4.1 contains a list of the foreign issues of Die Modenwelt, their editors and the places of publication. The data is not necessarily very precise because it reflects only one moment of production, the year 1890. The majority of these periodicals circulated for a long time.

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Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva 73

First issue

The Young Ladies’ Journal, London Die Modenwelt, Berlin, Germany

Jan. 1864

Oct. 1865

Oct. 1865

Oct. 1865

De Bazar, Gravenhage, Holland Budapesti Bazár, Hungary

5 Jan. 1857

1 Jan. 1866

1 Jan. 1860

1 July 1877

Dagmar, Kjobenhaun, Denmark La Saison, Germany La Saison, France

1 July 1866

1 July 1866

1 Dec. 1867

1 Dec. 1867

La Saison, Belgium La Saison, Switzerland La Saison, Italy

Since when is linked to Die Modenwelt

Publishing house

Illustrations printed by

Texts printed by

Harrison, London Franz Lipperheide, Berlin Gebr. Belinfante, Haag

Harrison, London Otto Dürr, Leipzig

weekly

Otto Dürr, Leipzig

Johann von Király, Budapest Carls Otto’s Nachfolger, Copenhagen Franz Lipperheide, Berlin J. Lebègue e Cie, Paris J. Lebègue e Cie, Brussels Nydegger & Baumgart Ufficio della Satagione (U. Hoepli), Milan

Otto Dürr, Leipzig

Gebr. Belinfante, Haag HungariaBuchdrückerei, Budapest

Periodicity

Price

9d (by fortnightly

post 1s) 1.25 Mark per term

fortnightly

f. 1.00 per term

fortnightly

2 Fl.

Otto Dürr, Leipzig

fortnightly

Otto Dürr, Leipzig J. Bolbachm, Paris

fortnightly

1 Kr. 60 Öre per term 1.25 Marks

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2 Fr. 2 Fr. 2 Fr. 2.50 Fr.

From Germany to Brazil

Name

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Different issues of Die Modenwelt

74

Table 4.1

1 Jan. 1872

1 Jan. 1879

1 Jan. 1873

1 Jan. 1873

Illustrirte FrauenZeitung, Germany

1 Jan. 1874

1 Jan. 1874

Modni Svet, Czech

1 Jan. 1879

1 Jan. 1879

The Season, Lady’s 1 Jan. 1882 Illustrated Magazine, New York The Season, Lady’s 1 Oct. 1884 Illustrated Magazine, London

1 Jan. 1882

La Estación, Periódico para Senhoras, Spain

1 Apr. 1884

1 Apr. 1884

1 Oct. 1884

Librería Gutenberg, Madrid

Otto Dürr, Leipzig

fortnightly

Rio: 12$000

Provinces: 14$000 per year

Otto Dürr, Leipzig

Stenström and Bartelson, Malmö

Otto Dürr, Leipzig

Otto Dürr, Leipzig

Josef Zvikl, Jungbunzlau

Otto Dürr, Leipzig (cover printed by Keppler e Schwarzmann, New York) Otto Dürr, Leipzig (supplement and cover printed by Hazell, Watson e Viney Ld, London Aylesbury) Otto Dürr, Leipzig

fortnightly

2 Kronen per term

fortnightly

2 Marks 50 Pf. per term

fortnightly

1 Fl. per term

monthly

?

monthly

1 shilling

fortnightly

3.50 ptas per term (Continued)

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Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva 75

Freja, Malmö, Sweden

H. Lombaerts & Comp Portugal: Livraria Ernesto Chardron Lugan C. Genelioux – sucessores –, Porto J. G. Hedberg, Malmö and Stockholm Franz Lipperheide, Berlin and Vienna Karl Vacˆ lera, Jungbunzlau and Prague The International News Company, New York 13 Bedford Street, Convent Garden

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A Estação, Jornal Ilustrado para a família. Edição para os Estados Unidos do Brasil

(Continued)

La Estacíon, Periódico para Senhoras, South America (Argentina, Uruguai, Colombia, Chile, Paraguai) La Stagione. Giornale delle Mode, Milan Мо*ный Cbet u Mo*ный Mа sазuнь, Russian Tygonik Mód I Powiésci, Warschau, Poland

First issue

Since when is linked to Die Modenwelt

Publishing house Franz Lipperheide, Berlin Argentina: CM Joly y Cia, Buenos Aires Ufficio della Satagione (U. Hoepli), Milan

Illustrations printed by

Texts printed by

Periodicity

Otto Dürr, Leipzig

1 Oct. 1882

1 Oct. 1882

1 Dec. 1866

1 Dec. 1866

Hermann Hoppe

Tipografia Bernardoni di Rebeschini, Milan Eduard Hoppe

1 Jan. 1860

19 Jan. 1867

E. Skiwskiin, Warschau

E. Skiwskiin, Warschau

Price

2.50 ptas per term

fortnightly

L. 2.50 per term

fortnightly

2 Rubel (per six months) 1.25 Rubel per term

weekly

Source: From 06 March 1887 to 01 January 1890, Illustrirte Frauen-Zeitung was published weekly. Note: This table reproduces data provided in Zum 25jahringen Bestehen der Modenwelt 1865–1890 related to the journals that were considered ‘different issues’ of Die Modenwelt (‘die verschieden Ausgaben der Modenwelt’). Journals, such as Les Modes de la Saison and The Young Ladies’ Journal, are not listed as ‘different issues’ of Die Modenwelt. They are rather described as journals with which Die Modenwelt had connections. Many of these journals published clothes patterns, fashion illustrations and especial issues that were sold separately. They also sold luxurious editions containing more illustrations or supplements, which raised the price of subscription. The price given in the chart is always for the economic edition of the journal.

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Name

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76

Table 4.1

In respect to the Brazilian magazine, for example, it is not true that A Estação was launched in January 1872 and from January 1879 onwards published with the same content as Die Modenwelt. Actually, the periodical that started to circulate in Brazil in 1872 was the Brazilian edition of La Saison. Apparently, in La Saison: Edição para o Brasil, the description of pictures was simultaneously in French and Portuguese. This is the information we find in an advertisement published by Lombaerts on 2 August 1876 in the daily paper O Globo, in which was announced the launch of the 1 July 1876 issue. It is worth noting that in 1876 at least three different periodicals fought over the growing fashion magazine market in Rio de Janeiro. In O Globo there are also advertisements for Gazeta Ilustrada dos Dous Mundos and Ilustração da Moda. The first, according to the advertisement of 3 August 1876, is a fortnightly publication from London with a variety of content and illustrations, among which were politics, highbrow literature, fine arts and fashion illustrations from Paris and London. Annual subscription would cost $20, with a promotional price of $15 for the first 5000 subscribers. Ilustração da Moda, in turn, in the advertisement of 9 July 1876, proclaims itself to be the only journal of Parisian fashion written in Portuguese, apart from being the best and the cheapest: The editor of this most important journal, the best and cheapest known to date, has the honour of informing you, esteemed ladies, that the 1st to 5th editions are now available, containing beautiful colour figures, many pictures, pattern and embroidery sheets and various articles on literature by the most famous authors, Littré, L Figuier and others. Annual subscription was to cost $10 for the capital (Rio de Janeiro) and $12 for the provinces. Compared with La Saison, Ilustração da Moda was in fact cheaper. The annual subscription price for La Saison advertised on 2 August 1876 was $12 for the court and $14 for the provinces. Even though it was a more expensive paper, La Saison still puzzlingly – or perhaps brazenly – presented itself as ‘the best and cheapest fashion journal’. In a later advertisement, though, Lombaerts changed tactics. He does not return to claiming La Saison to be the cheapest journal of Parisian fashion in Brazil. Instead, the editor emphasises the superiority of the magazine, implying that the reader will find in it the best relation between cost and value for money. Subscription was in fact

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Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva 77

78

From Germany to Brazil

The indisputable superiority of La Saison has today been proved. No other fashion paper, keeping in mind the price, is as varied, rich and cheap. No other, not even the weekly ones, manage at the end of the year a total of 2,000 engravings of fashion, 24 slides showing more than 100 carefully coloured toilettes, more then 400 full-size patterns with countless explanations of how to make them yourself, not only clothes for women and children but also every tasteful item to decorate and bring charm to the family home. (O Globo, 10 September 1876) A Estação, in Portuguese, was first published in January 1879. It is not surprising that Lombaerts considered the new magazine as a continuation of the Portuguese language version of La Saison, a periodical he had commercialised for seven years. What mattered to Lombaerts was the first year of La Saison’s circulation in Brazil, because these two periodicals were part of the same international enterprise. Apart from which, in making the connection between La Saison and A Estação, Lombaerts was availing himself of a commercial strategy: he would transfer the captive public from one periodical to the other. Lombaerts did not at first reveal that his magazine was in fact made in Germany; that way his readers could believe that they had before them an authentic French magazine. It was only when A Estação was accused of being a fraudulent publication, for presenting French fashion produced in Leipzig and Berlin, that Lombaerts revealed the complexities of this editorial enterprise to his readers: They say A Estação is a German magazine and you who believe to be dressed according to the precepts of the universal fashion capital, Paris, are totally deceived because you are only wearing clothes conceived in Berlin. Those who criticise A Estação base their arguments on the fact that some of the versions of this magazine in other languages are printed in Leipzig. A Estação is a branch of an organisation actually based in Berlin. They publish Die Modenwelt there. It is a fashion journal which today under this title alone has a larger total number of copies than all the fashion journals published in Paris put together.

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more expensive, but La Saison presented a greater quantity and more varied pictures:

Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva 79

From this date onwards, on at least two occasions, the editors revealed to the subscribers that other editions of A Estação were on sale in Rio de Janeiro: Recreio: there is a version of A Estação in Dutch for which the subscription is the same price as for any of the 14 languages [sic] in which it is published. (A Estação, 31 March 1888) Sorocaba: there are French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Swedish, Bohemian, Polish, Croatian, Hungarian and Slav versions of A Estação. We have collections of the same issues in all these languages available to see in our office and we are happy to offer subscription to anyone wanting the magazine in any of these languages. (A Estação, 31 July 1888) France was certainly the country that launched the fashion which Die Modenwelt took as the inspiration for its pictures. However, the subscribers of La Saison were not the first to leaf through Lipperheide’s Parisian novelties. The time it took to translate, compose and print the French periodical from the publication of Die Modenwelt was approximately a month. This can be verified by comparing the 1869 issues of the two magazines. The French issue of 1 November 1869 reproduces the same page layout and pictures (along with explanatory descriptions) as the Die Modenwelt issue of 1 October 1869. The main articles, however, are not the same. In La Saison, it is entitled ‘Chronique de la Mode’ and signed by Mélainie. In Die Modenwelt, it is called ‘Neue Moden’ and signed by Frieda Lipperheide herself. The French opening article deals with practical aspect of dress whereas Frieda Lipperheide talks about aspects of fashion in general. Apart from that, it is possible to verify that La Saison was printed sometimes in Germany and sometimes in France or Belgium. The 1869 issues were published in Leipzig by Jules Klinhardt printing house. In the same year, A/U Edelmann, also in Leipzig, was printing Die Modenwelt.

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It is edited there, the pictures are engraved there, it is printed there and translated into some of the fourteen languages to create twenty different publications all with the same artwork. (A Estação, 15 January 1885)

From Germany to Brazil

During 1872, until 1 December 1872, La Saison was printed in Brussels by A. N. Lebègue et cie. From 16 December 1872 it went back to being printed in Leipzig but this time by the A. Edelmann. Apparently there was more than one edition of La Saison, destined for circulation in different countries: in Germany, printed in Leipzig by Otto Dürr; in Belgium and Switzerland; and finally, in France, printed by J Lebègue in Paris. We can tell this by looking at the 1890 issues. Following the history of the printing of these various magazines does not fall within the scope of this study. My intention in presenting a few variations of its production occurring over time is to show that, being interconnected, Die Modenwelt and its foreign editions functioned as a large set of cogs. To our eyes, its working appears to be obsolete and slow, due to the speed with which news and images circulate on the Internet today, but to its contemporaries it was complex and fairly new. A Estação ought to be viewed as an extra cog in this machine which, along with other European periodicals such as Revue des Deux Mondes, contributed to the universalising of European cultural values. As Friedrich Melford writes: Die Modenwelt wherever European culture reaches out her white hands. Under the hot sun of the Equator or where eternal winter reigns, it is always the same paper with the same content, the same pictures without any individual selection or exclusion, advertising in 13 languages what’s new in fashion and what the art of female handiwork has to teach, be it a creation of our times or something from the chests of antiquity.13 When we look through today’s successful women’s magazines such as Burda, Vogue and Marie Claire, we experience the same thing as the readers of Die Modenwelt, since the various editions of these contemporary magazines, circulating in different languages in more than one country, follow the same concept and editorial pattern, just like the foreign editions of Die Modenwelt.

Readership When they gave the periodical a transnational flavour, the editors had in mind not only readers but also advertisers. The editors of The Young Ladies’ Journal alleged that the magazine was in circulation throughout the world and was read by more than half a million family members, thus constituting ‘a most grand medium for advertisers’.14 A concrete example

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of this is the British magazine’s attempt to create an international environment in the notes to advertisers. Although we can consider these numbers to be an expression of the editors’ ambitions rather than actual statistics, they do represent the volume of readers the magazine hoped to reach. We find the same aspirations in the Brazilian magazine. We saw that, in the leading article of 15 January 1885, Lombaerts reveals the cultural and economic complexity of the production of his periodical and emphasises the international nature of its circulation. Lombaerts also talks about 500,000 copies for the group of magazines associated with Die Modenwelt, assuring readers of the periodical’s high circulation. What is more interesting, both in the English journal’s note to advertisers and the leading article in the Brazilian magazine, is the confirmation that the Die Modenwelt project, under French cultural authority, unites readers from different countries in a single global audience, aspiring to the same outward signs of well-being, prosperity and status. What gave form to the global audience the magazine claimed to reach was the cultivation of the same European cultural values, taken to be universal. But to what extent can we compare the national audiences of each periodical with one another? Even if they shared the same consumer aspirations, does that mean that the readers in each country had the same goals? It seems that in Europe the creation of women’s periodicals with recipes, patterns and sewing explanations and tips for saving money is linked to women’s entry into the world of work.15 At least, as far as England is concerned, Braithwaite believes that in the second half of the twentieth century the country experienced an increase in the production of women’s magazines because, with the lack of domestic help, the mistress of the household herself took on these chores: The growth of industrialization brought new opportunities to thousands of young women who deserted the traditional role of domestic service and found clerical jobs and work in the bustling distribution and retail trades. The shortage of servants meant that the middle classes, in particular, were often confronted with their own domestic chores. This brought a demand for household hints and information, recipes, dressmaking tips and other domestic necessities.16 It would seem to me that Die Modenwelt was created to meet the needs of this growing market in Germany. As Adelheid Rasche states, Die Modenwelt ‘was directed at the German bourgeoisie in which the woman

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Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva 81

From Germany to Brazil

was above all responsible for decorating the house and dressing the family’.17 On the Brazilian side, when Lombaerts published the first issue of A Estação, we find in the main article the same promise as in the German magazine, to provide its readers with the means to live a stylish and elegant life but on a budget: This edition begins the eighth year of our journal ... We have just looked through the complete collection of issues published under the title La Saison, Brazilian Edition, and it is not without a small measure of satisfaction that we saw the evidence of the little we have done, yet was much, to meet our target. We should like to ask our dear readers, especially those who have accompanied us since 1872: Have we faithfully fulfilled our task of aiding and advising the most economical ladies, providing them with means to reduce their expenses, without skimping in the slightest on the elegance required of them by their respective position in good society, inspiring or strengthening in them a taste for work and teaching morality to the family who, in turn, will know how to instil such feelings? ... The Brazilian fashion journal is today a possibility where beforehand it would have been impossible. A Estação will be the first journal of this type. (A Estação, 15 January 1879) We cannot forget that fashion magazines in general, even today, promote the desire for social ascension. Actually, fashion magazines have always camouflaged social divisions since they propagate the precepts of fashion, normally launched by a prestigious group, in the lower levels of society. As Gilda de Mello e Souza observes, in the nineteenth century there were no longer insurmountable barriers, not even between the bourgeoisie and the nobility. In that period, the possibility of ‘communication between groups replaced the old rigidity, or rather the relatively fixed social structure, with a constant mobility’.18 And fashion plays an important role in bringing the classes closer together because, according to Souza, it is one of the most powerful instruments for integration and it plays an important levelling role, permitting the individual to become lost in the group and become part of a greater whole which provides support and security. And since the current established fashions are always those of the dominant class, the groups closest to it are, every moment, identifying themselves with their immediate superiors by imitating their dress.19

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83

However, we should not take the opening article of A Estação literally and jump to the conclusion that the Brazilian magazine was aimed only at the middle classes. Lombaerts appears to have been more ambitious in relation to the public he wished to reach, and this including matching his magazine with the limitations of the Brazilian editorial market which could not rely on a large middle class. To do this, he transformed his publication into a more varied magazine, still about fashion but at the same time about literature and fine arts. On the list of authors who wrote for the magazine, we find Machado de Assis, an already respected author at the time, who brought prestige to the magazine. Others who wrote for the magazine were Artur Azevedo, Olabo Bilac, José Moraes e Silva, Lúcio de Mendonça, Raimundo Correa, Alberto de Oliveira, Valentim Magalhães, Guimarães Passos, Alfredo Leite, Maria Carolina Guerra Juca, Prisciliana Duarte, Maria Clara Vilhena da Cunha e Inês Sabino Pinho Maia and Júlia Lopes de Almeida. The engravings of fine arts, in turn, came from Germany, from the magazine Illustrirte Frauen-Zeitung, also belonging to Lipperheide. This magazine, created in 1874, was actually an expanded edition of Die Modenwelt, with the same fashion content apart from a literary and art section entitled ‘Ausgabe der Modenwelt mit Unterhaltungsblatt’.20 We need now to move back in time and momentarily interrupt our discussion, in order to explain how literature became a very important sales component of Lipperheide’s journal and its foreign editions. We know that, when Lipperheide founded Die Modenwelt, he devised a fashion journal without literary content. The reason was to cheapen the production and to differentiate his journal from the other fashion periodicals available in Germany before 1865, such as the Bazar, the Allgemeine Musterzeitung and the Hamburger neue Mode-Zeitung Jahreszeiten. But in 1874, Lipperheide started to publish an entertainment and literary edition of Die Modenwelt: The Illustrirte Frauen-Zeitung. Lipperheide therefore kept Die Modenwelt’s original format and launched a second journal with the same fashion content plus literary texts and art illustrations. This was preferable to including a literary supplement within Die Modenwelt. La Saison and A Estação, however, chose to publish their literary texts in a supplement that was sold together with the fashion journal. The first literary supplement of the French journal had two pages and was published in October 1869. A Estação announced the publication of its literary supplement on 31 March 1879. The Young Ladies’ Journal from its first number had always been a literary and fashion journal.

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From Germany to Brazil

Lombaerts followed the model of the German magazine, in the sense that its literary supplement was also illustrated. It could contain more fashion, but above all artistic engravings, extracted from the Illustrirte Frauen-Zeitung. Along with the illustrations, as in the German periodical, there were in A Estação informative articles about the cultural movement in Rio, such as the plays and artistic exhibitions that were going on. It also contained some literary reviews, crônicas by Artur Azevedo, some poetry and fiction, serialised or otherwise, by the Brazilian collaborators mentioned above, and translations. The literary supplement of A Estação was certainly edited in Brazil. Lombaerts received the artistic elements from Berlin but had the magazine edited in his office. Judging from the comparison with some issues of the ‘Ausgabe der Modenwelt mit Unterhaltungsblatt’, the Brazilian literary section of A Estação was graphically the work of an amateur: the Brazilian texts and French advertisements surrounded the beautiful imported engravings, without following a fixed format. Among the various foreign editions of Die Modenwelt available for consultation, only La Stagione lacks a literary supplement. I could, therefore, compare the literary supplement of A Estação with those of Illustrirte Frauen-Zeitung, La Saison e La Estación. I also consulted the English periodical The Young Ladies’ Journal, which likewise published literature and illustrations but maintained an independent format, as already noted. Through the comparison of the literary content and the illustrations of these different literary supplements it is possible to see that Lombaerts was the only editor to reinforce the link with Germany, by importing artistic material for this part of the magazine as well. The literary supplements of La Saison and La Estación, in the years I consulted, do not contain illustrations, and The Young Ladies’ Journal contains engravings produced locally to illustrate the episodes of the popular novels published weekly. In relation to the literary quality of the serialised narratives in each of these periodicals, Lombaerts was, moreover, the only one to publish narratives by authors already respected by their contemporaries and whose work was canonised in their lifetime. The other periodicals published mainly popular literature. In English, for example, we find novels by Eliza Margaret J. Humphreys, Florence Marryat, Eliza Lynn Linton, Florence Warden and Gertrude Warden. We can thereby verify the other periodicals’ tendency to publish narratives by women who had only recently received greater critical acclaim, such as Eliza Lynn Linton herself and Helene Böhlau, a German writer. A Estação would naturally attract married women of the rising middle classes through its use of fiction about the already-arrived, of which ‘Sofia

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Feminine charm and masculine determination are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are parts which amount to the shrewd calculation of ascension. The grace needed to wear a dress to a ball and show off ones arms and shoulders, making them appear to best advantage ‘through well-chosen attitude and gestures’ is in symmetry with the talent and ambition required by a career.22 In turn, for young single women looking to marry above their class, the display of these outward signs of prosperity was often the shortest path to social ascension. Both married and single women had not only to master French and play the piano but also to present themselves in society in accordance with the latest French fashions. In a puff for Júlia de Lopes de Almeida’s novel A família Medeiros, we see that, in fact, A Estação took the most distinguished Rio families as its model. Valentim Magalhães, the author of the note, clearly identifies the public the magazine idealises. He does not address himself necessarily to readers in elite circles but rather to those who, even though not belonging to that privileged group, have access to it, like Sofia at the beginning of Quincas Borba. We can also infer from this note that amassed wealth and aristocratic birth are not the only means by which to obtain social distinction; it also comes through education and elegance, which can be learnt: Your Excellencies count among your relations the most distinguished families of Rio’s society, be it in education, elegance or wealth. I did not wish to add in aristocracy because such a distinction does not sit well with the egalitarian democratic regime in which we happily find ourselves. ... Since you are used to dealing with those families who populate the rich districts and enable the businessmen of lyrical opera to make a fortune, since you are one of those families, I kindly request you to relate with the Medeiros family. Oh! Do not look for them in Botafogo or Laranjeiras. It would be useless. That family is from São Paulo and lives in the rich interior of that State. (A Estação, 31 March 1893)

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of Quincas Borba’, by Machado de Assis (published serially in A Estação from 1886 to 1891), is perhaps the best literary example.21 For these readers, ostentatious beauty, culture and style represented the outward signs of economic prosperity and status. This is because, according to Souza,

From Germany to Brazil

A Estação also perfectly interested the well-to-do ladies because the magazine promoted the cultural values esteemed by the carioca elite itself, through which they sought legitimacy, identifying themselves with traditional aristocratic European culture.23 Thus, for members of the elite, A Estação expressed the fantasy of cultural identification with Europe. For the middle classes, it fuelled their aspirations of social ascension to the heights of the elite. I have tried to show how the Die Modenwelt project was made up of a network of periodicals orientated by French culture and with transnational aspirations. Crossing national borders, the editorial concept of Die Modenwelt created an audience that shared the same consumer desires. I have also tried to outline the target public mainly of the Brazilian, German and English editions of the magazine. I hope I have demonstrated that we can apply to the study of periodicals the same principal questions Robert Darnton raises concerning the history of books in general: periodicals, like books, do not respect linguistic limits, much less national boundaries.24 A Estação, along with the other edition of Die Modenwelt, is a good example, albeit in the second half of the nineteenth century, of the galloping tendency towards uniformity that we see throughout the whole of the twentieth century. As Robert Gross writes: The modern media shrank the globe, annihilating time and space. Millions read the same news, saw the same images, craved the same goods. Theirs was a standardized experience of mass culture, and if the content differed from nation to nation, the effects did not. Popular tastes, shaped by dominant media, transcended national boundaries.25 A Estação declared itself to be a transnational publication, preaching the dissemination of European culture. At the same time, in other Brazilian journals of the same period as A Estação, authors such as Sílvio Romero and Joaquim Nabuco fuelled the debate about the creation of a national history and literature.26 Thus we see that while some Brazilian intellectuals defended the political and literary independence of the country, the production of material culture in Brazil and, more specifically, the press led the country into a global process, following established European norms. In actual fact, we are dealing here with two spheres of interest. On the one hand, political motivations defended the sovereignty of the nation. On the other, commercial motivations strengthened the links between Europe and Brazil. Even so, the format of A Estação with its imported

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fashions and nationally composed literary supplement underwent national variation. A Estação reached an enviable circulation of at least 10,000 copies in 1882 and circulated for 25 years because Lombaerts knew exactly how to achieve harmony between the cosmopolitan and the local even though, through fashion, he had collaborated to tighten Brazil’s cultural dependence on Europe.27

Notes 1. The Commemorative Edition of the 25th Anniversary of Die Modenwelt (Zum 25jährigen Bestehen der Modenwelt 1865–1890) (Berlin, Leipzig: Otto Dürr, 1890). 2. The World of Fashion: Illustrated Journal for Toilette and Handiworks. 3. Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 127. 4. This collection was donated to the city of Berlin before the couple’s death: Franz Joseph Lipperheide (1838–1906), Wilhelmine Amalie Friederike Lipperheide (1840–96). See Adelheid Rasche (org.), Die Kultur der Kleider. Zum hundertjährigen Bestehen der Lipperheideschen Kostümbibliothek (Berlin: SMPK, Kunstbibliothek, 1999). 5. Frieda Lipperheide, Die Modenwelt 1 September 1870. See also Adelheid Rasche, Frieda Lipperheide, 1840–1896. Ein Leben für Textilkunst und Mode im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: SMPK, 1999), p. 19. All the translations from German, French and Portuguese are mine. 6. Marlyse Meyer, Caminhos do imaginário no Brasil (São Paulo: Edusp, 1993), p. 81. 7. Robert Gross, ‘Books, Nationalism, and History’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 36/2 (1998), 109. 8. Zum 25jährigen, pp. 5, 6. 9. Zum 25jährigen, pp. 6, 8. 10. We are going to see later in this chapter that A Estação had two different parts: the main fashion part, identical to Die Modenwelt, and a literary and illustrated supplement, which included texts by Brazilian authors and illustrations made in Germany. This supplement was typeset, edited and printed by Lombaerts, in Rio de Janeiro. 11. The Women’s Illustrated Journal. 12. Zum 25jährigen, pp. 47–9. 13. Zum 25jährigen, p. 13. 14. The Young Ladies’s Journal, 1 October 1890. 15. According to Evelyne Sullerot, the paper pattern first appeared in France in the periodical Souvenir (1849–55) and was called ‘modes vrais, travail en famille’. See Sullerot, La Presse Féminine (Paris: A. Colin, 1963), p. 7. In England, Brian Braithwaite attributes the invention of the paper pattern, as well as of the popular magazine, to Samuel Beeton, who published The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in 1852. See Brian Braithwaite, Women’s Magazines: The First 300 Years (London: Peter Owen, 1995), p. 12. 16. Braithwaite, p. 14. 17. Rasche, pp. 17, 19.

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18. Gilda de Mello e Souza, O espírito das roupas: a moda no século XIX (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987), p. 112. 19. Souza, p. 130. 20. ‘Die Modenwelt Edition with Entertainment Supplement’. 21. Quincas Borba was published in book format in 1891 and has been translated into English as Philosopher or Dog? Introduction by Louis de Bernières, translated from the Portuguese by Clotilde Wilson (London: Bloomsbury, 1997). 22. Souza, p. 83. 23. See Jeffrey Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-ofthe-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 24. Darnton, p. 135. 25. Gross, p. 109. 26. See Roberto Ventura, Estilo Tropical. História cultural e polêmicas literárias no Brasil: 1870–1914 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1991). 27. ‘With A Estação particularly, it can be said that each subscriber represents approximately ten readers, giving us a circulation of one hundred thousand readers when, on the other hand, our circulation is only ten thousand subscribers’ (A Estação, 15 March 1882).

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School Readers in the Empire and the Creation of Postcolonial Taste Robert Fraser

I begin with an image so familiar it hardly needs showing: John Constable’s painting of 1823, ‘Salisbury Cathedral, from the Bishop’s Grounds’ (Figure 5.1). To children everywhere it is familiar in the shape of a jigsaw puzzle, but for many who passed through the elementary school system in the British West Indies between 1926 and the early 1960s it possesses an additional resonance, reproduced as it then was on page 199 of Book V of Nelson’s much-used West Indian Readers. Many would have encountered it aged 11 in Standard Five, and read with greater or lesser fluency the accompanying commentary by the editor Captain James Oliver Cutteridge, Director of Education for Trinidad and Tobago and a keen amateur artist. Cutteridge treats the picture as an exercise in perspective. He calls attention to the framing of the South Front by trees, and illustrates on the following page how the sightlines meet at a vanishing point at the base of the famous steeple. Then he issues a curt invitation: ‘Write a paragraph describing, in your own words, what you can see in Constable’s picture.’1 During the early 1940s in wartime Port-of-Spain this invitation was addressed to an elementary schoolboy of Indian ancestry shortly before proceeding to Queen’s Royal College. Three decades later, from his cottage near Salisbury, he responded in literal terms to Cutteridge’s challenge by conveying in his own words – and in exactly one paragraph – the image’s original and continuing effects. The passage occurs towards the beginning of his novel of displacement The Enigma of Arrival, the narrator of which is newly arrived in Wiltshire: I saw what I saw very clearly. But I didn’t know what I was looking at. I had nothing to fit it into. I was still in a kind of limbo. There 89

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School Readers in the Empire

Figure 5.1 John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral, from Nelsons West Indian Readers, Book V

were certain things I knew though. I knew the name of the town I had come to by train. It was Salisbury. It was almost the first English town I had got to know, the first I had been given some idea of, from the reproduction of the Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral in my third-standard reader. Far away in my tropical island, before I was ten. A four-colour reproduction which I thought the most beautiful picture I had even seen.2 The passage is all the more revealing because disingenuous in certain respects. If this narrator really did meet that Constable landscape in school before his tenth birthday, then his reading age – and the author V. S. Naipaul’s – was two years in advance of his contemporaries. I suspect also that his consciousness of the process by which the plate was reproduced – four-colour printing – owes something to popular compilations such as The Children’s Encyclopaedia, where that technique was regularly and carefully explained, in one edition via successive impressions of a self-portrait painted in Arles by Van Gogh. The middle-aged Naipaul complains of having lacked a context for interpreting the

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Constable, though his paragraph places the experience of seeing the reproduction firmly against a backdrop of colonial desire. Perhaps the best-known general judgment on Constable’s landscapes is given by Ernst Gombrich in his much-reprinted The Story of Art. Constable, remarks Gombrich, aimed ‘to paint what he saw with his own eyes’.3 To this definition of realism Naipaul responds by the disclaimer that, as a colonial child – or even initially as an adult – viewer, he had little idea of what he was seeing. The truth surely is that he saw what he wanted, and what he wanted was England. In a modern British setting the recondition of Constable’s naturalism is impeded by intervening nostalgia. In the imperial environment it was obstructed by longing. The difference between these conditions is one of the themes of Naipaul’s novel, which as well as addressing migration, conducts a master class in interpreting landscape and, through it, alternative histories: of the land, of architecture and of the conditioned, observing self. Indubitably school readers of that period instilled an anxiety of influence in writers who once studied them. West Indian literature is peppered with acknowledgements to these modest books, and the detail of the references, specifying the volume and in some case even the pagenumbers, suggests not only the avidity with which they were absorbed, but the frequency with which pupils failed to hand them in. Why did this standard school fare – and Nelson’s Readers in particular – retain that sort of a hold? Thomas Nelson and Sons had been providing school readers for domestic and imperial use since the late nineteenth century, but the proliferation of branches and offices in far-flung dependencies had gradually entailed a localization of provision. Until about 1907 the pattern was for uniform Crown or Royal Readers, recognizable from their brown covers, which served the needs of pupils throughout the empire, including as it happens Naipaul’s Mr Biswas. There was, however, an increasing tendency to regionalize the provision, a policy first evident in the Special Canadian Series issued in conjunction with the Toronto firm of James Campbell and Sons from 1882. For the first time this series employed indigenous oral and literary sources where it could find them and organized its contents imaginatively, as the Prefaces carefully explained, around the successive seasons of the Canadian year.4 Popular and successful, these locally orientated books were systematically updated. From the Nelson archives in Edinburgh it is clear, for instance, just how anxious the firm became at the time of Great Depression to ensure that their readers were officially sanctioned as set books throughout the Dominion. Indeed, this proliferation of local provision became something of a specialty of Nelsons’ own Toronto house

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where from the 1920s onwards, with growing competition from other companies, the priority was to work in close collaboration with directors of education in the various Canadian provinces, several of whom were appointed as consultants. With their assistance, individual readers were tailored to the needs of pupils in Quebec, Saskatchewan, Ontario and so on. The model of regionalization and fraternization with government was then exported. Nelsons had long had their eyes on the Caribbean region as a locus for commercial expansion. Beginning in 1910, for example, they had been experimenting with converting West Indian bamboo into viable paper, a project that had culminated in 1917 in the purchase of a plantation and paper mill at St Joseph’s in Trinidad, and an agreement with the colonial government permitting them to harvest bamboo from Crown Lands.5 Since 1909, moreover, a preferential trading agreement had existed between Canada and the West Indies, extended in 1920 and again in 1925, as a result of which the Toronto branch gradually assumed responsibility for sales in the Caribbean. The turning point for educational publishing there – and the origin of the West Indian Readers – lies in the appointment in December 1922 of S. P. Jones as a travelling representative in the region. After a six-month tour through Bermuda, St Kitts, Antigua, Monserrat, Dominique, St Lucia, Barbados, St Vincent, Trinidad, Grenada, British Guiana and British Honduras, he reported that the rapid evolution of elementary education among the black and Asian population entailed a need for purpose-made textbooks. As his boss in Toronto, S. B. Watson, then wrote back to Edinburgh on 31 July 1923, enclosing Jones’s recommendations: ‘You will notice that on folio five he makes a definite suggestion for a West Indian Reader, or set of Readers. I am going more fully with him into this idea, and will write you a separate letter in a few days.’6 The following winter, Watson himself toured the Caribbean, and while in Port-of-Spain he met Cutteridge. It was the beginning of a long and fruitful association, not untouched by controversy. Four years earlier, Cutteridge had arrived in Trinidad to take over as Principal of Tranquillity Boys’ Model School, perhaps the best elementary school on the island. He came equipped, not with a university degree, but with a First World War field commission, a fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society, a zeal for educational reform and an eye for a telling picture. By the time Watson turned up, he had been elevated to Chief Inspector of Schools and Assistant Director of Education. Taking a maple leaf out of Nelson’s Canadian book, he volunteered not simply as consultant for

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the projected textbooks, but as author. He proved unstoppable. In 20 years he was to be responsible for several volumes of elementary school arithmetic, successive editions of these readers and – his all-time commercial success – Nelson’s Geography of the West Indies and Adjacent Lands.7 The maths was sometimes questioned, the geography scorned. The books sold mightily. Captain Cutteridge’s versatility, or hackwork if you like, was his strength, though in some it seemed a weakness. By temperament he was a geographer and artist, and his inclination to allow these interests to shape his writing was consonant with Nelson’s own editorial policy. After all, the books were to be illustrated and, following the Canadian model, they were to reflect the natural environment and the social setting of their young readership. Cutteridge’s revolutionary idea – though to some at the time it seemed a misdemeanor – was to situate literature in the Caribbean itself. In their distinctive red covers, his readers – six in number, including an introductory book – covered all sorts of subjects, from folklore and customs to fauna and flora and history, but the organizing theme was that of travel, and inter-connections between different places. It was a tendency enhanced by his pedagogical tactic of re-enforcing each subject by repeating it in successive volumes at different linguistic levels. Consciously or not, through graded exercises and extracts Cutteridge conveyed a vision of Caribbean culture as a continual inflow and outflow, movement and coalescence. He was less exercised by hierarchy than by variety, exploration, diversity, gravitation and change. The upwardly mobile, Garvey-inspired, middle-class Asian and AfroTrinidadian did not forgive him. And nor did Mr Biswas. The introductory volume got off to a promising start by introducing Creole tales, including Brer Rabbit, the Caribbean manifestation of the Ashanti trickster – figure, Ananse.8 ‘Nancy’ stories the critics dubbed them, and accused the editor of dumbing down. His inventory of livestock, including beef, was no more popular. ‘Readings by Captain Cutteridge!’ exclaims Mr Biswas, complaining about his son Anand’s secondary education. ‘Listen to this. Page sixty-five, lesson nineteen.’ Then, ‘in a mincing voice’ he reads aloud from the chapter in Book I on ‘Our Animal Friends’: ‘The cow and the goat give us milk and we eat their flesh when they are killed. You hear the savage?’9 Book II introduces the salient topic of travel with Lesson 21, entitled ‘A Voyage to London’10. It takes the form of an imaginary two-week journal by a passenger on a steamship ploughing across the Atlantic, through the ‘Sea of Weed’ (The Sargasso Sea), eventually sighting the Dover shoreline and Tilbury beyond. There is a four-colour print of a steamer with attendant tug and

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Figure 5.2

‘An Ocean Liner’ from Nelsons West Indian Readers, Book

II

the funnels of leading shipping lines (Figure 5.2), then black-and-white photographs of various sea- and landmarks, including the Azores and the legendary White Cliffs. It seems conventional enough until you realize that it was the generation of seven-year-olds entertained by this lesson in the 30s who in 1948, 18 years after the primer’s publication, took ship on the one-time troopship, the S. S. Windrush. Is there another school reader anywhere which, through describing a metropolis to groups of schoolchildren who have yet to visit it, helped change that destination forever? And there is more. Book III, set in the next standard up, re-enforces this travelogue by dwelling on the Sargasso Sea itself, wild and forbidding, introducing a motif recurrent in West Indian literature, and not just in Jean Rhys.11 And Book IV takes its young readers into the heart of the Empire itself with a chapter on ‘London’, evoking The Tower of London, Trafalgar Square and Oxford Street.12 Sam Selvon would have been ten when he read these descriptions in Standard Four in 1933. Twenty-three years later, in Lonely Londoners, his character Moses exults over these self-same sights and congratulates himself, unlike Moses of old, for setting foot in the Promised Land.13 But the gaze is not always trained overseas. Cutteridge was also interested in the demography of the Caribbean, and to that end inserts a running sequence of essays about its various communities, starting in

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Book II with a lesson entitled ‘India’. There it was that seven-year-old Naipaul, author-to-be of An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977), must have perused the opening sentence, ‘MANY boys and girls who will read this book are East Indians. Their parents or their grandparents came from India.’ Son of aspiring author and one-time journalist, he continued with the words, ‘In India most boys do not choose the kind of work that they do, but they follow their father’s trade.’14 When in the next book the infant Naipaul learned about ‘East Indians in the West Indies’,15 impressions were laid down that would be of use when depicting Biswas’s formidable in-laws the Tulsis, impressions reinforced for a third time in Book IV with its linguistically more demanding account of ‘A Hindu Wedding’.16 Cutteridge did not compose all the lessons from scratch. Many are synopses of classics, selected with a view to local relevance, and culled from existing Nelsons compilations such as Robinson Crusoe and Tales from the Iliad from their ‘Told to Children’ series. The motif of exile, for example, appears in an early volume with a paraphrase of Defoe’s Crusoe, including J. C. Dollman’s sketch of a castaway staring gloomily out to sea (Figure 5.3).17 As the poet Derek Walcott later put it in the title poem to his volume The Castaway, published in 1965: ‘The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel / Of a sail./ The horizon threads it infinitely.’ This was

Figure 5.3

J. C. Dollman, Crusoe, from Nelsons West Indian Readers, Book

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28 years after he saw that illustration in St Lucia in Standard Two.18 By the time he read Cutteridge’s synopsis of the Homeric duel between Hector and Achilles in Book III, the future author of Omeros was eight.19 And if the contest between his Homerically named fishermen in that eventual mock-epic possesses a bathetic, Heath-Robinson-like air compared with the Greek original; it may well be because the accompanying illustrations in the primer, taken straight from Tales from the Iliad, are indeed by the English cartoonist, William Heath Robinson.20 History, geography and source come together in the editor’s continual recounting of seafarers’ tales: Columbus, and most suggestively Sir Walter Raleigh. The account of the latter is drawn in the first instance from Sir Walter Raleigh in Nelson’s own ‘Teaching of English’ series, which itself relies largely on Raleigh’s own The Discoverie of Guiana of 1596.21 Thus Cutteridge is able to echo the Elizabethan’s descriptions of the Asphalt lakes of Trinidad and Venezuela, and to reproduce his approximate map of the South American coastline. Prompted no doubt by this, Naipaul, who had noted these details in Standard Four, sat in the British Museum Library in the 1960s poring over Raleigh’s rare volume, which in turn became a major source for the early chapters of his history of Trinidad The Loss of El Dorado, conveying its own impression of Raleigh’s career, as Naipaul’s own Prologue explains, by drawing largely on Raleigh’s words.22 Raleigh had encountered the aboriginal Caribs, subject of an exercise, in Book III in the generic readers published from 1928.23 Ten years later, however, distinct regional requirements led Cutteridge to collaborate with Frank Ogle on a parallel Jamaica edition. Distinguished by its orange covers, but with identical pagination to the original version, this substituted individual chapters more in line with local needs. The lesson on the Caribs, for example, went to make way for one on the Arawaks, of particular pertinence when this run of readers was placed on the syllabus in British Guiana.24 It was therefore this version of exercise 34 that an infant Wilson Harris studied in the Georgetown of the 1940s, kindling an imagination that would later populate a whole hinterland with the Arawak archetypes of his Guyana Quartet and many subsequent novels. Nothing is more celebrated in the Quartet than the encounter at the close of Palace of the Peacock (1960) with a giant waterfall, up the face of which Donne and his hard-pressed companions toil.25 It had been long in the making, since Lesson 25 of Book V in the Jamaica edition is devoted to A Visit to the Kaieteur Falls ‘in the far-away interior of British Guiana’, abridged with one tumultuous illustration from Sir Edward Davidson’s survey The British West Indies of 1903 (Figure 5.4).26

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Figure 5.4 ‘Kaieteur Fall’, from Nelsons West Indian Readers ( Jamaica Edition), Book V

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‘Although it was discovered in 1870,’ runs the text, ‘very few people beyond the aboriginal Indians who inhabit the neighbourhood have seen this great natural wonder owing to the difficulty and expense of the long journey from the coast-lands. Where most of the people in the colony reside.’ Hence, one suspects, the astonishment experienced by Harris’s explorers, and the transforming effect of that memorable final scene. The successive exercises of both editions not only supplied images and references that fed works of the postcolonial imagination, they also supplied future writers with metaphors for the colonial condition itself: enslavement, indentured labour and its aftermath. In The Polished Hoe, Austin Clarke’s prize-winning novel of 2003 set in the Barbados of the 1940s, a policeman named Sargeant is led through an underground dungeon beneath the Great House of a sugar plantation by a woman who has just confessed to murdering the manager. The dungeon is a site of constriction, punishment and terror, profoundly symbolic of enslavement in many senses. He thinks of the reading exercises in Nelson’s West Indian Reader Book III ‘about a spider who bores a hole in the ground and covers it with a lid made of pieces of straw and mud, as a protection and as a guillotine. As a weapon.’27 Sargeant’s memory, like the author’s, is uncannily precise. What both are recalling is the ‘Trap-door spider’ as described on page 119 of Lesson 29 of that book, with a drawing of the arachnid’s hide-away or nest, the tiny cap laid open and resembling a slice of cocoanut shell. ‘The trap-door spider is a very interesting one,’ Cutteridge records. ‘It makes a hole in the ground for its dwelling, and covers the top with a little door made of its threads and earth. This hole forms its hiding-place until it sets out on a hunting expedition.’28 In the section from Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival entitled ‘The Journey’, the narrator speaks of the early months of his sojourn in Wiltshire, and recounts how a lifetime of wandering has left him feeling impaled, spread-eagled, feminized, washed up. He had been working on a historical saga, evidently meant to be taken for The Loss of El Dorado, when ‘I had the waking fantasy of myself as a corpse tossing lightly among the reeds at the bottom of a river (a river like the one in the Pre-Raphaelite painting of the drowned Ophelia, reproduced in the Nelson’s West Indian Reader I had used in my elementary school in Trinidad, a river that turned out to be like the river in Wiltshire at the back of my cottage).’29 That local stream, of course, is the Avon, and the literary and pictorial one is the ‘weeping brook’ depicted in John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia after her suicide, reproduced in Cutteridge’s paraphrase of Hamlet in book V of his famous readers, where Naipaul the elementary pupil would have seen it at the age of ten.30

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In effect, these well-thumbed textbooks proved a quarry from which are hewn the plots of several of the more remarkable Caribbean novels of the second half of the twentieth century, together with something of the region’s poetic sensibility, its sense of history, culture and place. From public reaction in the early years one would scarcely have expected this result. Far from receiving credit for his repositioning of literature in a late colonial setting, the editor was reviled by the parents whose children’s eyes he was attempting to open. The assault was initiated in the late 1920s by Howard Bishop, a one-time teacher, a disciple of Marcus Garvey and editor of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Journal, who drew attention to the Director of Education’s lack of a degree. The same criticism was levelled by Eric Williams, a former pupil of the Captain’s at Tranquillity, an Oxford history first and Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago. ‘Cutteridge was not a university graduate,’ Williams snobbishly pointed out. In 1942 the much-maligned Captain, who had done quite nicely out of his many publications, withdrew weeping to the tax haven of the Isle of Man. Six years later The Clarion, instrument of the Trinidad Labour Party, invited its readers to envisage the geriatric former Director of Education in an old folk’s home, ‘spending his last days in a wheel chair and wearing a bib’.31 But his books continued to sell, in edition after revised edition, up to and beyond his death in August 1952, as Keith Sambrook, an employee of Nelsons from 1954 to 1962, well remembers,32 and as the weekly printing and monthly sales figures preserved in archives rescued from Nelson’s Parkside works abundantly confirm.33 The figures are well in excess of those for Nelson’s other principal stock-intrade: reprints of out-of-copyright classics. Take, as an arbitrary but far from untypical example, the reports from the printing room for the first few months of 1955. In the week of 20 January alone, 90,000 copies of the first reader were run off, while 20,000 plates were required for the second primer, and 10,000 for the fourth. In the week of 3 February, there were orders for 35,000 sets of covers, text and plates for Reader One; on the 14 March orders for another 32,000 sets of plates, again for Reader One, and 10,000 plates for Reader Five. Compare these figures with those for staples of domestic educational consumption during the same weeks: 4000 for that all-time favourite, Alexandre Dumas’s The Black Tulip, or 2000 for The Bible for Boys and Girls, and you can see just how profitable Cutteridge’s money-spinners continued to be throughout this period. The only equivalent figures are for readers intended for the African market, which belong to a different, if related, story. The West Indian Readers, moreover, continued in use until a drastic revision of the early 60s, a local imprint of which is available to this day.

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Throughout this period these small and unpretentious books served as a link joining the folk memories of two continents. School textbooks were a staple of Nelson’s business, having been so for a century or more, and many of the workforce back in Scotland drew satisfaction and a sense of purpose from the knowledge that their products were to travel the world. At much the same time as Naipaul sat enthralled before that reproduction of Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral, a 17-year-old apprentice called Bill Reid was continuing his training on one of the large Wharfedale presses in Nelson’s machine room at their neo-Gothic Parkside Works situated at the foot of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. His role was apparently pedestrian, yet because of its worldwide reach it also seemed grand: And it wasn’t a terribly exciting job, but at least you were bookprinting, and you felt top of the world ’cause you were part of a book that was being printed and going all over the world at that time. And, of course, you were now a year old in the trade and you were a real printer! And we used to have to print these, I mean there were millions of them!34 Reid can even remember the ink from the covers coming off on his hands, and having to wash it off under a coldwater tap at night. It is a salutary thought that some of the residue may well have transferred itself to the fingers of young readers in the Caribbean to be similarly scrubbed off in the evening, perhaps in a bucket, perhaps at a communal pump. In an age of virtual texts conveyed by screen we are, perhaps, beginning to forget the intimacy of touch and other sensations that once upon a time books as physical objects regularly transmitted from printer to reader. The infant Naipaul was very appreciative of the subtle tones of Nelsons’ four-colour illustrative technique, but the reminiscences of Eric Martin, who joined the firm’s camera department in 1953, allow us to view such visual experiences from the perspective of the producer: So what you did, you made up one negative with a colour filter. Then you made another one, blue, red, green, yellow. You made the negatives through these filters. Different negatives. And that brought up, you know, different parts o’ the picture, and then there was other men, retouchers, they had to accentuate the colours and that.35

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Few of these Scottish workers had ever visited the Caribbean or any of the many other parts of the Empire to which their artefacts were dispatched from the nearby port of Leith, yet they had a vivid feeling for the realities and commercial positioning of the firm, and for the place within changing markets occupied by its merchandise. Ever since the First World War the firm had, in spite of its apparent prosperity, been on something of a back foot. When Thomas Nelson III, grandson of the founder, had perished in the trenches in 1917, his place had been taken by his younger brother Ian, who by many accounts was far more enthused by the fruits of business success than the unglamorous grind of publishing. Long weekends were spent shooting at the family estate at Glenetive in Renfrewshire, the briefest of working weeks at Parkside, where the pleasure-loving director was regarded with sly and knowing affection by his lowlier employees. John Gunn, then a junior clerk in the counting room, paraphrases the prevailing attitude of the staff with some tact: ‘He was a very gentle gentleman, and spoke to everybody, but he didn’t actually have a hands-on job at all.’36 The files in the Edinburgh University archive amplify this impression with glimpses of Ian’s multifarious extramural activities. These included money-spinning though ultimately disastrous speculations in paper-manufacture from bamboo pulp in Trinidad and India, and a failed venture to sell off the loss-making estates in St Joseph’s to the American-based manufactures of the synthetic fibre Celanese Acetate, so that the bamboo could be processed into artificial silk. For quite a long period the firm enjoyed an unusually close relationship with their banker Charles Grenfell of Morgan Grenfell (‘Charlie’ to the board). Nelsons personnel even managed for some of this time to serve on the board of their own auditors, and in this capacity to send stern little notes to themselves, a situation that cannot have contributed to their financial realism. By the 1930s, they evidently existed at the centre of a web of subsidiaries or aliases operating across three continents, sharing much the same list of directors and shareholders, shunting capital between themselves, even communicating with one another through telegrams phrased in code. They were repeatedly in difficulties with the tax authorities in different countries. At Christmas 1935 they were obliged to rush their office accounts to Bengal, where the inspectors were demanding returns on their Indian investments. The relevant files were sent out on flying boat The City of Khartoum from Croydon Airport. The plane sank in the Mediterranean while attempting to land at Alexandria, taking the requested accounts with it. As Nelsons were then able to report to India with some satisfaction, enclosing verification from the Post Office (which at least they did

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not own), the mail had not been held in a watertight compartment, and therefore must be presumed lost. The whole entangled saga can be followed through the archive across correspondence between various linked addresses, though it seems imaginatively to belong in one of the swashbuckling novels of John Buchan, who for the immediately preceding period (1912–29) had, as it happens, worked as chief literary advisor to the firm.37 These operatic distractions could not disguise a more radical problem: Nelsons were failing either to rethink their publishing strategy in the changing commercial climate of the interwar and post-war periods, or to reinvest in basic plant and stock. For generations they had survived quite satisfactorily on three highly profitable lines: the imperial educational market, cheap hardback reprints of the classics of English literature and latterly a small slice of the Bible trade. By the 1950s there were many competitors in the first of these fields, and the second was being hit hard by a paperback revolution to which Nelsons were slow to react. They carried on in Scotland, where to the very end their printing was routinely done, turning out well-loved standbys such as the school readers on outdated and aging equipment. They may have convinced themselves of the prudence of this policy in their capacity as accountants, but they could not kid the workers. If you want the truth, ask the shop floor. Here is Bill Reid again: But Nelsons were never great modernisers. They were never at the forefront of technology. When photo-composition came along, they didn’t bother with that. The cameras were the old ones with the hood over the top and – they didn’t have magnesium flares, but they had everything else I think. And they never altered all the years we were there in terms of modernising the plant. The Monotype keyboard side was making lines of type and monotype up. But the machines were very old and they cluttered and cluttered and cluttered and cluttered.38 The din of the machines could not drown out the bugles of impending doom. When Ian Nelson died in 1958, he was succeeded by his son Ronald, whose principal interest was in steam trains. Most Friday afternoons, Ronnie took the 4.30 Flying Scotsman from Waverley Station to London. Settling into a first-class compartment, he hung up his bowler hat and then enjoyed a good dinner, rounding it off with a double brandy. One week he had invited his recently recruited junior colleague Keith Sambrook to join him at his table when, polishing off his aperitif,

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he rose to his feet and announced that he would spend the rest of the journey on the footplate of the engine. This he did, timing the arrival of the express train on his silver stopwatch at each station en route before re-emerging at King’s Cross, bowler hat once more on brow, to declare: ‘Late at Darlington again!’.39 So, all things considered, it was little surprise to the labour force when, one morning in 1962, Ronnie went into close two-man conference with the Canadian plutocrat Lord Thomson of Fleet at the London office, and sold the family firm to the Thomson Organization behind closed doors. Soon the printing division was separated from the publishing house, and within five years, though their books continued in use around the world, Thomas Nelsons and Sons as a commercial enterprise were little more than a name. The Parkside Works were demolished, and the archive was rescued from the skip.40 In the second volume in this set I shall be discussing the Oxford University Press (OUP), another British-based publishing firm with an equally global reach. OUP is not, of course, a family firm, but in its own quaint manner it has always had a patriarchal ambiance. Through an arcane combination of snobbery and flexibility, it has managed nonetheless to survive through thick and thin, as Nelsons did not. On the micro-level, in individual series, for example, Nelsons proved adaptable enough to reap success, especially overseas. At the larger macro-level, the level of management and policymaking, they failed to adapt at all adequately. Because of that higher failure, the house eventually fell. Meanwhile, back in the Caribbean, the chorus of condemnation against Cutteridge’s much-used readers had been unstinting. It was not for his alluring visions of Salisbury or London that the much-maligned captain received such opprobrium, nor for his recasting of the classics, his summaries of Defoe or Dean Swift, but for sidetracking local aspirations to universal excellence through the siren call of relevance. That conflict of interest is now a matter of history. To recognize its one-time existence, however, is to question one well-received theory that may be styled the ‘reactive model’ of postcolonial writing. According to this stereotyped view, school authorities throughout the Empire force-fed William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’ to their tender charges repeatedly ’til, sick of this foreign diet, they revolted by producing writing of their own. The example of Nelsons in the Caribbean tends to suggest on the contrary that – in this context at least, and over one protracted period – publishers and teachers sought valiantly to localize literary appreciation, in the teeth of parochial petit bourgeois elitism. But what the conscious mind of one generation rejected,

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the unconscious mind of the next permanently absorbed. Nelsons is now a fading memory for several generations in the West Indies and elsewhere. Nonetheless, the effect that they had on receptive young people has proved decisive. By attending, albeit temporarily and in part, to the changing needs of one particular local audience of schoolchildren, Nelsons bucked the trend, and crossed party lines. They planted seeds in the fertile soil of a vibrant culture, thereby helping in the long run to yield up a literature.

Notes 1. J. O. Cutteridge, ed. Nelson’s West Indian Readers V (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1928), p. 200. 2. V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 12. 3. Ernst H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1961), p. 374. 4. The Royal Readers Special Canadian Series. Third Book of Reading Lessons. With illustrations from Giacomelli and Other Eminent Artists (Edinburgh and Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons and James Campbell, 1883), iii–iv. A copy is held in Edinburgh University, Thomas Nelson and Sons Archive at Gen 1728 52.616. 5. Nelson Archive B/2/178 (Buchan Files) to ‘H–L of 1917’ (G. M. Brown files). Owing to technical problems with the crusher, though, the plant proved a liability, and finally something of an embarrassment. In 1942 it was disposed of to a South American consortium after lengthy and difficult negotiations. Nelson Archive Gen 1728.68.76D. 6. S. B. Watson to G. C. Graham, 31 July 1923. Nelson Archive. Gen 1728.37.471 (Toronto House Letters). 7. J. O. Cutteridge, ed. Nelson’s Geography of the West Indies and Adjacent Lands (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1931). 8. J. O. Cutteridge, ed. Nelson’s West Indian Readers I (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1928), p. 130. 9. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 339–400, citing West Indian Readers I, p. 65. For further references in this novel to the Nelsons readers, see Biswas, pp. 196–7, 231, 233–4, 310 and 485. See also John Thieme, The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction (London: Hansib, 1987), pp. 79ff. 10. J. O. Cutteridge, ed. Nelson’s West Indian Readers II (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1928), pp. 88–95. 11. J. O. Cutteridge, ed. Nelson’s West Indian Readers III (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1928), pp. 135–8. 12. J. O. Cutteridge, ed. Nelson’s West Indian Readers IV (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1928), pp. 77–86. 13. Sam Selvon, Lonely Londoners (London: Allan Wingate, 1956). 14. Cutteridge, Readers II, pp. 34–7. 15. Ibid., pp. 17–21. 16. Cutteridge, Readers III, pp. 78–81.

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

Cutteridge, Readers II, pp. 105–113. Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948–1984 (New York: Noonday, 1986), p. 57. Cutteridge, Readers III, pp. 102–5. Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber, 1990) especially pp. 14, 93, 97, 117–18, 125. Cutteridge, Readers IV, pp. 150–7. V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 21. Cutteridge, Readers III, pp. 139–43. J. O. Cutteridge and Frank Ogle, eds, Nelson’s West Indian Readers III, Jamaica Edition (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1936), pp. 139–43. Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber, 1960), pp. 144–52. J. O. Cutteridge and Frank Ogle, eds, Nelson’s West Indian Readers V, Jamaica Edition (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1936), pp. 157–63. Austin Clarke, The Polished Hoe (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003), p. 343. Cutteridge, Readers III, p. 119. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, p. 156. Cutteridge, Readers V, p. 145. For Cutteridge’s contributions to the Trinidadian educational system, and the reactions to it of the local bourgeoisie, see Carl C. Campbell’s Colony and Nation: A Short History of Education in Trinidad, 1834–1986 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1992) and also his Endless Education: Main Currents in the Educational System of Modern Trinidad and Tobago 1939–1986 (Barbados: University Press of the West Indies, 2000). Interview with Keith Sambrook, recorded in Senate House, London, 14 October 2005. Nelsons archive 1/W/MB. Heather Holmes and David Finkelstein, eds, Thomas Nelson and Sons: Memories of an Edinburgh Publishing House (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press in association with the Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records and the European Ethnological Research Centre, 2001), p. 93. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 4. The evidence for this complex imbroglio is contained in file 1728.65.738 of the Nelson archive, soberly entitled ‘Celanese’. Much of the correspondence is missing, but from the fragmentary record the following details can be inferred. The Indian enterprise was called the India Paper Pulp Company Limited, and based at Naihati in Bengal, adjacent to an estate managed by a concern known locally as the Bengal Coal Company of 8, Clive Row Calcutta, and in London as Andrew Yule and Co. Limited of 9, Basinghall Street, EC2 (Telegraphic Address: ‘Unicorn’ or ‘Yuletide’). Capital was provided by loans from Nelsons channelled though the so-called Bamboo Company Limited, whose directors were Ian Nelson, J. L. Jardine and Sir Hardman Lever. Lever was also the director of Nelson’s auditors, Lever, Honeyman and Company, whose London address was the very same as the Coal Company’s: 9, Basinghall Street. Several of the same names turn up as directors of a seemingly unrelated concern known as Yule, Catto and Company, who were accountants to the firm in India. In Trinidad the capital for the paper mill was provided jointly by Nelsons and Morgan Grenfell to Trinidad Paper Mills Ltd, which of course the former owned. Like the abortive negotiations

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with British Celanese, the deal was arranged by Abbott, Hoppin and Company of 120, Broadway, New York, whose agent George Whigham just happened to be a director of Morgan Grenfell, as indeed did Thomas Catto who sat with Andrew Yule on the board of Yule, Catto and Company, not entirely unrelated to the Andrew Yule and Company who shared office space with Nelson’s auditors. The necessity for the rushed tax return was caused by Nelsons’ insistence that their paper mill in India was a rupee company from which they derived no sterling benefit. Throughout all of these dealings Nelsons kept on the right side of the law by ensuring that, though associates of theirs sat on the boards of each of these incestuous concerns, no one enterprise shared precisely the same board of directors or list of shareholders as any other. One common factor is that several of the principals were ennobled: Thomas Catto as Baron Catto of Cairncatto in the County Aberdeen, Charles Grenfell as Lord St Just in Cornwall. For latter-day John Buchans, a rich plot awaits. 38. Holmes and Finkelstein, Thomas Nelson, p. 99. 39. Interview with Sambrook, 14 October 2005. 40. Interview with Sambrook, 2005. Alistair McCleery’s Preface to Holmes and Finkelstein, xxi–xxii.

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Origin and Growth of the White Fathers’ Press at Bukalasa, Uganda Ivan Page

Missionaries of whatever persuasion seek to share their ideas with others and so enlarge, what we might effectively call, an ‘imagined community’ of believers, transcending origin and place. European missionaries arriving in Africa in the nineteenth century were endeavouring to bring people of other tribes, languages, and races into the international community of the Christian Church. Within their own society, Africans who adhered to Christianity formed a new community, which was not necessarily appreciated by the authorities.1 Furthermore, Christian missionaries, announcing a revelation which has been written down, invariably engage in teaching others to read: that is to say, they also expand the community of the literate. The visitor to the Uganda Museum in Kampala can see the first printing press introduced into that country. It is an Albion, manufactured by Frederick Ulmer of London and supplied to the Church Missionary Society in 1876. It was assembled at Natete, Uganda, by the pioneer Scottish missionary, Alexander Mackay, probably in 1878, and used by him to print reading sheets, his own translation into Luganda of St Matthew’s gospel, and other texts. But it is not my purpose to relate the history of that press, fascinating though it might be. My aim in this chapter is to trace in detail the origins and growth of another printing press, one with a somewhat lesser claim to fame, perhaps, in that it was not the first missionary press in Uganda, but one whose history is traceable through archival sources and extant copies of its printed materials (which is by no means always the case), and rich in the kind of detail which might help us to understand some of the roots of the ‘entangled histories’ (to borrow Jürgen Kocka’s phrase) in which colonial print cultures became embroiled in this period. 107

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Origin and Growth of the White Fathers’ Press

The leader of the first group of Catholic missionaries (Missionaries of Africa) to reach Uganda was Léon Livinhac. On 20 January 1880, he reported to his superior: ‘The Africans of this country all want to learn to read, and many more of them would seek religious instruction if we taught it from books. The Protestants have a press and, by means of printed alphabets, they have for a time attracted a good number of pupils.’2 From the start he studied the language and culture of the people. He and his companions composed a grammar, a small dictionary, and a catechism in the Luganda language, and one of them translated the gospel of St Matthew, all of which were printed in Europe. Relations between the two groups of European missionaries were polite but not cordial: each group being persuaded of its rival’s errors. As early as 1881, Fr Lourdel, one of Livinhac’s companions, wrote from Uganda to Fr Bridoux in Algiers, saying: ‘There are small printing presses which are easy to transport and use, and which don’t cost much; if we could have one of those ...’3 No press was sent out at that time. Later, at the seminary at Carthage, probably at some time in the 1890s, a small press was installed, and large some of the student-priests learned to work it. In 1897 it was replaced by a slightly bigger machine,4 and the original press was eventually shipped to Uganda. In 1884, Fr Livinhac was appointed first Vicar Apostolic, or bishop of a region taking in the whole of Uganda. He did not end his days there, for in 1890 Cardinal Lavigerie of Algiers, the founder of the Missionaries of Africa, recalled him to North Africa to be his Vicar General for the missionary Society. After the Cardinal’s death in 1892, Livinhac became Superior General, a post which he held until his death 30 years later. Livinhac’s third successor as Vicar Apostolic in Uganda was Bishop Henri Streicher. Bishop Streicher was in Europe from September 1898 to June the following year; at the end of April 1899 he visited Algiers. He may have gone to Carthage as well, for he seems to have acquired the little press which was no longer in use. In any case, the diary of the junior seminary at Kisubi records on 2 December1899: ‘Father Fouquenet sets up our little printing press, which has been resting since its arrival as there was nowhere to put it and no artist to operate it. Unfortunately the collections of letters, the founts (as it seems they are called) were not made with a view to printing Luganda. Fr Fouquenet is devoting his few spare moments to printing a small geography composed in Luganda for the use of our pupils.’5 Although there is no evidence on this point, I think it probable that Fouquenet, who was ordained at Carthage in March 1898, had learned something of printing while he was at the scholasticate. At any rate, on 17 June 1900 the printing of the geography

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was completed, and in July 1901 the diarist noted that Fouquenet had begun printing the Latin hymns used at Mass and Benediction. On 1 August 1901, the superior of the seminary, Fr Marcou, wrote to Livinhac: ‘We have begun printing a Latin grammar in Luganda. I am sending you herewith one leaf of it hot from the press. I have a lot of notes for a Luganda grammar in Luganda; we hope to begin printing it soon. Same thing for a little book of arithmetic.’6 I must add that on a visit to Uganda in July 2005, I was not able to locate copies of these books. On 21 March 1902, Fr Jean Marcou, superior of the junior seminary, had written to an unidentified correspondent at Maison-Carrée giving a detailed description of the equipment at Kisubi. He stressed that he knew nothing of the trade, so could not use technical terms. He compared the Kisubi press unfavourably with the (second) one at Carthage. At Kisubi they could only print one large 8° leaf at a time. To men unfamiliar with the trade, the second press from Carthage may have seemed a desirable acquisition. Since Fr Fouquenet had been transferred to another mission, Marcou also mentioned that they needed a printer.7 In 1903 they produced a second edition of the geography textbook ‘for the mission schools’ (Diary 12-04-1903), and in July that year received a request from the bishop to print some prayers in the Runyoro language. At the end of the year, the staff announced to the pupils that the junior seminary was being transferred to Bukalasa: Kisubi would become a major seminary, opening with six students. In April 1905 Streicher wrote to Livinhac: ‘Your Lordship has no doubt learned that we should shortly receive in Uganda the little printing press which was used at Carthage. I take the liberty of asking you to send us a printer with the caravan expected in September; he can be a priest or a brother, but let him know his trade.’8 The press from Carthage mentioned here was the second one, acquired in 1897. The last of its products of which I am aware appeared in 1899. In 1905 Streicher certainly knew there was a press of sorts at Kisubi, and I have no doubt that Livinhac did too.

Three Brothers: Adéodat, Adalbert, Michel A significant moment for the ‘White Fathers’ press occurred with the arrival of Bro. Adéodat – in the world, Charles Ameline. Born in Dijon, he had worked for a time as a commercial traveller before trying his vocation as a Trappist at Staouéli in Algeria, whence he was sent for a time to the order’s monastery at Akbès in Syria. Then in 1900, aged 43, he applied to join the Missionaries of Africa. The Society was reluctant to accept

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Origin and Growth of the White Fathers’ Press

a candidate of that age, and coming from another religious order, but was eventually prevailed upon to give him a chance. In December 1901, the superiors decided to put Bro. Adéodat into the printing shop established the previous year at the Mother House. There he learned the trade. In reply to the letter from Bp Streicher, already quoted, the Superior General wrote in June 1905: ‘I hope to be able to send you the only Brother we have who knows printing well.’9 At some time in 1905, the Bro. persuaded his superiors to let him return to France on a study tour. He wrote a report in which he declared bluntly that ‘everyone agrees that the material from Carthage is worthless’.10 He had visited several big printing works, but found that experience irrelevant to the kind of work he expected to do in Uganda. By contrast, he went on: In the printing works of small towns, with limited material, where they are ready to undertake any work offered, and where every day there is a new problem to solve – that is where I have spent six weeks, and I hope to go back. Most people there agreed that the work we have done in the past year is very good; they were amazed at the Bambara manual. Certainly they pointed out a number of details, quite a lot in fact, but on the whole our work is good; while composition and layout leave something to be desired, the press work is good. They noticed that the inks we use are mediocre.11 He recommended the purchase of good second-hand equipment. The recommendation was approved by the Society’s General Council. And by October 1905, Adéodat had arrived at the junior seminary at Bukalasa. Fr Modeste Raux, who spent many years in Uganda and whose papers contain some useful historical notes, says that when Bro. Adéodat arrived at Bukalasa, ‘he tried out first a press which had seen better days at the scholasticate at Carthage. This quickly gave way to an automatic pedal press which was able to print between three and 4000 sheets a day’.12 It seems likely that at this period he printed some circulars of Bp Streicher’s on the hand press, beginning with a translation into Luganda of Decretum de quotidiana S.S. Eucharistiae sumptione, originally issued in Rome on 20 December 1905. In January 1907, the Regional Superior, Fr Malet, made an official visit to Bukalasa and reported to Bp Livinhac: ‘Bro Adéodat murmurs and criticises; he creates a bad spirit – and he has eye problems. He persuaded the bishop to spend 2500 fr on a press and is putting up a building to house it. It seems that the whole cost will be about 5000 fr. The Fathers are wondering what he’s going to print. In October 1907

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this Brother is supposed to renew his vows for another three years. In my opinion we’d be better off without him in the Society.’13 In fact the Bro. was permitted to renew his vows, but this was not the last time his character was criticised. On 10 March 1907, the house diary at Bukalasa noted: ‘Bro Adéodat prepared a luncheon for us; he wants to celebrate the start of printing in his workshop.’ On 4 July the diarist wrote: ‘The first fairly substantial book has just come off Bro Adéodat’s press. Our esteemed confrère was pleased to offer to the Fathers of Bunyoro a fascicle of their prayer book.’ The satisfaction with Bro Adéodat’s output did not last, however. In April 1909 Bp Streicher wrote to the Superior General: ‘If, among the missionaries you are sending in August, there were one capable of running the printing press at Bukalasa, he would be most welcome, because Bro Adéodat is showing his age and his worsening sight makes it impossible for him to do any composing.’14 Later that year he apologised to Livinhac for not having been able to send the printed text of resolutions of the Synod he had held because ‘I hadn’t counted on the maddening delays of our dear old Bro Adéodat’.15 The Brother himself, however, soldiered on – and evidently ruled in his particular domain. In April 1910 Fr Franco wrote to Livinhac about a visit from the Vicar Apostolic of the Egyptian Sudan: ‘The printing works amazed him. Indeed we are all astonished at the progress made by the workers under dear Bro Adéodat’s direction.’16 And in June the regional superior, van Wees, wrote to Livinhac: ‘I think Bro Philibert would not have got on with Bro Adéodat at the press. This dear brother has done very well, the press is his work, the apple of his eye. He’s in charge and doesn’t want anyone else interfering. That is why all the priests who have been appointed director have had to let the Brother do things his way – which by the way is very good. I mention this, My Lord, so that if you are thinking of sending an assistant for Bro Adéodat, it would be best to send a Brother who is still young and docile enough to take orders from Bro Adéodat.’17 In this period, each missionary was required to write at least once a year a lettre de règle to the Superior General. Bro. Adéodat’s letter of 15 November 1911 gives some idea of the conditions which prevailed in missionary presses at the time: ‘I have already been here five years, and how quickly they have gone! I hope for many more, not for myself, but for the work. It’s not quite right yet because I must admit I’ve not yet been able to train a foreman to take my place ... Herewith our latest inventory. If I were to add the books in Runyoro, of which I’ll send you copies when they’re bound, you would see that now we have a little workshop which costs

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[the Society] nothing. And like the spring tide, work flows in without interruption ... As for the employees, I am well pleased with them. (In three years I’ve only had to dismiss one man.) But these good people have little education – it’s the primary education which is lacking: no observation, no desire to go beyond a certain limit. They have the minimum necessary for a worker, but not enough to make a craftsman or an artist. With 15 employees I have little free time – 5 compositors, 2 pressmen, 2 folders (both boys), 2 stitchers, 3 binders and a bush carpenter.’18 Despite what he evidently saw as difficult production conditions, however, Bro. Adéodat’s press was a success. It was in that same year that Fr Gorju – of whom more later – was appointed director of the press, and it was probably he who drew up the regulations for it.19 He wrote to Livinhac in October: ‘The press has given every satisfaction to the Vicariate which now considers it free of all debt, the value of the machinery and the stock is greater than the excess of expense over receipts. As a result, the Vicariate considers all purchases made for the press as investments and authorises the director on his own responsibility to undertake any orders received, whatever the sum involved. The Council reserves to itself decisions about enlargement of the premises and the purchase of additional machinery.’20 Bro. Adéodat’s press continued to grow – but it had its problems, among them his single-mindedness, and his linguistic limitations. At the end of 1911 Gorju wrote again to Livinhac: ‘Our little press keeps on growing. It occupies 25 workers. We are asked for catechisms in runs of 10,000, similar numbers of arithmetic books and so on. Our poor Bro Adéodat handles that operation on his own. I did mention to you one day, My Lord, the necessity of finding him an assistant. I believe the Vicariate is thinking of giving him a priest. You yourself know Bro Adéodat ... The good Brother has his way of doing things, he has an independent character and is jealous of his authority. Sparks would fly if he were with a Brother older than himself. As for a younger Brother, frankly I’m afraid, and others are too, of the sort of training he’d get at this press ... I’m not talking about the material side of things: Bro Adéodat is great for solving problems and he’s also got a head for business ... Furthermore he hasn’t managed to learn the language.’21 It was in February 1913 that the new director arrived – Fr Gustave Domin, from Normandy, whose father had been a printer in Caen. At the end of 1913, Bro. Adéodat returned permanently to North Africa where he lived on until 1940, by which time he was 83 years old. Every press develops its house style, and the press at our Mother House at Maison-Carée was no exception. Its customary style was

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simple, unadorned, and sober – with the exception of a single title page, the Katekismu ey’abâna abato (Catechism for children) of 1904, which contains a border frieze, decorated initials, and typographical ornaments. It is the only one of its kind I have seen at Maison-Carée, and it is no accident, I believe, that it was executed while Bro. Adéodat was there. Figure 6.1 shows a typical example of his work from 1911, after his removal to Bukalasa.

Figure 6.1

‘Catechism for Beginners’, 1911, printed at Bukalasa

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Quite clearly, Adéodat had a taste for ornament and developed and implemented his own style in spite of the constraints imposed by his position as a missionary printer answerable to the Superior General. Though his was the first financially successful and aesthetically innovative touch at the White Fathers’ press, his work was continued by many other such printers, and this had far-reaching consequences. The Ugandan historian John Mary Waliggo evaluates the significance of the White Fathers’ press thus: This press was to revolutionize the academic work of the seminary and make a great impact on the entire Church and society in Uganda. Henceforth the seminary textbooks, including the voluminous Latin–Luganda lexicon by Father Franco ... were printed here ... The students became regular contributors to the popular monthly Munno. They became more interested in reading and following whatever was going on in the ‘world’. The basic books for Catholic teaching: catechism, prayer-book, lives of saints, works of meditation, outlines of Church history, etc. were fully revised to remove the many Latin, Arabic and Swahili words and expressions which had been included from the earliest days of Christianity in the country.22 The involvement of the seminarians in journalism and the broadening of their horizons to take in events far from Uganda certainly represented important changes in a society just emerging from near-total illiteracy. Modeste Raux, already quoted, analysed the growth of the press during the period 1911–14: It was during these four years that the press really took off. The present buildings are 48 metres long, and 6 wide, plus another building at right angles to the western end of the workshop, which is 14
6 metres, making a total area of 372 square metres. [Note: to judge from contemporary photographs, these buildings were of mud bricks, not baked bricks. See Figures 6.2–6.4] The buildings are divided into workshops, offices and stores. There are: five workshops, for composition, printing, trimming and finishing, folding, cutting and sewing; two offices, one for the director and one for correction; three stores – paper stock, printed books and shop.23 He goes on to list an impressive array of modern equipment added during these years, including ‘a wide range of types ... three good machines: one double-carrée, one demi-raisin, and one pedal-operated

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Figure 6.2 the work

115

The composing room at Bukalasa, with Brother Adéodat supervising

Figure 6.3 The press room at Bukalasa, again showing Brother Adéodat and some of the staff (Note that the building is constructed with sun-dried bricks.)

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Figure 6.4

Workers in the bindery at Bukalasa

quart-jésus, plus a proofing press. The bindery had three presses and two guillotines, one manual, one mechanical, one corner-rounding machine and two mechanical sewing machines’.24 And the workforce had clearly grown too, since 1911 when it employed only 15 people: The personnel, apart from the director, consisted of 44 workmen occupied as follows: composition 9; press work 7, finishing 3, folding and cutting 14, bindery 10, plus 1 proof reader ... At the start Bro Adéodat had had a lot of difficulty with his improvised workers, so much so that he thought them incapable of learning a trade – but Labor improbus omnia vincit. By 1914 the press had serious workers who liked their trade, while still being far less skilled than European workers, but who were capable of careful work. Among the compositors, three were very good; they did not limit themselves to type-setting but were competent at layout and could set a complicated forme of up to 32 pages. The pressmen were quite good at imposition. Each worker was expected to do the make-ready for his different tasks, and they managed quite well. In the bindery there were greater difficulties. A good many apprentices had to quit the workshops.25

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Let me add one small point here: I have mentioned that M.Afr. seminarians perform a certain amount of manual work during their years of formation. The same is true in other seminaries. Joseph Antony Zziwa, now Bishop of Kiyinda-Mityana, states in the thesis he defended at Louvain in 1990 that ‘Many seminarians were apprenticed to the skill of printing and book-binding, during the time allotted to manual work.’26 While Raux’s assessment of the unequal capabilities of different ethnicities is very much a product of its time, it seems clear that the ‘manual labour’ expected of a seminarian during his formative years was in fact capable of producing a skilled printer: one who would have a crucial role to play in Uganda’s future. World War I appears to have affected the press but little. Adéodat’s successor was a young Dutchman, Antonius van Balen, in religion, Brother Adalbert. Late in 1917, Gorju wrote to Livinhac that ‘Bro Adalbert quietly looks after the press as is proper for the time, and his character. He’s a good subject; he knows his trade, has a solid piety and doesn’t get in the way. His workers like him, and they work’.27 In his annual report for 1917–18, Gorju wrote of the press: ‘Despite the paper shortage, it remains one of the most serious works of the Vicariate, and one of those most appreciated by outsiders.’28 And its growth continued after the War, when most presses in Europe were struggling with supply and personnel shortages. The press was mentioned again in the report for 1921–22: ‘Fr Domin is decidedly ill, and so unable to direct the press; he has been replaced by Bro Adalbert who, while completely dedicated to his trade of printer, still finds time to perform other services for the community. Apart from a new impression of a book of meditations, lots of small jobs, publication of the monthly Munno, and plenty of binding, the house has begun printing a concordance of the gospels (by Fr Moullec), and the impatiently awaited new hymn book: it has the old hymns, revised and corrected, and new ones composed by different confrères, even by one of our African priests.’29 The report for 1923–4 notes further that The Press has not fallen behind other years. Munno has doubled its format and since, thanks to new paper, we have not raised the price of subscriptions, and the confrères have largely supported it, the number of purchasers has also grown considerably. This year we printed the Synod Statutes; a new edition of English Exercises has just come out; another edition of the hymn book is under way; we are reprinting the prayer book of which several fascicles were out of print. We look forward to finishing these two jobs so as to be able to give

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all our time and attention to the printing of textbooks for which there is such a need here in the Vicariate. We have, prepared for the press, the general geography of Africa, and a Roman history. We are working on a new edition of the Luganda grammar. After that we’ll have to think about the arithmetic – and many more jobs besides.30 The following year’s report, written by Fr Dupupet, had quite a lot to say about the press and concludes: ‘Fortunately the Press has no debts, which is just as well, for who would reimburse them? But we cannot make a profit from promotional booklets and the gifts of confrères. True profit comes from printing for the government and for merchants. That is the simple truth and it is as well that the confrères know it.’ The report includes an impressive list of ‘Jobs completed this year’ as follows: In Runyankole: Stations of the Cross, 2000 copies; Gospels, 4000; Hymns, 1000. English Exercises: 1500 Synod Statutes: 260 Hymn books (Luganda): 12,000 Munno (monthly): 2200 subscribers Various jobs for the government, etc. Catechisms, syllabaries: 30,000.31 Three years later the superior (still Fr Dupupet) wrote: Under the direction of Bro Michel, the Press has followed its usual course. Among the figures for publications coming off our presses this year, apart from more than 2000 copies of Munno each month, there were: 20,000 catechisms, 65,000 copies of readers for our schools, a Luganda grammar, a book of meditations, the magazine Charitas for the African priests, the circulars of His Lordship the Vicar Apostolic. In addition, we are reprinting the prayer book in Luganda, which was out of print. To this may be added many jobs for the government, such as registers of taxes, births, marriages, etc. In other words, our presses have not wanted for work this year.32 The report for 1937–8 records a major change at the press: ‘This year has seen a change for our Catholic journal, Munno. Until now, editing and printing were both done at Bukalasa, 80 miles from the capital. It became necessary to think about bringing everything closer to town. At the same time, an attempt was made to modernise the format of the

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journal, and our periodical has begun to come out twice a month. As the press was only installed at Kisubi after Easter, it is too early to judge the success of this innovation.’33 The move to Kisubi in 1938 marks the end of the period under consideration here. Let me just say that the activity of the press seems to have been greatly reduced throughout most of the 1940s, presumably on account of wartime shortages – which hit harder this time – and that it did not pick up again until 1949. The press was finally taken over by the Sisters of St Peter Claver in 1957, who developed it as the ‘Marianum Press’, which is still operating, but now, since 1973, belongs to the Archdiocese of Kampala.34 The reports I have been quoting have mentioned the Catholic journal Munno several times, cataloguing as they go its increasing success in terms of rising subscriptions, and I mean to explore the significance of this in a moment. Before turning to the story of Munno (the title means Your Friend) though, it is worth saying something more about Bro. Michel, born Josef Beijsens in the Netherlands in 1883. The obituary notice published after his death in 1954 relates that poor health delayed his departure for the missions until 1925 when he arrived in Uganda already aged 42: He was sent to the press at Bukalasa to continue the excellent work of Brothers Adéodat and Adalbert ... On his arrival at Bukalasa [in 1926] Bro Michel had the good fortune to meet an artist printer in Fr Domin. The Brother knew nothing about printing, and there was a mountain of work waiting to be done. He set to work resolutely and took such good advantage of his master’s experience that when the latter had, chiefly for health reasons, to give up the printing trade which he loved, Bro Michel was capable of taking over the enterprise.35 It was Bro. Michel who had the responsibility of transferring the press to Kisubi in 1938. This involved more than packing, shipping, unpacking, and installing all the equipment. Only a few of the workers followed the press to Kisubi. Consequently the Bro. had to recruit and train new men for the press. The obituary remarks that he was an improvised printer who became, by will power and intelligence, an accomplished printer with a style of his own. Here is a summary of the output of the press under Bro. Michel’s direction in 1937, the last full year of operation at Bukalasa: 25,000 syllabaries 25,000 catechisms

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4,000 readers 4,000 hymn books 3,000 prayer books 5,000 catechisms in Kigwa 500,000 cards for Catholic movements Periodicals: Munno Charitas Quarterly magazine for teachers Quarterly bulletin for scouts

Munno On 13 November 1909, Superior General Livinhac wrote to Bishop Streicher: ‘As regards the Protestants, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea – necessary even – in order to combat the long-term effect of their publication, Ebifa mu Buganda (on account of the heretical spirit which inspires it) if you were to have a Catholic periodical, in which you would give news of Rome, of the Catholic world and of your missions. What do you think, dear Bishop?’36 Streicher took the hint and replied on 5 May 1910: ‘The creation of a journal, or rather a monthly review, at our press at Bukalasa, is now decided. Fr Gorju has been designated in petto to be the editor in chief, and I hope that the first issue will appear on 1 January 1911.’37 On 21 July 1910, Gorju himself wrote to Bp Livinhac: ‘It seems, My Lord, that you have long desired a journal, and have mentioned it more than once. Your prayers have been answered, because in mid-December I shall send you the first issue of Munno ... Munno will give news of this and neighbouring countries, of England, and especially of Rome, Catholic news; and some news of indigenous politics ... The truth is that the heretical rag Ebifa mu Buganda is worth nothing.’38 He envisaged a print run of 1000 copies in the first year. The monthly Ebifa mu Buganda had begun to appear in January 1907. Its existence was clearly a spur to the Catholic authorities to produce a rival publication which would be more attractive to Catholic readers. Comparing both papers, and judging only from the proper names (for I do not know Luganda), it seems to me that Munno published more international news than its rival. Already in its first year of publication, it printed the occasional photograph on art paper of the bishop, the Kabaka, or some other celebrity.

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With this mail I am sending you, without further delay, the first number of the Bulletin of the Vicariate. I trust this will be just the beginning of the fulfilment of the promises made to Your Lordship some time ago ... It’s hardly necessary to tell you of the success enjoyed by our bulletin, even before the appearance of the first number. In eight days we’ve had 600 subscriptions which leads me to think that, once people have seen it, we shall have 2000. But I see more and more clearly that, to do the job really well, I shall need more time than I’ve got, and dear Bro Adéodat will need a helper and some more equipment ... There can be no doubt either that the Protestants will be alarmed when they see this first number, although I have tried to make it impartial. They will smarten up their insignificant Ebifou pretty swiftly.39 On 25 March 25, Livinhac wrote to Bp Streicher: ‘I’ve received the first two numbers of Munno. It seems to me well conceived and well executed, just the thing to inform and edify our new Christians while interesting them at the same time. It would be prudent not to mention conversions of Protestants to Catholicism. The editor of Ebifu mu Buganda could reply by relating the apostasy of Catholic priests [in Europe], alas!’40 In his annual report for 1910–11 Streicher declared: A special place among our apostolic works is reserved for our journal or monthly magazine, Munno, of which the first number appeared in January 1911. The magazine consists of 16 pages, with a supplement giving the life of a saint (8 pages), in all 24 pages, has been warmly welcomed by its readers white and black, Protestant as well as Catholic, in the protectorate and abroad. Its principal aim – which has been attained – is to take into the homes of the vicariate, in addition to local political and religious news, knowledge of the dogmas and the glories of Catholicism. If I make a very honourable mention here of the editor in chief, Fr Gorju, and his master printer, Bro Adéodat, I do no more than express the view of the 2000 subscribers to Munno.41 The first issue of Munno appeared in January 1911, and it was to appear regularly every month until 1938, when it began to be published fortnightly. A normal issue contained 16 (later 20) pages;

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It was on 4 January 1911 that the Bukalasa diary was able to announce: ‘Appearance of Munno, indigenous monthly review, printed at Bukalasa.’ Next day, the editor wrote to Bp Livinhac:

Origin and Growth of the White Fathers’ Press

the pagination was continuous throughout the year. From 1915, the December issue would contain an index to the whole year’s issues. The first numbers contained a liturgical calendar for the current month. This soon came to be printed on a separate sheet so that it could easily be pinned up in the home. By 1921, certain regular features, such as long articles on salvation history, or the history of Uganda, or the lives of the saints, were printed and paginated separately, and issued as a supplement. From 1920, the magazine carried some advertising; the issue for December 1920 contained an inserted sheet of advertisement in colour. In January 1924 the format, which one might call small 4°, changed to large 4°. In January 1938, when the press had moved to Kisubi, the format became broadsheet, and the paper was published fortnightly. There were other changes of format during the war years. In 1960 the paper started to appear three times a week, and in 1962 it became a daily. In 1979, the editor of Munno, Fr Clement Kiggundu, had the honour of being assassinated on the orders of Idi Amin. Munno finally ceased publication in 1992.

Analysis of the books known to have been printed at Bukalasa I have already quoted from Fr Dupupet’s report for 1928–9 in which he mentioned the importance for the profitability of the press of jobbing work undertaken for the government or for private persons. Nonetheless, the press was not primarily a commercial venture. It was founded as an aid to the apostolate. Hence the preponderance of religious literature in its output: catechisms, prayer books, books on the life of Christ, accounts of the Uganda martyrs and other saints. From the start the missionaries were involved in education. I have examined and recorded several syllabaries intended for use in the primary schools. There may well have been others which I have not sighted. We have seen that even before this press was established at Bukalasa, the missionaries were producing books of geography and arithmetic for the seminary. Once this press existed, it was called on to print several editions of a Luganda grammar, a Latin grammar, and Fr Franco’s substantial Latin–Luganda dictionary. Clearly, the monthly Munno was designed for the continuing education of literate Catholics, and the magazine Charitas was to perform a similar function for African priests. My bibliography of this press (Table 6.1) is certainly not complete, but – apart from the fact that I have not seen a single piece of the jobbing printing executed for outsiders – I think the 107 items I have examined give a reasonable profile of its output.

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Date

Author

Streicher Streicher S.C. Concilii Streicher Streicher

Pius X Streicher Streicher Sallam

Title

24 32 72 40 32 32 40 316 57–96 8 12 2 16 76 20 16 16 8 16 xx, 96 202 80 132 32

Location A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. Lourdel H. A.Ad.Tab. A.Ad.Tab. A.Ad.Tab. A.Ad.Tab. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. Lourdel H. A.Ad.Tab. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. (Continued)

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Notation des nouveaux cantiques Omumyuka akatabo k’engero aka’dirira alifu Engero ensonge ekitabo ekisoka Aritmetika entono n’ebigezo byayo Engero alifu ey’oluganda ... ennukuta ... Engero alifu ey’oluganda ... enukuta ... Cents 6 Abajulizi abesimi; Matyasi Mulumba ne Karoli Lwanga Extraits des lettres circulaires, 1897–1909 Batukirivu ( Saints) Ebaluwa ... seminario Decretum de quotidiana Eucharistiae [Mois de Marie] Circular 7/4/1908 [Triduum Fête-Dieu] Circular 17/5/1908 n° 45 Synode (10 octobre 1909) Katekismu ey’abakadde (Old folks) Sala za Bakristu mu runyoro Ekirangiriro [communion des enfants] 8/8/1910 Renseignements de l’Econome général Lettre circulaire n° 96 6/9/1910. Femmes catéchistes Lettre-circulaire n° 99 5/12/1910 Ebikorwa Kitabo 1 Grammatika ey’olulatini Grammatika entono ey’oluganda Second synode (30 août 1911) Katekismu ey’abasoka

Number of pages

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n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. n.d. 1907 ? 1908 1908 1909 1910 1910 1910 1910 1910 1910 1911 1911 1911 1911 1911

Provisional list of books printed at Bukalasa

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Table 6.1

1912 1913 1913 [1913] 1913 [1913] [1913] 1914 1914 1914 1914 1914 1914 [1914] 1915 [1915] 1915 1915 1915 [1915] 1917

Franco Streicher

Sallam Gorju

Streicher

Title

Number of pages

Amateka n’empisa ez’ekibina ekye Bannabikira Ekkunganyizo ery’ebigambo [Meditation J.C.] Lexicon latinum ugandicum

48 204 632

Okwanjula [Lettre circulaire n° 110: décret martyrs] Ebikolwa by’Eklezia Katekismu ya kwanza. Kiswahili Biblia entono. Ebifayo ebikulu eby’edini Troisième synode (3 octobre 1913) Ebikolwa eby’Abajulizi n’ebya Batukirivu. Kitabo II Ebikorwa Kitabo 3 Grammatika ey’olulatini Katekismu ey’abakadde Ow’Omukisa (Mois de Marie) Ekitabo ky’esala Mahagi – Congo. Katekismu mi sakramentu Mahagi – Congo. Weri mi dini; do latini do alur Ebikorwa Kitabo 4 Alifu ey’oluganda Katekismu ey’obutukirivu (de sainteté) Emirimo ku grammatika ey’olulatini (Exercitia latina) Horarium Seminarii Sanctae Familiae 1 Sept 1915 Seminario ey’ekita ekituvu e Bukalasa. Amateka ...

16 336 32 216 132 96 96 202 16 108 392 24 56 94 16 512 100 12 60

Ebikorwa Kitabo 5 Katekismu katoliki (Kirwana)

[impf] 32

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Location Bannabikira A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.Ad.Tab. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. Rubaga A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. Lourdel H. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.Ad.Tab. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. Lourdel H. A.G.M.Afr. A.Ad.Tab. Katigondo Katigondo A.Ad.Tab. Lourdel H. A.G.M.Afr.

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1911 1912 1912

Author

Origin and Growth of the White Fathers’ Press

Date

(Continued)

124

Table 6.1

1921 1921 1921 1921 1921 1921 1922

Gorju Streicher Moullec

Streicher

Streicher Streicher

Streicher

Streicher

Lettre circulaire n° 133 4/11/1917 Habari bnayopashwa na mwanafunzi Bigambo by’edini (Histoire sainte kihaya) Sacre de Sa Grandeur Mgr Forbes. Rubaga 19 mai 1918 Communiqué de l’officialité Lettre circulaire n° 149 ... triduum ... martyrs Abajulizi abesimi Matyasi Mulumba ne Karoli L. Ekkunganyizo ery’ebigambo eby’okwebulirira Abakristu (Life of Christ) Ekirangiriro abasomesa kye balangirira Abakristu ... Directorium pro sacerdotibus indigenis Vic. Ug. Biblia entoito (O. T. runyoro) Directorium pro sacerdotibus indigenis ... Ugand Masomo mepesi Abajulizi abesimi; Matyasi Mulumba ne Karoli Lwanga Ebaluwa n° 159 Ennyonnyola ekitambiro ky’emissa 18/10/1922 Ebaluwa n 160 Ey’okufumbiza abana 11/11/1922 Evanjiri ... na kalendario (runyankole) Ebitabo ebina eby’evanjili (Concordance) Statuts synodaux du Vicariat de l’Uganda Kkubo lya musalaba (Stations of the Cross) Katekismu katoliki ho kitabu ilimo mihayo yose ... Ekirangiriro ekya Karema Akatabo ka liturgia ... (Catechism)

12 8 62 36 12 8 28 246

A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr.

8 32 274 illus. 32 16 28 10

Lourdel H. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.Ad.Tab. A.Ad.Tab. A.G.M.Afr.

12 92 484 408 20 32 12 76

A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. Prov. Arch. Dar Lourdel H. A.G.M.Afr. (Continued)

Ivan Page

1922 1923 1923 1923 1924 1924 1924 1925

Streicher

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1917 1917 1918 1918 1919 1920 1921 1921

Streicher Streicher Cays Nsingisira

1926 1926 1927 1927 1927 1927 1928 1928 1928 1928 1928 [1928] 1928 1929 1929 1929 1930

Fr Timoteo Ssemmogerere

Gorju Lefebvre Rougerie et Dupupet

Title Myendere isuma ya Bakristiani ... (Cibemba) Ebaluwa ... Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro ... Yubileo erangibwa Ebifayo by’Abaroma Olugendo lwa Yozefu Nsingisira ne Deni Kamyuka lwe Bagenda e Roma Akatabo ak’enyimba (Chants) Akatabo k’aritmetika Abajulizi abesimi abe Buganda Amateka n’empisa z’ekibina kya Bannabikira Geography; ekitabo ekisoka ensi awamu (The world) ne Uganda Protectorate Tereza ow’omwana Yezu omutukibivu

Number of pages

Location

112 8 8 216 32 front.

A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr.

144 40 28 62 140

A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr.

32

A.G.M.Afr.

Ekitabo ky’essâla Katekismu ya masakramentu Katekismu ey’abasoka Seminarii maioris Ugandensis statuta et normae Ow’omukisa Muloboza (reader, in 4 fascicules) Grammar ey’oluganda

444 32 32 60 106 68, 68, 60, 124 116

A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. Lourdel H. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr.

Charitas n° 2 [Periodical] Alifu ey’oluganda Conference of heads of Catholic missions in Uganda Evangili eyandikirwe Matayo Mutakatifu (kihaya)

16 16 8 142

A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr.

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1925 1926/1/10 1926/3/10 1926 1926

Author

Origin and Growth of the White Fathers’ Press

Date

(Continued)

126

Table 6.1

1932 1932 1933 1933 1933 1934 1936 1936

ACTS – Kizinza J. Nsubuga [Michel]

Rougerie & Dupupet Streicher

J.T.K. Gomotoka Beauchamp

Amakuru g’entumwa Omuganda mu Bulaya Omulamuzi omutufu (La parfaite supérieure) Katekismu y’abarukubanza Ebikolwa by’abajulizi n’eby’abatukirivu (Vie des martyrs et des saints) Ebikolwa by’abajulizi n’eby’abatukirivu Grammar ey’Oluganda

84 280 72 32 112

A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. Lourdel H. A.G.M.Afr.

348 100

Ebbaluwa enkunganye omusumba w’e Buganda Arithmetic luganda (2 fasc.) Katekismu ey’abagurusi (Vieux – runyankole) Magezi Ntakke (1st edn 1931 – v. Rowe) Emigani ya Eklezia (Runyoro, probably Bukalasa) Ebikolwa ebifunzidda eby’abatukirivu mu buki lunaku ... February

192 68, 68 16 115

A.G.M.Afr. Lourdel H. Makerere A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr. A.G.M.Afr.

278 36

A.G.M.Afr. Lourdel H.

NB: Myendere (1925) No indication of place, but looks like Bukalasa work. Ditto for Directorium, 1921 Archives of the Archdiocese of Tabora (Tanzania) Archivio Generale dei Missionari d’Africa (Rome) Mother-house of the Bannabikira, Masaka (Uganda) Katigondo National Major Seminary, Masaka (Uganda) Archives of the Ugandan Province, Missionaries of Africa, Lourdel House, Kampala (Uganda) Makerere University Library, Kampala (Uganda) Archives of the Tanzanian Province, Missionaries of Africa, Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) Archives of the Archdiocese of Kampala, Rubaga (Uganda)

Ivan Page

Abbreviations: A.Ad.Tab. A.G.M.Afr. Bannabikira Katigondo Lourdel H. Makerere Prov. Arch. Dar Rubaga

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1930 1931 ? 1931 1931 [1931]

Origin and Growth of the White Fathers’ Press

I count 14 circulars of Bishop Streicher, 13 catechisms, and 13 lives of the saints, including the Uganda martyrs; 9 liturgical works – gospels, hymns, stations of the cross; 7 sets of rules, for the seminary, the diocesan congregation of sisters (Bannabikira), or the African priests; 6 grammars; 5 each of synod statutes, syllabaries, other textbooks – and the life of Christ; and smaller numbers of other categories. While the majority of the Bukalasa books are in Luganda, some are in French, some are in Latin, and there is at least one in each of the following languages: Runyoro, Runyankole, Alur, Kirwana, Kihaya, Kizinza, and Kiswahili. My group of ‘miscellaneous’ publications includes only three items, but among them two are particularly interesting because they were composed by Ugandans. In 1926, Joseph Nsingisira published an account of his pilgrimage to Rome; and in or after 1931, J. Nsubuga described in detail his journey to Europe, Jerusalem, and North Africa. We have already seen that some of the seminarians contributed articles to Munno. In 1927, Fr Timoteo Ssemmogerere published a devotional booklet at Bukalasa; he was to go on and write several others. In other words, Ugandans began to turn author. It is typical of missionaries who reach a society where writing is virtually unknown to begin by founding schools and teaching basic literacy in order to transmit their ideals more effectively. Ideology aside, there are interesting side effects to this ‘entangling’ of the histories of communication. It may well be that the missionaries themselves will be the first to study and record the language of the people to whom they are sent, and that theirs will be the first books ever written in that language. Insofar as those who have learned to read also acquire a taste for reading, it becomes necessary to supply them with books. Those who share the missionaries’ faith will want to read and re-read the gospels and the lives of the saints. But, their minds once opened to the influence of reading, they quickly acquire a taste for news of current affairs and the outside world – perhaps influenced by the ‘populist’ format of journals like Munno. Print culture can really be said to have reached the margins when readers become writers and themselves contribute to the pool of reading matter. The White Fathers’ Printing press at Bukalasa was neither the first nor the only press in Uganda, but in tracing its history we can see that it reflects each of these phases in the introduction of print culture to an African society.

Notes 1. See for instance J. F. Faupel, African holocaust: The story of the Uganda martyrs (London: Chapman, 1962). 2. Archivio Generale dei Missionari d’Africa, Rome (hereafter: A.G.M.Afr.) C 13–8.

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129

3. A.G.M.Afr. C 14–27. 4. See my ‘Les débuts de l’Imprimerie des Missionnaires d’Afrique: le rôle du Père Albert Vidal’, in Revue française d’histoire du livre Nos 110–11, 2001, pp. 189–215, especially p. 208. 5. A.G.M.Afr. Casier 163. 6. A.G.M.Afr. 086 296. 7. A.G.M.Afr. 086 345 f. 8. A.G.M.Afr. 086 201. 9. A.G.M.Afr. 082 203. 10. A.G.M.Afr. 088 020. 11. Emile Sauvant, Manuel de la langue bambara Maison-Carrée, Imprimerie de la Maison-Mère, 1905, p. 160. 12. A.G.M.Afr. Fonds Raux Z 44 2b. 13. A.G.M.Afr. 084 090. 14. A.G.M.Afr. 082 771. 15. A.G.M.Afr. 082 285. 16. A.G.M.Afr. 085 203. 17. A.G.M.Afr. 084 190. 18. A.G.M.Afr. 085 207–9. 19. A.G.M.Afr. 088 027. 20. A.G.M.Afr. 085 210. 21. A.G.M.Afr. 085 224–5. 22. John Mary Waliggo, ‘The Catholic Church in the Buddu province of Buganda, 1879–1925’, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1976, p. 23. 23. A.G.M.Afr. Fonds Raux. Loc. cit. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Joseph Antony Zziwa, ‘A history of the formation of the local clergy in the mission of the White Fathers in Buganda, 1893–1962’, Unpublished Th.D. thesis, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1990, p. 91. 27. A.G.M.Afr. 085 253 E. 28. Rapports annuels, 1917–18, p. 160. 29. Ibid., 1921–22, p. 463. 30. Ibid., 1923–4, pp. 451–2. 31. Ibid., 1924–5, pp. 558–9. 32. Ibid., 1928–9, p. 276. 33. Ibid., 1937–8, p. 238. 34. Yves Tourigny, So abundant a harvest: The Catholic Church in Uganda, 1879–1979 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), p. 159; and Archives of Kampala Archdiocese, 909 f° 8. 35. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique. Notices nécrologiques 1954–6, p. 218. 36. A.G.M.Afr. 082 283. 37. A.G.M.Afr. 082 294. 38. A.G.M.Afr. 085 204–5. 39. A.G.M.Afr. 085 213. 40. A.G.M.Afr. 082 316. 41. Rapports annuels, 1910–11, p. 174.

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A New Demand for Old Texts: Philippine Metrical Romances in the Early Twentieth Century Patricia May B. Jurilla

Two of the most distinct characteristics of the metrical romances of the Philippines are anachronism and displacement. Inconsistencies in time and place are so common in the verse narratives that they are practically a convention of the genre in Philippine poetry. Filipino authors evidently took great liberties in presenting foreign characters, fantastic plots, and ‘exotic’ settings due, perhaps, to extravagant imaginations or, more likely, to limitations in knowledge of the larger world outside the Philippine archipelago. As the Filipino historian Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera describes the romances: Not only are they ignorant of, and do they falsify, the face of the earth, but the planetary system itself suffers a radical change. Palms and tamarind trees grow in the vicinity of Moscow; Palestine and Macedonia are covered with prairies ... and whales appear in the Mediterranean. Events which begin in the morning in Macedonia end in the most natural manner in the afternoon of the same day in a place in Babylonia; and a princess of Aragon, captured early in the morning in Sicily, converses at midnight and without an interpreter with a Moro of Samarcand.1 But anachronism in Philippine metrical romances goes beyond being a standard element of the genre. As printed books, as articles in the history of Philippine literary publishing, the romances also bear about them a sense of incongruity in place and time. Considering that the Philippine metrical romances are generally about persons, places, and periods so remote and alien to Filipinos, it seems peculiar enough that the romances were the most popular form of secular literature during the Spanish colonial period (1565–1896) in 130

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the Philippines. Perhaps stranger still is the fact that they continued to be printed in the twentieth century, when a new worldview was revealed to the nation under the American administration (1901–46). However, what is particularly remarkable is that not only did the poems continue to be published, they actually maintained their popularity. Metrical romances may well be considered the literary bestsellers in the Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century. As texts that have traversed borders of time and place, the metrical romances of the Philippines make for a particularly interesting subject of study. This chapter explores how these old texts were published during the early twentieth century and why there was a new (or renewed) demand for them. It pays special attention to the case of Juan Martinez, an important figure in the Philippine book trade at that time. I should add here that my approach in this chapter is deliberately confined to the question of how this form of literature addresses Filipino national concerns. In spite of Sydney Shep’s persuasive call in the first chapter to this volume for a history of the book that moves beyond the boundaries of the national, I believe this move has to be seen as something of a luxury; for more recently de-colonised areas such as the Philippines, which have for years been forcibly denied any sense of what their ‘nation’ actually is, and how it is constituted, a national history is a good place – perhaps the only place – to start. While even here there are allusions and traditions – literary, linguistic, and formal – that migrate, I argue that we might usefully see the historically specific popularity of the metrical romance as constituting an ‘imagined community’ of sorts.

Philippine metrical romances: Awit and corrido In Philippine poetry, metrical romances come in two forms – the awit and the corrido. The awit is made up of lines in twelve syllables, the corrido in eight. Both forms consist of stanzas in quatrains, typically in monorhyme. Drawn from Spanish models, the romances tell of the lives of monarchs, warriors, and saints in faraway kingdoms and bygone times. As Damiana L. Eugenio notes in an invaluable study on awits and corridos, the poems were based on the sagas of Charlemagne, Arthur, and the Fall of Troy; Spanish history, legends, and chivalry books; the lives of the saints and the Bible.2 The most common themes in the poems are romantic love, religion, and magic.3 The genre of the metrical romance was introduced into the Philippines by the Spanish colonisers, probably as early as the establishment of colonial rule by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi in 1565. Romances, as well as

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Philippine Metrical Romances

Spanish tales and legends, were transmitted orally, for royal decrees prohibited the entry of books of fiction into the Spanish colonies. In the seminal study on Philippine metrical romances, Dean S. Fansler suggests that the secular texts were told to the Filipino natives by the soldiers of Legazpi, while the missionary priests introduced the Passion story, the saint legends, and the religious plays.4 More stories must have been disseminated as the Spanish regime grew in the seventeenth century. The metrical romances took root in the islands, and by the second half of the eighteenth century, local versions were already being written.5 Even though printing had existed in the Philippines since 1593, local metrical romances were still circulated by oral means and in manuscript form during the eighteenth century. This was due to the high cost of printing and the strict censorship enforced by the government and the Church.6 In the nineteenth century, though, metrical romances came to be printed in various local languages and produced in large numbers. In Tagalog, which was the most prominent of the vernacular languages and which would become the basis of the Philippine national language (Filipino), there were around two hundred titles published.7 New original narratives, which were based on Filipino history and folklore, also began appearing late in the century. The romances ‘were printed in the cities and towns and then hawked, sold in sidewalk stalls, and brought to the most remote barrios by itinerant peddlers’.8 Scholars primarily attribute the enormous appeal of the metrical romances during the Spanish colonial period to the temporary escape they provided to Filipinos from the harsh realities of life under foreign rule. Pardo de Tavera offers a further explanation: at that period it was the only type of secular literature available.9 But in the early twentieth century, Filipinos experienced basic freedoms they had never known before, including freedom of the press and freedom of enterprise. Public education was widely available, and massive improvements had been made in practically all aspects of life. So what appeal could the metrical romance still have offered its audiences? Why did the fantastic lives of Don Felizardo of Barcelona, or Prince Modesto of Ireland, or Princess Florentina of Germany retain a grip on the imaginations of the Filipinos? Why were metrical romances published and distributed in extraordinary numbers throughout the Philippines from the 1900s till the 1920s? How did they become literary bestsellers of the time? The case of the bookseller-stationer-publisher Juan Martinez offers some possible answers to these questions. Like many members of the book trade in his day, Martinez made a lucrative business out of producing and selling books in the vernacular languages. Awits and corridos were

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valuable products in commercial ventures such as Martinez’s since the works involved minimal investment and assured steady profit. The romances became, as it were, backlist items for publishers like him. Yet, in a crucial matter, Martinez is unlike the others: there is slightly more information available in his case. What I want to add to the invaluable accounts of Filipino vernacular publishing mentioned above, then, is a case study of a single publisher whose stock largely consisted of – and whose fortunes largely depended on – reprinted metrical romances. In this way, I suggest, we might be able to add a few concrete facts and maybe some new insights to previous speculations about the availability and astonishing longevity of these texts. It is not my intention here to speculate on what ‘popularity’ means – I do not plan to engage with the tired old debates about whether popular fiction represents majority fears or desires, whether it is essentially subversive or conservative in nature, or whether it is even worth studying at all. What I am offering in this chapter is a book historical approach based on surviving material evidence, in the belief that it is a valuable way of filling in evidential blanks in the larger canvas of Filipino print culture. As a rule, materials on Philippine publishing are scarce since, throughout the history of the country, the organisation and preservation of data on the book trade have been pursued neither exhaustively nor efficiently. Many documents and books were lost during the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Others did not endure the humid tropical climate and the termites, or the fires and the earthquakes. In Martinez’s case, as in that of most pre-World War II publishers, no business records appear to have survived. But valuable information on his life and publishing experience is available in the Dictionary of Philippine Biography (DPB). Furthermore, copies of many of his publications, particularly metrical romances, have survived and are now accessible in libraries. The books provide illuminating details on his practices as a publisher and bookseller – as well as general insights on the business of books in the Philippines during the early twentieth century.

Juan Martinez and his metrical romances Juan Martinez (1859–1934) began his trade late in the Spanish colonial period as an itinerant pedlar. According to the DPB, he sold rosaries, scapulars, printed illustrations of saints, novenas, metrical romances, and other religious objects in front of churches in Manila and in the neighbouring provinces. By 1900, he had settled in Manila and was operating a stand near the church of Binondo, the Chinese settlement in the city.

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In 1902, he set up a small shop in the same area with the sign Libreria de J. Martinez (Bookshop of J. Martinez).10 Martinez ventured into publishing eventually, beginning possibly as early as 1901. He issued ‘old popular works’, which he had printed in the presses of friends. In 1905, he acquired a Minerva platen jobber and began printing various publications himself. His business had grown into the Imprenta, Libreria at Papeleria ni J. Martinez (Printing Press, Bookshop, and Stationery Shop of J. Martinez). By 1917, he was flourishing in his trade: he was operating four shops, selling books in retail and wholesale, printing his own publications as well as accepting various print jobs from clients, and publishing a stream of books. Among establishments of his kind, he employed the largest number of workers, about fifty at one time.11 Martinez issued over one hundred romance titles in Tagalog. His romances look almost like pamphlets: thin books, ranging from 32 to 96 pages, in octavo size (around 18 ⫻ 13 cm) and printed on newsprint (See Figure 7.1). They were bound in gatherings, typically of four leaves, glued together in the spine, with newsprint wrappers for their covers. Martinez apparently allowed nothing to go to waste in his romance books; he usually used every available page to advertise his business. Typically, the insides of the covers as well as the back cover itself were printed with lists of titles available in his bookshops (See Figure 7.2). According to his back cover advertisements, he had published at least 54 Tagalog romance titles by 1907, 89 by 1914, and 100 by 1921 (See Figure 7.3). Martinez generally printed 5000 copies per edition of a metrical romance; he reduced the print run to 2000 to 3000 copies for the less popular titles and increased it to 10,000 for the more popular ones. The editions took a year or so to sell out, after which new impressions were made to meet the public demand.12 Many of Martinez’s titles went on to second or third reprints, some even to fifth, such as Francisco Baltazar’s Florante at Laura and Honorio M. Lopez’s José Rizal. They were evidently much in demand, probably as much for their range as for their competitive price. There is, however, a sense of shoddiness about Martinez’s romances. For one, typographical errors abound in the texts, even in the covers and title pages (See Figure 7.4). Also, many books bear no date, even in cases where the number of reprinting is identified. Then, the imprint appears in a number of variations. For example, a series of books published in 1915 uses the imprints ‘Limb. [Limbagan] ni J. Martinez’, ‘Imprenta at Libreria ni J. Martinez’,

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Figure 7.1 Front cover of Búhay na pinagdaanan ni Emilio na anác ni Artemio at ni Ángela sa cahariang Europa (The Life of Emilio, son of Artemio and Angela in the kingdom of Europe), second printing, 1914

and ‘Libreria de J. Martinez’. On the whole, he seems to have paid little attention to details, leaving errors and inconsistencies unchecked. Perhaps this was done to spare the expense of resetting types or having new plates made. Perhaps these details were simply taken for granted by Martinez to begin with because he did not know better. At any rate, the inconsistencies seemed to matter little to a readership which may well have been so familiar with the tales already – both through oral traditions and through earlier reprinted versions – that textual accuracy was less important than the freshness of an easily affordable new copy. It is important to consider that Martinez was operating at a time when native sensibilities were changing under the American influence, when Filipinos were taking on for themselves the ideals of resourcefulness

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Figure 7.2 Front cover of Calugod-lugod na búhay na pinagdaanan nang mag-asaua ni Adan at ni Eva (The Delightful Life of the Couple Adam and Eve), second printing, 1924

and self-improvement held by their new colonisers. The opportunity to engage and succeed in business became open to individuals like Martinez, who came from a poor family and had received hardly any formal education but who nevertheless possessed an enterprising spirit. It was also a time when censorship, which had been imposed by Spanish colonial rule for nearly three hundred years, was finally lifted. This allowed secular texts to circulate more widely, which in turn fostered the habit of reading in many Filipinos. Many entrepreneurs thus found a profitable livelihood in the book trade. But the publishing industry at the time was not at all well organised, much less guided by any set of professional principles or standards. Like other publishers of his day, Martinez must have had only his experiences and instincts to direct him in the finer aspects of printing and publishing. Like other entrepreneurs,

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Figure 7.3 Inside front and back covers of Manga kahanga-hangang ualong pu at ualong himala ni S. Vicente Ferer (The Eighty-eight Wondrous Miracles of St Vicente Ferer), displaying advertisements listing books sold at the shops of Juan Martinez (‘Mga Aklat na Ipinagbibili sa mga Tindahan ni J. Martinez’)

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Figure 7.4 Front cover and title page of Buhay na pinagdaanan nang tatlong binatang magcacaibigan na si Arturo, Lauro at Rosalio at nang isang dalaga na si Perpetua sa bayang Betania sa cahariang Egipto (The Life of the Three Young Friends Arturo, Lauro and Rosalio and the Maiden Perpetua in the Town of Bethany in the Kingdom of Egypt) Note the slight variation in the imprints.

he must have engaged in trade primarily for profit. As Hermenegildo Cruz noted in 1906, the publishing houses of the day did not differ from other businesses: their ultimate goal was to make money.13 Martinez sold his metrical romances at 20, 25, or 30 centavos each, prices well within the reach of the masses. In 1908, unskilled labourers earned daily wages at an average of 30 centavos and skilled labourers 3 pesos and 70 centavos.14 The romances were cheap books suited for popular consumption as opposed to other local or foreign works that could be afforded only by the higher classes. A rather extreme example of the latter is an imported edition of the Spanish novel Walter el bastardo ó poder del amor (Walter the Bastard or The Power of Love) by Angeles Hernández de Larrea sold by Martinez in his bookshops. The two-volume novel in fine binding was priced at 18 pesos, well out of the reach of most readers.

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How Martinez was able to sell his metrical romances at inexpensive prices is clear enough: in time-honoured tradition he printed large editions and used the cheapest kind of paper. Possibly, he was also able to limit his production costs by doing without the services of editors and proofreaders. His Tagalog romances still kept to the style used during the Spanish colonial period despite the prevailing practice among writers and publishers of using the modern Tagalog orthography, which abandoned the Spanish influences and followed a spelling based on the native syllabary. Other publishing houses evidently employed editors since they issued romances in new Tagalog versions, but Martinez’s texts hardly deviated from that of nineteenth-century editions; his romances (again in a time-honoured tradition borrowed from the West) were essentially reprints of old texts. Martinez also managed to keep his book prices cheap because, more often than not, he was able to avoid paying for another kind of labour – that of the authors. Author’s royalties, the DPB notes, did not bother Martinez much. In accordance with the customary practice of the day, he ‘bought the author’s work outright, or paid him partly in cash and partly in copies, or gave him one-fifth of the printed copies’.15 With the metrical romances, Martinez had very few authors to deal with, for they were mostly unknown or dead. In such cases, Martinez claimed the copyright for himself. Martinez died in 1934. His children Roberto and Juliana took over the business but could not sustain it for long. The Imprenta Libreria at Papeleria ni J. Martinez had had its day.

Publishing metrical romances in the early twentieth century The publishing of metrical romances was an ideal venture for Juan Martinez and other publishers of Philippine literature during the early twentieth century. It involved practically no difficulty or expense in acquiring material, for there was a great body of texts already in the public domain. Even obtaining romances protected by copyright also entailed only minor costs, for authors at that time ‘were not so much concerned with getting decent royalties as seeing their names in print’.16 Publishing romances required minimal investment in printing, for the texts were short and simple. And it offered the guarantee of profit since public demand was strong and steady. This is, perhaps, less surprising than it seems. The awits and corridos were old favourites with which the Filipino people were not quite ready or inclined to part. Without speculating too wildly about what the relative popularity of a given text can tell us about the collective psychology

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of its readers, it seems reasonable enough to assert that the romances were embedded in the habits and customs of a nation still as concerned with carving out a distinct and recognisable identity from the wreckage of their colonial past as progressing towards a modernity once more borrowed from the West. As Fansler noted in 1916, ‘These stories not only make up the body of most of the entertaining reading of the lower and middle classes, but they also furnish passages for quotation and recitation on every conceivable occasion’ – from toiling in the paddy-fields to conversing in social gatherings. Moreover, the stories of the romances were dramatised in the native komedya plays of every fiesta, the annual festival observed by each town in commemoration of its patron saint.17 On the simplest level, of course, the metrical romances were sources of amusement, providing audiences with a diversion from the tedium and adversities of everyday existence. They featured romantic love, fantasy, and happy endings. These were elements that the public valued in literature as ingrained in them by the literary tradition of the Spanish colonial period, and as adapted for use since in their own hybrid traditions. But there are further dimensions to these texts. One other important element that contributed to the mass appeal of the romances was didacticism. The romances were not merely escapist; they also served as sources of religious and moral instruction, particularly for the less educated. They animated Christian doctrine by presenting models of devotion and service to God, filial piety, constancy and fidelity in love, among others (See Figure 7.5). Their fairy-tale conclusions – good defeats evil, injustice is set right, suffering is ended and rewarded – encouraged belief and hope in the salvation promised to the faithful if not in this life then in the next. The romances offered the comforts and pleasures found in the familiar: they were stories that many generations grew up with, and they were in languages that were the people’s own. They were also distinctly Filipino in some aspects, despite retaining features of their foreign models. For instance, according to Eugenio, the portrayal of village life conformed more to the Philippine experience than that of the countries where the stories were set. Then, many romances were altered according to local customs and morals, particularly in the matters of courtship, marriage, and religious practice. Finally, some romances had local sites included in their settings, such as specific Philippine mountains.18 These metrical romances were, in short, part of the construction of a national heritage of the Philippines. In the early twentieth century, they were a popular means of preserving the past and coping with the present, when radical changes were being instituted by a new foreign power: the demand for romances can be related to the stirring of

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Figure 7.5 Front cover of Salita at búhay na pinagdaanan nang dalawang mag-amá sa isang aldeang sacop nang reinong España (The Words and Life of Two Fathers and Sons in a Village under the Kingdom of Spain), published in 1918

nationalist sentiments among Filipinos at that time. The American administration prohibited the advocacy of Philippine independence, forbade the display of the Filipino flag, and established English as the official language of the nation. In the face of such policies, Philippine nationalism manifested itself in the celebration of local languages and literatures. Filipino journalists, critics, and scholars praised and promoted the literary tradition of the nation, particularly literature in Tagalog. New writings emerged alongside republished old texts. As Martinez’s case demonstrates, the romances figured significantly in the latter aspect. While the romances were generally apolitical in nature, they were regarded as expressions of Filipino talent. And as such, it’s not stretching a point to claim that they may have served nationalist or political interests.

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In some cases, their relevance to the resistance to American colonialism is obvious. Florante at Laura and José Rizal, for instance, were the most popular among Martinez’s titles, and this was by no mere coincidence. Florante at Laura was considered the best poem in the Tagalog language and its author, Francisco Baltazar, the best Tagalog poet; it had been read since the late nineteenth century as a political allegory depicting the sufferings of the Filipino people under the oppressive Spanish regime. José Rizal, whose novels inspired the revolution against Spain, was revered as a national martyr. Tied as they were to the colonial past of the nation, the stories of the lives of Florante and Laura and of Rizal were especially significant to Filipinos who had to live once again under the rule of foreigners. Other romances may have had a similar appeal to readers, such as the awit on the lives of the Filipino priests Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, who were unjustly accused as agitators of the mutiny against the Spaniards in 1872; or on the legendary Spanish hero Bernardo Carpio, who was a symbol of freedom for Filipino revolutionaries in 1896.

Other literary publications of the period Metrical romances were popular publications indeed, but they were not the only literary writings that enjoyed the patronage of mass audiences. Novels were also widely circulated and read. During the early twentieth century, Tagalog novels in serial form enjoyed such popularity that readers bought the newspapers mainly for the fiction rather than the news.19 When weekly magazines began appearing in the 1920s, they sold briskly, too, primarily because they featured fiction.20 However, novels in book form, which began to appear in 1905, did not thrive well. To begin with, publishers were wary about investing in novels, for the genre was still new to Filipino readers and had no tradition yet that could serve as a guarantee for book sales.21 Martinez, for instance, published only six novels during his entire career. The caution with which publishers regarded novels is also partially explained by the fact that many authors paid for the printing of their texts, thus cutting out the middle man. They then placed their novels in bookshops, such as Martinez’s, and also sold copies themselves. If one were to consider the number of titles that went on to be reprinted as an indication of the commercial success of the novel in book form, the evidence suggests a dismal performance. Of the 328 books published from 1903 to 1938, only 8 titles were issued in second reprint, 3 in third reprint, and 1 in fourth reprint.22 As we have seen, reprints (even shoddy ones) of metrical romances far outperformed novels here. Of the

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first editions themselves, the novelist Faustino Aguilar paints a grim picture: many copies ended up as wrapping paper in Chinese shops or as commodities sold along with rusty metal scraps, screws, and nails in junk shops. For many novels, the best that fate had in store was a space in the baskets of church vendors. The books were peddled together with scapulars, beads, candles, and wax figures, of human ears, eyes, and bodies. Sometimes the wax ears and eyes would all have been bought already, while the novels remained unsold.23 Among the wares peddled by church vendors then, the novels were evidently the least likely to be sold. As commodities, novels undoubtedly flourished better as serials in newspapers or magazines. Typically costing 10 centavos per issue, the periodicals were cheaper than books and offered more value for money to the masses; more prosaically still, while serials served primarily, of course, as reading materials, they then realised an important after-life value as scrap paper which vendors used as wrappers or which were sold to junk shops. Such resale value constituted an important source of extra income for many Filipino families.

The metrical romances as bestsellers In the Philippine book trade of the early twentieth century, then, metrical romances fared better as commercial and cultural products than novels for reasons – albeit speculative ones – which I have outlined above. But bestsellers are by nature ephemeral. As John Sutherland describes them, ‘Bestsellers fit their cultural moment as neatly as a well-fitting glove. And, typically, no other moment.’24 So did the metrical romances of the Philippines during the first decades of the twentieth century. They appealed to the imagination and the condition of the Filipino people during a period of transition. When that moment had passed, when American colonisation had practically steered the Philippines away from its Spanish heritage and had all but changed the face of the nation, the romances not only lost their popularity but also came to be condemned. In a speech delivered before an assembly of teachers in 1920, Pardo de Tavera denounced the romances as ‘all lengthy, exaggerated, puerile, and absurd in the extreme’.25 He articulated an opinion that would be shared by a new generation of Filipinos, one that had come of age in the 1920s. They were fluent in English, American-orientated, and alienated from the native heritage; they were not interested in romances anymore. By the 1930s, when Martinez’s children were struggling to maintain their late father’s business, metrical romances were already languishing as commodities. The American scholar Harley Harris Bartlett observed

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then that big bundles of some of the later editions remained unsold.26 Even years later, a portion of Martinez’s stock was apparently still in bookshops or perhaps in storage. Some surviving copies of his romances bear the stamp of the Office of the Japanese Military Administration, dated 13 July 1943, indicating that the materials had passed the examination of the state censors. The stamps on the books also reveal that the copies still had not been purchased up to that time. While metrical romances had fallen out of the mainstream, the genre disappeared but slowly from the literary and publishing scene. A few new titles still appeared as late as the 1940s and, as the illustration below (Figure 7.6) demonstrates, there was a certain amount of

Figure 7.6 Front cover of Ang marilag na Virgen nang Kapayapaan (The Beautiful Virgin of Peace), published after 1925 The books bear the censorship stamp of the Office of the Japanese Military Administration, dated 13 July 1943.

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official sanction still attached to them. In fact, the old titles continued to be reprinted and issued in new editions in Tagalog until the 1950s and in other vernacular languages until the 1960s. However, by then, the romance was no more than a relic from the past, and the dwindling reissues – having served their purpose – finally dried up with the coming of age of a new, more confident, postcolonial Filipino generation.

Notes 1. Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, ‘The Heritage of Ignorance’, in Thinking for Ourselves: A Collection of Representative Filipino Essays, 2nd edn, Eliseo Quirino and Vicente M. Hilario, eds (Manila: Oriental Commercial, 1928), pp. 5–6. 2. Damiana L. Eugenio, Awit and Corrido: Philippine Metrical Romances (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1987), pp. xix–xxi. 3. Ibid., p. xxxii. 4. Dean S. Fansler, ‘Metrical Romances in the Philippines’, Journal of American Folk-Lore, 29 (1916), 203–34 (p. 204), repr. online, JSTOR, Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici⫽0021-8715%28191604%2F06%2929%3A112% 3C203%3AMRITP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J. 5. Eugenio, p. xvi. 6. Ibid., p. xvi. 7. Ibid., p. xvii. 8. Ibid., p. xviii. 9. Pardo de Tavera, p. 5. 10. ‘Martinez, Juan’, in Dictionary of Philippine Biography, 4 vols, E. Arsenio Manuel, ed. (Quezon City: Filipiniana Publications, 1955–95), I (1955), pp. 275–8. 11. All information in this passage ibid., p. 276. 12. Ibid., p. 277. 13. Hermenegildo Cruz, Kun Sino Ang Kumathâ Ng ‘Florante’: Kasaysayan Ng Búhay ni Francisco Baltazar at Pag-Uulat Nang Kanyang Karununga’t Kadakilaan (Maynila: Libreria ‘Manila Filatélico’, 1906), p. 42. 14. Hamilton W. Wright, A Handbook of the Philippines, 2nd edn (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co, 1908), p. 356. 15. ‘Martinez’, in DPB, p. 277. 16. Ibid., p. 277. 17. Fansler, pp. 204–5. 18. Eugenio, pp. xxxvi–xxxviii. 19. Iñigo Ed. Regalado, Ang Pagkaunlad ng Nobelang Tagalog (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1939), p. 13. 20. Jose Esperanza Cruz, ‘Malaki ang Naitulong ng mga Lingguhang Tagalog sa Paglilinang at Pagpapalaganap ng Wikang Pambansa’, in Sampaksaan ng mga Nobelistang Tagalog: Mga Panayam Tungkol sa Nobelang Tagalog na Binigkas Noong Abril 11, 1969 (Quezon City: Ang Aklatan, Unibersidad ng Pilipinas, 1974), p. 40.

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21. Faustino Aguilar, Ang Nobelang Tagalog: Kahapon, Ngayón at Bukas (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1949), p. 6. 22. ‘Talàan ng Mga Nobelang Tagalog’, in Regalado, Ang Pagkaunlad ng Nobelang Tagalog, pp. 30–46. 23. Aguilar, p. 7. 24. John Sutherland, Reading the Decades: Fifty Years of the Nation’s Bestselling Books (London: BBC, 2002), p. 7. 25. Pardo de Tavera, p. 5. 26. Harley Harris Bartlett, ‘Vernacular Literature in the Philippines: A Book Collector’s Year in Manila’, Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, 42 (1936), p. 221.

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Greene, Waugh, and the Lure of Travel Lynda Prescott

Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene were contemporaries, born in 1903 and 1904 respectively in what would later be labelled the ‘Metroland’ northwest of London, who became friends in their mid-30s. They were both Catholic converts, and although their political inclinations diverged, their names are often yoked together, not only as Catholic novelists but also as writers who were to a large extent formed by the experiences and atmosphere of the 1930s and the Second World War. As well as establishing considerable reputations as novelists, however, each of them travelled widely and produced a number of non-fiction books and articles based on their travels, especially in the early stages of their careers. In terms of literary history, these formative writing years for Greene and Waugh, from the early 1930s to the end of Second World War, sometimes fall into the dip between ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ studies. Most transitional periods afford rich opportunities for examining processes of change, and one interesting literary shift that can be observed in this period is the changing status of travel writing. As Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs point out in their introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing: ‘Writing and travel have always been intimately connected. The traveller’s tale is as old as fiction itself’;1 but it is only comparatively recently that the genre has attracted critical attention. This time lag was not due to any lack of material. All through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the spread of Western imperialism and colonisation opened up new areas of the world to European travellers, and there was a considerable public appetite for the resultant writings, in all sorts of modes, from the distinctly personal to the scientific or anthropological. The tendency for writers or would-be writers to travel and generate literary materials from those travels accelerated in the 147

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twentieth century, dramatically so in the 1930s. The popularity of travel writing guaranteed its commercial importance, though it would still take some time for the critical perspective to change, and for travel writing to become travel literature. In the course of discussing some of the work by Greene and Waugh that falls into the genre of travel writing, I have three aims in mind. The first, simply, is to illustrate some general points about the significance of travel writing in the 1930s. Although the focus here is on two British writers whose work was published mostly in Britain, travel writing – by its nature, and particularly in the 1930s – inevitably draws attention to those ‘historiographical goalposts such as metropolis and frontier, centre and periphery’ that Sydney Shep discusses in Chapter 1 of this volume (p. 16). In reaction against its long critical neglect, travel writing has of late dug itself into an indefensible trench, presenting itself to the world both as a separable genre and as an academic specialisation. But in fact there are few more explicit examples of ‘Books Without Borders’ than travel writing, a genre which by definition depends on global circulation, not only in the material form of books but also in the human form of writers and the less easily quantifiable but no less important form of ideas. Placing a chapter on travel writing within the wider context of colonial/postcolonial book history as represented by the current volume, I suggest, enables its rescue from the ghetto of academic specialism and reinstates it on the interdisciplinary global stage where it belongs. The second aim is to emphasise what has been noted in numerous commentaries on the two novelists’ work – that is, the close relationship between different kinds of texts by each writer. For both Greene and Waugh, travel writing was not merely a money-spinner but often provided the foundation for fictional writing. The third aim arises from the fact that, by its nature, literature of this kind, from this period, often addresses questions of Empire and colonialism. However, rather than homing in on the explicitly political dimension of the texts under discussion, I shall focus on how Greene and Waugh envisaged the relationship between the categories of ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’. In early twentieth-century anthropology, these were usually seen as opposing terms, but not necessarily dressed with the same associations that had coloured their usage in the heyday of Empire. Ethnographic and archaeological studies had by this time effectively challenged nineteenthcentury theories of racial determinism, and social evolutionists were now describing ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ societies within the same conceptual frame. Although to twenty-first-century readers the terms

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‘savage’, ‘native’ and ‘primitive’ may still seem freighted with colonialist assumptions and prejudices, in early twentieth-century usage – of the term ‘primitive’, especially – a complex range of meanings was building up. Interest in ‘primitive mentality’, for example, filtered through from the work of anthropologists such as James Frazer and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl into early twentieth-century psychoanalysis, and, more generally, as Western social, religious and political orthodoxies crumbled, ‘the primitive’ held out an intriguing alternative route of enquiry into the nature of human existence and essence. We can find traces of this kind of enquiry in the travel writings of Greene and Waugh, although it may sometimes be expressed in language that jars with twenty-first-century sensibilities.

The 1930s and travel writing Looking back on the 1930s, Evelyn Waugh described it as an ‘unencumbered decade’2 when ‘the going was good’. He used this last phrase as the title for a collection of his travel writings published in 1945; in the preface to that collection he writes: These were the years when Mr Peter Fleming went to the Gobi Desert, Mr Graham Greene to the Liberian hinterland; Robert Byron … to the ruins of Persia … I never aspired to being a great traveller. I was simply a young man, typical of my age; we travelled as a matter of course.3 Later critics endorse this point about typicality. Paul Fussell’s study of British literary travelling between the wars, Abroad, discusses the work of scores of writers, mostly young like Greene and Waugh, and mostly male as the quotation from Waugh suggests, who took off in search of places often as far away as possible from Britain. Fussell also talks about the ‘travel atmosphere’4 of this period, when an enormous number of books and articles declared themselves as ‘A Journey to …’, or ‘Letters from …’ or carried some geographical reference in their title. Even nontravel books were permeated by images of and allusions to travel: in addition to the traditional open road, other means of travelling – trains, ships (especially the art-deco liner) and planes – are everywhere in writing of the 1930s. Why was travelling ‘a matter of course’ for Waugh and his contemporaries? An older Graham Greene wrote that ‘we were a generation brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous disillusionment of the First World War, so we went looking for adventure’.5 Less positively, Valentine Cunningham suggests in British Writers of the

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Thirties that the desire to escape Britain, and especially to escape England, was particularly strong at this time. Alongside the harsh social realities of the period, many writers and artists sensed a kind of stultifying provincialism at home. It seemed, says Cunningham, that ‘[i]mportance, creative innovativeness, the centres of art and politics were … sited away from Britain. They were abroad, elsewhere’. He quotes Cyril Connolly, writing in 1929: ‘“England is a problem … there is no place in England for a serious rebel. If you hate both diehards and bright young things you have, like Huxley, Lawrence, Joyce, etc. to go and live abroad.”’6

Finances and literary markets Modernism had certainly reshaped the intellectual map, of Europe especially, and internationalism of the socialist variety would propel many British writers abroad for shorter or longer periods during the decade. But there were also strong financial motives for the travel-boom of the 1930s. There was a ready market for articles and books about travel. A dedicated journal, the Geographical Magazine, modelled on the successful American National Geographic, was founded in 1935, and at the other end of the market there was the long-running Wide World magazine (‘The true adventure magazine for men’) with its motto: ‘Truth is Stranger than Fiction’. Besides this, many newspapers and more general magazines published articles about travel: Greene and Waugh published such works in the Spectator, the Graphic, Harper’s Bazaar, even Vogue, although the latter was perhaps not a natural outlet for tales of intrepid journeys through the jungle. Besides the magazine and newspaper articles, and the proliferation of guidebooks intended for British and American readers, the kind of travel book designed more for fireside reading than as an accompaniment to actual journeys was enjoying immense popularity. Some of these appeared in special series, such as Jonathan Cape’s pocket-sized Traveller’s Library volumes; the series, begun in 1926, swelled to 180 titles by 1932, with over a million copies in print.7 Some writers, such as Robert Byron and Peter Fleming, built their entire careers on the development of the travel book as a distinct genre: it was their speciality. But for numerous others – we could list, for example, Auden, MacNeice, Isherwood, Peter Quennell, John Lehmann, besides Waugh and Greene – travel books were a way of supplementing their incomes as poets or novelists. Not only could they look forward to royalties from the books but publishers and editors were extremely

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willing to offer generous advances to cover the costs of travel. In 1935 Greene was able to fund his journey to Liberia with a publisher’s advance of £350, well above the average £200. He was able to negotiate even better terms for his visit to Mexico in 1938. Waugh’s journeyings were financed in a variety of ways. His first travel book, Labels, was the product of a Mediterranean trip on a Norwegian cruise-ship whose owners had been persuaded by Waugh’s agent to offer him and his wife free passage in return for some publicity. Sections of the ensuing travel book appeared in the Fortnightly Review and the Architectural Review before book-publication. (The range of publication outlets for this kind of writing indicates, incidentally, the multifarious nature of the travel book as a genre: Labels includes a long passage on the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, who in 1930 was little known outside Spain, hence the Architectural Review piece.) For his next journey, to Ethiopia, Waugh was officially a journalist, covering the coronation of Haile Selassie for The Times, and he tried to get his agent to finance later expeditions elsewhere by taking ‘any orders for travel articles – far flung stuff impenetrable Guiana forests, toughs in diamond mines, Devils Island, Venezuela. Particularly require payment on embarkation if possible’.8

Destinations Many British writers of the interwar years found the kind of escape they were looking for in Europe, especially the outer edges of Europe, from Iceland to the southern fringes of the Mediterranean and eastward to the politically exciting edges of the Soviet Union. Escaping to the Continent, even remote corners of it, was comparatively easy because Europe was thoroughly covered by tourist networks that had been developing for the best part of a century. After the First World War many European countries had their Offices or Ministries of Tourism, and although some parts of Europe had been relying on the trade of the travel industry long before this, by the 1920s and 30s tourism was recognised as a significant economic factor all over the Continent. ‘Travel’, in the romantic sense of the word, was barely possible in Europe; everyone was to some degree a tourist – and paid tourists’ prices. But as Waugh pointed out in a book review for the Spectator in 1932, there were still ‘numerous blank patches on the maps of Africa and South America’; the common opinion that the whole world had been ‘discovered’ was only true to a limited degree, he maintained.9 For both Waugh and Greene, as for Conrad before them, the idea of blank spaces

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on maps was inherently fascinating. The very title of Greene’s first travel book, Journey Without Maps, is, at the most literal level, a reference to the fact that for some parts of the world maps were still so tentative as to be virtually useless. But such territories, though they might still be unmapped, were by the early twentieth century apprehended as parts of a fast-shrinking world whose contours were coloured, for the Western traveller, by an awareness of interrelatedness. Helen Carr points out, in an essay on ‘Modernism and travel (1880–1940)’, that this was the beginning of the era of globalisation in which we live today.10 By the interwar period travel writing could no longer be heroic; pessimism about Western modernity tinged travel books as it did other forms of literature, and inevitably the subject matter of much travel writing brought to the surface ambivalence or anxiety about the ideologies that had supported imperialism. More positively, perhaps, the growth of cultural anthropology in the early twentieth century made it easier to conceptualise the world in terms of a ‘mosaic’ of separate cultures.11 What seemed to appeal particularly to travel writers such as Greene and Waugh as they took off to more distant destinations was the experience of being in cultural borderlands where separate cultures had not yet reached accommodation with each other.

Waugh’s journeys Evelyn Waugh’s first journey to Africa took him to Ethiopia (which he often calls ‘Abyssinia’), Aden, Zanzibar and Kenya. In the resulting book, Remote People, there are clear contrasts between the section titled ‘Ethiopian Empire’ and the later ‘British Empire’ – he evidently enjoyed the latter more than he had expected, finding an English way of life there that was no longer possible in England,12 but the real meat of the book is in the Ethiopian section. The coronation of the new Emperor in December 1930 was an important international occasion attended by many European dignitaries as well as an army of journalists. The Ethiopian episodes of Remote People cover not only these events in Addis Ababa but also other travels in Ethiopia, including a visit to the monastery at Debra Lebanos in the company of an absurdly reverential American ecclesiologist. In Waugh’s account of things, the collision between these different worlds – Ethiopia and the West – generally produces hilarious disorder. He delights in the incongruous, the chaotic, the downright farcical: Alice in Wonderland provides, he says, the nearest equivalent to the ‘peculiar flavour of galvanised and translated reality’13 that is life in Addis Ababa.

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As well as his newspaper despatches (usually disappointingly late because, unlike more seasoned journalists, he insisted on waiting to write about the events he witnessed until they had actually happened) Waugh was able to generate from this journey not only the travel book Remote People (1931) but also the plot – and many details – of his third novel, Black Mischief, published the following year. His accounts of the international community of journalists in Remote People also resurface in the later novel, Scoop (1938). Both these novels, set in Britain and Africa, achieve a delicate balance between the barbarism of the West, epitomised in Mayfair, and the moral chaos that Waugh’s protagonists encounter in the jungle of Africa. Waugh’s next major expedition was to British Guiana and the interior of Brazil in the winter of 1932–3. He financed the trip by asking his agent to guarantee an overdraft of £100, hoping to repay this with fees from commissioned travel articles.14 The title of the travel book that came out of this journey, Ninety-two Days, suggests a jail sentence, and it was indeed a punishing and miserable expedition for Waugh, but even in the most inaccessible corners of British Guiana, as everywhere, Waugh found comparisons with England. In one passage in Ninety-two Days, when he is several days up-river from New Amsterdam, he goes to wait for his guide, Yetto, who is at a party in a large Indian hut, and observes: The more I saw of Indians the greater I was struck by their similarity to the English. They like living with their own families at great distances from their neighbours; they regard strangers with suspicion and despair; they are unprogressive and unambitious, fond of pets, hunting and fishing; they are undemonstrative in love, unwarlike, morbidly modest; their chief aim seems to be on all occasions to render themselves inconspicuous.15 Although Waugh’s South American journey was not nearly as eventful as his earlier visit to Ethiopia, it was again very fruitful in literary terms. Stranded in Boa Vista, in northernmost Brazil, he turned out several articles and a ‘grade A short story’16 which is generally assumed to be ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’, inspired by an eccentric rancher he had come across in Guiana, and who, under his real name, Mr Christie, features in Ninety-two Days. The short story tells of a hapless British explorer lost in the jungle who is condemned to a living death as the prisoner of a madman who forces him to read Dickens aloud every day. This tale made a marketable piece in its own right and then, with some changes of names, provided the final episode of Waugh’s 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust.

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The novel’s protagonist, Tony Last, has gone to Brazil in search of a fabled lost city, but the expedition is doomed, and before being ‘rescued’ by the Christie-character, now named Mr Todd, Tony suffers a long bout of fever. In his delirium, snatches of his life in England are crazily transposed to Brazil, and he fuses the failure of the South American dream with the destruction of his English earthly paradise by the style-barbarians. As so often in Waugh’s writing, images of England and ‘the jungle’ merge.

Greene’s journeys Graham Greene’s first journey outside Europe was every bit as arduous as Waugh’s South American excursion. Early in 1935 Greene travelled to Liberia, on the Grain Coast of West Africa. Liberia had been much in the news in the late 1920s and early 30s. It had originally been founded as a settlement for former slaves from the United States, and was nominally a republic with an American-style constitution, but Liberia actually bore considerable resemblance to its colonised neighbours. The descendants of the freed slaves constituted a ruling class who were rumoured to have enslaved the native population, and the country’s administrative system followed the kind of indirect rule favoured in neighbouring British colonies where existing local power structures were used as the channels for central government. In the late 1920s stories about forced labour and the suppression of tribal minorities in Liberia began to exercise the League of Nations. Their report on allegations of slavery that came out in 1930 led only to the renewed suppression of a large tribe (the Kru) in southeastern Liberia who were striving for independence. A British Government Blue Book published in 1934 reported the rebellion of the Kru tribe and the brutal crushing of this uprising, and also enumerated the diseases that were rife in the country, described the lack of medical facilities and so on. Greene quotes from this report at the beginning of Journey Without Maps and comments: There was something satisfyingly complete about this picture. It really seemed as though you couldn’t go deeper than that; the agony was piled on in the British Government Blue Book with a real effect of grandeur; the little injustices of Kenya became shoddy and suburban beside it.17 Greene claimed to have been drawn to Africa by reading Rider Haggard and Conrad, and certainly this part of West Africa, not one where white settlers had successfully reproduced the conditions of their

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own countries, seemed to embody the ‘quality of darkness … of the inexplicable’18 that Greene sought. He is genuinely interested in the actual state of Liberia (and he does manage to interview the President of the country, as well as the infamous Colonel Davis, the ‘dictator of Grand Bassa’), but the expedition he embarks on with his cousin Barbara and various African servants and carriers is represented as both an inward and an outward journey. Journey Without Maps is a questnarrative, a predominantly masculine genre, and Greene writes with an awareness of European accounts of explorations in Africa, from the time of Mungo Park, Livingstone and Stanley, taking in Joseph Conrad’s Congo Diary and ‘Heart of Darkness’ along the way. But Greene’s quest is informed by his awareness of Freud, too, with his consciousness ‘of those ancestral threads which still exist in our unconscious minds to lead us back.’19 In his journey, on foot, into the interior of Liberia, far beyond the coastal areas that his passport permitted him to visit, Greene is constantly in search of the primitive, which he equates with innocence. The expedition involves extreme physical discomfort, exhaustion and sometimes terror, but there are revelations, too: at one point, among the dancers at Zigita, he comments that ‘the timelessness, the irresponsibility, the freedom of Africa began to touch us at last’.20 His return to the coast, after four weeks of walking through the jungle, is described as a return to ‘the seedy level’: ‘This journey, if it had done nothing else, had reinforced a sense of disappointment with what man had made out of the primitive, what he had made out of childhood.’21 The physical comforts of ‘civilization’ (and the word does appear with quotation marks as a chapter-heading towards the end of the book) are welcome to the weary traveller, but that is all. The next problem for Greene, though, was to make something out of his journey. In Ways of Escape he says: ‘It had seemed simple, before I set out, to write a travel book, but when I returned and was faced with my material I had a moment of despair and wished to abandon the project.’ He lists his fragmentary materials, a skimpy diary written in pencil, accounts of his carriers’ advances, a few newspapers and so on – ‘how was I, out of all this, to make a book? … The problem to be solved was mainly a problem of form … This book could not be written in the manner of a European tour; there was no architecture to describe, no famous statuary; nor was it a political book in the sense that Gide’s Voyage au Congo was political. …’ He had never written a travel book before and became preoccupied with the problem of form, wanting to avoid the ‘awful tedium of A to Z’.22 His declared solution is the parallel inward

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journey, the book becoming more personal in one sense, and the journey more general. In fact, there is more to the form of Journey Without Maps than this. In the opening and closing sections of the book there are piled up memories of ‘civilized’ corruption and chaos, a collage-effect of fragments that frame the African journey. In a more impressionistic way than Waugh, Greene too juxtaposes primitivism and civilisation. And like Waugh, Greene put his African material to fictional use as well, with a Conradian short story, ‘A Chance for Mr Lever’, published in the London Mercury in 1936. Another fictional by-product of the journey was the start of a novel which finally saw light as a short story, ‘The Other Side of the Border’, in a post-war collection of stories. The idea of crossing borders became a central motif of Greene’s next travel book, The Lawless Roads. This commissioned book was the first product of his journey to Mexico in 1938 to investigate the persecution of the Catholic Church there, as atheism became the official postrevolutionary creed. However, the first border he writes about is not between the USA and Mexico but a border that dominated his childhood, that between home and school (as a headmaster’s son he was ‘an inhabitant of both countries … pulled by different ties of hate and love’23). Like Journey Without Maps, The Lawless Roads stretches back into Greene’s own past as well as detailing a remote and troubled contemporary state for the benefit of his readers. Greene declares that he ‘loathed Mexico’, but here, as in Africa, he tends to find the poorest and simplest people – those who are most remote from ‘civilization’ – the best that he encounters. The second product of the Mexican journey followed very swiftly on the heels of The Lawless Roads: Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory, draws heavily on characters and episodes from the travel book in its wonderfully focused dramatisation of martyrdom. Greene always maintained that it was not part of his plan, in visiting Mexico, to write a novel about what he found there, but whether it was his intention or not, together the two books, fictional and non-fictional, offer, in the words of Cedric Watts, ‘a remarkable illustration of the transmutation of personal impressions into enduring art’.24 Greene and Waugh were certainly not the first literary travellers to reuse their experiences in different forms of writing, but the nature and extent of their literary recycling suggests that more than simple pragmatism may have been at work. It may be that the kinds of travelexperience they sought out, in places without maps, cultural borderlands, demanded translation into more than one literary form: for these novelists, the travel book alone did not permit the fullest possible exploration of their materials. There is no room to pursue this speculation

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here, though, so I would like to conclude simply by extending the point that Tim Youngs makes in his book about British travelogues of Africa written in the later nineteenth century: these writings, he says, often have a double focus, revealing the writers’ unease with Britain as much as describing their encounters with Africa.25 In the early twentieth century, as European values were increasingly questioned, we might expect these inward and outward perspectives to overlap all the more. Graham Greene’s travel books, expressive of a personal quest, tend to look to ‘primitivism’ for the kind of innocence and moral purity that is impossibly difficult to find elsewhere. Evelyn Waugh’s satirical stance scarcely permits that kind of hope. His encounters with ‘the primitive’ generate overt and repeated comparisons between so-called civilisation and the cultural borderlands he travelled to throughout the 1930s. The balance between the two worlds is precarious, but there are points in his fictional as well as non-fictional work of this period where the balance does tip. At the end of Remote People he addresses potential travellers: Why go abroad? See England first. Just watch London knock spots off the Dark Continent.26

Notes 1. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 2. 2. Evelyn Waugh, ‘Eldorado Revisited’, Sunday Times, 12 August 1962, reprinted in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. D. Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 593. 3. Evelyn Waugh, When the Going Was Good (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946), p. 8. 4. Paul Fussell, Abroad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 50ff. 5. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (London: Bodley Head, 1980), pp. 45–6. 6. Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 341. 7. Fussell, p. 59. 8. Cunningham, p. 350. 9. Evelyn Waugh, review of The Citadels of Ethiopia by Max Grühl, Spectator, 9 April 1932, reprinted in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, p. 129. 10. Helen Carr, ‘Modernism and Travel (1880–1940)’ in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (see Hulme and Youngs, above), p. 73. 11. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, ‘Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era’ in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 1. 12. David Wykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 85.

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13. Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (London: Penguin, 2002 [1931]), p. 23. 14. Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: a Biography (New York: Vintage, 2002), pp. 166–7. 15. Evelyn Waugh, Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. 404. 16. Hastings, p. 278. 17. Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps (London: Vintage, 2002 [1936]), p. 18. 18. Ibid., p. 20. 19. Ibid., p. 248. 20. Ibid., p. 134. 21. Ibid., p. 224. 22. Greene, Ways of Escape, p. 47. 23. Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads (London: Vintage, 2002 [1939]), p. 13. 24. Cedric Watts, A Preface to Greene (London: Longman, 1997), p. 41. 25. Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues 1850–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 1. 26. Waugh, Remote People, p. 184.

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Africa Writes Back: Heinemann African Writers Series – A Publisher’s Memoir James Currey

The African Writers Series was founded in 1962, almost exactly 25 years after the start of Penguin books. The paperback Series was to become to Africans, in its first quarter century, what Penguin Books had been to British readers in its first 25 years. It provided good serious reading at accessible prices for the rapidly emerging professional classes as the countries became independent. The colour orange for novels had been shamelessly copied from Penguin. By the time of its tenth anniversary in 1972, it had come to be called in Africa the ‘orange series’ and was stacked high in the key positions inside the entrances of the university campus bookshops, from one side of Africa to the other. The writer and critic Edward Blishen said at the time of the tenth anniversary in 1972: ‘I shall tell my grandchildren that I owe most of what education I have to Penguins and that through the African Writers Series I saw a new, potentially great, world literature coming into being.’1 English was the lubricant of the English-speaking world. It was not only how authority was imposed but it was also used by the subject peoples to resist that imposition of power. Writers in India, the Caribbean and Africa came to take advantage of the language that they shared. But they had to have publishing opportunities. And to begin with, those opportunities were almost all in London. By 1962 quite a lot of work by Caribbean writers had been published in London. Some Indian writers were well established on London lists. But practically no creative work by Africans had appeared. Writers in Africa needed to get the idea that they too might get published. The title of my chapter is ‘Africa Writes Back’ because I have seen, over the last 40 years, how Africans achieved the confidence to write back in novels, plays and poetry about what was happening to them. 159

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A Publisher’s Memoir

It was the received wisdom in British publishing in the early sixties that the only books that could be sold in Africa were school textbooks. There was no perceived “general market”. The colonial authorities thought of books for a purpose – the education of a new elite. Books for enjoyment which enhanced understanding of other Africans’ ways of love and death were not on their agenda. Alan Hill, the founder of Heinemann Educational Books, was described to me by the former head of the Longman Africa division as ‘an inspired madman’ because he did the things that other British publishers thought were a waste of time. A grandson of missionaries in Cameroun, he grew up knowing where Africa was. On his first visit to Nigeria in 1959, he was very proud of the fact that William Heinemann had the previous year published a novel called Things Fall Apart in hardback. To his amazement nobody knew anything about it. At the elite University College in Ibadan, expatriate staff refused to believe that a recent graduate could have had a novel published by a prestigious London publishing house. Chinua Achebe told me that as a student he read Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson which is set in Nigeria. He said that he had thought to himself: ‘If this man can get such a bad book about Nigeria published why don’t I have a go?’ A clear case of an African writing back. Alan Hill, in the heady atmosphere of the independence years (Ghana in 1957, Nigeria in 1960) saw the need to make serious general books by Africans available in a paperback series like Penguins. It was an inspired choice to make Chinua Achebe the Editorial Adviser to the Series. The first four titles included Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and its sequel No Longer at Ease. First printings were about 2500. It was a cautious start. Quickly Chinua Achebe’s name became a magnet for new writing. The photograph of the author on the back reinforced the idea that Africans might get published. By the twentieth anniversary in 1982 Heinemann had sold close on three million copies of Things Fall Apart; in the next 20 years sales trebled. There have been translations into many other languages. Neither Penguin nor Pan, the two major paperback series in Britain in 1958, bought rights. It now appears in Penguin Modern Classics. None of that would have happened if it had not been published in paperback as number 1 in the African Writers Series. Paperbacks are mostly reprint series. But what to reprint when so few novels by Africans had been published in hardback by British or American publishers? In 1962, the very year of the start of the Series, Chinua Achebe was at a conference on African writing at Makerere University College in Uganda in East Africa, when he heard a knock at

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the door of his guest house in the evening. He found a student standing there who offered him the manuscripts of two novels. The name of the Kenyan student was Ngugi. Weep Not, Child and The River Between were the first books to be accepted for publication in hardback as well as in paperback in the African Writers Series. That was the moment when Heinemann Educational Books took on the role that was at that time almost exclusively performed in London by general hardback publishers: the first time publishing of new creative writing whether novels, plays or poetry. There was also the stiffening thread of political works by people with names such as Mandela, Mboya and Kaunda. Ngugi got the idea of writing novels from the Caribbean. A range of writers from the West Indies were being accepted from the fifties onwards by established literary hardback publishers in London. Henry Swanzy’s BBC Colonial Service programme ‘Caribbean Voices’ gave hope to Walcott, Naipaul and many other writers. Africans needed hope as well. Ngugi tells in Homecoming of the impact on him of the Barbadian George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin: ‘He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world. And suddenly I knew that the novel could speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me.’2 We take it for granted in Britain now that there are many outlets – publishers, journals, newspapers, radio stations – who are accepting creative writing all the time. And we take it for granted that there are literary agents to place work. And we know that, once a book is published, there is a whole reviewing, promotions and feature-writing industry. At that time, we needed to get that industry to take writing by Africans seriously. A problem was that paperbacks were not reviewed in newspapers. Novels had to be published in hardback to be noticed. We needed to get the consideration of African writers in the reviewing columns along with the regular output from the hardback literary publishers. Reviews were necessary in order to get orders from public libraries who, at that time, were the main patrons of new writing. The father firm William Heinemann agreed, reluctantly, to publish Ngugi’s novels in hardback first. Heinemann Educational Books later published many of the writers in hardback under the imprint ‘Heinemann’. Only gradually did enterprising reviewers come to realise that there was a new vitality in the writing from Africa and looked to the orange paperbacks for something special. Keith Sambrook was the director at Heinemann Educational Books who had been put by Alan Hill in charge of the rapid expansion of

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offices in what we were then starting to call ‘the Third World’. Keith Sambrook, with Chinua Achebe’s active encouragement, built on the success of the initial four titles with a canny choice. There were anthologies of poetry, prose, short stories and plays. Some key titles such as Alex la Guma’s A Walk in the Night came from the remarkable Mbari list in Ibadan. There were some translations from African languages. However, it was the translations from the French which helped to establish the early dominance of the African Writers Series. The Parisian publishers had been much more enterprising about publishing African writers. In 1956 first novels by Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Oyono and Sembene Ousmane, all appeared. Some other publishers with educational lists in Africa were also starting paperback series of writers from Africa. Collins put about 20 African titles into their Fontana paperback list. Rex Collings, who had started his publishing life at Penguins, persuaded Oxford University Press to start the Three Crowns Series. He secured from Mbari the plays of Wole Soyinka, who was to be the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1965 Rex Collings went off, taking Soyinka to Methuens, who had one of the most distinguished drama lists. He made sure that I could inherit his publishing list at Oxford. However in 1967 the chance came to work with Keith Sambrook at Heinemann; by this time the first 30 titles in the African Writers Series had already gone a long way to establish a new canon of African literature. The central problem at Heinemann Educational Books was that here was an educational company which needed the educational system to build up the sale of its paperbacks to keep the prices down. We did not know that the new examination boards in West and East Africa would be so enterprising in prescribing texts by young living Africans; the boards in Britain preferred their authors dead. The bookshops, universities and schools were delighted to find that the Africans were writing back. The British firms Oxford University Press, Longman, Macmillan, Evans and Nelson dominated the educational textbook market in Africa in the early sixties. Heinemann Educational Books came late but made such a success of the African Writers Series that it helped to get textbook contracts. My more cautious colleagues were concerned that sex, religion and politics might keep the books out of schools. The inhibitions which concerned an educational publisher, only a few years after the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, did not worry Chinua Achebe as Editorial Adviser. He wanted the Series to reflect all the richness and variety of an emerging Africa. He was concerned with the widest literary criteria. All these books had to be approved for publication by a formal committee

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of directors and editors sitting round a table beneath the chandeliers of the ballroom of a house in Mayfair which had belonged to Lord Randolph Churchill and his wife, Jenny. After the discussion had gone on for some time about whether certain subjects would cut out the book from schools, the Chairman Alan Hill would say, ‘Well, James, what did the old Chinua say?’ He knew, everyone round that table knew, that if I had brought the proposal to the meeting then young Chinua Achebe would already have said ‘yes’ (even if it was on the telephone while passing through London from the Uli airstrip in Biafra to raise funds in America). So Alan Hill would say ‘Right James. You want to do it? Go ahead and do it?’ With the imaginative support of Chinua Achebe for the first 100 titles in the series, Heinemann had established that there was a general as well as an educational market in Africa. I visited Chinua and Christie Achebe at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka at the end of the civil war. The house was a shell. The walls were black. There was no power. Chinua Achebe gave me the manuscript of his short stories called Girls at War, which became No. 100 in the Series when published in 1972. He said that the time had come to hand over his role as Editorial Adviser to another African writer and he and I agreed that Ngugi would be absolutely appropriate. Ngugi immediately accepted but then after six weeks understandably decided that the duties would interfere with his own writing. Keith Sambrook and I set out to widen the African input. By the tenth anniversary of the Series, Heinemann had an active editorial office in Nairobi as well as Ibadan. So we suggested that, rather than a single Editorial Adviser to the Series, there should be a triangular system of consultation between the publishing editors in Ibadan, Nairobi and London. Aig Higo, himself a poet, had worked with Chinua Achebe almost from the start and continued to keep us in touch with the active Nigerian and Ghanaian literary scenes. Chinua Achebe and Ngugi, along with a host of other writers and academics, were to continue to give reports and recommend new manuscripts. Henry Chakava, Simon Gikandi and Laban Erapu in Nairobi were from a second generation. They were to make Heinemann the publisher of first choice in East Africa, as it already was in West Africa. I would continue to draw on the exile community and the new publishers of resistance to represent South Africa, Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies. Central to the policy was enthusiasm. Nobody had a veto. All three offices usually came to an agreement over novels. Selection of poetry tended to be a much more individual choice. Anthologies of plays tried to represent work from across the continent and from different traditions.

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Heinemann had built an active international network of choice in Africa. Consultation was not without considerable effort and expense. Again and again one is reminded that telephoning was expensive and unreliable. Cables were the text messages of the time and just as likely to be ambiguous. Photocopying the wide range of hopeful manuscripts to share between three offices was still relatively expensive. Airfares were still high (In 1959 it had cost Oxford University Press almost as much as my annual salary to fly me to South Africa). I was only able to justify the heavy costs of travel by going to see the educational authorities about textbook adoptions during the working day; in the evenings I and my African colleagues could drink and eat with the writers or go to their plays. It would never have been cost-effective to go round Africa just to see the creative writers. We could accept only a fraction of the piles of manuscripts received by the three offices. (I should guess 1 in 30 or 40). We spent a lot of money on reports. If the first reaction was hopeful I would get a second report. If both the reports were hopeful and had suggestions about rewriting I would, even if we were rejecting the manuscript, send them to the writer. We felt that it was constructive to pass on the reactions of our readers. Writing is a lonely business and if some advice comes it is better than a cold rejection slip. We invested all this effort to bring on new writers. Increasingly there were publishers in the larger African countries encouraged by the market which had grown for creative writing. In Nairobi the East African Publishing House had a rival Modern African Writers series. However, elsewhere the African Writers Series was so dominant that most of the writers offered their work to us first. It has often been said that it was inappropriate for the African Writers Series to be published in the old imperial capital of London. Individuals, usually European or American, have accusingly said to me, ‘A series of African writers should be published in Africa.’ However, the writers wanted to be published in London, and the common hope was that they would be treated as ‘writers’ rather than ‘African writers’. With Heinemann the most outstanding writers could often have it both ways with hardback and paperback publication. From a London base we were able to make the literary contacts which introduced these writers to readers not only in Britain and America but also in places as wide apart as Canada, India, the West Indies and Australia. And we sold translation rights in the major languages of Europe and Asia. At the same time, through the medium of English, we often introduced African writers in Portuguese and French to a larger audience than they were able to reach in the original language. Mongo Beti

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wrote to me on 8 December 1975 and said, ‘J’ai aussi parcouru avec étonnement les chiffres de vente’. The Egyptian publishing industry was the largest in Africa. Colloquial Arabic was used in the modern novel in spite of religious opposition. The first ever publication of English translations of the novelist Naguib Mahfouz appeared in the African Writers Series as well as in Heinemann’s parallel series called Arab Authors. This Egyptian novelist was to be the third winner from Africa of the Nobel Prize for Literature; work by Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and Naguib Mahfouz had appeared in the Series long before they received the Prize. Intrinsic to our handling of African writers was the need to build bridges: to literary agents, to hardback publishers who would get reviews and library sales, to broadcasters, to US publishers, to publishers in foreign languages. We found excitement in providing an international network. We knew a great deal about the literary industry in London and New York. We took a pride in getting the outstanding writers known in the literary circles there. At Heinemann Educational Books in London we wanted to show off the best work from Africa and show up the sniffy attitudes of the wellestablished literary imprints to whom we offered hardback rights. If the Caribbean writers were now established in London then recognition of the African writers must follow. I was disappointed that the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera’s first book of short stories, The House of Hunger, did not get a review in the Guardian, probably because it had only been published in paperback. I had given a copy to Doris Lessing and she reviewed it enthusiastically in Books and Bookmen. I sent the review to Bill Webb, literary editor of the Guardian, and he belatedly got it reviewed. He rang me up a few months later and said it had been chosen as a joint winner of the Guardian fiction prize which was at the time the most prestigious award for new writing. I have been reading the African Writers Series files which are now held in the University of Reading library. Mike Bott has persuaded several of the leading British publishers to lodge their archives with him. It is an important resource for anybody studying twentieth-century writing and publishing. I have been examining my publishing correspondence with some of my most outstanding authors. In the rest of this chapter I have picked out some of the questions that people ask about the Series. To illustrate my answers I have taken examples from three writers: Bessie Head from South Africa, but who lived most of her writing life in exile in Botswana; Nuruddin Farah from Somalia; and Ngugi from Kenya. All three have gained international recognition.

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A Publisher’s Memoir

I hope what will emerge is how extraordinary it was to be so deeply involved in the formation of what Blishen called ‘a new potentially great, world literature’. In October 2005 at a meeting in London, Chinua Achebe cheerfully hailed me as ‘My old conspirator who helped me launch African literature’. * How did we at an educational publisher get books recognised that literary publishers had turned down? Bessie Head’s first two novels were published by Simon and Schuster in New York and Gollancz in London. She had already had far more literary acceptance than most African writers. She had a posh agent, Hilary Rubinstein, who had spoken for Penguin in the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial. He had failed to place A Question of Power. Simon and Schuster, Gollancz, Chattos, Cape had all said it needed substantial rewriting. Bessie refused. She felt personally insulted. It was too autobiographical. I was sent the much-rejected manuscript by Randolph Vigne, one of her South African friends who was in exile in London; I had worked with him when he was the covert editor of the political and literary journal The New African in Cape Town in the crisis-torn early sixties. We had published some of Bessie Head’s early short stories in that journal. The manuscript of A Question of Power proved to be the most shocking portrayal of schizophrenia I have ever read. Bessie Head herself had been born in Fort Napier Mental Institution, Pietermaritzburg. Was her mother mad or was she just considered mad by South African society because it was alleged she had had an affair with her parents’ Zulu stable ‘boy’? Bessie was worried she was following her mother into madness. Here is the blast she gave Rubinstein in 1972: Patronage galls me. I see that you are waiting patiently and hopefully for another book. Please do not bother. This letter is intended to end whatever business relationship we had. If you cannot wait for another agent to come and collect my affairs from A. P. Watt you are free to throw the whole bloody lot out of the window ... I don’t need your patronage Hilary. You are not my type. You know what would happen with the fourth book: ‘Poor dear, she’s a loony.’ I am supposed to write books that are rejected by you. I prefer to be rejected by both Gollancz and McCalls then see what I do next. This is goodbye. (16 June 1972)3

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James Currey 167

I feel very strongly opposed to the idea that the author should be asked to do any re-writing. The thing is superb as it is ... I do feel that it could be made slightly more accessible to the reader, but all that I think is necessary – or, I think desirable – for this is a fair number of very trifling editorial amendments. These are very small points indeed mostly, in fact, a matter of punctuation. Sometimes a sentence pulls one up and has to be re-read to grasp the meaning. Sometimes this is because it expresses something that is complex or demands a pause for thought; but it is often because the comma is in the wrong place ... (27 September 1972)4 I had already written to her accepting the book: A Question of Power numbs me. I go back and back to it ... It is big. You throw the lot at us and I really can feel, feel, feel though I cannot always understand. I know you have laid the inside of your head on the paper and I think we are asking you to do the impossible ... The book will never be easy. But it has to be slightly more accessible. It is a public exposure of a very private thing. Having gone so far with your public exposure can you go a little further? Can you go back to it? Can you stand outside it? (14 August 1972)5 I told Bessie Head that she did not need to change a word, even a comma. Acceptance transformed her and she immediately set to work and made the book much more accessible. The African Writers Series was doing so well that I was able to get it accepted. It did not matter that it might not sell in schools. General market titles were selling in Africa. Without the African Writers Series her most remarkable piece of work might not have appeared and she could have despaired of writing further books. In A History of South African Literature, Christopher Heywood says, ‘Before Head no other South African writer encompassed the main communities with comparable skill and love.’6 Were inappropriate European standards imposed on African writers? In fact through the African Writers Series authors from Africa were showing new directions to a worldwide audience. The most ambitious writers insisted on being judged by international standards.

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The novelist Richard Lister advised in a report for Heinemann:

A Publisher’s Memoir

Nuruddin Farah early on told me, ‘I am nothing but a nomad.’7 Over the years, as he has lived in India, Nigeria, Italy, Britain, Russia and now in South Africa, he has continued to reveal the realities of life in his native Somalia. I was so gripped by the manuscript of his first novel From a Crooked Rib that I took it to bed, to the complaints of my wife, Clare, as I turned the rustling pages. He was amused that I asked in my letter of acceptance if he was a woman because I felt he wrote so perceptively about a woman in a Muslim society. Ebla does not see why, while her husband is away training in Rome, she should not take a second husband as a man in a Muslim society might take a second wife. Second novels often present problems for author and publisher. It took four years of revisions before A Naked Needle was published. Nuruddin Farah had studied James Joyce and the obscurity of the manuscript put off two British readers who were themselves both practising novelists. At that time he lived in Trieste drawing on the colonial Italian of his native land and, as an outsider like James Joyce, poised on the edge of the English imagination. The reports which were being commissioned in Nigeria and Kenya were providing new perspectives. New standards were being established in Africa. It was Omalara Leslie at the University of Ibadan who wrote of A Naked Needle: ‘It is one of the few really genuinely global and nonparochial African novels in which the contemporary African experience is a felt and living reality’ (11 October 1974).8 Simon Gikandi reported in 1981 on Sardines, the second of Nuruddin Farah’s trio: Variations on the themes of an African dictatorship: I honestly think that Farah will become one of the great masters of the African novel. For me Sardines came as a pleasant surprise. I left off Farah after reading From a Crooked Rib and The Naked Needle which were not so strong in comparison with other urban novels, but I seem to have missed the potential that was evident in them. In Sardines, Farah brings to the African novel complexity and consciousness of style unrivalled, except by the Soyinkan creation The Interpreters.9 I could not get books approved by the Wednesday editorial meeting in London without reports from Africa. Our editorial readers made comparisons across the world of literature. Simon Gikandi in one report managed to include references to Infante Cabrera, Wole Soyinka, Carlos Fuentes, James Baldwin, Dambudzo Marechera and John Williams. My colleagues deserved to be impressed.

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Understandably authors wanted to be read beyond the ghetto of the African Writers Series. After we had published the first two books in paperback, Nuruddin Farah’s trilogy about the dictatorship of Siyad Barre in his native Somalia was then originated in hardback by the enterprising Allison and Busby and subcontracted to the African Writers Series. He has continued to publish regularly in New York and London – the international network. Did a London publisher impose inappropriate cultural values? Were African languages ignored? Ngugi set his own agenda in Kenya. Ngugi had published three novels and a play by the time he was 30. His books were, like those by Lamming and Conrad, in a great tradition. He was on his way. Heinemann had been selling phenomenal numbers: 50,000 of Weep Not, Child in one month in Nigeria. But what was he writing? Keith Sambrook asked a colleague in Nairobi in 1973: ‘I am a bit puzzled by Ngugi; he seems to have come to a full stop. The short stories are good but, in confidence, I don’t think they show any advance on his previous, admittedly high, standard of writing. He is full of ideas, young, famous – what serious writing is he doing or planning?’10 The seriousness of the next stage was to overwhelm everyone and especially the ruling elite of Kenya. Mwai Kibaki was elected recently as the welcome replacement to Moi as President of Kenya. When he was Minister of Economic Affairs under Kenyatta he launched Ngugi’s fourth novel Petals of Blood in the Nairobi City Hall in July 1977. There were 1000 guests. 500 hardbacks were sold. Success. But it was plays, and particularly plays in Gikuyu, which were to bring Ngugi into confrontation with the Kenyan politicians. Ngugi and Micere Mugo had found that plays were more effective than novels when they had put on The Trial of Dedan Kimathi at the National Theatre in Nairobi in 1975. In it they forcefully put the case that the peasants had led the Mau Mau struggle against the British, but that it was the loyalists who had done the independence deal with the British and robbed the peasants. That play was in English. Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his cousin Ngugi wa Mirii were asked by the villagers of Kamiriithu to write a play in Gikuyu for the open-air theatre they were building. The ruling class allowed him to address the intellectuals in English. But when he talked to the peasants in their own language the authorities were angry. This play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry Who I want), was banned by the District Commissioner in November 1977. On the last day of the year in which Kibaki had launched his last novel in

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A Publisher’s Memoir

English, Ngugi wa Thiong’o was taken in chains to Kamiti maximum security jail to be held without trial until almost the end of 1978. He emerged brandishing the manuscript of a novel rewritten secretly in prison on sheets of Bronco interleaved toilet paper. The University of Nairobi was frightened to rehire him, so Henry Chakava gave him a desk in his office to work. It was a double act of bravery by Henry Chakava to publish in Gikuyu the Ngugis’ dangerous play and Ngugi’s novel. It was not just brave in political terms but also in commercial terms; it had proved almost impossible to sell literary books in Kenyan languages unless they had school adoptions. Other publishers would have tried to slip out of this dangerous publishing by using the commercial argument as an excuse to escape the political dangers. In 1977 Henry Chakava had been pleased to hire Simon Gikandi full time in the interim before he went to Edinburgh to work for his doctorate, having just graduated at Nairobi with the only first in the whole Faculty of Arts. As a student he had reported with singular confidence and perceptiveness on a whole range of writers, including Meja Mwangi and Nuruddin Farah. His report on the original Gikuyu Caitaani Mutharaba-ini is full of positive appreciation, though not without criticism for Ngugi’s tendency to lecture his readers. Simon Gikandi puts his finger on the problem of what audience the author is meant to be addressing: Since this is a very long novel. It will be expensive to produce. It will appeal largely to the ‘literary people’ – what Arnold Bennett used to call the professional few who find excitement trying to delve into the intricacies of style and meaning. So, if Ngugi has the ‘ordinary’ readership in mind, he might discover that most people consider reading long and somehow complex novels trying. The play, Ngaahika Ndeenda has the advantage of being short and straight-forward. The novel has an intricate structure built on flashbacks, dreams and allegory, and unless I am under-estimating the literary nature of the rural peasantry/working class, this is one of the problems we have to contend with. (6 July 1977)11 This was his first novel to be written in Gikuyu and it was later translated as Devil on the Cross. When it was published with the Kamiriithu play in Nairobi in 1980, Henry Chakava and his colleagues, to avoid government sanctions, got the copies out of the printers, straight into the boots of their cars and off to the bookshops across Gikuyu country.

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There were three printings in two months. Ngugi told us, in delight, of an exciting new phenomenon in Kenyan bar life. A new class of readers emerged. A man would read aloud from the novel until his glass of beer was dry. He would then place the book open but face down until the listeners had bought him another beer. Literacy paid. Ngugi had, on entering one bar, been surrounded by people all giving as their own the names of the characters they had been playing in bar room readings of the Ngugis’ play. Ngugi’s duel with the authorities continued. When Ngugi wrote a musical play for villagers of Kamiriithu, they booked the National Theatre for the performances. The authorities never even acknowledged applications for a licence to perform. So 50 villagers bussed into Nairobi each day, sang songs in several Kenyan languages on the steps of the National Theatre and then went into rehearsal in a theatre on the University of Nairobi campus. After some ten days this was banned, and the District Commissioner sent in three truckloads of troops to tear down the theatre at Kamiriithu. Henry Chakava not only risked his job and the future of Heinemann as a textbook publisher in Kenya. He was attacked by men with pangas. He had threats on the telephone. He had money demanded out on the veld near Thika. But he was backed by Keith Sambrook and Alan Hill in his publication of Ngugi. I believe that the directors of any of the other big British textbook publishers with companies in Kenya would have dropped Ngugi. The new owners of Heinemann in the late eighties wanted to re-establish control over Henry Chakava, but he stuck to his independence and when they used the ultimate sanction – the withdrawal of the ‘Heinemann’ brand name – he set up EAEP (East African Educational Publishers) as a Kenyan company. His new venture was so successful that Heinemann in Britain had to go back later to ask him to represent the African Writers Series. Henry Chakava’s troubles over publishing Ngugi continued – sometimes taking bizarre forms. In 1986 his offices were raided when President Moi ordered the arrest of the wandering troublemaker Matigari, not realising that he only existed as a character in the Ngugi novel of that name. Were too many books published? Chinua Achebe’s reply to this last question by an interviewer for the London Sunday Independent at the time of the thirtieth anniversary in 1992 was, ‘All I can say is, better too many than too few.’12 My aim was to publish as many good books as possible. In one year in the late seventies, when the commodity-price boom was favouring Nigeria, Zambia

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and Kenya, we published 22 titles. A lot for a single publisher. Not many for a continent. The accountants wanted winners every time. My colleagues in Africa and I wanted as wide a choice as possible. The overall success of the Series gave us the freedom to experiment, and some experiments to our surprise became winners. We kept books in print as much as possible. People in the universities and the schools knew that if, at the last minute, they prescribed a text for a reading list then it would be available. They never knew when Penguins would go out of stock. At Heinemann we all – in Africa, in London and at offices round the world – took advantage of English to provide an international network. We used the advantages of being in London to stimulate an explosion of creative writing in Africa. In these days of so much Afro-pessimism one can say that African writing and African music have reached out across the world. One can really say that Africans have learned to write back.

Notes 1. John St John, William Heinemann: Century of Publishing 1890–1990 (London: William Heinemann, 1990), p. 519. 2. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Homecoming (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1975), p. 81. 3. Bessie Head, A Question of Power, Reading University Library (hereafter RUL) MS 3221 HEB 13/9. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Christopher Heywood, A History of South African Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 216. 7. Nuruddin Farah, From a Crooked Rib, RUL MS 3221 HEB 12/13. 8. Nuruddin Farah, Naked Needle, RUL MS 3221 HEB 13/8. 9. Nuruddin Farah, Sardines, RUL 3221 HEB 13/5. 10. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Secret Lives, RUL MS 3221 HEB 12/9. 11. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross, RUL MS 3221 HEB 27/8. 12. Interview with Chinua Achebe by Jenny Uglow in The Sunday Independent, 3 January 1993.

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Outside the Nation(al): ‘South African’ Print and Book Cultures, and Global ‘text-scapes’ Andrew van der Vlies

Arjun Appadurai’s sense of a range of ‘-scapes’ – media-, ethno-, techno-, finan-, ideo- – describing the reality of ‘historically situated imaginations’ in a world whose character is marked increasingly by the traffic, transport, and displacement of representations, people, technologies, money, and ideas omits, it seems to me, a key ‘-scape’ of particular interest to students of print and text cultures: ‘text-scapes’.1 While this might usefully be read into the Appaduraian ‘mediascape’, I think it a productive term for envisaging both a space and strategy of and for enquiry, one which (as I argue elsewhere) suggests ‘the productive energies of studies of the processes of meaning-making through which literary artefacts, stories, films, performances, historical accounts (and so on) are constantly re-made, re-situated, and re-appropriated in and between’ conventionally conceived nation states.2 It responds, too, to Sydney Shep’s injunction in Chapter 1 to this volume that we – students of histories of the book, or of textual cultures – engage with Benedict Anderson’s later explorations of nationalism as (in Shep’s paraphrase) ‘constant negotiation across the entropic borders of homogeneous empty time’, informed as it is by contemporary globalised transfers of capital, and movements of people. Critical (like others) of national book history projects for failing to account for the transcontinental or transnational entanglements which have defined so many print and textual cultures (and which are inadequately circumscribed by discourses of the nation and the national), Shep turns to her adoptive Aotearoa New Zealand as a ‘case’ where ‘the shape of that discursive space’ has been ‘significantly determined by powers, events, and systems entirely outside its geopolitical boundaries’. Another fruitful space to which we might look for examples of entanglements which engage in contestatory and complicated ways 173

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Outside the Nation(al)

with the idea of the nation(al) is that of the production, transmission, reception, and afterlives of the material forms of work by writers in exile from apartheid-era South Africa. Less obviously itself a geopolitical entity than, for example, majority Anglophone island colonies of settlement such as Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, the very borders of the nation had been settled only in 1909, in advance of the Union of two British colonies and two defeated Boer republics in 1910.3 Even so, as the apartheid government’s experiment with multiple, spurious black African ‘national’ entities in its doomed ‘Bantustan’ policies of the 1970s and 1980s illustrates, ‘South Africa’ was less an organic nation state than a space of contested racial, ethnic, and linguistic interest groups. David Attwell offers the phrase ‘textured postcoloniality’ to describe the peculiarly inflected temporal space of its multiple, partial transitions from settler-colonial and autochthonous societies to (apparently) fully-fledged, postcolonial ‘Rainbow Nation’, after 1994.4 Many writers from this uncertain nation space sought to publish abroad, for a variety of economic, ideological, psychological, or legal reasons – including the comparatively small reading and book-buying public inside the country, a desire for metropolitan cultural validation, or because of state interdiction (including political banning and censorship). The ‘character and identity of South African literature’, veteran critic and writer Lewis Nkosi noted in 1994, was thus, for most of the twentieth century, largely ‘determined somewhere else’, from ‘outside of the community in whose name’ writers might ‘[claim] to be speaking’.5 In South African Textual Cultures, I canvas the spaces of ‘position-takings’ (to cite Pierre Bourdieu) occupied by work by an illustrative group of such writers, arguing that such spaces have ‘necessarily been varied and heterogeneous’, sub-, supra-, trans-national (or global), and invariably ‘inadequately historicised or accounted for in survey histories of the country’s literary production’.6 Although mindful of Shep’s warnings that ‘[m]icro studies reinforce the empirical basis of the field’, and, citing Wirtén, that they are ‘“in most cases ... records of national histories”’ which are hence all too often ‘“vehicles for nation-state construction”’, I want to suggest here that aspects of the publication histories of work by two ‘South African’ writers illustrate the extent of the entanglement of such work in global textscapes. The authors I have in mind both spent many years and published most of their writing outside of apartheid-era South Africa, writing without and against what was among the most contested national polities of the late twentieth century.7 They gave their names, jointly, to a literary prize established

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by the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) in 1988, suggesting that both were cast as indicatively and ideologically national writers, insofar as COSAW imagined a post-apartheid nation: the Bessie Head/Alex La Guma Prize. Bessie Head, born in Natal in 1937, worked in Cape Town and Johannesburg as a journalist, before going into exile in Botswana in 1964.8 Her first published story, ‘A Woman from America’, appeared in The New Statesman in Britain in August 1966. When Rain Clouds Gather appeared from presses in New York (Simon & Schuster, 1968) and London (Victor Gollancz, 1969), as did Maru (McCall; Gollancz, 1971), but her next – and arguably most famous – work, A Question of Power, was placed with great difficulty with publishers in both countries in advance of an African Writers Series paperback. The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales (1977), Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981), and A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga (1986) followed, before Head’s untimely death, aged 49, in 1986. Denied citizenship in Botswana until 1979, she was, for 15 years, effectively a stateless person for whom the nation was (observes Rob Nixon) ‘less an organic community than a set of administered categories that militated against her efforts to cultivate community and ancestry’.9 She never returned to South Africa, but spoke of having performed, in and through her writing, ‘a peculiar shuttling movement’ – psychological, emotional, and imaginative – ‘between two lands’.10 Her books’ biographies – as much as their contents – illustrate and enact the transnationalism of her oeuvre, career, and material trace. Alex La Guma was, for many, among the most politically engaged and accomplished writers of his generation in South Africa. However, his work could not, legally, be read inside South Africa from August 1961, when he was ‘banned’, until 1986, the year after his death.11 Born in February 1925 in District Six, Cape Town, the son of a prominent trade unionist (Jimmy La Guma), La Guma helped establish the South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO) in 1954, was active in planning for the 1955 Congress of the People at Kliptown, and was a defendant in the notorious mass Treason Trial of 1956–60. After his acquittal, he was arrested and detained frequently, banned, and finally placed under indefinite, 24-hour house arrest in December 1962. In September 1966 he was allowed to go into exile and went first to Britain (where he chaired the London branch of the African National Congress (ANC) between 1970 and 1978) and finally to Cuba, where he and his wife were the ANC’s chief representatives in Latin America (after 1979). He died in Havana in 1985.12 A decade earlier, the ANC’s cultural unit in

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Outside the Nation(al)

London was already fêting La Guma for his ‘enduring contribution’ to South Africa’s ‘national literature’, although none of his books had been published there.13 His first book, the novella A Walk in the Night (1962), was published in Ibadan, Nigeria. And a Threefold Cord (1964) and The Stone Country (1967) were published in Berlin, and In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979) by Heinemann Educational Books, included in their African Writers Series (they also reprinted A Walk in the Night in 1968, and The Stone Country in 1974).14 The biographies of both writers’ books enact the predicaments of an exilic ‘South African’ textual condition. La Guma’s are perhaps the most surprising in their engagements with extra-national politics during the Cold War. His banning in 1961 meant that nothing he said could be reported, and anything he wrote was prevented from being published or circulated in any form inside the country. As a ‘listed’ Communist, he was regarded by the fiercely anti-Communist apartheid government as posing a clear danger to the safety of the state.15 The typescript of his first book was smuggled to Nigeria, and published by Mbari in 1962.16 In the same year, La Guma made contact with Seven Seas in (East) Berlin, seeking to present his work as amenable to an international socialist readership and institutional networks of promotion and dissemination. This press published his next two novels, And a Threefold Cord and The Stone Country, both of which sought to present the necessity of representing post-apartheid conditions of possibility for a non-racial society in a social democratic nation. In And a Threefold Cord, the reader is invited to identify with Charlie Paul, the chief protagonist’s growing realisation that the conditions in which he and his family live in a shantytown on the Cape Flats are a result of the apartheid system. La Guma’s detailed descriptions of the filthy streets and tenements, and the suggestion that his characters are determined by circumstances beyond their control, reveal his indebtedness to a European tradition of naturalism in which the representation of social conditions invites critical reflection on their causes. It is precisely the relative lack of recognition of causality by the characters in La Guma’s work which is an essential part of his technique: his novels depend for their impact on an active engagement by the reader in constituting the protest message. At the end of And a Threefold Cord, Charlie thinks about the words of a fellow labourer: ‘people can’t stand up to the world alone, they got to be together’.17 The space of the community – let alone the nation – requires imaginative projection. The Stone Country engaged in a similar, if accelerated, representational project, featuring a political prisoner, awaiting trial, who is more politically

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active in his opposition to state injustice than any of La Guma’s previous characters. He is the voice of political consciousness, being the only prisoner in his cell conscious of the particular economy of violence operating in the prison: ‘What a waste; here they got us fighting each other like dogs.’18 Seven Seas had been established in 1958 by Gertrude Gelbin, American-born wife of the German author Stefan Heym, and published about 12 English-language paperback titles a year. It sought to introduce English-language writing to German readers, and to ‘keep alive the works of American and other English-speaking “progressive” authors who are forgotten or neglected’ because they have been censored or otherwise marginalised ‘in their own societies’. It favoured works which demonstrated ‘anti-Fascist, anti-racist and anti-war propaganda themes’, but which also possessed ‘considerable literary merit’.19 The Seven Seas list included Ezekiel Mphahlele’s memoir of growing up under apartheid, Down Second Avenue, and fiction by South African writers Jack Cope, Harry Bloom, and Richard Rive.20 Margins were tight, and a profit was usually only made after 50,000 copies were sold, so the firm’s success depended on Communist Bloc countries buying enough of each title to finance the print run, although this was often frustrated by preferential treatment given to German-language publishers by the GDR functionaries responsible for controlling book exports. Consequently, the firm had to rely on a distribution network of leftwing bookshops and agents in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, and across Europe.21 The Seven Seas editions of La Guma’s novels encouraged unambiguously political readings. And a Threefold Cord’s front cover features a dilapidated shack, the blurb on the back cover indicates it is about conditions under apartheid, and its epigraph, from Ecclesiastes, extols the strengths to be found in cooperative action. A blurb on the first page emphasises the interconnectedness of the novel and its author’s life, while a biographical note on the last page details La Guma’s frequent arrests and detentions.22 Most significantly, a foreword by exiled South African journalist and politician Brian Bunting provides a full account of La Guma’s life and concludes with an expression of hope that the novel might provide stimulus to international condemnation of the Verwoerd regime and might force it to free political prisoners.23 Bunting situates the novel in the contested field of protest writing, arguing that for art to ‘have any significance’ it should reflect social conditions and injustices.24 The Stone Country appeared in 1967 with similar framing texts. Its rear cover echoed Bunting’s assertion in his foreword to And a Threefold Cord that there

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could be no ‘Art for Art’s sake’ in a book reflecting ‘the truth about apartheid’ and stressed the engagement of La Guma’s writing with immediate political concerns, situating it emphatically as a kind of engaged social realism.25 The Seven Seas list was clearly aimed at readers sympathetic to socialism and to the imperatives of protest literature. Their editions situated La Guma’s writing as both definitively South African, providing true accounts of social conditions in the country, and as writing participating in an international socialist struggle.26 This made it eminently suitable for audiences in communist countries, and it was read in the Soviet Union (although much work remains to be done on the details). A Russian translation of The Stone Country appeared in 1967, and of And a Threefold Cord in 1968, suggesting that La Guma’s work was regarded as sufficiently orthodox social realism for a Soviet audience. His was not the only ‘South African’ writing so available, either; works by Peter Abrahams, Harry Bloom, Phyllis Altman, and Jack Cope were all published in translation in the USSR.27 To date, few of these particular Cold War-era global textscapes have been explored in any detail. Seven Seas Books was keenly aware of the need to balance emphasis on commitment as a primary valorising characteristic with an argument that what they were publishing really was also ‘literature’. In 1968, an anthology entitled Come Back, Africa!, which included La Guma’s ‘A Glass of Wine’, a short story published in Black Orpheus in 1960, included a substantial introductory essay suggesting that the representation of the ‘harsh reality’ of conditions in Africa required ‘a commitment which must be broad and humanitarian and not limited to immediate protest and political objectives’.28 The essay stressed that La Guma, in particular, was equal to this task. Anglophone ‘Western’ reviewers were less convinced, however. While conceding that the nature of South African society made it difficult for an author ‘not to state his convictions and not to postulate solutions to this harsh social situation’, Wilfred Cartey, writing in The African Forum, suggested that And a Threefold Cord was ‘oversaturated with description and overdocumented with detail’.29 Leading Africanist Bernth Lindfors thought it ‘marred’ by a ‘clumsy attempt to wring a political moral’ from the narrative.30 How, then, was La Guma’s work to be promoted to a mainstream British and North American readership less attuned to the aesthetics of protest? The Heinemann Educational Books (HEB) African Writers Series (AWS) published A Walk in the Night alongside selected short stories in 1968 (following a 1967 Heinemann hardback), and followed this with

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In the Fog of the Seasons’ End, The Stone Country, and Time of the Butcherbird.31 (And a Threefold Cord would not be republished in English until 1988, when it appeared in a British edition from Kliptown Books, which included a revised introduction by Bunting, and cast the novel, once again, in an expressly political context: the press was linked to the anti-apartheid movement in Britain.32) The AWS, while selling small numbers to British and American readers and institutions, was primarily targeted towards educational markets in Africa; La Guma’s appearance in the series marked his entry into what was establishing itself, ambiguously, as a canon of pro- and post-independence African writing. His work may have made the list of a British publisher, but it was still marginal relative to the output of large publishers of popular and literary fiction.33 While well intentioned, the series acted ironically, too, some have argued, as a ‘purveyor of exoticist modes of cultural representation’, aiding a ‘continuing exoticisation of Africa’.34 Planned AWS titles frequently failed to attract sufficient attention from mainstream British presses to be published by them in hardback – something initially thought necessary as a precursor to AWS publication, to attract notice in the periodical press. Bessie Head’s A Question of Power faced this problem in 1972; Currey recalls that the typescript was rejected by Jonathan Cape, Scribners, Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, and others, before he finally persuaded new left-leaning publisher Reg Davis-Poyner to publish it in hardcover.35 The novel’s progress to print was unusually fraught. Head had sent the typescript to her agent, Hilary Rubinstein, at A. P. Watt, and to Giles Gordon at Gollancz, but both had doubts, Rubinstein calling it ‘too dense and intractable’.36 Head thought Rubinstein was being patronising and fired him, hiring Gordon, who was in the process of leaving Gollancz for Anthony Sheil’s literary agency, to represent her.37 Randolph Vigne, a friend, who had been a colleague of James Currey’s in South Africa (both were now in Britain), encouraged Head to send the typescript to Currey at HEB (which had reprinted Maru in the AWS).38 Head’s relations with friends, publishers, and mentors alike were frequently strained by her increasingly fragile mental health – which fittingly, or tellingly, informs the depiction of Elizabeth’s breakdowns and delusions in A Question of Power, a book Head admitted was ‘almost autobiographical’, at least in impulse.39 Head’s struggles with mental illness (like her character Elizabeth’s struggles with visions of contending abusers and interlocutors) provides a metaphor for the manner in which Head had constantly to negotiate her own representation – in reviews,

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interviews, and letters. Hers was a constant struggle, in a national space removed from the country of her birth, and in extra-national textual space, against the demands of various discourses of belonging and identity (gender or racially determined) which strove to define her, and her writing, in a number of ways. (Her writing was variously categorised as autobiographical, for example, which, to complicate matters further, she variously contested and suggested.40) Interestingly, errors in the dust jacket copy of the Davis-Poyner first edition of A Question of Power demonstrate a signal lack of awareness of the novel’s setting, clearly confusing Botswana – described as ‘an African enclave within the borders of the Republic that has independence of a kind’ – with Lesotho.41 Currey was upfront with Head about the readership the novel could expect in its AWS format, telling her in a letter dated 24 August 1972, well before Davis-Poyner agreed to publish the hardback edition, that ‘[t]here is no better way to publish a book in Africa than in the African Writers Series. But if it is in that Series, distribution in the UK will mainly be through African Studies channels ... One would like more people to be able to read it’.42 He did manage to find what he calls a ‘third way’ to publish the novel, ‘in a general market paperback such as [by] Penguin, Panther, Picador or Pan’: it was finally accepted by Pantheon in New York in 1974.43 Similar problems attended attempts to secure hardback publication of La Guma titles planned for the AWS in the 1970s. In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and The Stone Country were both rejected by Tom Rosenthal at Secker & Warburg, for example, as neither politically nor artistically striking enough to warrant hardback publication.44 While HEB published the hardback of the first, The Stone Country (rights to which HEB acquired in 1973) appeared in a paperback AWS edition alone, in 1974, as did La Guma’s final published novel, Time of the Butcherbird, in 1979. Head was ambivalent about the associations of the AWS, telling Currey in 1978 that she had heard that some book buyers acquired each new title not to read, but to add to their AWS collection.45 She was particularly sensitive to being exoticised, labelled, or ‘collected’ – she had herself had to negotiate an ethics of collecting in compiling/writing her oral narrativeinformed Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981), and would later describe an encounter with the academic Susan Gardner ‘as re-enacting a process of disrespectful collection’ (in Nicole Leistikow’s words).46 Head wrote of their 1983 interview that Gardner had ‘promoted’ her ‘to the Bushman Curio Dept’. This, she explained, worked as follows: ‘The well-heeled drive up, stare intently at the Bushman, take flurried notes and dash back

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to write their thesis. The well-heeled get more well-heeled and the Bushman gets poorer. I am not as illiterate as the Bushman so I protest. They will never do this again to me.’47 Her concern not to be exploited is expressed, significantly, in relation to ‘the Bushman’; Bushman/San peoples formed autochthonous cultural communities in Botswana (and less so in South Africa and Namibia), but the term ‘Bushman’ was also a pejorative colloquialism in apartheid-era South Africa for ‘Coloured’. Her example might thus be taken to indicate Head’s awareness of her own marginal status in Botswana, but also of herself as mixed-race (and so, technically, in apartheid-era categories, Coloured), lending particular power to her resistance of any kind of inadequate racial, ethnic, or national labelling.48 Alex La Guma identified himself as Coloured. That both writers were so labelled stands as a useful (though admittedly not unproblematic) emblem of their status on the borders of discourses about nation and race, and also of their books’ material border-crossings. The antiapartheid struggle was often cast as one pitting an indigenous ‘black’ populace against a minority, racist, ‘white’ government. Both Head and La Guma complicate this frequent, too-easy, Manichean construction, just as ‘Colouredness’ itself continues to render problematic constructions of the nation on any exclusivist racial basis.49 While racial ‘hybridity’ has long been what Mohamed Adhikari calls a ‘defining attribute’ popularly associated with Coloured identity, ‘Colouredness’ is itself a much more heterogeneous form of naming, still current, and contested, as a self-identification, in post-apartheid South Africa.50 Just as ‘Colouredness’ illustrates fractured, sub-national structures of identification in South Africa’s contemporary nation space, so the textual-cultural biographies of works by border-crossing writers such as La Guma and Head, involving multiple extra-national movements in global textscapes, demonstrate the challenge to any nationally constituted ‘South African’ book history.

Notes This essay is for Mrs Blanche La Guma. 1. See Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’ (1990), in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (1993; Harlow: Pearson, 1994), pp. 324–39. 2. See Andrew van der Vlies, ‘Transnational Print Cultures: Books, -scapes, and the Textual Atlantic’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 8.1 ( January 2007), 45–55; 47–8.

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3. Although South Africa governed the League of National mandate territory of (German) South West Africa (present-day Namibia), from 1919 to 1990, and there was serious debate, until the late 1920s, about the expansion of the Union of South Africa northwards, to incorporate parts of erstwhile Southern Rhodesia, and potentially Moçambique and Bechuanaland. See Rodney Davenport and Christopher Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History, 5th edn (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 288–91. 4. David Attwell, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005), p. 1. ‘Rainbow Nation’ is, of course, a term made popular by Archbishop (Emeritus) Desmond Tutu. 5. Lewis Nkosi, ‘Constructing the “Cross-Border” Reader’, in Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman, Kenneth Parker, eds, Altered State? Writing and South Africa (Sydney: Dangeroo, 1994), pp. 37–49; 48. 6. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. & intro. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), pp. 29–30; Andrew van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 8. Shep suggests ‘global’ is more suggestive than ‘transnational’. 7. Shep, ‘Books Without Borders’, citing Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, ‘Surveying the (Battle) Field: Book History, SHARP, and the Guerilla Tactics of Research’, SHARP News 12.1 (2003), 3. 8. For biographical details, see Gillian Stead Eilersen, Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears (London: James Currey; Cape Town: David Philip, 1995). 9. Rob Nixon, ‘Border Country: Bessie Head’s Frontline States’, in his Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 101–30; 108. 10. Bessie Head, A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Craig McKenzie (Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1990), p. 67. See Nixon, ‘Border Country’, pp. 121–2. 11. See Andrew van der Vlies, ‘Reading Banned Books: Apartheid Censors and Anti-Apartheid Aesthetics’, Wasafiri, 22, 3(November 2007), pp. 55–61. 12. For biographical information, see Cecil Abrahams, Alex La Guma (Boston: Twayne, 1985), pp. xi–xv; Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens: Ohio University Press; Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005), pp. 117–18. 13. Barry Feinberg to James Currey, 12 February 1975, HEB Archives, Reading University Library, HEB 3/8. 14. For a detailed discussion of the publication and reception histories of La Guma’s work in Nigeria, East Germany, and Britain, see Van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures, Chapter 5. 15. The Internal Security Act, and Suppression of Communism Act, both of 1950, made this draconian treatment possible. See Christopher Merrett, A Culture of Censorship: Secrecy and Intellectual Repression in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip; Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1994), and, on La Guma’s treatment by apartheid-era censors, see Van der Vlies, ‘Reading Banned Books’. 16. Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night (Ibadan: Mbari, 1962), p. 108. See Van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures. 17. Alex La Guma, And a Threefold Cord (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1964), p. 168.

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18. Alex La Guma, The Stone Country (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1967), p. 74. 19. Max Frankel, ‘Seven Seas East of the Wall’, The New York Times, 10 January 1965: Section 7.2, 3, 32–3; 32. David Lowe, Interview with Andrew van der Vlies, Cambridge, 11 March 2002. Seven Seas appears to have been owned, or at least partly financed, by a large German publisher, Volk und Welt; it ceased publishing in 1978. Volk und Welt, privatised in 1993, was purchased by Dietrich von Boetticher in 1995, and in 1999, Munich-based Luchterhand Verlag, also owned by Von Boetticher, took over production and distribution. No archival records for Seven Seas Books appear to have survived. Dag Maaske (Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, Frankfurt), email correspondence, 8 November 2001. Heym had fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1935 and served in American military intelligence during the war, but he and Gelbin, both socialists, chose to move to the German Democratic Republic in 1953. See Dennis Tate, ‘Stefan Heym: East German Dissident Author’, The Guardian, 17 December 2001, 20. 20. See lists of books in La Guma’s And a Threefold Cord, pp. 174–5, and The Stone Country, pp. 170–1. 21. Seven Seas Books (catalogue) (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1976). 22. La Guma, And a Threefold Cord, p. 1 (‘Briefly, about the Book’), p. 8 (epigraph), p. 176 (‘Briefly, about the Author’). 23. Brian Bunting, ‘Foreword’, in La Guma, And a Threefold Cord (1964), pp. 9–16; 16. Bunting had edited the anti-government newspaper The Guardian (de facto unofficial mouthpiece for the banned Communist party) and worked on several of its successors, including Advance, New Age, and Spark. La Guma had also worked for New Age before his banning. Bunting was eventually, predictably, banned and forced into exile in London in 1963. See Brian Bunting, The Rise of the South African Reich (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), inside front cover. 24. Bunting, ‘Foreword’, p. 9. 25. La Guma, Stone Country, cover; and see Bunting, ‘Foreword’, p. 9. 26. La Guma repeatedly stressed the impulses his work shared with writing by antiimperialist writers globally, and he was active in moves to promote links between writers in socialist and postcolonial states. He was a recipient of a Lotus Prize from the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Delhi, in November 1970 (receiving the award from Indira Gandhi), when his fellow awardees included Augustino Neto and Mahmoud Darwish. See ‘Alex La Guma Gains Lotus Prize’, Sechaba 5.2 (February 1971), 8; and Alex La Guma, ‘Address by Lotus Award Winner’, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 10, 4/71 (October 1971), 195–7. 27. Victor Ramzes, ‘African Literature in Russia’, Transition 25 (1966), 40–2; 41. Ramzes writes, for example, that Peter Abrahams’ The Path of Thunder had been screened, used for a ballet, and had 12 printings by the mid-1960s (41). 28. Herbert L. Shore, ‘A Note on South African Life and Letters’, in Herbert L. Shore and Megchelina Shore-Bos, eds, Come Back, Africa! Fourteen Short Stories from South Africa(Berlin: Seven Seas, 1968), pp. 15–37; 26. Other writers represented in the volume were Bloke Modisane, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Richard Rive, Phyllis Altman, and Alan Paton. 29. Wilfred Cartey, ‘Recent South African Novels’, African Forum 1.3 (Winter 1966), 115–121; 117. 30. Bernth Lindfors, ‘South Africa’, Books Abroad 40.1 (Winter 1966), 116.

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31. See Van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures, Chapter 5, further. 32. Alex La Guma, And a Threefold Cord (London: Kliptown Books, 1988); Bunting’s revised ‘Preface’ occupies pp. i–ix. 33. See V. Unwin and J. Currey, ‘The African Writers’ Series Celebrates Thirty Years’, Southern African Review of Books 5.2 (March/April 1993), 3–6; Gail Low, ‘In Pursuit of Publishing: Heinemann’s African Writers Series’, Wasafiri 37 (Winter 2002), 31–5. 34. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), xi, p. 50. 35. James Currey, ‘Publishing Bessie Head: Memories and Reflections’, Wasafiri, 46 (Winter 2005), 19–26; 19; Eilersen, Bessie Head, p. 153. 36. Letter of 27 April 1972, cited in Eilersen, Bessie Head, p. 150; and see p. 142. 37. Eilersen, Bessie Head, p. 151; Currey, ‘Publishing Bessie Head’, p. 20. 38. Currey, ‘Publishing Bessie Head’, p. 20; Eilersen, Bessie Head, p. 152. See also Randolph Vigne, ed., A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965–1979 (London: Heinemann Educational, 1991). 39. Eilersen, Bessie Head, p. 149; see pp. 143–50. For another account of Head’s difficult relationship with colleagues and mentors, see Peter Nazareth, ‘Path of Thunder: Meeting Bessie Head’, Research in African Literature 37.4 (Winter 2006), 211–29. 40. See Nixon, ‘Border Country’, p. 109. Tellingly, too, Head’s character, Elizabeth, feels ‘that some of the answers’ for her visions and nightmares ‘lay in her experiences in Botswana’, where she is subject to occasional victimisation, exclusion, and racial abuse. Bessie Head, A Question of Power: A Novel (London: Davis-Poyner, 1973), p. 19. On Head’s self-presentation, and the material presentation of her works, see Nicole Leistikow, ‘Marketing Bessie Head: Collections, Classifications, and the Negotiation of History’, unpublished M.Phil. thesis (University of Oxford, 2001). 41. Head, A Question of Power (1973), dustjacket blurb, inside front flap. 42. Currey, ‘Publishing Bessie Head’, p. 20. 43. Eilersen, Bessie Head, p. 156. Currey claims 1977; ‘Publishing Bessie Head’, p. 21. 44. Tom Rosenthal to Keith Sambrook, 30 July 1971, HEB Archives, Reading University Library, HEB 18/3; and Tom Rosenthal to James Currey, 3 January 1973, HEB 12/8. 45. Letter of 10 December 1976, cited in Leistikow, ‘Marketing Bessie Head’, p. 21. 46. Leistikow, ‘Marketing Bessie Head’, p. 43. 47. Quoted in Maria Olaussen, Forceful Creation in Harsh Terrain: Place and Identity in Three Novels by Bessie Head (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 41. See Leistikow, ‘Marketing Bessie Head’, p. 43. 48. Head’s mother was white, her father black. Her mother was institutionalised before her birth, and the infant Bessie was placed with a Coloured foster family until the age of 13. See Eilersen, Bessie Head, pp. 7–11. 49. A London Times reviewer greeted the AWS A Walk in the Night and Other Stories under the heading ‘Now the Coloured Voice’, for example; P. H. S., ‘The Times Diary’, Times, 31 August 1967, 401. 50. Adhikari, Not White Enough, p. 22. During the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, Coloured was eclipsed by ‘black’ as a more capacious term for all

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ethnic and racial groups ‘othered’ by white South Africa. Some Coloured community leaders later either insisted on a lower-case ‘c’ or prefaced ‘socalled “Coloured”’, although La Guma himself rejected this last designation vociferously, objecting to its use in an ANC publication. See Alex La Guma, Letter, Sechaba ( June 1984), 13. See also Nixon, ‘Border Country’, p. 105; Zoë Wicomb, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 91–107.

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11 Roshni Mooneeram

Setting the scene Sidney Shep’s call for an approach to book history which challenges the homology between the cultural and the national is certainly a good point of departure in considering Shakespeare’s postcolonial journey to Mauritius. The travel of the Shakespearean canon, the very backbone of the English history of the book, to an Indian Ocean island with a complicated colonial history, and whose native bird, now famously extinct as a result of colonial transactions, gave to the English language the simile ‘dead as a dodo’, is bound to be transnationally tumultuous. Mauritius can itself be seen as a palimpsest where layers of colonisation, various waves of migration, a dozen languages which wax and wane in importance, several literary traditions and a ‘national’ one in the making, write over, across and with one another. The island is a contact zone1 par excellence which has in turn borne the subjugation of Shakespeare, gladly imported him, consumed him, exploited him, transgressed him and shipped him back to London. This chapter investigates the roles and impact of Shakespeare in postcolonial Mauritius through Dev Virahsawmy’s changing negotiations with the Shakespearean canon from 1981 to 2004. The production, circulation and reception of Shakespeare in Mauritius tell their own tales about an evolving sense of national history. I investigate first the style in which the nation is imagined. A brief overview of the political and sociolinguistic context within which Virahsawmy reworks Shakespeare into Mauritian Creole helps to contextualise the postcolonial motivations behind his adaptations and translations of canonical European texts. After a century of French colonisation followed by a century and a half of British colonisation, Mauritius has been independent since 1968. 186

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Shakespeare’s Postcolonial Journey

Although socio-economic and political changes have helped to undermine, to a large extent, the colonial social distribution, a colonial linguistic policy continues to perpetuate the exclusion of a large section of the population in postcolonial Mauritius. English remains the de jure official language: that of parliament, jurisdiction, administration and the official language of instruction in education, at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. French occupies a semi-official status as the dominant language of the media. However, the last Population Census (2000) provides the following staggering figures for the main languages usually spoken at home: English (less than 0.3 per cent), French (approximately 3.8 per cent), Creole (70 per cent). Half a dozen or so of Indian and Chinese languages play an increasingly restricted role. To a large extent the reluctance of the Mauritian State to revise its colonial language policy stems from the negative symbolic value of Creole which is mainly derived from the accumulation of historical and cultural associations since early French colonisation. This sociolinguistic status quo may also be deliberately maintained in order to safeguard the interests of that elite. To quote Mark Sebba: ‘This [the status quo] may be due to power being held by an elite who can comfortably use the official standard or lexifier language. They may have a vested interest in keeping the majority uninformed and controlling their access to national institutions.’2 Dev Virahsawmy, a prominent intellectual figure in Mauritius, has been doing the very opposite for the past 36 years. He has attempted to valorise the use of Creole in his capacity as militant activist in the early days of independence, and later as linguist, publisher, creative writer and translator. He is the pioneering and most prolific creative writer using the medium of Creole, with over 40 published oeuvres, many of which have been translated and are internationally acclaimed. Indeed, in the early years of independence his pioneering protest plays had a momentous impact on the history of Mauritian Creole as a literary language, triggering a cultural movement which was to inspire a number of artists and writers to experiment with the medium of Creole. Alongside other writers, he has laid the foundation for a thriving literary tradition in the vernacular. In fact, Creole has been raised into an effective medium of literary expression which, in the field of theatre, rivals English and French, previously the dominant languages of theatre. He set up his own publishing house Bukie Banane in 1977, focusing exclusively on publications in Creole. From 2001, Virahsawmy has posted all his new and older literary texts online (http://pages. intnet.mu/develog) to ensure free and wide accessibility. He also perseveres in producing e-books through Bukie Banane, seeing publishing as

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a crucial factor which confirms the emergence of Creole as an autonomous literary language. Virahsawmy’s privileging of the Mauritian vernacular, a minor cultural language in a global context but the major language in a local context, is both a matter of cultural empowerment and a means of decolonisation.

Translation in a postcolonial context Although Virahsawmy focuses his attention on Shakespearean plays, he has also translated the Indian epic Mahabharata and works by Molière, Hugo, Prévert, the Grimm brothers, and Matthew Arnold. The translation of world canonical texts into the vernacular is part of a bridgebuilding exercise between national literatures, aimed at creating a two-way flow and a more egalitarian relationship between older literatures benefiting from synchronicity and diachronicity, and the nascent Mauritian literature. This attempt at rectifying historical asymmetries is both cultural and linguistic. Historically, as emphasised by Even-Zohar, literary translation seems to repeatedly engender or reinforce various forms of creativity which extend from national and other identity formations to literary and linguistic resourcefulness.3 Across Europe a mounting sense of national identity pressed the major countries to develop their own vernaculars which would rival Latin. In England, the spirit of nationalism in the aftermath of the country’s ascendancy in Europe manifested itself in educators’ and writers’ association of the English vernacular with national values and pride. Translation from established languages and, in particular, from canonical texts to relatively young literary languages have played and can play a transformative role by both extending the linguistic resources of the target language and legitimising the latter as a literary language. Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s works were themselves vernacular translations of classic texts. Homem and Hoenselaars describe the dependence of that prolific period in English literary history on appropriations and rewritings of classical source texts as ‘a crucially productive aspect of the agon between classical and vernacular’.4 This analogy is, however, limited and limiting, and the contemporary postcolonial context of literary translation requires further probing. There are more politically specific reasons as to why in current postcolonial times translation becomes an almost irresistible endeavour to redress the asymmetry of relations between languages, cultures and ultimately between peoples. In a postcolonial context, Niranjana insists, the problematic of translation becomes a significant site for raising

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questions of representation, power and historicity.5 Indeed, since translation has at its heart the discursive practices which animate interactions between peoples and nations speaking different languages, in a postcolonial context the practice of translation becomes a political and cultural site of contestation, deconstructing colonial perceptions of cultural otherness and positing alternative views to the colonial translation process. Viewed within this postcolonial framework, the translation of Shakespeare, in particular, is bound to be a contentious task. The complex web of ambiguous factors which explain the proliferation of postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare has been the subject of prolific scholarship.6 Shakespeare as the embodiment of British imperial culture, Shakespeare as a site which is already culturally heterogeneous through constant reworking in different ages, and his universal appeal as the most performed playwright in the world, build up his mythical status which, in a postcolonial context, often becomes a fertile space of contestation. In Virahsawmy’s case, his intention to ‘use Shakespeare to enhance my language’ demonstrates that he explicitly manipulates Shakespeare’s hypercanonicity and its consequent influence on the image of the target language.7 The choice of Shakespeare allows him to transpose into a regional language an author who, in addition to holding universal status, plays a central role in the literary space of Mauritius. Under British rule, a theatrical culture developed in the 1930s, if only for a small elite, with the creation of the Mauritius Dramatic Club. The historian Decotter highlights 40 years of performances of Julius Caesar among other plays.8 Shakespeare was not only particularly influential in the colonial history and education of Mauritius, as he was in other previous British colonies, but he continues to be a dominant figure in the secondary school curriculum. Virahsawmy, himself a lecturer who has taught Shakespeare for 40 years, describes his imagination as being haunted by Shakespearean characters.9 It is hardly surprising that Shakespeare pervades many of his creative works at shifting levels of engagement. A distinction across Virahsawmy’s different forms of engagement with Shakespeare may be useful in tracing the postcolonial journey of the bard. The Shakespearean canon is present in fragments across several plays which are not translations. Zeneral Makbef (1981), Sir Toby (1998), Ziliet ek so Romeo (2001) are original texts which have very little to do with the Shakespearean plays evoked. They exploit instead the Shakespearean resonance as reusable material to build up a Mauritian postcolonial national theatre. Although inspired by Twelfth Night, Sir Toby (1998) remains an original and feminist creation of Virahsawmy’s

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where Beatriss-Shakti, inspired by Dante’s Beatrice and the Hindu concept of omnipotent female energy Shakti, plays a leading political role. Gender is, indeed, a major preoccupation in Virahsawmy’s reworkings of Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet the lovers are only ever once referred to as ‘Juliet and her Romeo’ when the Prince comments on the woeful story of Juliet and her Romeo, thus closing the play. The very order of the title Ziliet ek so Romeo signals a rewriting of gender roles. The play opens in a botanical garden reminiscent of Eden where Romeo evades Ziliet’s persistent sexual advances for fear of being caught red-handed. Reversing the myth of genesis, it is Romeo who was cloned from one of Ziliet’s cells. Along her journey outside the garden, Ziliet establishes herself as a successful entrepreneur, meeting a fate far removed from that of a fallen Eve or the tragic end of Shakespeare’s Juliet. Virahsawmy’s rewriting of Shakespearean heroines not only highlights the repressive nature of various patriarchal institutions, including those of a literary canon and religion, but also acts as a means of intervention. The central role which Virahsawmy also ascribes to the heroine of Toufann (here Kordelia rather than Miranda), as assertive of sexual independence in her relationship to Caliban and resistant to patriarchal authority, is again in line with his feminist agenda. The multicultural influences he draws from suggest that this re-imagining extends beyond the nation to a world which recognises and promotes gender democracy.

Iconoclastic and identity-forming translations Annie Brisset’s distinction between iconoclastic and identity-forming translations in Quebec, where the vernacular joual does not benefit from official status, is a useful paradigm in distinguishing between two types of translations considered in this chapter.10 Toufann (1991), a parodic rewriting of The Tempest situated at the juncture between creation and translation proper, is what Brisset describes as an iconoclastic translation. An iconoclastic translation uses fragments of the source text to produce a different work. Although Toufann is a radical postcolonial rewriting, unlike the plays mentioned above, it nonetheless retains too much of the original to be considered a new work in its own right. Another example of an iconoclastic translation is Virahsawmy’s Prezidan Otelo (2003) where Othello is gay and Desdemona, another powerful female character, is the most trusted cabinet minister under his presidency. On the other hand, Prins Hamlet (2004) and Enn ta Senn dan Vid (1995), translations of Hamlet and Much Ado about Nothing are part of a

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clearly identifiable set of plays which import the source works in their entirety (also Trazedi Makbes (1997), Zil Sezar (1999) and Lerwa Lir (2007), translations of Macbeth, Julius Caesar and King Lear respectively). These can be said to be examples of identity-forming translation which ‘elevates a dialect to the status of a national and cultural language’.11 I consider next Zeneral Makbef, Toufann and Prins Hamlet. Zeneral Makbef (1981), performed for the stage repeatedly in Mauritius and abroad (1981, 1982, 1984, 1990), is a key play in the early theatre of protest. Although it is an inspired rewriting of Macbeth, its success relies on its establishment of a national theatre which would explore and express a local identity. It is a political satire which takes place in a newly independent Third World country written from an identifiable ideological position conducted as much against a French as against an English linguistic and political hegemony. The plot of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which revolves around tyranny and the usurpation of power, parallels the representation of history in several of the postcolonial African countries surrounding Mauritius. Indeed, Virahsawmy’s Makbef, who makes himself Emperor of a Republic, with a lust for power matched only by an unnaturally intense sexual appetite for both men and women, is a satirical reference to leaders such as Bokassa and Idi Amin Dada. Zeneral Makbef warns against two types of oppression facing postcolonial countries: the risk of becoming puppets in the hands of superpowers and that of becoming the victims of their own leaders. Virahsawmy’s play also takes its cue from the overthrow of tyranny by collective action which concludes Shakespeare’s play. From faithful servant of the murdered king to apparently naïve servant of Makbef, Sooklall will then make his way into Ledi Makbef’s bed and finally lead a revolutionary coup against Makbef himself. The impact of the first encounter with Shakespeare was twofold. First, it facilitated the shrewd exploration of the politics of newly independent countries and, second, through its association with an established literary culture, Zeneral Makbef enhanced the status of Mauritian Creole as the national literary language. A decade later, leaving aside the use of Shakespeare as a springboard for the exploration of local politics, Virahsawmy’s rewriting of The Tempest was to engage more assertively with the politics of Shakespeare in a postcolonial context. Imbued with an unequivocal colonial context, The Tempest retains a powerful hold over the postcolonial imagination of the tempest-tossed island of Mauritius. The politics of language, location and dislocation; the acutely uneven relations of power highlighting the civilising mission of Englishness when it encounters the ‘other’, the lure of subversion; and an obsession with

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commotion which is overtly reflected in the very title, all combine to make of the rewriting of this play a compelling and resolute postcolonial endeavour. While all translations are to some degree or another forms of rewriting, Virahsawmy’s Toufann, a three-act play in prose, is a more extreme form of rewriting akin to what Michel Garneau describes as a ‘tradaptation’, the genre of flexible rewriting midway between translation and adaptation.12 Toufann follows its independent trajectory, mostly violating the established patterns of the source text and choosing to adhere to some of them metonymically.13 Virahsawmy’s irreverent rewriting is reactualised in an age of modern technology and firmly situated in postcolonial subversion. The geographical space of Mauritius is located not at the margins but at the centre, and Caliban is no longer what the colonial self invented as the savage but an intelligent and attractive young man, a ‘métis’ of mixed ancestry, issued from a white pirate and a black slave. Being a brilliant technician, he is the only one capable of carrying on Prospero’s scientific work and will eventually reign as king, partner to Prospero’s daughter, and it is his progeny which will one day take over. In his rewritings, Virahsawmy certainly writes against Shakespeare on more than one political level but he also writes with the bard. His rewriting is, after all, dedicated to Shakespeare himself. Virahsawmy displays a generous amount of licence in bringing together characters from and outside The Tempest: Miranda is Kordelia, Alonso is King Lir, Antonio is Yago, Stephano and Trinculo are Dammarro and Kaspalto, two stereotypical Mauritian characters. The English equivalents for these examples of nomen est omen would be ‘spliff-head’ and ‘piss-head’ respectively. Dammarro’s name is inspired by a Hindustani song about the delights of marijuana and Kaspalto is named after divin kaspalto, a cheap local wine. While, on one hand, Virahsawmy maintains an impertinent literary link with Shakespeare across various plays, on the other, he also opens a linguistic and sociocultural connivance with a Mauritian audience, bringing to the Shakespearean canon local and postcolonial linguistic elements and references alien to it, crossing borders at will. Virahsawmy’s irreverence to Shakespeare is sharply noted as Yago finally gets his chance to speak back to his creator: Need somebody to blame? Oh yes let’s all blame Yago. Ever since that little fucking shit Shakespeare used me to destroy Othello and Desdemona everyone thinks I’m to be blamed for all the problems of the world. (Act II, scene 6)14

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On a more serious note, Virahsawmy can be said to write with Shakespeare in the sense that he is concerned less with the historical wrongs of colonisation than with the incomplete forms of decolonisation and contemporary social constructions of injustice in Mauritius. Through Prospero, played by an Indo-Mauritian15 actor in performances in Mauritius, Virahsawmy engages critically with the fact that postcolonial Mauritius has bred its own neocolonial tyrant. A further striking feature of Toufann is Virahsawmy’s use of codeswitching to English in a play otherwise written entirely in Creole.16 Because codeswitching to English (a High language in the diglossic sociolinguistic context of Mauritius) is associated with either characters such as Dammarro and Kaspalto who lack confidence in their own voices or in the unimaginative cliché phrases used by Lir and Polonius (who replace The Tempest’s Alonso and Gonzalo), English is hardly identified as a norm. The following example foregrounds the latter’s mental lethargy and reluctance to engage responsibly with the action of the play: Yago: ‘Vot Mazeste! Abdike? Lerwa Lir: Wi, mo abdike. Power corrupts ... Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Donn pouvoir lepep. Organiz eleksion.’ Yago: Your Majesty! Abdicate? King Lear: Yes, I abdicate. Power corrupts ... Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Give power to the people. Organise elections. (Act II, scene 3) Leroi lir: ‘Mo pa ankoler ditou. A Bondie, ayo si koumadir ... Prefer pa panse. Poloniouss: Bizin gard lespoir. Where there is a will there is a way.’ King Lear: I’m not angry at all. Oh God, if only ... Best not to think. Poloniouss: You must keep your hope up. Where there is a will there is a way. (Act II, scene 5) These characters are in sharp contrast to socially well-adjusted, more prestigious protagonists of integrity such as Kalibann who does not codeswitch to English even in his most challenging moments. In fact,

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within the literary and linguistic space of the play codeswitching clearly serves as a useful critical tool in the othering of European languages. Indeed, in a play written in a confident Mauritian Creole voice, the carefully scattered snippets of English, partly designed to evoke a Shakespearean flavour, construct both the Shakespearean canon and the English language as exotic. This distancing strategy alleviates some of the anxiety surrounding the position of the bard in a postcolonial context and, in particular, the controversial use of Shakespeare in the creation of a ‘national’ literature. The nature of Virahsawmy’s rewriting and his use of codeswitching in Toufann suggest that Virahsawmy sustains admiration for Shakespeare while simultaneously demonstrating that bardolatry does not command his intellectual respect. By the same token, Toufann also manages to steer clear of an uncritical acceptance of an imagined community. While Prospero’s old regime is clearly buried at the end of Toufann, the play denies itself closure, by ending with the threat of further political subversion from those subordinates which the story could not recuperate. When Kaspalto and Dammarro question the fact that they still occupy marginal roles, Kordelia promises that she will ask that another story be written in which they would fare more fortunately. Toufann does not end on the note of a happily liberated postcolonial community but rather addresses further unresolved issues of power and dominance. In the true style of a book without borders, Toufann leaves open a door for another story. Pertinently in relation to the main issues addressed in this book, Virahsawmy demonstrates a vision of a national literature that not only acknowledges Mauritius as being permeated by a multiplicity of peoples, places, histories, languages and literatures but as one that thrives on two-way exchanges between the ex-colony and the centre. Virahsawmy’s transformation of Shakespeare suggests, indeed, a model of cultural independence which lies not within the confines of a navelgazing national history but one which thrives in multi-directional international connections. A third posture of Virahsawmy’s in relation to Shakespeare can be illustrated through some of the lexical traits of Prins Hamlet, an ‘identity-forming translation’. A line-by-line translation of Shakespeare into Mauritian Creole raises several difficulties in relation to the historicocultural and linguistic aspects of the source text. Not only are Elizabethan English and Mauritian Creole unrelated languages, they are furthermore also separated by time, geography, culture and asymmetrical historical experience. This distance explains Virahsawmy’s description of Prins Hamlet as the most difficult of his translating experiences.17

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In terms of general translation strategy, in Prins Hamlet, Virahsawmy does not carry out a mechanical transfer of translation units but feels free to cut and add to the number of words in the source text, juxtaposing different translation techniques from transliteration where Shakespeare’s exact imagery and vocabulary are retained to free adaptation.18 One of Hamlet’s most widely discussed puns: ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ (1.2.65–66) is seen as a challenge to the translator in whose language there are no two such words for relatedness as ‘kin’ and ‘kind’. It is translated ingenuously to inpe plis fami, inpe moins ami. In addition to the close syntactic correspondence between the target language and the original, the translation also generates prosodic echoes of the source text. The acrolectal ami from French stands out in a distinctly Creole construction, whereas the usual word for friend is kamarad. There are examples of other borrowings in his translation of Claudius’s oxymoronic metaphors through hybrid compounds ‘With mirth in funeral’ is translated to Maryaz karrmadi, where the Tamil noun for funeral is used as an adjective to maryaz. The translation of ‘with dirge in marriage’ into lanterman vinndou follows a similar pattern, with the Tamil noun for wedding functioning as adjective qualifying the Creole word lanterman. Another example of hybrid lexis is Enn Maha-leroi (1.2) (So excellent a king) where Maha (supreme), a Hindi adjective originally from Sanskrit, is tagged to a Creole word to replicate the outstanding stature of King Hamlet. A possible motivation for the strategic use of words from older cultures – Tamil, Hindi and French – may be that they contribute to the diachronic distance between the audience and the world of the play. An archaic register in the context of a new language is necessarily a matter of artifice. Virahsawmy partly restores the historical dimension of the foreign text through an attempt at archaising the language while using resources available and recognisable in a local context. He thereby invents domestic analogues for foreign forms and themes by drawing from the heterogeneity of the sociolinguistic landscape of the target culture. It is a point of interest that Virahsawmy attempts a rendering of pseudo-archaic language through stylistic means which stubbornly refuse to draw from the source language. There are, indeed, no borrowings from English in Prins Hamlet. The gradience of power and prestige in relation to English and Creole seems to be a major consideration in Virahsawmy’s translation context. Whereas the use of English for the purposes of lexical extension seemed acceptable and even confident in most of Virahsawmy’s original creative writing and

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in his previous works, including Zeneral Makbef and Toufann, in Prins Hamlet the self-consciousness of translation seems to call for greater domestication. If translation, in the sense of an identity-forming translation, from English into Creole is to defeat the argument that the latter is too poor a language to express abstract ideas, then Creole should be able to accommodate Hamlet without resorting to lexical borrowings from the source text. Indeed, the contradictions of using Shakespeare to promote the Mauritian vernacular lead to creative tensions in Virahsawmy’s translation strategies. Through this dialectic of dependence on and independence from the source text, symbolic power is detached from an exclusive association with English and associated with Creole. This is not, however, a purist approach to language since Creole itself is a contact language at once permeated and permeable by various languages, in more pronounced and visible manner than other languages. Rather, these self-imposed constraints of resisting borrowings from English encourage the translator to devise new stylistic resources for Creole. Through the linguistic and cultural self-representation that translation encourages, therefore, Shakespeare becomes an instrument of self-assertion.

Who’s/Whose Shakespeare? Translations, where relationships between source and recipient cultures are tense, precarious and shifting, reveal as much about the target culture as the source one. Annie Brisset goes as far as to argue that ‘of all the types of translation practised in a culture during a given historical period, theatre translation is the only precise indicator of the profound relationships of the culture to itself and to the Foreigner’.19 Over three decades, Virahsawmy’s reworking of Shakespearean texts has played distinct roles both within the receiving culture and in relation to colonial hegemony. Within Mauritius Shakespeare has been opened up to both a much wider audience than colonial productions in English would have allowed and contemporary and overtly political issues. Virahsawmy’s earlier intellectual engagement with Shakespeare revolved around the project to construct or represent Mauritian nationalism. The association of Shakespeare to local politics brought Mauritius into centre stage. A comparative perspective was then generated whereby the symbiosis between the national language and literature in Mauritius is compared to that of established western European national languages and literatures. More specifically, the manipulation of Shakespeare’s linguistic talent and hypercanonicity helps to establish Creole as one of the world’s literary languages.

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But moving beyond the national project, Virahsawmy’s engagement with Shakespeare is, to use Shep’s term, ‘aggressively transnational’. Toufann has, in turn, been translated into English20 and was performed in London by Border Crossings in 1999. It was also the focus of an international conference, ‘Toufann and other Tempests: Shakespeare in postcolonial contexts’ (Birkbeck college, London, November 1999). A transfigured transnational Shakespeare exported back to an English audience (itself postcolonial?) contributes to the growing scholarship on The Tempest. The decolonisation of Shakespeare thus lies in a disconcertingly confident shift of power relations between the latter, the postcolonial translator and audiences embroiled in varying forms of postcoloniality. Virahsawmy’s transformations of Shakespeare reveal, in line with Shep’s insightful point about the changing dynamics between teller and tale, that it is Mauritius which helps to redefine Shakespeare, not the other way round. In fact, Shakespeare’s postcolonial journey is as much part of the project to explore a local history – which under Virahsawmy’s pen resists a delimited space – as it contributes to the plotting of the intellectual history of Britain, bringing centre and margin into a mutually transformative dialogue.

Notes 1. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 2. Mark Sebba, Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 237. 3. Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘The position of translated literature within the literary polysystem’, in James Holmes, ed., Literature and Translation (Leuven: Acco, 1978). 4. R. C. Homem and T. Hoenselaars, eds Translating Shakespeare for the Twentyfirst Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 6. 5. Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Postcolonial Context (Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 1. 6. For examples, see Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds, Post-colonial Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1998) or Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999). 7. Jane Wilkinson, ‘Interviews with Dev Virahsawmy and Michael Walling’, in African Theatre, Playwrights and Politics, ed. by Martin Banham, James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), p. 113. 8. André Decotter, Le Plaza, un demi siècle de vie théâtrale (Port-Louis: Précigraph, 1983), p. 7. 9. Personal Communication, Mauritius, September 2004. 10. Annie Brisset, A Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 1968–1988, trans. Rosalind Gill and Roger Gannon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

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11. Ibid., p. 165. 12. Garneau produced Macbeth in joual in Quebec in 1978. 13. Maria Tymoczko argues that translation can only ever be a metonymic process, but in the case of Toufann this metonymy is overt. Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester: St Jerome, 1999). 14. Dev Virahsawmy, Toufann. All Virahsawmy’s plays are available at (http://pages.intnet.mu/develog). 15. Mauritian of Indian descent. Indo-Mauritians form the majority of the Mauritian population and dominate the political scene. 16. For a more extensive discussion of language in Toufann, see Roshni Mooneeram, ‘Language politics in Dev Virahsawmy’s Toufann, a postcolonial rewriting of The Tempest’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41: 3 (2006), 67–81. 17. (http://pages.intnet.mu/develog/tradiksion). 18. An extended discussion of Virahsawmy’s translation of Hamlet was first published in the following chapter ‘Negotiating Shakespeare’s hypercanonicity in Creole: ideological and practical considerations’, in Translating Voices, Translating Regions, ed. by Nigel Armstrong and Federico Federici (Rome: Aracne, 2006). 19. Brisset, xv. 20. Michael and Nisha Walling, Toufann (London: Border Crossings, 2004).

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Abrahams, Cecil. Alex La Guma (Boston: Twayne, 1985). Adhikari, Mohamed. Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens: Ohio University Press; Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005). Aguilar, Faustino. Ang Nobelang Tagalog: Kahapon, Ngayón at Bukas (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1949). Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). Amory, Hugh and David D. Hall, eds. The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991). Andrews, Robert. The Virginia Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1784 (Richmond: Nicolson & Prentis, 1783–9). Armstrong Nigel and Federico Federici, eds. Translating Voices, Translating Regions (Rome: Aracne, 2006). Arnaudov, Mihail. Bulgarskoto knizhovno druzhestvo ve Braila, 1869–76 (Sofia: Izdateltsvo na Bulgarskata Akademia na Naukite, 1966). Attridge, Derek and Rosemary Jolly, eds. Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Attwell, David. Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005). Ballantyne, Tony and Brian Moloughney, eds. Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand’s Pasts (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006). Banham, Martin, James Gibbs and Femi Osofisan, eds. African Theatre, Playwrights and Politics (Oxford: James Currey, 2001). Bell, Steven M., Albert H. Le May and Leonard Orr, eds. Critical Theory, Cultural Politics, and Latin American Narrative (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993). Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). Boehmer, Elleke, Laura Chrisman and Kenneth Parker, eds. Altered State? Writing and South Africa (Sydney: Dangeroo, 1994). Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. & intro. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). Braithwaite, Brian. Women’s Magazines: The First 300 Years (London: Peter Owen, 1995). Braude, Benjamin and Bernard Lewis, eds. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural State, 2 vols (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, Inc., 1982). Brisset, Annie. A Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 1968–1988, trans. Rosalind Gill and Roger Gannon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). Bunting, Brian. The Rise of the South African Reich (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964). 199

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Select Bibliography

Select Bibliography

Campbell, Carl C. Colony and Nation: A Short History of Education in Trinidad, 1834–1986 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1992). ——. Endless Education: Main Currents in the Educational System of Modern Trinidad and Tobago 1939–1986 (Barbados: University Press of the West Indies, 2000). Carpenter, Kenneth E. ed. Books and Society in History (New York & London: R. R. Bowker, 1983). Cartelli, Thomas. Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999). Clarke, Austin. The Polished Hoe (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003). Cohen, Deborah and Maura O’Connor, eds. Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale, 1992). Commemorative Edition of the 25th Anniversary of Die Modenwelt, The (Zum 25jährigen Bestehen der Modenwelt 1865–1890), (Berlin, Leipzig: Otto Dürr, 1890). Crampton, Robert J. A Concise History of Bulgaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Cruz, Hermenegildo. Kun Sino Ang Kumathâ Ng ‘Florante’: Kasaysayan Ng Búhay ni Francisco Baltazar at Pag-Uulat Nang Kanyang Karununga’t Kadakilaan (Maynila: Libreria ‘Manila Filatélico’, 1906). Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Cutteridge, J. O. Nelson’s West Indian Reader 1-v (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1928). ——, ed. Nelson’s Geography of the West Indies and Adjacent Lands (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1931). and Frank Ogle, eds. Nelson’s West Indian Readers III–IV, Jamaica Edition (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1936). Daboll, Nathan. The New England Almanack and Gentleman’s and Lady’s Diary (New London: Green, 1783–1800). Darnton, Robert. The Kiss of Lamourette (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). Davenport, Rodney and Christopher Saunders, eds. South Africa: A Modern History, 5th edn (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000). Decotter, André. Le Plaza, un demi siècle de vie théâtrale (Port-Louis: Précigraph, 1983). Eilersen, Gillian Stead. Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears (London: James Currey; Cape Town: David Philip, 1995). Engelhardt, Edward. La Turquie et le Tanzimat ou Histoire des Reformes dans l’Empire Ottoman (Paris: A Cotillon et Cie, Imprimeurs-Editeurs, 1882). Eugenio, Damiana L. Awit and Corrido: Philippine Metrical Romances (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1987). Evans, Harold G. A Short History of Bulgaria (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1960). Faupel, J. F. African Holocaust: The Story of the Uganda Martyrs (London: Chapman, 1962). Fleming, Patricia Lockhart, Gilles Gallichan and Yvan Lamonde, eds. History of the Book in Canada / Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Fussell, Paul. Abroad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Gallagher D., ed. The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (London: Methuen, 1983). Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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Gergova, Ani, ed. Bulgarska Kniga Entsyclopedia (Sofia-Moscow: Pensoft, 2004). Gilmore, William J. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992). Gombricht, Ernst H. The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 1961). Greene, Graham. Ways of Escape (London: Bodley Head, 1980). ——. Journey Without Maps (London: Vintage, 2002 [1936]). ——. The Lawless Roads (London: Vintage, 2002 [1939]). Griffith, Penny, Ross Harvey and Keith Maslen, eds with Ross Somerville. Book & Print: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997). Griffith, Penny, Peter Hughes and Alan Loney, eds. A Book in the Hand: Essays on the History of the Book in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000). Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson, eds. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997). Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber, 1960). Head, Bessie. A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Craig McKenzie (Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1990). ——. A Question of Power: A Novel (London: Davis-Poyner, 1973). Heywood, Christopher. A History of South African Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Hilendarski, Paisy. Slavyana -Bulgarska Istoria, pod redaksiata na Petar Dinekov (Sofia: Bulgarski Pisatel, 1946). Holmes, Heather and David Finkelstein, eds. Thomas Nelson and Sons: Memories of an Edinburgh Publishing House (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press in association with the Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records and the European Ethnological Research Centre, 2001). Holmes, James, ed. Literature and Translation (Leuven: Acco, 1978). Homem, R. C. and T. Hoenselaars, eds. Translating Shakespeare for the Twenty-first Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). Hranova, Albena. ‘Language: Borders, Identities, Utopias–Balkan Cases’, New Europe College Regional Program 2002–2003, 2003–2004 (Bucharest: New Europe College, 2004), pp. 213–255. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routlegde, 2001). Hulme, Peter and Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Hutchins, Nathan. Hutchins’ Improved for the Year of Our Lord 1781 (New York: Gaine, 1780). Hutton, Charles. The School-Master’s Guide: Or, a Complete System of Practical Arithmetic, Adapted to the Use of School (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1766). ——. Calculations to Determine at What Point in the Side of a Hill Its Attraction Will Be the Greatest, &c (London, 1780). Ilieva, Anna. Hristo Gruev Danov, 1828–1911 (Plovdiv: Durzhavno Izdaltelstvo ‘Septembri’, Muzei na vuzrazhdaneto i natsionalno osvoboditelite borbi, 1977). Jelavich, Barbara. History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Jones, Philip Henry and Eiluned Rees. A Nation and Its Books: A History of the Book in Wales (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales in association with Aberystwyth Centre for the Book, 1998).

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Select Bibliography

Judd, Eben W. Webster’s Calendar or the Albany, Montgomery, Washington & Columbia Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1790 (Albany: Webster, 1789). Kinross, Robin, ed. Counterpunch (London: Hyphen Press, 1996). La Guma, Alex. A Walk in the Night (Ibadan: Mbari, 1962). ——. And a Threefold Cord (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1964). ——. The Stone Country (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1967). Loomba, Ania and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-colonial Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1998). Lyons, Martyn and John Arnold, eds. A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001). Manuel, E. Arsenio, ed. Dictionary of Philippine Biography, 4 vols (Quezon City: Filipiniana Publications, 1955–95). de Mello e Souza, Gilda. O espírito das roupas: a moda no século XIX (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987). Merrett, Christopher. A Culture of Censorship: Secrecy and Intellectual Repression in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip; Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1994). Meyer, Marlyse. Caminhos do imaginário no Brasil (São Paulo: Edusp, 1993). Moore Francis (Pseud.). Vox Stellarum, or a Loyal Almanac for the Year of Human Redemption, 1766 (London: Bettenham, 1765–9). Naipaul, V. S. A House for Mr Biswas (London: Penguin, 1969). ——. The Loss of El Dorado (London: Penguin, 1973). ——. The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections (London: Penguin, 1987). Needell, Jeffrey. A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Homecoming (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1975). Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Postcolonial Context (Oxford: University of California Press, 1992). Nixon, Rob. Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York, London: Routledge, 1994). Olaussen, Maria. Forceful Creation in Harsh Terrain: Place and Identity in Three Novels by Bessie Head (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). Partridge, John (Pseud). Merlinus Liberatus, being an Almanack for the Year of Our Lord Christ, 1800 (London: Thorne, 1799). Pavlé, Ivic, ed. The History of Serbian Culture, trans. Randall A. Major (Edgeware: Porthill Publishers, 1999). Pavlovich, Paul. The History of the Orthodox Church (Toronto: Serbian Heritage Books, 1989). Perkins, Maureen. Visions of the Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change 1775–1870 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Pollock, Sheldon. Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley & London: University of California Press, 2003). Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). Quirino, Eliseo and Vicente M. Hilario, eds. Thinking for Ourselves: A Collection of Representative Filipino Essays, 2nd edn, (Manila: Oriental Commercial, 1928). Rangelov, Rashko. Svobadata na Pechata (Sofia: Izdatelska Kushta, 1994).

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Rasche, Adelheid, ed. Die Kultur der Kleider. Zum hundertjährigen Bestehen der Lipperheideschen Kostümbibliothek (Berlin: SMPK, Kunstbibliothek, 1999). ——. Frieda Lipperheide, 1840–1896. Ein Leben für Textilkunst und Mode im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: SMPK, 1999). Regalado, Iñigo, ed. Ang Pagkaunlad ng Nobelang Tagalog (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1939). Rittenhouse, David (Pseud. Abraham Weatherwise). Father Abraham’s Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1775 (Philadelphia: Dunlap, 1774). Rummonds, Richard-Gabriel. Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and the Iron Handpress (New Castle and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, 2004). Sebba, Mark. Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles (London: Macmillan, 1997). Selvon, Sam. Lonely Londoners (London: Allan Wingate, 1956). Sewall, Daniel. An Astronomical Diary, or Almanack for the Year of the Christian Era 1784 (Portsmouth, 1783). Shore, Herbert L. and Megchelina Shore-Bos. Come Back, Africa! Fourteen Short Stories from South Africa (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1968). Smeijers, Fred. Counterpunch, ed. by Robin Kinross (London: Hyphen Press, 1996). Souza, Gilda de Mello e. O espírito das roupas: a moda no século XIX (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987). St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). St John, John. William Heinemann: Century of Publishing 1890–1990 (London: William Heinemann, 1990). Sutherland, John. Reading the Decades: Fifty Years of the Nation’s Bestselling Books (London: BBC, 2002). Tourigny, Yves. So abundant a harvest; the Catholic Church in Uganda, 1879–1979 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979). Tymoczko, Maria. Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester: St Jerome, 1999). van der Vlies, Andrew. South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Velchev,Velcho. Paissi of Hilendar: Father of the Bulgarian Enlightenment (Sofia: Sofia Press, 1981). Ventura, Roberto. Estilo Tropical. História cultural e polêmicas literárias no Brasil: 1870–1914 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1991). Vigne, Randolph, ed. A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965–1979 (London: Heinemann Educational, 1991). Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems 1948–1984 (New York: Noonday, 1986). ——. Omeros (London: Faber, 1990). Walling, Michael and Nisha. Toufann (London: Border Crossings, 2004). Watson, Robert Seton. Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question (London: Macmillan, 1935). Watts, Cedric. A Preface to Greene (London: Longman, 1997). Waugh, Evelyn. When the Going Was Good (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946). ——. Remote People (London: Penguin, 2002 [1931]). ——. Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). West, Benjamin. The New England Almanack or Lady’s and Gentleman’s Diary (Providence: Carter, 1774–84).

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Select Bibliography

——. Bickerstaff’s Boston Almanack for the Year of Our Redemption 1775 (Boston: Mills & Hicks, 1774). Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader (1993; Harlow: Pearson, 1994). Winstanley, William. Old Poor Robin 1780 (London: Hawkins, 1779). Wizard, The. My Life as a Miracle (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1998). Wright, Hamilton W. A Handbook of the Philippines, 2nd edn (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co, 1908). Wykes, David. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Youngs, Tim. Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues 1850–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

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A Estação, 67–88 A History of the Book in Australia, 21 Achebe, Chinua, 160, 162, 163, 166 Girls at War, 163 Things Fall Apart, 160 Addis Ababa, 152 Aden, 152 Africa, 5, 15, 108, 109, 110, 118, 128, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159–72, 179, 191 (see also individual countries) African National Congress (ANC), 175 African Writers Series (AWS), 3, 6, 159–72, 175–80 (see also Heinemann, William (publishers) and Heinemann Educational Books) Alexandria, 101 Algiers (Algeria), 5, 108, 109 Allison and Busby (publishers), 169 almanacs, 6, 55–66 America (North), 4, 20, 21, 22, 24, 55–67, 101, 135, 141, 142, 150, 160, 163, 164 (see also United States of America) America (South), 15, 30, 67, 96, 131, 151, 154 (see also Latin America and individual countries) Amin, Idi, 122 Anderson, Benedict, 16, 23, 24, 25, 38, 42, 43, 173 Anglophone, 5, 159, 174, 177 (see also Languages) Antigua, 92 Apartheid, 6, 173–85 Asia, 9, 28, 30, 164 Assam, 4 Auckland, 11 Australasia, 23 Australia, 3, 21, 33, 164, 174, 177 Austria, 49

Babylonia, 130 Balkans, the, 7 Baptist Missionary Society, the, 2 Barbados, 92 Barcelona, 132 Bentley, Richard (publishers), 11 Berlin, 47, 49, 67, 73, 78, 176 Bermuda, 92 Biafra, 163 Bible, the, 2, 55, 102, 131 Binding, 3, 9 Black Orpheus (journal), 177 Bohemia, 79 booksellers, 9, 47 Botswana, 175, 180, 181 Bourdieu, Pierre, 24, 174 Brazil, 47, 49, 67, 73, 78, 176 Britain, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 19, 21, 22, 33, 49, 55–66, 148–50, 152–4, 157, 159–61, 164, 168, 171, 174, 175, 179, 186, 189, 197 (see also United Kingdom and England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales) British and Foreign Bible Society, the, 2 British Library, the, 9 Brussels, 80 Buchan, John, 102 Bukalasa, 107–129 Bulgaria, 7, 38–54 Calcutta (Kolkata), 10, 22, 28 Cambridge, 2 Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, the, 19 Canada, 3, 19, 20, 91, 103, 164 Canton, 28 Cape, Jonathan (publishers), 150, 179 Cape Town, 166, 175 Caribbean, the, 92, 93, 94, 99, 100, 101, 103, 159, 161 Carthage, 108, 110

205

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Index

Index

Catholicism, 107–29, 147, 156 (see also Christianity) censorship, 9, 48 Chakava, Henry, 163, 170, 171 Chatto and Windus (publishers), 166 China, 23, 30, 143 Chow, Kai-Wing, 4 Christianity, 45, 46, 106–29 (see also Catholicism) circulation (of texts), 6, 9, 70, 86 Clarke, Austin, 98 Collins, William (publishers), 162 Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, the, 20 Congo, the, 155 Constable, John, 89, 90, 91, 100 copy editing, 3 Creole, 93 Croatia, 23, 79 Cuba, 175 Cutteridge, James Oliver, 89–106 Daboll, Nathan, 58, 59, 60 Darnton, Robert, 1, 2, 15, 16, 18, 67 design (of books), 3, 13 Dictionary of National Biography, the, 2 Dictionary of Transnational History, the, 31 Die Modenwelt, 7, 67–88 Dijon, 109 distribution, 3, 5, 6, 9, 29 Dominique, 92 Doubleday (publishers), 179 Dumas, Alexander, 99 East African Educational Publishers (EAEP), 171 East India Company, the, 2 Edinburgh, 5, 15, 91, 92, 100, 170 Egypt, 165 Eliot, Simon, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 32 England, 18, 56, 150, 152, 153, 157 (see also Britain and United Kingdom) empire, 7, 33, 61, 89–106, 148 (see also individual countries) Encyclopaedia of African Biography, 3 Ethiopia, 10, 151, 152, 153

Europe, 3, 4, 7, 38, 67, 81, 86, 108, 128, 147, 154, 164, 176, 177, 188 (see also individual countries) Farah, Nuruddin, 165, 168, 169, 170 A Naked Needle, 168 From a Crooked Rib, 168 Sardines, 168 First World War, the, 7, 92, 101, 117, 149, 150, 151 France, 3, 5, 18, 26, 50, 110, 186 (see also Languages) Franklin, Benjamin, 58, 59 Genette, Gerard, 14 Georgetown, 96 Germany, 3, 7, 18, 30, 31, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 78, 79, 82, 132, 177 (see also Languages) Ghana, 160, 163 Ghosh, Anindita, 4 Gikandi, Simon, 163, 168, 170 globalisation, 3 Gobi Desert, the, 149 Goldsmith’s Almanac, 57, 60 Gollancz, Victor (publishers), 166, 175, 179 Gombrich, Ernst, 91 Gordimer, Nadine, 165 Greece, 8, 40–6, 48, 49, 51, 96 Greene, Graham, 7, 147–158 Journey Without Maps, 152 The Lawless Roads, 156 The Power and the Glory, 156 Ways of Escape, 155 Grenada, 92 Guardian, the, 165 Guiana, 92, 96, 151, 153 Gunn, John, 101 Havana, 175 Head, Bessie, 6, 165, 166, 167, 175–81 A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga, 175 A Question of Power, 166, 179, 180 Maru, 166 Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, 175, 180

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The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, 175 When Rain Clouds Gather, 175 Heinemann Educational Books, 6, 160, 161, 162, 176, 178, 180 Heinemann, William (publishers), 161, 163, 164, 167, 169, 171, 172 Hemmungs Wirtén, Eva, 15, 174 Higo, Aig, 163 Hill, Alan, 160, 163, 171 History of the Book in Canada, the (Histoire du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada), 19 Hobsbawm, Eric, 23 Honduras, 92 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 1, 4, 28, 32 Holland (see also Languages) Houghton Mifflin (publishers), 179 Hutton, Charles, 59, 60 Ibadan, 160, 162, 163, 168, 176 illustration and illustrative techniques, 9, 70, 78, 83, 84 Illustirte Frauen-Zeitung (magazine), 72, 73, 83, 84 imagined communities, 16, 23, 24, 31, 39, 64, 131 (see also Anderson, Benedict) India, 2, 8, 9, 15, 28, 30, 32, 95, 101, 159, 164, 168, 177 Ireland, 10, 19, 61, 62, 132 (see also Britain) Islam (see Muslim) Italy, 168 Jamaica, 96 James Campbell and Sons (publishers), 91 Japan, 33, 143, 177 Jerusalem, 128 Jews, 45 Jones, S.P., 92 Joshi, Priya, 4, 28 Kaiteur Falls, 96, 97, 98 Kampala, 107, 119 Kenya, 152, 154, 168, 169, 170, 171 Kolkata (see Calcutta) Koran, the, 48

Ladies Diary or Almanac, the, 57, 59 la Guma, Alex, 6, 162, 175–81 A Walk in the Night, 162, 178 And a Threefold Cord, 176, 177, 178 In the Fog of the Season’s End, 176, 179, 180 The Stone Country, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180 Time of the Butcherbird, 176, 179, 180 La Saison (magazine), 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84 Languages Alur, 128 Arabic, 165 Danish, 68, 79 Dutch, 23, 68, 78, 79 English, 11,19, 31, 55, 60, 68, 79, 117, 118, 141, 159, 164, 169, 177, 187, 188, 193, 194, 196 (see also Anglophone) Filipino, 8, 130–146 French, 11, 19, 31, 61, 68, 77, 78, 79, 81, 85, 128, 162, 164, 187, 195 German, 79, 177 Gikuyu, 169, 170 Hindi, 195 Hungarian, 68, 79 Italian, 11, 68, 79 Kihaya, 128 Kirwana, 128 Kisubi, 109, 119, 122 Kiswahili, 128 Kizinza, 128 Latin, 11, 109, 114, 128, 188 Luganda, 114, 120, 128 Mauritian Creole, 186–98 Portuguese, 68, 77, 78, 79, 164 Runyankole, 128 Runyoro, 111, 128 Sanskrit, 2, 195 Slavic, 38, 79 Spanish, 11, 68, 79 Swahili, 114 Swedish, 68, 79 Tagalog, 139, 141, 142, 145 Tamil, 195

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Index

Latin America, 175 (see also America, South) Legazpi, 132 Leipzig, 73, 79, 80 Lessing, Doris, 165 Liberia, 151, 154, 155 libraries and librarianship, 9, 11, 31, 50 Lindfors, Bernth, 178 Lipperheide (publishers), 67, 71, 73, 79, 83 London, 6, 10, 11, 22, 70, 93, 94, 102, 103, 107, 147, 156, 157, 159, 161, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 172, 175, 186 Longman (publishers), 160, 162 Los Angeles, 11 Luganda, 108, 120, 128 Macaulay, Lord Thomas Babington, 11 Macedonia, 7, 38, 48, 49, 130 Macmillan (publishers), 11, 162 Madras, 10 Mahfouz, Naguib, 165 Maison-Carée, 112, 113 Manila, 133 Maori, 22, 23 Marechera, Dambudzo, 165 The House of Hunger, 165 Martin, Eric, 100 Martinez, Juan (publishers), 131–146 Mass Observation, 9 Mau Mau, 169 Mauritius, 8, 11, 186–198 McDonald, Peter, 16 Mediterranean, the, 101, 130, 151 Merlinus Liberatus (almanac), 57, 59, 60 Methodism, 64 Methuen (publishers), 162 Mexico, 156 missionaries, 2, 5, 107–29 Monserrat, 92 Moore, Francis, 57, 59, 60 Moscow, 130 Mphalele, Ezekiel, 177 Down Second Avenue, 177 Mugo, Micere, 169 Mumbai, 10

Munno (magazine), 117–28 Murray, John (publishers), 11 Muslims, 40, 45, 46, 168 Mwangi, Meja, 170 Naipaul, V.S., 90, 91, 95, 96, 98, 100, 161 Nairobi, 163, 164, 169, 170, 171 Namibia, 181 nationalism, 4 Nelson, Ian, 102 Nelson, Ronald, 102, 103 Nelson, Thomas III, 101 Nelson’s Geography of the West Indies and Adjacent Lands (see also Thomas Nelson and Sons, publishers), 92 Nelson’s School Readers (see also Thomas Nelson and Sons, publisher), 8 Nelson’s West Indian Readers (see also Thomas Nelson and Sons, publishers), 89, 98, 99 New Amsterdam, 153 Newfoundland, 10 New Testament, 10 (see also Bible, the) New York, 165, 169 New Zealand, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 32, 33, 173, 174, 177 Newell, Stephanie, 4 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 161, 165, 169, 170, 171 Devil on the Cross, 170 Homecoming, 161 I Will Marry Who I Want, 169 Petals of Blood, 169 The River Between, 161 Weep Not, Child, 161, 169 Nigeria, 160, 163, 168, 169, 171, 175 Nkosi, Lewis, 181 Old Poor Robin (almanac), 57 Olympia Domata (almanac), 57 Orality, 9 Ottoman Empire, the, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51 Oxford University Press (publishers), 162, 164

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Palestine, 130 Palgrave Macmillan (publishers), 31 Pan (publishers), 160, 180 Pantheon (publishers), 180 paper, 3, 14, 92 Paris, 67, 70, 77, 78, 79, 162 Partridge, John, 57, 59, 60 Penguin (publishers), 159, 160, 162, 166, 172, 180 Philippines, the, 4, 8, 130–146 Picador (publishers), 180 Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 1, 28 Poland, 23, 79 Port-of-Spain, 89, 92 Portugal, 61, 163 Présence Africaine, 3 print culture, 55 printing techniques, 3, 39, 50, 79, 90, 107–29, 134–5 production (of texts), 5, 8, 29, 71, 72, 73, 83, 130–46 Quebec, 190 Queen Victoria, 10 railway fiction, 9, 10 Raine, Craig, 9 readers and reading, 3, 9, 10–11, 63, 80–6 Reading Experience Database (RED), 11 reception, 29 Reid, Bill, 100, 102 revolution, 6, 56, 58–63 Rhodesia (see Zimbabwe) Rio de Janeiro, 77, 79, 85 Rome, 5, 73, 120, 128 Rushdie, Salman, 11 Russia, 45, 47, 168 (see also Soviet Union) Samarcand, 130 Sambrook, Keith, 99, 102, 161, 162, 163, 169, 171 Scotland, 3, 9, 16, 19, 26, 102 Scribners (publishers), 179 Season on the Seasons (almanac), 60 Secker & Warburg (publishers), 180 Second World War, the, 7, 10, 11, 67, 133, 147

Selassie, Haile, 151 Selwyn, George Augustus, 11 Serampore (see Srirampur) Serbia, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 48, 50 Seven Seas (publishers) Shakespeare, William, 8, 186–98 Shep, Sydney J., 5, 38, 131, 148, 173, 174, 186, 197 Sicily, 130 Simon & Schuster (publishers), 166, 175 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 64 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), 16, 32 Somalia, 165, 168, 169 South Africa, 6, 32, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 173–85 South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO), 175 Soviet Union (USSR; see also Russia), 151, 177 Soyinke, Wole, 162, 165, 168 The Interpreters, 168 Spain, 8, 61, 130–46, 151 Srirampur, 2 Stationer’s Company of London, the, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60 St Kitts, 92 St Lucia, 92, 96 St Vincent, 92 Suez canal, 10 Sutherland, John, 16, 143 Sydney, 15, 21 Syria, 109 telegraph (invention of ), 10 Thomas Nelson and Sons (publishers), 5, 89–106, 162 Tobago, 89, 99 Tolstoy, Leo, 50 Toronto, 91, 92 travel writing, 147–58 Trieste, 168 Trinidad, 89, 92, 96, 99, 101 Turkey, 39, 40, 42, 49, 50 typesetting, 3

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Index

Uganda, 106–29, 160 United Kingdom, 26 (see also individual countries) Unites States of America, 6, 10, 26, 59, 62, 64, 68, 154 (see also America, North) Venezuela, 96, 151 Virahsawmy, Dev, 8, 186–98 Vox Stellarum (almanac), 57, 59, 60 Wales, 3, 19 Wasafiri (journal), 9 Watson, S.B., 92 Waugh, Evelyn, 7, 147–58 A Handful of Dust, 153 Black Mischief, 153 Labels, 151

Ninety-two Days, 153 Remote People, 152, 153, 157 Wellington (NZ), 13 West, Benjamin, 58, 59, 60 West Indies, 8, 89, 91, 92, 95, 161, 164 Wheeler’s Railway Library, 10 (see also railway fiction) Williams, Eric, 99 Wing, Tycho, 57 Winstanley, William, 57 World Writers Series, 11 Young Ladies Journal, the (magazine), 72, 80, 83, 84 Zambia, 171 Zanzibar, 152 Zimbabwe, 163, 165

10.1057/9780230289116 - Books Without Borders, Volume 1, Edited by Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond

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