A novella for entrée, an encyclopaedia for main course, and a digest for dessert: the literary tastes of the larval bookworm

SpitzbergFor many of us, the term ‘bookworm’ conjures up two popular creatures which inhabit the dimly lit recesses of libraries.  One the pale voracious bibliophile, with an almost unhealthy all-consuming interest in books, much like the short-sighted reader depicted in the German artist and poet Carl Spitzweg’s painting The Bookworm (1850).  The other more destructive, a bespectacled and well fed grub, who smiles with great satisfaction from a hole that it has bored through the pages of a book.  Whilst we have probably met, or may even be a proud example of the former, how many of us have ever encountered one of the latter?

Indeed the larval bookworm is an elusive creature, whose presence is more often evidenced by the trail of damaging lacework it leaves behind.  In this sense the bookworm’s crime is a perfect one in that it absconds after its eating spree had finished, metamorphosing into an adult insect, with its dastardly legacy only discovered many years after the attack.   An example of the destructive peregrinations of a family of bookworms in a 17th century Persian manuscript in the Baillieu Library’s Rare Books Collection can be seen in this image.

Lavāʼiḥ [manuscript] [by] Nūr-al-Dīn ʻAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī

The term bookworm is a generic one, and may refer to the larvae of several species of insect – including house moths, carpet beetles and the paper louse – which feed on paper, pastes, wood, cloth and moulds found in books.  The grub’s fondness for cool, dark, humid and undisturbed corners of neglected bookshelves provides the perfect food source, and a home in which communities can thrive so secretly.

Due to the developments in paper making over time, the taste preferences of bookworms have meant that books produced between the mid-1450s to the 1820s are the most susceptible to this type of insect attack, when the ingredients used in paper making (cotton, linen, starch) were the most natural and pure.  The larvae are not fond of animal parchment (which has protected very early books and medieval manuscripts), and the high proportion of chemicals and other additives in 19th and 20th century papers made them unattractive for the young grubs to eat.Micrographia - title page

Despite their diminutive size, bookworms have captured the imagination of scientists, politicians, book lovers, poets, and even 20th century cartoonists.  The earliest formal depiction of a ‘bookworm’ in Robert Hooke’s spectacularly hand-illustrated work Micrographia actually shows what we now know as a silverfish.  Micrographia caused a sensation when it was published by the newly formed Royal Society in 1665, as it contained the first descriptions of the natural world as observed through a microscope.  Never before had the eye of a fly, or the structure of a snowflake, or the intricate appearance of a ‘bookworm’, been seen in such magnified detail. Silverfish

 

Hooke writes:

It is a small white silver-shining worm or moth, which I found much conversant among books and papers, and is suppos’d to be that which corrodes and eats holes through the leaves and covers…Its head appears bigg and blunt, and its body tapers from it towards the tail, smaller and smaller, being shap’d like a carret.

 

 

 

As well as attracting scientific interest, the bookworm has also inspired poetry, mostly in the form of humorous verse.  John Dovaston (1782-1854) an English writer and naturalist, and close friend of the celebrated natural historian and wood engraver, Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), published his poem ‘Bookworms’ (playfully subtitled ‘How to Kill’) his 1825 anthology.

Dovaston - title pageBookworm poem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the later 19th century, the bibliophile, William Blades in his The Enemies of Books (1880) devotes an entire chapter to the bookworm.  Also adopting a humorous tone, he details the attack of the ‘worm’ (in this case a regiment) on an early work from the famous printing house of Peter Schoeffer of Mentz:

‘It is just as if there had been a race.  In the first ten leaves the weak worms are left behind; in the second ten there are still 48 eaters; these are reduced to 31 in the third ten, and to only 18 in the fourth ten…Before reaching folio 71 it is a neck and neck race between two sturdy gourmands, each making a fine large hole, one of them being oval in shape…At folio 87, the oval worm gives in, the round one eating three more leaves and part way through the fourth’.Enemies of books - cover   Bookworm table

In 1879 a Northampton bookbinder sent Blades a live specimen of a ‘fat little worm’ which had been found in an old book by one of his assistants:

He bore his journey extremely well, being very lively when turned out.  I placed him in a box in warmth and quiet, with some small fragments of paper from a Boethius, printed by Caxton, and a leaf of a seventeenth century book.  He ate a small piece of the leaf, but either from too much fresh air, from unaccustomed liberty, or from change of food, he gradually weakened and died in about three weeks.

Despite their extensive destruction, these elusive creatures also found popular expression in the 20th century.  Hugh Harman’s and Friz Freleng’s  Metro-Goldwyn Mayer cartoon The Bookworm (1939) brought together a range of literary and historical characters – Macbeth’s witches, Robin Hood, Black Beauty – in the unsuccessful quest to catch an endearing worm who lives in a tunnel in a thick tome.  Once again the worm triumphs  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Hn6GQLyTs .  And taking on an enemy guise, the villainous character ‘The Bookworm’ was played by Roddy McDowall in the 1960s television series Batman.

It seems certain that whilst both loathed and loved through history, the bookworm and its havoc will continue to intrigue scientists, surprise, frustrate and disappoint book lovers, and remain a delightfully enigmatic creature in the popular imagination.

Susan Thomas, Rare Books Curator

 

 

 

Archive of a Refugee Scientist

Today 9 June is International Archives Day, and in September the International Council on Archives is holding its Congress in Seoul on the topic of Archives, Harmony and Friendship. In the digital age when collections and institutions are more connected we are used to thinking internationally about archives. The wanderings of pre-digital archives often reveal remarkable stories. One archival trail in our holdings at the University of Melbourne Archives that goes all the way from the North Pole to the South Pole is left by meteorologist Fritz Loewe. As a Jewish refugee he was also caught up in one of the great exoduses of the twentieth century.

Two men wintering in snow cave, Ernst Sorge and Fritz Loewe in their ice cave at Eismitte station in Greenland, Christmas, 1930, Fritz Philipp Loewe Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, 1988.0160.00002

Loewe had served as assistant glaciologist to the expedition leader of the German Greenland Expedition (1930-31), Alfred Wegener, who first developed the theory of continental drift. Between October 1930 and the following May, Loewe lived in an ice cave with expedition member Ernest Sorge and one other scientist, when Loewe’s toes were amputated for frost bite. While this saved him from perishing on the return journey to the base like Wegener, ice bound camaraderie with Sorge did not survive the Nazi era.

Loewe, working for the Prussian Meteorological Service, was among some 2000 German academics and researchers who lost their jobs after the Nazi civil service reforms of 1933, which prohibited Jewish employees. If this wasn’t bad enough, Loewe was reported to the police by his erstwhile colleague and Nazi Party member, Sorge, for complaining about the treatment of Loewe’s brother-in-law by the Sturmabteilung (the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party). Wegener’s brother Kurt, who took over as leader for the Greenland expedition in 1930, provided a reference to get Loewe out of jail.

Loewe migrated to England with his family in 1934, where he worked as an Advanced Research Student in the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. The University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor, geologist and polar scientist Raymond Priestley, met the refugee scientist on a visit in the English summer of 1936.

Priestley was keen to secure Loewe’s services, not least because the German Air Ministry was rumoured to want him back. The Australians wanted him too. Priestley earmarked one of two ‘refugee’ Carnegie Fellowships awarded to the University of Melbourne.

Loewe arrived in Melbourne in 1937 and taught the first intake of Royal Australian Air Force navigators, and when he was appointed the University of Melbourne’s first lecturer of meteorology in 1939 trained scientists for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. A gesture of international friendship at the same time served national self-interest, providing a way to boost scientific expertise and fill a technical skills gap.

Loewe joined several Antarctic expeditions including as an observer to the French Commandant Charcot expedition 1950-51, where he produced a detailed mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet. Australia’s territorial claims in East Antarctica bordered the French claim and Loewe was fluent in French having studied law in Grenoble before World War One.

Correspondence from Uwe Radok, Tatura, 1941, Fritz Philipp Loewe Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, 1988.0020

Historians are increasingly wary of simply celebrating the impact of European Jewish refugees on the English speaking academy, as evidenced by multiple Nobel Prize winners, new disciplines and leading research schools, not to mention the atomic bomb. England acted as a clearing house for academic refugees on the way to another country, mostly the United States of America. In 1940, 30,000 European refugees were interned in England as enemy aliens and thousands deported including the earth scientist Uwe Radok. On arrival in Australia, he was interned again at a camp at near Tatura in Victoria. Loewe and Radok co-discovered the sub-tropical jet stream in 1950.

Behind stories of survival, resilience and success is a more complicated one of the fragmentation and deflection, if not the ruin, of many careers and lives. Scientists like Loewe tended to do better in new or ‘marginal’ disciplines and many Jewish refugees changed their disciplines or direction as a result of emigration. Many could not continue their paid work at all; rarely under the same conditions and status as previously.

Not only did Loewe develop his scientific career, he was also able to steward his archive: through Germany, Greenland, England, Australia and Antarctica, and finally, to preserve it in Melbourne. It gestures to stories that are yet to be – or may never be – discovered in the Archives.

Katrina Dean (2015) Situating Fritz Loewe: Scientist, Émigré, The Australia Jewish Historical Society Journal, 22/3, pp.497-511.

A selection of photographs from the Loewe collection is accessible online through the University of Melbourne Archives digitised items catalogue: http://archives.unimelb.edu.au (type 1988.0160 into the digitised items search box).

Or see the University of Melbourne Archives Facebook photo album https://www.facebook.com/University-of-Melbourne-Archives-225329370847089/photos/?tab=album&album_id=753337708046250

Hands on! A paper conservation workshop at the University of Canberra

Cleaning suppliesSusan Thomas and Jen Hill, the curators of rare books and music respectively, spent a day at the University of Canberra recently learning the basics of paper conservation. While most of the day was “hands on”, the presenters, Dr Mona Soleymani and Ian Batterham, began the day talking about the history of paper making, its composition and common additives and the various contributors to paper deterioration.

Paper cleaning task

Then came the first of our practical tasks. We worked on our own sheets of paper—purposefully dirtied and defaced—to try various techniques of surface cleaning, including vacuuming, gentle brushing and scraping. We also tried using a range of cleaning products ranging from the everyday to the highly specialized.

A paper washing task followed: our heavily acidic and brittle paper from the classifieds section of a 1970s newspaper was checked for colour fastness, then given a magnesium carbonate bath in order to de-acidify it. We also learned different ways to flatten and dry paper.Washing paper

Tissue paper Japanese

 

Next we used carefully torn pieces of Japanese tissue paper to repair a printed paper sheet with several rips on its edges. High quality Japanese tissue, with long fibres visible to the naked eye—combined with a purpose-made adhesive—gave remarkably good results considering our beginner status. Our last task was to attach a backing sheet to a small colour print.

Backing and repairingThe course was expertly taught and very enjoyable. As curators it has given us knowledge and understanding that we can apply day-to-day in the management of our collections.

Jennifer Hill (Curator, Music)

 

Secrets and Signatures

Rebekah J. Harris – PhD Candidate in History at the University of Melbourne School of Culture and Communications

The most alluring aspect of an archival family collection is its honesty – its documentation of a family’s success and failures. Unless someone has deliberately removed something, personal papers hide very little. In this respect, the Bright Family Collection, recently catalogued by the University of Melbourne Archives, is particularly revealing. The collection is a rare record of 18th century British trade in the Caribbean, and it follows the Bright family’s business as plantation owners in Jamaica, the West Indies, for roughly four hundred years (1511-1974). As documents recording the disturbing history of slavery, they give crucial insight into the British Empire at its height. However, as a family collection, it holds thousands of letters, of commercial and private consequence.

Scholars of all periods regard letters as crucial to the historical understanding of cultures and people, but there is nothing more exposing than a familial letter. Having read only a fraction of these letters, it was clear to me that the Brights were not only know for their immense wealth, but were a widely respected and admirable bunch. In fact, many of their letters concerning the slaves on West Indian plantations were radically compassionate.[1]

But like all families, they had their issues. Through the papers of the Bright Collection, we can piece together the individuals, and indeed, individual tastes, of each family member. Take Allen Bright Snr., for instance, he was a pewterer for his Uncle, Henry Bright, in Jamaica. Notably, the name A. Bright appears alongside a notable increase in receipts for rum and ‘grapes,’ and other slightly decadent debts to tailors and builders. Although considering his profession, drinking was a suitable pastime to use his pewter utensils. What is far more telling about Allen, however, are the openly expressed opinions of his family. Take, for example, the frustrated letter from Bristol, East Sussex in 1750.  Simultaneously charming and scathing, his younger sister informs him that his mother is deeply disappointed in him for not bringing his young wife home to see her, and: ‘…she takes it very uncind of you…She did not think that she should have ever lived to have askt anything of you that you wold have denied her…’

In the section of the letter below (figure 1), the handwriting brings her sentiments alive– as a staggered, chaotic and amazingly expressive letter from a frustrated girl. To be honest, holding the material letter made me terrified of the wrath of Allen’s mother and sister. The uneven lines, the scribbled out words and splodges heighten the emotion behind the letter. Evidently, Allen’s ‘loving sister’ was on an important errand in writing this hasty reprimand, before she sprinted back to the side of a mother whose nerves were wrecked, having: ‘not comedoun stairs yet, but have no other complaint but her cof which is much better my compliments…’

Figure 1. Letter from M. Bright to A. Bright, 1750.
Figure 1. Letter from M. Bright to A. Bright, 1750.

Yet, family misdeamers did not end here. And Allen Snr’s mistakes are not to be compared to his son’s, Allen Jnr. On September 26th, 1767, the younger Allen received a far more serious letter from a friend, known as ‘Lane.’ The letter’s beautiful handwriting; confident, cursive and suave, is a surprisingly accurate description of his personality, as understood from this shocking letter. The letter is triumphant, beginning with the lines:  ‘Oh Cursed C*#!t what has’t thou done.’

Figure 2. Letter from Lane to A. Bright, 26 September 1767
Figure 2. Letter from Lane to A. Bright, 26 September 1767

Lane’s letter pronounces his successful seduction of a young Betsy Griffiths, the daughter of Capt. Griffiths from Boston. He writes of how they met and how the affair began… because, as he happily admits: ‘it will be some satisfaction to me to propagate it among a few Particulars…’

Not only does Lane reveal himself to be far more suave and conniving than his perfectly tidy hand, he also leaves us questioning the propriety of his friend, Allen. Of another young lady, he writes, ‘they tell me vows and protests that you never gave her anything… what must a person think of such an Eternall Createure.’ And he signs off, with a suitably contrived and flourished signature.

Figure 3. Letter from Lane to A. Bright, 1767
Figure 3. Letter from Lane to A. Bright, 1767

However morally repugnant, the father and son’s letters bring us in touch with the experiences, associations and social conventions of the mid-eighteenth century – their gossip, their illicit secrets, and their responsibilities. Although the Bright Family Collection yields incredible insight into the business and formal correspondence of prominent landowners of the 18th and 19th century, the familial and social relations are equally as enlightening for the historian. Allen Snr. And Allen Jnr. Bright’s papers are just a scratch on the surface of the vast amount of intimate affairs to be discovered amid the Bright Family’s correspondence across the Atlantic.

Rebekah Harris is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Melbourne School of Culture and Communications. Her thesis investigates the private and public communication methods of social reform for Victorian feminists, and in particular, the Kensington Society (1865-68).

Note: The handwriting of the original archives can be difficult to read, and my translation, while attempting to replicate the spelling, is not necessarily accurate.

[1] Kenneth Morgan, ‘The Bright Family Papers,’ Periodicals Archive Online, Vol. 22, Iss. 97, (1997), 126.

Studies for masters: new research into old master drawings

The Baillieu Library Print Collection includes approximately 100 drawings, many of them donated by Dr J. Orde Poynton in 1959.

In recent years a series of detailed research projects, undertaken through the university’s Cultural Collections Projects Program, have shone a spotlight upon these works.

Many of the drawings are studies, some by artists perfecting their skills, others created as patterns for prints, paintings or sculptures. They have been executed in various artistic styles and media and range in date from the 16th to the 19th centuries. They have passed through the hands of numerous artists, dealers and collectors before reaching their destination at the University of Melbourne. Some of their secrets and stories remain untold.Their beguiling lines and mysteries invite the viewer to explore beyond the marks that lie on the surface—to plumb their depths for some fascinating surprises.

A selection of drawings are on display on the ground floor, Baillieu Library form 6 June – 24 July 2016.

Selected drawings

Francesco Zuccarelli’s oil sketch is a curious image, and is unlike the majority of the works he produced. He is more commonly associated with rococo decorative painting. The focus
on the figure rather than the surrounding landscape makes this work a rare composition. The inscription on the verso states that it is from a series of ‘6 original drawings, with engravings’.
The Baillieu Library also holds a copy of the corresponding engraving by Antonio Baratta.

Francesco Zuccarelli, La Carità (Charity), c. 1760–70Antonio Baratta, La Carità (Charity), c. 1760–70

Francesco Zuccarelli, La Carità (Charity), c. 1760–70, gift of Dr J. Orde Poynton, 1959, Baillieu Library Print Collection University of Melbourne.

This mysterious mannerist drawing is a study of what appear to be one Juno and two Sabina statues. The drawing was probably executed in late 16th-century Rome, where all three statues were on public display. The drawing bears the monogram of renowned English collector John Barnard, as well as that of the lesser-known E.A. Patterson.

Unknown artist, Three statues of women and a study of a female head, c. 1580

Unknown artist, Three statues of women and a study of a female head, c. 1580, gift of Dr J. Orde Poynton, 1959, Baillieu Library Print Collection University of Melbourne.

A handwritten inscription on the verso of this drawing reveals a name: ‘Antonÿ Georgetti’. This identified the sculptor of the statue after which the drawing was made: one of the
ten stone angels holding the Arma Christi (‘Weapons of Christ’) that adorn the Ponte Sant’ Angelo in Rome. According to the Bible, a sponge dipped in gall and vinegar
was offered to Jesus on the Cross, as a final act of persecution.

Unknown artist after Antonio Giorgetti, Angel with the sponge, 17th century

Unknown artist after Antonio Giorgetti, Angel with the sponge, 17th century, gift of Dr J. Orde Poynton, 1959, Baillieu Library Print Collection University of Melbourne.

This study, which represents a scene in the life of the infant St John the Baptist, can be paired with a more advanced composition drawing held in the Louvre, also attributed to Eustache Le Sueur. An artist of immense popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries, and one of the founders of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Le Sueur was often referred to as ‘The French Raphael’, as is inscribed on the verso of this drawing.

Attributed to Eustache Le Sueur, Zechariah regains his speech, 17th century

Attributed to Eustache Le Sueur, Zechariah regains his speech,17th century, gift of Dr J. Orde Poynton, 1959, Baillieu Library Print Collection University of Melbourne.

Abraham Bloemaert’s drawing is a preparatory design for a print which is titled The Annunciation. Another preparatory drawing of the same subject is held in Rotterdam. Bloemaert was a foremost Catholic artist whose voluminous output has endured for centuries.

Abraham Bloemaert, The Annunciation (c.1625-35)

Abraham Bloemaert, The Annunciation c.1625-35, gift of Dr J. Orde Poynton, 1959, Baillieu Library Print Collection University of Melbourne.

This drawing is very similar in technique and composition to that of Mary with the infant Christ In The Crib or Holy Family, another drawing which is in Düsseldorf and is a study for an unidentified painting. Giacinto Calandrucci moved to Rome to undertake training under Carlo Maratta.

Giacinto Calandrucci, Madonna with the Infant (c.1670)

Giacinto Calandrucci, Madonna with the Infant (c.1670), gift of Dr J. Orde Poynton, 1959, Baillieu Library Print Collection University of Melbourne.

Contributors

Alex Shapley, James Dear, Jessica Cole, Callum Reid, Peter Mitchelson and Fleur McArthur.

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