"My Tables, My Tables; Meet it is I Set it Downe!"

For someone whose field is “digital studies” I seem to be spending a lot of time with old books lately. Just a week after our letterpress course, Kari and I had the great treat of an up close look at some of the Blakes from the Lessing J. Rosenwald collection at the Library of Congress. (Kari had arranged a showing for her class from GMU—so I also finally got to meet some of these cool students she’s been talking about all semester.) The Rosenwald collection at the LC is the single largest gathering of Blakes in the US; I had looked at some of them a number of years ago, back when I was project manager for the William Blake Archive. Things have changed. Back then, I got my readers’ card and simply requested the Blakes I wanted to look at as though they were any other book (I vividly remember a teenager—he couldn’t have been more than sixteen, clearly working at the Library as an after school job and wearing a pair of Walkman headphones—come bopping out of the stacks with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell tucked under his arm). This time around the collection’s chief curator, Daniel Desimone—wonderfully well-informed about Blake himself—did all of the handling. We looked at copies of There is No Natural Religion, the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Europe, America, the Book of Urizen, and Blake’s illustrations to Young’s Night Thoughts. As always when I see real Blakes I’m reminded of what even the gorgeous, high-resolution, painstakingly color-corredted images in the Archive cannot capture: their scale for one thing, when held by a human hand; the smell of the old paper and ink; the flecks of gold Blake added to the coloration in some of his later copies; the rich, velvety texture of the thickly layered inks and watercolors.

None of this, however, is to bemoan the failures of digital repersentation; critics of the Archive, for example, never tire of reminding us that these images are finally only representations, not substitutions for the “real thing.” Well, duh. The mistake is to think that even our very close up look at the real thing wasn’t also mediated: the LC is a public repository, yes, but we got our showing because Kari was a credentialled scholar with a more-than-casual reason for requesting to see them (and because Mr. Desimone is obviously the kind of curator who delights in sharing the incomparable items in his charge—not necessarily the norm in the library and museum world). Still, unlike my earlier visit to the collection, this time we couldn’t handle the books ourselves (and just to be clear: thank goodness for that!). So we saw only those pages Mr. Desimone elected to show us (though he was happy to take requests), and only for the length of time he held them under our nose. Truth be told, I’m not sure I can conceive of what truly unmediated access would look like. Owning your own Blake, to have and to hold? Well, where did you get the money to buy it?

Update: George suggests the character who eats a Blake in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. Hmm.

Anyway, as if that wasn’t enough, we then got to hear Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier address the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies on writing tables (erasable writing surfaces once used to jot down this and that in the course of a day; sort of an early modern PDA. Thus Prince Hamlet: “My Tables, My Tables; Meet it is I Set it Downe!”) Their article will be out in Shakespeare Quarterly this fall, and it’s very rich indeed.