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NEW
dir e c t ions
IN BOOK
history

Reading Books
and Prints as
Cultural Objects

Edited by
EVANGHELIA STEAD
New Directions in Book History

Series editors
Shafquat Towheed
Faculty of Arts
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK

Jonathan Rose
Department of History
Drew University
Madison, USA
As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of
maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That
is the goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish
monographs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new
frontiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars.
Its scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds
and to all historical periods from antiquity to the 21st century, includ-
ing studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions
in Book History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the van-
guard. It will experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unex-
plored archives, debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories,
study neglected subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history
to other academic fields. Every title in this series will address the evolu-
tion of the historiography of the book, and every one will point to new
directions in book scholarship. New Directions in Book History will be
published in three formats: single-author monographs; edited collec-
tions of essays in single or multiple volumes; and shorter works produced
through Palgrave’s e-book (EPUB2) ‘Pivot’ stream. Book proposals
should emphasize the innovative aspects of the work, and should be sent
to either of the two series editors.

Editorial board:
Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Brazil
Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, USA
Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Australia

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14749
 Evanghelia Stead
Editor

Reading
Books and Prints
as Cultural Objects
Editor
Evanghelia Stead
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Guyancourt, France
& Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France

New Directions in Book History

ISBN 978-3-319-53831-0 ISBN 978-3-319-53832-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53832-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939084

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: Claudio Parmiggiani, Campo dei fiori [Field of Flowers] and Delocazione
[Displacement], San Giorgio in Poggiale, Bologna; from the collections of Fondazione
Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, Biblioteca d’Arte e di Storia di San Giorgio in Poggiale,
Genus Bononiae - Musei nella Città

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Evanghelia Stead

Part I Manuscripts as Cultural Objects

2 From Devotional Aids to Antiquarian Objects: The

Prayer Books of Medingen 33
Henrike Lähnemann

3 How to Read the “Andachtsbüchlein aus der Sammlung

Bouhier” (Montpellier, BU Médecine, H 396)? On
Cultural Techniques Related to a Fourteenth-Century
Devotional Manuscript 57
Henrike Manuwald

4 “Otium et Negotium”: Reading Processes in Early Italian

and German Humanism 81
Michael Stolz

v
vi Contents

Part II Prints in Europe

5 The Fluidity of Images or the Compression of Media

Diversity in Books: Galeriewerke and Histoires Métalliques 109
Christina Posselt-Kuhli

6 Change of Use, Change of Public, Change of Meaning:

Printed Images Travelling Through Europe 137
Alberto Milano (†)

Part III Printed Books: Media, Objects, Uses

7 The Promotion of the Heroic Woman in Victorian and

Edwardian Gift Books 159
Barbara Korte

8 Pinocchio: An Adventure Illustrated Over More Than a

Century (1883–2005) 179
Giorgio Bacci

9 Illustration and the Book as Cultural Object: Arthur

Schnitzler’s Works in German and English Editions 209
Norbert Bachleitner

10 Two Peas in a Pod: Book Sales Clubs and Book

Ownership in the Twentieth Century 231
Corinna Norrick-Rühl

Part IV Epilogue

11 E-Readers and Polytextual Critique: On Some Emerging

Material Conditions in the Early Age of Digital Reading 253
Stephan Packard

Index 279
 Contributors

Giorgio Bacci Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy

Norbert Bachleitner Vienna University, Vienna, Austria

Barbara Korte University of Freiburg, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany

Henrike Lähnemann Oxford University, Oxford, UK

Henrike Manuwald Georg August University, Göttingen, Germany

Alberto Milano (†) Museo Per Via, Pieve Tesino‚ Provincia di Trento, Italy

Corinna Norrick-Rühl Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany

Stephan Packard Universität zu Köln, Köln, Germany

Christina Posselt-Kuhli Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Evanghelia Stead Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Guyancourt,

France & Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France

Michael Stolz University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

vii
 List of Figures and Tables

Fig. 1.1 Claudio Parmiggiani, Campo dei Fiori (Field of Flowers)

and Delocazione (Displacement) 3
Fig. 2.1 Intensity map of the distribution of the Medingen
manuscripts in 1542 (ringed) and in 2017 50
Fig. 3.1 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine,
H 396, fol. 29r: Saint Calendar (1–14 January) 60
Fig. 3.2 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine,
H 396, fol. 45v/46r: Flagellation and Crowning with Thorns 62
Fig. 3.3 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine,
H 396, fol. 19r: Jesus and the Canaanite Woman 63
Fig. 3.4 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine,
H 396, fol. 6r: Ask, Seek, Knock 67
Fig. 4.1 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 504, fol. 59v:
codex owned by the German humanists Hermann
and Hartmann Schedel 88
Fig. 4.2 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 3941, fol. 13r:
codex from Gossembrot’s library, with two-column
register on the “inventors of the arts” 89
Fig. 4.3 a Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, 2° Cod. 217,
fol. 175v: codex from Gossembrot’s library, references
on Sibylline Oracles also pointing to Boccaccio’s book
on Famous Men. b Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August
Bibliothek, 36.19 Aug. 2°, fol. 188v: codex newly
attributed to Gossembrot’s library, detail with numerous
cross-references 91
Fig. 5.1 Theatrum Pictorium, 1660, frontispiece 112

ix
x List of Figures and Tables

Fig. 5.2 Nicolas de Pigage, La Galerie Électorale de Dusseldorff ou

catalogue raisonné et figuré de ses tableaux, 1778, mural
display 115
Fig. 5.3 Nicolas de Pigage, La Galerie Électorale de Dusseldorff ou
catalogue raisonné et figuré de ses tableaux, 1778, title-page
engraving drawn by Nicolas Guibal 116
Fig. 5.4 Thesaurus Brandenburgicus, 1696, frontispiece, vol. I 119
Fig. 5.5 Thesaurus Brandenburgicus, c. 1696, frontispiece, vol. II 120
Fig. 5.6 Thesaurus Brandenburgicus, 1701, frontispiece, vol. III 121
Fig. 5.7 Romeyn de Hooghes, title-page engraving for Nicolas
Chevalier, Histoire Guillaume III par Medailles, Inscriptions,
Arc de Triomphe, & autres monumens Publics,
Amsterdam 1692 124
Fig. 6.1 Ventola engraving, after Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s
La Grasse Cuisine and La Maigre Cuisine, published
by Luca Bertelli, Venice 140
Fig. 6.2 La Grasse Cuisine, second edition, reversed engraving
after Pieter van der Heyden (after Pieter Brueghel the Elder)
by Hieronymus Cock 141
Fig. 6.3 Francesco Villamena, Il Bruttobuono, engraving, Rome, 1601 144
Fig. 6.4 Crédit est mort, engraving, anonymous copy
of Il Bruttobuono by Francesco Villamena, Lyon,
last quarter of the seventeenth century 145
Fig. 6.5 Francesco Villamena, Geminiano caldarrostaro, copy
by Charles David, published by Pierre Firens, Paris,
1620–1630 146
Fig. 6.6 Portrait de M.r Ramponeau [sic] cabartier [sic] de la
basse Courtille en bonet [sic] de nuit, etching
and chisel engraving, published by Charpentier,
Paris, March 1760 147
Fig. 6.7 The Surpreising Bett Decided, etching, published
by Carington Bowles, London, c. 1751 149
Fig. 7.1 Frank Mundell, Heroines of Daily Life. London:
The Sunday School Union, 1886 168
Fig. 7.2 Alfred H. Miles (compiler), A Book of Brave Girls at
Home and Abroad: True Stories of Courage and Heroism
Shown in Modern Life by Women and Girls. London:
Stanley Paul, (1909) 172
Fig. 8.1 Enrico Mazzanti, frontispiece for Carlo Collodi’s
Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino, 1883 181
Fig. 8.2 Carlo Chiostri, drawing illustration for Carlo Collodi’s
Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino, 1901 184
 List of Figures and Tables xi

Fig. 8.3 Attilio Mussino, original drawing for Carlo Collodi’s

Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino, 1911 187
Fig. 8.4 Piero Bernardini, blue cover with Pinocchio silhouette
for Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di
un Burattino, 1942 192
Fig. 8.5 Lorenzo Mattotti, full-page plate, Pinocchio’s meeting
with the Cat and the Fox. In Carlo Collodi, Le Avventure
di Pinocchio. Storia di un Burattino, 2008 196
Fig. 8.6 Mimmo Paladino, serigraphy for the Cat and the Fox,
In Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio. Le Avventure di Pinocchio, 2004 198

Table 9.1 Diagram of the narrator’s and the illustrator’s perspectives

in Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl 216
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Evanghelia Stead

Cultural Stories and Libraries

In central Bologna, the deconsecrated church of San Giorgio in Poggiale
provides a long and eventful chronicle. Its many features also nourish a
fascinating cultural allegory.
First recorded in writing in 1237, the church was founded in much
older times, and is most probably of Longobard origin. The edifice,
rebuilt in late Mannerist style under the mendicant order of the Servite
friars between 1589 and 1633, is still preserved today. A monastery,
added between 1641 and 1642, met with the fate of many other reli-
gious institutions in the Napoleonic wars, along with the church: it was
suppressed, never to retrieve its sacred vocation either under private
or public ownership. The church was, however, reconsecrated several
times over the course of the nineteenth century. It re-opened inter-
mittently, from 1824 to 1842, under the Franciscan order of the Frati
Minori Conventuali (the Minorites or Greyfriars), and again after 1882
under the Jesuits. The coup de grâce came with the Second World War.

E. Stead (*)
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Guyancourt, France
e-mail: evanghelia.stead@uvsq.fr
E. Stead
Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France

© The Author(s) 2018 1

E. Stead (ed.), Reading Books and Prints as
Cultural Objects, New Directions in Book History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53832-7_1
2 E. Stead

On 25 September 1943 it was heavily bombed and many of the splen-

did artworks it housed were either lost or destroyed. Desecrated, and
even effaced from Bologna’s cultural memory, it faced demolition, but in
recent years it has undergone two restorations, before finally reopening
as a library in 2009.1
Currently installed in the San Giorgio sanctuary, two artworks by the
contemporary unclassifiable Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani (1943–)
mirror this turbulent storyline. The first is a delocazione (“displace-
ment”), the name Parmiggiani bestows on the traces of dust, soot, and
smoke left by books or objects on the walls of memorable places.2 In
San Giorgio’s semi-circular apse, shadowy outlines of books and shelves
form three insubstantial bookcases looming from between slim Ionian
pilasters. They were torched, imprinted with fire, and only the trace of
their presence remains on the walls, impeccably restored and finished in
2010. Resembling oversized silver-based photographs, or silver-plated
daguerreotypes, they form Parmiggiani’s first permanently visible dis-
placement—former installations having never survived beyond their
temporary exhibition. This ethereal, white-and-grey “fresco” serves
as a backdrop to the second artwork, a portentous installation, now
standing on the site of the vanished altar. A bell weighs down upon a
squat, square bed of charred books. Christened Campo dei fiori (Field
of Flowers), the monumental tribute alludes, among other things, to the
death of Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake.3
The ghostly “bookcases” and the hefty sculpture, materialized in
space as vast metaphors in subtle dialogue with each other and with us,
commemorate the bombing and gutting of the church, the silencing of
the bell, all the while affirming their presence and renewed existence. In
their contrast and tension, they remind us that books are as much solid
bricks as they are symbolic voices and evocative spirits. In this volume,
we look at them as objects, as media, as metaphors, and as symbols. By
transferring ideas and structuring worlds through their rich materiality,
they are seminal agents in the construction and reconstruction of cul-
ture. Just as the inside of San Giorgio was obliterated but today accom-
modates a library, the original shapes and forms of books may survive
and undergo many transformations (Fig. 1.1).
Parmiggiani’s artworks not only reflect upon time, wreckage, and change,
they also invoke the mutability of books, both conceptually and materially.
As a twinned gesture in a desecrated space, they evoke a rich cultural story
of traceable deposits that bind the works of art to the refurbished space
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Fig. 1.1 Claudio Parmiggiani, Campo dei Fiori (Field of Flowers) and
Delocazione (Displacement), courtesy of the artist. Collections Fondazione Cassa
di Risparmio in Bologna, Biblioteca d’Arte e di Storia di San Giorgio in Poggiale,
Genus Bononiae—Musei nella Città
4 E. Stead

and to its books and prints suggesting novel uses and virtual potential. San
Giorgio in Poggiale today houses: Bologna’s Art and History Library, total-
ling 100,000 volumes from the 1500s to modern times; a periodical and
newspaper collection from the eighteenth century to the present; and a
photographic archive of some 60,000 prints pertaining to Bologna before
it underwent major urban change. Access from the street is through a cir-
cular wooden drum that was conceived by the architect Michele De Lucchi
(1951–) as a tower of books to exclude the city’s noise. The material and
spiritual life cycle of a printed book from production to destruction is
here complete: from paper, traditionally derived from lumber and rags, to
volumes kindled, then conceptualized. The whole building reads as a vast
metaphor, or, as Garrett Stewart would have it, a remarkable “bookwork”
(Stewart 2011). Yet these volumes are no longer orphaned codex forms
violently hijacked from their normal use, as in most of the cases studied by
Stewart. In San Giorgio, materially wrecked objects and their conceptual
reinterpretation have been relocated within a modern library’s collections.
Yet, San Giorgio is more than just an empty, echoing, cultural cell
turned operational library. The lateral walls of the ex-church shelter
a cycle of altar-like paintings by Piero Pizzi Cannella (1955–) baptised
Cathedrals, alluding to other landmarks, either imaginary cities or real
places. The library hosts conferences, talks, and cultural events, and is
today one of Bologna’s important cultural venues. As such, it is part of
the Genus Bononiae virtual network of urban museography, Bologna’s
streets serving as hallways, and its historical edifices working as exhibition
spaces with exhibits, all of which attest to the city’s contribution to the
arts and sciences.4
From a rugged past there emerges a multi-layered identity and his-
tory. Both the San Giorgio library and Parmiggiani’s material and con-
ceptual artworks address factual, physical, and symbolic representations of
cultural objects. They feature as strong emblems the way this collective
volume engages with books and prints as objects, media and metaphors.
Hence the referential analogy, by way of introduction, to the recurrent
phenomena this book investigates.
We set out to retrace here, across books and prints, cultural stories
analysed in context and retold. The extreme, the growing value, even the
perishable quality of cultural objects, all register and reflect the passage
of time, the rise and fall of trends, the changes in purpose, the shifting
functions. As tangible and symbolic embodiments of culture, books and
prints both mean and matter. They point to many uses, whether factual,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

intellectual, or imaginary. Our particular interest is in addressing their

past value and current heritage, textual, visual and object-specific, from
the fall of the Roman Empire to Amazon’s e-reader hardware.
The parable of San Giorgio in Poggiale, rife with intellectual and
mythical reconstruction, takes us back to the practices of convent scrip-
toria, brings us through the deposits of a remembered past, the many
layers of present physical printed matter, to suggest finally translation
into digital media through the Genus Bononiae network. Similarly, this
book starts with medieval manuscripts, then turns to prints, investigates
meanings and uses of printed matter, and closes with e-readership and
digital books.
As a cornerstone of European culture, Bologna symbolizes the birth
and building of universities in the Western world. Over the last 18 years,
the “Bologna process”, adopted in 1999 by 29 countries with the aim
of creating a European Higher Education Area, has brought students,
academics, and educational systems into durable contact. It has fostered
multi-disciplinary, life-long, and linguistic education through the pro-
motion of circulation and exchange across Europe, thanks to informa-
tion technologies and despite a dismissal as “Humboldt’s nightmare”.5
Likewise, events prior to this book brought together scholars from 6
European countries (Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, the United
Kingdom, and Austria), cutting across specialities and fields of interest:
medievalists encountered sixteenth-century experts, baroque connois-
seurs and modernists; literary historians rubbed elbows with profession-
als of book and media studies; academics mingled with a collector (since
sadly departed); literature scholars engaged with art historians; and all in
answer to the preoccupations of cultural history. Research institutes for
advanced studies provide such platforms as are necessary for interdisci-
plinary encounters, and the venture resulting in this publication origi-
nated as a conference held at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
(FRIAS) at Freiburg-im-Breisgau in July 2015.
Within this book’s wide, interdisciplinary perspective, we adopt no
conventional divisions of language, country-specific practices or print cat-
egories (collectable fine art versus the cheap and popular, for example).
The editor is of course aware that the selection of chapters proposed here
is mainly European-focussed with a few extensions reaching across the
Atlantic to the USA in the West, and stretching in one case to Russia in the
East. This, however, stems from the participants’ subject matter, not from
6 E. Stead

oversight. Many outstanding studies have opened new ways of investigat-

ing cultural history outside Europe and across the globe. Several Panizzi
lectures have considered manuscripts and prints worldwide, from com-
paring Hebrew manuscripts between East and West (Beit-Arié 1993) to
Arabic learning introduced into England (Burnett 1997), one turning to
books in medieval China (Dudbridge 2000). To mention but two scholarly
inquiries, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s Toward a Geography of Art (2004)
has straddled the geographical dimension of art history in Europe, Latin
America, and Asia during the early modern period, opening methodo-
logical vistas not only in art history but also in cultural geography. Equally
stemming from geography, Sean Roberts’s Printing in a Mediterranean
World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography (2013)
shows how political and intellectual culture renegotiated the heritage of
classical antiquity when manuscripts turned into printed books, copper-
plate engraving emerged, and remarkable tailored copies travelled from
Quattrocento Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici to Bayezid II’s court
in Constantinople. Although Roberts does not refer primarily to Ottoman
sources, he revisits relations between early modern Italy and the Ottoman
state in their respective views of the world. And I would have been keen to
add to the present volume a chapter on the travels of The Arabian Nights
around the globe across manuscripts as well as printed and illustrated mat-
ter—a fascinating topic that is only just being investigated.6
However, although grounded in Europe, this volume’s interest and
scope lies beyond its specific subject matter in the way it can be relevant
to future research both inside and outside Europe. Many of its particular
chapters could be case studies to be continued, carried over, or renewed
in other parts of the world, as they build not only on new research mate-
rial, but, more importantly, on an interdisciplinary methodological
stance, each author enhancing his or her home discipline with a broader
approach.
Several moments chart threshold periods: the late Middle Ages, early
humanism, early precursors of art publications, illustrated books from
the industrial age, book consumerism in the twentieth century, contem-
porary e-reading. Just as Parmiggiani’s works of art are both material and
conceptual, our aim for this book is to conceptualize how “the mate-
rial culture of ideas” (Sharpe 2000, 39) relates to reading; how physical
books and prints reveal tendencies and developments, past and present,
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

while disclosing their changing significance over time. To what extent do

form and content, message and medium, respond to material, concep-
tual, symbolic and imaginary use? How do they point to specific cultural
narratives or tales?

The Drill of Discipline

Our wide-angle approach encompasses a field rich in accomplish-
ments, rife with debate. From the 1980s, intense disciplinary discus-
sions have sought the best path towards writing “the history of books”
(Darnton 1982)—a translation of the French term histoire du livre, not
always engaging to anglophone ears.7 There are three major compet-
ing disciplines in this arena: History (privileging cultural transactions),
Bibliography (focussing on material artefacts), and Literary Studies
(prioritizing literary texts). Robert Darnton’s “communications circuit
of the book”, epitomizing the transactions between author, publisher,
shippers and agents, booksellers and readers, is a well-known attempt to
formalize the field and prevent the disciplines from “running riot”. The
role of reading however, was wanting in this model, as Darnton himself
acknowledged: “reading remains the most difficult stage to study in the
circuit that books follow” (Darnton 1982, 16). Several innovative con-
tributions have since made reading studies a leading area in contem-
porary research, from Roger Chartier’s work constructed around four
constants—authors, texts, books, and readers8— to Martyn Lyons’s A
History of Reading and Writing in the Western World (2010), Palgrave
Macmillan’s series on The History of Reading (2011), and an identical
title in the “Routledge Literature Readers” series (Towheed et al. 2011).
Eleven years after Darnton’s influential essay, analytical bibliogra-
phy made its own claim to recognition. Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas
Barker promoted an alternative model of circulation, arguing compel-
lingly that the life of a book does not begin with writing any more than
it ends with reading. Significantly, their book cycle begins with publi-
cation and goes on to reception and survival, but does not end there.
It is graphically set at the very heart of “the whole socio-economic
conjuncture”, seen as four spheres exerting radial pressure on the core
life cycle of the book. The spheres correspond to: (a) intellectual influ-
ences; (b) political, legal, and religious influences; (c) commercial pres-
sures; and (d) social behaviour and taste. This counter-model, aiming to
capture the total significance of books, mainly privileges print culture,
8 E. Stead

“something printed or written in multiple copies”, produced “for

­public consumption” (Adams and Barker 1993, 51). In other words, it
excludes manuscripts, be they medieval copyists’ productions or unique
­unpublished scripts, and was conceived in the pre-digital era. Akin to
Darnton’s graph, it schematizes affairs and relationships diagrammati-
cally. And models, though necessary to visualize, formalize, and rep-
resent theories, “have a way of freezing human beings out of history”
(Darnton 1982, 11).
Peter D. McDonald would in turn emphasize human interactions
in 1997 with his British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice,
1880–1914, as Leslie Howsam notes (Howsam 2006, 38f). By applying
Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural theory of the literary field to book history,
McDonald provides the cyclical actions with relationships and structures.
Writers, critics, publishers, printers, distributors, and readers endow
Darnton’s circuit with genuine life; texts are not only meanings and ideas
to be interpreted, but “radically situated, for Bourdieu, as material forms
with a specific status in the [literary] field” (McDonald 1997, 13, quoted
by Howsam 2006, 38). Transitory commercial, cultural, and intellectual
situations take on a new significance.
Mapping the field, discussing its methodological principles, and iden-
tifying key notions, these useful contributions also reveal the difficulty
in providing a full portrayal of books and prints as cultural objects, and
in rendering their roles or agency. While the historian’s and the bibli-
ographer’s grids capture crucial aspects of the book industry and tech-
nology, they are based either on the book as product, commodity, or
artefact (Darnton), or on the book as object of inquiry, in an attempt
to have Bibliography recognized as a sovereign academic discipline
(Adams and Barker). The question of what books may achieve as cul-
tural agents is not tackled. Leslie Howsam has importantly observed that,
firstly, Darnton’s focus is on the book trade; his main interest lies in the
book’s material production and distribution and he means to explore the
history of communication, not develop a history of culture (Howsam
2006, 31–32). Secondly, still according to Howsam, by concentrat-
ing on events, Adams and Barker undertook to establish bibliographic
truth, provide an accurate text, and follow its transmission. The “reading
public or the broader culture is cast in passive terms”, and “the social
context” in which the book emerged “drops to the background” (ibid.,
15). Despite their ambitious approach, Adams and Barker deem that
“understanding of reception is episodic and scattered”. Reception itself is
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

a “theme”, “a passive thing”, not a process (Adams and Barker 1993, 60

and 58). Their recurring comparison of Bibliography with Archaeology
clearly does not favour the book’s impact or influence. Lastly, McDonald
intends “to re-think and re-write literary criticism” and, by recon-
structing the literary field, “stress the complexity of a literary culture”
(Howsam 2006, 39).
This collection also builds on literary and artistic culture with a dif-
ference: by combining literary analysis and looking at how books and
prints are shaped by design, format, uses, and, later, marketing, it inves-
tigates their impact on cultural trends; similarly, it explores how cultural
trends shape the reading and deciphering of books and prints. Books and
prints may well be the outcome or consequence of procedures, transac-
tions, or trades (as well as a witness to the legitimacy and strength of
Bibliography); still, they concern us here as active and complex repre-
sentatives of culture through their manifold uses and many-sided reading
processes.
Since McDonald, an alternative to the “History of Books” has
emerged in the form of “Book Studies”. The breadth implied by the
term has proved appropriate for this book. True, in Jonathan Rose’s
words, Book Studies represents “a new academic field to explore the
past, present, and future of all forms of written and printed communica-
tions” that “would bring together, under one interdisciplinary umbrella,
specialists in book history, the book arts, publishing education, textual
studies, reading instruction, librarianship, journalism, and the Internet,
and teach all these subjects as an integrated whole” (Rose 2003, 12,
my emphasis). Admittedly, when Book Studies is merely understood
as “a dual discipline”, encompassing “Book History and Book Arts”
(Stepanova 2007), significant phenomena, such as the effects of reading
or the complexity of literary culture, are still sidelined. And it has been
asked whether Book Studies is not “merely an interdisciplinary academic
program” rather than a “free-standing discipline” (Stepanova 2007).
The latter question, however, concerns more the structure of academia
than Book Studies as the research stance we propose here. This book
aims to show its research benefits. As I have already argued regarding
periodicals, it may not be necessary to establish yet another free-stand-
ing discipline. “Discipline” implies rules and sanction. Books (and, in
the broadest sense, manuscripts, periodicals, and prints) invite switching
disciplines in order to cross-exchange views and interrelate objects, uses,
and fashions. Should yet another specialist field emerge, it would, in the
10 E. Stead

effort to be peer-recognized, necessarily generate rules, scopes, aims,

issues, and so on, and diligently so. We are sufficiently supplied with dis-
ciplines to be able to explore books, prints, and periodicals, and under-
stand how they work as cultural objects. More pertinently, should we not
consider how books and prints challenge our disciplinary criteria (Stead
2015)?
This challenge is addressed here by asking more modestly “What do
books and prints do as cultural objects?” while moving from construc-
tive dialogue between disciplines to interdisciplinarity. We attempt this
without promoting yet another scheme or study model, or giving our-
selves a further scientific identity. Commercial, cultural, and intellec-
tual exchanges are transitory: our approach needs to be supple enough
to adapt and remain flexible. An approach is not a fixed attitude, and
research is not a position (a location, rank, posture, or set argument),
even if it often leads to academic appointment, status, or employment.
It may, however, gain strength and finesse by adjusting to objects—start-
ing with a close examination of their materiality. Conversely, disciplinary
discussion may simply derive from an anxiety of academia as an institu-
tion, rather than being a search for interpretative improvement. Bonnie
Mak argues that systems of classification may be “transformed into repre-
sentatives of different categories of knowledge, and even come to signify
knowledge itself” (Mak 2011, 56). Since Book Studies covers substan-
tially different historical periods, dissimilar media and varied situations,
it is crucial not to fix and batten down its means of investigation and the
directions it may take. The authors in this collection, challenged by their
very objects of study, have adopted interdisciplinary approaches while
striving to provide a comprehensive survey in each particular historical
context. Books and prints are already demonstrable cultural agents in this
sense.
Book Studies implies a long list of fields well implemented and inves-
tigated by specialists: Book History; Materiality and Printing Studies
(frequently called Analytical or Descriptive Bibliography); Book Arts;
Media History and Internet Studies; Literature and Publishing Histories;
Histories of Education, Librarianship and Journalism; Social, Economic
and Political History affecting the book trade and interacting with
it; Digital Humanities; the Social History of Reading, and Textual
Studies—to name but the most prominent. We have chosen a broad
chronological approach here, with each study calling on two disciplines,
if not three. Is this cross-disciplinary approach “poaching” (Howsam
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

2006, 37)? Admittedly, Michel de Certeau did not disdain braconnage

(“poaching”) in his elaborations on cultural theory and everyday life (De
Certeau 1980, 279–296).
Such an approach informs a book published in 2012 under the title
La Chair du Livre: Matérialité, Imaginaire et Poétique du Livre Fin-de-
siècle (The Flesh of the Book: Materiality, Imagination and Poetics of the
Fin-de-Siècle Book). In this, thanks to the productive metaphor of the
book as flesh, it is argued that print culture is based on much more
than the reader’s intellect: it relies on his or her senses and imagination.
Print and visual culture is explored in relation to the rich materiality
of fin de siècle publications and inserted in “a network of cultural and
metaphorical associations woven into nineteenth-century book culture”
(Arnar 2014, 474). When print culture is probed both literally and
figuratively, and an iconographical or metaphorical analysis combines
with critical discourse, books and prints prove to be much more than
a depository of formats, techniques, materials, or illustration styles:
they are the very hub of cultural metaphors that throw light onto visual
and literary experimentation. Starting from a plurality of methodolo-
gies, materiality, figurative imagination, and poetics have thus proved a
threefold way to look at books and prints as telling objects of cultural
history. Addressing sophisticated and mechanical printing, deluxe and
low-priced realizations, that study even extended to writing instruments
in Suetonius’s The Lives of the Twelve Caesars; Marcel Schwob’s bust,
modelled as book-ends that defined the breadth of his private library;
as well as Schwob’s medieval and early modern books, which creatively
informed his modern writing, anticipating Borges. The question thus
arose: Could books and prints then be studied in similar ways across
periods and in other media than those proper to the fin de siècle? FRIAS
welcomed this idea in the broader context of the ongoing project on
Goethe’s Faust I print culture.9
This volume is one consecutive answer. In the wake of James
O’Donnell’s and Roger Chartier’s previous contributions,10 tradi-
tional boundaries according to media and periodicity have here been
suspended. Manuscripts, prints, printed matter and digital media are
considered as silent but powerful European, and sometimes transatlan-
tic, messengers, as cultural objects “bearing in their pages the bounda-
ries of their possible reception”.11 Intersemiotic relationships arise from
the ways their parts combine: content with container, inside with out-
side, text with image and ornament, binding with ideas and purport,
12 E. Stead

contextuality with intertextuality, genotype with phenotype. Grounded

in materiality, the chapters offered look at reading processes, imaginary
representations, and circulation.

Materiality, Reading, Representation, and Circulation

Each study starts from the material forms in which wording and art are
constituted and transmitted. The material characteristics of prints and
books are consistently central to their meaning—this is a key meth-
odological stance. Accordingly, the detailed examination of the physi-
cal constitution of written and printed matter leads, in a few cases, to
deciphering specific objects; in other, more numerous cases, the material
characteristics of prints and books become the connective tissue between
communities of readers. But the anatomy of an object would fall short of
the mark, if it did not release its imaginative energy. Materiality may be
intimately bound to the ideas it expresses and carries. Careful, conscious
designs may converge to constitute trends, and these change significantly
over time. Investigations conducted in archives, or the anchoring of
material relationships, thus allow for restaging activities in new intellec-
tual, political and social contexts, thanks to the numerous connections
between readers and objects of study.
We look at reading firstly by deciphering books through use, and
by pairing materiality and concept. In this process, reading, whether of
manuscripts, prints, or tablets, is seen as the vibrant part of the intel-
lectual pursuit. Object matter engages with immaterial meaning in a
mutually dynamic relationship. From the book’s implementation (books
as objects) to its energy released through individual or collective read-
ing (books coming to life), books and prints engage “with the aes-
thetics of reception but by displacing and enlarging its aim” (Chartier
1985, 81).12 Secondly, we follow the changing roles of books over
time. They are not only historical documents bearing the traces of the
past, but agents of knowledge, aesthetic import, and imaginative intel-
lect. Thirdly, the wealth of humanist culture from antiquity to modern
times is represented by interrelated reading. Michael Stolz underlines the
density of humanist reading: not just the mind’s encounters with texts
while reading, but also with remembered reading, and reading circum-
stances rooted in previous reading scenes. Similarly, our title, Reading
Books and Prints as Cultural Objects, combines internal and external
reading processes: the researcher’s gaze, the readers’ experience, and
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

the multi-layered scenes that are read involving other readings. Reading
embedded in material culture is prolonged by electronic reading: on the
one hand, digital texts are consumed by contemporary readers; on the
other, e-text providers monitor this very readership in turn to constitute
reading communities or gather representative samples for advertisement
campaigns from the information collected electronically.
Furthermore, this book extends former publications on books stud-
ied alongside images. The 2002 special issue “Reading with Images in
Nineteenth-Century Europe” showed that images in books fully partake
in literary reading: they enable the author to write with images; they
empower the reader through visual spurs; and they endow the book itself
with a spectacular dimension (Stead ed. 2002). Images may relate to the
text structurally, indicate peak moments, or connect with other images
(just as texts do in intertextuality). The 2014 special issue of Word &
Image on “Imago & Translatio” looked into the translation of literary
works in Europe alongside artistic rendition, simultaneously considering
transfer from language to language and from language to images from
the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, while discussing circula-
tion patterns and publishing tendencies. This gave rise to a self-imposed
methodology, at the crossroads of Literature and Art History, Semiotics
and Translation Studies, as well as Visual Culture and Literature Studies
(Stead and Védrine eds. 2014).
Expanding on these investigations, several chapters in this volume
explore reading with images from the Middle Ages to modern times,
while one chapter examines how prestige prints encounter the book.
Reading with images depends on additions (ornament, insert plates,
in-text images) or self-standing prints. It may give rise to various book
genres. Frequently understood as illustration (i.e. explanation, demon-
stration, or illumination), such limitative branding may be misleading
when texts decked with images produce intricate intersemiotic relations,
expand or contradict textual meaning. The relevance of the term “illus-
tration” may also be challenged. There may be many books within a
single book, as there are many meanings and dimensions within a given
print. And when “artworks on paper” (drawings, engravings, litho-
graphs, reproductions) circulate extensively between countries, then
media and art history are further enriched.
Books and prints are, however, not just objects or media. An impor-
tant part of their life relates to the imagination. As Ernst Robert Curtius
famously showed, books and writing, as symbols, play a seminal part in
14 E. Stead

Western culture from antiquity to the end of the Enlightenment (Curtius

1953). This argument has been taken further in the mass-printing age
and recast in Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian
Britain (2012). Large-scale changes and a new cultural status drive
books into other uses than reading: they become fashion accessories,
wastepaper, wrapping for food or props—a medium for social interac-
tion. They involve “rejection theory” (rather than reception theory). In
this collection we attempt to look at several sides of the metaphorical and
symbolic associations involved.
This complex process may lie in the book’s very materiality: to insert
valuable materials in a volume (such as a bone plaque much later added
in a medieval manuscript psalter, as H. Lähnemann shows) is to imag-
ine a modest book’s other self by imitating the ivory of representational
manuscripts’ lavish bindings. Material embellishment could have con-
noted spiritual devotion, the soul’s commitment; but, in the case of this
particular object, at the time it is inserted, it reflects instead antiquar-
ian infatuation. Moreover, books function as metaphors. They partake
of the way humans construct notions of truth, existence, the world, life
itself. As Kevin Sharpe argues, “the texts, discourses and performances
by which a culture structures the chaos of experience are the representa-
tions of the world that become the only reality that human beings can
know” (Sharpe 2000, 11). As bearers of such phenomena, books and
prints epitomize “cultural history” “between practices and representa-
tions”—to echo an eloquent title by Roger Chartier (Chartier 1988).
If the “world as representation” is “fashioned by means of the series
of discourses” (ibid., 11), books are a central means to fathoming and
understanding a culture. Equally essential to representation, prints act as
clusters of images that structure the imagination and bear on the psyche.
They carry innovation, established conventions, or revolutionary belief.
Reading and picturing processes are the channels through which texts,
myths, and imaginary patterns are transmitted, read, re-read, and reme-
diated in different contexts and over time. Their twin energies stimulate
the imagination, just as they transform and shape experience, belief, or
configurations of the world.
Such processes depend largely on circulation and dissemination. In
this book, we investigate inter alia the movement of prayer books from
the Medingen convents across lands and centuries; the reinterpretation
(and displacement) of texts through illustrated and translated editions
of Schnitzler’s works across Austria, Great Britain, and the USA; as well
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

as the transformation of prints between genres and cultures, thanks to

pedlars and hawkers. European cultural exchanges existed very early, well
before our global digitized culture. To show books and prints as agents
between cultures is seminal. Traditional nationally based approaches to
documentation limit reception, restrict investigation, and distort percep-
tion, since they prevent dissimilarities, distinctions, or even disparities
from exerting their refining influence on the elaboration of theory. This
volume shows that prints and books reflect the encounter, divergence,
and overlapping of cultures. Questions of production, reception, trans-
formation, and circulation of aesthetic and cultural models are brought
to the fore. Rather than putting the emphasis on a unified field, this
volume stresses journeys, movement, and changing categories. Reading
itself is both a spiritual and a physical movement. Early modern read-
ers engage with negotiation, that is textual and remembered interchange
that transcends barriers of origin, space, and time. Similarly, quality cate-
gories and hierarchies are tested: we take into account originals, variants,
replicas, and serialization processes. Finally, we turn to books and prints
as complex and self-referential cultural agents that change from cultural
objects into cultural emblems. Cultural emblems nourish the mythical
dimension of the book object itself, and the last two chapters challenge
this mythification of the book.

Reading Cultural Objects Over Time

Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects extends its reach from the
Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, and is divided into four parts
according to questions of media: manuscripts, prints, mechanically
printed books, and e-readers. Each part contains two to four chapters.
Part IV serves as an ample conclusion, more speculative in nature, and
which may also be read as a foreword to digital reading practices. This
arrangement works more as reversible counterpoint than strict chronol-
ogy. As will be immediately obvious to the reader, chronological order
is not always strictly respected within a section. For instance, Part I, on
manuscript culture, might have begun with a piece on a fourteenth-cen-
tury devotional booklet rather than with the fifteenth-century Medingen
prayer books. By the same token, Part II, on prints, ought to have
opened with the circulation of cheap print culture from the sixteenth
century onwards rather than with baroque reproductions of princely
galleries. In both cases, the chronological inversion is the consequence
16 E. Stead

of the methodological questions raised by this volume. By encompass-

ing three media-driven periods, the scope of Lähnemann’s study on
the Medingen manuscripts announces our investigation from medieval
times to the digital age. To examine prestigious copperplates glorifying
political personalities before derivative, far-travelling imagery, infinitely
adjustable to use and context, works counteractively to the status of
such worthies’ galleries. The inverse contrapuntal order in Part II mir-
rors rival, yet complementary, categories. In Part I, the profusion of cul-
tural practices around the Medingen manuscripts is apt justification. In
both instances, inversions echo our wide-ranging approach to book and
print culture. Put differently, chapters in each part engage with specific
media in complementary ways and address questions relevant to special-
ist dialogue. Nevertheless, they articulate problems that clearly transcend
periodicity, medium-specificity, and specialisms.
Part I focusses on manuscripts while addressing reading practices in
contexts that are monastic and antiquarian (H. Lähnemann), devo-
tional (H. Manuwald), or early humanist (M. Stolz). In Chap. 2,
Henrike Lähnemann follows the prayer books made by fifteenth-cen-
tury Cistercian nuns in the Medingen convents through to the twenty-
first century. The nuns individually plied script, ornament, prayers, and
hymns to express worship, although common devotional features may
also be discerned. In their material and spiritual identities, these book-
lets are cultural handbooks: not only manuals in the current sense, but
strong expressions of personal soul and body devotion by the handmaid-
ens of God, schooled and trained in the convent. To be fully grasped,
their rich materiality transcends descriptive bibliography. It points to
symbolic uses. Materializing the word thus employs parchment, for
animal skin best befits the word made flesh, just as scraping the manu-
script to use it anew embodies conventual reform and renewal. That a
patchwork—a motley of cloth and sewn-on scrolls forming an ante-
pendium (altar cloth)—leads to the discovery of a rich array of prayer
books now dispersed throughout Europe and also over the Atlantic,
shows how deeply cultural history relies on textual heritage—texts and
textiles, according to the etymology (“text” comes from “texere”, “to
weave”). Such practices are not unique or exclusive to Medingen. In
the first half of the twentieth century, Clelia Marchi, a peasant woman
from Poggio Rusco near Mantua, wrote her diary on a 2 m-wide bed
sheet, now a jewel in the collection of the National Diary Archive of
Pieve Santo Stefano near Arezzo, along a Memory Route.13 Her diary
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

is today available in print form.14 Textual culture transcends books, just

as books are a part of broader cultural trends. That thread indeed leads a
long way. The Medingen path of manuscripts winds through faith, doc-
trinal and historical ruptures, and emerging specialisms. Religious trans-
formations and historical turning points encounter nascent academic
disciplines: Antiquarianism, the building of museum collections, German
Studies, Philology, Codicology, Linguistics, and Musicology. The prayer
books encourage manifold perusal: they may be read as expressions of
personal faith; mirrors of religious engagement and reform; collectors’
cherished treasures; items hoarded by museums to signal cultural shifts;
pieces of disciplinary implementation; or as testimony to politics, institu-
tionalization, and internationalization.
Not all manuscripts or books, however, provide such plentiful infor-
mation. In research, abundance of evidence and scarcity may jostle, as at
the opening of Part I, enhancing its contrapuntal structure. In Chap. 3,
Henrike Manuwald discusses an enigmatic case, a minuscule picture
book from central Germany dating from the first half of the fourteenth
century and now in one of the libraries in Montpellier, indecipherable
by manuscript type, of unknown production, and pointing to unknown
cultural practices—such as re-memorizing the Gospels through pictures
and abbreviated texts in vernacular German. In many pages, images take
the lead over text. To modern eyes, the meaning emerging from textual
abbreviations and pictorial signs would make of the booklet a series of
punning riddles or rebuses. Not so to the medievalist. Manuwald turns
to modern theory, namely cultural accomplishments as discussed in
media and cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken). The actor-network
model, in which an object shapes or even creates an action, spurs com-
parison of the Montpellier manuscript with other objects of the period
(folding calendars; almanacs; books of liturgy; collections of Gospel
excerpts, known as pericopes). The three related parts of the booklet
exemplify further dimensions of reading: the decoding of symbols or
mnemonics; material signs alluding to an immaterial text; the function of
textual and pictorial abbreviations; word and image complementing each
other, and intertextually relating to the Gospels. Original and later uses
point again to multilayered reading practices. Combinations of images
and pericopes in the vernacular attest to both lay and clerical readings.
The author stresses the shared cultural competences of the time, indi-
vidual meditative or ruminative reading, and even emotional engagement
18 E. Stead

with the biblical stories (devils defaced). However small, the Montpellier
booklet well reflects the extensive power of books.
Chapter 4 leafs through depictions of reading in Italy and Germany.
Michael Stolz considers reading scenarios in Europe from late antiq-
uity to early humanism. His investigation extends from Saint Augustine
(reading Saint Paul and Antonius’s vita) to early German humanists
(reading in their libraries) via Petrarch returning to Saint Augustine
and reading Boccaccio, who himself leads on to Chaucer and Christine
de Pizan. Thanks to the contrapuntal pattern of otium/negotium, inti-
mate considerations and private, self-reliant, intention supplement
social exchange and the interaction of ideas in cultural representations
of reading: remembered reading, reading embedded in other reading
scenes, hasty reading accompanied by commentary, translation, pub-
lic assessment, as well as multiple cross-referencing. This bustling activ-
ity highlights the antecedence of performances that current automated
feats sometimes advertise as very modern. The swift interchange of ideas
is not just mental but again also physical, as signalled by the use of the
Latin verb currere (to run), pairing physicality and concept. As the com-
mon denominator of circulation and commerce (negotium), movement
reminds us that Hermes, messenger of the gods, is equally the wing-
footed god of trade. Interestingly, in the wake of early humanist transac-
tions, a new awareness of fiction emerges when Sigismund Gossembrot
opts for the ‘other’ truth to be found in poets’ works and invention as
opposed to religious verity. Is not Hermes, though, the god of wily fib-
bers as well? Should he not be seen as the deity of make-believe?
A detail in Stolz’s essay provides the transition from Part I to Part II,
which turns to images and circulation. The humanist Hermann Schedel
comments, when reading, on retexere (“weaving anew”—a further bond
between textual reading and interlacing) by lining up functions com-
monly attributed to images, particularly illustration: retexere is explained
as “clarifying”, “denuding”, or “exposing”, “reporting omitted things”,
“making obvious” or “public”, and, most fittingly, as “opening”.
What, then, would images add to reading processes? As already
pointed out, the objects of study in Part II could not be more antitheti-
cal: on the one hand, pricey and elaborate engravings are seen to con-
fer the highest praise and honour; on the other hand, studying low-cost,
broadly distributed imagery can provide genuine insight into widespread
uses and tendencies. Substantial material differences enhance the social
and technical aspects: the expensive prints embrace the book format in
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The
brother's return, and other stories
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The brother's return, and other stories

Author: A. L. O. E.

Release date: November 13, 2023 [eBook #72110]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: T. Nelson and Sons, 1886

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

BROTHER'S RETURN, AND OTHER STORIES ***
Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as
printed.

SARAH MAY'S KINDNESS REMEMBERED.

 THE

BROTHER'S RETURN
AND OTHER STORIES.

BY

A. L. O. E.,

AUTHOR OF "FAIRY FRISKET," "FAIRY KNOW-A-BIT,"

"THE GIANT-KILLER,"
ETC. ETC.

London:
T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW.

EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK.

1886.

CONTENTS.
THE BROTHER'S RETURN

BLACK YARN AND BLUE

THE SHEPHERD'S DOG

WHAT BIRD WOULD YOU BE?

THE HERO AND THE HEROINE

BEWARE OF THE WOLF

THE BROTHER'S RETURN

AND OTHER STORIES.

The Brother's Return.

"I COULD have been sure that John's house stood here,"
murmured Ralph Daines to himself as he looked around. "I
know that it stood by the turn of a road, just as one came
in sight of the church, and that it had a clump of trees in
front, just like these before me. Ah! Well, well," he added,
"it's more than twenty years since I turned away from my
brother's door—turned away in anger—and twenty years
will bring changes. Perhaps I've mistaken the place, after
all. I stayed but a short time with John, so that I never
knew his home well. In twenty years, one may forget; yes,
one may forget a spot, but there are some things which
never can be forgotten, however long we may live."

And amongst those things which rested upon Ralph's mind

was his quarrel with his brother, Long John—a quarrel so
sharp, that, after the two had parted, they had never seen
nor written to each other again. For twenty years and more,
Ralph had dwelt in a distant land, and had never so much
as sent a letter to inquire after the welfare of the brother
whom he had left in England. But when Ralph at last
returned to his native isle, his heart began to yearn towards
the only near relation whom he had upon earth. His anger
had been softened by time; and Ralph thought that his
brother's home should be his home, and that, though they
had parted in anger, they might yet meet again in affection.

Ralph Daines, after leaving his luggage at the inn nearest to

the place where his brother had dwelt, set out on foot for
the house, being sure that he knew the road well enough to
enable him to find it without much trouble. But the traveller
was perplexed, when he came near the spot where he
thought that the house should be, to see only waste land
overgrown with thistles and charlock, with bits of a tumble-
down fence which could not keep out some sheep that were
grazing where once a garden had been.

"Perhaps I've taken the wrong road, after all; perhaps I

should have turned to the left after passing the mile-stone,"
mused Ralph. "I wish now that I had inquired the way at the
inn, but I thought that I could not miss it. However, it
matters little, for here comes a child tripping along the path
over yon meadow. She perhaps may be able to tell me the
way to the house of John Daines."
Ralph leaned over the rough paling which bordered the
meadow, and waited till the little girl whom he saw carrying
a bundle of fagots should come up to the place where he
stood. The child looked poor, but her dress was neat, and
her cheeks were as rosy as the flowers which she had stuck
in her bosom.

"I say, my little friend," began Ralph, as soon as the child

could hear him, "is there not a lonely house near this place,
with red tiles and a porch, and a poultry-yard behind it?"

"I dun no, sir," said the child.

"Was there not once such a house on the plot of waste land
behind me?"

"I dun no," repeated the child, who was scarcely four years
old.

"I do not seem likely to get much information out of this

little one," said Ralph to himself; "but she may know
people, though she does not know places.—Does a Mr.
Daines live near this spot?" he inquired.

The child looked doubtful for a minute, then muttered, "Dun

no;" and seemed inclined to pass on.

"Wait a bit, little one," said Ralph. "You may perhaps have
heard of Mr. Daines as 'Long John,' for he often went by
that name!"

A gleam of intelligence broke at once over the rosy young

face. "Eh! Yes; he be father!" she cried. "Nobody don't call
him mister."

"Your father!" exclaimed Ralph in surprise; for the speech

and dress of the little girl were those of a poor peasant child
—not such as might have been expected in one brought up
in the comfortable house of his brother. "Do you mean to
say that Long John Daines is your father?"

The child nodded her head.

"And where is he now?" cried Ralph.

The little girl raised her sunburnt arm and pointed towards
the church which appeared at a little distance.

"Can you take me to the place, my little friend? I will help

you over the stile, and carry your fagots for you, and you
shall have a bright new shilling when we arrive at your
home."

The eyes of the child brightened. She let the stranger lift
her over the stile, and kiss her, and gaze in her face—saying
that her eyes were just like her father's. She then tripped
merrily along by his side, and in reply to Ralph's questions,
told him that her name was Mary, and that sometimes she
was called Polly. She did not know whether she had any
other name, but she knew that she was Long John's little
child, for all the folk knew that.

"Where is your mother?" asked Ralph. His brother had not

been married when they had parted, twenty years back.

"Mother is with father," said Mary.

"And is that their home?" inquired Ralph, as he approached

a pretty farmhouse which stood a little way back from the
road.

"Oh no!" cried Mary, in surprise at the question. "Not a big

home like that."
Ralph's face became graver and sadder, for the farmhouse
was not so large as the dwelling in which he had last seen
his brother. It was clear that Long John could not have
prospered in life; and this made Ralph more deeply regret
having so long harboured anger against him.

"Why had I the folly—the worse than folly—to keep up a

quarrel with my own brother!" thought he. "Poor John has
gone down in the world; I shall find him, perhaps, in
distress. He has needed the help of a brother, and knew not
where a letter would find me.—Has your father to work very
hard?" he inquired.

"Oh no," replied the child again, with a look of surprise.

The mind of Ralph was relieved. "Then he is never very

hungry?" said he.

"Never hungry," answered Mary gravely.

"It is a comfort that John has not known actual want,"

thought Ralph. "If I find him—as I expect—a poor man, I,
with plenty of money in my pocket, shall be able to start
him again in business."

Ralph walked for some time in silence by his little

companion, for his thoughts were full of the days of old. He
remembered how he had romped and played with his
brother when they had been children together; and he
remembered, alas! How often their sports had ended in
quarrelling and fighting. Both were proud, passionate boys;
neither liked to give in; neither could bear to ask pardon of
the brother whom he had wronged. The last sad quarrel
between Ralph and his brother had followed on a thousand
lesser ones, which had embittered the lives of both.
"Ah, how often our poor mother urged us to love one
another!" thought Ralph, now a worn elderly man, as he
recalled the days of his youth. "How she spoke to us of the
meekness and gentleness which should be shown by every
Christian, and taught us that he that is slow to anger is
better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he
that taketh a city! What grief it would have given to our
mother could she have known that, after her death, her
sons would be more than twenty years without seeing or
hearing tidings of each other! But now I will make amends
for the past. Poor John shall find that for him and his family
I have an open purse and an open heart. I hope that the
quarrel which has kept us so long asunder may be the last
which shall ever arise between me and my only brother."

Ralph was so much engaged with thoughts such as these,

that he scarcely noticed that his little guide was now taking
him through the village churchyard, until she suddenly
stopped quite still, which made her companion stop also.
Mary pointed to a mound of turf, over which the long grass
was growing. There was a low head-stone by the mound,
with a short inscription upon it. Ralph started and trembled
when his glance fell on that stone. It bore two names: the
first that of MARY DAINES, who had died, aged twenty; the
next that of her husband, JOHN DAINES, who (as the date
showed) had died not a year before his brother's return.
Little Mary was too young to spell out the words on the
stone; but she had been taught to look on that grassy
mound as the home of her father and mother.

Great was the surprise of the child to see the burst of grief
to which her quiet, grave companion gave way. The little
one knew not how great had been her own loss; her childish
tears for her father had long since been dried; to her, there
was no deep sadness in the peaceful churchyard, or the
grassy mound on which daisies grew. Mary wondered why
the tall stranger should fall on his knees by the mound, and
bury his face in his hands, and sob as if he were a child.
Mary knew not what a bitter thing it is to repent too late of
unkindness shown to a brother; to wish—but to wish in vain
—to recall words which should never have been spoken,
deeds which should never have been done.

Ralph would at that moment have given all that he

possessed upon earth to have been able to say to himself,
"There was never anything but kindness and love between
me and him whom I shall see no more upon earth!"

At length, Ralph arose from the grave, with a heavy heart,

and eyes swollen with weeping. He took Mary up in his
arms, pressed her close to his heart, then covered her face
with kisses. He was thankful that there was yet one way left
by which he could show affection to his lost brother; he
would act the part of a father to John's little orphan girl.
Ralph promised by his brother's tomb that he would watch
over Mary, and care for her and love her, as if she were his
own child.

And well did Ralph keep that promise,—well did he supply a

parent's place to Mary. Not only did he feed and clothe her,
and give her a happy home, but he earnestly tried to bring
her up as a Christian child. He taught his little niece to give
and forgive, to bear and forbear, and never to lie down at
night to sleep before she had asked forgiveness of any one
whom she had offended during the day.

"Oh, my child!" Ralph would say with a sigh to Mary,

whenever she showed any sign of a proud or passionate
temper, "never let anger have time to grow, for its fruit is
sin and bitter sorrow. Pray for grace that you may be able
to keep the blessed command, 'Let all bitterness, and
wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put
away from you, with all malice; and be ye kind one to
another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as
God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven you.'"

Black Yarn and Blue.

SOFTLY outside Mary's cottage fell the rain, the gentle April
rain; and round and round went the wheel within the
cottage, where Mary sat at her spinning. Never did her
husband wear a pair of socks that was not of Mary's
spinning and knitting. The hum of the cottager's busy wheel
was a pleasant sound; and cheerful and bright looked
Mary's face as she busily spun her blue yarn.

But the face of her son Jemmy was neither cheerful nor
bright, as he sat, with his crutches beside him, in front of
the fire, with his back turned towards his mother. First
Jemmy yawned, then yawned again, and then he took to
sighing; and his sigh had so dreary a sound, that it drew
the attention of Mary.

"What are you thinking of, Jemmy, my lad?" asked the

mother, stopping the wheel for a minute.

"I am thinking of all my troubles," was the mournful reply,

uttered slowly, and in a tone most plaintive.

"Well, the accident to your leg was a great trouble; but the
poor leg is getting better,—the doctor says that you will
soon throw your crutches away," observed Mary cheerfully;
and round again went her wheel.

"I was not thinking of great troubles, but of little troubles,"

said Jemmy; "this has been an unlucky day. It rains when I
want to go out."

"Oh! The blessed rain, which will do the country such good!"
interrupted his mother.

"And I've lost my silver penny," continued Jemmy. "I cannot

find it, though I've hunted in every nook and cranny."

"Certainly that is no great trouble," laughed Mary. "Wait till

I've spun this yarn, and I'll help you to look for your silver
penny. And what is your next trouble, my boy?"

"That pretty plant which the gardener gave me is dying; it

is curling up all its leaves," sighed doleful Jemmy, glancing
towards a flowerpot which stood on the sill.

"I daresay that it only wants a little water," said Mary. "See
how the spring shower is making the fields and hedges
green! Your poor prisoner in the flowerpot has not had a
drop to drink since yesterday, when you brought it home.
Have you any more troubles, my boy?" The question was so
playfully asked, that Jemmy felt rather ashamed of his
sighing and grumbling.

"Only that Tom is unkind; he is always teasing me to come

out and fly the kite with him, when he knows that I have a
lame leg. He said, when he went out this morning, that my
coddling at home was all nonsense; that he'll make a
bonfire of my crutches some day, and that I never shall
miss them! It was very, very unkind."
"Tom is a little too fond of joking; but I really don't see
anything in that joke to set you sighing," said Mary,
laughing. "My dear boy, you are much too ready to set that
brain of yours spinning gloomy thoughts. Suppose that I
were to put black wool upon my wheel, what should I spin
but black yarn, and your father would have nought but
black stockings to wear. Why should one choose a dark
colour, when it costs nothing to have a cheerful one? So
with the yarn of thought. Take something pleasant to think
of, something bright to turn round and round in your mind.
Suppose now that, instead of your troubles, big or little, you
take to counting up all the kindnesses which you have
received since yesterday morning."

Jemmy had shifted his position, so that he was now sitting

looking at his mother; and a sight of her cheerful face was
in itself enough to brighten him up a little. Still, it was
rather in a grumbling manner that he replied, "I don't know
what kindnesses I have to count up. No one is ever kind to
me,—except, of course, you and my father."

"We count for something," cried Mary. "But think a little

longer, my lad—turn your wheel round a little faster." And
the spinner suited her action to her words.

"Well, Tom did mend my kite this morning; I suppose that

you would call that kind," observed Jemmy.

"Now were you not needlessly spinning black yarn instead

of blue, when you thought of Tom's rough joke instead of
his real act of kindness?" asked Mary.

"And perhaps it was kind in the gardener to give me that

plant; only it's dying now," said Jemmy.

"It was not dying when he gave it; I've seldom seen a
prettier flower. Have you no other kind deeds to
remember?" asked his mother.

It was a new thing to Jemmy to count up kindnesses

instead of troubles, and he rubbed his forehead, as if rather
perplexed.

"My grandfather gave me a shilling yesterday," he said at

last, "and that was a kindness."

"And you chose to think more of the penny lost than of the
shilling received! How fond some people are of choosing the
black yarn!" cried Mary.

"There's no one else that has done anything kind to me; I

can remember nothing more," said Jemmy, after a
moment's reflection.

"I can remember something for you, then. Who taught you
reading and spelling yesterday afternoon?"

"Oh, Sarah May," answered the boy. "But that is nothing

new; she has done that ever since the hurt in my leg
stopped my going to school."

"Yes, she has shown kindness to you every day for the last
ten weeks, and therefore you have forgotten to think of it
as kindness at all. O Jemmy, Jemmy. Here is a sad choosing
of the black yarn instead of the blue!"

"Teaching me costs Sarah nothing," began Jemmy; but he

stopped short, for he could not help feeling a little ashamed
of such ungrateful words.

"That is an odd thing to say!" cried Mary. "Does not

teaching cost Sarah trouble and time; and is it not for time
and trouble that every workman and workwoman is paid,
except those who, like Sarah, take to helping others from
kindness? I know that Sarah went in her old dress to church
last Sunday, because she had not had time to make up her
new one; I know that she has stopped at home to teach
you, when she might have been enjoying a pleasant walk
with her brother. I suppose that my lame kiddie thinks so
little of all this kindness because Sarah is good and patient,
and never grumbles at small troubles like somebody that I
know."

Mary went on with her spinning faster than before, leaving

Jemmy to turn over in his mind her little reproof. Perhaps
the yarn of his thoughts was dark enough at first; for
Jemmy was mortified to find what a silly, discontented,
ungrateful boy he had been. He sat silent for several
minutes, and then saying, "I had better water that plant,"
he rose from his seat, and went slowly up to the water-jug,
which stood in a corner of the room.

As soon as Jemmy had lifted the jug, he uttered an

exclamation of pleasure. "Oh, here is my silver penny!" he
cried. "It has been lying all the time under the jug!"

And in the jug all the time had been lying the water which
was all that was needed to make the delicate plant revive,
stretch out again its curling leaves, and lift up its drooping
blossoms. Jemmy felt pleasure in watering his flower; to do
so, he thought, was almost like giving drink to a thirsty
animal.

Jemmy was all the more pleased, because he had a little

plan in his mind, which he carried out on the following day.
When his mother had set him to count the kindnesses which
he had received, she had taught him also to feel grateful for
them.
But the little spinning-wheel of his brain did not rest there,
nor stop till Jemmy had found out some way of showing
that he was grateful. It was indeed but little that the lame
boy could do; but when he carried to Sarah May a nosegay
of all his best flowers, and saw her smile of pleasure as she
received it, a joyful sense of having done what was kind and
right filled the heart of the grateful boy. The yarn of
Jemmy's thoughts then seemed to have become as clear
and blue as the sky.

Dear reader, what thoughts is your little brain now

spinning? When you gratefully remember kindnesses from
earthly friends, blue and bright is the hue of your thoughts;
but when you are also thankful for all the countless
blessings bestowed by your Heavenly Friend, then the
thread is all turned into gold!

The Shepherd's Dog.

"WELL, uncle, and if I did kick the little beast, what of that?
He's only a dog, a mere shepherd's dog," said Steenie
Steers, in a tone of contempt, as he looked down on the
rough little creature that had crouched for protection beside
the chair of his master, Farmer Macalpine.

"And what is a dog—a shepherd's dog—but a useful

creature, a grateful creature, that might teach a lesson to
many of a nobler race?" said the farmer tartly.
Macalpine had a face almost as sharp and eyes almost as
keen as those of his four footed companion, and his shock
of tawny hair was almost as thick and rough as the coat of
his faithful Trusty. There was nothing smooth about Farmer
Macalpine, as his spoiled nephew found to his cost
whenever he and his uncle chanced to be together.

Steenie Steers thought himself a very fine fellow indeed; in

this, as in many other things, he had formed a very
different opinion from that of Farmer Macalpine. Though
Steenie was not yet quite twelve years of age, he already
put on all the airs of a grown-up fop. Macalpine had found
the boy lolling in the only easy-chair in the room of his
aunt, Miss Steers, with his silver-tipped cane in his hand;
and Steenie had hardly risen to welcome his uncle, though
he had not met him for more than a week.

"I've come to see your Aunt Elizabeth, Steenie; is she at

home?" asked Macalpine.

"Aunt Bess—why, no; she's out somewhere," answered the

nephew. "I dare say that she's trotted over to the doctor's,"
he added, in a tone of utter indifference.

"Is her head better? How did she sleep last night?" inquired
the farmer.

"How can I tell? I've just come in from a stroll in the

woods," replied Steenie.

"I suppose that you did not go on your stroll without your
breakfast; you must have seen your aunt then," said
Macalpine, in his rather snappish manner.

"I wasn't down to breakfast till old Aunt Bess had done
hers, and gone out," answered Steenie. "I was up late last
night at the Burnsides," added the boy, with a yawn.