Nicola

Just like the book, lost and found in the Library.

The touch of a note book

I recently became a little obsessed by Ellis Rowan, the Australian illustrator who created a beautiful repertoire of birds, butterflies and insects, on paper.

More precisely, I became a lot obsessed by Ellis Rowan's note books. I wrote to the National Library of Australia, inquiring about the note books she used.

They didn't think I was demented. Not at all! They sent me photographs of MS 2203 (calling it a scrapbook, not a note book). MS 2203. They explained it was made of 'very simple nature', most likely bound in buckram cloth, about 23 x 27 cm in size, filled with newspaper articles about Ellis Rowan and her art, with some correspondence.

They pointed out, if I'm really keen, I could hire a local researcher to examine the scrapbook.

I considered it. But I probably wouldn't know what I was seeking. The touch and feel of the book. The weight of it, balanced in the hand. How the bound papers slip or move or shift as their weight lifts and settles them under the finger touch as you turn them. The handling, rough or smooth, of the bindings, the spine, the edges, the covers.

I believe that the sensory experience of a book we hold in the hand - one that whispers, 'use me, write in me, enjoy me!' is truly a moment of intimacy. Me, and You, delightful note book, together! In this moment, holding this book, the one I'm looking for to contain all my most important treasures - times of life, remembrances, significances - I'll know whether you're staying with me, or whether I can't give to you all the things in my head.

Perhaps Ellis Rowan thought the same? Perhaps she picked up each book, for notes, sketches, cuttings, doodles, jottings, and weighed it a moment in her hand, touched the texture of the paper, the strength of the binding, and knew this was the one, to hold butterflies.

Question amongst the Celebrations!

For my ears, it's always a cause of celebration, scooping up the ephemera of the person who has shaped a cultural life, whether in music, literature, performing arts, politics, or for being old after being young, and having made so much to make it into significance.

So it is with Tony Benn. 

Blimey, writing journals from the age of nine? And I bet those early entries aren't like My rabbit died. Mummy put him in the garden. I hope Flopsy is eating lettuce. Forever.

I bet they were all Studied British Parliamentary history this morning. Must find out about this fellow, Erskine May.

But I have questions. What are the notebooks like? Is the paper thin, or lined? Are the note books thick or thin? Big or little? Card covered or cloth? Are Tiny Benn's books spilled over with milk from morning cereal? How did Junior Benn handle his favourite note books? Did Teenage Benn doodle rude pictures in the back pages? And, as he grew up and changed, where did he write, and what of himself did he leave behind - around, between, above the words?

I might be nosy parkering too much in the intimacy of the writing experience, but really, I'm fascinated by the memories each note book contains. The physical experience of handling and maintaining that, over time, allows us to peek a little into a person's habits. Your note book is keeping a record of you, even when you don't know it.

Because where we hold a book, tells, over time. Pages folded or torn perhaps say, we were handled roughly. Or do they tell us, we were handled, constantly, sometimes too quick, such was the frustration of that young writer!

The cover, holding rings of mugs and cups and bowls, then says to me not, I was a note book unloved. But, I was always there, on the desk, to hand, invaluable, always a partner, a reader for a writer's thoughts.

Thomas Babington Macaulay's library at Wallington, Northumberland tells me a thing or two about this accidental memory-making.

He's the Member for Parliament who went off to India. He's known for the 'Minute' - the instruction that education in India was to be through the language of English. That's another story, but what fascinated me was the Macaulay who would scribble notes in books, and then bleed on them. (Possibly not intentionally.)

Such was his enthusiasm for early rising thinking - and possibly being provoked beyond calm disposition - he would scribble notes while shaving in the morning. Victorian shaving is a bit hit and miss when you're in a temper, and consequently Thomas, and his note-making, suffered.

So, among the whoops and celebrations for the archives saved for the nation, can I ask you, dear archivists, to add a line or two, to tell me what the pages say? Not the words, but the use, the holding, handling, treasuring or trashing that goes on, every time we pick up our note book.

Marvellous

Book One

Book Two

Book Three

Poison

 

 

Sue

A Medieval book for travelling. Comes complete with salvaged and restitched vintaged leather; brass buckles; strange emblems gathered from long histories and chain from the library fastening. Inside, discover medieval papers (honest), rebound documents and blank, clean sheets of paper, time travelled from the past to be flung into the future.

Forever in the Library of Knowledges

Justine

Objects: Skull, ring, star, emblem of scholar, apple label.

 

To my way of thinking, there is only one colour for a story apple (or a pair of kick-you boots), and that is red. Uncompromising, dangerous, rebellious; the colour of blood and woman and fight and revolution.

The button, like a wheel of fortune: shape and change your fortune as you go by your sharp pin - deliberate, pointed, purposeful. Shape the past, change the order of consequences, move the objects as you build the future.

Open inside, a rainbow; a weaving in and out for objects and stories. The scholar and the apple label held inside a red purse; keep here your collections of objects for your tellings as you need.

The inside? Tucks, folds, pockets and quiet places set against the shout of bold colours. We won't go there: the quiet pages are for the teller to slip between as they refresh the words they'll use.

Don't pay attention to what I write, pay attention to what I say; don't pay attention to what I say, pay attention to how I tell it; pay attention, not to how I say anything, but what I do, as I slip away.

I have to listen carefully to those storytellers. I never know whether they are crafty, slippery souls, not to be trusted, or whether they are truth-tellers in disguise, merchants of honesty. They shift emphasis in a heart beat: listen to this, I'll tell you now, this was the moment: they slip between stories, evading capture of themselves, there and not-there, unwatched and watched as a magician: then you look around and think, when they are gone, they were only the narrator after all; tapping into the stories we already carried inside our own heads; we just didn't know the stories were there until the teller appeared, then disappeared.

Joseph

Objects: purse, token, lock and keys, music string, timekeeper.

The object which is biggest, boldest, leaps out above all others, informs all others, is where I start.

Purse. Keeper of economies (in the black or in the red); keeper of treasures (in mine, 3 coins and a piece of bent metal I rescued from the road); and snap-open-my-mouth-closed keeper of memory, history, mythologies and meanings (threaded back to who-knows-when).

Then we'll start with black, pop in the treasure token, and stitch the purse so it can never be lost, to a background of feel-me silver shimmerings like distant stars (origins not found).

The lock I separate from the key (of course, because it wouldn't be Story to have problem and solution put together), and then I find transparencies that make me think about layerings of time and experience; I find fractured texts and tones of greys like snippets of songs, half-concealed, half-revealed (the way my memory works, or fails me).

Song, folk songs, the poetry of Keats, we're following natural beats and rhythms of the landscapes where we are turned into ravens since forever.

Time, kept quiet, put into the background, because I want to create in my books a poetry of materials that a holder uses to create their truths which endure, timeless.

Rien

Objects: Laughing skull, loveheart lock, snatch of hair on hide, King of Hearts, crafty crow.

The most textured, tactile of all: stroke the hair on hide, to which I add a golden thread, makes your object of all desire or an object of all undoing and who can tell which way that tale will tell?

For hair on hide, I've chosen a matching frame - not-leather-not-suede but both - curious, textured, tactile, feel me, cloth-but-not-cloth.

Next, the skull, laughing, impaled, on pole: the final triumph aloft a hazel length? Or the final mocking humiliation of once your whole-body-being? Only the teller of a tale can know which way to tumble that yarn. I've put that hazel pole, like the listener or the teller, straight up, cover front, turned towards the pages where we'll all gather our stories.

The King of Hearts, in hiding, as well he should be, both maker of hearts, breaker of hearts. Here, in this book, his status not torn from the pack, from the rest of him, from his sitting-atop the throne of his hierarchy, but cut. Cut with a deft pair of scissors, sliced away by one I pray more skilled than he: a cutter of hearts she be. Snip snip!

Loveheart lock. Love, forlorn, love withheld, love trapped and sealed away, guarded, the vulnerabilities that love needs to live, not shown. The non-telling heart, sealed behind net and double blocked by black-top pin. Steel, paper, net. I've locked you at the book back where your fingers are caught and trapped, for who breaks in?

Then, this is your book, stitched with nets to catch unwary fingers; textures of branches to twist up and confound your wandering eye; pockets, tucks, folds as codes only a story teller can tell, and the revolutions, reformations and Decalogues of ancients stitched into the binding, seeping their way into every story told.

Crafty crow?

Making sharp exit, sharp right.