Philobiblon

GORDON BROWN will intensify the battle for Britain’s green voters with a range of new environmental taxes in this week’s budget, including a rise in road tax for “gas-guzzling” cars and large four-wheel-drive vehicles.
The chancellor is to create a new top rate of vehicle excise duty for the worst polluters, taking it up to about £185. The measure would probably apply to vehicles that emit more than 250 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilometre driven.
At the moment, the top rate of road tax on private cars applies to those emitting more than 185g of CO2 per kilometre. Owners of diesel cars in this band pay £170 a year while owners of petrol-driven cars pay £165.

The headline “gunning for gas-guzzlers” looks great. But £10 to £20 a year; what a total cop-out! (One can only hope this will be one of those leaks that will be boosted in the Budget for another spin-doctor headline.)

Tim Yeo, the senior Conservative MP who chairs the committee, said: “If we are going to deter people from buying and using such vehicles in towns then we should be looking at road tax levels of up to £5,000.”

Here, here! (And I might add, which the Conservatives won’t, the level has to be so punitive that the resale value drops out of these vehicles – that’s one way to REALLY discourage people from buying them.)

And, yes, before anyone asks, I’m happy to allow for exemptions to normal tax levels for people who can show that they really need them, eg genuine farmers; a 5-acre paddock for Petronella’s pony mustn’t count.

Just one more reminder why: evidence from 1930s diaries show the effects of climate change. (I’m sure I’ve read that story before, but what the hell, it is a good one.)
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The Queen being in Australia takes me back, to my first “big” job as a journalist (covering her visit to Albury in 1988). Widespread apathy about royalty was already evident then and it seems nothing has changed except among the few oddities who always go into paroxyms of puppyish devotion on such occasions. Even John Howard, despite all of his attempts to take Australia back to the 1950s, hasn’t managed to change that.

Really, it is time Australia got its own head of state, surely.

You’ve only got a day to do it – the deadline for certain consideration of nominations is midnight tomorrow night …

Today, at the British Library, I think I really, finally, after a couple of days of flailing around, finally worked out how to approach this simply and systematically. (With a lot of thanks to my commenter Clanger, who sent me in many of the right directions.) So, in case this is of use to anyone else (and for my own future reference), here it is:

Imagine you’ve just found, say in a catalogue, a pamphlet or broadside from the 16th or 17th century that you want to know more about, but all you’ve got at this time is probably an extended title. (And a secondary literature search indicates no one has written anything on it.)

Walk through the rather gloomy doors of the Rare Books Reading Room at the BL, then:

1. Search the English Short Title Catalogue, which is available online at the BL, and I believe most decent uni libraries, to find out particularly where copies are held. There is also a print version. (This will also provide lots more technical data – write it all down, it may make some sense eventually.)

2. If somewhere accessible to you, it is best to get the pamphlet itself, as the actual artefact will tell you more than any copy. (Handwritten annotations often don’t come out on copies.) However, if a trip to the US to consult one pamphlet is out of the question – and lots of them are in America – see if it has been microfilmed (which all of the ones I’ve encountered have been.)

3. But stop – don’t get out the microfilm without checking Early English Books Online – a completely separate database (don’t you wish it was linked to the Short Title Catalogue). All of the microfilmed Early English Books 1475-1650 are on this – taken from the microfilm, but far easier to handle, and to print … (even at the ridiculous BL price of 20p a sheet.)

4. To find out more, try checking the Register of the Company of Stationers (ed. Arber), which is on Open Access in the rare books reading room. (The above two databases may only be available in there too – not sure about that.)

5. If you are trying to find an author only identified by initials, try The Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English literature by Samuel Halkett and John Laing.

(If you are wondering what I’ve been researching there is a listing here.)

Looks simple, doesn’t it. But my search was complicated by the fact that the BL’s copy of Monodia appeared to have been printed with another work by the same author, The Sacrifice of Isaac which was first printed two years earlier. (And it appears that the person who put the stamps on it when it entered the BL thought so too.) The numbering of the leaves of the printing runs A3, A5 etc, then the next item starts B1 etc. And the font and general style seems to be identical.

But it is catalogued separately, and the only other known copy, in the Huntington, has a different call number and also appears separate. I finally solved the mystery by looking at the EEBO image of Isaac, which shows the numbering of it starts at B because there are eight pages of prefatory matter – a letter to the reader, to two of his “beloved friendes” (for which, I think read patrons), and a stray sonnet. These have leaf numbering with “As”.

(Leaf numbering, BTW, means that each sheet has its own number, rather than each side, and it usually seems to start with a letter, followed by a number.)

So now I’ve got lots of info, and a whole heap of new research questions.

There’s one I’m hoping anyone who’s read this far might be able to help me with, specifically the following woodcut image, which is found on both of the elegies of Helen Branch printed by Thomas Creede.

Not quite sure how that is going to come out, so to describe it, the image is of an apparently naked woman holding an open book, wearing a crown over long hair flowing down her back, and striding right foot forward. Behind her is a cloud from which descends a hand holding a sheath of hay/brush (?) that is almost running down her back, or perhaps striking her. The Latin around it reads: Viressit Vvlnere Veritas.

It may be that this is used on other Creede books, maybe all – that’s one of Monday’s projects, but I’d still like to know what it shows…

I’d also love if anyone could point me in the direction of a work dealing with woodcuts and other decorations (fancy letters etc) of these books and pamphlets …!

Boris Johnson is writing today in the Guardian about his collision as a cyclist with a French tourist. (More of the Tories’ “green” campaign no doubt… although to be fair I believe does genuinely regularly cycle, unlike David Cameron, who does so for photo opportunities.)

But I do sympathise, having just, while cycling back from the British Library, avoided by millimetres a collision. This wasn’t exactly a pedestrian, but a man washing his car (parked illegally close to the intersection with a major road), who stepped back to admire his greenhouse gas-producer, right into my path.

In a micro-second I had to decide whether I could afford to swerve around him, which I couldn’t, as another car could easily come belting around the corner. Instead I yelled loudly, which made him jump out of the way, just in time.

There are more and more cyclists getting around in London, which is great, you just wish people like this would wake up to the fact that relying on hearing to judge whether it is safe to step into the road, is not a safe option. And as for the jaywalking mobile phone-users, well I won’t get started on those…

When you really look at history, it is amazing how many women you CAN find. In today’s Guardian a review of The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece by Carola Hicks.

Hicks makes an elegant and intriguing counter-claim for a female patron, a woman who was herself an expert in this historically feminine artistic medium, and had a personal stake in finding a subtle accommodation between Saxon and Norman accounts of the conquest: Edith, widow of Edward the Confessor and sister of the defeated king Harold, who was reconciled to the conqueror’s regime after 1066 as an honoured Saxon survivor among the new Norman aristocracy.

The tapestry’s iconic status also precipitated bitter battles among 18th and 19th-century historians, dividing English from French, male from female. Two redoubtable women give this story its heart. The engaging and astute Eliza Stothard first encountered the tapestry on her honeymoon in 1818, her artist husband having been commissioned to paint an exact copy for the Society of Antiquaries, only to find herself dogged by a false accusation that she had stolen a fragment of the fabric. She was finally exonerated just before her death, by now a prolifically successful historical novelist, at the age of 92. And Elizabeth Wardle, wife of a master dyer from Leek in Staffordshire who was one of William Morris’s closest collaborators, led a team of 37 women to create a full-scale replica of the entire tapestry, “so that England should have a copy of its own”.

Well this evening I cycled to the first cricket net of the season while wearing long johns. The temperature was zero degrees, or at least close enough to that as to make no difference.

That definitely counts as a new experience. It wasn’t on my list of things to do – like visiting Persepolis or riding the Trans-Siberian – but it was a new experience.