Two weeks after the tutorial I mentioned in my previous post, I returned to Special Collections to look at one of the books we were shown there which had particularly piqued my interest.
Photos: Special Collections, McClay Library, QUB.
Mein Buch, written and illustrated by Carl Maria Seyppel (with an introduction in verse written by Friedrich Martin Von Bodenstedt), is something of an enigma. I went back to Special Collections to look at this book because I had been intrigued by it- for purely aesthetic reasons.I don’t speak German, so had no hope whatsoever of understanding the text. This was a book I wanted to look at for its own sake. My response to it would be based solely on whatever actually handling the book made me feel.
I was only half-right.
The book is absolutely beautiful. It was published in Dusseldorf around 1884, but was made in a faux-antique style, delighting in its own skeumorphism. It is not fastidiously faithful to the medieval manuscript in its imitation- but it does not need to be. It references the past without being overly concerned about historical accuracy. We are aware that it has been made to look and feel older than it is, while still having enough room to imagine that it is as old as it pretends to be. Mein Buch is bound in sackcloth, with a rusty iron clasp and studs on the front cover. It is written in ink. Its pages have been artificially aged in a style termed mummiendruck– literally, “mummy-print”- that, along with the plates and ilustrations that feature throughout the book, materially embody its Egyptological subject matter, and allow readers such as myself, incapable of reading the text, a means of engaging with the book.
So, is it a book, or a ‘bookwork’? Is there really a difference? Does anyone have the right to impose arbitrary restrictions upon what a book can and cannot be? Mein Buch’s text may make no sense whatsoever to those who can read German. It may be completely inaccessible to those who cannot. But the book is there.
Even more curious about the book than I had been before looking at it, I asked a member of staff at Special Collections if they could tell me anything about it. The librarian I spoke to, while incredibly helpful, was quite open about the fact that almost next to nothing was known about it or Seyppel. The only substantial piece of information she had been able to dig up on over the years was this slightly odd article by Tom Trusky, in an e-journal called The Bonefolder. She also told me that, as far as she could tell, the text contained within Mein Buch was basically gibberish. My instincts had been more right than I’d realised- if there was meaning to be found in this book, it was not encoded in its text.
Trusky’s article charts his journey to finding out something- anything- about the elusive Seyppel and his works. From it, I learned that Mein Buch is one of several Egyptianesque works produced by Seyppel. Seyppel’s ‘Egyptian trilogy’ is comprised of Er-sie-es, published in English as He-she-it; Schlau, Schlauer am Schlausten (Sharp, Sharper, Sharpest in English), which, according to Trusky, is Seypell’s take on a particularly gruesome tale from Herodotus; and Die Plagen, which was- allegedly- later appropriated as anti-Semitic propaganda for children by the Nazis. Among Seyppel’s other works are his Kneip- episteln, which “apears [sic] to be a compendium of portraits and commentary about residents of a German neighborhood, including a Jew” , which may go some way towards supporting the accusations of Seyppel’s anti-Semitism. Seyppel’s Christopher Columbus Logbuch, bound in seaweed boards with pages doctored to look water-damaged- also published in English as My secrete log boke- an edition of which Trusky states was actually believed to be authentic by critic William Richard Cutter in 1918. Seyppel was obviously very good at what he did. Then we have Mein Buch, of which the American edition is largely blank, and seems to have been intended to be used as a journal. All editions of Mein Buch/ My Book originally had padlocks, although the copy held by the McClay Library has misplaced this at some point.
Schlau, Schlauer am Schlausten was reproduced three times in 1931, 1974 and 1982, although Trusky claims that the two most recent attempts at reproduction fall short of the mark, and are “conventional trade books”. This does not surprise me. Having ‘read’ Mein Buch, it is not difficult to imagine that reproduction of it, or any of Seyppel’s other works, would be disappointing at best if not undertaken by the man himself.
Apart from the dearth of information on Mein Buch’s author or its textual history, I was also unable to glean much about where the copy I looked at had actually come from- to commandeer the term ‘herstory’ coined by second-wave feminists, its ‘bookstory’. Its shelfmark in the McClay library, beginning with x, indicates that it is a rare book from the 19th or 20th century. That is it. No notes on how it was acquired- whether it was donated, purchased or found. Nothing. Maybe someone used to know. We can only guess. And I suppose that it is the need for guesswork and speculation about its provenance that makes Mein Buch so compelling.
This is a book whose ‘bookstory’ is particularly interesting, because so little of it is known.
Book Sniffing in the Digital Age 