 | a bibliographical newsletter Issue 12 February 2020  |
Devon publishing 2010-2019
In 2015, just after the Devon bibliography had been initiated in the present format, a page was issued on Devon publishers, giving details of about sixty that had been located in Devon. With the start of the new decade and with the designation of Exeter as UNESCO city of literature, which places much emphasis on Exeter as a publication centre, it has been decided to look back over the last decade and survey and analyse the publishing landscape in Devon.
During the decade the Devon bibliography has so far listed just over 4,000 published documents relating to Devon. To these must be added several hundred periodicals, newspapers and maps. These publications were issued by 1223 identified publishers, an average of a little more than three items per publisher, although of course there is considerable variation in recorded output from one publisher to another.
Of these publishers 709 (58%) were located in Devon. Within Devon Exeter accounted for 246 publishers (28%) followed by Plymouth (46), Torbay 22 (33 with Paignton and Brixham) and Sidmouth (22). The following towns had between 10 and 20 publishers recorded in the Devon bibliography: Totnes, Exmouth, Newton Abbot, Tiverton, Crediton, Barnstaple, Okehampton and Tavistock. Other parts of the Westcountry accounted for 80 publishers (6.5%) , London for 157 (13%) and other English counties for 188 (15%). The rest of the British Isles (Wales, Scotland and Ireland) accounted for only 24 (2%), less than Europe with 27, the United States with 31 and the rest of the world with six. A complete listing has been published on the Devon bibliography website.
The Devon bibliography aims to list works about the county and its wider region and also works about Devonians, literature inspired by or set in the county and works published within Devon, so its remit is quite wide. The resulting figures are revealing in many ways.
1. The wide geographical spread. While 58% were published in Devon, Exeter with 28% exceeds both London with 13% and the rest of the British Isles with 24%. Within England the geographical spread of publishers is relatively even, although the two largest towns were in the Westcountry: Bath and Bristol, each with 14 publishers, coming ahead of Oxford with 13. Other significant centres were Barnsley with seven (swollen by the various Pen and Sword imprints) and Manchester with six. Taunton and Wellington each had five.
2. The variety of formats. These range from multi-volume works down to three-fold leaflets (often vital for providing the sole published evidence of the activities of organisations, charities or pressure groups), from newsletters to technical reports (often more easily to be found on-line than in hard copy) and from newspapers to maps. With the spread of the internet, theses can also be considered as publications but, like websites, these have not been included in this survey.
3. The varying ease of locating items. The publications of most London and larger provincial publishers can be located through the British national bibliography, often through pre-publication information or, in the case of smaller publishers or authors, who know that the British Library is supposed to "have a copy of everything", frequently several years after they first appeared in print. But BNB's coverage of local publications is patchy, to say the least. It lists very few local authority publications and the publications of many local societies also fall through its net. Online sources such as JISC hub (formerly COPAC), WorldCat, Amazon, or Abebooks (linked to Amazon) may help but keyword searching to locate recently published items is tedious and haphazard with many false drops - Devon is a very widespread first name particularly popular, it would appear, among porn-stars. A large number of more local publications are picked up by haunting bookshops, tourist information centres, community hubs and libraries.
3. The complex structure of publishing. In the digital age anyone can be a publisher and many publications have, in addition to the traditional paper-based hardback and paperback versions, an eBook edition with its own ISBN. Within most communities in Devon there will be a parish magazine, sometimes combined with a community newsletter. The parish, town or district council will publish minutes, annual reports or planning and policy documents, often with useful statistics and a wealth of data that sheds light on the present state of the community. Larger communities may publish a guidebook, accommodation directory, town trails or books of walks. There may be a local museum, gallery, historical society, country house or charity, each publishing annual reports, publicity, or newsletters. Some of these, such as the Devon Air Ambulance's monthly Helipad are handsomely produced and informative. Tabulating the publishers of those publications that have reached the attention of the compiler of the Devon bibliography reveals just how much is being missed. Individual authors too are much more confident in publicizing their work. The typescript deposited in the local library or the traditional "vanity publication" has been replaced by personal web space, recourse to digital publishers or, increasingly, authors setting up as publishers to market their own writings. These publishers do not always see the merit of notifying the local studies library - or indeed any library. At the other extreme larger publishers have long formed massive conglomerates, often with offices in more than one country, and have a stable of imprints which, on the surface, often seem to be separate publishers. Penguin Random House is perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon. It is particularly apparent in newspaper publishing where Archant, Local World Holdings and Tindle between them are responsible for some 40 editions of local newspaper or periodical titles in Devon.
4. The need for continuous monitoring of local publications. During the decade that has just ended almost 4,000 Devon publications were added to the bibliography, about 400 a year quite apart from periodical issues and, as has been seen, coverage is incomplete. These publications need to be looked for, the publishers contacted, books acquired where appropriate, they have to be catalogued to an acceptable standard and their presence in collections publicized to the world at large. Such things are not done by themselves and the outside world will not do it for Devon. There is in Devon at present (outside Plymouth and the Devon and Exeter Institution) no specialist librarian to record the rapidly changing present situation of communities across Devon and to maintain Exeter and Devon's local published heritage. There is also insufficient funding to continue to maintain the millennium of Devon's written and published heritage into the next decade. If the situation is unchanged in four years time, perhaps we are entitled to wonder how or why Exeter managed to acquire the accolade of "city of literature".
More on maps and map lists
The Devon bibliography includes more than 17,000 Ordnance Survey maps and plans at a wide variety of scales from 1:500 to 1:1,000,000 and covering two centuries of mapping. The main problem is how to present them in a meaningful way. An answer has been found by revamping a mapping website unearthed during the recent digital excavations of lost DCC web pages. In the year 2000 the Westcountry Studies Library produced a Digital map of historic Devon. Using a series of work placement youngsters and a good deal of scissors and paste, photocopies of two early one inch to a mile surveys were cut into 10 Km national grid squares, scanned, and then linked to adjoining sheets: Benjamin Donn's one inch to the mile survey of 1765 (Batten and Bennett, no. 44) and C. and J. Greenwood's one inch to the mile survey of 1827 (Batten and Bennett no. 96). The first county map of Devon, Christopher Saxton's map of 1575 (Batten and Bennet, no. 1) was cut into six 50Km sheets and served as an index to the one inch sheets. With all its faults the website achieved some recognition and is still listed on mapping gateways, although often to the incomplete web archive which has lost many of the map images.
Now it is being revamped as Key to early maps of Devon and lists of national grid Ordnance maps. Surviving images have been reloaded, missing ones re-scanned and new maps added. The Saxton map is also receiving 10Km images and, more importantly if less decoratively, Ordnance survey large-scale plans on national grid sheet lines, published since about 1950 are listed for each 10Km square. So far only the squares around Exeter (SX99) and to the east of Devon have been listed. The final total for the whole county will be around 10,800 listed sheets. To this will have to be added the County series, published for Devon between the 1860s and the 1930s - another 5,800 sheets, but using a different reference system. Links to digital versions will also be added, most notably for the National Library of Scotland's archive, and also to the Know your place website. Much remains to be done. Most location references are to copies in the Devon Heritage Centre, but they have been undertaking much rationalisation of their collections and there is at present no publicly available listing. For this reason details of edition have not always been given, nor is it clear whether SUSI or SIM copies have been passed to the Devon Record Office.
Scribes of the Lord
On 10 February this old bibliofool will be giving a talk to the Friends of Exeter Cathedral which will probably result in yet another web page. Images of pages from more than thirty of the almost one hundred illuminated manuscripts which passed from the Cathedral Library to the new Bodleian Library in 1602 will be shown. In addition there will be a close examination of an account roll for the installation of the library in new premises over the east cloisters in 1411 and 1412. Over a period of forty weeks two carpenters laboured, Hamond Jakyl being paid 6d a day and his assistant Henry Atwater 5d. Payments for wages were tabulated weekly and in addition work was undertaken on rebinding 133 volumes, in Exeter and also Ashburton. The total expenses for the whole project were £35 13s 6d. Based on a comparison with 2020 wage rates for carpenters this implies that one pound in 1412 is equivalent to about £4,000 today, making the entire project cost the equivalent of £142,000. The detailed listing of materials used - shelving boards, nails, chains, iron bars, glue, parchment, leather - make it possible to draw up a hypothetical design for a desk in the library and, based on the layout that can be inferred from an inventory of 1506, to reconstruct the entire medieval library. Perhaps a digital reconstruction of the medieval library could be a project for the UNESCO city of literature programme - after all for more than half a millennium the Cathedral Library was the largest such institution in the region, a centre of literacy, study and inspiration and much of its contents survives. The mindset of those who produced these treasured manuscripts can be ascertained from a Latin sermon added, in a 12th century hand, to a Durham Cathedral manuscript:
Let us consider then how we may become scribes of the Lord. The parchment on which we write for him is a pure conscience, whereon all our good works are noted by the pen of memory, and make us acceptable to God. The knife wherewith it is scraped is the fear of God, which removes from our conscience by repentance all the roughness and unevenness of sin and vice. The pumice wherewith it is made smooth is the discipline of heavenly desires ... The chalk with whose fine particles it is whitened indicates the unbroken meditation of holy thoughts. The ruler [regula] by which the line is drawn that we may write straight is the will of God ... The tool [instrumentum] that is drawn along the ruler to make the line is the devotion to our holy task ... The pen [penna], divided in two that it may be fit for writing, is the love of God and our neighbour ... The ink with which we write is humility itself ... The diverse colours wherewith the book is illuminated, not unworthily represent the grace of heavenly wisdom ... The desk [scriptorium] whereon we write is tranquility of heart ... The copy [exemplar] by which we write is the life of our Redeemer ... The place where we write is contempt of worldly things.Do we sit at our laptops today with such reverence and humility?
Cross Channel currents
As Brexit casts its shadow, the first
phase of a long-running international project closes with the publication by
Droz in Geneva this month of the Dictionnaire
des imprimeurs, libraires et gens du livre en Basse-Normandie 1701-1789 by
Alain-René Girard, Ian Maxted and Jean-Dominique Mellot. The project is more relevant to Devon
than at first appears. The first two authors were both local studies
librarians, of Calvados and Devon
respectively. The active programme of twinning in the 1970s and 1980s included
study visits and even an international exhibition taking caricatures of
Napoleon from Exeter to Caen France Exeter Exeter and Caen and their regions, to which is being added Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach
in Germany
This is the research that is drawing me
away from the Sisyphean task of the Devon bibliography
after five years. It is my hope that its continuation can find some public
support, especially now Exeter
This was the provocative title of a talk
given for the Twentieth Century Society by Peter Thomas to a packed audience in
Exeter Library on 25 January. He used photographs from his own Isca Historical
Photographic Collection, with 60,000 images from 1860 to date probably the
largest collection of Exeter photographs in private
hands, to illustrate the changes in Exeter Exeter Exeter
