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Medieval Book X

Report: "Technology of the Medieval Book X", 14 - 25 July, 1997, near Santa, Idaho

In medieval times and late antiquity the skills of bookmaking were closer to the skills of everyday life. Sources of the technologies of bookmaking could be found in water management, food and fiber production, bone working, flax spinning, wood hewing and skin curing. An interplay of generalized and specialized crafts, exposed to observation and understanding by everyone, distinguished the early history of codex bookmaking.

It follows that to experience medieval bookmaking today what is required is not so much a reconstructed scriptorium or bindery, but a living environment that mirrors an earlier age. Just such an environment has been created by Jim and Melody Croft on their twenty seven acre homestead high in the Idaho forest. This was the site of the tenth annual Technology of the Medieval Book workshop founded and managed by Jack Thompson and Jim Croft. Each year a dozen or more participants have attended to learn of the range of crafts involved in medieval book production.

The Stamping Mill

The Thompson/Croft stamper mill on Pokey Creek is a good starting place for a tour of the TMBX workshop. The mill also offers a fine example of emergence of specialized book craft from a more general, underlying technology.

The possibility of a stamping mill for paper fiber began with the power source of a pond, but the maintenance of the pond and down stream ecology was also a concern. All pulp cooking and washing is done six hundred feet above the mill and this water is run through a gray water filter and then down to a raspberry patch on a large mound of top soil. The dilute lye and dross makes a good fertilizer and each filtering insures clean drinking water below.

The stamper mill is located in the woods. As you follow the trail you gradually begin to hear the sound of the tripping and dropping hammers. Three hammers produce four beats as the strike of the trip peg for the first hammer adds a fourth note to the cycle. Then there is a pause as the hammers begin to rise again. One turn of the wheel produces a full cycle of six hammer drops. Inside the mill building, with the sound of running water and the motion of the walking hammers, the technology is fully exposed. It is almost a natural technology complete with frogs in the mill pond. The connection between the mill and the pond and the finished book is not difficult to understand. The management of the flow of water is connected to the management of the flow of words.

The small stamper vat holds nine gallons, enough to make twelve to fifteen sheets. The four foot diameter, overshoot wheel trips the hammers at a forty revolutions per minute rate when ten to twenty gallons per minute are running. The ideal running rate is eighteen to twenty revolutions per minute. The pond comes up in November and December insuring a good four to six months of stamping with a nine gallon vat fully stamped in three days.

The flax fiber for the paper comes from China and from the Croft garden. The home grown flax plants were in an even stand, the result of very careful seed distribution. At the time of the workshop the green flax field was sprinkled with violet blooms. In the fall the plants are dried and retted. From the time of harvest to the finished sheets the fiber is subjected to as much conversation as processing. Single stalks are the subject of minute examination. Pokey Creek paper fiber stock also includes linen firehose discarded by the timber industry and imported Russian hemp.

The Village

The TMBX workshop created a village in the Idaho woods. The Croft homestead is on a large scale with a huge work studio and tool shed and a large, outdoor kitchen. Fifteen to twenty visitors are easily accommodated in small cabins and a tepee and yurt camp. Some features of urbanization are missing in the village. There is no city electricity, refrigeration or flush toilets, no phone, no TV. But modern archeology of the Croft settlement adds unmistakable signs of civilization. There is a wonderful yard of twenty vehicles comprised exclusively of 1952-3 Chevy Suburbans, 1937-53 "Jimmy" trucks and 1976-9 Subarus. There are also a few school buses.

We worked together in the huge, airy shop shed with tree stump stools with fiber and skin work stations outside. The hewing station was by the stand of flax. All around the settlement are woods that have grown up since the timber season of 1916. One pathway leads up a slope to a view of the hills covered with fir and tamarack. From there you can see people at work and the trails of wood smoke.

The visitor soon settles in and overcomes surprise waking up to Jim's trombone solo. The outdoor dining room is in the middle of a magnificent garden. The visitor walks through on paths between beds of colored lettuce, rhubarb, beets, squash, onions, carrots and peas. Herbs are mingled with flowers and towering over the garden is a lodge pole trellis walled with apple trees pruned back to let in light.

Food at the open air kitchen is amazing. Salads and vegetable soups come straight from the garden. Main courses, three times a day, every day for two weeks, were always different. There were exotic curries, stir-fry, stews and roasts. Diversity ranged from home smoked local trout to vegan "scrabbled eggs". These meals were beautifully prepared on two wood fired ranges by Collene Kinkaid and Judie Hearth. Throughout the workshop the skills of the kitchen were a counterpoint to the skills of bookmaking.

So who were the inhabitants of this village? To begin with there were a small number young people including those of the Croft and neighborhood families. These were country kids, amazing with axes or with piano and guitar. Children are also real helpers with village maintenance and fire tending. Even in the summer there are fires for cooking, fiber preparation and water heating. These fires are widely dispersed and the fixed distances are shortened by running children.

Grown-ups in the village were its Mayors, Jim and Melody Croft and itsSchool Master, Jack Thompson. The fifteen TMBX participants were: Reg Beatty, book arts teacher from Toronto, Reed Bowman metal worker, experimental archeologist and member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Sharon Burrows, therapist and also member of SCA from Vancouver, Claudia Chemello from the Conservation Department of the Library of New South Wales in Sydney, Ethan Ensign, book conservator from Salt Lake City, Rudi Diesvelt, leather worker and production craftsman of Rare Discovery Enterprises, Dan Essig book artist from Iowa City, Christie Kerstetter, printer from Pennsylvania, Alice Kotzen, ethnographer and Henry Kotzen, physician and book collector, both from Palm Desert California, Shanna Leino student of book arts and crafts from New Hampshire, Pamela Moore, book artist from Barcelona Spain and Joel Spector, instructor in book crafts.

Curiously, all of these participants were contacted and enrolled on-line. The paradox of gathering medieval book makers on the Internet is probably uninteresting in itself, but it does indicate the spread of book arts interest beyond its traditional print reading mode.

The Book Work

After making ink with oak galls and iron sulfate our book making began with a small notebook. This was composed of four gatherings of Pokey Creek handmade paper and was sewn with thread that we had spun and plied from Idaho flax. Knife kerfs in the folds were wedged opened to permit passage of a hog bristle needle. The sewn book was provided with a paper cover. This small notebook could represent the exemplar from which medieval books were copied. In the exemplar-to-copy process of the manuscript era the medieval book was always a reproduction.

The main book project was begun with splitting and hewing of oak billets. Here the lesson was the versatility of the hewing ax which can be used with and across the grain for heavy work and pushed with a planning action for finishing. Such versatility could explain the book boards of surviving medieval bindings that still reveal the evidence of heavy initial hewing. Perhaps such boards were produced using only a single tool. Unlike the northwest cedar, the three hundred and thirty year old oak did not want to produce flat boards.

The paper used was sheet formed and dried during the workshop. Some of the fiber used was Russian hemp mixed with Idaho flax. The twelve by eighteen inch sheets were folded twice or three times to produce book gatherings. Sewing was done with thread that was hand spun from Idaho flax. Drop spindles were used to spin individual plys which were then plied together to make the working thread. Four threads were cabled to make sewing cords. Goat skin was dehaired and tawed to produce thongs and skin for covering.

Some books were sewn on cords and some on tawed thongs. Lacing paths were drilled and chiseled into the boards to receive the sewing supports and the lacing edge was also beveled and fitted to the shoulder of the sewn book. Books were covered using drawn-on board and drawn-on leather technique. Covered books were fitted with foredge clasps. These were either hook or pin closures.

In all of this long sequence of book construction Jack and Jim were very attentive teachers always assisting each participant with individualized help. Each question was considered as if the answer would unlock a whole way of working, and some times it did. At the end of the workshop all the books were brought out for a group photo. We were all surprised that we had created a small library, straight out of the wooden board era.

End Note

In retrospect the TMBX produced an environment of an earlier medieval European society as if it had occurred in Idaho. We were like a lost tribe or aliens that had landed in a strange land. But if we did come down in a UFO we were bringing an old and venerable technology to the resident civilization. This technology was classical book making. To our lost colony it seemed that the larger part of history was neither in the past or in the future. We found the bigger part of experience in the present moment.

We will all remember the work sessions, early and late and the after dark camp fires that held off mosquitoes with a combination of smoke, stories and music. Finally, as Jim put it, there was the underlying good purpose of "building books from the ground up".

1. wooden board binding by Shanna Leino