8. The Edwardian Book Inscription as a Call to Action

Most Facebook users are familiar with “calls to action”, defined by Business Dictionary (2020) as “words that urge the reader, listener or viewer to take an immediate action, such as ‘Write Now’, ‘Call Now’ or (on Internet) ‘Click Here’.” Calls to action are most widely associated with businesses who use them as advertisements to spark engagement with followers. However, they can also be carried out informally by any Facebook user who posts something that demands his/her followers to respond in a particular way. According to Gerodimos and Justinussen (2014), typical calls to action on Facebook use strategies, such as imperatives, direct address and emotional appeal, and usually encourage users to share the post, add a comment, find out more information, donate money or join a competition.

As we have been discovering throughout this blog series, none of these novel literacy practices are, in fact, novel. An exploration of Edwardian book inscriptions reveals that, aware of the way in which books moved between the private and public sphere, many book owners used their inscriptions as calls to action, using them directively to explicitly advise readers or prompt specific reactions from them. These calls to action tended to take two forms: instructing people how to carry out good reading practices and instructing people how to behave.

In most cases, these instructions were delivered through gift inscriptions. As gift inscriptions were a form of “constrained ownership” that enabled the giver to pass on a book of his/her choice to the recipient, they offered the ideal platform through which to deliver a call to action. The fact that the call to action was embedded within the act of gift-giving afforded it with a high potential to intrude into the “sanctum sanctorum” of the family home, thereby turning a potentially face-threatening message into an unthreatening everyday occurrence, which made the message even more powerful.

Some inscribers, however, chose to deliver their calls to action far more brazenly by commissioning custom-designed typographical bookplates on which their messages were printed. They would then be stuck into books and circulated amongst family members and friends. These overt directives perhaps bear the most similarity to call to actions on Facebook as they target potential readers directly and, in many cases, even leave spaces on the endpapers for readers to write their own feedback/opinion or contact details to find out more information.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

The bookplate below belonged to Albert T. Davies and advises potential readers to “always read the preface of a book” because “it enables you to survey more completely the book itself” and “you frequently also discover the character of the author from the preface.” Albert was a bookseller’s assistant who lived in Porth, Wales. Here, he draws upon the knowledge of his occupation to perform status by placing himself into a position of authority on reading habits. As an assistant rather than a manager, it is likely that this level of influence would have been denied to Albert in real life. However, within the boundaries of the book, he is able to gain intellectual standing. This becomes even more apparent when we realise that the advice came originally from the poet Bryan Waller Procter, not Albert, but that there is no mention of Procter’s name in the bookplate. In recent years, some Facebook users have come under fire for copying and pasting posts rather than clicking the ‘share’ button because this removes the details of the original author and makes them open to appropriation (McQueen and Shields, 2017). While these concerns surrounding plagiarism were not so much an issue in the context of Edwardian bookplates, they, nonetheless, show how hiding original sources could enable people to index their own intellectual standing.

The other most common call to action surrounding reading practices concerned book theft. Edwardian book owners held their books in high esteem and wanted to ensure that any potential borrowers would not steal them. This led to the creation of complex multimodal bookplates, threatening thieves with God’s wrath, violence or even death if they dared steal. Common images showed thieves padlocked into stocks or being executed by hanging, while writing tended to draw upon Bible quotes (e.g. “The wicked borroweth and returneth not again”) or use childlike rhymes (e.g. “Black is the raven, black is the rook, but blacker is the person who steals this book”) to remind borrowers of their obligations to the book owner. While in the medieval period, these types of curses would have served as very real threats to thieves, Edwardian book curses operated pragmatically as admonitions that urged readers not to steal. They did not hold any force as credible threats unless book owners were prepared to take the law into their own hands.

Book inscriptions instructing people how to behave also tended to draw heavily upon the teachings of the Bible. The bookplate of essayist Hamilton Wright Mabie informs readers that “manners maketh man,” i.e., a person should be judged according to his/her behaviour towards other people. The bookplate was not the first time that Mabie had used this phrase; in his My Study Fire, he wrote that the proverb “manners maketh man” was never more clearly verified than in the case of Shakespeare whose style is so “literally unimitable” and whose work is a “perfect assimilation of the outward world by the inward spirit” (1894, p. 188). Drawing upon its previous and current usage, we see how Mabie has ingrained the phase with an additional layer of meaning. Here, he is not only instructing readers how to behave in life but also how to approach literary texts.

We see an early viral form of the call to action by Sir William Hartley – the jam manufacturer and philanthropist. In 1909, Sir Victor Horsley and Dr Mary Sturge wrote Alcohol and the Human Body – a scientific temperance book. The book was widely praised for teaching working-class children about the dangers of alcohol and encouraging them to take a pledge of abstinence. Hartley was a keen supporter of the temperance movement and decided to use part of his personal fortune to purchase 40,000 copies of the book and distribute them to each recognised speaker of the national Band of Hope Union, as well as Anglican, Free Church, and Methodist ministers in order to promote temperance. Hartley took the time to inscribe each copy himself instructing recipients that the book would “prove most helpful to all who are responsible for the physical, social and moral welfare of the community and for the training of the young.” Thanks to newspaper reports, we can trace the impact of this call to action and note its success. Throughout 1909 and 1910, Hartley was invited as a guest speaker to clubs across Britain to lecture on temperance and present copies of Alcohol and the Human Body to children. Local Band of Hope clubs also decided to adopt the book as “the basis of a course of study for the coming session.”

In the context of borrowed books, the library instructional bookplate also served as a clear call to action for all library patrons. This wonderful example below from the Hyde Institute Library in Barnet Vale sets out a clear list of rules on what library users can and cannot do, including telling lies to librarians, entering with small pox, falling asleep at tables or leaving their business cards behind.

Newspaper archives show that the rules were responded to with much bemusement or frustration from many. “I am expecting to hear of an indignant protest from Moscow about bourgeoise tyranny at Barnet Vale, where the life of the literary-minded proletarian seems to be hardly worth living,” one writer joked.

Another penned a humorous poem The Truthful Borrower to signal his disapproval:

Don’t lie to the Librarian Who lives in Barnet Vale Don’t say you love Philosophy And dote upon Theosophy And lap up antiquarian Research upon the Gael, But, think, perhaps, that for to-day, Just for a change like, by the way, You’ll take a Murder Tale Don’t try to play the Jekyll In the Institute of Hyde And say you find Euripides Makes Wallace seem insipid (he’s The cheap to cull the shekel, But he’s culture’s suicide!”) Say like a man: “I’ll trouble you For one by Edgar W. Any I haven’t tried!”

The above examples show that, even within the confines of their books, Edwardians were able to find novel ways to generate calls to action and take advantage of books’ portability to encourage potential readers to respond in a particular way. These calls bear much in common with the calls on social media in terms of their direct address, emotional appeal, use of imperatives and prompts to give feedback, search for more information or carry out a particular response. However, they differ substantially in their focus. Edwardian calls are most concerned with the notion of respectability and the ‘proper’ way to conduct oneself in civilized society. Contemporary calls, on the other hand, often have a more commercial edge or are tied up with direct requests to donate money, sign petitions or enter competitions. Providing a historical backdrop to these calls really highlights how societal values, motivations, stances and relationships have developed over time and the importance of considering social media as part of a wider history of technologically and socially mediated change (Tagg and Evans, 2020).

References:

Business Dictionary, 2020. Call to Action, http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/call-to-action.html

Gerodimos, R. and Justinussen, J. 2014. Obama’s 2012 Facebook Campaign: Political Communication in the Age of the Like Button, Journal of Information Technology and Politics 12(2), pp. 113-32.

Mabie, H.W. 1894. My Study Fire, Dodd, Mead & Company.

McQueen, H. and Shields, C. 2017. Where Facebook meets plagiarism; an investigation and an intervention, Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, 5(3), pp. 33-44.

Tagg and Evans, 2020. Message and Medium: English Language Practices Across Old and New Media, de Gruyter.

Newspaper Articles (all from www.britishnewspaperarchive.com):

Forty Thousand Books, Belper News, 11 June 1909.

Rules for Readers, Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 28 April 1930.

The Truthful Borrower, Daily Herald, 14 May 1930.