9. The Parody Bookplate: Edwardian Meme?

No assessment of literacy practices on Facebook would be complete without a look at the meme – an image that is typically paired with a humorous concept or catchphrase relating to pop culture, social interactions or everyday situations in which people often find themselves. While internet memes emerged as a concept in the mid-1990s, they developed rapidly following the launch of YouTube in 2005 and the widespread growth of social media. According to Shifman (2015), there are two central attributes of memes: creative reproduction of materials and intertextuality. She describes creative reproduction as parodies, remixes or mash-ups (e.g. Star Wars Kid, Hitler’s Downfall), while intertextuality blends together two seemingly unrelated concepts (e.g. Gangham Style and Mitt Romney’s Binders Full of Women).

As we have seen in previous posts in this blog series, book inscriptions were created with an awareness that they would be shared amongst family, friends and acquaintances as books moved around a person’s social network. Therefore, it may be unsurprising to discover that some book owners injected a touch of humour into their inscriptions to bond with others and construct a sense of group membership. While it would be a stretch to draw any precise parallels between the internet meme and Edwardian inscriptive practices, there was one type of inscription that clearly had more in common with the meme than any other: the parody bookplate.

The parody bookplate emerged in the early 20th century and made fun of the strict rules and regulations that often guided the creation of bookplates. It particularly poked fun at the portrait bookplate which, outside of armorials, was the oldest bookplate type in existence, having been present in Britain since the 1670s. As the name suggests, the portrait bookplate typically showed a bust of the book owner and aimed to portray him/her in line with idealising artistic conventions, i.e., looking as flattering as possible (Carbon, 2017). The original aim of portrait bookplates was to leave behind images of book owners so that when they died and left their books to an institution, the bookplate would stand as an acknowledgement of their generosity. The parody bookplate turned this whole genre on its head by drawing upon traditions, yet blending or twisting them in unique ways, as we will see below.

This cheeky bookplate belonging to the English designer Pickford Waller is a particular favourite of mine. For anybody familiar with Austin Osman Spare’s 1907 painting Portrait of the Artist, you may recognise a similarity between the two artefacts. That’s because Waller was a friend and major patron of Osman, so Osman created this parody version of his most famous work for him. In the original Portrait of an Artist, Osman meditatively broods over a table of imaginary bric-a-brac that reflects the contents of his mind. In this parody, Waller sits in a similar pose yet looks rather worse for wear and slightly spaced out. The ‘contents of his mind’ seem to equate to images of nudes and a bust in the background of Osman himself. In designing this bookplate for Waller, Osman is making an ironic statement, laughing at himself, his work and the broader bookplate genre.

The bookplate of author Dennis Wheatley, shown below, also offers an interesting twist on the standard expectations of bookplates. The image is a clear parody of the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Here, Wheatley appears sitting on the ground naked, listening in awe to the satyr who is a physical representation of his close friend Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe. Gordon-Tombe was a shady criminal who introduced Wheatley to a hedonistic lifestyle. In 1922, he disappeared and was found murdered one year later. Here, Gordon-Tombe sits with a chilled bottle of champagne and saxophone to indicate his ‘wild side’. The accompanying strapline states, “One admires EVE for having tasted of the FORBIDDEN TREE OF KNOWLEDGE. -- But what a WONDERFUL EXPERIENCE she missed when she overlooked the TREE OF LIFE. I should have eaten of not ONE, but ALL the trees in the garden -- and THAT, dear boy -- is what I hope for YOU,” encouraging the viewer/reader to make the most of life. The text anchors the image by fixing its meaning in a process of “elaboration” (Barthes, 1977, p. 39), which strengthens its message and makes sure that it is likely to be correctly interpreted by all those who come into contact with it.

The Punch style self-portrait of the book owner Zephaniah Hutchinson below is another good example of the parody bookplate. Hutchinson was a leading trade unionist, general secretary of Nelson Independent Labour Party, and, later, general secretary of the Bacup and District Weavers, Winders and Beamers Association. Hutchinson has chosen to present himself in an over-exaggerated and unflattering manner in his bookplate, which mocks the traditional portrait genre. In doing so, he plays down the bookplate’s importance and suggests that he is not afraid to make fun of himself. The parody also throws criticism at a typically upper-class practice and introduces a working-class perspective to its traditional design. This bookplate was produced in 1914 when Hutchinson served as an organiser for the short-lived Daily Citizen newspaper – an official organ of the Labour Party – and was designed by the paper’s cartoonist Gilbert Webster. Hutchinson gave several public speeches in support of the newspaper around the Manchester area and was known for his animated way of pointing and lifting his leg onto a chair as he talked – both aspects played up in his bookplate. Hutchinson’s bookplate would likely have been met by laughs from those in his social circle who were familiar with his style of public speaking.

Admittedly, there are less direct parallels between the meme and the parody bookplate than some of the other literacy practices that we have looked at in this blog series. Nonetheless, there are still some linguistic and pragmatic similarities between them. According to Dancygier and Vandelanotte (2017), memes build on existing constructions, but in doing so, develop their own unique genre-specific constructional properties. A similar mechanism is at work with parody bookplates. What began as simply comical versions of portrait bookplates developed into a sub-genre in its own right with clear distinguishing features. Another key commonality is the way in which memes and parody bookplates represent emotional and experiential meanings. Both rely on intersubjectively accessible assumptions, visual representations and frame metonymy to transmit complex messages. Furthermore, in both cases, success depends on others recognising the meaning of certain semiotic choices and using their individual schema to construct meaning (Rintel, 2015). Equally, memes and parody bookplates are not just about sharing, but co-creating cultural meanings by relying on ideas and emotions assumed to be shared or known by peers within a given discourse community. In sharing, they elicit responses and further iterations from others in a continuous creative cycle that produces and reproduces knowledge and humour.

References:

Barthes, R. 1977. Image-Music-Text, HarperCollins.

Carbon, C. 2017. Universal Principles of Depicting Oneself across the Centuries: From Renaissance Self-Portraits to Selfie-Photographs, Frontiers in Psychology, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00245

Dancygier, B. and Vandelanotte, L. 2017. Internet memes as multimodal constructions, Cognitive Linguistics 28(3), pp. 565-98.

Rintel, S. 2014. Explainer: what are memes?, The Conversation, January 13, https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-memes-20789#

Shifman, L. 2015. Memes in Digital Culture, MIT Press.

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

“Help for Daily Citizen”, Daily Citizen, 20 June 1914.

The Movement, Labour Leader, 12 September 1912.