There’s plans afoot! Watch this space. That’s all I can say for now.
Plotting and scheming
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The Novgorod Codex
The medieval city of Novgorod in north-west Russia is an astonishing archaeological site, where waterlogging in anaerobic conditions has preserved huge amounts of material from the earliest periods of occupation around the ninth or tenth century. Archaeologists have worked at Novgorod since before the Second World War, and the site is now a World Heritage Site. Much of the construction at Novgorod was of wood – not only the buildings but also the road surfaces and most of the surviving artefacts. Amongst the objects found preserved on the site are hundreds of text and text-fragments, most of them written on pieces of birch bark which has been used as paper around the world for centuries. The texts found at Novgorod include personal letters, legal notices, business records and schoolwork.
One part of the Novgorod Codex
Alongside the birch bark letters and numerous metal styli, pieces of wooden writing tablets have also been found, and in July 2000 three limewood tablets complete with their wax writing surfaces were uncovered – what has become known as the Novgorod Codex. The primary text of the Codex, recorded on the wax, is Psalms 75 and 76. However detailed analysis of the wax and wood revealed a palimpsest of overlaid texts, consisting of religious writings and fragments of texts, many of them previously unknown. The tablet has been dated to the period around the end of the tenth century.
The decipherment and translation of the Novgorod Codex is ongoing, but already it has revealed hitherto-unknown details of the religious culture and connections of medieval Novgorod. Deciphering the texts has been fiendishly difficult as the letters indented in the wood and the wax are directly superimposed and written in the same handwriting. The decipherment effort has been led by linguist Andrey Zalizniak, who has suggested that the owner of the codex was a monk named Isaakiy, based on first-person references in the texts.
The continuing work on the Codex and the considerable amount of material that it has already revealed highlight the value of buried books as uniquely rich and productive archaeological finds.
References
Zalizniak, A. 2002. The 11th-Century Novgorod “Codex” on Waxed Wooden Tablets. Oxford University Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents Newsletter No. 10, Autumn 2002.
The Faddan More Psalter
The Faddan More Psalter
One of the reasons I became interested in buried books is the fact that in Britain and places with similar climates, a book covered in damp earth is likely to rot away to nothing in no time at all. Flesh and soft body tissues don’t survive burial, so why should books? Of course there are a few odd areas of the world – parts of Scandinavia, Ireland and Germany – where well-preserved corpses have been recovered from peat bogs after hundred or even thousands of years. Bog bodies, sure, but who ever heard of a bog book?
In 2006 a book was dug out of a peat bog in County Tipperary, Ireland, by a bulldozer driver. In the years following its discovery conservators worked to uncover the extraordinary story of the Faddan More Psalter, named after the area where it was found.
The cover as found
The psalter, or book of psalms, consists of a text, written on vellum, dating to around the year 800 and likely to have been produced locally. The manuscript was found inside a leather wallet or folder, with a lining of papyrus – evidence of a link between the Irish and Egyptian Coptic churches during this period.
The cover conserved
It isn’t clear how the book came to be buried, but monks were known to have used bogs as hiding places for valuables in the face of Viking raids, so it is possible that the Faddan More Psalter – like so many buried books – was placed in the ground for protection by somebody who didn’t live to recover it. Today the Faddan More Psalter is on display in the National Museum of Ireland.
References
Gillis, J. and A. Read. nd. The Faddan More Psalter: a Progress Update. National Museum of Ireland.
‘Soldbuch’ and songbook in a WW1 mass grave
No Man’s Land excavations at Loos
In 2005 an odd collection of artefacts arrived in the conservation laboratory at UCL Institute of Archaeology. The objects had been found in a mass grave on the site of a First World War battlefield, and the No Man’s Land group of battlefield archaeologists hoped that the information from the artefacts, together with the examination of the bones, would allow them to identify the bodies. Amongst the collection were several waterlogged paper objects that had been found on the bodies. While the water had preserved the papers from decay, it had also made separating, recording and conserving the pages a particular challenge (Peters, n.d.).
Paper object prior to conservation
Two of the paper objects were found with a single body – number 13 in the mass grave – and ultimately led to its identification. The first was a Soldbuch, a German soldier’s paybook and general identification and record document. This revealed the soldier’s date of birth, the twentieth of October 1892, and a few other scraps of information. The other object was a German military song book. While the songbook did not contain any identifying information, it did contain a postcard the soldier had received, and together with archival information they enabled the remains to be identified as Gefreiter (Lance Corporal) Leopold Rothärmel. Rothärmel was a concert master who had been awarded the Iron Cross a few months before his death. Traces of the medal ribbon were found with his body (Peters and Sully 2006).
Some of the paper objects after conservation
Historical records from Rothärmel’s unit showed that he was reported killed on 3 October 1915, shot in the abdomen, and his place of burial was listed as unknown. Thanks to the efforts of the archaeologists and the painstaking investigative work by the conservators, Leopold Rothärmel has a marked grave in a German military cemetery (Peters and Sully 2006). To date, no surviving relatives have been traced.
References
Peters, R. n.d. Finding the Fallen: Conservation and the First World War.
Peters, R. and Sully, D. 2006. Finding the Fallen: Conservation and the First World War. In D. Saunders, J. Townsend and S. Woodcock (eds) IIC 2006 Munich Conference: The Object in Context – Crossing Conservation Boundaries, 12-16.
Scarred books in Estonia
In 1944 Soviet troops advanced into Estonia, and tens of thousands of people fled their homes, many travelling into exile in Sweden and German. Before they fled, many buried their family treasures and valuables for safekeeping, possibly anticipating only a short exile before returning home. Mats Burström’s short book Treasured Memories describes the attempts by the children and descendants of these exiles to recover their family’s possessions, often more than half a century later. The burial of valuables in times of danger or uncertainty has a long pedigree in Estonian society and elsewhere, and Burström describes the families searching for buried heirlooms such as silverware, glassware and even telephones in landscapes transformed beyond recognition.
Alongside treasures buried for their monetary value there were other items – including guns and paramilitary uniforms – which could have implicated their owners in anti-Soviet activity. Buried alongside these more violent objects were artefacts of cultural resistance: Estonian books. While some books were buried to protect them from destruction, according to Burström:
The books that according to the stories were buried were largely the sort that were forbidden by the Soviet authorities … The forbidden books that feature most often in the stories are history books – both world history in general and Estonian history in particular – and reference books, usually in Estonian. The Soviet ban was part of a campaign to eradicate Estonian identity and nationhood. (Burström 2012: 107)
Burström discusses a four-volume history of the world in Estonian – published in the 1930s and entitled Üldine Ajalugu – bought second hand in Tallinn in 1996 by Toomas Petmanson from a middle-aged man whose relative had buried them in 1944. The burial of the books as the Soviet army advanced into Estonia was used to explain the water damage and generally decrepit state of the books, which Petmanson – who treats the books as precious artefacts of Estonia’s past – regards as “the scars that witness to the books’ own history” (Burström 2012: 89). As Burström points out,
The hiding of books can be read as a way of protecting the works on the shelf that would probably have been the most expensive to buy, but also as an act of defiance: even if you did not dare to leave to the books on the shelf, you refused to accept the eradication of written Estonian history, the sum of Estonian knowledge, and the Estonian language. (Burström 2012: 107)
The burial of books for their protection, to conceal them from discovery and potential destruction, links the Estonian texts to the paperback belonging to the anonymous prisoner in Stalag Luft III, and arguably to John Dee’s manuscript books. Like these other buried books, the Estonians consigning their literary and historical treasures to the ground risked punishment if found in possession of the texts. Given the widespread practice of burying possessions in wartime Estonia it is not unlikely that more books will be unearthed in the future.
References
Burström, M. 2012. Treasured Memories: Tales of Buried Belongings in Wartime Estonia. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.
Digging up a book at Stalag Luft III
Excavating escape tunnel ‘Dick’ at Stalag Luft III
I have only excavated one buried book, in Poland, on the site of one of the most famous events of the Second World War. On the night of the March 24 1944 a group of more than 200 Allied prisoners of war attempted to break out of Stalag Luft III prison camp in Sagan, Silesia (Brickhill 1979). This was the largest escape ever attempted, involving the digging of three massive tunnels, and became known as The Great Escape. The escape was masterminded by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, known as ‘Big X’, and involved a complex organization of tunnel diggers, document forgers, teams to dispose of the excavated earth, technicians to build tunnel props and air pumps, and tailors to turn military uniforms into civilian clothes for disguises.
The route of escape tunnel ‘Harry’, marked on the surface
On the night of the escape 77 men managed to escape from the camp before the alarm was raised. Many of those waiting in the tunnel or in the hut which disguised its entrance heard the alarms and proceeded to destroy or hide their forged documents and disguises (Brickhill 1979: 191). Of the escapers, three made successful ‘home runs’ to neutral countries, while the other 74 were recaptured. Of these, 50 were murdered in cold blood, singly or in pairs, on Hitler’s personal orders.
The wooden huts on the site are now long gone, leaving only the concrete bathroom floors and the brick piers on which the huts once stood. The site of the camp has now returned to its natural, heavily wooded state. In 2003 during the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the escape I was part of a team of investigators led by a television crew who visited the site of the Great Escape to locate and excavate one of the three escape tunnels (Pringle et al. 2007). In the entrance to the tunnel we found a number of artefacts including a makeshift lamp and a home-made rubber passport stamp.
Ceramic bowl with Luftwaffe stamp
In the sandy soil beside one of the brick piers I excavated the damp and friable remains of a small cardboard suitcase. Too badly eroded to be lifted from the soil, I carefully scraped through the black powdery remains of the suitcase lid, revealing the remains of a shirt and jacket both equally degraded by time and moisture into fine fragments. The buttons of both garments had survived, and the jacket buttons proved to be metal military uniform buttons with small squares of beige cloth glued over them – most probably a rough but effective disguise. Also in the suitcase were a rusty set of watercolour paints and a German paperback book.
The watercolour paintbox from the excavated suitcase
The book, a truly astonishing thing to have survived at all, was in fragments no bigger than a fingernail. No more than three or four words could be made out on any one piece, and it was impossible to tell – beyond the language – what book it was. The identity of the owner of the suitcase has never been discovered, so the true story of the paperback book buried in the sandy earth of Stalag Luft III is likely to remain unknown.
References
Brickhill, P. 1979. The Great Escape. London: Arrow Books.
Pringle, J., Doyle, P. and Babits, L.E. 2007. Multidisciplinary investigations at Stalag Luft III allied prisoner-of-war camp: The site of the 1944 ‘Great Escape’, Zagan, Western Poland. Geoarchaeology 22, 729-46.
Rot with thy author
How many authors are buried with copies of their books? For most this would be a tribute, placed lovingly or affectionately in their coffin. But for one author at least, the book was hurled into the grave with the full force of religious hatred.
The short but eventful life of the Protestant theologian William Chillingworth (1602-44) included a brief and unhappy conversion to Catholicism, service in the King’s army in the English Civil War, and a series of confrontational discourses with Catholic and Puritan religious scholars. In 1637, as part of an on-going debate with a Jesuit, he published The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, the work for which he is most widely known. In January 1644, an invalid and prisoner of war, he died in Chichester at the age of forty-one (Chernaik 2004).
William Chillingworth
Shortly before his death Chillingworth had made the acquaintance of the Puritan zealot and fellow Oxonian Francis Cheynell, then serving (like Chillingworth) as a military chaplain, albeit in the opposing army. The debate between the fanatical Cheynell and the more troubled Chillingworth was inconclusive, and while Cheynell attended Chillingworth during his final illness it is unclear whether this was motivated by genuine concern or out of a desire to affect or claim to have affected a deathbed conversion (Pooley 2004).
After Chillingworth’s death, Cheynell published a short book with the impressively lengthy title: Chillingworthi Novissima, or, the sicknesse, heresy, death and buriall of William Chillingworth (in his own phrase) clerk of Oxford and in the conceit of his fellow souldiers the Queens arch-engineer and grand-intelligencer: set forth in a letter to his eminent and learned friends, a relation of his apprehension at Arundell, a discovery of his errours in a briefe catechism, and a shorr oration at the buriall of his hereticall book [sic] (Cheynell 1644).
Title page of Cheynell’s book
As the title suggests, Cheynell buried a copy of The Religion of Protestants in Chillingworth’s grave (Pooley 2004). Chillingworth, despite his wavering faith, had been permitted an Anglican funeral (Chernaik 2004). Cheynell attended the event, and in front of the friends of the deceased delivered a lengthy address in which he condemned Chillingworth and his book in fiery terms:
I refuse to bury him myself: yet let his friends and followers, who have attended his herse to this Golgotha, know, that they are permitted, out of mere humanity, to bury their dead out of our sight. If they please to undertake the burial of his corps, I shall undertake to bury his errors, which are publish’d in this so much admir’d yet unworthy book: and happy would it be for this kingdom, if this book and all its fellows could be so bury’d, that they might never rise more, unless it were for a confutation; and happy would it have been for the author, if he had repented of those errors, that they might never rise for his condemnation; happy, thrice happy will he be, if his words do not follow him, if they do never rise with him or against him.
‘Get thee gone then, thou cursed book, which hast seduc’d so many precious souls; get thee gone, thou corrupt rotten book, earth to earth, and dust to dust; get thee gone into the place of rottenness, that thou mayst rot with thy author, and see corruption.’ So much for the burial of his errors. (Cheynell 1644: 59-60)
So saying, he flung a copy of Chillingworth’s book into the grave.
References
Chernaik, W. 2004. Chillingworth, William (1602–1644). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition) (accessed 12.1.13)
Pooley, R. 2004. Cheynell, Francis (bap. 1608, d. 1665). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition) (accessed 12.1.13)
Books in Time Capsules
The craze for burying time capsules that emerged in the 1930s in the US and Europe saw a wide variety of books consigned to the earth in tins, crates, barrels and purpose-built, carefully engineered pods.
Lowering a time capsule into the ground
Time capsule books are buried with the aim of preservation and the anticipation of future recovery (Jarvis 2003), so the choice of books is particularly interesting. They are generally meant to communicate something about contemporary society to future societies.
Shrock and Edgerton with time capsule components
Many of the time capsule buriers of the mid-twentieth century buried books reduced onto microfilm, then regarded as a panacea for libraries and archives. In 1966 MIT professors Robert Shrock and Harold Edgerton buried a wildly over-engineered time capsule beneath the site set aside for Alexander Calder’s iconic sculpture La Grande Voile.
La Grande Voile by Alexander Calder, under which the MIT time capsule was buried
Along with the typical time capsule schlock (coins, toys, and a copy of Time magazine) the four foot long Pyrex tube contained “Microfilmed copies of a road atlas, a cookbook, a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and an Encyclopaedia of Science and Technology.” (Shrock 1982: 197). The glass tube was filled with inert argon gas, sealed, and packed inside a copper tube before being sealed in asbestos and buried in a concrete vault.
Burying the Westinghouse Time Capsule 1
Shrock and Edgerton’s time capsule recalled the more high-profile burial of the Westinghouse Time Capsule 1 in 1939 at Flushing Meadows Park, site of the New York World’s Fair (Jarvis 2003). This futuristic cigar-shaped copper alloy cylinder contained a bewildering variety of cultural and scientific artefacts, including microfilms containing around ten million words of text drawn from books, magazines, encyclopaedias and newspapers. Alongside the microfilms were two books: a leather-bound bible and a book detailing the contents and location of the time capsule itself, copies of which were deposited in hundreds of libraries and collections around the world.
The Crypt of Civilization
One of the largest time capsules in the world – more of a time crate, perhaps – is the Crypt of Civilization at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, sealed in May 1940 and intended to be opened in May 8113. The 200 square foot room is dug into the bedrock, tiled in porcelain and sealed with a stone roof and a welded steel door. The crypt holds a bewildering variety of objects aimed to provide a snapshot of twentieth century life, including electronic goods, medical tools, masonic jewels, kitchen utensils, personal beauty products and a selection of toys. As with the MIT and Westinghouse time capsules, the majority of books in the crypt are in the form of microfilm: approximately 800 volumes including the Oglethorpe Book of Georgia Verse and “authoritative books on every subject of importance known to mankind” (Oglethorpe University 2013).
The burial site of the Nickelodeon time capsule
Given the future-minded seriousness of some time capsules (the Westinghouse capsule included a letter to the future from Einstein), the Nickelodeon time capsule buried at Universal Studios in 1992 is refreshingly different. The contents of the capsule were nominated by children, and aimed to represent objects of significance to children. Perhaps surprisingly, alongside a Nintendo Gameboy, Rollerblades and a Home Alone video, a number of books were placed in the capsule including an atlas, a history book and a volume on endangered species (Crezo 2012). The capsule is scheduled for opening in 2042.
With a few exceptions the books buried inside time capsules are meant to convey the values and achievements of the cultures that buried them. The relative abundance of encyclopaedias amongst the buried books suggests an archival aspect as well: the collected knowledge of a civilization buried for safekeeping as a gift to people of the future.
References
Crezo, A. 2012. Every item inside the time capsule Nickelodeon buried in 1992.
Jarvis, W.E. 2003. Time Capsules: A Cultural History. London: McFarland & Company.
Oglethorpe University. 2013. Inventory of the Crypt of Civilization.
Shrock, R.R. 1982. Geology at MIT, 1865-1965: a history of the first hundred years of Geology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Volume II: departmental operations and products. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Write 100 stories and bury them in a forest
Unlike Woolf’s Orlando, book artist Sarah Bodman did remember her trowel when she went to bury her book. However, fearing that (like Rossetti) she might repent her sacrifice and attempt to retrieve her book, she (again like Rossetti) passed on the responsibility to others to act in her absence. Bodman’s art book An Exercise for Kurt Johannessen (2010) describes the creation and interment of a storybook. Johannessen’s book Exercises, a pastiche of serious spiritual and physical exercise books, is made up of a series of strange and whimsical instructions such as “Eat peas and think of princesses”, “Go into the forest. Dig a hole and scream in it”, and “Bury an umbrella on a rainy day” (Johannessen 2001). As Bodman describes it, “One of the exercises in the book is: “write 100 stories and bury them in a forest”. So I did.” (Bodman 2010: 2).
Bodman’s storybook
Bodman wrote the 100 short stories in a blue square-ruled exercise book. Her art book lists only the titles of the stories, including “There was an old lady”, “More volcanoes”, “Equations” and “Collaborative dreaming for Dick Turpin”. The stories themselves are not reproduced because, as Bodman explains, she interpreted the exercise to mean that the burial was meant to hide the stories from readers’ eyes. As Bodman’s exercise was for Kurt Johannessen she wanted to bury the book in a forest as close to his native Norway as possible: in the event the book was buried in Denmark while Bodman attended the Doverodde Book Arts Festival. The book was taken into the forest and buried: Bodman’s art book shows the hole being dug, the book in place at the bottom, and finally the site with the earth replaced in the hole, surrounded by moss, leaf litter and small pine trees.
Burying the book
My thanks to Sarah Bodman for permission to use her images. I strongly recommend that you print and assemble a copy of her book – linked below.
References
Bodman, S. 2010. An Exercise for Kurt Johannessen. [link to download of book]
Johannessen, K. 2001. Exercises. Bergen: Zeth Forlag.
‘The follies of dead men and the wisdom of worms’
In 2010 a number of political and religious extremists made headlines around the world by publicly burning copies of the Koran. After Florida Pastor Terry Jones announced his intention to burn a Koran to mark the anniversary of the September 11th attacks he was publicly condemned by President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and politicians around the world. While Jones later publicly called off his “International Burn a Koran Day”, six men in Gateshead in the north of England were arrested after filming themselves burning a Koran behind a pub (BBC 2010).
P.Z. Myers
In response to what he regarded as the creeping criminalization of blasphemy and religious dissent, the prominent atheist blogger and activist Professor P.Z. Myers called for the respect traditionally accorded to holy books of all kinds to be subjected to much harsher critique. Myers compared the commonplace ownership of different religious texts to mounting slave shackles on one’s walls, keeping torture equipment in the kitchen or a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on one’s coffee table (Myers 2010). Reflecting on the fact that he owned copies of both the Koran and the Christian Bible, Myers recorded and posted a short film of himself burying the two books in his garden beneath a yellow flowering plant. As he wrote at the time:
Right now, the pages swell with moisture, the fibers separate and the chapters turn into pulpy masses. Bacteria bloom and their colonies expand; fungi flourish and their hyphae infiltrate and convert cellulose into spores. The ink runs as nematodes writhe over the surfaces, etching the words with slime and replacing the follies of dead men with the wisdom of worms. The roots of flowers and grasses will fumble downwards to embrace the decaying leaves, and the roots of trees will impale the volumes laterally. Given only a little time, the madness will be reduced to compost.
At every instant in this gradual process of degradation, the books are being improved and given greater value. And with my decision to discard the poisonous symbols of past ignorance, I became a little more free. (Myers 2010)
In the video Myers drops crumbled soil between the pages of the books before laying them quite gently at the bottom of the hole. He replaces the plant and loose soil before watering the plant and books and leaving them to grow.
References
BBC. 2010. Men arrested in Gateshead over suspected Koran burning.
Myers, P.Z. 2010. Sunday Sacrilege: a funeral for folly.
Burying Books 