Our words diary and day book (sometimes daybook or day-book) are cognates, though the latter is disappearing from common use. Everybody knows what a diary is. A diary is the written record of the happenings of a day in the life of the person who writes it down. A diary is generally considered to be a highly personal and private document, the exclusive property of the person who writes it. In fact to snoop in someone else’s diary is transgressive, the act of a cad. The day book is a different sort of document. It is in general a sort of commercial or business form of a diary, usually a record of the daily running financial dealings, including both income and expenditure, of a commercial operation of some sort. There is no expectation of personal sentiment or reflection in a merchant’s ledger. It aims to record stone-cold facts. That is, it is meant to be an objective record of objective factual data deployed on a day-to-day basis. While not usually an absolutely personal document, as a “business record” its is access controlled by the proprietors of the business involved.
The foregoing verbiage began as a prologue to a brief history of the old practice of the diurnal recording of time—that is, recording it by days with special associations: All Hallows, Saint Swithin’s Day, Lammas Tide, etc. One of the most famous battles of British history—certainly of British historical lore--was that fought at Agincourt in northwestern France on October 25, 1415. It is memorialized, among other places, in an immortal speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V. Historians naturally enough call it the Battle of Agincourt, the site of the battlefield.. But Shakespeare does not identify the geographical place-name or secular calendrical date. For him it was fought on Saint Crispin’s Day. Crispin is a saint so obscure that nobody has even heard of him except by reading Shakespeare, but the Bard’s first readers still knew what his feast day had been.
One of my own long favored books for random dipping into and meandering about in is a huge large-format two-volume nineteenth-century continuation of the medieval tradition: Chambers’s Book of Days. The author/editor of this remarkable anthology was Robert Chambers, one of a dynamic pair of Scottish literati brothers active (and one might even say hyper-active) around the middle of the nineteenth century. His bibliography is enormous, and it includes one volume (Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation) that is taken by some to anticipate important features of Darwin’s Origin of Species. The book’s somewhat fuller title is The Book of Days: a Miscellany of Popular Antiquity in connection with the Calendar. Casting about for ideas as blog day approached, I opened this book on August 3rd to see what Mr. Chambers had to say about that particular day. For an amateur letter-press printer (which I used to be and still technically am) there was a kind of cornucopia. It turns out that that date saw both the birth (1509) and the martyr’s death (1546) of Etienne Dolet, printer and condemned heretic. A very poor birthday present for one of our important free-thinking printers. But it was likewise the birthday of Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, also know as Charles Mahon, FRS (1753 –1816), the inventor of the printing press that bears his name. Dolet’s story is a story about the victory of obscurantism and bigotry, Stanhope’s a monument to useful invention and progress. So I’ll go with Stanhope. “It is rather a remarkable circumstance in connection with the typographical art,” writes Chambers, “that from the period of its first introduction up to the latter half of the eighteenth century, no alteration took place in the form or mode of working the press.” That is both true and somewhat puzzling. For while Stanhope continued Gutenberg’s basic principle of pressing a sheet of paper against a stationary type-block under deflected levered lateral pressure, he replaced the wooden parts of the printing machine (press) with heavy iron—also now used for the press frame—to achieve revolutionary results. We today still speak of the presses “rolling”. But for the entire early history of printing they were instead “squeezing”. I find all the instruments and accoutrements of the early printing craft to be things of beauty, especially the nearly supernaturally accurate planes of the press beds, but I must say that the Stanhope press was a particular masterpiece of industrial design. And once invented, the Stanhope press was continuously improved over decades. Soon enough it would be realized that through fine engineering it was possible to automate both the inking of the type faces and their striking of rapidly inserted paper sheets against a fixed platen. Sinceyhe machine was/is practically indestructible, there are many surviving Stanhope presses, in all their subtly different iterations. Johannes Gutenberg will possess forever his well deserved titles of originator; but the massive increase in the productivity of printing machines, a phenomenon with obvious cultural significance, especially for popular culture, owes a great deal to the aristocratic English tinkerer, Lord Stanhope.
A beautiful Stanhope press
But I must make at least a feint of an attempt to get back to the theme of the day as a unit of measurement. In the old lore of the “days” there is a mixture of the fabulous and the scientific, as in our distinction between astrology and astronomy, both of which claim to be study of the stars. As a mode of seeking truth astrology seems superior at least to another ancient mode of sooth-saying, namely haruspication. In that art the meaning of all things was thought be most fruitfully searched out in the entrails of slaughtered fowl. The old ideas concerning auspicious and inauspicious days were usually related to astrological forms and movements. There were lucky and unlucky days, often related to lucky and unlucky astral configurations. Christianity sanctified certain days. A holiday is manifestly a holy day. Many holy days were calendrically fixed. But the holiest of all, the Feast of the Resurrection (Easter) is variable, determined by astronomical circumstance nearly as mysterious as the event it memorializes. Technological progress and linguistic change are not always precisely in synch. A journey is no longer the distance a man can walk in a day. And turgid academic journals do not make their appearance daily, thank the Lord. We do still, however, speak wistfully of the days of our lives. I have already had more than 30,000 of those!
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