explanation (razo):

supplies
1 ream Neenah brand “Classic Laid – Classic Natural White” 8.5”x11” paper
1 hide light blue suede leather
1 spool waxed linen thread
5 large-eye needles (they broke every few loops)
1 carpet needle
1 16-oz. bottle “Aleene’s Original Tacky Glue”
2 ink pads
2 rubber stamps
1 Microsoft Windows-compatible computer (or one with a MS Word alternative)
1 facsimile Amoretti and Epithalamion by Edmund Spenser
1 insane desire to mimic English Renaissance poetry

about the original
Edmund Spenser first published his Amoretti and Epithalamion (physically not that different in appearance from most books of poetry of the time) in 1595, financed by his patron William Ponsonby and celebrating his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle. “Amorettti” is Italian for “little loves,” referring to the 89 short sonnets (14-line poems about love) that make up the first third of the book. After the sonnet sequence, there comes a set of four untitled short poems that scholars have dubbed “the Anacreontics” for their similarity to the short poems of the classical poet Anacreon (most famous for his numerous drinking poems); these pieces too focus on love, specifically upon several exchanges between Cupid, Venus, and Diana. The Epithalamion (Greek for “before the bedchamber,” a wedding poem traditionally written by the best man and not the groom), the third and most important part of the book, recounts in 24 stanzas (filled to the brim with numerology) Spenser’s wedding day: June 11, 1594, a date made explicit both by historical record and the numerological references within the poem.

text info
Sonettes and Songs mimicks Spenser in both content and in appearance (the title, for example, recalls the sonnets/Amoretti and the songs/Epithalamion, while also playing on George Tottell's 1565 anthology of Tudor poetry, Songs and Sonettes). The first section of my book is a sonnet cycle (like the Amoretti, but shorter), followed by four anacreontic poems, and then finally a number of songs celebrating the Queen of Atlantia (the wedding celebration Epithalamion for Spenser). The song selection is much smaller in size than Spenser’s; I sacrificed length here out of time constraints (discussed below).

Philosophy of the book: Sir Philip Sidney, one of the greatest literary critics of the Elizabethan age, presented a Neoplatonic theory of poetry in his Defense of Poesie, to which nearly all the late Elizabethan poets then adhered in their writing (Spenser especially). According to Sidney, the Neoplatonic ladder of souls went in this order: vegetable > animal > rational > divine. The three aspects of a rational (human) soul were memory, reason, and will. The will (action) is the least of the three; even animal souls have will. The human will is considered infected by default, thanks to the Fall of Adam, and this prevents the human soul from becoming more rational. However, one can use one’s memory (the most Platonic aspect of Sidney’s Neoplatonism) to recall the idea of something – especially an abstract notion, such as love, honor, or virtue – to try and imitate those concepts. The memory recalls the original meaning of these concepts from the depths of the collective human understanding, as known by God and by Adam before his sin. The rational soul then uses the faculty of reason to determine how properly and how best to imitate and utilize these concepts once they are remembered. The will is then erected by the aid of memory and reason to act most rationally and virtuously in one’s life. Spenser applied this tripartite notion of the rational soul to his Amoretti and Epithalamion, and I have done my best to imitate it:

The sonnets: memory. While sonnet sequences always end on a downer, their purpose is for the sonneteer (or the fictional narrator within the sequence) to try and achieve the memory and idea of what love truly is. For most sonnet protagonists (especially Sidney’s Astrophel), that idea is never fully grasped – but it is the attempt that is the most important factor for a stand-alone sequence. For Spenser, he manages to obtain the idea of love, though he is separated from his love at the end of the sequence (a bit ironically, since he knows they will marry soon); this acquisition allows him to then contemplate in which way to apply that idea to his life. In my sonnet sequence, I tried to attempt a middle ground between Spenser and Sidney with a much darker ending: a kind of anti-Sidneyan approach, almost. I can understand what love is, but it is too late now for my protagonist to use that knowledge – a notion that seems fitting since the book contemplates the excellence of the queen and how the average citizen can think upon her.

The anacreontics: reason. The anacreontic poems for Spenser provide an image of what love fundamentally is. Having already remembered what love is, Spenser can contemplate the manner in which love should be applied to one’s life; he uses several scenes between Cupid, Venus, and Diana to discuss several differing views of love. I turned to the mythical story of Aurora and Tithonis for my subject matter. Aurora, goddess of the dawn, fell in love with the mortal shepherd Tithonis. She asked Zeus to give him eternal life so that she would not be without him after he died. Zeus agreed, but did not grant him eternal youth (since Aurora didn’t ask for it). Tithonis grew so old and wisened that he eventually became a grasshopper, and was essentially forgotten and forsaken by Aurora. Most medieval scholars thought this story was hilarious – even up until Milton (see his “Elegy V” ll. 49-60), poets make fun of this fiasco. In making the Queen of Atlantia like Aurora and myself (the average Atlantian citizen) Tithonis, I could reflect upon the short-lived dawn (the reign of the Queen) and how colder the world is afterwards – we can reflect upon the reign later, but it is not the same (save within the timeless form of poetry, where she can theoretically remain a queen forever). The tale of Aurora and Tithonis then allowed me to realize that one should not be dismayed after the passing of a beloved person or thing, but to celebrate it while it exists and to record that joy within poetry to relive it that way, where the passage of time cannot injure or erode it.

The songs: will. The songs are the celebration of love (the rational way to include the notion of love into one’s life) for the Queen that were produced after the epiphany of the anacreontic verses. There are only five songs, because I was only able to write five before I needed to begin producing the book. Five was also an important number for reigns in Atlantia: five months is the time of the shorter reign of the year for Atlantia, and I wanted readers potentially to remember not only Rachel (for whom I wrote this, though her reign was longer) but the other Queens that have sat upon the throne of Atlantia as well.

bookmaking info
Books made in sixteenth-century England came in several sizes, based on how many times the base sheet of paper was folded: the folio (folded in half – 2 pages), the quarto (folded in half twice – 4 pages), and the octavo (folded in half three times – 8 pages) were the most common.

While this book would technically be called a quarto (as the pages are from a twice-folded 8.5” x 11” leaf), it is closer to the size of a sixteenth-century octavo.

Paper was normally made of linen rags pulped in a large vat and then collected in thin sheets with the use of wire pans, which gave the sheets a lined texture. Some paper-makers only used parallel wires that went horizontally across the page; others had horizontal and vertical wires, giving the paper more of a checkered feel. Most paper-makers had a watermark somewhere in the wire layout so that they would be recognized for their work. After enough sheets were made, collections of sheets were then dried by enormous paper presses in order to flatten and prepare them for printing use. I did not have the budget, space, or time to create a linen-rag vat in which to pulp up paper sheets. Instead, I procured a ream of coarse-textured paper from a paper supplier (the roughest they had, complete with watermark – mostly used for resumes) that I felt could hold ink well and give enough of a period feel. I attempted to match the texture as best I could with the paper of the Amoretti and Epithalamion facsimile published by UK’s Scolar Press (who has published facsimiles of several early modern English works).

Printing was most commonly accomplished with the aid of the movable-type press (invented in the 1450s by Johann Gutenberg), where each letter was cast separately from one another so that printers could arrange any layout necessary. Amoretti also had a number of woodcut stamp decorations on each page, a common feature. I did not have the budget, time, or supplies to cast metal movable type or to carve out woodcuts that I knew would hold up for 12-15 copies of a book (competent woodcut stamps could last for several hundreds of uses). Instead, I used Microsoft Word for the typeface, after finding font faces that matched almost perfectly the type used in Spenser’s book (which I could examine extensively thanks to the online facsimile database Early English Books Online, to which my university subscribes). I substituted rubber stamps whose design resembled the styles used in the Amoretti. The stamps were less than perfect, but I am not disappointed by their appearance at all.

Most printers, using the aforementioned movable-type presses, printed out their pages on full, uncut sheets of paper and then folded and assembled the leaves in the proper order afterwards. Usually, they would create mini-folios (several folded papers pocketed within one another, generally four or eight) to sew together vertically at the spine with waxed linen thread, through holes punched by an awl. Then, the bookbinder would sew the mini-folios together horizontally on the outside of the spine, creating the spinal ridges that can be seen on most leather-bound books. A thin piece of paper, enough to cover the spine and an inch or two overlap on the front and back pages, was then glued, with hide or bone glue, over the spine. On the inside of this, an endpaper was then glued in the front and back. For bound books, a number of waste papers (usually old manuscripts or misprinted pages) were then glued on the outside of the spine sheet (but not to the endpaper glued to the inside of the spine sheet) for extra stiffness beneath the cover. For most of the Middle Ages, wood was used to stiffen the cover and also to weigh the book down – vellum manuscripts were much more prone to reacting to humidity and the elements than rag paper. Then, leather was glued to the stiffeners and folded over to cover the edges. The endpaper was then glued over the excess leather and the stiffeners.

Uncovered books were also commonly published, and most have not survived to today. These uncovered volumes were often fairly short and cheap. Sometimes, short, uncovered books were not mini-folios sewn together, but rather a number of single-leaf folios collected together by the practice of “stab-sewing,” or sewing that goes through every leaf of paper rather than only some. Stab-sewing (also called side-sewing and stab-binding) was first practiced by the Coptic Egyptians but continued in Europe through the Renaissance.

Stab-sewing could be done vertically or horizontally; I chose to do simple horizontal loops in the interest of time (and also so that the leather-bound copies could have something mimicking the horizontal ridges of period leather-bound books), using waxed linen thread through holes punched by a large carpet needle. I also did not use mini-folios because Microsoft Word (my replacement for a marginally literate 16th century printer and his employees) had trouble trying to format text upside-down.

In the interest of time and because I had paper I wanted to get rid of, I sewed my cover-stiffeners (waste card stock) and endpapers to the main book papers. Instead of hide or bone glue, I used an all-purpose tacky craft glue that was advertised to work especially well with leather, fabric, and paper. My covers were light blue-dyed suede (a color I thought was well-suited for something to be given away at an Atlantian Coronation), cut with 1” margins around the dimensions of the papers (with an extra ½” for the spine width). This way there would be no chance of a gap between the cover and the endpapers. The glue took about ten minutes for each cover to dry, but the result was pretty flexible and something (I hope) resembling a sixteenth-century “soft cover” leather-bound book.

bibliography
Davis, Walter, ed. The Works of Thomas Campion: Complete Songs, Masques, and Treatises with a Selection of the Latin Verse. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
Evans, Maurice. Elizabethan Sonnets. London: J.M. Dent, 1977.
Fowler, Alastair. Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh U, 1975.
Herman, Peter, ed. Sir Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella: Texts and Contexts. Glen Allen, VA: College Publishing, 2001.
Maclean, Hugh and Anne Lake Prescott, ed. Edmund Spenser's Poetry. New York: Norton, 1993.
Middleton, Bernard. A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique. New York: Hafner, 1963.
Rivers, Isabel. Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Students' Guide. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1992.
Spenser, Edmund. Amoretti and Epithalamion, 1595. Mengston, England: Scolar, 1973.
Szirmai, J.A. The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000.
Waller, Gary. English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century. London: Longman, 1986.