VoE - David Brewer
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[00:00:00] 

David Brewer: Reputation is central to how the literary world works and functions smoothly. Reputation determines how much people get paid, reputation determines how much attention and what kinds of attention gets paid to different writers. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: David Brewer is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. He works on the literary, theatrical, and visual culture [00:01:00] of the long 18th century as well as the history of the book. He is also interested in how magic works both historically and in fantasy, and I wanna ask him more about that.

I think today he is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award, and I welcome Dr. Brewer to Voices today. 

David Brewer: Thank you for having me. 

David Staley: Well I wanna begin, first of all with your latest book project, which is called _The Fate of Authors_.

It's a really intriguing title, I have to say. What, what are you arguing in _The Fate of Authors?_ 

David Brewer: Well, _The Fate of Authors_ is a phrase that comes up a lot in the period, both with famous people like Alexander Pope and people that probably you have never heard of. 

David Staley: So the period is the 18th century? 

David Brewer: Yes. 

David Staley: Yes.

Mm-hmm. 

David Brewer: But it is the long 18th century, 'cause we like to annex several decades on either side, so I really kinda begin around 1670 or so. So, _The__ Fate of Authors_ is I said, is a phrase that comes up a lot in the period, and it's always about the [00:02:00] vulnerability of authors, the ways in which authors are kind of subject to the whims of readers and booksellers, what we would call publishers, how they're, they don't have the kind of control over their work, their reception,

their reputations that they would like to have, and they complain about it, but they also have a sense of this is the way of the world, this is how things are. A lot of what that vulnerability seems to turn on is how much their reputations can be manipulated by others. Reputations are in some ways stories about ourselves that we're not in command of, or at least not primarily in command of,

we can do things around the edges to perhaps shape them. But it turns out that reputation really, really is central to how the literary world works and functions smoothly. Reputation determines how much people get paid, reputation [00:03:00] determines how much attention and what kinds of attention gets paid to different writers.

And this is not just in the literary realm. It's true kind of in social history more generally. This is an age before credit bureaus. And so reputation largely determines perceived credit worthiness, whether or not you can borrow money, reputation obviously is important for young women hoping to get married, and so it's a w orld in which reputation looms largely large including for authors, but it's not how most literary historians have traditionally thought about authorship in the period. And so 

David Staley: why, why might that be? 

David Brewer: I think there's been a longstanding desire to kind of find the kind of origins of us or the origins of the modern in the period,

and there are reasons to why that makes sense. If you look at our political institutions, they stem at least in part from the 18th century. If you look at some of our, at least [00:04:00] supposedly, deeply held values, things like human rights and such. They were largely invented in the 18th century. So I get why there would be that desire to find almost a origin story for us and why it would be easier to do that in the 18th century than earlier, but

that has turned in the case of authorship into a lot of stories about things like intellectual property. I mean, the first copyright laws in the anglophone world did come in in the early 18th century. And they do name authors. They're basically a fiction for publishers to try to get back some of their previous monopoly rights that parliament had taken away.

But there's, I think, a widespread sense that if literary property and royalties and making a living from your work is important to writers today, and there was copyright starting the 18th century, then that must mean that that was the central thing of importance to writers in the 18th century. 

David Staley: And it wasn't? 

David Brewer: No, most writers made almost no money from their work, [00:05:00] had no expectation of making at least direct money from their work.

David Staley: 'Cause they were independently wealthy, or...? 

David Brewer: Some were independently wealthy. Some were able to use their work as a way to get various kinds of patronage, either, individual package from nobility or government sinecure.

There are a lot of people who were the assistant deputy inspector of wine where they got a salary and had to like show up once a year. And those were... 

David Staley: A good gig. 

David Brewer: It is a good gig and in some ways it's like the traditional, like Chicago and New York political machines where there are just

bosses handing out jobs that didn't require much to people they want, whose support they wanted or who had done them a favor or something. But a lot of people just had other work or they were just desperately poor, and that never changed. And so, the idea of authorship as a profession at which one could earn a [00:06:00] living authorship that would be a self-regulating profession in the way that law and medicine and things like that are considered self-regulating professions, that's really a minority view, and there's evidence for that. But a lot of the stories that literary stories have traditionally told have been, I think, mistaking kinda the part for the whole, or see on the thing that seems to have the most clear continuity to now, and then presuming that that must be the whole story.

And that means being pretty selective with evidence, and so one of the things I've been trying to do in this project is just cast my net much more widely and think about lots of kinds of evidence that don't usually figure in our standard accounts. 

David Staley: What sorts of evidence, or...? 

David Brewer: One of my favorite examples is shop signs.

So, London does not have street numbering until the 1760s. Prior to then, if you want to find a business, either you just know where it is or you go look for a sign. [00:07:00] In some cases, those signs are gonna be fairly clear. If it's like the three pigs or the black boy or something like that, then you can probably figure it out.

But, many, many booksellers in bookshops booksellers is a period term for publishers. So, they're publishers who have bookshops, and then there are people who just sell books have signs that are just author's heads. So you can buy a book at Milton's Head, or Prior's Head or Addison's Head. And there, often,

especially in the the figures from the early 18th century, they look a lot alike. It's just guys in full bottom wigs. And so being able to pick them out, especially if you're like sending your servants, I'm not sure how easy that was. I'm not sure how well they worked as signs, but I'm interested in just the idea that an author's head becomes and that the just general

things that that author's name suggests, 'cause names are good proxy for reputations, [00:08:00] that helps kind of distinguish those kinds of businesses from others. And that seems to be much more about authors as a kind of particular sort of figure and individual authors as having

particular associations with them. So Milton, for example, has smaller Republican politics was an apologist for had what were then thought to be extreme ideas about divorce and, and such. So buying a book at Milton's Head may suggest some things about the kind of establishment you're going to and the kind of books that they have on offer.

I mean, I guess today if you were to, purchase something at the sign of Che Rivera that would, that would probably signal something suggesting uh, something. 

David Staley: Does this help to establish reputation? These sorts of... 

David Brewer: It does. 

David Staley: Physical markers. 

David Brewer: Yes. And a lot of this is [00:09:00] recursive and self-reinforcing.

So, someone gets a reputation for a certain thing and then others build on that and that enhances the reputation for that thing all the more and so on. And that's part of what authors complained about as, you know, their, their fates, that it was beyond their control. Mm-hmm. That once there was a bandwagon going, it would just keep on being self-reinforcing whether or not they thought it was fair or accurate.

And so I guess part of what I'm interested in is that recovery of a period, understanding of what the kinds of beings that authors were, the kinds of status they had in. The literary world, but I'm also just interested in that, that kind of vulnerability. We have grown up in a world in which authors are [00:10:00] either these kind of.

Capital G geniuses who can do no wrong and have immense control over their work and their reception, or they're just kind of irrelevant. And I think there are plenty of people today who don't really think about authors one way or another. And this is, and I'm looking at a world where there's a lot of interest in authorship.

And a lot of interest in authorship, including in places that you might think would signal a lack of interest in authorship. For example, most literary publications are initially anonymous. Most, poems and prose fiction and comes out without an author's name attached. Most essay periodicals have pseudonyms, sometimes quite elaborate pseudonyms.

Most plays are initially advertised and staged without a playwright's name attached, but, and so it would be easy to [00:11:00] presume, and some people in the past have presumed that just means. That, well, people didn't care about authors. But then you start looking at copies of those publications and they're full of people having scrawled names of authors on their title pages, supplying what the printed object did not supply.

David Staley: Is that after the fact or, 

David Brewer: It's always, well, it's after the fact of publication, but sometimes it's like within a week. 

David Staley: Within a week. 

David Brewer: And sometimes they seem to be. To show some inside knowledge. There's a whole kind of gossip network of auth about authorship and attribution. Sometimes they seem to be guesses based on more or less solid reasoning, and sometimes they seem to almost be.

Playfully counterintuitive or just so off the mark as to be funny kinds of things. Like, there's a copy of The Way to Wealth at the library company in Philadelphia, which the Way to Wealth is [00:12:00] a compilation of poor Richards maxims so Benjamin Franklin's. Mm-hmm. Maximum, you know, early to bed, early dry makes man healthy, wealthy and wise.

You know, all, all those things. They get combined into this long. Not that long dialogue where someone just keeps on spouting. Well, poor Richard says this, poor Richard says this. But the copy, and so if you were just approaching. That in a spirit of trying to get it right, presumably you would guess Franklin or someone like that.

But the copy at the library company says the Duchess of Queensbury. 

David Staley: Oh. 

David Brewer: Who is about one of the least Ian figures you could possibly come up with. And given what else we know about that copy and the library company, which of course was started by Franklin and Friends, I am guessing that someone just thought it would, well, everyone knows this is by Franklin.

There's, there's no glory in being able to like guess faster than [00:13:00] someone else who wrote this. So I'm just gonna come up with the most exceedingly implausible candidate possible. 

David Staley: So a joke. 

David Brewer: Yeah. And there's a lot of that. There's a lot of that kind of play. Oh, around authors that I think both suggests an interest in them and a sense that they are not gods among men.

That they are, they exist in some ways for the public's entertainment. 

David Staley: So does that, does that ever change? I'm gonna take us outta the, the, the, the 18th century. Long or otherwise. So you say there might be a, a, a minority, a small number of authors who can. You know, live off of their mm-hmm. Live off their writing.

Is there ever a time where the author has that sort of stature? The 19th century, is it Dickens, is it the 20th century? Is it Norman Mailer, or is this always the case with authors? 

David Brewer: There are always more people trying to write and publish. Then there seems to be a [00:14:00] market to support 

David Staley: and now there's subset.

David Brewer: But, but I think there was. A stretch from maybe, I don't know, the 1840s to the 1960s or so, when it was significantly more possible and there was significantly more deference being paid to authors. This is not quite what I'm talking about, but it might help illustrate. My first book was. In some ways about 18th century fan fiction, it was about readers who wanted more of beloved characters, and when authors weren't providing yet, they just set out to come up with further adventures for Gulliver or Pamela or Faff for Tristan Shandy or others.

And there with a few cases a few exceptions, the authors. Ideas for the character. The authors [00:15:00] plans for the characters seemed to have been just b blindly disregarded. That there were, the author was just like another guy telling stories about this character and his version was no more authoritative than mine.

And whereas contrast that to the 19th century where you have. People writing to Dickens, begging him to please let little ne live in the sense of which suggests that they're kind deferring to him, that they can try, they can make the plea, but ultimately it's gonna be his call. And so authors have in the 19th century, and this is painting with very broad brush, but thinking that in the 19th and first.

Half, two thirds of the 20th century a more easily acceded to authority. And they're more of a sense that they are superior beings and they might have [00:16:00] some genius that others don't have, and that they. Should be deferred to the default should be deferring to them rather than having them defer to us.

Yeah. 

David Staley: So I wanna talk about another project. You're, you're writing about the book Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. I've never heard of this book, I have to confess. 

David Brewer: Oh, it's a, it's a, it's wonderful. It's a novel from 2004 that I read when it came out, and I have reread probably a dozen times since then.

I've taught on a number of occasions. It's really one of my favorite. 

David Staley: So we really are now the 18th century. If it's in 2004, 

David Brewer: well it's, 

David Staley: it's a very long 18th century. 

David Brewer: It's set in the 18 teens. Mm. It's set in the regency. So it's set in a more conventional long 18th century. They're not still in years that don't begin with the 17.

It's this fabulous novel that imagines. A kind of an alternate history for England [00:17:00] in which there was this vibrant tradition of magic in the late Middle Ages that then kind of wanes through the 16th and 17th century becomes pretty much just a subject for gentlemanly antiquarians, where no one's actually practicing it, and it's kind of vulgar to practice in the 18th century.

And then gets revived in the early 19th century with big consequences for the Napoleonic Wars for all the other things that are so familiar to us from 'cause I mean, that Regency period and in that early 19th century more generally is probably one of the periods of the past, other than maybe World War ii that, anglophone readers know best just because of Jane Austen and the endless Austin adaptations and films, and a very popular historical fiction set then like the Aubrey Matin Naval novels. And there seems to be an endless fascination with Napoleon [00:18:00] and such, so it's, and it's very cleverly using a lot of the standard techniques.

Of historical fiction, having cameos from well known historical figures and getting period addiction right. And having just little details that show you, you've done your homework, like having the, the right kind of fruit knife and things like that. But it's combining that with this. Yeah, clearly counterfactual thing about magic this invented past of the, in, in the medieval period where things are much, much different and then anticipated future in which things will be again, different.

So, and that and that. I think one of the things that most fascinates me about it is the early 19th century. Looks a whole lot like the early 19th century [00:19:00] that we know, but there are different explanations for everything. So George III has still gone mad, but it's not because of porphyry, it's because he is been possessed by a fairy.

David Staley: Ah, okay. Okay. 

David Brewer: Wellington still wins at Waterloo, but it's because a magician has moved things around rather than 'cause the Prussians showed up at the right time. And but so the central period in which it's set is meticulously historically faithful except for the magic whereas the, imagine medieval past is much different among other things. There's a kingdom of Southern England and a kingdom of Northern England, so there isn't any national unification of the way that there had been since the 11th century. And then at the very close to the novel magic, which has been practiced by a handful of people during the vast, most of the novel gets [00:20:00] democratized.

And so there's this vision that whatever the, the rest of the 19th century looks like, it's not gonna look like the 19th century. We know. And this is just done in a really smart, clever way. The writer, Susanna Clark is able to ventriloquist the period quite well, including doing a credible Austin impression.

And. There are a lot of the backstory and history of magic that she develops is done in footnotes. And I always love, I always love notes and especially in forms like novels that don't usually have them, and it's just a delight and. There's this series published by Paul Grave that is asking for people to make short pitches for what should be in a new cannon of science, fiction and fantasy.

How once we get beyond, you know, the obvious token, Lewis, like lagu suspects, who else [00:21:00] should we regard as central to those modes of writing? Who else should we be teaching and writing about? Who else should we be taking seriously and reading carefully in the way that we tend to do with things that are canonical.

And I think she belongs, but it's also a chance to write in a kind of advocacy that I don't always get to do. It's almost a. That old fashioned genre of the appreciation. 

David Staley: Well, I was gonna say, you're you're gonna be her agent. I'd introduce you as as someone who is interested in how magic works.

Where did this interest in magic come from?

David Brewer: It's a thing I think about a lot. I'm not sure I have the best answer because it's not something I can really remember not being interested. In. 

David Staley: Okay. 

David Brewer: But I grew up in Wilmington, the Wilmington, Delaware suburbs, so basically the greater Philadelphia suburbs. And, [00:22:00] but when I was four, we moved to Tokyo for three years, and that was kind of amazing, just being in.

A world that did not work in the way that the Philadelphia suburbs worked. And my parents were much freer there than I think that they were before or certainly since we came back. I think that having a distance from their or ordinary lives was, was good for them. And around that time, I.

Developed an interest in Japanese folklore, which is full of stories about various kinds of non-human creatures and magical goings on. And so I suspect that I acquired my interest in magic then, and got tied up with this sort of delight in a way [00:23:00] of living that seemed. To have more possibilities than the way of living back in Delaware did, especially the way of living back in Delaware with my family, who are, we didn't go to church, but they're my family.

My parents are really Calvinists nonetheless. And so there's a, there was a certain kind of constriction that had gotten temporarily relaxed. And I think that part of what fascinates me about. Magic, both the historical desire to engage in magic, which goes back to antiquity and I think is still very much with us, even if we like to say otherwise.

The first day of my course on history of magic in witchcraft, I ask how many students believe in magic. M, maybe a quarter, we'll say it. And then I ask how many have astrology apps in their phones? And it's more than twice that, of course. But I think that the [00:24:00] magic is in part about being able to exert your will on the world and to not be.

As constrained by and subject to your circumstances as you would otherwise be. And I suspect the time in Tokyo was my own little version of that. 

David Staley: The last time you and I saw each other before we sat down here was in the main library. 

David Brewer: Mm-hmm. 

David Staley: Where your students from Medieval and Renaissance studies 56 11 were displaying their projects.

That course is the history of the book, and I'd like you to tell us a little bit about the class and about what we saw the day Sure. That the students were presenting their work. 

David Brewer: Sure. So I teach two. Courses on the history of the book, the Medieval and Renaissance studies one covers that really the Renaissance.

We start with in the mid 15th [00:25:00] century with the invention of movable type Gutenberg and go up through the early 19th century because the techniques for book production don't much change between 15th and the early 19th century. It's still handset pieces of type handmade on. Pieces of paper that have been made by hand, sheet by sheet, et cetera.

And I teach a follow up course that I'm doing right now English 56 12. That is the history of the book in modernity, where we start from the early 19th century and go up to today, or at least yesterday and where we're thinking much more about. The consequences of mechanization where printing is no longer being done through muscle power, but through steam or electric power paper is made in big rolls rather than sheet by sheet.

Eventually bindings rather than being built up around a book one by one or separate cases into which a text block gets slotted and glued and so on. And the final project for all of these book history classes, and I've been doing this since I wanna [00:26:00] say. 20 12, 20 13 is an exhibition where the students select material from the Red Books and manuscripts libraries collection.

And make an exhibit out of it. And the idea is that it's a collectively curated single exhibit so that they each will have a portion, we call it their case, but it's really a table. Yeah. But that, that is part of a larger hole that they're seeing. We're getting, say. An exhibition with seven curators rather than seven mini exhibitions.

And it's a kind of writing that they have almost never been asked to do before. 'cause they're writing labels for the individual items. Mm-hmm. They're writing labels for their cases. They're writing wall text for the exhibition as a whole. And so it's much less in terms of a word count than a standard paper for a class would be.

But you're. A, the words have to be perfect. [00:27:00] And B, you're writing for the public Yeah. Rather than writing for your teacher. And that involves trying to anticipate what the public will know. Mm-hmm. And won't know what, what might interest them. And every year they've done it. The students come up with a different organizing theme or set of questions in the autumn the class that the exhibition that you went to was, playing on the seventies ecological motto that reduce, reuse, recycle, because so many aspects of early modern books involve reusing materials that had previously had in other life paper is made from linen rags, which had previously been shirts and underwear. Leather bindings are made from the skins of animals, which had been previously using them as skins and so on.

But also. There's lots of reprinting, lots of mm-hmm. Selecting and reduction there. And I thought [00:28:00] they, they did some very clever things with it, and 

David Staley: it was very 

David Brewer: impressive. Very impressive 

David Staley: display. 

David Brewer: And they always find objects that I didn't even know were in their collection. I mean, I, I certainly don't know all that's in the collection.

It's, I think upwards of a hundred thousand books. But I worked with it a lot over the years and they, I'm always delighted by what they find. 

David Staley: Well, I think this is the third class I've seen and I'm just impressed every time, every time I see it. So 

David Brewer: I think it's one of the my favorite things to teach here, and I.

The students always rise to the occasion. Mm-hmm. And, and I think it's, it's a memorable experience for them and they, and it's a chance to, for them to actually, I think. Make that switch, which is really important in classes, but also hard to pull off of going from being a student of something to a practitioner, 

David Staley: yes.

David Brewer: Of something. 

David Staley: They're very knowledgeable. When, whenever I spoke with them, it's [00:29:00] clear. They're very knowledgeable. 

David Brewer: So I, I really like that as an assignment, as a goal that we're building toward. I like. And I like it as a way for students to really use the collections in a significant and substantive way because there are lots and lots of headaches associated with being part of a huge university.

And if you just wanted to like sit in a classroom and you know, talk about a novel, you could probably do it at least as well, fight maybe better at a liberal arts college. But. OSU has. Some fabulous resources, and I think there's been kind of a practice. It's less so now than when I showed up, but still I see it of trying to shield undergraduates from that.

And that, that seems silly. If you're going to deal with the headaches of going to SU, you should at least also be able to draw [00:30:00] upon the resources of it. And this is. My way of doing that. Right. I asked them, 

David Staley: and you mentioned rare books and manuscripts and there's not a, not a better resource, I think anywhere.

Tell us what's next. What are you working on next? 

David Brewer: I think I'm finally gonna get outta the 18th century. 

David Staley: Okay. 

David Brewer: I, I have long had. Side interest in the mid 20th century us. But I've never really written about it for publication. Like I did a, my favorite project in graduate school was not my dissertation, but was a seminar paper I did on the Reader's Digest condensed books.

David Staley: Oh, interesting. 

David Brewer: And so there's something about, especially the forties and fifties that I find really fascinating and I have some psychological theories about that. But, but one of the things, aspects of that period I find really fascinating are pulp magazines. And that's where I think a lot of the kinds of writing that Modernisms have rejected, were kept alive.

That's where [00:31:00] adventure stories and science fiction and other things that you know, the Fitzgeralds of the world couldn't be bothered with kept going. They're fascinating objects. They have these often really lured covers. They have fascinating ads. Many of them involving, like improving yourself by becoming a radio repairman, right?

Yes. They have letters, columns, sometimes where fans are writing in and finding each other in kind of a, sort of, sort of virtual community of other fans. And. So I'm, there are two, I have two things on the horizon that involve the pulps. One would be doing an exhibition at, in the main Thompson Library Gallery of pulp Magazines with one of the curators from Air Books and manuscripts because we have a very good collection and they are objects that students seem to always respond to.

And I think, people in the broader Columbus public might be [00:32:00] interested as well. And the other is one of the fantasy series. They read a lot as a kid and keep on going back to a series of stories by Fritz Libor about a man named Faff and a man named the Grauer. And they are, oh. In that kind of mid-century swords and sorcery kind of down and dirty kind of fantasy.

It's not high minded. It's not saving the world. They're, they're out for themselves. But I've always enjoyed them and I think a lot of. Other people kinda are feeling their influence even if they never read them, because that is went a lot of what went into things like Dungeons and Dragons. Sure.

And which in turn has shaped lots of other things. So they're getting Fritz libor like fourth hand. But when things that interest me about LIBOR is he published [00:33:00] something like 45 stories about these two over. Well, from the late thirties to the late seventies, so over 40 years. And mostly in the pulps and they're not in chronological order.

They're in probably close to 20 different venues. And I'm interested in how readers kind of come up with ideas of them as. Coherent charismatic characters when they're getting them in such snippets and pieces and there's not a clear, the publication order does not line up with any kind of internal biography for them.

And so it seems like a interesting test both for. How character can be created in that dispersed kind of serial publishing environment, but also [00:34:00] in the kinds of work cognitive work really that go into assembling someone who could seem like a coherent figure. The gray mouser from all these different little fragments, which, and there's no, unless you're a serious collector, there's no guarantee that any given reader's gonna be encountering all of them.

And so what's involved in working from those more partial bits? So in some ways, it's a chance to put together

questions I've thought about as I growing up with reading I did as a kid. 

David Staley: David Brewer. Thank you. 

David Brewer: Thank you. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer. [00:35:00]