Book of Days

Most all the printers I know (and as a letterpress printer myself, I know a lot of them) are a salty bunch who are never lacking for good stories, creative profanity, and a hankering for a beverage with spirit. And here, on this 24th of August, comes a spirited celebration just for us printers. It is Bartlemas: St. Bartholomew’s Day, known also as St. Bartlemy’s Day. It is the traditional date of the celebratory printers’ Wayzgoose. Wayzgooses (Wayzgeese?) nowadays are celebrated all year round at the various places where letterpress printers congregate (we’re taking part at a Wayzgoose in Boca Raton, Florida, on October 14; you should come!)… but years and years ago, Bartlemas and the Wayzgoose went hand in hand.

The Wayzgoose is a particularly English celebration, one that comes out of the shifting of the seasons. By the time we reach Bartlemas in the seasonal round, we are a full eight weeks past the summer solstice. Sunlight is waning: the autumnal equinox is just a month away. With it, day and night are equal, and once it passes, darkness overtakes light. In the days before glazed glass windows, Bartlemas was also the signal that it was time to paper the windows in preparation for winter. Once the windows were papered, it was also time, once again, to illuminate the print shop with lanterns and candles. For papermakers and printers both, Bartlemas was an important time of year. Not to mention the bookbinders, as well: St. Bartholomew is a patron saint of book artists and bookbinders. This comes from his martyrdom: St. Bart was one of the original Twelve Apostles, and he met a bitter end, flayed alive and crucified upside down. The flaying has made him a patron saint of butchers, tanners… and the bookbinders, too, for they typically bound books in leather. He is also a patron saint of cheesemakers and beekeepers: the honey harvest typically begins at Bartlemas. In Cornwall, mead is blessed on this day.

But back to the printers. Randall Holme, in 1688, gave us this description of the Bartlemas Wayzgoose:  “It is customary for all journeymen to make every year, new paper windows about Bartholomew-tide, at which time the master printer makes them a feast called a Wayzgoose, to which is invited the corrector, founder, smith, ink-maker, &c. who all open their purses and give to the workmen to spend in the tavern or ale-house after the feast. From which time they begin to work by candle light.” It is, no doubt, a day with a long history of tavern printshop talk and robust drinking songs, hearty laughter and good cheer. For all involved in the Black Art: printers and printers’ devils both.

Image: Ancient Printing-Office engraving from The Every-Day Book by William Hone, London, 1827.

WAYZGOOSE is a fun word that gets tossed around a lot in printing circles, usually marking a big celebration involving presses. But the word, beautifully obscure as it is, does have one particular day associated with it: St. Bartholomew’s Day, the 24th of August… also known as St. Bartlemy’s Day, or Bartlemas. St. Bartholomew is one of the patron saints of bookbinders. Indeed, of most anyone associated with the book, so he has become a patron saint of book artists, in general. I may be a writer, but I come to words through the book arts, so these are my people: we are papermakers, book designers, printers, and bookbinders, and St. Bart watches over all of us and our crafts.

We know very little about Bartholomew the man. He was one of the Twelve Disciples; that much we do know. He may have traveled to India, to the area around Bombay. Tradition says that he met his end in Armenia in the first century; he is one of the legion of saints who met gruesome deaths for their beliefs, and his was about as gruesome as it gets. You may want to skip the next sentence if you don’t want to read about it…. Here goes: St. Bart was flayed alive, and as if that wasn’t harsh enough, he was then crucified upside down. If you skipped that sentence, it’ll make no sense, really, why he is patron saint of bookbinders, so go on, go back and read it. Done? Okay, good. That flaying made St. Bartholomew a patron saint of butchers (and there were many in my family, for generations back in Italy on my dad’s side) and of tanners… and of bookbinders, who very often bind books in leather. (It all makes sense now, doesn’t it?)

Then there are the papermakers, whose Bartlemas traditions have more to do with the subtle daily shifting from summer to winter. While the bookbinders were honoring St. Bartholomew with their leather bindings, the papermakers were marking St. Bart’s Day in an “out with the old, in with the new” fashion, using up the last of their summer pulp in the vats by making paper not for the print shops but rather for folks to use to seal off their windows for the coming winter. Glass windows came into vogue much later; earlier on, it was waxed paper that was used to keep out the elements. Once this St. Bart’s window paper was made, the papermakers went back to making paper for the printers, clearing out the vats and recharging them with new pulp made from rags that had been retting all summer long.

And finally, the printers. The printers are the life of the Bookish Bartlemas party, for it is the printers who celebrate the Wayzgoose, a particularly English custom with a direct link to the waning summer. All summer long, they’d been setting type by sunlight. But come St. Bartholomew’s Day, that sunlight was fast decreasing; we are, after all, a full two months now past Midsummer. That longest day each June is followed always by increasingly shorter days, increasingly longer nights, as we proceed on that annual trek toward Midwinter. The Bartlemas Wayzgoose came about as a marker of days: It was the day each year when printers typically returned lamps and candles to the print shop, when they began again to set type with the aid of lamps. A good print shop proprietor would bring in not just the lanterns and candles, but some good food and strong ale to boot. His crew might get the day off and a little extra pay, as well, which was typically spent on a goose to roast for the table (which is one theory of the source of the word “Wayzgoose”). In some places, mead, the delightful intoxicating beverage made from honey, was the beverage of choice. Especially in Cornwall, where a Blessing of the Mead ceremony takes place even today at this time of year. Continuing the road of connexions, our friend Bart is also a patron saint of beekeepers. As we continue to gather our stores for the coming winter, it is traditional, too, to bring in the honey crop on his feast day.

It’s a couple of years ago now that I first read that the Jerusalem Post, on August 27, 2010, reported that Johannes Gutenberg’s 42-Line Bible, the first book printed from moveable type, was completed on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1454. I’ve tried finding other sources to back up this claim, but I have to date had no luck. Still, I like the idea of this and if it is indeed true, this may have something to do with the day becoming a matter of such importance to printers and bookbinders. No matter what is fact and what is legend, our view on the day is simple: Bartlemas is a day for celebrating the core traditions of the book arts: papermaking, printing, and bookbinding. If you are a maker involved in these noble arts, as we are here at Convivio Bookworks, perhaps you’ll mark the day by making something suitably bookish. And if you are not a maker but a book arts enthusiast, your job today is to appreciate a good book. Perhaps you are preparing a traditional Rare Bartlemas Beef for your supper tonight, heady with nutmeg, ginger, mace, cinnamon, and cloves. And perhaps your Bartlemas is simply an excuse to pour some ale or mead. No matter your role or how you celebrate, we wish you a Happy Bartlemas, and a Happy Wayzgoose. If there ever is a day in the round of the year for bookish folks to shout Huzzah and cheers!… well, this is it.

Image: “Typesetter at Enschede Haarlem” by Charles Frederick Ulrich. Oil on panel. 1884 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. Perhaps it’s Bartlemas Day? Perhaps there’s mead in that cup? The lamp’s not lit but the windows are open.

Last year, a couple of days before St. Bartholomew’s Day, which is on the 24th, I went to the butcher shop to procure a beef brisket, and the next day began the preparations for our first Bartlemas Beef, using a recipe more than 350 years old… modified a bit to suit contemporary cooking methods. It turned out to be a really good meal, quite fitting for the traditional celebratory Printers’ Wayzgoose that also falls on St. Bartholomew’s Day, which, this year, is coming up on Wednesday. The Wayzgoose is a day worthy of celebration not just for us printers but for anyone who is a bibliophile. I suspect that describes most of the people who are subscribers to this blog. The preparations can take a bit of time. If you want to join in the celebration this year by cooking a traditional Rare Bartlemas Beef of your own, here’s a reprint of the recipe to get you going.

Some helpful hints on the recipe: we began with a fresh beef brisket and went straight to the step that calls for wine and vinegar. The vinegar we used was white vinegar. “Cover with paste”: I took this to mean put flour on it, like you do when browning beef for stew. We cooked ours all day in the slow cooker, and we ate our meal hot, rather than cold. And if you are going to eat your Bartlemas Beef cold, you’d best cook it Monday or Tuesday rather than on Wednesday. So here you go: the recipe, with some Bartlemas background to boot. It was the Convivio Book of Days chapter on August 22, 2015… though I did find a new illustration and I did alter the dates a bit so it fits this year’s calendar. Enjoy!

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Wednesday, the 24th of August, brings St. Bartholomew’s Day, the day of the traditional Printers’ Wayzgoose, and this is a big day for book artists like me: St. Bartholomew is a patron saint of bookbinders and book artists and his day has been of significance to printers and papermakers, as well, for centuries. Goose is one traditional meal for the day, as is cheese, for St. Bart is also a patron saint of cheesemakers. But so is Bartlemas Beef, which takes some time to prepare… hence today’s post, designed to give you the time necessary to prepare a proper meal for your Wednesday Wayzgoose.

This recipe for a Rare Bartlemas Beef is taken from The Cook’s Guide by Hannah Wolley, printed in London in 1664. (The book’s full title is quite long: The Cook’s Guide: or, Rare receipts for cookery Published and set forth particularly for ladies and gentlewomen; being very beneficial for all those that desire the true way of dressing all sorts of flesh, fowles, and fish; the best directions for all manner of kickshaws, and the most ho-good sawces: whereby noble persons and others in their hospitalities may be gratified in their gusto’s. Phew. Perhaps the first celebratory printer’s wayzgoose came about once the typesetter triumphantly finished setting the type for this long-winded title.)

Lady Wolley calls this beef “rare” meaning fine or good. It does not refer to the cooking temperature. Judging by the three days soaking, she means for us to use salted beef, but that was 1664 and this is not and I think we can begin with fresh beef at the second step of her recipe, where the vinegar and wine is introduced. Be that as it may, here is her full 1664 recipe for a Rare Bartlemas Beef:

Take a fat Brisket piece of beef and bone it, put it into so much water as will cover it, shifting it three times a day for three dayes together, then put it into as much white wine and vinegar as will cover it, and when it hath lyen twenty-four hours take it out and drye it in a cloth, then take nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, cloves and mace, of each a like quantity, beaten small and mingled with a good handful of salt, strew both sides of the Beef with this, and roul it up as you do Brawn, tye it as close as you can; then put it into an earthen pot, and cover it with some paste; set it in the Oven with household bread, and when it is cold, eat it with mustard and sugar.

There you have it: an old old recipe for celebrating an old old holiday. The St. Bart’s Wayzgoose is not widely celebrated today, but, considering the current boom of interest in letterpress printing and book arts, perhaps it should be. Pass the mustard, please.

Cinnamon is one of the spices you’ll need to make a Rare Bartlemas Beef. The image of a cinnamon tree is from one of the earliest natural history books about China. Its author was an unnamed Jesuit missionary. Engraving, 1656 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.