Ohel or Dod? Ideal copies and messy print

When is a repair to a title page more like a clue to a bibliographical puzzle?

detail of an altered title page

This question has intrigued me since, some years ago, I first consulted a Folger copy of John Rogers’s 1653 Ohel or Beth-shemesh. A Tabernacle for the Sun: Or Irenicum Evangelicum. An Idea of Church-Discipline, in the Theorick and Practick Parts (135- 312q). The Folger Institute’s recent faculty weekend seminar, “Narratives of Conversion in Reformation Europe, ca. 1550-1700,” co-directed by Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith, gave me reason to return to the puzzle when, in one session, we were examining relevant Folger holdings. This book was of interest to the seminar for providing one of the first printed collections of Protestant sectarian conversion narratives circulated in English. I use the term “book” loosely, for Ohel is one of my favorite examples of how difficult it can be to establish stable and finite limits for a book. It is hard to know exactly what constitutes Ohel, even though there’s a pretty full body of evidence to consider. 

Generally speaking, the online English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is a researcher’s best guide to the publication history of books printed in England in the early modern era, as this book was. The ESTC distinguishes between two editions of this title in its records. The first record is for Ohel, which is described as a text in two parts, with each of those two parts having a separate title page, Ohel and Challah. The ESTC has a second record for Dod, which is described as a reissue of Ohel and Challah with 106 pages of additional prefatory material at the front, and a new general title page, Dod.

title pages for Dod, Ohel, and Challah, as in the Folger’s copy of the “complete” set (154- 966q); click to enlarge

An entirely new title seems excessive for the addition of dedicatory letters, tributary poems, and an extensive series of visual charts displaying the organizational logic of the book. But perhaps I wouldn’t question Dod as the title to the complete work so much if there weren’t other clues that point to different possible relations among the three parts—and different extant arrangements for the three title pages of this book.

For instance, when the bookseller Robert Ibbitson took the book to the Stationers’ Company to register his property rights in the title, the entry in the company register specified a treatise in three books under the general title Ohel. And when the famous mid-seventeenth-century book collector George Thomason purchased the book later in the year, he had all three parts, but he numbered the title pages in a confusing order, and in the collection of his books as it was bound later in chronological volumes, the title page for Challah comes first in the sequence, when it is generally accepted as the last of the parts. ¹

What about the internal evidence of the title pages themselves? It doesn’t help matters that two of these title pages (Dod and Ohel) each make some claim to be the first or overarching part; none of the title pages announces itself as the third part of the treatise; nor does the wording of any of the title pages correspond precisely with the respective half-titles immediately following. Part of my inability to let go of this puzzle is that I disagree with ESTC’s conclusion that Dod is the overarching title. Yes, that title page reads “the first part of Iren. Evangel.” But Ohel’s title page announces itself as “Irenicum Evangelicum. An Idea of Church Discipline,” which is both the overarching theme and in keeping with the entry in the Stationers’ Register. The title page for Ohel not only features the author’s name, but it carries the imprimatur of Joseph Caryl and a fuller imprint. The title page for Dod does not have Rogers’s name on it.

Perhaps I should just let this go as a case in point of inevitable variation in any individual copy from the ideal text as cataloged. After all, one of the delights of working with hand-press books is that there are so many copy-specific features. What makes these differences so compelling?

the altered title page for Challah (135- 312q)

If we consider the changes made to the title page of the Folger copy of Ohel—shown in detail at the start of this post and in full above—with this complicated bibliographical history in mind, we can begin to see the alteration as evidence of certain measures taken by a reader (or bookseller) to achieve a sense of wholeness. The change is to the seventh line of the title page, so that the line reads “Being the book of Church Discipline.”

But comparison with the Challah title page illustrated in the triptych above reveals that someone has carefully cut out the line “Being the Second Book of Church-Discipline” from the original Challah title page, presumably to remove the incriminating word “second.” It is easy enough then to move that title page from after p. 214, where it belongs, to the front of the book for binding. Can you blame whoever it was who came up with this solution to present a complete copy?

Order and consistency were not among Rogers’s strengths as he pushed his agenda for an entirely new rationale for church organization in the revolutionary year of 1653, as Oliver Cromwell dissolved the Commonwealth and established a Protectorate. Rogers was advocating for nothing less than a theocracy. He had a scheme (in both “theorick and practick” parts, according to Ohel’s title page) for gathering in the Protestant elect and preparing them for the Fifth Monarchy, when Christ would rule on earth for a thousand years. In part, he was preparing the way by adapting a Hebraic scripturalism as his guide. Whether or not there were bibliographical complications, these would still be exotic and provocative title pages. Each begins with a Hebrew word, which is transliterated into English, then translated and elaborated in terms of its place in Rogers’s evolving scheme and (possibly) serial publication.

In looking more closely at George Thomason’s collection (as digitized on EEBO), I began to suspect that he was as confused as any of us: he seems to get the order of Ohel wrong in a way unexpected enough that a possible source of all this confusion begins to come clear. Thomason has all three title pages, but they are distributed oddly. First comes the title page for Challah. The title page for Dod immediately follows, making Challah a title page without any associated text. Then the title page for Ohel is found where we would expect to find the title page for Challah, after page 214.

What begins to make sense of these confusions is that the title page for Challah may have always been a free-floating, single leaf. Is it possible that these title pages had never been conjugate with (or attached to) another leaf printed on the same sheet of paper? Were these title pages perhaps printed separately, even in a different shop? These are hardly the only pages with Hebrew print. Was there something about the font size that made it a more specialized job? Was it simply a shared printing job?

If a savvy collector like George Thomason didn’t know what to do with the title pages, there is little chance that subsequent owners could sort through the challenges of the three confusing title pages. Indeed, the three copies in the Folger Shakespeare Library each present a different title page and a different portion of the text.

The larger point may be that this was a big, messy, complicated print job, made so in part because it served a big, messy, and politically urgent agenda. Rogers was lobbying Cromwell, and perhaps the print job was coming awfully hard on the heels of the writing and the indexing and the diplomatic outreaches with dedicatory epistles. Helen Smith added this book to the bibliography of Folger primary sources for the “Narratives of Conversion” faculty weekend seminar in order to call attention to the plethora of indices, epistles, and charts that surround the book, paratexts that make up the first 106 pages.

Paratexts are typically the elements of a book that ease the way in, that help a reader navigate the book. Ohel is replete with such finding aids, including an ever-changing set of running headers and a additional 32 pages of indices at the end. ²

Maybe it’s in the push and pull between strategies of familiarization and estrangement—the familiarizations of the paratexts and the estrangements of the Hebraic characters and the millenarian agenda—that this book of ecclesiology comes to life. In some respects, the very aspects that make Ohel a complicated bibliographical example are signs, too, of the rapidly changing and radically unstable political scene, as Commonwealth gave way to Protectorate in 1653. The instability of the book, then, ought not to be reduced to a bibliographical puzzle with a solution to be found in close description of an ideal copy. Rather, perhaps when we understand how closely the rapidly progressing production of Ohel responded to the unfolding public events in which it meant to intervene, we can also better appreciate the dynamic qualities of this book.