College, Cambridge.
This study is about the desire for books—the collector’s desire for books—in the production and dissemination of Renaissance literature, chiefly in English. Myles Blomefylde may have been flamboyant, but he was not anomalous among readers and writers in the era of early print. Many thousands of collected volumes like the one pictured here survive from this period under various bibliographic designations: Sammelbände (or multibook compilations), personal anthologies, composites of manuscript and print, tract collections, and others. Many still reflect an early owner’s desire to appropriate and interact with the texts, to organize and repurpose them, or to transform existing works into new works. Blomefylde’s Historie of Italie stands as a witness to such processes most likely because the larger compilation and collector are of literary-historical consequence. The adjacent Gesta Romanorum is the only known copy of that translation, and Blomefylde has long been recognized for handing down several unique late medieval play texts, including the only complete edition of Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres.5 Yet the very consequentially that encouraged the preservation of this volume for four centuries could have led to its breakup or loss in a different institutional setting. As William Sherman has shown, libraries and collectors in the modern era privileged “clean books” and routinely had the marks of early readers such as Blomefylde removed from important texts.6 A similar desire for “pristine rebinding,” noted by conservators and bookbinding experts including Julia Miller and John Szirmai,7 drastically altered compilation structures in modern book collections. If all or part of an early Sammelband was judged to have exceptional value, the likelihood was high that the volume would be separated into its constituent units for individual rebinding or sale, eliminating the traces of early ownership. St. John’s College had neither the onsite binding facilities of a Henry E. Huntington nor the distinguished Enlightenment-era foundation collections of a British Museum.8 The Old Library, where the rare books are kept and consulted, remains very much as it was when it was founded in the seventeenth century, a short time before the Blomefylde volume was deposited there.9
Indeed, among collectors, major works of Renaissance literature constitute the most valuable, desired category of early printed books. Along with the first and grandest productions from movable type, such works have progressed through modern book markets, fine binderies, auction houses, institutional libraries, and conservation laboratories where less sought-after texts from the period have remained uncirculated and unprocessed. The literary output of the early handpress has, therefore, been disproportionately touched by the modern preference for clean, individually bound books. In some library collections, such as St. John’s, we can find important Renaissance works that look as they did to their earliest readers. But much of the literary rare-book archive—which supplies essential primary texts to editors, critics, and historians—reflects the desires of modern readers: the uniformity of industrialized printing and binding, the order of the systematic catalog, the circumscribed aura of the collectors’ item. In many of today’s most extensive and accessible libraries, a more complicated material history of Renaissance texts lies buried in institutional records.
This book excavates a culture of compiling and text collection that prevailed after the emergence of print but before the ascendancy of the modern, ready-bound printed book. It focuses on the organization and physical assembly of early printed literary texts, both at the hands of their first owners and collectors in the Renaissance and also, necessarily, at the hands of the modern collectors—individual and institutional—who have reorganized them, classified them, and made them available to us in libraries. Its premise is the observation, shared by bibliographers and recent historians of the material text, that books have not always existed in discrete, self-enclosed units. In the early handpress era, the printed work was relatively malleable and experimental—a thing to actively shape, expand, and resituate as one desired. Copies of Shakespeare’s quarto plays and poems were bound into custom anthologies; literary masterworks were mixed with pamphlets and other printed ephemera to form topical Sammelbände; texts of all kinds were enlarged by writing, binding, and even sewing in additional material. These compiled volumes were not the sealed-off textual artifacts—organized by author, genre, subject heading, and short title—that are found on shelves in most rare-book archives today. (It would take careful curatorial work, we will see, to forge this normative disposition of texts.) Rather, these were fluid, adaptable objects, always prone to intervention and change.
For readers in the Renaissance, compiling was born of the everyday demands of book ownership. As Paul Needham and David Pearson have argued, in the handpress era, “there was no such thing as a ready-bound edition, corresponding to the clothbound books with which we (in Englishspeaking countries) are familiar today.”10 The commonplace notion that early printed texts—particularly the small formats used for vernacular literature—were sold unbound or merely stitched has been refined and extended by Mirjam Foot, Nicholas Pickwoad, and other scholars of bookbinding.11 Often the task of having sheets turned into books fell to the owner at the time of purchase. Other times “certain kinds of popular books, such as religious texts, law books, school books, and classical texts, would sell sufficiently well for the publisher or bookseller to have a quantity ready-bound in stock” (Fig. 2).12 In both cases—user-initiated bindings and partial-edition retail bindings—we observe the tremendous agency of the consumer in determining the physicality of texts, whether through active assembly or perceived measures of popularity. More important, because these handmade bindings were vastly more expensive than the printed sheets of the texts themselves, it was financially necessary to gather multiple works of normal length into single bound volumes to ensure their preservation.13 Thus, with each purchase, the consumer played a role not only in the physical appearance of texts but also in the internal organization of texts in bindings—a central aspect of literate culture that in later centuries would become the province solely of producers. Every bound volume was a unique, customized assemblage, formed outside of an absolute prescription issuing from an author or publishing house. The book, in this respect, had a morphology that it would lose in the era of industrially produced texts and the classification systems based on them. Methods of collecting such books into libraries were correspondingly tentative and exploratory; wills, inventories, and catalogs from the period show a striking variation in shelving habits and methods of text preservation.14 Advances in technology had made it newly possible for an individual to own more books than he or she could possibly read,15 and without established practices for assembling and codifying the mass of texts that one could acquire in this age of cheaper print, readers and book owners experimented with the possibilities.
Figure 2. A seventeenth-century bookshop from Johann Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (London, 1685), sig. N8v, showing books unbound, in stacks of sheets, and bound, fore-edge out, on shelves. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
For writers in the Renaissance, compiling was fundamentally entwined with textual production. This is a crucial theme in the chapters that follow—and a crucial bridge, I contend, between bibliography and the literary scholarship that tacitly, inescapably depends on it. Poets, playwrights, and essayists are by necessity also readers. In any period of written culture, they are subject to historically specific norms and conceptions of the text, embodied in reading and collecting routines, which render the world of words intelligible. The “order of books,” to use Roger Chartier’s influential phrase,16 limits certain modes of writing and enables others in sustaining an accepted range of categories or codes within (and sometimes against) which literary producers work. Bibliographic organization in this elemental sense defines writers’ potential relationship with texts. And in early print culture, this relationship was particularly changeable and dynamic. Jennifer Summit has written of a “formative chapter in their history” in which early modern libraries “actively processed, shaped, and imposed meaning on the very materials they contained.”17 The history of bookmaking in the period is one of rapid “diversification of the product” as binders, wholesalers, and
