Needham explored the potential losses involved in such practices in an early account of English Sammelbände, and Gillespie, Nicholas Pickwoad, and John Szirmai have since nuanced our understanding of the anachronism of modern bookbinding.20 Early binding, we know, was not an absolutely integral part of the production process; over the course of the sixteenth century and into the Renaissance, the work of determining a material assembly fell to retailers and, increasingly, to readers.21 Books formed according to the desires of the early consumer—whether sent to the bindery after the purchase or placed on sale ready bound owing to popular demand—could at any point in their life span be broken down and reconfigured as new desires or changes in ownership arose. More important, the cost of binding a book in the period has been estimated at 1s 6d, many times higher than the cost of most printed texts themselves.22 So especially in the case of small formats such as quartos and octavos, which encompass most printed works in the emergent European vernaculars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, single-text volumes in leather bindings were all but impracticable as a mode of storage.23 The demands of book ownership were such that vernacular works were, as a matter of routine and preservation, compiled into flexible, anthology-like formats that do not easily map on to classification systems in modern libraries. Text producers in this early period, as we might imagine, designed and marketed texts accordingly, as “annexed” or annexable to other texts. Early printed works, as Gillespie has explained, “suggest a remarkable openness on the part of printers and owners to the malleable, multiple forms of books.”24
Occasionally in archives we find traces of these malleable, multiple forms, which give us a glimpse into what Pugh must have seen at Cambridge. Most literary-historical researchers have at one point or another requested a rare book at a special-collections library only to find that it is bound with other rare books; such arrangements often no longer make sense to us, but they did to their earliest owners, who read and preserved them this way. Common, less familiar forms of evidence include binders’ notes, such as the one in my epigraph, and referentless contents lists written in by early readers, which sometimes remain in the flyleaves of books that were rebound into individual units in modernity. These documents tell us what modern catalogs as a rule do not: that the early texts we research once existed in material configurations substantially different from the ones we observe now in rarebook rooms.25 Such traces are difficult to locate because archives have selected against them. As Needham’s pioneering study of the problem made clear, modern collectors, both individual and institutional, had little patience for high-value texts that seemed to exceed the boundaries of a conventionally defined book.26 Focusing on Sammelbände containing early texts printed by William Caxton as a case study, Needham demonstrates that “a curiosity about … potential clues to the original marketing, or to the original purchasers of Caxton’s books was alien to the mentality of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century connoisseur.”27 In acquiring rare books, collectors would most often impose on them—by means of rebinding, cleaning, and filling in or even forging missing text—a modern idea of what a book ought to look like. Needham concludes that collectors wanted books to reflect their possession and their possession alone. “Almost all copies, therefore, as they came into the hands of antiquarian booksellers and clients, were cut out of old covers and put into new ones…. The result was inevitably something smaller, thinner, meaner, and less honest than what had been before.”28
Such modifications, Needham finds, touched more than two-thirds of the early printed books in his sample.29 This dynamic, he argues, represents a “failure of historical imagination” on the part of modern collectors—an almost systematic effacement of evidence for reading in the name of owning clean, individually bound books.30 As we might expect, these archival interventions have disproportionately shaped texts of high literary or cultural significance. The more a rare book was sought after by modern collectors, the likelier it was to be severed from its material history and reconstituted according to modern specifications. Indeed, scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature have noticed, if not explicitly investigated, this archival bias as it shapes our knowledge of how canonical texts were read and circulated. Stephen Orgel, in a study of readers’ marks in an early copy of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, has noted that “one of the strangest phenomena of modern bibliophilic and curatorial psychology is the desire for pristine copies of books, books that reveal no history of ownership.”31 William Sherman has surveyed the attitudes toward early books in the Renaissance and today, documenting a broad cultural shift from readers who routinely wrote and intervened in published texts to readers who are institutionally prohibited from doing so.32 “Within the book trade,” Sherman explains, “there has been a history of aggressive practices involving bleaching the pages and trimming their margins down to the very edge of the printed text.” The effect is not only to erase signs of earlier use but also to reinforce the boundaries of an “ideal” copy—boundaries that may not have been self-evident before the modern imposition. As Sherman argues, “The ideal copy becomes, in a paradox that is all too familiar to museum curators and art conservators, a historic object with most of the traces of its history removed.”33
Perhaps the most famous theorist of modern collecting and the historicity of collected objects is Walter Benjamin, whose musings in the Arcades Project form an unlikely preamble to concerns over nineteenth-century archivology among scholars of the book.34 In this, Benjamin’s self-proclaimed masterwork, the collector figure is vital to the task of capturing nineteenthcentury bourgeois society in its complexity. The archetype is often taken to refer to the collector of antique objects or curiosities, but Benjamin is careful to offer as expansive a definition as possible, incorporating and at times highlighting the book as a kind of collector’s item.35 Already in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin had used his own books to theorize the collection in general terms as “a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order.”36 Forsaking this artificial order for what he called “the prismatic fringes”37 of the library—the loose paper, the unbound, uncataloged, and as yet unshelved—Benjamin famously meditated on the fetishistic nature of collecting, a notion that becomes the basis of his extended analysis in the Arcades Project. Here, exploring more fully the psychology of the collector, Benjamin affirms that “the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion.” The collector sets a world of scattered and incommensurable things into order through a process that Benjamin identifies as abstraction or decontextualization—a salvaging of the object from its own perceived disorganization, irrationality, or dividedness so that it forms a self-bounded talisman of ownership and a metonym for the collection itself. Benjamin summarizes, interrogating this sense of boundedness: “What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this ‘completeness’? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection.”38 For collectors, broadly defined, this desired completeness is “mint” or “original condition”; in collections, it is the complete “set” or “series.” For book collectors, a number of analogous terms orbit around the bibliographic category of “perfection”: a text is understood to be “perfect” (and of its maximized potential value) when it is bounded and self-enclosed, with nothing lacking or added on and with a clear location in a series, such as the Short Title Catalogue, or a class catalog, such as William Pugh’s.
In setting forms of completeness like these in diametric opposition to utility, Benjamin alerts us to the paradox in modern collecting practices that strip away objects’ “original functions” in restoring them, as Sherman affirms, to their so-called “original conditions.” But books and other collected objects are in this respect not so much removed from history (Benjamin points out that history matters very much to the collector). Rather, they are removed from their particular, discontinuous histories of use. Any semblance of their circulation or ownership outside
