assembling verse in much the same way that he assembles his book. This chapter examines both texts side by side to argue that the injunction to compile and imitate in this way was already present in Watson’s sequence, giving us a new way to think about the demands printed verse collections made on readers and the poems that such curatorial routines ultimately helped produce.
The fourth chapter, “Vernacularity and the Compiling Self in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Montaigne’s Essays,” explores the work of assembly in two key texts whose authors forged what we would see as hybrid compilations, much like Lilliat’s. Beginning with a well-known manuscript in Spenser’s hand now at the Folger (itself formerly part of a compilation once in Spenser’s possession) and the famous “Bordeaux copy” of Montaigne’s Essays, I investigate how these two Renaissance authors represented the writing self as a maker or augmenter of books, encoding what they themselves did. Spenser, I argue, marshaled the material features of the early printed text—glosses, woodcuts, typography, the apparatus—in order to announce the arrival of the New Poet in his debut, The Shepheardes Calender. The text, I suggest, is not only appropriative in the sense of deriving models from classical exempla but also in the sense that Lilliat’s is: it inhabits and transforms an existing printed work, The Kalender of Sheepehards, a humble almanac. Montaigne too, I argue, styled himself as an assembler of texts—what he calls a “craftsman”—in his Essays, which are marked by his own practice of inhabiting and expanding printed books and those of his interlocutor, Etienne de la Boétie. Even as Montaigne’s work inaugurates a new, more spontaneous genre of prose, I argue, it develops an older conception of books as fluid and subject to redefinition. “Of Books,” in particular, dramatizes the process of writing in and on books, as The Shepheardes Calender also did, to announce a new role for the writing self in the Renaissance. Both writers, I go on to demonstrate, were themselves generative sources for early readers, who combined and interacted with their printed texts in compilations.
Bound to Read concludes by reassessing the Renaissance “collected works” volume and the authorial corpora they marketed to readers as products of material assembly. Chapter 5, “The Custom-Made Corpus: English Collected Works in Print, 1532–1623,” traces the development of the monumental writer-organized literary volume from the later medieval period to the more well-studied productions of Jonson and Shakespeare. Beginning with The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1532)—the earliest of such literary collections in the vernacular—I demonstrate that bodies of writers’ poetry and drama were recombinant, often functioning as topical compilations or marketing venues for other, related writers’ work, recalling and sustaining the protocols of Middle English book culture in the print period. Moving to the larger Works of Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and others in the early seventeenth century, I show how such collected volumes were produced and used in detachable formats, to be combined with other things; their unified appearance today reflects the familiar curatorial values of author-title-date classification and bibliographical integrity, which only began to systematically guide text assembly after the transition to industrial book production in the modern era.
At our own moment of technological transition, in which ways of using and assigning value to texts once are again in flux, historically grounded understandings of text production are becoming newly important. The extent to which patterns of assembly inform reading and writing is everywhere in evidence today: word processing blurs the once-stable boundary between composition and revision; eBooks and iPods break up the perceived wholeness of cultural products like books and albums; digital textuality and new literary genres such as fan fiction reinstate notions of writing as enlargement and compilation. The surviving archive of early printed texts has again been reassembled and re-presented in digitization projects, which often rewrite the “organically whole text” back into literary history in following bibliographic protocols established in the modern era. Bound to Read calls attention to the limits of the self-enclosed book as a model in a period of new and exciting capabilities, shedding light on a form of textuality that prevailed before modern notions of the book were in place. It urges us to revise accounts of literary production across periods in view of a different type of creative agency—the agency of compilers, curators, readers, programmers, and others who make books, as authors do.
PART I
Readers
CHAPTER 1
Special Collections
Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries
It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where, as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), it turns to stone.
—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1927–1940)
This and the accompanying 11 volumes had been bound together as one, full calf of poor quality over pasteboards…. Book taken down. Pages washed/deacidified in limewater bath and all folios strengthened using Crompton 10 gsm tissue with “lamatec” adhesive. Sewn on 3 tapes, attached to split boards. Bound ¼ Oasis with vellum tops and marbled sides.
—A modern binder’s note in a copy of Shakespeare’s Richard II (1634)
Bookbinding and collecting, like other aspects of the history of reading, are “on the order of the ephemeral.”1 The acquisition, ordering and shelving, use, and conservation of texts in libraries are activities that leave little evidence behind. Firsthand accounts of text assembly and the organization of knowledge in early print are scarce and most often rooted in the perspective of producers, whether in manuals or as documentary by-products of printinghouse accounting.2 In modern rare-book rooms, we might find binders’ tickets or unusually detailed collectors’ notes in the flyleaves of texts showing later curatorial activities. But artifacts in special collections, particularly the highly prized ones, are unforthcoming about their material histories. Only under exceptional circumstances of cataloging or record keeping are we able to learn much about the past lives of the most valuable written works. Two libraries at Cambridge University, however, do give us an exceptional record of the order of books in the handpress era and a surprising look at the reordering of early works in modern archives.
In 1799, a Cambridge cataloger named William Pugh was dismissed from his post for making insufficient progress on a new category of books, the “AB class,” which was to comprise all valuable specimens of early printing then held in the university’s Royal Library.3 Pugh, a respected fellow at Trinity College, had been at the job for nearly ten years, having been hired almost immediately after taking his bachelor’s degree on the strength of his reputation as a voracious reader. He was widely knowledgeable and passionate about working with rare books. But according to contemporary accounts, he was also eccentric, and eventually he became slovenly, obsessive, and antisocial. After his dismissal from the library, Pugh reportedly “dreaded the society of everybody.”4 He would lock himself in his room for long periods, emerging suddenly to scandalize the college by throwing all his linens in the River Cam. One evening after a rash of unexplained vandalism in the town, Pugh was spotted outside of his room and followed. On leaving the college grounds, he retrieved a stick from the water’s edge, walked into town, and proceeded to smash street lamps, shrieking and calling them Robespierre, Danton, or St. Just. Tolerance for fellows’ eccentricities was high at the time, but the incident was enough for Pugh to be dismissed from college and declared insane. Years later he was said to have regained some of his former reputation, but he never returned to work. According to contemporaries, “He still had a somewhat insane look.”5
