undoing has interested scholars of the book because, by all accounts, it began with a near-pathological tendency to read rather than merely catalog the texts in the AB class. To the dismay of the university librarians, Pugh would often become fixated on a single volume when adding it to the shelf list; if it was unfamiliar, “he was not content with looking at the title page, but applied himself to reading the contents.”6 This diversion, of course, is the sort of thing the cataloger striving for efficiency is trained to avoid. And indeed, Pugh’s unfinished AB-class catalog, long since superseded, survives today in the Cambridge library archives as a monument to inefficient bibliography.7 Its entries are digressive, unsystematic, and sometimes speculative. Pugh recorded not only titles, authors, and imprints, but also formal features, curiosities in the texts, cross-references, and notes to himself and to posterity with relevant thoughts that crossed his mind as he read. With such a taste for detail, Pugh frequently used up to ten folio-sized pages (rather than the customary line or two) to catalog a single book, piece by piece, at a rate that eventually exhausted the patience of his colleagues (Fig. 4). His waywardness, so the story goes, had no place in a modern library on the verge of reform—of blossoming, as it would over the next century, into a national institution.8 He simply had to be let go.
But what was William Pugh reading on the job? What was so fascinating about a collection of early printed texts to this modern archivist? This chapter begins by investigating the peculiarities of Pugh’s reading materials, which I suggest can be instructive to a history of the book that is only beginning to account for the practices of selection and reorganization that have shaped the libraries and literatures we know today.9 No mere document of bibliographical incompetence, the AB catalog offers something rarely found in the field of textual history: a detailed snapshot of an early printed book collection as it looked to previous generations of readers. As David McKitterick has explained, the Royal Library at Cambridge was acquired in 1715 from Bishop John Moore, who had built his great collection out of the private libraries of English bookmen from as far back as the sixteenth century.10 The AB class was part of an effort to process those books as they moved from individual to institutional ownership. It was designed specifically to accommodate the valuable specimens of early printing from the collection, including incunabula, early sixteenth-century texts, and select literary works from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods.11
In setting William Pugh to work on such materials, the university librarians did an unexpected service to book history. Scholars of early print culture have long found catalogs and inventories from the period to be unreliable guides to the contents of English literary book collections, as compilers tended to record only the first title in a vernacular multitext volume or to relegate such low-status vernacular works to a summary “et cetera” at the end of the list.12 Pugh’s AB catalog, in contrast, is thorough, and obsessively so. Its excess of detail—from the texts in each binding, to the material added in by early readers, to notes on where duplicate copies may be found elsewhere in the library—allows for a privileged glimpse into the formation of a modern archive out of numerous rare-book sources. But most important, as I will demonstrate, it allows us to compare these early catalog entries to their referent books, now under different classification at the Cambridge University Library. And the result is surprising. What Pugh saw in the 1790s is not what we see today. The collection was in large part composed of items that seem now to defy bibliographic categories and textual boundaries: multiple books bound together, printed texts mixed with manuscripts, incomplete and supplemented works, one author with another, prestigious literature with ephemera. By modern standards, it would almost be enough (as they say) to drive one mad.
Figure 4. A leaf from the AB catalog, in which Pugh only recorded two books. The second (shelf mark AB.10.53) was a composite volume containing Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1611). In the catalog entry, Pugh has added, “N.B. E.K.’s Preface.” Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
The processes of archival selection and reorganization that I open up for discussion in this chapter touched most institutional libraries in Anglo-American modernity; the AB class at the University Library is one prominent example that permits a degree of reconstruction. Outside the literary-historical domain, where “rare book” is perhaps not a guiding category in the same way, we find that reconstruction is in some key instances unnecessary. In the second part of this chapter, I turn briefly to a comparable Renaissance-era collection kept fully intact less than a mile down the road from the University Library in Cambridge, at the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College. Here, in the later part of the sixteenth century, the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker undertook to generate, as Pugh would in the 1790s, a full inventory of hundreds of early printed texts in varying states of hybridity and compilation, as they were encountered by their earliest readers. But unlike the texts in Pugh’s AB catalog, the books that were recorded in what became known at Cambridge as the Parker Register were not reorganized or reclassified in the modern period.13 Because of a series of unusual provisions that Archbishop Parker himself built in to the catalog, the collection remains, we might say, unprocessed. The new mode of book preservation, in which valuable early texts are individually rebound and protected as clean, integral copies, did not supplant the older one. The library, as a consequence, is messier and less accessible by modern standards, baffling at times even to resident Parker librarians. Yet, as I will argue, the collection at Corpus Christi College reflects the largely unacknowledged extent to which books were in the early years of print customizable, always subject to enlargement and rearrangement at the hands of users. Because Matthew Parker himself, whose projects and published works are known to us, was the primary collector of these books, the Parker Library also begins to suggest some of the ways in which the malleability of early printed materials could become intellectually generative for Renaissance writers, a theme I explore in the second part of this study.
The Modern Collector and the History of the Book
William Pugh is a liminal figure in the transition to modern practices of collection management and conservation, practices that have recently come under study for their reforming effects on books from earlier periods of production.14 In both individual and institutional collections in modernity, the task of preserving premodern books was often one of reorganizing them into discrete, systematized units—one text per binding, print with print and manuscript with manuscript, in the author-title-date catalog model with which we are most familiar. Modern custodianship rationalized bodies of written information and maximized a particular kind of accessibility while also reducing wear and deterioration, which the handling of books in older, fragile, or multitext bindings is likely to bring about. These efforts also increased returns on investments since clean rare books would fetch more individually on the book market than those bound together.15 Indeed, the first significant incentives for reorganization were likely book auctions, which debuted in the later seventeenth century in England, along with the rise in trade bookbinding toward the end of that century.16 But the process reached its apex in the nineteenth century, when the industrialization of binding and book production made the single, ready-bound printed text the standard.17 The legacy of this period, as Alexandra Gillespie has shown, is on display in our best-known rare-book rooms, where valuable early printed texts are almost always clothed in grand Victorian-era bindings. In her study of Middle English Sammelbände in print, Gillespie relates the story of a nineteenthcentury book buyer who, at an auction of the Duke of Roxburghe’s library in 1812, mused on how “enchanting” a certain early English compilation would be “when divided into parts and encased in dark red morocco surtouts.”18
This is, for the most part, how we find the former AB-class texts at the Cambridge University Library today: individually bound in calf, sheep, or goat, often with gilded edges or matching protective book boxes. Julia Miller describes this artificial contemporaneity and uniformity: “Our hand binders, including our book conservators, have tended to learn their craft from that relatively recent tradition
