Smyth 2018

Smyth, Adam. Material Texts in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Derrida, bricolage "as the practice of re-using materials in order to solve new problems, of persisting with concepts that are broken but which are useful for the time being -- 'the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from a text or heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined'. Printing is similarly indebted to the recycled the leftover, the repurposed: to misprinted pages used as backing sheets between the platen and tympan; to tiny pieces of paper, narrower than the thinnest blank, squeezed between letters in the forme to tighten the text; to wood blocks of various sizes slotted in to patch together the forme; to the piece of bent wire used to keep the loose lower rooler in place; to the inventive adjustment of orthography to alter a word and thus the line length in pursuit of a justified line; to creative inversions of type when supplies run low. This culture of reuse is encouraged by the fact that printing always produces an excess. ?However small the job, there are the material leftovers, remnants: proof sheets that had been checked and so served their purpose; flawed sheets where the roller fell off or the over-inked type produced a thick blur instead of words. We could throw these away, but since one principle of printing is the extraction of maximal value from minimal resources, the leftovers can be fed back into the process of production: fed back imperfectly, but as best they can. Printing, then, seemed to be a profoundly analogue process: operating not within the 1/0 of a digital economy, but rather on a continuum of tending-towards-better-or-worse." (6)