Knight 2013

Knight, Jeffrey Todd. Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Sammelbande

"The literary output of the early handpress has, therefore, been disproportionately touched by the modern preference for clean, individually bound books." (3)

"This book excavates a culture of compiling and text collecitont hat 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 collector 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,t hat books have not always existed in discrete, self-enclosed units." (3-4) -- they were "fluid, adaptable objects, always prone to intervention and change" (4)

in user-initiated bindings and partial-edition retail bindings, "we observe the tremendous agency fo the consumer in determining the physicality fo 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, ti was financially necessary to gather multiple works of normal length into single bound volumes to ensure their preservation. 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." (4-5)

"For writers in the Renaissance, compiling was fundamentally entwined with textual production." (5)

"Augmentations, continuations, additions, supplements. Like the bound volumes that accommodated them, printed works of literature in early handpress culture were frequently the outward products of some order of compiling." (7)