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)

"But despite this shared emphasis on compiling and text assembly in the rhetoric of literary production, scholars of the period thinka bout and interpret writing as if it takes place only i nthe world of ideas, not in embodied practice. While our metaphors are insistently material, in other words, we imagine this particular, habitual intertextuality in Renaissance letters unfolding discursively. The literary producers and archival products examined in the chapters that follow demonstrate that, on the contrary, the Renaissance inclination to 'gather' and 'patch' was a more physical, ingrained thing than our assumptions about practice have allowed. The readers and writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not simply think of their books as aggregations of text; they physically aggregated, resituated, and customized them. Out of necessity and desire, they assembled volumes into unique configurations and built new works out of old ones. Models of literary production in the period were to a perhaps surprising degree predicated on the possibility that a text could be taken up and joined to something else. The bifurcation between ideas and material practice -- between making works and making books -- is, like the modern collectors' binding, a later imposition." (8)

etymology of compile -- compiling "was production, strictly speaking, in the semantics of Renaissance literary activities" (8); compiling as composing, defined in Palsgrave's 1530 translation dictionary as a form of authorship (8)

"The field-specific claim of this study then is twofold. It will argue first that books in early print culture were relatively open-ended and to a great extent bound (in both senses) by the desires of readers, and second that the attendant practices of compiling and collecting came to have an important structural impact on the production of Renaissance literature." (9)

Renaissance had the "idea of the literary work as flexible and contingent, and a pervasive, underlying idea of writing as something closer to what we would call repurposign or recontextualization" (9)

Special Collections: Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries

Pugh's AB catalogue, 1790s, showing multiple books bound together (25)

"The evidence from PUgh's entries and subsequent annotations consistently suggest that the only books unlikely to be subjected to reform in a modernizing institutional library were those perceived as authorial, nonvaluable, chronologically or thematically consistent, and purely one bibliographical type or another. With few exceptions, we now know such books as tract volumes." (38)

Parker, removal of eleven leaves from Anglo-Saxon homily manuscript, inserted into a different composite manuscript of thematically unrelated material; covered other bits of text on these pages that he was not interested in with scraps of vellum (42)

Matthew Parker, removing leaves from one book to adorn another (42)

"The most notorious instance of Parker's textual manipulation is MS 197, a fragment of an eigth-century gospel. When the manuscript came into his possession, Parker reversed the canonical order of the gospels -- placing John before Luke -- because, it is said, he found the cover illumination of the former more visually appealing." (41) -- see Little Gidding