Redefining manuscript miscellanies

revisit The Whole Book: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9920157893503681

album amicorum / friendship album

Deidre Lynch, "Paper Slips: Album, Archiving, Accident"

“Founded on clipping, both literally and figuratively, albums are books that come together only as other books come apart.” (89)

“The album page as a depository of, and portal to, a past moment, and of the poem as the link connecting the now to the bygone time of a paster reading, thereby connecting readers to lost, absent, or dead friends.” (89)

Garvey 2012, blank books as spaces where archive is repertoire

Derrida, books as a space of gathering together

“The album-keeper ‘’performs archivalness’’ in indulging, through her book, her impulse to treasure, amass, embalm. And yet in this context her impulse often appears to have come uncoupled from the mechanisms of retrieval and information extraction that many commentators deem essential to the idea of the archive. These, it must be confessed, are archives lacking finding aids: to study Romantic album keeping is to confront the distinction between archiving as a process and the archive as a product.” (90)”

Rogue archiving

“Those who archive precious remembrances between album covers also tacitly propose a redefinition of ‘’the book’’ in general as only a provisional, conditional sort of storage system. In there hands, as we shall see, ‘’book’’ signifies a collection point for those slips and scraps, and a way-station that those paper-objects occupied previous to their further detachment and transportation elsewhere.” (90-1)

“In one of the ironies that these albums often trade in, they themselves have had trouble getting remembered — their vexed relation to the category of book, their makers’ simultaneous attraction to and impatience with the storage capacities of the codex form, contributing to the problem. While surviving examples of this book type have now come to rest in research libraries and archives, the volumes’ meanderings across the boundaries of our scholarly categories appear endless. It remains a tricky thing within the history of the book to identify the proper place for handmade, customized volumes of this sort.” (91)