Knight 2013

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

• 22: …Artifacts in special collections, particularly the highly prized ones, are unforthcoming about their material histories.
• 25: …[Pugh’s AB Catalog] allows us to compare these early catalog entries to their referent books, now under different classification at the CUL. 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 eb enough (as they say) to drive one mad.
• 26: 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 reduring wear and deterioration, which the handling of books in older, fragile, or multitext bindings is likely to bring about. 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.
• 30: But books and other collected objects are in this respect not so much removed from history (Benjamin points out that history matters very much to the collector). Rather, they are removed from their particular, discontinuous histories of use. Any semblance of their circulation or ownership outside the present collection is erased as they are put into what Benjamin calls “magic circles” on shelves and on display.
• 31: The wide-ranging entries in the AB catalog offer a concrete introduction to the ways in which taxonomies of reading and book ownership vary over time and to the curatorial procedures through which traces of this variability have been submerged in modern collections.
• 37: Like the composite volumes of material that exhibited what we see as thematic or chronological incoherence, the AB-class books that contained works by more than one author were likely candidates for reform in the nineteenth century.
• 39: Documents such as the AB catalog encourage us to consider how our understanding of literary and textual history has been shaped by the archival practices of collecting, codifying, and making books available on shelves and in reading rooms – practices commonly assumed to be objective. …the collectors and archivists whose activities set the terms for our interactions with texts have gone largely unstudied in Renaissance English literary criticism. To what extent, we might ask, has the privileging of certain kinds of text and the relegation of others to tract books (or worse, garbage bins) informed our notions of canon formation or the preferences and habits of readers from earlier periods? Have our default bibliographic distinctions – between incunabula and printed books, or printed texts and manuscripts – trained us to see disruption in the past where there was continuity. The force of this line of inquiry is not to condemn the biases of modern collecting or roll back the work of the collector in the hope of finding something originary [not “unediting” or “uncollecting”]. Rather, like Benjamin, it is to take up forms of collecting as expressions of historically specific desires and material or economic imperatives – behaviors that can teach us about the cultures from which they emerge.
• 52-3: …The very centrality of curatorial activities to literary-historical interpretation that constitutes the argument of this chapter. For in the extant archive of early printed materials, the fullest traces we have of early reading and writing practices are often the remarkable survivals that escaped conservation and reclassification in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. So much primary evidence was lost as modern book owners systematically remade the archive in their own modern image. Perceptions of what was normal and what was anomalous in earlier cultures of the text – perceptions of literary history itself, embodied in library shelves – are shaped to a great degree by the largely silent work of the book collector.