Gillespie 2004

Gillespie, Alexandra. “Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbände.” The Huntington Library Quarterly 67.2 (2004): 189. Print.

189-190: [Didbin’s account of taking apart a sammelbande at the Roxburghe sale, 1812] …a day of unexampled courage, slaughter, devastation, and phrensy—unprecendented, and never again (it is hoped to be witnessed within the arena of an Auction-room! …The ‘grand total amount’ (to speak emphatically, and according to precedent) of the sums given for these slim and slender articles was 538l.3s. ‘But why select these?’ replies the reader. ‘It makes very good for my anecdote,’ I rejoin. Know, therefore, and believe, that these very articles were formerly bound IN ONE VOLUME, in the collection of Dr Farmer…which ‘one volume’ was sold for Twenty Five Guineas ONLY at the sale of the library. The volume was indeed ‘without propriety deemed to be matchless.’ …What a walking feast was this, therefore!—and will pedestrian matches ever be made, or to be made…produce the sum which that enchanting volume brought, when divided into parts, and encased in dark red-morocco surtouts?

195: Example of disbound sammelband ordered by Bradshaw – the Ferrers Sammelband, CUL Inc 5.J.1.1 [3482-88 and 3490]

…at the instruction of the University Librarian, Henry Bradshaw (1831-1886), they were all disbound in the mid-nineteenth century and only later rebound, in green morocco. 203: Scholarship on late medieval manuscripts insists upon minute histories of material objects and flexible, multiple ways of making, but also thinking about, those objects. Such work inevitably (if sometimes inadvertently) suggests that bibliographical taxonomies are like the scientific systems described by Foucault in The Order of Things. Both discourses reveal “a swarming continuity of beings, who communicate amongst themselves, mingle and perhaps transform themselves, shift shapes, one into another.” 210: I have argued that the producers of the books in early Sammelbände were engaged in a dynamic process. They allowed their customers a degree of interpretive freedom. They showed an awareness that books as material objects subsist in culture and continue to produce meaning beyond expectation or intention; and the books they produced reveal a resolve to make something of these circumstances, the ordinary conditions for textual transmission. 213: The early English Sammelbande described in this article direct the reader toward less readily apparent bibliographical histories. And these histories suggest that all those who find themselves in thrall to the shifting meanings of books contribute to what makes those books so very “enchanting.”