Dane 2012

Dane, Joseph A. What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books. University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Print.

• 150: The fact that so many of the early books we encounter in libraries are not in their original bindings has produced among most bibliographical scholars a habit of mind that considers bindings and books two separate things. Bibliographical books are thought to transcend their bindings. I can still, in accord with standard bibliographical thinking, take any book on my shelves, rip its binding off, and have it rebound without changing its bibliographical identity. If we look at early English plays in a library such as the Huntington Library or the Clark Library, with a focused interest only in their earliest distribution and form, we soon learn to disregard bindings altogether: the copies are nearly all in elegant, expensive bindings from the nineteenth century, creating a common genre and form these books may not have possessed in the seventeenth century. The morocco-bound quarto volumes shown in figure 8.3 from the Clark Library reflect nineteenth-century English aesthetics and the importance early English drama had for nineteenth-century collectors and their American counterparts of the twentieth century. But these bindings tell us little about institutions surrounding English drama in the seventeenth century.