Price 2012

Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton University Press, 2012. Print.

• 219: In an age of taxed paper, reading constituted only one point in a cycle: beginning its life as rags no longer worth wearing, the page dwindled back into paper once its content was no longer worth reading. In the wood-pulp era, only bibliographers continued to notice the prehistory and afterlife of legible objects.
• 220: …this chapter will suggest that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century – the dematerialization of the texrt and the disembodiment of the reader – in fact have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood pulp paper (in the late nineteenth century) and then (in the twentieth) of plastics.
• 221: London Labour decouples the realist mode from fictionality
• 224: There’s something especially poignant, however, about measuring the ephemerality of a text against the adaptability of a book, because the contrast inverts the traditional hope that words will survive the surfaces on which they’re inscribed – whether brass, stone, or marble and gilded monuments, much less paper. Within that tradition, pages transcend the temporal limits that paper embodies. If texts broker a transhistorical meeting of minds, the book – “Poor earthly cask of immortal verse” (Wordsworth) – can never break free of a particular location in space and time. Mayhew turns that contrast on its head, pitting the durability of paper against the disposability of words. [In 2.9 waste collector section]
• 226: Friswell’s two possible destinations for a no longer readable book – butter wrapping and manure – remind us that paper ended its life as an aid to ingestion and excretion. And as it accumulated traces of its successive users’ hands, or intestines, the book reneged on its traditional mission of transcending the body.
• 231: If wastepaper looms large in the slums that Mayhew describes, the simplest explanation is that the Victorians associated mental operations (such as reading) with the upper classes, manual gestures (such as wrapping) with the lower.
• Before the invention of toilet paper and paper bags – both first produced for sale in the same decade [1860s] as London Labour – and the even more spectacular rise of plastics, old paper was inextricably linked to food.
• 232: [Macaulay in “Mr. Robert Montgomery”] The fashionable novels of eighteen hundred and twenty-nine hold the pastry of eighteen hundred and thirty.
• 232-3: In a culture that dismisses texts as “not worth the paper they’re printed on,” to register the usefulness of the book-object – how fast it catches fire or how much mutton grease it can sop up – is to assert the uselessness of its contents…. Over the course of a printed object’s lifetime, texture replaced text as the source of its value.

233: And James Simpson has observed that during the dissolution of the monasteries, those into whose hands they fell “reserved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr iakes, some to scoure theyr candel styckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and the sope sellers, and some they sent over the see to the bokebynders” (Simpson, “Bonjour paresse” 258). William Sherman adds that cutting and pasting could just as easily connote reverence, same action, difference cause. The pyres of Nuremberg confer a dignity lacking from the kitchen fire.

• 235: Tracing the book’s origins exalts; predicting the book’s fate degrades: a similar symmetry links Sartor Resartus’s reflection on the mortality of books – “is it not beautiful to see five million quintals of Rags picked annually from the Laystall; and annually, after being macerated, hot-pressed, printed on, and sold – returned thither; filling so many hungry mouths by the way?” – with Carlyle’s boast that a letter from John Sterling attacking SR would be “made into matches.”
• 239: In anticipating its own disposal, London Labour drags its readers down to the level of grocers. Where most Victorian reformist genres, from the political speech to the industrial novel, leveled up – asking middle-class readers to endow working-class characters with an interiority that mirrored their own – Mayhew levels down, reducing the page in front of us to tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper. Texts from Oliver Twist to Ranthorpe to David Copperfield withdraw the book from the marketplace; Mayhew instead reminds us of the resale value of the page before our eyes. [“the outer pages of this periodical will, in future, be used as a wrapper, intended to be cut off in binding”]