Victorian Rebinding Notes
Binding
Potter, Esther. “The London Bookbinding Trade: From Craft to Industry.” The Library 15.4 (1993): 259–280. Web.
development of industrial bookbinding driven by increased literacy and regular supply of books with same format, like the Bible (bible societies) (265), as well as technology change in the early 19th cent.
259: Mechanization came late to bookbinding. The first machine was not introduced until 1827 and the major developments came in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was in fact the change in the structure of the trade that made it economically feasible to develop machinery. What the binders were adapting to was the growth in the output of books and the emergence of the publisher. 262: Hitherto the principal customer for bookbinding was the private owner who had bought his books in sheets or in some temporary covering such as wrappers or boards, and the binder would receive single copies from an individual customer…. When a publisher had the whole edition in his hands, and especially if his policy was to sell to the trade copies ready bound, the binders would be receiving books in large batches. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century a bookseller’s shop would have shelves of novels and belles-lettres in paper covered boards for the customer to have rebound to his own taste, and shelves of directories and such like in simple sheep bindings. This move towards more standardized bindings was still very far from the uniform binding of a whole edition.
Growth of unskilled labor (increased demand and developing technology) supplanting the traditional role of journeyman, also the increasing specialization of parts of the trade
266: It was not only the Bible binders who were expanding. By the second decade of the century the publisher was no longer a rare phenomenon and the binders were learning to adjust to edition binding. The coming of the annuals put fresh pressure on them. In November 1822 Ackermann introduced the Forget Me Not: a Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1823, and for the next twenty years or so the market was deluged every Christmas with these annuals and gift books. 267: The annuals had other influences on the trade as well. One or two edge gilders had started working for the trade at the very end of the eighteenth century. The rise of the annuals left edge gilding securely established as an independent trade. 268: For technical innovation we must look to the trade binders [vs craft binders]. Bookcloth was devised in the early 1820s by Archibald Leighton for William Pickering. It was not the first cloth to be used for binding. Velvet, for example, had been popular with the Tudor monarchs and in the first quarter of the nineteenth century one or two binders were specializing in silk bindings. The Pickering/Leighton cloth was at first intended for temporary bindings, a smarter alternative to paper-covered boards, and the binding was referred to as ‘cloth boards’; but as the quality of the cloth was improved it was developed into a cheap, practical and attractive alternative to leather, and was a significant step in improving productivity in binding. The breakthrough in the evolution of publisher’s cloth into a permanent and attractive binding came in 1832 with the discovery, again by the inventive Archibald Leighton, that bookcloth could be blocked in blind or in gold by machine.
Example of the cloth and gilding innovation: vol 1 of Byron’s works (London: Murray, 1832) Case binding
270: Casing was not unknown but it had not been popular, although in the late 1820s more cloth cases are found, as for example on the Cadell publication of the Waverley Novels, forty-eight volumes, 1830, which was issued in a very large edition. Casing increased dramatically the speed of the forwarding process, although it did nothing to change the folding and sewing, and consequently the ratio of women to men increased. 275: At the beginning of the century binding was divided into two main categories. The West End binders living in the Strand and in Westminster, and their journeymen wore long black glazed aprons. They made fine bindings for private clients and among them were some of the largest binders, Charles Lewis, Charles Hering, and John Mackinlay. The trade binders who worked for the booksellers lived in Holborn and the City and their journeymen wore green flannel aprons. Butt he dividing line was flexible. The West End binders would put part of an edition (perhaps the large paper copies) into morocco for a bookseller and the trade binders could, and did produce fine bindings for private customers. 276: The growth of edition binding changed the balance. The West End binders continued to work in much the same way as they had been doing at the beginning of the century. They grew somewhat in size but not greatly. The main growth was in trade binding and it was accomplished more by an increase in the size of the firms than in their number. There were still plenty of small jobs to be done for the booksellers, and small workshops abounded, but blocked case binding required machinery and a large scale operation to make it economic. Bookbinding is not easily mechanized and by the middle of the century the only machines in general use were the rolling mill or a hydraulic press, the blocking press, a guillotine for cutting edges, and a board cutter which squared the boards. There was nothing to help with folding and sewing, rounding and backing, or case making. [Edition binding and case binding] Such developments greatly increased the speed of production and so enlarged the binder’s capacity and at the same time reduced his costs… The other side of this coin was the steady erosion of the skill and status of the journeyman. 280: By the middle of the century edition binding was normal; publishers’ bindings were largely case-bound cloth. Though wholesale binding was still far from being mechanized it was organized on mass production lines to match the growing industrialization of printing and publishing. From the late eighteenth century the bookbinders had successfully adapted their methods to the emerging need for edition binding, slowly at first but after about 1800 at a rapidly accelerating pace. Until 1820 it had been done with traditional techniques. In the 1820s and still more in the 1830s expansion was aided by the development of book cloth and the introduction of the first machines. Cloth casing transformed book binding from a cratft to an industry and separated it from bespoke binding which remained a craft.
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.”
Pollard, Graham. “Changes in the Style of Bookbinding, 1550-1830.” The Library 11.2 (1956): 71–94. Web.
72: The bindings which we see and handle today have all been made to meet the requirements of previous owners. We cannot fruitfully consider changes in the style of binding without first considering some of the changes in the owners’ requirements. 73: At the very beginning of the sixteenth century a couple of hundred volumes was a very large private library indeed; at the end of that century it would have been a mere handful among the thousands owned by De Thou. The growing multitude of books forced their owners to range them upright and side-by-side on the shelves, showing only the fore-edge or the back.
Effect of collecting, of more than one book, on the material construction of other books. Material, constitutive intertextuality
74: Love of display is closely linked with another passion – the desire for uniformity. But in the course of the last three centuries subsequent owners, seized with the three passions for identification, for display, and for uniformity, have added many types of embellishment to the backs of books already bound. This creates a serious problem in the study of the chronology of binding styles. It is not uncommon to find a book of (say) 1650 in contemporary binding, even with a dated contemporary note of ownership, but with the gilding on the spine added a couple of hundred years later. At the first glance there is nothing to show that the gilding and the lettering are not contemporary with the binding. 75: [Around 1800] Collectors began to desire a small but select bookcase full of very rare or very fine books instead of lines of shelving loaded with the best editions of all the best authors.
Selection as reading
This contraction of shelf space led to a process of disbanding: the first edition of an Elizabethan play or of Gray’s Elegy was taken out of the fat volume in which it had stood for a century or two with a dozen of its less coveted fellows, and put in a slim binding by itself.
Cf. Dane on how many leaves needed to be worth the binding in EM books
94: The date of this final development [a machine for lettering cloth cases before they were put on the books] may be fixed from a verse in a song sung at the first optional Dinner of the Five Bookbinders’ Lodges in June 1829;
’O, the march of invention has reached us at last and manual labours diminishing fast, Patent cases are made which a long time will last And quite spoil our binding in London. Of late a machine hath been handed about To finish at once a Book clean out, ‘Twill all out pan-tilers quite put to the rout In this beautiful city of London (qtd. from W.C. Boteler, Songs for Bookbinders, 1837) Jensen, Kristian. “Creating a Better Past: Collectors of Incunabula in the Late Eighteenth Century.” Early Printed Books as Material Objects: Proceedings of the Conference Organized by the IFLA Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Munich, IFLA Publications. Ed. Bettina Wagner and Marcia Reed. Berlin: Saur, 2010. Print. 281: Incunabula are books printed in the fifteenth century – but often they hide it well. Many of them look, and not only on the surface, like eighteenth-century books, for the simple reason that what we see is in no small part from the eighteenth century. While one might deplore the loss of fifteenth-century evidence, I will, instead, here confront what we actually have, and consider incunabula as books which existed in the eighteenth century and which were, in that sense, eighteenth-century books. 283: His [Panzer’s] rejection of medieval text exemplifies the enlightenment rejection of those texts which have played no role in the progress of mankind towards greater understanding. In their own environment incunabula would meet a well-merited destruction, for they were texts not merchandise. By being removed from this environment, the books could acquire a modern, progressive meaning and gain a fair price in the market place. Reification and commoditisation and, inevitably, modification, were a way of saving incunabula from themselves. 285: It was given a valuable binding because it was considered to have a status which it did not itself adequately express. [Grammatica rhythmica copy in Rylands Library, rebound by Spencer] 289: We have seen books from the fifteenth century changing decisively from begin texts, important or more often despicable, to being objects, often highly priced incunabula. A discipline was created, able to engage with these books as objects, a historical discipline with minimal roots in the environments of academies or universities or other public institutions, but fully rooted in the world of the market, of collectors, and of dealers.
Foot, Mirjam M. The History of Bookbinding as a Mirror of Society. London: The British Library, 1998. Print.
11: The tendency to speed up production by cutting corners, while at the same time preserving appearances, is a thread that runs through the history of bookbinding from the end of the Middle Ages to the present day. As literacy increased, as more books were produced, bought and bound, as the book became a general commodity rather than a treasure for the privileged, binders adapted their methods and their wares to an ever-changing and expanding market. The impetus provided by the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent and consequent changes in the ways books were produced, the momentous changes in the booktrade during the nineteenth century and the emergence of the publisher as the productive force, are all reflected in the way books were bound and in the transformation of bookbinding from a craft to an industry. Although these developments are best reflected in the plainer trade bindings, the spread of literacy, changes in readership and economic changes are equally clearly mirrored at the more luxurious end of the market. Of course, the introduction of gold, be it gold leaf, gold paint, or sheets of precious metal, as an element of book decoration, remained for a long time limited to those very few who could afford it or who were thought to deserve such a valuable honour. Pratt, Aaron T. “Stab-Stitching and the Status of Early English Playbooks as Literature.” The Library 16.3 (2015): 304–328. Print. 305: Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century owners who were keen to ‘update’ their playbooks then broke these composite volumes back into individual copies, repackaging them in new bindings that turned them into singular, precious, luxury objects. These later owners also gave dedicated bindings to playbooks that had remained in stab-stitched form, obscuring their past or erasing it entirely. 307: For them [Stallybrass/Chartier], the canonization of vernacular drama and the canonization of its authors were both contingent upon whether or not titles were likely to be bound, irrespective of format. In the terms of their argument the stumbling block was less that playbooks were short than it was that they were publications sold without bindings. The two scholars separate books from pamphlets on strictly bibliographical grounds – books were bound, pamphlets were stab-stitched – and they see the distinction as having important cultural ramifications. 312: As mentioned at the outset of this article, later collectors almost always turned their copies of Elizabethan and Jacobean literary works into prize objects reflecting their achieved status as great works of the canon. The books we now cherish, as a result, are the hardest to find in their first structures. This fact makes the project of this article particularly challenging, as it is the original condition of these works and the relationships between them that it seeks most. 321: …bookbinding, as a trade, was driven by an imperative of economy, by consumer demand for copies that were about as cheap as possible. 322: In actuality, the additional cost for a binding would appear to have doubled or even tripled the total retail price of a quarto playbook. 325: …As the survey demonstrates, nothing about owning a stab-stitched quarto would have seemed atypical or down-market at all. 326: So although some individuals did decide to bind their plays into composite volumes, it is misleading to categorize stab-stitching as a temporary structure, as is common in discussinos of early bookbinding practices.
Marks, Philippa. “Binders and Keepers: Bookbinding and the British Museum Library Bindery.” Bookbinder: Journal of the Society of Bookbinders and Book Restorers 16 (2002): 18–30. Print.
18: The impact of bookbinding policy on the development of the British Museum Library is surprising until we learn that ‘in the early years such little money as was available for the collections was for the most part spent on binding.’ The archive references to bindings figure so largely in the institution’s records that it is impossible to supply a comprehensive analysis in this article.
Encouraging!
Although techniques had changed little since the invention of the printing press, the industrial revolution and the advance of science in the 19th century meant that new restoration methods could be devised. British Museum bindery workshops led the way and were looked upon to provide examples of ‘best practice’. 21: …Two years later [1882], the bindings bills were quered for being so high. The Trustees laid down that Eyre and Spottiswoode should cut costs by using half roan, rather than morocco on all but the most frequently used books, and reduce washing and mending. 22: Even in more modern times there seemed to be a gap between the more ‘trade’ oriented binders at the BM bindery, and craft binders who frequently learnt their trade at colleges and worked in small workshops specialising in bespoke work. It is fair to say that throughout its history, the Museum binders cared as much as the Keepers about the appearance of books. This is shown by a poem (item 19 Jaffray 166) composed by Victorian Museum binders. [the poem, “The Bookbinders’ Humble Petition to the Trustees of the British Museum,” in a separate doc) Bindings were required to be strong, long-lasting, and cheap…. Covering materials included leather and cloth; pamphlets, bound in a separate workshop called the French bindery, made do with board bindings. Books that were considered important, including early Bibles, and early editions of Shakespeare, were more lavishly tooled than others. There was a conscious effort to bind sets of books and books about the same subjects in the same style.
A modern sense of uniformity (cf JTK, Benjamin)
23: The 19th century enthusiasm for historic bindings styles is reflected by the fact that tools were cut to imitate earlier styles, for example English 16th century panel stamps. This was not always appropriate, however; the binding on shelfmark BL C.24.c.15, a 16th century English text, is an imitation of a French binding. Many collections acquired by the Library bore coats of arms added by the original owner. In the case of these named collections, the Trustees ordered that stamps be cut so that when items needed to be rebound, they would fit in with the originals. The pattern book of tools used in the BM Bindery notes the ordering of certain armorial designs to identify the collectors including Cotton, Cracherode, Garrick, Harley and Musgrave. 27: The basic requirements for binding work are light, space, good ventilation, a water supply, and a means of heating the tools. Accommodation was also needed for the bindery-run Catalgoue Shop, the place where catalogue entry slips were glued into the printed catalogue
An almost Dickensian sense of rich physical materiality going on in the BL basement.
28: According to Bernard Middleton [Recollections, 2000], the bindery was ‘a substantial brick-built structure, two storeys high, about 100 yards long and 20 yards wide. The ground floor consists of a large hall with small rooms at each end… This main workshop is devoted to forwarding and the more advanced preparatory work for sewing… The upper floor is divided into two main workshops…with smaller rooms at each end. One of the large rooms is occupied by the finishers and the menders, the two departments being ranged down each side of the building by the windows. The other one is occupied by the women’s department.’ Until 1850/51, the grant for bindings was not divided into allocations for the different departments. Binders were paid according to the time taken rather than the number of items dealt with. 29: [1872] Costs also rose due to the Museum binders increasing their charges…. ‘Mr. Rye [Keeper of Printed Books] has directed his attention to the best means of effecting a reduction of expenditure; he has ordered certain classes of books, pamphlets included, to be bound in a cheaper mode, and that such books only should be bound as are most important or which urgently require it.’
Cross reference this with Pratt talking about Stallybrass/Chartier’s problematic distinction between book and pamphlet, which is likely a genealogical descendent of this type of thinking
Pickwoad, Nicholas. “The Interpretation of Bookbinding Structure: an Examination of Sixteenth-Century Bindings in the Ramey Collection in the Pierpont Morgan Library.” The Library 6.3 (1995): 209–249. Print.
209-10: There are two obvious explanations for this variety, one being the process of development over time, particularly as the trade adjusted to the increasing flow of books from the printing presses and attempted to increase output and lower costs; the other is that different countries and centres of book production arrived at different solutions according to their varied traditions and locally available materials. 213: The presence of so many second-hand books also suggests one of the reasons why the collection is so special. The Ramey family did not collect books for show, and were clearly keen to gather the texts they wanted to read as economically as possible. There are no fine gold-tooled bindings, the nearest to a ‘fine binding being a Lyon imprint of 1522 in heavily worn black silk with silk ties; the great majority have little gold or silver tooling, if they are tooled at all. The large number of cheap limp parchment bindings, the presence of one uncut sewn textblock which never had a binding and another bound in boards which never received a covering are clear signs that the Rameys were not concerned with making their books pretty – not even with making them durable. While they were surely not unique in this, the collection is unusual in having survived intact and largely untouched, though a small number were already in their second bindings before they came into the collection. One book which ‘escaped’ temporarily before the Morgan bought the collection was promptly rebound by its new owner, and serves as a warning of the precarious survival of such modest looking books. Now safe from that risk, the Ramey collection offers a rare chance to study in detail bindings which were never thought of as permanent or even worthy of note.
Use to contrast EM printing practices with Victorian along with Pratt Talk about the methodological strength of this study (in last 2 sentences)
217: [Distribution of limp to board bindings, the latter declining as the 16th cent went on] The changeover occurred in the 1550s, probably in response to a worsening of economic conditions across Europe and a general rise in prices…. The coincidence of economic trouble and the introduction of a less complex binding structure suggests a move towards cheaper book production. In an absence of archival evidence, it is again to the books that we have to turn for proof, using at first one simple structural feature – the number of supports on which the books are sewn (between two and seven in this collection). The calculation is based on some very straightforward facts: the more supports a book is sewn on, the longer it takes to sew it, and therefore the more expensive it will be to make.
Would binding structures have been added to cheaply bound books in rebinding? Or sewn in differently?
233: Identifying such indicators of quality [in limp parchment bindings] can place comparatively plain volumes at a much higher level than their exteriors might suggest, and shows that quality is not always associated with elaborate decoration. 246: This study of the Ramey collection shows the potential for drawing such conclusions from a study of the structure and materials of the bindings, with scarcely a sideways glance at tooling, which has as yet offered little help in localizing and dating work in this particular collection. 248: It should also show that even small details of the meanest and plainest of bindings can contribute to our understanding of the economics of the booktrade and the movement of books across Europe. Pickwoad, Nicholas. “Onward and Downward: How Bookbinders Coped with the Printing Press 1500–1800.” A Millennium of the Book: Production, Design and Illustration in Manuscript and Print, 900–1900. 61–106. Print. 61: …If the history of the book is looked at as a process by which ever larger numbers of books were placed into more hands at ever lower prices, then the story does become a bit brighter, and the deterioration in quality can be seen in a different light. So far as the binding historian is concerned, it is a a story of the binding trade facing the realities of increasing demand and financial pressure, sometimes with ingenuity, sometimes with shoddy work and sometimes with straightforward deception – though in the latter case, the advantage was presumably meant to accrue to the binder than the market as a whole. From the end of the middle ages until late in the industrial revolution, the equipment and materials used remained essentially unchanged, to the extent that a binder from an early 16th-century shop could have walked into a [62] workshop in the early 19th century and started work with scarcely a moment’s hesitation – unless it were over the choice of decorative finishing tools he would have found at his disposal. 62: …techniques that have conventionally been considered to be rather recent developments of the trade, in fact first appeared much earlier than has been generally acknowledged. 63: …There were essentially two ways of reducing the cost of a binding and increasing production: either to use cheaper materials (or use them in smaller quantities) or reduce the amount of work involved in making a book, either by speeding up the individual processes or by omitting them altogether. One method reduces the cost of materials, the other increases output, and either could be used individually or in combination. 71: Another historical process which is common to all forms of binding is the way in which they tend to suffer a continuing reduction in the complexity and care of their construction. [Just the long diachronic progression of binding economies] 84: The choice of covering skins does not greatly affect the speed at which a binding can be completed – though cheaper skins will typically receive less work because fine finish is less relevant. 92: The date of the earliest appearance of case binding is as yet unclear, as there are many books from the mid-16th century where the attachment of cover to textblock is by adhesive only – one of the two define features of a case binding – but where it is also clear that the book was covered after the boards had first been attached to the endleaves or endleaf guards (the sewing support slips in these examples are not laced into the boards) and not before their attachment, as a separate unit to be ‘cased-in’ at the end of the binding process. This is the critical distinguishing feature of the case binding, because it is this feature which allows the introduction of parallel production lines, where cover and textblock can be prepared at the same time rather than in sequence. Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. Rutgers University Press, 2002. Print. ix: Dust is the immutable, obdurate set of belief about the material world, past and present, inherited from the nineteenth century, with which modern history-writing attempts to grapple; Dust is also the narrative principle of that writing; and Dust is the joke. 23: The hazards of leather working had been known and recorded in the ancient world. Right through the process, from fellmongering (the initial removal of flesh, fat and hair from the animal skins) to the paring and finishing of the cured and tanned skins, workers were known to be liable to anthrax. In medical dictionaries and treatises of the eighteenth century, ‘anthrax’ meant ‘antracia’, ‘anthracosis’ or ‘carbunculus’, that is, what came in the late nineteenth century came to be defined as the external or cutaceous form of anthrax. Leather workers and medical commentators also knew that the processes of fellmongering, washing, limerubbing, scraping, further washing, chemical curing, stretching, drying and dressing all gave rise to dust, which was inhaled. Descriptions of leather-working in the bookbinding trades also show that the amount of hand-paring, shaving and scraping involved in the process (and productive of dust) remained remarkably consistent across two centuries. In parchment-making, skins were subjected to the same processes as was leather apart from tanning; these, too, changed very little between medieval and modern times. Indeed, the modern treatment of parchment and vellum is almost identical with very old European practices. 25-6: In the same period as the indestructibility and fatality of the anthrax spore came to be understood, archivists and book restorers started to define a type of leather deterioration, particularly in ‘modern’ leathers, those of the post-1880 era, when the book binding and finishing trades began to use imported vegetable cured leather in great quantities. ‘Red powdering’, ‘red decay’ and ‘red rot’ continue to be described in the literature of book conservation. Red rot is as well known among historians as it is among archivists. A crumbling of leather in the form of an orangey-red powdering, it is said to be found particularly in East India leather, prepared with tannin of bark, wood or fruits. It seems then, that dust is more likely to arise from the disintegrating bindings of ledgers, registers and volumes bound at the end of the nineteenth century, than from older material preserved in the archives. But there is a second type of red decay known to conservationists, a hardening and embrittling (rather than powdering) of bindings which occurs most often in leathers prepared before about 1830. This also gives rise to dust in handling. It seems, from the considerable literature on this topic, that the causes of leather rot must be found in the type of tanning agent or agents used (and these have been numerous) making the finished skin more or less vulnerable to atmospheric conditions. Parchment, which is essentially untanned leather, does not suffer from this kind of deterioration. 27: But we can be clearer than Michelet could be, about exactly what it was that he breathed in: the dust of the workers who made the papers and parchments; the dust of the animals who provided the skins for their leather bindings. He inhaled the by-product of all the filthy trades that have, by circuitous routes, deposited their end-products in the archives. And we are forced to consider whether it was not life that he breathed into ‘the souls who had suffered so long ago and who were smothered now in the past’, but death, that he took into himself, with each lungful of dust.
This puts me in mind of Capitalism in the Web of Life
75-6: To want to go to the Archive may be a specialist and minority desire (only a Historian’s desire after all), but it is emblematic of a modern way of being in the world nevertheless, expressive of the more general fever to know and have the past. Wanting the past can be attributed to certain turns of thought by which individual narratives of growth and development (particularly narratives of childhood) have become components of what we understand the modern self to be. ‘History’ is one of the great narrative modes that are our legacy from the nineteenth century, and as a way of plotting and telling a life (of giving shape and meaning to the inchoate items of existence) it is useful to compare it with the modern idea of childhood, and the way in which the remembered childhood – the narrative of the self – has become the dominant way of telling the story of how one got to be the way one is. In the practices of history and of modern autobiographical narration, there is the assumption that nothing goes away; that the past has deposited all of its traces, somewhere, somehow (though they may be, in particular cases, difficult to retrieve). � Tribolet, Harold W., and Kenneth W. Soderland. “Binding Pratice as Related to the Preservation of Books [with Discussion].” The Library Quarterly 40.1 (1970): 128–138. Print.
The dialectic of a [evolutionary?] typology of texts between literary practices and archival practices, including rebinding
128: …The work of the early binder is truly remarkable. He conceived sound constructional techniques, some of which have survived for 1,000 years. As the demand for printed books increased, it is apparent that the quality of binding suffered because inexperienced help with questionable talent was recruited to supplement the output of the skilled binders. Shortcuts followed, and by the eighteenth century one can see evidence of these in the construction and materials used for binding. 129: …The basic fashion of binding was not changed. Many evolutionary variants in binding styles have developed during the past several centuries; yet, as Klinefelter reminds us: “If Christopher Columbus were to return to earth today, one of the things in daily use that he would easily recognize would be a book.”
The preponderance of evolution metaphors in binding history indicating a typological cast of mind over the longue duree
The paper in existing books that require rebinding or restoration, however, presents another problem; here the mistakes of the past are frequently seen and must be resolved. Although paper is the most important element of the physical book and the binding is a protective shell, often the binding outlasts the paper, a condition too frequently seen in many books produced during the past century. 130: Prolonging the life of the book is the logical objective in most instances. However, the manner in which this is done requires intelligent judgment. If the book is a rarity it should be set aside for special treatment in the hands of a skilled binder, who would have the competence to restore or rebind it. An intermediate category should be recognized for those books too significant for the so-called library binding, yet not qualified for the special treatment. The third category should include books that justify simple rebinding. 131: Adhesive binding is not new. Over 100 years ago gutta-percha and other rubberlike substances were used on a large number of new books. Some of these were rather elegant publications. By now, most of these books have probably broken apart as the bonding material crystallized. The process was, however, a beginning; its survival is due chiefly to the improved adhesives made available during the past fifty years. 133: During the last century, tanners made an effort to expedite the process and at the same time gain an unnatural evenness of color by the application of acids that have proved to be injurious and have resulted in an inferior product. The decline of quality tannage is particularly evident in many bindings produced during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Briefly, the group [the Council of the Royal Society of Arts of England’s Committee on Leather for Bookbinding, convened in 1900] determined that protective organic salts found in early vegetable-tanned skins were being washed out in the modern processes, and that potassium lactate should be applied to newly tanned skins. The purpose of the potassium lactate is to prevent the sulphur dioxide absorbed from the urban atmosphere from causing early disintegration in vegetable-tanned leather. 134: Only recently has the craft of binding restoration been recognized as one that requires the skills of the highly competent hand binder, coupled with ingenuity and a thorough knowledge of materials and constructional techniques.
For restoration only: the knowledge was at least there for binders at the BL in the 19th century
Knight, Jeffrey Todd. “Shakespeare and the Collection: Reading beyond Readers’ Marks.” Shakespeare and Textual Studies. Ed. Margaret Jane Kidnie and Sonia Massai. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Print.
177: The entries describe more-or-less identical books: Shakespeare’s play is complete, bound in leather, decorated (copiously) with gold, lettered with the author, title, and date, flanked with protective endpapers, and given a class mark reflecting the order of acquisition in an institutional collection. The uniformity is unremarkable, indeed expected by a modern reader of Hamlet, trained to see copies in predetermined material configurations that are consistent with the literary value and distinction of the work.
178-9: …the essential involvement of collectors, curators, conservators, and consumers in the materiality of these texts. The permutations are also, in an important sense, readings of the play. 181: [limits of marginalia case study for the history of reading] Where markings do survive [rarely in Shakespearean texts], and reading becomes recognizable to scholars only or primarily in forms of marginal response, the history of reception can be unhelpfully restricted to a sequence of particularizing case studies. The more abstract forces of reading and interpretation – markets, norms of ownership, classification systems – that shape literary texts across multiple temporal planes are made to seem natural or objective in turn. A more dialectical approach is needed – one that gives renewed attention to the ‘theoretical constructs’ that define and obscure early modern reading without sacrificing the historical specificity of empirically minded material text analysis. Such an approach might begin with the idea that early Shakespearean texts have ‘implied collectors’ and ‘implied collections’, which inform a work’s meaning by virtue of its situation in a larger network (a binding or library, for example: often several of them over time). 182: Medievalist literary scholars have been quick to take up miscellanies, anthologies, and other collections not just as material artifacts but as culturally resonant ideas: among them, frameworks for reading and canon-formation, and templates for literary production, including Chaucer’s. 183: The fact that most of the surviving pamphlets are now bound individually means that research on Shakespeare’s readers must account for, and draw its insights from, both the imagined collection(s) of early modern book culture and that of the modern library. 184: To see acts of storage, selection, and arrangement as creative and productive of meaning – especially where such acts were not yet prescribed in universal catalogues and commercial book-binding, but also where they were, much later, in modern literary culture – is the challenge of a post-materialist history of reading. 185: …attentiveness to forms of textual organization as reading, as meaning-making. 194: The curatorial histories of texts are a vital, underexplored part of what James Simpson has recently called the préjugés upon which any hermeneutic act depends: ‘An artifact implies its history, and is illegible without habituated understanding of that history’. 195: As William St. Clair has recently observed, ‘Although there has always been much interest in the meaning of certain texts, how they came to be written, and in the lives of their authors, little attention has been paid to the processes by which the texts reached the hands, and therefore potentially the minds, of different constituencies of readers.’
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 preferenes 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.
Stallybrass, Peter. “Marx’s Coat.” Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. Ed. Patricia Spyer. London: Routledge, 1998. 183–207. Print.
183: But while the commodity is a cold abstraction, it feeds, vampire-like, on human labour. The contradictory moods of Marx’s Capital are an attempt to capture the contradictoriness of capitalism itself: the most abstract society that has ever existed; a society that consumes ever more concrete human bodies. For the commodity becomes a commodity not as a thing but as an exchange value. It achieves its purest form, in fact, when most emptied out of particularity and thingliness. 184: To fetishize the commodity is to fetishize abstract exchange-value[.] To fetishize commodities is, in one of Marx’s least understood jokes, to reverse the whole history of fetishism. For it is to fetishize the invisible, the immaterial, the supra-sensible.
Theoretical implications of the commodification of literary heritage
185: [William] Pietz shows that the fetish as a concept was elaborated to demonize the supposedly arbitrary attachment of West Africans to material objects. The European subject was constituted in opposition to a demonized fetishism, through the disavowal of the object. It is profoundly paradoxical that widely antagonistic ideological critiques of European modernity share the assumption that modernity is characterized by a thoroughgoing materialism…. But to oppose the materialism of modern life to a nonmaterialist past is not just wrong; it actually inverts the relation of capitalism to prior and alternative modes of production.
The implications of this for literary anti-materiality? Cf. Price
The radically dematerialized opposition between the “individual” and his or her “possessions” (between subject and object) is one of the central ideological oppositions of capitalist societies. 186: What was demonized in the concept of the fetish was the possibility that history, memory, and desire might be materialized in objects that are touched and loved and worn. 188: What clothes Marx wore thus shaped what he wrote. There is a level of vulgar material determination here that is hard even to contemplate. 200: [Talking about HC Andersen’s “The Shirt Collar”] Andersen restores to the notion of the book, which had become increasingly the “invisible” medium joining the immaterial ideas of the writer to the immaterial mind of the reader, the literal matter of the book and the participation of “literature” in the life-cycle of cloth. What Marx restores to the notion of the book, as to every other commodity, is the human labors that have been appropriated in the making of it, the work that produced the linen of shirts and petticoats and bedsheets, the work that transformed bedsheets into sheets of paper. [Transition in 1850s-60s from cloth-based paper to wood-pulp based paper, at ~ the same time when books being rebound, periodization being formed…]
Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton University Press, 2012. Print.
1: [On Boffin and Gibbon] But what if the geographical confusion made bibliographical sense? As a waste-dealer familiar with tanners, Mr. Boffin would have heard of “Russia” as a metonymy for leather produced in that country, calfskin (often dyed red) tanned with birch oil that imparted a characteristic smell. In this hypothesis, the hope that “you might have know’d him” would look perfectly reasonable: cannier than Silas, Mr. Boffin does recognize the book “without,” if not within. If we took Russia to refer to container rather than contents, then the dustman’s class position would reflect less a deficiency of interpretive skill than an excess of sensitivity to color, texture, and smell. His ignorance of the history in the book would throw into relief how much he knows about the history of the book. 2: In short, what meanings do books make even, or especially, when they go unread? And why did Victorian novelists care? That books function both as trophies and as tools, that their use engages bodies as well as minds, and that printed matter connects readers not just with authors but with other owners and handlers – these facts troubled a genre busy puzzling out the proper relation of thoughts to things, in an age where more volumes entered into circulation (or gathered dust on more shelves) than ever before. 3: By 1887, an article titled “Literary Voluptuaries” could declare that “the collector is curious about margins, typography, and casings, but comparatively indifferent to contents” (805). Cover and content, authenticity and appearance: the language of insides and outsides makes any consciousness of the book’s material qualities signify moral shallowness. Leather bindings rub off on their skin-deep owners…. No cheaper cue for our sympathies, no surer predictor of the plot: a character who sells his father-in-law’s library can’t be trusted not to buy a mistress; a character who wants his books bound in leather will marry the blond; a character who manhandles books will abuse children. When John Reed reduces books to projectiles or Tom Tulliver asks why a bankrupt’s books shouldn’t be auctioned off along with his chairs, their refusal to treat the book as a protected category signals their blindness to what’s special about Jane or Maggie. 5: In particular, they excavate the often contentious relation among three operations: reading (doing something with the words), handling (doing something with the object), and circulating (doing something with the object), and circulating (doing something to, or with, other persons by means of the book – whether cementing or severing relationships, whether by giving and receiving books or by withholding and rejecting them). Often pictured as competing, in practice these three modes almost always overlapped. 8: The book’s material properties trump its textual content when its value (whether for use or for resale) lies in attributes orthogonal to its legibility. 10: The Victorians plotted the book/text distinction onto every axis imaginable: temporal (new books get read, old books handled), sexual (the text as the province of male thinkers, the book as raw material for women’s curlpapers or pie plate liners), generic (the text as the object of piety, the book as the butt of jokes), ethical (the text as an aid to selfhood, the book as a spur to selfishness), social (the text as the business of intellectuals, the book of filthy rich bibliophiles or literally dirty rag collectors), even disciplinary (the text as the purview of Skimpoleanly aesthetic sensitivities, the book of Gradgrindianly empirical plodders). 11: In social terms, the professional middle classes’ rejection of materialism left the book-object in the hands of effete gentry (the owners of country house libraries as selfish hoarders), rich vulgarians (Manchester manufacturers’ wives who chose books to match their color schemes), or poor illiterates (costermongers who priced a book by the absorbency of its pages). 17: The text signifies individual freedom, the book social determinism; the text generates empathy among different classes and genders, while the book marks differences of rank and age. Benjamin, Walter, and Rolf Tiedemann. The Arcades Project. Harvard University Press, 1999. Print.
Benjamin, Walter, and Harry (trans) Zohn. “Unpacking My Library.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 59–67. Print.
Models of Polychronic Materiality
Gidal, Eric. Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Print.
12: I deploy the hybrid taxonomy of the Ossianic unconformity as a figurative conceit to explore how a marginalized and discredited literature provides a compelling language to register and reflect upon the social and spatial disruptions of industrial modernity and the stratigraphic consciousness of geological deep time. 14: As the land itself becomes perceived less as a place and more as a spatial and temporal event, the book comes into its own as the authentic Ossianic object – a memorial record of a vanishing moment within the landscape of industrial modernity and a product of the urbanized communicative networks facilitating the shaping of that new terrain. 15: These geological forms, both past and present, help us to perceive the environmental significance of textual irregularities in the poems of Ossian through a kind of biblio-stratigraphy. As geological unconformities reveal periods of dislocation and erosion in the discontinuous strata of sedimentation, textual unconformities reveal periods of economic displacement and environmental transformation in the irregular divisions assembled on the surface of the page. 161: The mariner who gazes across to the tombs of ancient warriors, when standing on board an iron steamer, gains new status as a reckoning with a future state, an insertion of possibilities within the elegiac mechanisms of Ossianic verse, and a dialogue between stratigraphic inscriptions and the engines of the industrial age. 179-180: The mariners who gaze upon the warrior’s tombs now ride aboard an iron vessel. The books they hold in their hands, interchangeable and reproducible products of steam-powered knowledge, have become the new standards of authenticity to measure the land upon which they gaze. And the rocks that they encounter have been sliced and quarried, revealing sedimentary evidence of shifting continents and rising and receding oceans over eons of Earth’s vast history as well as the far more recent intrusions of industrial terraforming and economic exploitation. 181: …I have sought to underscore the critical capacity these reflexive and mediating laments acquired over the course of the nineteenth century. The long reception history of these poems, which were themselves contorted records of a much longer history of reception and transmission, is as integral to their meaning as the Gaelic legends and ballads they reshaped. The uniquely hybrid quality of these volumes and their layered sediments of translation and divergence reveal variations and irregularities born of a momentous acceleration in environmental history. The textual and rhetorical unconformities with which we have been occupied bear signatures of violent contests of displacement and extraction in an industrializing archipelago, an “incremental and accretive” unfolding of what Rob Nixon has termed the “slow violence” of environmental degradation. 182-3: Lined up on a bookshelf, these works form a kind of biblio-stratigraphy of textual sediments and paratextual intrusions. Tracing the signatures of social and spatial changes that have produced them allows us to perceive the dynamic and protean nature of environmental and social conditions over wide scales of time and to recognize in the books themselves textual manifestations of the proleptic self-eulogy that Macpherson made a rhetorical master trope of his Ossianic poems.
Lesser, Zachary. “Hamlet” After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Print.
- The First Edition of the Tragedy of Hamlet, Payne & Foss, 1825 5: The entire textual history of Hamlet is haunted by bibliographic ghosts. 8: [About Urne Buriall] The sudden emergence of objects from the past provokes a kind of explanatory fever while resisting any easy assimilation into our received orders of knowledge. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past 9: The past grows from the accidents of survival, and our histories are written out of such simultaneously ordinary and numinous things as the urns contained. 10-11: The central argument of this book is that Bunbury’s discovery, itself a historical accident, has had profound effects on our understanding of Hamlet, of Shakespeare as an author, and of the nature of the Shakespearean text. These effects have gone unnoticed, however, because they derive from what I call the “uncanny historicity” of Q1, which does not easily fit our usual modes of historicist scholarship. The Literary Gazette perfectly captured the strangeness of Q1 by terming it a “new (old) Play”: Q1 is simultaneously a text of 1603 and a text of 1823. Behind Freud’s conception of the uncanny lies just the sort of temporal confusion that Q1 embodies: then impinges on now as the forgotten or concealed past returns to life in the present, producing a disorienting sensation of alterity within familiarity. This “new (old) Play” comes “before” Q2 and F, published earliest of the three, and “after” them, becoming widely known only after two centuries of editing, performance, and criticism had raised Hamlet to the pinnacle of English literature. The immediate reaction to Q1 in the nineteenth century entirely depended on this uncanny temporal oscillation, as does the ongoing and shaping power it has had on twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas of Hamlet. 11: Q1 is thus anachronistic in the root sense of that word. The Greek prefix ana- can signify not only “against” or “backward” – yielding the common meaning of anachronism as misplaced in time – but also “again” or “anew,” suggesting the oddity of a belated return that, Rip Van Winkle-like, scrambles our expectations of temporal order and progression. Q1 comes back again in time, in the wrong time, but also just in time (inevitably so) for the role it is to play in its “own” time. As Margreta de Grazia has noted, in “the field of literary studies, as presently historicized, nothing could be worse than to be accused of anachronism.” But what to do when history itself is unsettlingly anachronistic? 12: the totalized synchrony of New Historicism 13: …Our literary histories lead us to imagine, on the one hand, an orderly diachronic parade of movements, texts, and authors in a kind of secular typology of supersession, and on the other, a synchronic coherence that ties literary works to the period of their creation. Indeed, the diachronic transformation of one period into the next depends on the synchronic uniformity attributed to each. But Q1 “belongs” as much to the early nineteenth century as to the early seventeenth century, not because we can trace a continuous chronological path from its publication to its later nineteenth-century “reception” – quite the opposite – but rather because Q1 seems to flicker back and forth between 1603 and 1823. Our usual historicism cannot imagine that these two dates might coexist as a single “period,” strangely disconnected from the intervening years. 17: …Historicist scholarship repeatedly discovers in archival research, philological inquiry, and bibliographic analysis truths about the Shakespearean text that in fact derive from the very process of discovering them. [“recursive progression”] 21: I show how these contingent “truths” about Hamlet have become true only through a long process of critical, editorial, and theatrical engagement with the uncanny historicity of Q1. The genealogy of these pseudodoxia challenges the historicist methods of reading that have long dominated Shakespeare studies and prompts a rethinking of our critical and editorial practices. 23: strict “unediting” vs. understanding the “sedimented history of critical engagement”
Harris, Jonathan Gil. Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Print.
Underwood, Ted. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford, California: Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013. Print.
Hayot, Eric. “Against Periodization; Or, On Institutional Time.” New Literary History 42.4 (2011): 739–756. Print.
739: Within such a field the master concept governing any single work of scholarship (a particular idea of society, of the literary, of the performative) becomes a visible choice, which must be justified against unchosen alternatives. 740: But that obviousness makes it difficult to explain the near-total dominance of the concept of periodization in literary studies, a dominance that amounts to a collective failure of imagination and will on the part of the literary profession. The profession has failed, first, to institutionalize a reasonable range of competing concepts that would mitigate some of the obvious limitations of periodization as a method, and, second, to formalize in institutional form significant transconceptual categories that would call attention to the boundaries periodization creates within the historical field of literature. 742: None of this militates against the concept of the period in any specific way, or prevents one from recognizing all the great work done under its aegis (and under the rubric of New Historicism more specifically). It does, however, open the door to asking about the impact of periodization’s dominance of scholarship in the humanities, which reflects badly on our collective awareness about the ideas governing our institutional and scholarly behavior. 744: Period is the untheorized ground of the possibility of literary scholarship. And so we live with its limitations and blind spots. [specifically the canonical set of periods, geographical limits, and that “periods instantiate more or less untheorized and inherited notions of totality…fairly unsophisticated ones,” “codify an unstated theory of how periodization works in historical time,” “promotes historical microscopism”] 745: …periods do not just “secretly imply or project narratives or ‘stories,’” but do so in relation to a larger “historical sequence in which such individual periods take their place and from which they derive their significance.” This remark by Frederic Jameson directs us to the ways any single period theorizes an entire apparatus or background against which its own essence emerges, and thus allows us to grasp the dually totalizing nature of periodizaton, which operates both as an inward-directed theory or typology of wholeness or essentiality, and as an outward-directed presumption about the historical bed that hosts or incubates, at regular intervals, those types of wholeness. 745-6: Do periods get shorter because something changes in the nature of historical time? …The decreasing size of periods is an effect of chronological narcissism, in which the receding and foreshortened past plays Kansas to our Manhattans. 746: The problem is that the structural relationship between the particular and the general produced by these limitations encourages certain kinds of questions and certain kinds of answers, and discourages or makes impossible others. 748: Conceptually, again, we have a number of options, including the longue duree model developed by the Annales school [book history’s genealogical inclination toward this] (finding its purchase in literary studies now in the sudden, occasionally alarming popularity of world-systems theory), the Marxist dialectic, or, more speculatively, concepts like Derrida’s hauntology (which is, in some respects, the application of the logic of individual memory developed by Freud to the historical sphere), or Badiou’s event, all of which gives us theories of historical development that do not require the one-thing-after-another, and-then-the-period-changes model that governs the current institutionalization of periods. [749] (Here Benjamin’s remark that the “concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time,” invites us to consider how the putative temporal rupture created by the period boundary operates within a common-sense framework of historical movement. That is why periodization cannot recognize what Benjamin calls the “leap into the open air of history” that is the dialectic.) Citing “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations 752: In the long run the dominance of periodization, and its imbrications with institutional time, derives not from our incapacity to develop alternatives, but our incapacity (or unwillingness) to institutionalize those alternatives in ways that would affect the way we think and teach, publish and hire – and indeed our inability to institutionalize forms of suspicion, transformation, and change that would continuously mitigate the necessary negations of our most cherished and useful definitions.
Guldi, Jo, and David Armitage. “The History Manifesto.” (2014): 176. Web.
1: …Almost every aspect of human life is plotted and judged, packaged and paid for, on time-scales of a few months or years. There are few opportunities to shake those projects loose from their short-term moorings. It can hardly seem worth while to raise questions of the long term at all. 7: Indeed, in a crisis of short-termism, our world needs somewhere to turn to for information about the relationship between past and future. Our argument is that History – the discipline and its subject-matter – can be just the arbiter we need at this critical time. 8: It was during this period [last quarter 20th cent], we argue, that professional historians ceded the task of synthesizing historical knowledge to unaccredited writers and simultaneously lost whatever influence they might once have had over policy to colleagues in the social sciences, most spectacularly to the economists. 8-9: The return of the longue duree is how we describe the extension of historians’ time-scales we both diagnose and recommend in this book. 10: Building on earlier models of the longue duree, in this chapter, we set forward three approaches that history offers to those in need of a future: a sense of destiny and free will, counterfactual thinking, and thinking about utopias. Those freedoms of history, as we shall show in the chapters ahead, set aside historical thinking from the natural-law models of evolutionary anthropologists, economists, and other arbiters of our society. 15: The attempt to transcend national history is now almost a cliché [or even a Eurocentric one, cf. Chakrabarty], as most historians question the territorial boundaries of traditional historical writing. Much more novel, and potentially even more subversive, is the move to transcend conventional periodisations, as more and more historians begin to question the arbitrary temporal constraints on our studies. Transnational history is all the rage. Transtemporal history has yet to come into vogue. 16: The ambition of Braudel and many of the historians of the Annales group who followed him in his quest was to find the relationship between agency and environment over the longue duree.
It’s interesting how in the history of the book discipline that, though it owes its genealogical origins to the Annales school, it’s been sifted into periodization.
17: Such a myopic form of historical understanding, tethered to power and focused on the present, evaded explanation, and was allergic to theory: in Braudel’s view, it lacked both critical distance and intellectual substance. 29: As baby-boomer historians later retreated from direct engagement with these issues into the micro-history of race and class [how do we not flatten those?], long-term history became the domain of other writers without the historian’s training – some of them demographers or economists employed by the Club of Rome or the Rand Corporation…. Dirty longue duree history blossomed, but historians were not the ones with their hands in the dirt. 30-1: Insofar as both climate science and economics have often left us with a vision of the world in which alternative futures are scarce or non-existent, history’s role must be not only to survey the data about responsibility for climate change [Andreas Malm], but also to point out the alternative directions, the utopian byways, the alternative agricultures and patterns of consumption that have been developing all the while. 36: We need a careful examination of these events, building upon existing micro-historical studies towards the pinpointing of particular turning-points and watersheds in history, moments of revolution that destabilised institutions, climates, and societies. This long-term history needs to benefit from micro-history’s refinement of the exemplary particular, those short moments in history during which the structures of power, hierarchy, and imagination are revealed.
Drawing an analogy between marginalia case studies to a longue duree history of reading
Indeed, the number and variation of turning-points and eras that historians have proposed suggest, as Jurgen Osterhammel conjectures, that ‘the sense of epochs have been steadily weakening’. The horizontal chronology of one age following the next is being succeeded, in terms of how we think about time, by a topological flow of ‘multiple modernities’, intersecting and weaving, in which the forces of causation, according to Manuel De Landa, may be conceptualised as different elements – rock, water, and air – all changing, but some changing faster th an the others. 37: Longue-duree history allows us to step outside of the confines of national history to ask about the rise of long-term complexes, over many decades, centuries, or even millennia: only by scaling our inquiries over such durations can we explain and understand the genesis of contemporary global discontents. It proposes an engaged academia trying to come to terms with the knowledge production that characterises our own moment of crisis, not just within the humanities but across the global system as a whole.
Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1972. Print.
297: The familiar three-part division of the modern book trade into publisher-wholesaler, printer, and retail bookseller was established in Britain during the early years of the nineteenth century. Henceforth the central figure in the trade was the specialist publisher, who wholesaled his own books but usually not those of other publishers; who was not a wholesale stationer and who might not even have a retail bookshop; and who (with a few exceptions such as the University presses) was not a printer or a binder. The specialist publisher organized the production, advertising, and wholesaling of editions, usually at his own risk but sometimes on commission for authors; and he financed the publication of editions of which he owned or leased the copyright. His position was pivotal because he was not only the organizaer but also the financier and indeed the speculator of the book trade. 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.
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