So, one day when I wasn't wandering the beach (sadly, I never did get to the beach) I had the pleasure of hearing a paper delivered by Jonathan Senchyne who is currently completing his dissertation at Cornell University. Senchyne presented on rag content in early modern paper and the textual evidences of that material reality in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet. (Take another look at "Author to Her Book," and you will begin to see that presence!) During his presentation, Senchyne offered us the startling image of a page from the Library of Congress copy of Tenth Muse with a piece of unprocessed rag still clearly visible in the paper. One of the great pleasures of doing book history scholarship in the archive is that there are still such revelations to be granted by the artifact. As Senchyne presents it, the rag in the page at the Library of Congress is beautiful emblem not only of the dependence of the paper industry upon domestic sphere but also a reminder that Bradstreet was – like other early modern readers and writers – savvy about the international, material contexts of print production.The image of this book put me in mind of another artifact. The American Antiquarian Society owns a 1678 Boston imprint of Bradstreet’s poems, and the covers of this volume are stiffened with printer’s waste paper. Clearly visible within the stretched leather edges of the inside cover are the discarded pages of what appears to be an Algonquian language catechism. Here we see Bradstreet’s poems, originally printed in England, now reprinted in New England with posthumous additions, all bound up in the materiality of European-Indian encounter and the rising local print economy. To me, this volume has always served as a material emblem of the early history of New England printing.
Hearing Senchyne’s account of the rags in the page, I was reminded that there are many such material emblems out there to tantalize our historical imagination. I began to think more about the role of the artifact in book history approaches to literary scholarship. Specifically, how do we deal with the serendipity and idiosyncrasy of the material archive? How broadly can we make claims based on individual cases? How do we put two disparate emblems – rags in a book and a book bound in an Indian language catechism, for example – into dialogue with each other? How do we theorize the meaning of what is extant and, more problematically, what is no longer extant?
Just some thoughts in my post-Bermudian, post-SEA glow. Chime in if you wish.
Good picture choice! (That's one of my favorites).
ReplyDeleteI'd read somewhere (Amory's essay on colonial books in the History of the Book in Britain, maybe?) that a whole bunch of Eliot-translated works got used as waste-paper, but didn't know of a concrete example. Fascinating!
Yours is sort of "the big question" in book history, isn't it? These individual cases - whether material (like a bit of rag or binder's waste) or intellectual (like marginalia or an author attribution, viz. David Brewer's paper) - how do we deal with them?
I think they're what we all love about what we do ... this week I got an automated alert that a bookseller (on the Isle of Wight, of all places), had listed an early (1727) edition of a book I collect. I wrote and asked whether it contained any early ownership notes/bookplates/&c. The seller wrote back and said that it did, but went to great pains to say that the plate and signatures "didn't detract" from the book. I laughed, and wrote back that I didn't think they would, and that in fact they made me more likely to buy the book than not. I'd much rather have a copy I can research and learn about, rather than a pristine copy.
That said, I think we all have to be careful not to "read" more into individual cases than the evidence warrants. Sometimes as case studies they can be illustrative, and useful (and amazingly interesting), but perhaps drawing broad conclusions from them isn't always the best way to go.
Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about idiosyncrasy as an inevitable component of archival research. I'm trying to think of it as more that simply a potential pitfall of interpretation to be avoided. It's a force in the research we do, no matter how cautious we try to be. (In fact, being cautious about reading is a direct result of idiosyncrasy, right? So the idiosyncrasy of individual cases is a factor no matter how we choose to deal with it.)
ReplyDeleteTake a look at Jackie Penny's new post for another view of "projection" in the archive. I'm starting a label for the blog: "Subjectivity in the archive." Especially after hearing Pat Crain's thought-provoking presentation at SEA, I think this is an important topic for discussion.
I love your anecdote about the bookseller. It reminds me of a great essay by William Sherman called, I think, "Slightly Soiled by Use" (or something like that). I read it recently in this wonderful Folger Library exhibition catalog called The Reader Revealed. (Although I thought I remembered reading it somewhere else before...) The whole volume is quite worthwhile. I think you can get it used from Amazon for not too much.