Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation 022646914X, 9780226469140

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface; or, What Is a Multigraph?
Introduction
1. Advertising
2. Anthologies
3. Binding
4. Catalogs
5. Conversations
6. Disruptions
7. Engraving
8. Ephemerality
9. Frontispieces
10. Index
11. Letters
12. Manuscript
13. Marking
14. Paper
15. Proliferation
16. Spacing
17. Stages
18. Thickening
Epilogue
Works Cited
About the Multigraph Collective
Index

Citation preview

INTERACTING WITH PRINT

T H E M U LT I G R A P H C O L L EC T I V E

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M a r k A l g e e - ­H e w i t t A ngel a Borchert D av i d B r e w e r Th o r a B r y l o w e Juli a Carlson

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Mich a el M acovsk i Nichol as M ason Tom Mole A ndrew Piper Da hli a Porter

Br i a n C owa n

Jonat h a n Sachs

Susa n Da lt on

Di a na Solomon

M a r i e - ­C l a u d e F e l t o n Mich a el Ga mer Pau l K e e n Michelle Lev y

A n d r e w S t a u ff e r R i c h a r d T aw s N ikol a von Merv eld t Ch a d W e l l m o n

INTERACTING WITH

PR I N T ELEMENTS OF

R E A DI NG IN THE ERA OF PR INT S ATUR ATI ON

The Multigraph Collective Th e U n i v e r s i t y o f Ch i c a g o P r e s s Ch i c a g o a n d L o n d o n

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27  26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18     1  2  3  4  5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­46914-­0 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­46928-­7 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Le Fonds de recherche du Québec—­Société et culture (FRQSC) toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Multigraph Collective (Scholarly group), author. Title: Interacting with print : elements of reading in the era of print saturation / The Multigraph Collective. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017035583 | ISBN 9780226469140 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226469287 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Printing—History—18th century. | Printing—History—19th century. | Intermediality—History. Classification: LCC Z124.A2 M85 2017 | DDC 686.209/033—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035583  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Preface; or, What Is a Multigraph? xi

Introduction 1 1. Advertising 15

10. Index 155

2. Anthologies 33

11. Letters 169

3. Binding 49

12. Manuscript 185

4. Catalogs 66

13. Marking 204

5. Conversations 85

14. Paper 223

6. Disruptions 97

15. Proliferation 243

7. Engraving 113

16. Spacing 260

8. Ephemerality 126

17. Stages 274

9. Frontispieces 141

18. Thickening 288

Epilogue 305 Works Cited 311 About the Multigraph Collective 343 Index 349

I L LU ST R AT I O N S Color Pl ates (follow ing page 46)

1 Pieces of twig mounted inside the cover of Thomas Gray’s Poems (1768) 2 Contents page from Thomas W. Handford’s Illustrated Home Book of Poetry and Song (1884) 3 Binding of Friendship’s Token (1855) 4 François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour (1758) 5 Binding of J. Griffith’s Travels in Europe, Asia Minor and Arabia (1805) 6 Fifty-­sol assignat (1793) 7 Admission form to the Foundling Hospital (1756) 8 Printer’s waste reused as a specimen-­drying book (1768–­1771) 9 Page from I. Thomasen’s Eikon Basilike (1713) 10 Tracing of hands from The Works of William Shakespeare (1853) 11 Reading in multiple directions, Hale family scrapbook (nineteenth century) 12 Mary Delaney, Asperula (1777) 13 Green’s characters in The Red Rover (1836) 14 J. R. Smith, The Dream (1791) 15 Charles Williams, Luxury (1801) 16 Authorized English version of the Holy Bible (1890)

Bl ack-­a nd-­White Figures

0.1 Pieces of twig mounted inside the cover of Thomas Gray’s Poems (1768)  8 0.2 Trio of theoretical concerns  14 1.1 Handbill for Salmon’s Royal Wax-­Work (1760s)  20

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2.1 Contents page from Thomas W. Handford’s Illustrated Home Book of Poetry and Song (1884)  37 2.2 Frontispiece and title page from Friedrich Wilmans’s Taschenbuch der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet (1823)  42 2.3 Joseph von Eichendorff’s “Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel” from In zarter Frauenhand (1887)  45 2.4 Binding of Friendship’s Token (1855)  46 3.1 François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour (1758)  55 3.2 Binding of J. Griffith’s Travels in Europe, Asia Minor and Arabia (1805) 59

3.3 Binding of Anna Seward’s Letters (1811)  59 4.1 Page from James Petiver’s Hortus siccus Cappensis (date unknown)  76 6.1 Page titled “Natural History,” from the Fliegende Blätter (1845)  102 6.2 Page showing multiple typefaces, from the Fliegende Blätter (1845)  103 6.3 Charles Philipon in La Caricature (1832)  106 6.4 “Pear speech” in La Caricature (1835)  107 6.5 George Cruikshank, Bank Restriction Note (1819)  108 7.1 William Woollett, The Death of General Wolfe (1776)  119 8.1 Fifty-­sol assignat (1793)  132 8.2 Admission form to the Foundling Hospital (1756)  135 8.3 Printer’s waste reused as a specimen-­drying book (1768–­1771)  136 9.1 Frontispiece and title page from Mary Robinson’s Poems (1791)  147 9.2 Frontispiece and title page from the illustrated edition of Don Quichotte de La Manche (1836)  149 9.3 Frontispiece to Otto Roquette’s Waldmeisters Brautfahrt (1897)  151 9.4 Frontispiece and title page to first edition of Dombey and Son (1848) 153

9.5 Frontispiece to Rousseau’s Collection d’auteurs français (1833)  154 10.1 Page from Johann Samuel Ersch’s Allgemeines Repertorium der Literatur für die Jahre (1785–­1790)  163 12.1 Manuscript transcription from I. Thomasen’s Eikon Basilike (1713)  188 12.2 Two pages from I. Thomasen’s Eikon Basilike (1648)  189 12.3 Title page from Charles Churchill’s Gotham, A Poem, Book III (1764) 192

13.1 Tracing of hands from The Works of Shakespeare (1853) 210

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13.2 Title page inscription from Caroline: or, The History of Miss Sedley (1787)  212 13.3 Manuscriptural emendations of The Foundling Hospital, for Wit (1746) 214

14.1 Anonymous, La confession coupée (1677)  228 14.2 Reading in multiple directions, Hale family scrapbook (nineteenth century)  236 14.3 Mary Delany, Asperula (1777)  237 14.4 Green’s Characters in The Red Rover (1836)  239 14.5 Pasted-­in emendation of George Steevens’s Works of Shakespeare (1802)  241 15.1 J. R. Smith, The Dream (1791)  255 15.2 Charles Williams, Luxury (1801)  256 15.3 “The Card Catalog,” from the Library Bureau Catalog (1890)  258 16.1 George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” from The Temple (1633)  262 16.2 Last page of “To the Genius of Africa” from Robert Southey’s Poems (1797)  270 16.3 William Wordsworth’s “Lines left upon a seat in a Yew-­Tree” from Lyrical Ballads (1798)  271 18.1 Authorized English version of the Holy Bible (1890)  291 18.2 Francesco Bartolozzi’s engraving of John Henderson as Iago (late eighteenth century)  296 19.1 Network representation of renvois linking the chapters of this book 307

19.2 Network representation of topical similarity between chapters of this book  308

P R E FA C E ; O R , W H AT I S A M U LT I G R A P H ? A multigraph is a book written by numerous authors. In this, it represents a new kind of scholarly object. Unlike the monograph, written by a single author (or two or three coauthors), the multigraph represents multiple voices and multiple points of view. It exceeds the normal scale of scriptural collaboration. In this, it has a cacophonous underside. And yet, unlike the edited volume, in which a single individual (or two or three) organizes the disparate voices of multiple authors that never really cohere into a meaningful whole, in the multigraph those voices come together to tell a more unified story. There is a symphonic aspect to the text, but in this, the performers are also the conductors. It is organized from within. This project began in 2011 during a planning session with the original members of the Interacting with Print research group: Susan Dalton, Tom Mole, Andrew Piper, and Nikola von Merveldt, later joined by Jonathan Sachs. Much had already been written about the crisis, death, and future of the monograph. The idea for the multigraph was a preliminary answer to these concerns and an effort to push the collaborative nature of our research group as far as possible in its published outputs. Interactivity was to be both our topic and our method: to study the interactions of the past, we would create new kinds of interactions in the present. Synthesizing the knowledge of our collaborators would afford a means of producing new kinds of

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knowledge. Our aim was not a manual or handbook, or a summa of existing knowledge, but a process in which emergent ideas could take shape, and new arguments for thinking about the history of print and media more generally. Integration and generation were related from the beginning. To facilitate this development, we created the following process, which took place over the course of roughly two years. We share it with readers in the hope that it not only gives insights into what we have produced but also might be replicable for other researchers and other projects. We are deeply grateful to both the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—­Société et Culture, without which this project would not have been feasible. As we enter into the era of “big humanities,” which is nothing more than a reenactment of long-­forgotten humanistic practices from the past (Wellmon 2014), projects like these will be important for thinking about how to use the public investment in humanities research toward the goal of integrating the many specialized veins of research that proliferate today. The book’s composition fell into three stages, which we came to designate, in the spirit of its bibliographic origins, with a set of organic metaphors. First was seeding. At this stage we invited participants to offer brief contributions (typically a third to half the length of the published chapters) on a key concept from any area of their own research. The contributors were drawn mostly from among those who had participated in the research group’s activities over the previous three years, and so had already contributed to our developing theoretical framework. They were invited to choose from a “seedbed” of suggested keywords or to propose their own. Inherent in the idea of the seed is that it be generative, motivating further additions from other contributors. Some seeds became chapters, some were amalgamated, and some failed to germinate. Winnowing became a crucial aspect of the process. During the second stage, grafting, contributors embellished and edited one another’s seeds. To do so, we used a wiki environ-

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ment administered by Mark Algee-­Hewitt, which allowed us to track versions and restore changes. The authors of all changes were recorded, and the wiki interface allowed for discussions in the comments section about the new directions a chapter was taking. As in any good garden, the point of the graft was that it must take—­it required consideration of the ideas of someone else and an attempt to draw connections with thoughts not one’s own. For the graft to survive, and to promote subsequent grafts, it had to integrate with the original seed and allow the new, amalgamated form to develop in new directions. At this point in the project, we found ourselves rethinking many of the chapters in significant ways, so that they developed far beyond the initial seeds. We also found that a face-­to-­face meeting was crucial to this development. We held the first of two annual workshops in which we created a rotating system of editorial sessions to work on the seeds. As each contributor moved from session to session, she or he would engage with new seeds and with continually shifting combinations of other contributors (using a very ungainly algorithm to generate the assignments, a bit like doing class scheduling by slide rule). By the end of the first two-­day workshop, each contributor had edited at least half of the seeds and had interacted face-­to-­face with at least half of the other contributors. Plenary sessions helped shape a collective vision for the volume as a whole. New visions and new directions were identified for each of the seeds, with individuals volunteering to add new material or to rework old. Each seed had a serial action plan assigned to it, a route that it would travel as it was edited and augmented by further participants. Everyone volunteered for as many seeds as they could reasonably participate in. Over the course of the next year, changes and additions were made in time for our second workshop, the aim of which was no longer more creation but completion. The third and final stage, pressing, sought to fix the project into a stable form, to shift from the vitality of the web to the more permanent form of the hortus siccus, the specimen book

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of pressed flowers. At this stage, we held another workshop of rotating sessions and interactions, during which we appointed for each chapter an editor who was not the author of that chapter’s seed. The editor’s job was not to write the chapter, but to manage the process of collaboration to ensure that the finished chapter was produced to a high standard and in a timely fashion. At any time in the process, any contributor could edit any part of the book—­including this preface. There was no hierarchy between authors and editors. There were twenty-­t wo authors and twenty-­t wo editors. Once the seeds were finalized, they were aggregated into a single manuscript, at which point it fell back to the project originators to tie up the loose ends and submit the manuscript for peer review. It may be worthwhile to reflect on the variety of media we used to write this book and the place of mediation in the scholarly process. Alan Liu has suggested that “social computing encourages literary scholars to remember and repurpose the long history of social writing, publishing, reading, and interpreting,” and it is certainly the case that without the wiki interface, and the instant flow of communication enabled by email, this project would have been inconceivable. At the same time, it is equally true that the project could not have happened without the face-­to-­face interactions and the opportunities for interpersonal exchange that they afforded. In part, this is because no virtual environment (at least none that has yet been invented) can fully mimic the kind of spontaneity and engagement that can occur when individuals meet in person. But just as important, we doubt whether online social networking alone would have allowed for the sociability necessary to nurture and sustain commitment to this project. We can’t help but notice how many of the practices we engaged in, such as note-­taking, annotation, revision, are—­as Liu suggests—­as old as the history of writing itself, and it is certainly the case that an online networked environment can foster these activities. But we also strongly believe that carrying forward “the long history of social writing, publishing, reading, and interpreting” will require that we continue

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to find opportunities to interact, personally, with one another and with the material artifacts we work with. Why a book? Given that we undertook this project in a digital environment, and that the wiki was essential to its composition, the logical outcome might seem to be an online product—­an interactive website, a hypertext repository, or a publicly accessible wiki. Such an outcome would have its own advantages: users could navigate through the chapters in nonlinear ways, an unlimited number of illustrations could be included, dynamic visualizations of the material could be produced, and the text could be updated without restriction, or even opened to editing by its readers in the manner of Wikipedia. We have chosen to forgo these possibilities in favor of a printed book because we believe that—­at this moment in media history—­print can still do things that digital media cannot. We contend that print still has a valuable role to play as a central medium of humanistic communication. The relative stability of the printed book reflects values associated with the durability and referenceability of humanities research. Digital products offer different possibilities for interactive functionality, but at the time of writing, they remain difficult to integrate into the academic circuits of reception and assessment, and they are all too often hard to sustain online in the long term. If we choose the old technology of the printed book to be our product, however, we nonetheless chose the new technology of the wiki to shape our process. New technologies allow us to challenge established paradigms of print production in the contemporary academy, emphasizing values of process, community, and collaboration over scholarly hermeticism, hierarchy, and charismatic insight, as well as recovering and making visible practices of community and collaboration that, while they have long characterized humanistic inquiry, have often been obscured by our publication forms and practices. At the same time, the collaboratively authored multigraph can be a useful tool for addressing one of the central problems of today’s scholarly landscape: the surplus of information. With

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so many new books and journal articles appearing continuously (not to mention conference papers, online resources, blog posts, and tweets), it is increasingly difficult to make an impact on any particular field of study. In bringing together a wide range of scholars, but in such a way that works toward synthesis rather than differentiation, the aim of the multigraph is to address these dual problems of coherence and scale. It combines the multiperspectival nature of the edited collection with the unified vision of the monograph. We think the fusion of print and digital media will prove in the end to offer a substantial contribution to how we as academics think and communicate. We leave it our readers to judge whether we have succeeded in our aims. But for many of us who cowrote this book, the experience transformed our understanding of how we can undertake scholarly inquiry in the humanities. Writing together in this way, we experienced the remarkable generosity of our coauthors, and the refreshing reminder that contributing to the sum of our knowledge is a collaborative endeavor. All of us spend our professional lives in an environment that is pervasively competitive and often implicitly adversarial; we often have to compete for grants, for jobs, for recognition. We are asked to rank our graduate students and sometimes our colleagues against one another. Even as the rhetoric of interdisciplinary collaboration becomes common, the academy (particularly in the humanities) persists with a lone-­scholar model. Writing this book allowed us to come together in a different way: not to present the fruits of research already largely complete (and individually carried out) and have them judged by others, but to work together to produce something new, which none of us would own but for which all of us would take responsibility. If there is a polemical edge to this project, it is this: producing a print object with multiple authors, all of whom are equally responsible for all of its content, deliberately makes it more difficult to assign personal responsibility for any part of the whole to any one of the authors. Call it one small act of resistance to the academy’s increasing overreliance on measures of account-

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ability. Unable to measure what we value most, we have come to value what we can measure. Effacing the measurability of academic work offers one way of moving past the overreliance on quantifying the assessment of learning and research today. Alongside all the effort to quantify, we think it is also time to develop new models of creativity and thought that are not easily subsumed within the accountant’s black arts. This project intends to affirm the argument that, when it comes to the making of ideas, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

INTRODUCTION This book offers an innovative approach to the study of print culture based on the concept of interactivity. The approach was itself conceived, developed, and articulated in a novel and interactive way. The twenty-­t wo collaborators of the Interacting with Print research group collectively wrote this book using both an online platform and old-­fashioned annual symposia, and we are jointly responsible for all it contains. In this, we investigate how people interacted with printed matter, how they used print media to interact with other people, and how printed texts and images interacted within complex media ecologies. Interactive is a word most often associated with digital technologies, but we contend that a nuanced and historicized concept of interactivity is key to developing a deeper understanding of print, which emerged as the predominant communications technology in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book’s eighteen short chapters offer an alphabetically arranged guide to key concepts in our approach to print culture in this period. Some chapters engage with cultural practices that were shaped by print, some with forms of printed matter that reflected or produced cultural practices. The chapters do not by any means cover all possible topics, and they are not intended to serve as an introductory guide to print culture in this period or a comprehensive overview of it. Rather, each chapter aims to articulate an aspect of our theoretical approach and to show it at work through examples chosen from across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (with some effort to look before and after this period), from Britain, France, and Germany (with some

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examples from North America, Austria, and Italy). The chapters are arranged alphabetically and can be read in any order. Keywords at the head of each chapter and cross-­references between them allow readers to navigate through the volume in a variety of ways. The book’s epilogue tries to imagine nonbookish ways of representing these same relationships—­interacting with print using new computational forms of navigation. THE ER A OF PR INT S ATUR ATION

Print was undoubtedly important before and after the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but European culture can most fully be described as a “print culture” in these two centuries. From the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 that freed English printers from government control to the technological innovations of 1897 that allowed photographs to be printed in newspapers, this period saw print in all its forms move to the center of cultural life without eliminating other communications media. Innovations included new technologies of printing (the iron press, the steam press, stereotypy), new methods for reproducing images (steel-­plate engraving, halftone, chromolithography), new distribution infrastructures (macadamized roads, canals, railways), and new understandings of intellectual property, which crystallized into new copyright laws. In conflict, competition, or synergy with other communications media, print created new spaces for people to gather (in libraries, reading societies, printsellers’ exhibitions, and artists’ academies), newly diversified industries (as printing, publishing, and retailing became distinct operations), and new genres of writing (such as reviews, synopses, children’s literature, and gift books). Although there were significant differences between national contexts, the similarities are sufficient to sustain an account of print culture that is widely applicable. This is the period of extensive reading, both in the sense that more people were reading and in the sense that there was more for them to read (Engelsing). The rise of popular educa-

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tion ensured a pan-­European spread of literacy in our period: only 20–­30 percent of adults in Catholic European countries and 35–­45 percent of adults in Protestant European countries could read in 1700; by 1900 the figure for both was 90 percent. These members of the first true mass-­reading public had much more reading matter to contend with, as the total amount of printed matter in circulation grew exponentially from the 1770s onward. They used print in conjunction with other media to disseminate and appropriate ideas, influence and form opinions, and define and redefine communities. The total amount of printed matter in circulation and the literacy rate both continued to rise into the twentieth century. But with the invention of sound and screen media, print would gradually be displaced from its position of cultural centrality. The invention of the gramophone and the cinema—­or print’s partial remediation through microfilm—­did not kill print off any more than print killed off manuscript or oral culture, although both periods witnessed numerous laments to this effect. Indeed, print circulated information about these new media and helped to structure cultural consumers’ interactions with them. But over time sound and screen media would challenge print’s dominance over the circulation of information, the structure of education, the forms of public debate, and the pursuit of pleasure. We thus imagine our period to sit in the middle of a heuristically valuable three-­part structure: emergence, saturation, and differentiation. The question that remains is whether the current displacement of print has introduced a much-­debated fourth era (a so-­ called late, decadent, or dying age of print) (Striphas), the result of the impact of digital media, or simply more differentiation (Piper 2012). Either way, it is clear that a history of mediation after 1900 could not reliably take print as its primary object of study. Our focus, by contrast, is on a moment in time when a single form of mediation—­one composed of numerous different technical and institutional components—­assumed cultural dominance through interactions with other channels of media-

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tion. In this, we hope to provide a useful history to understand our present moment when the digital threatens to subsume all other forms of communication within itself. BOOK HISTORY AND PRINT HISTORY

The history of the book (histoire du livre, Geschichte des Buchwesens, Buchwissenschaft) has emerged as a rapidly expanding international field of interdisciplinary research in the past two decades. Pioneering studies by Darnton, Kernan, Wittmann, and Febvre and Martin have been followed by more recent groundbreaking synoptic accounts (Raven 2007; Siskin; Chartier 1994; St. Clair; McKitterick; Piper 2009b; Giesecke) as well as specialized studies on the role of gender (Keen 2012; Price 2000; Hesse; Dalton; Hoagwood and Ledbetter) and class (Warner 1990; Rose; Wadsworth; O’Malley) in the making of what is now commonly referred to as print culture. Uniting and revitalizing the existing scholarly endeavors of analytic bibliography, publishing history, textual editing, and literary study, the field is beginning to achieve a greater degree of theoretical sophistication and to reflect on its own practice. Our aim with this book, however, is not simply to join the debate but also to transform some of its premises. Taking the new degree of theoretical self-­consciousness within the field as our starting point, we aim to rethink the habitual narratives of book history—­indeed, its identity as “book history”—­in an effort to resituate print within a broader media ecology. We take aim at three persistent myths about print culture in this period: 1. Print displaced other media. Existing studies often represent the “rise” of print in the eighteenth century as a rapid and total displacement of other media (Kiesel; Eisenstein; Martin 1994; Kernan 1989). We focus instead on the continued importance of nonprint spaces (such as manuscript albums, epistolary correspondence, and salon conversations) and cultural practices linked to orality, performance, and sociability (such as reading

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aloud in domestic settings, public lectures, or tableaux vivants). These media thrived alongside print, not simply as “anachronistic,” “defensive,” or “asocial” practices (as asserted by Warner 1990; Thornton 2009; Gitelman; Newlyn). But they also did so by interacting with print: contesting or promoting it and engendering new forms of medial, cultural, and social interaction. These interactions force us to rethink the supposed asociability that surrounded the rise of silent reading and private viewing that have often been thought to characterize our period (Chartier 1994; Jajdelska; Schön). 2. Print equals letterpress (or engraving). Existing studies often align “print” exclusively with either “writing” (Williams; Kittler; Siskin; Koschorke) or the reproduction of visual art (Clayton; Bann 2001). We focus instead on graphic spaces in which text and image interacted, such as gift books, banknotes, caricatures, catalogs, or broadsides, and we explore the relationships between print and other areas of visual practice, such as drawing, painting, architecture, and sculpture. These interactions complicate received narratives of the antagonism between literary and visual culture (D’Arcy Wood; Wettlaufer; Neumann and Oesterle), instead showing how print’s meaning was refracted through its representation of other media. 3. Print culture is national culture. Existing studies often associate print culture with national culture, following Benedict Anderson’s influential approach. Work by Adrian Johns and William St. Clair reaffirms the national differences between European print cultures. Mindful of the extraordinary extent to which print culture was defined by the international circulation of texts, images, and people, we examine parallels as well as exchanges between national cultures. These interactions show that print culture did not emerge only in the crucible of national fervor but also within an international context of translation, imitation, reprinting, and cultural cross-­fertilization.

Studies of print culture often rely on models of mutually exclusive “spheres” to understand the impact of print culture.

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Whether public-­private, producer-­consumer, male-­female, parent-­child, national-­foreign, or even modern-­premodern, such spherical thinking dates back to the work of Jürgen Habermas on the political ramifications of the public sphere and the voluminous critical literature that followed (Calhoun; Robbins; Meehan; Warner 2002). Such work underestimates, however, how interactive print formats such as conduct literature, gift books, translations, and children’s books pushed individuals to negotiate between spheres by calling on a variety of media to suit the varied nature of their relationships (Dalton; Heesen 2002). As we argue, the history of print media benefits from an understanding of the way print allows individuals to move between spheres or social domains, what we call the act of intermediation. A HISTORY OF PRINT INTERMEDIALITY

These myths about print culture isolate print from other media and sever the connections it created among media and between individuals. By contrast, our approach traces international, interdisciplinary, and intermedial interactions. We apply and extend important new research in the field of intermediality (Gitelman and Pingree; Bolter and Grusin; Jenkins; Thomsen) to analyze cultural practices of intermediality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These cultural practices were widespread: children traced images printed in books [paper]; engravers reproduced the painted stage sets of the revolutionary spectacle [stages]; publishers engaged in multimedia advertising campaigns [advertising]; salons turned their conversation into publications and used the publications they read to stimulate conversation [conversations]; readers thickened their books with illustrations cut out from other books or with the autographs of loved ones [thickening]; viewers took printed catalogs into a growing number of public galleries or preserved them for later reverie [catalogs]; fans of Lord Byron turned from his poems to his image [frontispieces];

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admirers of Goethe copied passages from his printed texts into commonplace books [manuscript]; and archivists were busy arguing over what kinds of printed material had accrued enough value to be preserved among the growing mass of “flying paper” and loose leaves [ephemerality]. For the purposes of this volume, we identify three distinct kinds of interaction—­people interacting with print, print interacting with nonprint media, and people interacting with each other through the medium of print—­though we expect, indeed hope, that others will identify more and expand on our taxonomy. PEOPLE IN THE WORLD OF PRINT

At first glance, people might not seem to interact with print at all. Printed texts are open to the same complaint that Socrates made about writing more generally—­no matter how vehemently you disagree with them or how persuasively you counter their arguments, they go on saying exactly the same thing. But in fact people interacted with print in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a wide variety of ways. They cut their way into the leaves of books with paper knives [paper]. They took pen and ink in hand and marked their books with ownership inscriptions, marginalia, and corrections [marking]. They wrote poems on flyleaves [manuscript]. They bound their books in a style of their choosing, sometimes gathering texts together in unexpected ways [binding]. They unbound books to extraillustrate them, tipped in manuscript leaves, and folded out large-­ format maps, facsimiles, or images. They collected, mounted, and displayed printed images [engraving]. They made their own books by folding and stab-­stitching loose sheets; they cut text and images from magazines and pasted them into scrapbooks [paper]. In the age of movable type, authors and publishers also regularly tinkered with their writing in subsequent editions. Print was rarely fixed and uniform, but subject to constant intervention by authors and readers [proliferation]. We take the volume of Thomas Gray’s Poems, published in

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0.1. Pieces of a twig allegedly from the yew tree mentioned in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy” mounted under cheesecloth in a recess cut out of the board of the inside cover, from Poems (1768). The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (PML 145576). Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987. Photograph: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

Glasgow in 1768 and held in the Morgan Library’s Gordon Ray Collection, as a prime example of the kind of interactivity we are talking about (fig. 0.1, plate 1). In it we see that a space has been cut out of the book’s boards to create a windowed placeholder for a twig. A caption beneath the window indicates “This twig is from the ‘yew tree’ mentioned in the fourth stanza of ‘Gray’s Elegy.’” The note continues to indicate that the twig was presented on October 1848 to Howard Edwards. Further paste-­ins show a printed clip of the relevant stanza from Gray above an engraving of the country churchyard that forms the subject of Gray’s “Elegy.” The opposite endpaper has details of the auction catalog from which the book was purchased in

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1804. Collectively, the various cutouts and paste-­ins tell a story of both the appreciation of Gray’s “Elegy” and the appreciation of the book Poems itself as an object made to tell its own story. We see how illustration, letterpress, manuscript, binding, and found object interact here to connect the book to specific times and places: the owner’s initial encounter with the churchyard of Gray’s poem, the subsequent gift exchange with the book’s later recipient in 1848, the institutional conditions of the book’s circulation thirty-­six years after its initial publication, and of course its eventual inclusion in the Morgan Library’s special collections. The book records the individual, social, and medial interactions that give it meaning as an object in the world. As this example suggests, books (and print more generally) were thus a part of the everyday lives of men, women, and children living throughout the period in question; books were taken outdoors and overseas, and thus subjected to the elements; they were read during meals and in bed, subjecting them to further signs of wear. Books were passed from hand to hand, in circulating libraries and book clubs, and by the practices of gifting and inheritance, as well as collecting and auction sales [antholo gies]. But books did not always move through such regularized channels, and reading itself was not always (and perhaps not usually) the organized, orderly, and solitary activity it is generally thought to have been. Charles Lamb offers two examples that suggest the multifarious ways in which individuals found and interacted with print: “Coming in to an inn at night—­having ordered your supper,” he asks, “what can be more delightful than to find lying in the window-­seat, left there time out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest—­t wo or three numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine” (1822, 35)? Writing in 1822 about a scandal magazine that ceased publication in 1796, Lamb suggests that even the most seemingly ephemeral of print productions could survive, and be enjoyed, when the gossip they relayed was stale and “antiquated.” Reading pleasure could be found serendipitously, but it could also be done in “uneasy snatches,” by those “who, not having wherewithal

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to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls” (36). Indeed, Lamb claims that one of these street readers had “in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa” before his efforts were halted by a stall keeper (36). People interacted with print not merely in the private closet or library, or even merely in the social spaces of the salon and domestic parlor, but in the public spaces of the inn and the street, the theater and the shop. PRINT IN THE MEDIA ECOLOGY

Studies of print culture have done much to show us how print rose to a position of cultural dominance between the 1430s and 1900, and in so doing helped structure new institutions, new models of social organization, new political ideologies, new religious movements, new sociologies of knowledge, and new understandings of the self. But the concept of a print culture is a flawed one if it gives the impression that print superseded earlier media, or that it operated in isolation from other media or to the exclusion of other media. To speak of shifting from an oral to a textual culture overlooks the extent to which conversations, lectures, sermons, and public readings persisted in the age of print and gained currency from their relationships with print. To speak of shifting from a scribal to a print culture overlooks the extent to which manuscript writings, annotated books, hand-­copied music, commonplace books, and handwritten letters continued to circulate in the age of print [manuscript; marking]. To speak of shifting from a visual to a textual culture (as when Protestantism urged common believers to turn away from icons and toward their Bibles and prayer books) overlooks both the importance of printed images and the complex relations between printed images and letterpress text [frontispieces; engraving; disruptions]. What is needed, then, is an understanding of print culture that restores it to the media ecology in which it was historically embedded. The notion of a media ecology allows us to think

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about culture as a space in which several media interact with one another. Changes in any one medium produce changes in all the others, just as the introduction of a new medium, or its rapid growth, produces changes in the others. We take the term ecology from Neil Postman, who suggests that “technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. . . . One significant change generates total change” (18). But we use it not as Postman uses it, to deplore the effects of new communications technologies on public discourse, but to model the historical complexity of media change. Thinking in terms of a media ecology provides an alternative to the rhetoric of supersession that often characterizes accounts of media change, as Paul Duguid put it, “the idea that each new technological type vanquishes or subsumes its predecessors” (65). Instead, thinking ecologically makes visible the interplay of media and draws attention to the porous boundaries between them. We seek to understand the relations among media, the ways in which each medium is shaped by the others, and the ways in which those relations change over time. But do not imagine, because we seek to look beyond print to other media, that we have given up on the idea of a print culture. Rather, we seek to formulate new ways of understanding the centrality of print in our period (for a critique of the term print culture, see Gitelman). Once we stop saying that print superseded, displaced, or marginalized other media, we can start to think about how print rose to cultural centrality by facilitating engagements with other media, both existing and new. An operagoer following the performance in her libretto; an exhibition viewer jotting notes or making sketches in her catalog; a theater patron remembering a performance while reading a review, perusing a play script, or looking at a print of an actor; a stenographer recording a sermon for publication—­all these people were engaged in cultural practices of intermediality in which print thrived by remediating other media. Print, in other words, was a solvent of culture, a vehicle for other media as well as a medium of its own.

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INTERPERSONAL PRINT

How did people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries use printed matter to structure and mediate interactions among themselves? In our period, print brought people into new relationships with one another, reinflected existing social relationships, and shaped new social imaginaries. When Byron placed a footnote in Beppo signed by the printer’s devil, E. T. A. Hoffmann ruminated on the anonymizing powers of the lending library in “My Cousin’s Corner Window,” or Charles Nodier played with the typographic regularity of the novel in Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept chateaux, these authors were, each in their own way, signaling the ways in which print was always visual as well as textual, social as well as personal, and necessarily institutionally complex. These imaginings of print offer fictional emblems of some of the many ways in which printed matter structured and mediated interpersonal relationships in the world, not simply on the grand scales of publics, audiences, or imagined communities, but also on a smaller scale of groups, families, coteries, and friends as well (Levy; Dalton). Examining interpersonal print can productively complicate two ways in which scholars have tended to approach print culture. The first approach has been to assume that the important relationship in the world of print is the relationship between the readers and the book, or between the reader and the author as mediated by the book. This approach might stress the historically fugitive nature of reading, presenting reading as a solitary, silent, or alienating activity that, in most cases, leaves no historical trace. Or it might explore the ways in which books get figured as friends. Or it might stress the ways in which reading is imagined as a form of relationship with the author. In these approaches, reading is basically bilateral, an encounter between the reader and the book, or mediated but still basically bilateral, an encounter between the reader and the person or the world to which the book gives access. This approach overlooks the extent to which print can triangulate interpersonal relationships, so

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that people in the world of print not only relate to books and authors but also use books and authors to relate to one another. Print not only produces the simulacrum of a relationship with an author most readers will never encounter in person; it also produces and inflects the real relationships readers have with one another. The second approach has been to connect print to such large-­ scale social formations as nation-­states and religious denominations, most often in a process of affirmation or immersion. Benedict Anderson famously argued that print culture was crucial to the development of nationalism because it made it possible to conceive of holding allegiance to a geographically distributed “imagined community” mediated through journalism and other kinds of printed matter. This argument assumes, first, that relationships with people you encounter personally—­ people in your family and your social circle—­are not mediated, that these relationships are in some sense “natural,” whereas relationships with people you don’t encounter personally are “imaginary” or constructed by mediation. But it also assumes that the function of print is always immersive or one of allegiance building. Print in these narratives is reliable. We want to draw attention to the ways that interpersonal relationships on the local, familial, and even intimate level are also mediated by print, and to the fact that those mediations can be disruptive as well [disruptions]. The abundance of print meant that debates about credulity or reliability were always front and center, not end points toward which print inexorably marched [proliferation; index]. Focusing on the neglected middle ground of interpersonal interactions as well as disruptive or unreliable interactions will inevitably change our understanding of both print and social relationships. In this middle ground lie the social and interpersonal interactions structured and mediated by print, which form the texture of social life in a print culture. We find print insinuating itself into interpersonal relationships in all kinds of ways. Courting couples reading together. Parents or tutors read-

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ing to children. Correspondents recommending and discussing books in their letters. Book clubs and friendly reading societies who pooled their resources to acquire books that would otherwise have been beyond their reach, and then read them together or passed them around between them. Salons, conversazione, and bluestocking gatherings that used printed texts to stimulate their discussions, and then often transformed those discussions into print. Finally, the more ludic battles between authors and their unreliable printers, or engravers and the reproduction culture of money and finance. All of these offer examples of interpersonal interactions that were structured and mediated by print, some promoting intimacy and connection, and others foregrounding the irritability of print as an agent of instability.

0.2. Trio of theoretical concerns.

This, then, is our trio of theoretical concerns: how does a particular configuration of media become associated with historically specific practices to produce new kinds of social configuration? While each of the following chapters emphasizes one or other element of this trio in different measure, our overall aim is to elaborate an approach that takes account of all three. This approach moves toward an understanding of the negotiations that accompany social mediation in different times and places, and under different technological conditions. In so doing, it provides us with an account of the fields of interactivity that have shaped the history of print.

1

ADVERTISING One of the great untold stories of the efflorescence of print culture is the coincident expansion of print advertising. A wealth of evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, illustrates how, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advertising moved from the periphery to the center of retail economies (Mason 2013, 11–­22). The period witnessed impressive multimedia advertising campaigns, waged in a variety of innovative formats, most of which became more widespread, diverse, and inventive over time. Stretching back to printed advertisements in seventeenth-­century chapbooks and newspapers [ephemerality], the links between commercial advertising and print provide their own history of intermediality. Alongside the late seventeenth-­century explosion of trade notices in periodicals, pamphlets, and broadsides, the English word advertising shifted from denoting “warning” and “advising” to its modern commercialized meaning. Not surprisingly, as commercial life developed, so did the use of advertising as a means of promoting sales and public notoriety. In Byron’s London and Balzac’s Paris, discarded handbills littered the streets, posters covered seemingly every blank wall, and brand names were chalked on walls in foot-­high letters. By the 1820s, advertising vans or carts had become a prominent feature of the streets of large cities, sometimes moving in organized processions (Strachan 16–­18; Thornton 2009, 4–­11; Mason 2013, 50–­62). The notion of the roving advertisement may have originated with the practice of self-­promotion through perambulation, such as practiced by the English dentist Martin von

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Butchell, who made it “his custom to ride on a white pony which he sometimes painted all purple and sometimes with spots” to promote himself and his medical practice (McKendrick 93). From their earliest appearances in London in 1829, omnibuses bore advertisements on their outer panels (Strachan 18), and by 1844, in “Advertising Considered as an Art,” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal could report the ubiquity of “Men, looking like animated sandwiches—­squeezed in as they are between two boards, conspicuously inscribed with huge invitations to ‘Try Potts’s pills’” (401). These “direct” forms of publicity were joined by “indirect” forms, such as obtaining puffs in influential newspapers, cultivating endorsements from celebrities or other public figures, and encouraging word-­of-­mouth recommendations (Mason 2013, 23–­49). The sophistication, inventiveness, and variety of these promotional strategies were partly an outgrowth of the high taxes levied on newspaper advertisements through the British Stamp Act of 1712, which prompted advertisers to look for cheaper vehicles to carry their message. Even so, the rapid and extensive circulation of print made it the medium of choice, as attested by the exponential increase in print advertising over the course of the eighteenth century. According to post–­Stamp Act tax records, the annual number of taxed advertisements rose from 18,220 in 1713 to 125,000 in 1750 and 500,000 in 1800 (Nevett 26–­27; compare Raven 2003, 26). As a result of the flood of new advertising revenue, British newspapers that long had relied on government subsidies grew increasingly independent and, in some cases, highly profitable (Asquith 1978, 111; see also Asquith 1975, 721). On the continent, some newspapers had similar success stories, as in the case of the Vossische Zeitung, a German paper that in 1795 was able to cover its printing costs, editor’s salary, and censor’s fees out of advertising revenues (Groth 371). Not only was print a preferred medium for advertising, but printed books vied with patent medicines as the mostly heavily advertised consumer products of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Long before this time, however, European

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publishers had exploited their control of presses to print advertisements for their own books. The first printed advertisement in British history, for instance, is widely acknowledged to be William Caxton’s 1477 handbill for The Pyes of Salisbury, a book he both printed and sold in his shop (Eisenstein 60). Because of such dynamics, literary advertising offers an interesting case of “interactions with prints” within print itself. The detailed book advertisements found in most newspapers—­which routinely included descriptions of the book’s size, paper, images, and binding—­often functioned as readers’ initial mode of “interaction” with the new titles, thus creating anticipation and expectations on their part [catalogs]. Particularly noteworthy books were frequently announced via large-­scale newspaper advertising campaigns, such as that for Byron’s Don Juan, the pending release of which was heralded in a series of “trailer” advertisements designed to whet readers’ appetites (Mozer 248). Book advertising also occurred within books themselves, as many volumes ended with advertising leaves listing other titles by the same author or publisher. Largely unintentionally, the censorship culture of ancien régime France generated a different sort of intratextual advertisement, as every bound book included carefully chosen excerpts from the approving censor’s report required for a title to receive the print privilège (Darnton 1979, 27–­28). Considering this narrative of advertising’s rise and its impact on the publishing industry, it is surprising how little it factors into traditional accounts of European print culture. To a large degree this might be explained by how, owing to the uneven development of European economies and political systems during the early industrial age, advertising played widely divergent roles in the rise of reading publics and book industries across Europe. As we have seen, advertising significantly affected the emergent print culture of eighteenth-­century Britain, but the dynamics in France were dramatically different. Before the 1790s, the rigid system of French guilds prohibited most kinds of self-­ promotion by means of handbills, broadsides, or print advertisements (Todd 518–­19). In the seventeenth century, only one

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publisher, Théophraste Renaudot, had the sole privilège to print advertisements, and he was only to disseminate these through his Feuille du Bureau d’Adresses. And, whereas Samuel Johnson could complain that in 1750s London “advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused,” across the channel the loosely connected news sheets known as Affiches, or wall posters, were attempting to jump-­start newspaper advertising in France after the previous century had seen several failed attempts to do so. By 1789, forty-­four French towns had their own Affiches, but with an average circulation of between 200 and 750, the readership for their advertisements paled in comparison to those for the leading British papers (Jones 1998, 17–­18). A second difficulty in drawing generalizations about advertising’s connection to European print cultures is pinning down what exactly counts, since printed advertisements were by no means a stable generic category during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Consider the diversity of printed matter that was labeled “advertisement”: single-­sheet broadsides and handbills; want ads in newspapers; lists of books recently published in periodicals or tipped into books; the authorial or editorial advertisements that explained, disclaimed, or justified the content of a book; and even directions for the book binder. Both the nationally specific contexts for advertising’s development and the generic diversity of advertisements invite the essay that follows, which attempts to rethink the instrumentality of advertising and how people (publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers) interacted with these materials. As we detail later, advertisements seek to disguise their blunt (and often distasteful) instrumentality by claiming to be simple descriptions, working across media to imaginatively engage their audiences, and borrowing seemingly innocuous material and turning it to the purposes of publicity. Advertisements thus forward the economic ends of their producers by functioning within three related systems: an economy of information, an economy of consumption, and an economy of attention. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this three-­

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pronged attack was fueled by increased competition between producers and their products, a condition that was transferred onto the reader or viewer. As we argue, the way people consumed print advertisements might produce collectives with similar tastes or beliefs, but these communities were founded on notions of their distinctiveness, and thus set out to distinguish themselves from those who were allegedly less refined, educated, or moral. Authors, publishers, and reviewers operating in this system often pitted different kinds of advertising against one another, with the result that the collectives forged by advertisement thus often exposed, or produced, factions within an imaginary reading public. Advertising was thus a stage on which debates about the credibility of print were acted out, and the dupe who believed everything he or she had read in print became a ready-­made stand-­in for any particular group that was being satirized. At the same time, then, as famous advertisements were becoming crucial points of communal experience within the emerging public sphere, advertising itself functioned as yet another mechanism for social differentiation. INS TRUMENTA L IT Y

However covertly at times, most print is “instrumental” insofar as its reason for being is to make something happen in the world. Religious print aims to bring about spiritual and behavioral change (to convert, to comfort, to arrest backsliding, to assuage doubt); literary print attempts to please, to persuade, to move, to make the long hours pass more quickly; and, of course, the blank printed forms and ledgers of commerce and government exist to facilitate trade, tax collection, and the promulgation and enforcement of the law. Direct advertising, however, wears its instrumentality on its sleeve to an unusual degree, in large part because it combines the unabashed functionality of commercial instruments with the persuasive blandishments of rhetoric. As such, it can serve as a sort of limit case that lays bare the instrumentality of print more generally.

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1.1. 1760s handbill to draw visitors to Mrs. Salmon’s Royal Wax-­Work in Fleet-­street. Photograph: Rare Books and Manuscript Library and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute of the Ohio State University Libraries.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as now, readers generally preferred “the soft sell,” where seemingly neutral descriptions solicit readers to open their wallets. Consider, for example, a handbill from 1760s London that was designed to draw visitors to Mrs. Salmon’s Royal Wax-­Work in Fleet-­street (fig. 1.1). This is essentially a simple catalog of wax figures to be seen at Mrs. Salmon’s establishment. While various glowing adjectives are scattered about, they mostly describe the historical or literary characters being represented rather than the waxworks per se. Hence it is Andromeda who is “fair,” the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth Tudor that is “happy,” the King of Prussia who is “most excellent.” It is only at the end that the laudatory language shifts to Mrs. Salmon herself, whose skills come in for commendation with “the lively Representation of Campbell the dumb Fortune-­teller, which nothing but Life can exceed.” And it is only after this that the admission price is mentioned, as if a mere formality that no one who appreciates the

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national and religious icons on display could possibly think twice about paying. Compared to this handbill, the German periodical Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786–­1829) features similarly plain and functional descriptions of a range of objects from the realms of fashion and luxury, complemented by several detailed color engravings in the main content pages. The accompanying Intelligenz-­Blatt employed the genre of announcements to present extensive descriptions and lists of objects of consumption. It included where and usually at what cost the advertised product could be purchased, although it mainly created a desire for consumption of objects as part of a virtual community of taste. All the printed products were either luxury items (wallpaper, paper for bindings, binding products, writing and drawing paper, and engravings) or related to fashion (the publisher’s fashion calendar, an Italian fashion magazine, and the journal itself). While the Intelligenz-­Blatt in 1786 primarily focused on luxury objects or fashionable accessories and mentioned very few print products, that content shifted later to advertisements of collected works and then to advertisements for a wide range of print publications. For the German periodical, this combination of periodical-­and market-­specific advertising was new and legitimized by the newly laudatory discourses of luxury (Borchert 76–­79). The publisher thus encouraged the commercialization process through the provision of information about local productions to a broad transregional public. The instrumental and commercial nature of book advertising in France remained ambiguous throughout the eighteenth century. In theory, French book advertisements of this era set out to provide only such bibliographical information as the title, size, type of paper, binding, and typography. Because these advertisements were deemed a public service, they appeared free of charge in Journal de la Librairie, a weekly periodical that ran from 1763 to 1789. But many French book advertisements also provided information that was essentially commercial in nature, such as the book’s price and where it could be pur-

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chased. In considering how booksellers and authors used Journal de la Librairie, we can discern the tension between purportedly “informative” and “commercial” advertising. As the ban on any “spirit of competition” imposed by the guild system was fading at the end of the ancien régime, booksellers began employing various innovative marketing strategies to stimulate sales. Charles-­Joseph Panckoucke (1736–­1798), often considered the original “modern publisher” in France, quickly saw the commercial potential of advertising and was the first to charge a fee to those wishing to advertise in his newspapers (Feyel 2003, 843). Yet even though Panckoucke had provided an opening, most booksellers were so unaccustomed to advertising logic that they failed to include details on their books’ prices, distinctive features, and other potential selling points. In fact, so short on details were most notices that several subscribers actually complained about how the adverts failed to mention even so much as a price. That Panckoucke himself realized the danger of any appearance of puffery or self-­promotion is evidenced in his admonition to would-­be advertisers in his Mercure de France: “It is indecent of publishers and authors to praise their own books. One must only make them known” (Todd 532). While Panckoucke, his readers, and those wishing to advertise in his papers struggled to grasp advertising’s unstable functions in their historical and national milieu, questions of instrumentality also troubled English printers contemplating the proper medium for this rhetorical mode. Sometimes, as with eighteenth-­century English medley prints—­works that advertised the engraver’s skill and the printseller’s wares via trompe-­l’oeil replication of a diverse array of printed images and texts—­the power of the advertisement was grounded in a reflexive relationship between the object for sale and the medium of representation (Hallett). In other cases, however, intermediality was central to the instrumentality of advertising. This was particularly apparent in the case of shop signs, which were regularly reproduced as trade cards to be given to customers. In their static and mobile

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formulations, these images thus fixed the location of commercial premises in a particular place and time and operated as ciphers for the circulation of goods, money, and people (Garrioch). Furthermore, as Richard Wrigley has shown, sign painting in eighteenth-­century Paris operated in tension with academic art practices, as fine art and advertising frequently overlapped (Wrigley). Eighteenth-­century French artists including Chardin and, most famously, Watteau, with his L’enseigne de Gersaint of 1720–­1721, regularly painted shop signs. Watteau’s image of customers viewing paintings piled high in Edme-­François Gersaint’s shop on the Pont Notre-­Dame simultaneously blurred the lines between advertising and fine art and called attention to the status of art as yet another type of commodity. Gersaint shifted his business from fine art to dealing in luxury goods in the 1730s. As a prominent marchand-­mercier, he was the first in France to realize the potential of public auctions and the only dealer outside the trade in prints to advertise extensively in the press (McClellan 445). From the 1740s, his primary mode of publicity was the sales catalog, which pioneered the construction of the dealer as type, provided an archetype for connoisseurship, and effectively mediated the language of art criticism for an art-­ buying public [catalogs]. Ascending the social ladder (much like the dealer whose shop it advertised) and swiftly becoming assimilated into the artistic canon, Watteau’s painting was reproduced in an engraving by Pierre Aveline in 1732, thus reentering the market as an advertisement for the painting’s aesthetic value. For much of the eighteenth century, sign painting was a site for the articulation of evolving professional identities, and it was frequently invoked in polemical debates about distinctions between artisanal and artistic practice. While in England this tension was brought to the fore in Bonnell Thornton’s and William Hogarth’s 1762 gala, the “Grand Exhibition of the Society of Sign-­Painters” (Paulson 336–­61), in France, debates over the compatibility of commerce and art played out in the rivalry between the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and

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the Academie de Saint-­Luc and associated disputes over printmaking’s status in the hierarchies of visual art. After the French Revolution the stakes of such debates changed, as sign painting became a valued marker of the rejection of official art policy and the failure of the Academie Royale to support artists—­although, conversely, sign painting was equally capable of suggesting an artist’s failure to meet high-­minded revolutionary principles (Wrigley). Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century, artists as diverse as Vernet, Gérard, Charlet, Gavarni, and Géricault all made signs, intervening in public space in ways that exceeded official expectations for their art. Advertising thus represented an important site for the formation and negotiation of hierarchies of genre and medium. As a terrain where painting and print might meet each other on equal terms, the interactive possibilities advertising offered came to be viewed as opportunities to both shape and transgress professional and social categories. FORGING COMMUNITIES

As the example of sign painting illustrates, even as advertising sought to simultaneously disguise and mobilize its instrumentality, it was widely recognized that it had uses beyond the instrumental. Though advertisements sought to distinguish products from those of their competitors, as potential interventions in cultural and aesthetic debates, advertisements might also be mobilized to forge collectivities. This aspect of advertising is particularly apparent in the book trade, where authors, booksellers, and reviewers used various forms of the advertisement to forge their own commercial or authorial identity by demarcating an ideal community of readers. The Journal de la Librairie indicates how authors who sold their own books used print advertisements to assert their authority and connect to an audience. French booksellers labored under tight restrictions for how they could market their wares, with everything down to the size of their shop signs tightly regulated. Free advertisements in periodicals such as the inexpensive Jour-

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nal de la Librairie were therefore a rare opportunity for writers to reach potential readers and assert their role and status as “authors” within society. Of all the identified authors who self-­ published after 1777, when it became legal for them to sell their own books, 61 percent published at least one advertisement in the Journal de la Librairie (Felton 185). Since such advertisements offered writers their best chance to stand out from the crowd, these notices are not surprisingly filled with inflated descriptions of books’ material features, novelty, and superiority to rival titles. Advertisements in The Journal de la Librairie also display such innovative marketing tactics as repeatedly advertising the same title (something that was technically not permitted), announcing limited-­time rebates, and offering discounts for returning and bulk buyers. In tandem with advertisements in periodicals, authors also promoted their works through prospectuses and paratextual materials within the book itself. Meant to serve as a preview of the eventual publication, prospectuses also frequently emphasized the level of luxury and craftsmanship to be displayed in the physical object. For example, the prospectus for the second edition of Encyclopedia Metropolitana (1849) not only reiterates the goals of the first edition—­to provide “an orderly digest of all great points of human knowledge” (4)—­but also promises that the new edition “will be handsomely printed in a series of cabinet volumes, in crown octavo, in the style shown by the specimens on p. 14 and 15” and will be “abundantly illustrated by Maps, Woodcuts, and Engravings” (10). While prospectuses might implicitly identify prospective readers as belonging to specific subsets of society, subscription lists like those included in the fifth edition of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1789) were much more explicit about the tastes and proclivities of their imagined audience. Such lists advertised books by defining an audience and playing on readers’ desire to be part of that audience. This strategy clearly worked in the case of William Wordsworth, who, having found his name omitted from the list of subscribers to Smith’s edition,

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penned his name into the list in his copy. Unlike Smith and her English counterparts, French authors and booksellers seldom used subscription lists for advertising, though the mention of meaningful patronage ties was put forward whenever possible (sometimes as part of the title itself). As evidence of a growing desire to find their own place within the literary market and to build their own readership, more and more authors who self-­ published also included a list of their other works inside their books (Felton 206). Title pages that announced the book as “by the author of” and booksellers’ lists for other works by the same author tipped into the back of books functioned in much the same way in Britain. Authorial prefatory “advertisements” could also suggest that reading a text amounted to joining a community. In the preface to the anonymously published Evelina (1778), for example, Fanny Burney aligns herself with a who’s who of eminent male authors of the previous generation, including Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. With these references, Burney establishes her authority as a novelist and defines the kind of fiction one is about to read. This book, readers are warned, will not transport them “to the fantastic regions of Romance,” but it will lodge them securely in the realm of nature (xiii). Beyond this, Burney also situates her reader as one versed in a specific kind of fiction, with specialized knowledge of literary history and the development of the novel as a genre. By reading this novel, the preface implies, a reader demonstrates that she has a particular kind of cultural capital—­one that, as Burney’s backhanded dedication to the “Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews” implies, the review-­scribbling hacks of Grub Street Jack. As Burney’s novel shows, any of a number of paratextual features might function as a form of advertising that welcomes purchasers to a highly selective community. Similar attempts to make would-­be readers believe that purchasing a specific title would grant them admission to desirable literary communities were employed in Germany’s rapidly growing book market. Friedrich Justin Bertuch’s aggressive

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marketing of his review periodical, Allgemeine Literatur-­Zeitung, included repeatedly advertising in the same newspapers, sending circulars to booksellers in advance of the trade convention in Leipzig, mailing personalized invitations to subscribe to well-­ known scholars, and sending the prospectus, a sample article, and handwritten letters to well-­known persons and institutions both in Germany, and across Europe, and America. This was all executed in a very timely manner, so that “das Ding in recenti memori bleibt” (the product remains in recent memory) (Hauke 372). After this campaign, Bertuch concluded, “Die Berichte in den Zeitungen haben ihre Schuldigkeit gethan, sie haben das Publikum aufmerksam und neugierig gemacht. . . . Unsere Ankündigung fängt an allenthalben Sensation zu machen, natürlich schwatzt nun das profanum vulgus die Kreuz und die Quer darüber, lobt und tadelt, freuet sich oder fletscht die Zähne, je nachdem es sein Interesse heischt: Tant mieux pour nous: wenns nur Lärmen macht” (“The reports in the newspapers have performed their function; they have made the public attentive and curious. . . . Our announcement almost begins to create a sensation; naturally the large public is talking about it back and forth, praises and criticizes, is pleased or snarls, depending on which interest is at stake. All the better for us, if it only makes noise”) (Schönfuß 46–­47). On the heels of this success, Bertuch’s attention remained focused on products from his printing press, including launching the popular Intelligenz-­Blatt as a supplement to his periodical. All along, he employed strategies of constantly keeping this publication at the forefront of his target audiences’ minds. For the periodical Journal des Luxus und der Moden, he built on the audience’s interest in engravings by sending the prospectus and sample prints to potential subscribers (Hauke 374). By 1805 he had established a large and devoted enough following that he could publish a new, sixteen-­page magazine, Typographische Monatsbericht, focused entirely on the products of his publishing house. By developing a connection to the consumer through strategic advertising, he not only countered the anonymity of

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the market but also created and maintained the attention of a virtual community of consumers. Early nineteenth-­century booksellers in Britain also sought to define specific audiences through a combination of advertising formats, including advertisements in newspapers, periodical puffs, and lists of recent publications tipped into the back of books or printed on the boards. The publisher John Murray and Byron’s efforts to promote Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812 combined a spectrum of different strategies to effectively create the Byron brand (Mason 2013, 50–­80). Murray continued to capitalize on the Byron brand in coming years. For example, as part of the marketing for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1816 volume Christabel &c., Murray ran a Morning Chronicle advertisement with the blurb that it was a “wild and singularly original and beautiful Poem. lord byron.” By adding this comment, Murray suggested that fans of Byron would also love Coleridge’s gothic ballad from 1799. By connecting these works, Murray sought to mobilize an already-­extant audience, Byron enthusiasts, while also piquing reader’s curiosity over a work Byron had apparently labeled wild, singular, original, and beautiful. As with Bertuch’s strategy for marketing the Allgemeine Literatur-­Zeitung, Murray’s campaign for Coleridge elicited both praise and denigration, the latter in the form of a few snarling reviews published even before the book’s release. Murray’s efforts to hype the title were undoubtedly aided by the poem’s sixteen-­year preprint circulation, when it was read and/or heard by many of Britain’s literary elite, including Byron, Charles Lamb, John Stoddard, Walter Scott, Henry Crabb Robinson, Catherine Clarkson, Percy and Mary Shelley, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth. In a prepublication review, Coleridge’s devoted friend Lamb refers to circumstances “well known to many of Mr. Coleridge’s friends” as well as the “public curiosity” the poem had provoked, thus distinguishing the coterie of preprint readers from the curious public eagerly awaiting its release in print. In the weeks and months following the book’s release, review-

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ers excluded from “that coterie of ardent admirers” lined up to disparage Christabel as a “long-­hoarded treasure” that failed to live up to its inflated reputation. Writing in the Eclectic Review in June 1816, Josiah Condor admits he “had frequently heard of Mr. Coleridge’s manuscript” and was “curious” if the poem would match reports of Coleridge’s preeminent abilities, but he was sorely disappointed when “after sixteen years concealment, it comes forth—­a fragment still.” The poem’s fragmentary condition and its long preprint circulation mobilized both its supporters and detractors: the poem was either a singularly original work of genius, more valuable for its fragmentary condition, or a rigged-­up ruin not worth the notice bestowed on it. These reviews of Coleridge’s poem staged a battle between literary factions: taking a position on Christabel became a way of identifying with a specific literary circle of Romantic poets or casting one’s self in with the opposition to the whole crowd of modern scribblers. CREDIBILITY AND CREDULITY IN PRINT

If advertising was deployed to imagine, incite, and even produce communities of reader-­consumers, its strategies for doing so worked on the premise of exclusion as much as inclusion. In the context of advertisements masquerading as benign paratexts, the reader’s sense of inclusion often arose by positing a community defined against a larger, more diffuse public defined by lack. What the public lacked might be obviously tied to economics—­as in the case of not having the means to subscribe to an elaborately illustrated edition—­but more often it was a lack of knowledge. As the reviews of the Christabel volume suggest, the “curious public” was curious only because it was not “in the know,” a status reserved for the select group who had read the poem before it was released in print. In this case, having access to the printed book alone was tantamount to being an outsider, part of an amorphous public whose desire to possess the book (or conversely, to berate it) derived from the act of

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exclusion performed by Murray’s advertisement and the reviewers’ responses. But this example also reflects a larger cultural understanding of the status of print objects and people’s interactions with them in the first decades of the nineteenth century. If knowing the unpublished back history of a publication often marked inclusion in an elite literary community, the curious, gullible public was defined as such by its belief in the transparency and credibility of the printed word. Any close study of advertisements, however, made it abundantly clear that one couldn’t trust the printed word, as increasingly hyperbolic notices unleashed an arsenal of half truths, puffs, and ploys aimed squarely at the consumer’s purse. By the early nineteenth century, the average reader in much of Europe was certainly aware of the tendency of advertisers to exaggerate the virtues of their products. When he asked booksellers and authors to refrain from self-­praise, Panckoucke wrote how this practice “rarely gave the Public an impression that worked in their favour” (Todd 532). This is perhaps why some booksellers and authors specifically encouraged readers (or prospective subscribers) to come to their shop or house to judge the quality for themselves by examining the proofs (Felton 201). But even this promotional strategy relied on the notion that print might be reliable and trustworthy, if only one could trace it back to its origin in inked metal type and pressed paper. Advertisements continually invoked the reliability of print by way of its materiality (that is, you can see it with your own eyes), while at the same time undoing the very foundation of this belief with a half-­hidden sales pitch. Advertising thus presents a stage on which debates over the credibility of print were acted out; more than this, advertising reveals how the issue of print’s supposedly inherent credibility was mobilized for various ends, from reinforcing social hierarchies to advocating for political reform. In the 1822 essay “On Patronage and Puffing,” William Hazlitt muses, “There is a wonderful power in words, formed into regular propositions, and printed in capital letters, to draw the assent after them, till we have proof of their fallacy. The ignorant

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and idle believe what they read, as Scotch philosophers demonstrate the existence of a material world, and other learned propositions, from the evidence of their senses” (306). Reiterating this sentiment, the Westminster Review suggested in the 1828 essay “Puffing and the Puffiad” that the public “believes two thirds of what it reads in print in honor of typography” (441). In these accounts, print appears to have immense power over early nineteenth-­century readers—­so much that this ignorant public was inclined to trust the expertise and objectivity of any news item, commentary, or review unless compelled to believe otherwise. Leaving room for reading some measure of satire into these comments, it is clear that the power to compel belief does not apply to any and all varieties of printed objects. These are objects that draw attention to their materiality through bold or unusual typography. Reading words in all caps, Hazlitt suggests, has the same effect as empirical observation: it provides a material guarantee of truth. The context of “puffing” indicates a shared concern with print objects devoted to extravagant praise—­those that aim to inflate the reputation of persons or objects for the purpose of direct or indirect economic gain. What is at issue in both comments is the perilous conflation of truth claims based on empirical evidence and an artificially inflated sales pitch. Even if no one actually believed what he read because it was in all capital letters, the imagined threat remained. Advertising, in short, sought to confuse science and sales, truth and lies, in the mind’s eye of the consuming public. Perhaps the most disturbing (and persistent) instance of this conflation appears in advertisements for patent medicines and quack nostrums. As noted earlier, nostrums had long ranked among the most aggressively and pervasively advertised products in Britain, which had only increased their disrepute in certain circles. In Germany as in Britain, respectable advertising avoided Charlatanerien (self-­praise instead of objective descriptions), Marktschreyereien (medicine puffs), and schmutzige und schlüpfrige Schriften (erotica) (Intelligenz-­Blatt, Journal des Luxus und der Moden, June 1793). This hardly put a stop to advertising’s

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proliferation in these and other countries, but it did open the door for a host of brilliant satires on the excesses of advertising. In one particularly amusing send-­up, a scene from the satirical novel Adventures of a Flea (1785), Mrs. Suds (a laundress) says of her snuff that “it is a little of Rowley’s British herb that makes it so strong;—­I take it to make me long-­lived (sneezes).—­Ever since the Duchess of Somerset recommended it to make people live long and see double (sneezes again)—­you know that there was a paragrum in the news-­paper about it; and you know it must be true, because it was printed” (63). Bolstered by the duchess’s puff, the fictional Mrs. Suds has put her faith in the actual advertisements for “the Original british herb snuff” that appeared in the Public Advertiser from 1762 to 1778, to the noticeable detriment of her nasal passages. Thirty years later, the third stanza of Thomas Hudson’s “Because ’Tis in the Papers” (in Comic Songs by Thomas Hudson, London, 1818) would return to this subject of the bewitching power of printed advertisements: The Advertising Doctors’ bills on blessings closely border, For taking only two small pills will cure ev’ry disorder; Infallible and simple, too, they cure all nervous vapours: And all their powers must be true, because ’tis in the Papers.

Satiric jabbing notwithstanding, the potential end point was not so funny. As the famous prison reformer John Howard discovered in 1790 when he self-­medicated with Dr. James’s Fever Powder (a compound of arsenic, mercury, and other choice ingredients), believing in the material power of print could be dangerous, if not fatal, when the experiment was to be tried upon one’s body (Porter and Porter 222n53). Advertisements helped segment expanding readerships, but they also became litmus tests for the perpetual instability of the printed truth.

2

ANTHOLOGIES Anthology, from the Greek anthologion, “a gathering of flowers”—­ the subject seems apt for the Interacting with Print multigraph, itself a collection of writings first expressed as seeds and then cultivated into more exfoliated forms. The practice of making volumes in this way extends back at least to the classical era, with the so-­called Greek Anthology (of epigrams dating from the early Hellenistic period) and Latin Anthology (of short poems from the imperial age) serving as landmark manuscript compilations whose reception in early modern and post-­Enlightenment Europe set precedent for compilers to follow. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the genre of the anthology was not as well defined or as consistently labeled as it is today. In fact, the word anthology only rarely occurred on title pages. Instead, there was an extensive discourse of anthologization that represented anthologies as caskets of gems, bouquets of flowers, collections of beauties, treasure troves, or choice selections. Anthologies served a variety of purposes and audiences: they became embedded in educational contexts as school syllabi increasingly incorporated vernacular literature and aimed to create durable national canons; they provided material for recitation and elocution practice; they were used for private devotion but also self-­culture and pastime; and they could be items of fashionable display, with little concern for the words that were in them. Anthologies appeared in a variety of formats, from cheap duodecimos to expensive, elaborately bound and elegantly produced gift books or luxury editions. Their contents ranged from collections of short quotations

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gathered under thematic headings (such as “forbearance,” “forgiveness,” and “fortitude”) to multivolume works organized by author and containing substantial selections from the oeuvre of each writer included. In this chapter we focus on three kinds of work that anthologies could perform during our period through their combined practice of gathering and recycling. First, anthologies helped create canons of literature by selecting and reprinting the “best” writing from the past, shaping its reception in the process. Second, anthologies offered readers up-­to-­date bulletins on the best new writing or the poems from the past that were currently fashionable. And third, the anthology became increasingly important as a material object that was both suitable for display and associated with novel social practices. Literary anthologies were an important print genre during the two centuries under discussion here because of the way mixture and reuse variously combined to produce different types of readerly and sociable communities, no doubt overlapping in complex ways: readers were united both by their dedication to canons and to fashions. On the one hand, they formed a community connected by the timelessness of taste, those poetic relics preserved in the book’s amber that were meant to endure. On the other hand, they formed an in-crowd knowledgeable about the day’s most ornate and perishable gatherings, to be replaced by a collection no less exemplary and no more permanent the following year. As Goethe said of certain tropical fish—­that they reveal their most brilliant colors only in death—­so, too, of the anthology. But anthologies were also primary exhibits of the way printed matter was woven into heterogeneous medial and social contexts, contexts that could move between distinct social spaces from the classroom to the domestic living room. C A NONI Z ATION

Anthologies were part of larger social and material practices of collecting and reprinting that governed reading practices and

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social interactions between readers in new ways (Benedict 1996; Price 2000; McGill; Piper 2009b, 53–­83). The anthology—­and the poetic anthology in particular—­served as an important tool for regulating literary taste through a process of canonization, the preservation of select works over time (Ross). The idea of the floral gathering was transformed into something more akin to the book of specimens: they didn’t wilt but were pressed into some kind of pedagogical service. In Britain, the period between the publication of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Arthur Quiller-­ Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) was pivotal in the development of the printed anthology, with Francis Palgrave’s best-­selling Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861–­) anchoring the form in the Victorian era. In German, the 1836 Biedermeier collection Auswahl deutscher Gedichte (Selection of German poems) by Theodor Echtermeyer served as the period’s anthological benchmark, with thirty-­four editions appearing by century’s end (Häntzschel 163). The rise of antiquarianism, bibliomania, and modern editorial practice in the late eighteenth century provided the foundations for this literary culture of collecting, one that would profoundly influence readers’ relationships to poetry over the following century. Works like Percy’s Reliques helped usher in a wave of interest not simply in folk ballads themselves but also in a recuperative relationship to national literary production more broadly (Newman). The numerous projects that came in Percy’s wake, from Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–­ 1803) to Herder’s multivolume Stimmen der Völker (1778) to Charles Nodier’s Essais d’un jeune barde (1806), sought to imprint the evanescent voices of lost, and highly localized, cultural origins. However much these works’ initial aims were to promote literary innovation and exceed the strictures of classical poetics, over time they would gradually provide a template for the recuperation of national classics. By the end of the century, and particularly in Germany in the wake of the wars of unification, anthologies were some of the most overtly nationalistic forms

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of printed matter. Oft-­reprinted classics by Goethe, Schiller, or Hölderlin were set alongside or even quietly nudged aside by more “patriotic lyrics.” As the editor of Echtermeyer’s thirty-­ second edition, Ferdinand Becker, argued, “The powerful age and the men who have led it—­our great, good old Kaiser and his magnificent son, ‘our Fritz,’ Bismarck, Moltke—­must find in this book their poetic glorification. . . . Our youth desire to see the famous deeds and heroic figures of its Volk in the transfigurative light of poetry” (vii). And yet as gatherings of pieces that have already bloomed in the public eye, anthologies often partake of the spirit of the harvest, autumnal, if not twilit. Alongside their identity as collections of national fervor, anthologies were also personal companions in the service of thematic reflection. This seems particularly true of the heavily thematic anthologies of the later nineteenth century. American publications such as Bryant’s New Library of Poetry and Song (1870) and Handford’s Home Book of Poetry and Song (1884), or German publications like Für Haus und Herz (For home and heart, 1881) and Am eigenen Herd (Before the hearth, 1887), were subdivided into topical clusters such as “Poems of Sorrow and Death,” “Poems of Love,” “Home and World,” “Duty and Deed,” or seasonally inflected categories like “Winter” or “Evening” (fig. 2.1, plate 2). Where Echtermeyer’s initial compilation had organized poetry according to ascending difficulty (in a kind of Faustian vector of elevatory reading), later editions placed the poems within more horizontally arranged conceptual rubrics. These frequently reprinted blockbuster volumes, and dozens like them, offer poetry organized according to its general subject matter and emotional tenor, to be consumed, as their titles indicated not so subtly, in a domestic setting, preferably in front of a fireplace. As interfaces for their readers, they demanded affective engagement and encouraged sentimental surfing: they offered idioms and images for a reader’s own emotional life. In this way, they reprocessed a tradition to de-­emphasize authors, dates, and national origins in favor of readerly appropriation

2.1. Contents page from Thomas W. Handford’s Illustrated Home Book of Poetry and Song (1884). Digitized by Internet Archive. Original: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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and reflection. The notion of the domestic treasure, or Hausschatz, was their guiding spirit. Produced at the apogee of European book culture, such anthologies testified to the rich tradition of poetry even as they signaled its waning status as high philosophic art. It would take the decadents and the modernists to push against such repackaging, and in so doing move poetry away from personalized bourgeois consumption and into the marginal, high spaces of the avant-­garde. Poetry’s usefulness, one of the hallmark’s of the nineteenth-­century anthology, would itself be repurposed to new ends. Anthologies thus exerted a decisive influence on who and what mattered in the literary landscape of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Repetition shaped reception, then as now. But so, too, did representation. In addition to the interpretive implications of the anthology’s organization, editorial paratexts influenced readers’ responses as well. Headnotes, footnotes, glosses, and capsule author biographies all inflected readers’ approach to poems. The editor’s choice of which poems to include shaped the understanding of an author’s oeuvre as a whole, while the editorial choices made when abridging longer poems or excerpting book-­length poems (and prose writings) shaped how those texts were received by later readers, including many who would not read them in their entirety. For example, some anthologies reduced Percy Shelley’s long political poem Queen Mab to a single passage of natural description, effectively excising its political content and neutering its radical agenda. Others extracted the embedded lyric “The Isles of Greece” from Byron’s Don Juan, stripping the lyric of its poetical context and presenting it as an example of lyrical abstraction or an expression of Byron’s own sentiments. Anthologies also fostered readerly assumptions that carried over to other books, producing what Stefanie Lethbridge has called “anthological reading habits”: approaches to literature learned from the anthologies that treated long poems and novels as though they were anthologies of shorter passages that could be dipped into at will. The anthologies thus promoted an “antho-

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logical” approach to long poems, which encouraged readers to view them as collections of highlights connected by more prosaic or undistinguished linking passages. Such anthological reading could be carried over to long poems, or even to an author’s collected works; both could be treated as strings of brilliant gems to be experienced discreetly. Anthologies contributed to a growing sense of literature’s partiality in the nineteenth century, as that which was divisible but also importable—­as that which could be shared and mutually experienced (Piper 2009b, 125). In cutting, excerpting, and selecting poems in these ways, anthologies did several things. They made poems conform to the anthologies’ built-­in preference for short forms, and for lyric above all. They sliced out content that did not fit with contemporary sensibilities or that might be perceived as radical or subversive. They circulated poems that readers might not otherwise have encountered, even while they sometimes censored them in the process. Anthologies must have sent at least some readers to collected editions to read a poet’s work at greater length. Finally, as their mixedness suggests, they complicated any clean narratives about authorship. Anthologies could, on the one hand, decisively monumentalize authorial identity, as in the ornate and multiply reprinted editions of poetry by Goethe, Schiller, or Byron. They were integral media in the emerging “celebrity apparatus” that Tom Mole has identified as one of this period’s hallmarks. But on the other hand, the anthology could also de-­emphasize authoriality in the name of readerly appropriation. In the gems, beauties and highly circulatable quotations that seemed cut off from their initial speakers (and were quite often spuriously attributed), language seemed to float free from speaker. Like the growing uniformity of bindings [binding], anthologies could have an anonymizing effect on authorship, making literature something more akin to Holy Writ—­universal and omnipresent, belonging to no one particular time, place, or person. As the editor Maximilian Bern wrote in 1887 in Before the Hearth, “The 601 poems here are so enmeshed that it is as if they do not stem from 187 separate poets but from a single one” (vi).

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FA S HI O N A B IL I T Y

If the numerous anthologies of the eighteenth century evoked images of flowering, the harvest, and abundance, their later progeny—­the fashionable gift books, almanacs, and table books of early to late nineteenth-­century Europe—­eventually came to symbolize, in the eyes of many, the disease and sterility of modern bookselling. Less than a century after Johnson’s Dictionary defined the anthology as, first and foremost, a “collection of flowers,” the Edinburgh Review in January 1852 scorned anthologies as the place where poems go to wilt and decay: “Elegant extracts, Anthologies, are sickly things: cut flowers have no vitality—­the single growing violet lives sweetly and lasts: the splendid bouquet decays into unsavoury trash, and as trash is thrown away” (Jones 1852, 163). What the Edinburgh Review here objects to is not the taste-­ shaping collections of canonical verse discussed previously, but the particular anthology subspecies of the fashionable annual, which took Western Europe by storm in the first half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the best contemporary account of this genre’s rise is Leigh Hunt’s essay “Pocket-­Books and Keepsakes,” written, appropriately enough, for the Keepsake of 1828. Hunt’s genealogy of the annual begins with the private commonplace, table, and pocket books that became increasingly popular, particularly among women, in the eighteenth century. By the turn of the nineteenth century, enterprising publishers began experimenting with ways to industrialize (and monetize) this hitherto-­homespun corner of print culture. Blazing the trail, as Hunt indicates, were the German literary annuals of the century’s first decade (the so-­called Taschenbücher). These eventually inspired an inundation in 1820s and 1830s Britain of “the Forget-­me-­not, the Literary Souvenirs, the Amulets, and the Keepsakes, which combine the original contribution of the German annual with the splendid binding of the Christmas English present” (Hunt 1827, 11). Hunt’s genealogy was only partially correct. The German

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annuals of the early nineteenth century owed much of their inspiration to the rise of French literary almanacs that began to emerge close to a half century earlier. With the invention of genres like the Almanachs des muses in 1765, which was quickly imitated a few years later in German in the form of the Musenalmanach, we can see the emergence of an international trend that promoted a new temporal sensibility regarding the genre of the “occasional poem” (Klussmann and Mix; Lanckoronska and Rümann; Lüsebrinck). With its placement alongside the lunar tables and other familiar almanac material, the poetry that appeared in literary almanacs was gradually being naturalized as well as commercialized through the fact of the almanacs’ expiration. The poetry of the almanacs, Taschenbücher, and gift books was framed as having a life cycle, one that fit perfectly within what Ina Ferris and Paul Keen have called an emerging “commercial modernity.” Like the canonizing anthologies that were their near kin, the annuals of the nineteenth century aimed to inculcate taste and propriety via extracts from the works of renowned writers. Where they broke new ground was in privileging new writing over old, drawing heavily on the talents of women contributors and editors, and placing emphasis on the visual, rather than merely literary, aesthetics of the text. Most significant, the leading annuals spared no expense in commissioning the premier artists and engravers of the age to adorn the pages of their volumes. For Keepsake of 1828, £11,000 was reportedly budgeted for engravings alone, and increasingly even the most prominent poets were instructed to use the edition’s engravings as the primary inspiration for their commissioned verses (Erickson 30–­31). Across different national traditions, then, literary annuals employed a variety of visual techniques to frame the reader’s interaction with the text, turning the reader as much into a viewer as anything else. Ornate title pages, allegorical frontispieces, illustrated slipcases, or—­later in the century—­fine bindings and imposing illustrations that accompanied sparsely populated pages of text were some of the primary strategies

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2.2. Frontispiece and title page from Friedrich Wilmans’s Taschenbuch der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet (1823). Photograph: University of Michigan Library Collections.

through which these volumes created a visual environment to accompany, if not overwhelm, their literary contents. If the typographic flourish was in many ways the titular entry to the fashionable anthology—­see, for example, the Taschenbuch der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet (Pocket book dedicated to love and friendship, 1823) or The Irving Gift (1853)—­the devotionally tinged allegorical frontispiece was the most common visual portal to such anthological reading (fig. 2.2). Cherubs, palms, laurels, and madonna figures abound in these volumes, framing reading as both immersive and didactic. Far from Rolf Engelsing’s well-­known model of a religiously informed intensive reading that gets replaced by a commercially driven form of extensive reading, we can see how literary annuals remediated the habits and visual codes of religious education in a secular literary vein. One of the features unique to the annual anthologies was that, before the integration of illustrations into the text with

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new printing techniques [engraving], they were often sold with suites of copperplate-­engraved illustrations as part of their front matter. Like their textual counterparts, these illustrations were of a heterogeneous nature, ranging from literary scenes and historical personages to allegorical poses. The engravings were followed by long stretches of text that assisted the reader in interpreting their significance. The commentary provided a clear tension surrounding the assumed function of the images. On the one hand, introductory material encouraged readers to use their imaginations: “Because the extent to which a gift’s enjoyment is left open to us belongs to the value of that gift, we leave open to those whom these illustrations are gifted to interpret them freely, each according to his fantasy’s ability to appropriate them and turn them into a story” (Taschenbuch für Damen ii). On the other hand, there followed several pages of very careful explanation of the scenes. Readers were left to their own devices with the illustrations if they chose not to read, but they could also be didactically guided toward the proper interpretation if they combined reading with looking. In their direct targeting of a rising female reading class, these books were very much a part of their age in its aim of combining imaginative freedom with pedagogical stricture. The textual control of imagery in the annuals of the first half of the century would be inverted by century’s end with the proliferation of luxury or table editions of poetic anthologies. The point of these books seemed to be to integrate reading into a larger program of spectacular vision. Unlike baroque emblem books, with their strong mnemonic connections between the iconic and the poetic, the nineteenth-­century luxury anthology was largely intent on promoting a form of imaginative transport off or through the page. In Freidrich Zettel’s immensely popular In zarter Frauenhand (In a tender woman’s hand, 1887), which underwent ten editions over the following ten years, we see a variety of illustrative tactics that use overpopulated bowers, abandoned cottages, or the prostrate, lonely individual by a tree to condition poetic reading as an admixture of visual long-

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ing and leisurely reflection (fig. 2.3). These books replayed the decorative tactics of the long tradition of illustrated books—­ floral headpieces, arabesque incipits, and marginal illustrations that engulf the text—­to situate the reader in an imaginative, social, and spatial elsewhere. More than just illustrations, however, contributed to the spectacle of the flood of annual literary anthologies. Already in 1828 Leigh Hunt remarked, “If publications of this nature proceed as they have begun, we shall soon arrive at the millennium of souvenirs. Instead of engravings, we shall have paintings by the first masters; our paper must be vellum; our bindings in opal and amethyst; and nobody must read us except in a room full of luxury, or a bower of roses” (1) [binding]. To appreciate how thoroughly ornate literary anthologies had become by midcentury and beyond, one need only consider the Friendship’s Token of 1855 held in the American Antiquarian Society’s collection (fig. 2.4, plate 3). With its embossed, floral-­patterned, red-­ leather binding, at the center of which lay a small oil painting of a Romantic cloudscape encircled by opal stones (Hunt’s prediction come true), this collection of the year’s literary material was being framed as a sensorially rich object, appealing to site, touch, and imagination in a complex web of perception. Reading was by no means the primary point of these book objects. This formula of ekphrastic poetry, elaborate illustration, ornate binding, and fashionable writers proved enormously profitable for publishers over the century. By some accounts, the annuals of late 1820s and 1830s Britain almost single-­ handedly rescued a publishing industry that was floundering after the banking crisis of 1826, collectively bringing in more than £100,000 per year at their peak (Hoagwood and Ledbetter 78). Threatened by this sea change in publishing, a host of establishment writers—­many of whom, incidentally, had at one point contributed to the annuals—­decried the devastating impact this middlebrow, feminine, and visually oriented variant of the anthology was having on literary culture. Perhaps most notoriously, William Makepeace Thackeray equated

2.3. Joseph von Eichendorff’s “Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel,” from In zarter Frauenhand (Stuttgart, 1887). Photograph: BPK, Berlin / Art Resource, New York.

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2.4. Binding of Friendship’s Token (1855). Photograph: American Antiquarian Society.

writing and drawing for an annual with prostitution and complained that the annuals for 1838, with their “miserable mediocrity,” “feeble verse,” and “gathering of small wit,” marked a new low point for an already-­bankrupt genre (757). The annuals were in many ways at the center of debates about the commercialization of reading and the proper regulation of aesthetic sensibility. Whether as apogee or nadir of nineteenth-­century print culture, it was impossible not to recognize that, with their unequivocal embrace of visual culture, literary annuals represented a dramatic shift in how readers interacted with print.

Plate 1. Pieces of a twig allegedly from the yew tree mentioned in Thomas Grey’s “Elegy” mounted under cheesecloth in a recess cut out of the board of the inside cover, from Jonathan Grey’s Poems (1768). The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (PML 145576). Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987. Photograph: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

Plate 2. Contents page from Thomas W. Handford’s Illustrated Home Book of Poetry and Song (1884). Digitized by Internet Archive. Original: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Plate 3. Binding of Friendship’s Token (1855). Photograph: American Antiquarian Society.

Plate 4. François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour (1758). Photograph: V&A Images, London / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 5. Cottonian binding on Robert Southey’s copies of J. Griffith’s Travels in Europe, Asia Minor and Arabia (London, 1805). Photograph: Courtesy of The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

Plate 6. Fifty-­sol assignat (1793). Photograph: Richard Taws.

Plate 7. Admission form to the Foundling Hospital, with attached fabric token (1756). Photograph: © Coram.

Plate 8. Printer’s waste reused as a specimen-­drying book, from the drying book from the Endeavor voyage of 1768–­1771. Photograph: © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

Plate 9. I. Thomasen, page from Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings (1713). Manuscript transcription of the original. Photograph: General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Plate 10. A tracing of hands in The Works of Shakespeare (1853). Photograph: Alderman Library, University of Virginia. Photography: Andrew Stauffer.

Plate 11. Reading in multiple directions in the Hale Family Scrapbook (nineteenth century). Photograph: Draper Hill Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

Plate 12. Mary Delany’s Asperula made from 230 pieces of cut-­out paper (1777). Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Plate 13. Green’s Characters in The Red Rover. Photograph: Rare Books and Manuscript Library of the Ohio State University Libraries.

Plate 14. J. R. Smith, The Dream (1791). Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Plate 15. Charles Williams, Luxury, or the Comforts of a Rumpford (1801). Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Plate 16. Authorized English version of The Holy Bible (1890), bound with the Book of Common Prayer and The Whole Book of Psalms, including art by Catholic dissident William Faithorne tipped in to the text. Photograph: Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (B 7770.8.5).

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FROM HAND TO MOUTH

The development of fashionable anthologies was tied in important ways to the growing visual ornamentation that characterized the print culture of the period [frontispieces; engraving]. But it was also integrated with other intermedial practices, including handwriting and recitation. Anthologies often included ornate dedicatory leaves with blank spaces for the names of givers and recipients to be written in by hand, a feature that indicated the larger social significance of these volumes. However much they were a part of the growing visualization of literature in the nineteenth century (D’Arcy Wood), they were also part of a larger process of placing books within sentimental networks of exchange. They did so, above all else, through the motivation of manuscriptural practices, whether in the form of dedicatory inscriptions, shared underlining, or writing occasional poems to each other on the tissue paper between illustrations (Piper 2009b, 121–­52) [manuscript]. Literature packaged in parts in the form of the anthology was framed through the act of handwriting that accompanied it as something impartable—­as that which could be shared within a larger economy of writing. The evolution of the anthology from miscellany to gift book highlighted the extent to which such collective practices were being designed to produce new kinds of collectivities and to offset the individuations that belonged to commercial print culture. Sharing and owning, copyright and common right, were not two distinct and oppositional entities by the nineteenth century, but two integral halves within a larger economy of textual circulation. The anthology was a crucial format that straddled that divide in complex and persuasive ways. Another way anthologies structured relationships among communities of readers was through practices of recitation. Many readers looking for poems to recite found them in anthologies, and many anthologies were designed specifically to provide material for recitation, including a series of “school speakers.” This symbiosis between the printed products of

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anthologists and the cultural practices of reciters ensured the popularity of poems such as Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” and Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca” throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Recitation could take place in family circles or educational settings such as school speech days or Sunday schools, as well as between individuals such as parents and children, governesses and their pupils, and courting couples. Memorized and recited poems circulated beyond the books in which they first appeared, but the initial choice of poems for recitation was often made from anthologies. Anthologies thus helped shape readerly practices of interaction that occurred outside their pages. As with all the print genres that follow historically, the anthology’s materiality was central to its meaning within a larger economy of print artifacts. Indeed, such materiality likely trumped the intratextual snipping and gathering that has attracted most of the scholarly attention concerning them. Far more than simple battlegrounds for who was in or out over time within various literary coteries or pantheons, such intermedial experiences of visualizing, writing with one’s hand, or reciting aloud were arguably the more significant drivers of the anthology’s meaning within this period. Understanding the book as a material object, and the social and sensorial interactions it occasioned, gives us deeper insights into its reasons for success and continued circulation.

3

BINDING Books are fundamentally the creation of binders. Authors produce manuscripts; printers produce sheets. Only in the act of folding printed sheets into folios or quartos or octavos or other formats, and then attaching those folded sheets to one another, do we get a book. Binding is thus a deliberate act that creates meaning through the presentation and collation of the leaves it encloses. It is something we often take for granted, so much so that it remains largely invisible. Scholarly citations describe authorship, title, place of publication, publisher, year of publication, pagination, and even the number of volumes in a given publication, but rarely information about a book’s binding. Even in descriptive bibliography and material text studies, unless a particular binding is unique or otherwise noteworthy, it is unlikely to become a focus of attention. With the exception of some titles in Google books, images of covers and spines are often excluded from digital remediations of books, an example of what Diana Kichuk has called “content amputation” (298). And yet for eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century book buyers, the choice of a binding would generally precede the reading of the text it enveloped. For most of the period we are investigating (and long before), binding began with a stack of folded sheets. Gatherings of several sheets nested inside one another—­or individual sheets, if they were in a format that required a lot of folding—­were stitched to bands that formed the beginnings of a spine. In the eighteenth century, many books could be purchased only stitched, or on the Continent, still in sheets. Advertisements in

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Journal de la Librairie in the 1780s, for example, reveal that Parisian booksellers generally offered their books in only a single form: stitched, brochés, 85 percent of the time, or bound, reliés, the other 15 percent of the time. Only about 10 percent of them would offer a choice between stitched, bound, or, in a very few cases, unbound, en feuilles (Felton 161). In Britain, choices about the exterior covering of the book were generally made at the point of sale; on the Continent, the convention was to commission bindings only after a text had been acquired. In either case, a binding was completed when boards for the front and back covers were sewn to the bands, and then covered along with the spine with leather or paper. The places where those covers attached to the boards would then be themselves covered with paper (the so-­called pastedowns), and then the covers and spine might be decorated with a design comprising lettering and little tool marks, with gold leaf attached to some or all of that design. As this suggests, bindings available for any given edition were various and often came at multiple price points depending on decoration (say, blind stamped or gilt) or type of leather. Binding was a realm of consumer choice. This process remained more or less stable until the advent of uniform publishers’ bindings in the 1830s. Constructed as a unit structurally separate from the text block, these bindings formed cases into which the folded and stitched sheets would be inserted (with glue, rather than sewing, connecting the sheets to the binding). Their decorations would be stamped as a whole by a machine, rather than constructed out of individual tool marks, and the material covering the boards was a glazed cloth, rather than paper or leather. This allowed for a hitherto-­unimaginable uniformity across editions, along with a far more pictorial sort of decoration. It also put an end to the optional nature of binding. After roughly 1830, book buyers who wanted their bindings customized could no longer purchase merely stitched texts; instead, they had to buy fully bound books and have them unbound and rebound. Before 1830, however, every act of binding was essentially an

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act of rebinding. Every book was the object of a binding decision, in much the same way that an anonymous or untitled text still participates in the system of authorial and titular designations. To fold a sheet or to assemble a series of folded sheets is itself an act of binding, and therefore, to say that early modern books were sold “unbound” is to overlook the fact that placing a text in wrappers or even merely stab-­stitching it for initial sale constitutes an act of binding. The subsequent decision to remove a book from its wrappings and to bind it in leather is, in effect, to have it rebound. This is more than a semantic distinction: binding is an act of valuation and interpretation, underscoring the transient as well as the more intractable aspects of how eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century readers—­but also authors and publishers—­interacted with print. Acts of binding may appear to contain and control the text by materializing its physical boundaries. Rebinding, however, makes visible the interlocking systems of social, cultural, economic, and political valuation in which manuscript and printed materials participate and which they help to define. ORDER: HISTORY IN HOLES

If every binding is an act of rebinding, many gatherings of paper bound together contain the traces of a book’s former selves. Following these traces, we uncover a simple fact: binding foregrounds that the printed text is as malleable as its manuscript counterpart. Even as it fixes the order of elements in a book or manuscript gathering, it is also an exercise in shape-­shifting. Binding produces (and sometimes exposes) the chameleon-­like nature of the text block; it reveals the ways pages are ordered and reordered to serve the needs and desires of authors, editors, and sellers. Binding and rebinding map histories of strategic use and abuse. Some of the most cogent evidence for binding histories comes from the handmade punch holes that remain after pages are separated from a codex (the technical term is stab-­

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binding). Such evidence often stands as the best indicator of an original codex’s page order or sequence, making it particularly important for literary and historical analysis [marking]. A key British example can be found in the illuminated books of William Blake in the 1780s and 1790s, in which various printings of a codex are often bound in different page sequences, regardless of their page numbering and plot associations (Viscomi). Such divergent orderings are evident in, for example, various printings of Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, and the first Book of Urizen. (Indeed, no two copies of Songs of Innocence share the same plate ordering.) Of course, examples of stab-­binding can be found well before the eighteenth century. That quartos of Shakespeare’s plays still retain the telltale two stab holes indicates that they were sewn together in wrappers—­ like pamphlets—­rather than bound in boards. Even in the case of sumptuous publications like Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623), punch-­hole markings have provided vital evidence. In 2008, for example, Raymond Scott approached scholars at the Folger Shakespeare Library, offering for purchase what was later verified as an authentic First Folio. The volume in question was, however, missing its front cover, thereby enabling scholars to see a telltale pattern of punch holes and binding thread. Indeed, unbeknownst to Scott, most of the First Folios could be positively identified by such punch-­hole patterns, since a descriptive census of all extant editions had been published in 2003 by Anthony James West. As a result, the punch-­hole evidence was used to identify the volume—­in this case, as a copy stolen in 1998 from the Durham University library. Scott was accordingly prosecuted, found guilty of handling stolen property, and ultimately jailed for eight years. Punch-­hole evidence also provides a method for reconstructing the original order of manuscripts that have been reorganized and rebound at a later date. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the work of Emily Dickinson, who is known for sewing together unique assemblages of her poetry into “fascicles,” handmade gatherings of individual sheets that reveal eviden-

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tiary punch holes after separation. Since Dickinson never numbered or indexed these individual pages, their original sequence and arrangement must be reconstructed from such evidence as individualized stab-­binding. While the thematic coherence of the poems collected into fascicles is contested in Dickinson studies, the evidence of stab-­binding is often used not only to determine original page sequences but also to effect the critical interpretations that underlie such groupings and categorizations. Even when pages survive bound together, the nature of the binding and the booklets produced can provide crucial information about a writer’s compositional practices. While almost no manuscripts of Jane Austen’s printed fiction survive, there do exist several small handmade notebooks containing manuscripts of drafts of two incomplete narratives, “The Watsons” and “Sanditon.” These booklets are small (approximately nineteen by twelve centimeters) and appear to have been made by cutting down sheets of “post” writing paper (Sutherland 145, 169); with the “Sanditon” manuscript, for example, several sheets were folded and possibly pinned to make quires, and the quires were then nested inside one another to make three booklets, of thirty-­t wo, forty-­eight, and eighty pages (Sutherland 169). It has been speculated that Austen wrote in these small, handmade booklets (as opposed to store-­bought blank volumes, such as she used to copy her juvenile writing) because they were “more easily secreted . . . from prying eyes”; they could be easily hidden under other papers, and perhaps—­because they were originally constructed from writing paper—­they could be made to look like letters, a far more acceptable form of female writing than fiction. This feature of the homemade booklets does not seem to have served the Bodleian Library (the owner of the largest portion of “The Watsons”) terribly well. After paying £993,250 for the sixty-­eight-­page manuscript in 2011, all four leaves of the second quire were reported missing shortly after the manuscript was digitally photographed. If authors, editors, and librarians use custom binding for

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both practical and aesthetic reasons, readers might also through acts of rebinding. An extreme example is evident in the practice that became known as grangerization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (see Peltz 1997, 2004; Jackson 185–­96; Pointon 53–­78). Named after James Granger, the author of the popular Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution (1769), grangerization is the addition, most often through interleaving, of illustrations, prints, and sometimes even original drawings or manuscripts, to an existing printed text [thickening]. Grangerization thus required existing books have their bindings disassembled, and the practice of “book breaking” evolved as grangerization became a popular pastime in the nineteenth century. By grangerizing a book, the reader-­ owner often dramatically altered the original book—­or even, as in the case of Richard Bull’s thirty-­six-­volume extra-illustrated version of Granger’s two-­volume book, completely transformed it (Huntington Library shelf mark 283000). As the fate of Dickinson’s fascicles and Bull’s Granger suggest, binding reveals the powerful role of the consumer in making meaning through the organization and binding of manuscript or printed pages. BINDING VALUE TO DESIRE

The variety and malleability of pre-­1830 binding choices and practices makes it possible to examine the ways in which eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century book owners (and thus presumably at least some readers of those books) understood the significance of the texts they possessed. Choosing to bind a text in leather-­covered boards in the first place, rather than leave it in wrappers, indicated that the text was valued in a specific way: the purchaser presumably intended to keep, display, read, and perhaps reread it. Readers sometimes chose to individualize their bindings with bookplates or monograms. Even the imposition of uniformity—­the decision to bind all of one’s books the same way or to distinguish them by genre, topic, era, or some other principle—­could reflect an owner’s thinking about library

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3.1. François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour (1758). Photograph: V&A Images, London / Art Resource, New York.

organization or the organization of knowledge more generally. In contrast, not binding a book could also be an expression of individual preferences or readerly practice. Texts that were unlikely to be collected or reread, because of either their topicality or their alleged lack of value, might not have bindings commissioned for them. But if a reader was particularly ardent (or wished to be perceived as such), even texts “worthy” of binding might have to wait to be bound. Madame de Pompadour, for example, was fond of having herself painted reading books that were merely stitched, as if she couldn’t stand the delay that binding would impose upon her encounter with the text (fig. 3.1, plate 4). Within the myriad acts of valuation that go into the making of a book, binding can indicate the ways contemporary readers

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mobilized print for purposes of self-­definition—­in this case, to produce an identity for public consumption. If Madame de Pompadour made the lack of binding into an expression of herself as a passionate reader, Romantic-­period authors in Britain were equally passionate about binding choices, and equally attuned to the interlocking systems of economic, social, and cultural value in which their choices were embedded. Charles Lamb’s 1822 essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” articulates some of the ways binding registered value in the early nineteenth century. As Lamb makes clear, binding was expensive, and to have an extensive library bound was the privilege of the elite class. While pointing to binding as a marker of class status, Lamb is also centrally concerned with the match between a book’s content and its binding. While describing the range of binding styles available, Lamb articulates a theory, albeit an idiosyncratic one, about the cultural meanings of binding: admitting that “to be strong-­backed and neat-­bound is the desideratum of a volume,” he insists that some books deserve to be fully and finely bound, whether in Russian style (tanned cowhide) or Moroccan style (goatskin leather), but a fine leather binding, even “when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscriminately” (33–­34). For magazines, Lamb prefers “the dishabille, or half-­binding (with Russia backs ever),” an intermediary binding style, where the back, spine, and front corners are bound in leather, and the rest covered in cloth or paper. Such binding would provide durability rather than luxury. Some texts—­specifically “Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large”—­did not, according to Lamb, deserve the title of books and thus should not be bound at all. The problem with binding such material was not that it was considered ephemeral—­Lamb approves of binding conventionally defined ephemera like the “kind-­hearted play-­book” [ephemerality]. Rather, the problem was that when dictionaries and treatises are dressed in fine bindings, these texts act “like false saints, usurpers of true

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shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants” (Lamb 33–­34). The legitimate occupants of fine bindings are old, good books—­those whose value resides in the combination of culturally sanctioned authors and content, and the longevity of the physical object. As the distinction between playbooks and pocket books indicates, Lamb’s essay uses binding to put forward a set of generic hierarchies. The “works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which ‘no gentleman’s library should be without’” are unworthy of fine binding; he even claims that “it moves my spleen to see these things in books’ clothing perched upon shelves” when “tythe of that good leather would comfortably re-­clothe my shivering folios” (33). Here, Lamb distances himself from the country gentleman seeking to fill his library with grand, synoptic histories and treatises of moral philosophy, putting in their place the collector’s preference for old folio editions of Sir Philip Sidney or Milton’s prose works. In this system, books are not valued as a medium for the Enlightenment program of diffusing knowledge; instead, Lamb’s comments on binding elevate and celebrate “literature” in its modern designation of works of creative imagination. Crucially, however, the ascension of literature in Lamb’s essay rests on the sensual pleasures he associates with bindings. Where a book is at once both good and rare, where the individual is almost the species, “no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel.” Even so, ultracanonical authors like Shakespeare or Milton should not be beautifully costumed: with “a Shakspeare [sic], or a Milton (unless the first editions), it were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession of them confers no distinction. The exterior of them (the things themselves being so common), strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of property in the owner” (34). The affective power of the literary work—­its ability to raise sweet emotions—­adheres not in its linguistic content but in its cover. In these vaguely sexualized descriptions of books in various

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states of dress and undress, Lamb’s essay trades on the rhetoric of bibliomania and the bibliomaniac, a collector whose love of literature was lodged in the pleasures of possessing the book as a physical object (Lynch 108). The book as object exerted immense allure for many of Lamb’s contemporaries (Lynch; Ferris), and binding thus became a site of bibliophilic desire and exchange. For example, in 1808 Robert Southey was settling his family and his books into a permanent residence at Greta Hall in Keswick in the Lake District. The prospect of having his book collection gathered together, and more important, housed with him, provokes thoughts of beautifying their bindings: Southey writes to his friend Mary Barker that “one set of six folios is lettered in gold upon bister . . . & the volumes connected with chain work, but the gold-­leaf is exhausted & two links are yet wanting to the chain” (1804–­1809, letter 1471). To complete the decorative bindings, Southey writes to “beg, intreat & desire” two things of Barker: to send him “as much gold leaf as a frank will carry” and to visit him so they can “juniperize” (or add gold leaf to) the bindings together (1804–­1809, letter 1472). Through this playful, sexually charged epistolary exchange, the practice of decorating bindings produces personal intimacy between people by way of their mutual desire to possess and dress the rare and expensive volume. The lavish bindings of Southey’s folios stand in direct contrast to his “ducks,” books with tattered covers that were housed at the “dark end” of his library, out of public view. This collection of ugly ducklings certainly included the books Southey’s daughters and their friends rebound in colored cotton cloth with handwritten labels on the spines (fig. 3.2, plate 5; and fig. 3.3). In 1836 Southey wrote, “One room is almost fitted up with books of their binding: I call it the Cottonian library; no patchwork quilt was ever more diversified” (1849–­1850, 6:284). Whether or not, as has been speculated, this material came from the discarded dresses of Southey’s wife and daughters, it is clear that women in the Southey household learned and practiced the craft of rebinding. Southey’s son estimated that some

3.2. Cottonian bindings on Robert Southey’s copies of J. Griffith’s Travels in Europe, Asia Minor and Arabia (London, 1805). Photograph: Courtesy of The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

3.3. Binding on Anna Seward’s Letters of Anna Seward: Written between the Years 1784 and 1807 (London, 1811). Photograph: Courtesy of The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

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twelve hundred to fourteen hundred books were kept in this “Cottonian Library,” a pun on Sir Robert Cotton’s seventeenth-­ century library, which formed the basis of the British Museum. Charles Southey would later write that his father was “much interested and amused [by the work], as the ladies would often suit the pattern to the contents, clothing a Quaker work or book of sermons in sober drab, poetry in some flowery design, and sometimes contriving a sly piece of satire at the contents of some well-­known author by their choice of its covering. One considerable mode of convenience attended this eccentric mode of binding—­the book became as well known by its dress as by its contents, and much more easily found” (Southey 1849–­1850, 6:17). These domesticated books may have had a wider influence: according to Michael Sadleir, Southey’s collection persuaded publishers to use flowered cloth bindings, which first became commercially accessible in 1825 (47, 43). Within the household economy, however, the cotton-­covered duck proclaimed Southey’s stable domestic life, standing in direct contrast to the (perhaps illicit) pleasures of his gilded folios. BOUND AND DETERMINED: POLITICS AND PUBLISHERS

Binding was often an expression of the book owner’s preferences, finances, and tastes, while also providing a platform for the elevation of literature as a genre of writing and the embrace of the book as an object of desire. Both social and intimately personal, a product of the buyer’s active choices, pre-­1830 binding practices vest agency in the consumer of print. Even so, acts of binding were run through with political implications; how you bound your books and what you bound together might reflect your position on a political, legal, or theological debate. Unsurprisingly, publishers often sought to influence and control buyer’s choices about how and what to bind. For example, the publisher John Murray supplied title pages in the back of Lord Byron’s volume of poems Hebrew Melodies, which purchas-

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ers could use when binding the book together with other Byron publications to form a two-­volume collected works (Mole 110). In France, “instructions to the binder” regarding the intended order for specific parts or illustrations were common. For example, as part of his pitch to potential subscribers to his Galerie Universelle in 1785, Imbert de la Platière explained the benefit for readers to receive parts of the book periodically because “they will have the advantage to classify the detached Vies and Portraits according to their taste” (Felton 200). Such suggestions about binding might not seem to be value laden on the surface, but both the book owner’s choices and the publisher’s directions for binding could, and often did, make overt political claims. For example, Leigh Hunt performs his inclusion in a specific literary coterie through a review of his friends’ libraries, but he also uses bindings to pronounce a radical politics to his readers. As with Lamb (who appears in the act of kissing his Homer in Hunt’s essay), Hunt defines books as imaginative literature, but he also finds that fine bindings change his relationship both to books and to his friends. Of his friend Henry Crabb Robinson, Hunt comments that “H.R.’s books are all too modern and finely bound, which however is not his fault, for they were left him by will,—­not the most kindly act of the testator. Suppose a man were to bequeath us a great japan chest three feet by four, with an injunction that it was always to stand on the tea-­table” (Hunt 1823, 3). For Hunt, Robinson’s library of books in fine bindings is an unfortunate burden in its all-­too-­visible display of wealth. This condition, Hunt claims, speaks of something more than bad taste: he recalls “borrowing a book of H.R. which, having lost, I replaced with a copy equally well bound. I am not sure I should have been in such haste, even to return the book, had it been a common looking volume; but the splendor of the loss dazzled me into this ostentatious piece of propriety. I set about restoring it as if I had diminished his fortunes, and waived the privilege a friend has to use a man’s things as his own” (Hunt 1823, 3). The lavish binding produces a reaction that runs directly

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counter to Hunt’s practice of treating his friends’ property as his own. Hunt’s commitment to leveling distinctions of class and education (recall that Hunt was a supporter of the young working-­class poet John Keats) is thwarted by the splendor of H.R.’s bindings. A library of fine modern bindings is, for Hunt, an unavoidable statement of one’s class politics; binding is an essentially performative act, one that demonstrates, even if unintentionally, a political position. As with the external coverings of books, different ways of binding materials together could make very different outward political claims. Controversial works that elicited intense reactions from the reading public can be particularly instructive in this regard. A salient example is Jacob Tonson’s 1710 authorized (by the House of Lords) edition of the proceedings of the trial of the Tory clergyman Doctor Henry Sacheverell. The first impression of the work was issued as a folio, and it was sold for the considerable sum of seven shillings. While Tonson’s edition tried scrupulously to present itself as full, fair, and impartial, it was widely understood by contemporaries to be a Whig publication (Cowan). The reason for this perceived Whig bias had little to do with the contents of the text itself: it was widely understood to have provided a rather accurate account of what had been said and done during the trial. The bias came from the omission of a key detail: that Tories wanted to emphasize the personal persecution (by the Whig managers of the trial) of a man they believed to be an orthodox doctor of divinity of the established Church of England. Dozens of differently bound copies of The Tryal of Doctor Sacheverell are housed in research libraries and private collections around the world, and many of them have distinctly Tory or Whig bindings. Tory bindings almost invariably include a tipped-­in engraved portrait of Doctor Sacheverell—­a visual reminder of the real man (in full clerical gown) who had endured persecution at the trial. Whig bindings never include the portrait of Sacheverell; their emphasis is on the text itself, the magisterial and just proceedings of the law duly administered by the

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highest court of the land. Tory bindings often include an additional textual supplement to the Tonson proceedings, a short tract printed by the Tory bookseller Abel Roper titled An Impartial Account of What Pass’d Most Remarkable in the Last Session of Parliament, Relating to the Case of Dr Henry Sacheverell (1710), which had been rushed into publication to coincide with the publication of Tonson’s edition, and which in fact beat Tonson to the booksellers’ stands by two days. Roper’s tract and the portrait of Sacheverell himself act as identifiers of Tory allegiance within the reader-­bound folios of Tonson’s Tryal. We know from contemporary advertisements that these binding decisions were not homogeneous by chance; booksellers often instructed purchasers on the proper way to bind up particular tracts together. In the 16–­19 June 1710 issue of the newspaper the Supplement, the bookseller John Morphew advertised a series of folio tracts he had for sale at his shop near Stationers’ Hall, and he advised his readers on just how he thought they should be bound up. His tracts were, he noted, proper to be bound up with the Tryal of Dr. Henry Sacheverell; and the method of placing them: I. An Impartial Account . . . II. The List of the . . . Members of the House of Commons that were for and against Dr. Sacheverell. III. The Tryal itself. IV. The Lords Protest. V. The Four Bishops Speeches. VI. The Collection of Addresses.

Surviving copies of the Tonson folio testify that this advice was often heeded, at least by Tory readers. Other surviving copies indicate that Whig readers had their own ideas about how the folio ought to be bound. The Tonson Tryal held by the British Library (shelf mark Sach. 444) is bound with sixteen other items, all of which are of a clearly Whiggish bent. Another volume held at the Cambridge University Library (shelf mark R.7.2) includes an engraving memorializing the Hanoverian accession of 1714, indicating that it had been bound at least four years after the trial and that Whig readers still thought it worth preserving

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the Tonson Tryal text and giving it a prominent place in their libraries. In the decades after 1830, the potential meanings of binding materials together and of how books were covered and decorated began to shift with the onset of large-­scale commercial binding. The movement from individualized binding practices into market segmentation in the nineteenth century was driven above all else by the tactical use of color. The association of a specific binding and a literary genre was especially important in France, with the Bibliothèque bleue composed of cheap and popular works (Bollème). Dating from the early seventeenth century, these affordable and often illustrated books, usually of small formats and made with inferior paper, were associated with mass and popular culture. Called livres bleus because of their bluish paper binding, these popular books (short novels, fairy tales, religious works, plays) were generally sold by peddlers who traveled from town to town, in areas where the inhabitants did not often interact with print. Bindings of a specific color became the trademark of successful publishers in the nineteenth century, especially Louis Hachette (who adopted the color blue for his travel books) and Michelin, which, to this day, still publishes green travel books. Other examples include the bright-­green illustrated paper wrappers that were used to sell the German Taschenbücher or literary anthologies, the uniform gray browns of the expanding lending libraries, the yellow covers that came to stand for a particular crime genre in Italy, or the multicolored publishers’ cloth bindings, in bright reds, greens, and blues with elaborate gold lettering, that came into vogue in the 1870s. Commercial bindings thus gradually emerged over the course of the nineteenth century as a material space to differentiate both genres and readers from one another via the category of taste. But they were also a crucial means, as Carlos Spoerhase argued in “Reading the Late-­Romantic Lending Library,” of anonymizing reading. As bindings came to signify by category, the book as an extension of an authorial persona—­always fragile and indeed oscillatory in its associations—­was increas-

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ingly diminished. But as we have shown, this development was not entirely new: as a practice and topic, binding might appear to be a form of individualized expression, but more often than not it simultaneously performed, and sometimes was mobilized to create, social and generic hierarchies in the guise of individuation. By organizing people into distinct groups of readers and grouping books by genre, the multicolored bindings of the later nineteenth century reiterate the work that binding had performed throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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CATA L O G S Ever since the creation of the first printed book catalog, Georg Willer’s Novorum Librorum quos Nundinae Atumnales, Francoforti Anno 1564 celebratae, Venales Exhibuerent—­a print item that lists other print items for sale—­the catalog has been a vital component of European print culture. It is both a regulatory device, one that retroactively arranges a quantity of material, and an engine of desire, initiating new prospective orientations around an imagined future possession or experience. As catalogs began to proliferate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, orienting individuals’ relationships to books, art, collections, and consumer goods in increasingly pluralistic ways, how did individuals—­as compilers, consumers, or readers—­use them? Unlike dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopedias, and related compendia of information [index], catalogs expressly mediate between people and items in the object world; and while an early modern catalog of books might list “all the books ever written on a given subject or by all the authors of a given nation” (Chartier 1994, 70), the bookseller’s or publisher’s catalog identifies potential belongings, driving acquisition and consumption. How, we wish to ask, did catalogs participate in shaping individuals’ relationships not only to print during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but also to the wider world of things? In what ways did catalogs articulate that world, and in what particular cultures of reading and viewing were catalogs embedded? How did the catalog’s typographic linearity, whether sparse or abundant, expose this referential, indexical genre to creative manipulation and atypical reading?

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FIXING

Catalogs from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century primarily fall into two categories: inventories of goods and inventories of collections. In the former group, we can include printed advertisements that tell one what it is possible to buy in a particular place from a particular person or business. Omnipresent catalogs of this type included booksellers’ catalogs, catalogs of art-­historical prints, and consumer catalogs. Where the art catalog might very often have served as an important guidebook—­orienting viewers’ attention within a local collection—­the consumer catalog was often bound up with the distant and the postal. As Catherine Golden as well as others have reminded us, there was an important connection between print and the post, one that extended well beyond the world of letters. One increasingly popular version was the toy and curiosity catalog, embodied in Georg Hieronimus Bestelmeier’s popular Preiss-­Courant (1803–­), which listed an assortment of items such as magic mirrors, dollhouses, and magic lanterns, and would serve as an important forerunner of the rise of mail-­ order toy catalogs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But an inventory of goods might also list items for sale at an auction, or things one might win if one entered a lottery—­for example, Ashton Lever sold the contents of his museum entire in a lottery to James Parkinson in 1786, who in turn sold the collection piecemeal at auction in 1806 (in 7,879 lots over two months to about 140 purchasers). The auction catalog, compiled by the collector and naturalist Edward Donovan, stretches to 410 pages; twelve annotated copies of this catalog survive; they are variously bound with guides to other museums, watercolors and drawings by Sarah Stone and other unidentified artists, manuscript lists of artifact types, and printed price lists (Kaeppler 19–­21). Auction catalogs often record the process by which a list of goods for sale is born of an inventory of objects in space, things you can see in a museum or private house but cannot take with you when you leave—­except as they appear,

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remade as word and/or image, in the inventory itself. This second type of catalog represents “enclaved” objects (to use Arjun Appadurai’s term), objects that have been taken out of circulation and are not (at least temporarily) available for purchase or exchange. (Catalogs of circulating libraries make an interesting exception to this rule.) The inventory of a collection might also be used to keep track of things while they move through space, as with Daniel Solander’s Manuscript lists of Plants collected during Cook’s first voyage, in the order in which they were placed in the drying books for carriage home (in London’s Natural History Museum Library and Archives). A second catalog of Banks’s South Seas collection—­compiled by Solander after the Endeavour had returned to England and the dried plants were safely lodged in Banks’s house—­remakes the objects into type specimens; this catalog likely would have been printed in tandem with carefully prepared plates of Banks’s “florilegium” (as it is now called), had that work come to fruition in Banks’s lifetime. In this second incarnation, the taxonomic list reveals a characteristic of the catalog more generally: it binds description to the material world until the collection’s dissolution untethers the “items” in the list from their objects and gives them leave to circulate, unrestrained, in the world of print. The capacity for something to be lost or sold suggests its status as property; catalogs may have different functions with regard to what they list—­to sell, to inventory, to typify—­but the majority are statements of ownership and possession—­for example, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole (Strawberry Hill, 1774); A Scientific and Descriptive Catalogue of Peale’s Museum (Philadelphia, 1791); A Companion to the Museum (Late Sir Ashton Lever’s) (London, 1790); Bibliotheca Dormeriana: A catalogue of the genuine and elegant library of the late Sir Clement Cottrell Dormer, . . . which will be sold by auction, . . . by Samuel Baker (London, 1764); An alphabetical catalogue of all the books in the library, belonging to the Bristol Education Society (Bristol, 1795). Whether it describes the contents of a house, museum, bookshop, or library, in each instance the catalog solidifies the

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relationship between objects and the person or group that possesses them. Indeed, the existing scholarship on collections and collecting, which dwells on the motivations, desires, whims, and perversions of the individual collector, sheds light on the aims of the catalog as a genre. Collections manifest the individual’s effort to control and contain the external world—­and thereby ward off mortality—­by erasing the context of origin and replacing it with the self-­referential system of the collection (Baudrillard 14–­16; Stewart 151). This strategy of containment might be employed for national, political, or cultural reasons as much as personal ones. As critics of colonial and early American natural history suggest, collectors like Sir Hans Sloane, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Wilson Peale and William Bartram used lists and catalogs to fasten temporal, material things within the fix of writing, to provide stability in the volatile environment of Jamaica or the newly constituted United States. The catalog thus acts to shore up chaos into order—­even if this projected stability could never be attained in nature or government (see Looby; Manning; Kriz). We may, by an extension of this logic, understand the catalog of “all the books” in the Bristol Education Society Library not simply as a locational device and organizing inventory but as a symbolic expression of the ordering, theological aims of the Baptist missionaries “in any part of the British Dominions,” whose education and training the library supported (Rippon 33). As Solander’s or Bartram’s taxonomic lists suggest, catalogs often attempt to fix objects in the space of print when they are in imminent danger of dispersion—­by sale, shipwreck, or political upheaval. But catalogs also attempt to control and contain the external world by sequentially ordering a given collection of objects, fitting them into a diachronic narrative. This approach is especially apparent in early museum catalogs, which often emphasize a narrative that is not only sequential but markedly historical as well. That is, catalogs are often arranged to tell an allegedly coherent, progressive, linear story—­a history of, say, a culture or a nation. A striking example of this can be

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found in James Granger’s catalog of portrait prints, A Biographical History of England . . . adapted to a Methodical Catalogue of Engraved British Heads [thickening]. But this narrative desire also stands behind many of the preeminent cultural institutions of the age. The catalog and the physical arrangement of the British Museum were, at various times, reconceived to promote a sequential and explicitly nationalistic narrative (Gidal; Thomas). Unlike the curiosity cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—­which might suggest the individual stories behind discovering particular objects regardless of their geographical origin—­eighteenth-­century museums and their concomitant catalogs tend to strive for comprehensiveness by foregrounding the cultural or geographic origin of an object and promulgating a more global, all-­inclusive narrative framework for comprehending the collection. At the same time, these museums, their catalogs, and the organizational logics that they represent in print and physical space constitute explicitly public statements. While curiosity cabinets tended to express idiosyncratic, essentially private visions of collecting, these ordered museums spawned catalogs that stand as public attempts to synthesize a plurality of things, using the techniques of description and narration, into an ideological expression of the nation that possesses and displays them. UNFIXING

While catalogs strive for order and fixity for many reasons—­for keeping track of how many copies of an edition had sold; for buying an insurance policy or leaving a will; for consolidating self, knowledge, or the nation—­they also manifest a tendency to unloose objects from their moorings in space and time. Of the Dominican monkey in his museum, Peale notes that “this animal while living was sprightly, pettish and passionate” (1796, 8); on the subject of the stuffed, equally exotic jackal, he relates that its sharp, strong cries “frequently alarmed the whole neighborhood” and “seemed to pronounce the words fire, murder,

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with an intermixture of sounds like those of persons in extreme distress” (29). The catalog’s purportedly referential prose re-­ places, personates, and reanimates. The first entry in the “Refectory, or Great Parlour” in Walpole’s catalog A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole is “a conversation, by Reynolds, small life: Richard, second lord Edgcumbe, is at a table drawing in the library at Strawberry-­hill; George James Williams is looking over him; George Augustus Selwyn stands on the other side with a book in his hand. Lord Edgcumbe, Mr. Selwyn and Mr. Williams used to be with Mr. Walpole at Christmas and Easter at Strawberry-­hill” (3). The 1759 painting represents Walpole’s “Out of Town Party,” a group of dissolute aristocratic wits with government appointments, one of whom, Edgcumbe, had died before the catalog description was issued. As with Peale’s jackal, the description transgresses the boundary between life and death: in the textual rendering of the painting, the figures are drawing, standing and looking now just as they “used to be,” reanimated in the ekphrasis of visual art as text. (Peale, it should be noted, called his taxidermically posed specimens “statues of the Animals with real skin to cover them.”) What this tells us about Walpole or Peale as collectors is less interesting to us than what it reveals about the catalog as a genre. The memories of the collector, a principal feature of the entries, unsettle the reader-­viewer, the person standing in a room with the guidebook in hand, looking at the stuffed jackal or the painting over the chimneypiece. The animal or person is both there and somewhere else, fixed and mobile, mute and speaking, dead and alive; it has stopped being an object one looks at and has become a living thing that might bark, bite, or visit at Christmas. Through a kind of dramatic illusion, the catalog alters the relationship between audience and object, pushing visitors to see—­and hear—­more than what is before their eyes. A catalog’s tendency to fix and unfix simultaneously can be illustrated in the context of public art exhibitions such as those of the Royal Academy. The exhibition catalog had emerged originally as little more than a promotional supplement (likely to

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avoid the awkwardness of demanding an entrance fee) at the first annual exhibition of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce in April 1760. Soon after, however, the catalog’s price was doubled so as to regulate more stringently the social experience (the possibility, even) of exhibitiongoing and to obviate troublesome lapses in class distinction. Its very presence, regardless of content, thus served something of a policing function, although the catalog simultaneously transcended its immediate utility to enable a wider range of affective, imaginative responses brought about by its dissemination outside the time-­space of the exhibition, and by its appropriation across a wide range of printed images and criticism. Until 1780, the Royal Academy catalog was organized alphabetically by artist, with paintings listed beneath each name. Thereafter, a sequentially numbered list, beginning with the work hung above the door in the Great Room of Somerset House, worked more efficiently to incorporate each work into a wider exhibitionary spectacle and to involve the whole ensemble in a wider print ecology (Matheson 43). For example, viewers irritated by the absence of names in the catalog identifying the sitters of the portraits that constituted the majority of paintings on show were prompted to speculate wildly as to who these individuals might be and, more particularly, to interweave their experience of the catalog with a broader culture of printed images. Key here were engravings and etchings—­by artists as varied in their aesthetic purpose, market status, and honorific or satirical intent as Johann Ramberg and Thomas Rowlandson—­which depicted the crowd in the exhibition space. Serving as metacommentary, such works might replicate the social exclusivity of the exhibition space while also affirming the wider, more diverse world of print in which the catalog circulated. Parallels can be made with France, where from 1740 the Salon livret had listed artworks in order of academic rank, although this later changed significantly with the de-­hierarchization of the Salon during the French Revolution, when works were, as at the Royal Academy, listed according to placement. Prior to

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this change, artists such as Gabriel de Saint-­Aubin sketched the layout of the exhibition space in the margins of his catalog, effectively combining two cataloging models—­the hierarchical and the spatial—­which he worked up later in a number of images (Whyte 542). These images of exhibition spaces, which as with their British counterparts usually represent fashionable, famous, and ridiculous catalog readers in situ, operate as illustrated extensions, or remediations, of the catalog itself. However, while faithfully reproducing the organization of works on the wall, they also point to those more affective, disruptive, or subjective qualities of the ordering experience that tend to remain invisible in the bare lists of the catalog: the social engagements, flirtations, fantasies, emulations, and juxtapositions that attended individual and collective interactions between catalogs and artworks, as well as the misrecognitions (of art objects and their viewing subjects) and breakdowns in social and artistic hierarchies that exceeded the ordering imperatives of the catalog. Not only visual artists exploited the disruptive possibilities of the genre. The robust verbal formulas of sales catalogs provided easy fodder for Grub Street wits and humorists. A commonly reproduced manuscript satire claimed that among the goods to be auctioned in small lots at the Royal Coffeehouse at Charing Cross in 1680 were “six boxes of rich royall sodomy incest, curiously wrought by the Duchess of Portsmouths own hand, at 40000 guinneys each box, and to advance a guinney each bidding”; as well as “two boxes of super fine paradoxes, the one to supress popery by destroying the protestants interest, and the other to maintain the liberty of the subject by raising a standing army at home. Valued at 5d a box, to be advanced 2d a box each bidding” (“At the Royall Coffee House” 556–­60). Such satires gained pungency by setting things that were ostensibly beyond the market, such as sexual virtue, religious truth, or political liberty, within the obviously commercial milieu of the auction (Cowan 138–­43). As this lampoon suggests, the media culture of the period was saturated with commercial enticements. The

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sea captain and overseas merchant Thomas Bowrey, collected several catalogs of the sales of East India goods held in late seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century London. Sometimes he used the catalogs to record in manuscript the names of his merchant competitors who bought the goods up for sale, along with the prices that they paid for the merchandise, as he did for the East India House sale catalog of 312 canisters of tea in seventy-­four lots, all “to be seen in glasses” in September 1689. Consumption was conspicuous, and the catalog was a particularly sensitive register not only of far-­reaching networks of exchange but also of the anxieties that attended the increasing commodification of culture and lives. Together these examples suggest how printed catalogs might have affected readers and viewers: how, despite the referential aims of the genre, the gap between printed entries and physical objects enabled their imaginative reconfiguration; and how, despite sequencing techniques designed to facilitate identification and secure the relationship between commentary and canvas, the catalog enabled artists to record, recall, and remark upon those canvasses and the social dramas that played out before them in print remediations that opened the fourth wall of the gallery to the view and amusement of the broader public beyond. And while the rich array of sales catalogs in historical archives documents the getting and spending that drove empire, those same catalogs supplied—­along with margins for inscribing personal and professional rivalries—­the linguistic code for parodying those people and institutions that benefited most. The same descriptive reduction, indexical specificity, and quantifying precision that set things and societies in order was turned, provocatively, to display in reprint after reprint the affective relations and bodily desires that animated them. WEIRD READING

How else did people interact with public exhibition or private collection catalogs, auction catalogs, and booksellers’ lists? Of

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what use or value were these publications to someone who did not and could not own the items described—­especially after leaving, or having never visited, the space of exhibition or sale? It makes sense for John Murray to have preserved an archive of his lists of recent publications (he bound them into his personal copies of the Quarterly Review: like his detailed account books of costs and profits, these catalogs record his successes and failures as a publisher), or for Goethe to have preserved playbills of the performances of his plays around the German territories (or indeed abroad). An advertisement might be seen as the disposable ephemera of commodity culture (often printed on different paper and leaved into the front or back of published books)—­ but if that is the case, why did some book buyers choose to preserve these lists when they rebound their copy in fine leather and marbled boards [ephemerality]? We’re interested in unpacking the cultural currency of catalogs as a genre that circulates beyond the collection, as a print object available for creative manipulation, appropriation, and recollection. To take an initial example, consider the late seventeenth-­ century naturalist James Petiver, an epitome of the obsessive collector who was equally obsessed with publication and printing. The alter ego of his massive and chaotic specimen collections, Petiver’s keyed catalogs of botanical and entomological images are fascinating print artifacts in their own right. In the Herbarii Britannici . . . Raii Catalogus (A Catalogue of Mr. Ray’s English Herbal), for example, Petiver inscribed each individual plate with its own dedicatee, invoking an older mode of classification by patron (Chartier 1994, 73) and oddly associating persons and plants. In his horti sicci (bound collections of physical specimens), he had a habit of snipping entries from printed catalogs and using these material quotations to paste the dried plants to the page more securely (fig. 4.1). In a modern taxonomic catalog, entries appear independent of physical objects: catalog entries describe general “types” that can be used to identify and categorize specimens contained in drawers, boxes, or cases—­or simply recalled from observa-

4.1. A page from Hortus siccus Cappensis. Plants gathered at the Cape of good hope by Mr oldenland and sent to Mr Petiver and disposed by him, Hans Sloane’s bound herbarium volumes, H. S. 156:36 (BM) (Natural History Museum, London). Photograph: © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

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tions in the field. As Charlie Jarvis reminds us, in botanical classification (which is based on the binomial system developed by Linnaeus in the 1740s and codified in his 1753 Species Plantarum), taxonomic names are established with reference to a “holotype,” the individual specimen referenced in the first published description of a taxon. (Interestingly, many of the original holotype specimens in Linnaean botany are not physical specimens but artist’s renderings or illustrations in books.) In his horti sicci, Petiver materially relates the abstracted typological entry to a particular instance of the thing it describes, literalizing the fixations of the taxonomic catalog—­its hierarchical ordering of species in the world—­by using it as a medium to affix. Yet the printed text is wrinkled and creased in the process, undermining the work of typology in the deformations of typography and the page. In many ways, Petiver’s hyperreferential practice stems from and materially reproduces the messy state of pre-­Linnaean botany, where names compounded as collections grew geographically more inclusive and labeling a specimen became an exercise in textual exegesis. (With the widespread acceptance of Linnaeus’s binomial system after 1753, naming practices and the content of taxonomic descriptions were standardized.) Petiver’s reappropriation of the printed catalog is certainly driven by a desire for order, but it hardly manifests this on pages that recall the sometimes disorderly assemblages of scrapbooks and commonplace books and make for difficult reading. Thus, by virtue of its descriptive generality and its status as paper that can be cut, pasted, and used to paste [paper], the taxonomic catalog lends itself to illustrative reuse and palimpsestic assemblage; and in the hands of the obsessive collector-­cum-­natural historian in the age of doing things with print, subverts its own claims to objective clarity and referential transparency [marking; thickening]. If the actual cutting and pasting of the published catalog entry confuses its orderly rows of print, so can another form of reading: an associative form of skimming invited by the cata-

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log’s own fragmentary grammar. The listlike catalog afforded a range of imaginative possibilities, and despite its characteristic typographic lineation, it opens up a decidedly creative space of arrangement. Returning to A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, and specifically to the “China-­Room,” we find a chimneypiece composed of a farmhouse window “formerly of Bradfield-­hall” affixed to a chimneypiece from “Hurst Monceaux in Sussex” made whole in the engraving on the facing page (Walpole 6). The feeling of spatial dislocation and recomposition increases in the room itself, where “on the shelves and floor is a collection of porcelain, earthenware, glass, and enamel on copper, of various ages and countries” (6). The succeeding list occasionally gestures to provenance, but more often lapses into minimalist bullet points: An old blue and white plate with a rib in the middle. A coloured handle cup, saucer and square plate, à la Grecque, of Seve china. Two old blue and white plates, artichoak pattern. Thirteen ditto, with peacock feathers. Sixteen coloured old Japan plates. Four ditto, blue and white, with figures. Three ditto, with figures. Twelve ditto, of coloured Japan china. Four ditto, with birds. (7)

This utilitarian economy of language is typical of early modern inventories of household goods, which aimed to account for an individual’s belongings during liminal moments of death or insolvency (Keating and Markley 209–­10). For modern art historians, the extreme vagueness of such inventories often yields more confusion than clarity about the collections they represent. Similarly, Walpole’s catalog might have been sold as a souvenir of one’s visit to the villa, but its format hardly helps reconstruct what a visitor had seen. Rather, it tends to break things apart

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(as in the case of the chimneypiece) or to blend items into each other—­ditto, ditto, ditto—­leaving the vague impression of a Japanese figure costumed in feathers and artichokes. Like the “deep dish of Roman earth, with stories of Ovid’s Metamorphosis,” the catalog trades on transformations born out of quick associations: “an earthen-­ware dish, with heads of Charles 2d. and queen Catherine in blue and white” raises the specter of his father’s severed head and the queen’s blanched corpse. On the heels of this image, an impossible medieval battleground in Fayence, littered with “grotesques and the arms of bishop Contarini,” sprouts from two “dishes of fayence” (tin-­glazed pottery) set between “two dishes of very old French earthen-­ware” and an “octagon colored plate of Saxon china” (7). In the midst of the fray, one begins to wonder what French earthenware tastes like and which color octagons usually are. What we’re proposing, and what we think catalogs make available as an unexpected contribution to the print culture of our period, is the way catalogs can be read as a gothic form, ones that admit readers into realms fantastical where mute objects come to life and things are not what they seem to the empirical eye. In the “China-­Room,” the brevity of description reduces things to a syntax of notable features; and with the paratactic placement of things side by side, without logical connections, adjectival modification begins to slip and parts join up with other parts, forming strange bodies. The cognitive state provoked by catalogs is akin to the waking dream or reverie of eighteenth-­century aesthetics, in which we are “so much absorbed in the contemplation of what passes in our imaginations . . . [that] we believe things present before our eyes that are not so” (Darwin 46). As Lord Kames argued, “The pleasure that arises from a train of connected ideas, is remarkable in a reverie; especially where the imagination interposes, and is active in coining new ideas, which is done with wonderful alacrity” (1:300). Crucially, the train of ideas is not produced by connections present in the text; rather, as authors of educational miscellanies, gothic novels, and everything in between proclaimed,

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pleasure increased when the imagination was given free reign to perform its magical work of dismemberment and recombination. William Beckford summarized it thus: the imagination “delights to disjoin, or jumble [ideas] together with the wildest caprice, and cares not for method, or arrangement, or any thing else provided she holds up a Pleasant picture to the mind” (n.p.). The effect of such imaginative play, Kames points out, is that “in a reverie, where ideas float at random without making an impression, time goes unheeded and reckoning is lost” (1:162). If we want to explain why inventories seem to thwart their utilitarian function, and why people bought, saved, and reread catalogs, perhaps it is because the cognitive pleasures of the genre are precisely the opposite of the drive to add up and account for, to order and fix. As Goethe would write about his newfound practice of collecting catalogs during his travels: I have taken some notice of the actual conditions of an observant traveler and seen where the mistakes of his narrative often lie. However one positions oneself one only ever sees something from a single side and hurries too quickly towards judgment. . . . In this regard I’ve created files in which I gather all kinds of public papers that I encounter, newspapers, weekly periodicals, sermons, laws, playbills, and catalogues. In this way, I gather not only that which I have seen and noticed, but also my momentary judgments and thus have material that will in the future remain interesting enough to me as a history of both the inner and the outer. As long as I maintain enough interest to continue this handicraft [Handwerk] for a while through both my foreknowledge and mental training, I will be able to gather together a great mass of material. (Staiger 447)

Goethe would collect a variety of catalogs during his travels and interleave them with his notes as important precursors to his writing (Piper 2013). The catalog was thus uniquely suited to position the mind between what Goethe called this “history

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of both the inner and the outer,” highly deictic and centrifugal on the one hand—­the catalog does nothing so much as point—­ and also profoundly generative of reverie and a combinatory creativity. TOPOGRAPHIES OF READING

We conclude with a final illustration of the catalog’s potential by considering its introduction into a print genre that is itself an amalgamation of other genres. With its maps, views, tables, and mountain outlines, the nineteenth-­century guidebook would seem obsessively to represent the material world—­to fix it in print as it stands on the ground. Yet what happens when the paratactic meets the topographic? When the native features of the nation’s hills—­not the china, earthenware, or magic mirrors of the salon—­are offered for consumption? Here, too, the equivocal status of the catalog emerges—­its formalization of a drive to order and stimulation to imaginative reordering—­shedding light on the force of the catalog in the national imaginary. Jonathan Otley’s inclusion of the “Botanical Notice” in the fourth edition of A Concise Description of the English Lakes, and Adjacent Mountains (1830) is intriguing for what it suggests about the cultural and cognitive value of catalogs and their relation to descriptive prose. In the second edition, of 1825, Otley had included a lyrically inflected prose enumeration of the “verdant plants . . . growing in all the lakes”: “In a dry summer, . . . the Lobelia [dortmanna] spreads its recurved radical leaves upon the bottom, and in July, shoots up its spike of delicate pale flowers above the surface of the water . . . while the reeds, bulrushes, and Typha latifolia, are waving over them with the wind” (38). In the fourth edition, Otley separated the botanical references from the description of lakes, expanding these into a print section of their own. Here we learn, for instance, that “different species of the Orchis tribe are found in the meadows—­the Orchis conopsea on Hartley hill, Buttermere—­the Butterfly, O. bifolia two miles

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from Keswick on the Penrith road; and Mr. Nelson has transplanted the Fly Orchis, Ophrys muscifera, into his garden at Milnthorp” (141). Thus, whereas Petiver enclosed material specimens within his horti sicci, fixing dried plants to pages with strips of printed catalogs, Otley’s “Botanical Notices” guided tourists to the “rare species” where they flourished—­at the cost not of the life of the plant but of the coherence of the sentence. Though Otley disavowed any “attempt at a systematic arrangement of the botany of the district,” sentences tend, under the pressure of comprehensiveness, toward their own decomposition: “Yellow Poppy, Papaver cambricum, in Longsleddale. Yellow-­horned Poppy, sea Celandine, Chelidonium glaucum, on the coast near Flookburgh. Deadly nightshade, Atropa Belladonna, near the same place, and about Furness Abbey” (139). Contextual and descriptive details fall away, taking verbs with them. It is only a small step from these fragments of names and places to the “Botanical Memoranda” of Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes (1850) and to the emergence of the catalog from the paragraph: Peucedanum Ostruthium...... Legberthwaite. Parnassia palustris................. Foot of Skiddaw. Pinguicula vulgaris................ Wansfell, and in moist elevated places. Potentilla fruticosa................ Screes. Primula veris.......................... Occurs rarely. Primula farinosa.................... In several moist situations. Pteris crispa........................... Borrowdale. Pyrola media.......................... Stock Gill Force. Pyrola minor.......................... Dunmallet. (234)

A small step, then, to the associative and asyntactic readings explored earlier and thus to the possibility of “screes” “occur[ing] rarely” “In several moist situations” despite the efforts of alphabetization and dot leaders to maintain conceptual organization and horizontal readerly progress. The eye slips

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vertically like scree down the typographic slope, upsetting the topographic organization governing the large-­scale maps and charts as it makes an impossible coordination of a valley (Borrowdale), waterfall (Stock Ghyll Force), and small hill with the remains of an Iron Age fort (Dunmallet). The 1854 edition of Black’s Picturesque Guide adds the element of time to the botanical catalog as the tourist is encouraged to seek out species in situ and at their designated “period of flowering,” where “5–­9=May to September, &c.” (236). For example, “Humulous lupulus, hedges near Keswick and Grasmere—­7”; or several lines below, “Impatiens noli-­me-­tangere, Stock Ghyll Force—­7–­9” (236). If Petiver’s horti sicci show the strain on print in contact with clippings of dead matter, the press of taxonomic reference toward substance in the private botanical collection, Black’s “Memoranda for Botanists” shows the striving of print to designate plant life, to direct the mobile observer in time within a place newly conceived as a national treasure of rocks and stones and flora (though not yet designated a national park). And just as Black’s directs its reader-­tourists toward living species, it construes those reader-­tourists as human species in the flux of experience. The introduction explicitly endows the guide with the power of casting spells over visitors. Particularly its quotations of poetry, interspersed throughout the guide, “will, we feel assured, not only contribute to elevate the feelings and improve the heart, while the reader is contemplating the scenes which are there portrayed, but will also form a spell by which, in coming years, he may recall the pleasures of the past, and revisit in imagination the scenery over which we are now about to conduct him” (4). Despite its relentless indexicality, Black’s Guide seeks to awaken the imaginative eye, to convert the tourist into a subject of memory and “imagination.” It is neither the quoted lines of poets alone nor simply the lines of the catalogs that pinpoint time and place of flowering but their amalgamation that enables the imaginative transposition of the self—­to, for example, the “Cerastium alpinum” at the “rocks above Red Tarn, Helvellyn—­

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6–­7” (236). The nineteenth-­century guidebook thus emphasizes another effect of the catalog: in this instance, the untethering of the subject from the fixities of time and place and the aesthetic recollecting of the nation’s flora, fells, falls, and ruins.

5

C O N V E R S AT I O N S Conversazione is an Italian term that became fashionable throughout elite society in eighteenth-­century Europe as a means of describing the practice of sociable, often literary, conversation among both men and women (Unfer Lukoschik, 39–­47; Tinker 102–­22). These discussions were known by many names (ruelles, soirées, cercles, sociétés, crocchi, ästhetische Tees) and came to be referred to collectively as “salons” by the mid-­ nineteenth century, when they had become primarily objects of nostalgia (Lilti). The term salon highlights the location in which the meetings took place, a particular type of public space within a private urban home. The salon’s mixed-­gender and mixed-­rank sociability was a marked contrast with primarily masculine sociable spaces such as coffeehouses or taverns (Cowan; Tlusty). Although salons were hosted both by men and women, scholars have generally focused on those presided over by women, since these salons represent one of the few mixed-­sex cultural institutions in which women could take a leading role. Within this literature, the semiprivate character of the meeting space has contributed to the debate about the broader place of women in eighteenth and early nineteenth-­century intellectual life. Were salon women secondary players in a male star system, and hence marginal to Enlightenment thought, or were they essential to the Republic of Letters (Harth; Lilti; Goodman)? Contributions to the debate, despite their best efforts to achieve closure, illustrate a variety of tenable standpoints, given the

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multiple ways in which salon women positioned themselves vis-­ à-­vis intellectual culture. One way to capture the array of options that salon sociability offered its female participants is to shift the focus from the space to the activity, understanding conversations as a dynamic, free-­ flowing practice that wove together print, manuscript, oral conversation, images and the plastic and performing arts. Unlike other social institutions—­such as lodges, scientific academies, coteries, book clubs, and learned and debating societies—­that promoted conversation focused on a particular oral presentation, a manuscript or a printed text, salons proposed more media fluidity (Mee). Salon conversation could be exclusively oral, involving gossip, storytelling, or flattery, but it was just as often carried out alongside and in conjunction with other media. Salon participants read letters or poetry; they played games that cued conversation; they talked about newspapers; and they discussed works of art and performances. Moreover, salon criticism was often incorporated into published print texts, inspired print or manuscript representations of salon life, or fed future manuscript correspondence The complex relationship between orality, manuscript, and print at the heart of salon culture meant that elite women could alter their intellectual interventions depending on the particular circumstances in a very broad and unifying understanding about women’s natural identity. Viewed as spontaneous and sensitive, women could assume authority in conversation and correspondence. Print publication was more vexed, although some outstanding figures, including the imposing Germaine de Staël, could place their own writing at the center of salon conversation. Finally, some salon women parlayed their status as embodiments of an ideal public into authorship, offering themselves as models of reception or arranging to have their correspondence published after their death as a means of commemorating salon sociability. ::::

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David Hume famously declared in 1742 that there was no “better school for manners, than the company of virtuous women; where the mutual endeavour to please must insensibly polish the mind, where the example of female softness and modesty must communicate itself to their admirers, and where the delicacy of that sex puts every one on guard, lest he give offence by any breach of decency” (1985, 134). His view was widely shared, and early modern prescriptive literature often represented elite women as excellent conversationalists: they were sensitive, compassionate, spontaneous, and detail oriented, and their presence was thought to polish and improve the discourse of the men in their company as well (Goodman; Burke; Fumaroli). The prevalence of such norms helps to explain why women featured so prominently in the gatherings they hosted across Europe from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. The substance of salon conversations as well as the practice of social interactions at the heart of these gatherings remain confoundingly inaccessible, rendered indirectly through manuscript or print mediation. In addition to prescriptive sources detailing what some considered to be the ideal salon conversation, what we know about what was actually said (or left unsaid) in the salons must be gleaned from individual descriptions or administrative reports. Suzanne Necker’s journal, for example, contains reflections on how to prepare for conversation in her salon; salon guests occasionally offered opinions of hostesses in their memoirs; some correspondence mentions salon exchanges in passing; and French police files document salon sociability (Goodman 70–­81, 100–­107; Lilti). If the practice of oral exchange remains opaque, there is no doubt that women’s reputation as talented conversationalists provided a point of entry into literary and artistic activity. For the French précieuses of the seventeenth century, salons were the scene of collaborative writing that would later be set down in print; they were also the source of conversations integrated into novels and dialogues (DeJean; Harth 46–­47). In the early nineteenth century, Germaine de Staël deliberately linked lit-

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erary talk and publishing in print. Preceded by her reputation as a member of the exiled French elite and as a successful novelist, even thematizing oral improvisation in her novel Corinne; ou, L’Italie (1807), she created a salon ambulant while traveling throughout Europe (Furst). She used this gathering to solicit criticism and explicitly seek the aid of male habitués, like August Wilhelm Schlegel and Adalbert von Chamisso, to help her better understand the German culture she would go on to describe in De l’Allemagne (1810–­1813). Simultaneously, Staël structured the sociability of her salon with material that was explicitly not destined for print. Games of letter writing, like jeu de petite poste, allowed guests to see themselves as sujets de fiction (Habermas 50; Gardiner). The easy back-­and-­forth between salon conversation and print was not always acceptable to a social order characterized by anxieties about the proprieties of both female participation in public discourse and the commercial world of print culture. If it took centuries for gentlemen to overcome the stigma of print, it took even longer for well-­born women to do so (Saunders; Johns; Ezell 1999). In the wake of the précieuses, hosting a literary salon in France, Germany, Austria, and Italy was generally deemed incompatible with authorship. Much more common was the association of salon women with literary reception. In a culture that endowed literature with the power of emotional transport and the duty of moral instruction, women readers were tasked with determining whether a work of art or literature was sufficiently touching and edifying. In this way, women supposedly represented an “ideal public,” neither too learned nor too ignorant. Women negotiated these constraints in various ways. As we have seen with Germaine de Staël, some violated them, although at the price of being charged with unnatural masculinity by men and women alike. Others worked more quietly within a consensual framework, approaching authorship tentatively and presenting their publications as an outgrowth of their role in the salon of facilitating reception, distribution, and sociability.

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Placing themselves between authors and their intended publics, salon women could adopt the role of literary intermediary, a role compatible with contemporary gender dynamics represented in works of popular philosophy. In personifying the intellectual limitations of a wider reading public, salon women played the real-­life counterparts to the fictional marchionesses in Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) and Francesco Algarotti’s Il newtonianismo per le dame (1737), allowing male authors to determine whether their work was sufficiently simplified or agreeable to circulate in polite society. For example, Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi (1760–­1836), the internationally known Venetian salon hostess, known as Teotochi Marin before her second marriage in 1796, and known henceforth as Teotochi to avoid confusion, expanded this interest in simplicity by publishing a work popularizing aesthetics. In 1809, Teotochi published her Opere di scultura e di plastica di Antonio Canova, in which she described the most renowned of Antonio Canova’s sculptures. In the definitive 1821–­1824 edition, Teotochi sought to provide a comprehensive collection of all Canova’s works, each now accompanied by an engraving of its outline. In both editions, the author stressed that she was not assessing the academic merit of the sculptures but rather describing how the works affected her upon viewing them, thereby reinforcing salon women’s link to reception. The transition from an embodiment of the “ideal public” to a published author was not always so direct, and indeed was not always the principal objective of salon hostesses. Publication and reception were simply two among many communicative and social practices that fell within the orbit of salon sociability, working alongside the conversations and manuscript correspondence that remained the preferred media of elite communication. If men of letters submitted their work to salonnières before publication, salon women continued to cultivate an interest in literature, painting, sculpture, theater, opera, improvisation, and public readings, and they offered observations on all of them. The nature of their responses varied con-

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siderably, ranging from astute criticism to complacent flattery (Lilti). For example, the Venetian salonnière Isabella Teotochi received Ippolito Pindemonte’s (1753–­1828) writings on several occasions, but not always with applause. Pindemonte appreciated her honesty. In letters, he admired her judgment, addressed her criticisms, and even took her to task for not calling some stylistic awkwardness to his attention (2, 12, 175). Aurelio Bertola (1753–­1798), meanwhile, went still further. Shortly after meeting Teotochi, he requested her comments on his Elogio di Gessner (1789) (8 July 1788, letter 448, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze [BNCF]). Responding to solicitations from authors was only one of many ways in which salon hostesses interacted with printed texts. Salons also served as an institutional anchor and literary clearinghouse for the circulation and marketing of texts produced in a variety of media, including books, manuscripts, and letters. Knowing that Teotochi regularly received well-­known men of letters, Bertola had his bookseller send her ten or twelve copies of his Viaggio sul Reno (1795), with a request that she not forget to mention to all whom it might interest that his book could be found at Bertazzoni’s shop (6 October 1795, BNCF). Printed copies of books were not always so readily available, especially in the German and Italian states, so men and women of letters regularly lent out their own books and asked others to procure new publications for them when they traveled (Dalton 101). Sometimes the waiting was too much. On 6 February 1784, the Veronese salon hostess Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini (1752–­ 1807) commented on the slow diffusion of Bertola’s Idea della bella letteratura alemanna (1784) out of Lucca (see letter in the Biblioteca Teresiana). In contexts like these, salonnières could help their authorial friends by diffusing manuscript copies of their current or future print publications (30 March 1789, BNCF; 4 September 1783, Biblioteca Teresiana). The goal of such gestures was social as much as it was economic and intellectual. Facilitating media exchange not only promoted print publications but also fostered community around authorship.

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Social ties were not only activated before or after publication; they could also be built into the printed text itself. Printed dedications in publications brought in additional income, and they fulfilled the more subtle but important function of trumpeting the writer’s connections by offering a simulacrum of personal communication. As a remediated version of a kind of homage offered in person, printed dedications were paratextual residues of (or surrogates for) sociability. Aurelio Bertola, for example, dedicated his works to influential salon hostesses such as Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini and Isabella Teotochi. In England, salonnières such as Elizabeth Montagu and other bluestockings were key patrons for later eighteenth-­century authors (Griffin 190–­91; Eger 2008, 39–­47). Salon sociability also made its way into in the correspondence of its participants, which was often self-­consciously arranged for posthumous publication. The letters of Rahel Levin, who led one of the great German Romantic salons, are a case in point (Wilhelmy-­Dollinger). Levin, who married Karl August Varnhagen in 1814, was a young unmarried Jewish woman in Berlin of precarious social standing and little mobility. In her salon, she organized and led discussions of a broad range of untranslated publications with her habitués, among them some well-­known authors. Like Staël, she was an intellectual force in her own right, but her attitude to publication was very different from that of Europe’s première woman of letters. Staël accorded publication great importance in establishing literary authority. In response to the Swedish diplomat and statesman Karl Gustav von Brinckmann, who compared her with Levin, Staël exclaimed: “Ah! Sie vergleichen Rahel also mit mir? Das ist nicht schlecht. Hat sie was geschrieben?” (Oh, you compare Rahel with me? That is not bad. Did she write or publish something?) (Seibert 226n95). Contrary to Staël’s scornful implication that Levin was not talented or ambitious enough to publish, Levin consciously eschewed the status of published author. She wrote highly cherished letters that functioned, both for her circle and for others, as a kind of virtual salon. Her relation-

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ship with Varnhagen did not much alter her attitude toward publication. With explicit reference to French salonnières like Marie de Vichy-­Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand, Levin understood her role to be “lektorat ante litteram” (Isselstein 196) and explicitly saw herself as a mentor because she was not publishing (Varnhagen 1983, 4:302–­3). When pushed by her future husband to publish excerpts of her correspondence with him about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a montage in various journals, followed by excerpts from her literary criticism and finally her aphorisms, she did so anonymously or under the name of her brother, Ludwig Robert (Varnhagen 2001). Far from preventing the eventual publication of her writing, however, Levin actively prepared her letters for publication after her death. Before traveling to Paris, she wrote to her friend Frau von Boye: “Und sterb ich—­such alle meine Briefe—­ durch List etwa—­von allen meinen Freunden und Bekannten zu bekommen . . . und ordne sie mit Brinckmann. Es wird eine Original Geschichte und poetisch” (and when I die—­search to receive all my letters—­with guile even—­from all my friends and acquaintances . . . and order them with Brinckmann. This will be an original genuine story and poetic) (Varnhagen 1983, 1:208). During her lifetime she took care to compile an archive of her letters, from which she hoped one of her followers would create an Andenkenbuch, a book of memories entitled Rahel. The subtitle of this three-­volume collection of letters, Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde (A book of commemoration for her friends) creates the impression that the eighteen hundred pages of print they constitute ought to be considered simply a form of remembrance for her friends, many of whom were habitués of her salon. The first private edition of 1833 (printed a few weeks after her death) was an esoteric collection mimicking a salon in print. Her husband then published in 1834 an expanded version that bore the same title as the first—­again with no authorial name—­highlighting the heterogeneous group involved in its composition. In the context of prerevolutionary Germany, the 1834 edition became a programmatic publication to further

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the emancipation of women (Feilchenfeldt). Her husband next began to transform this hybrid between a book of memories and a posthumous book of remembrance through Grangerization [thickening] by collecting more letters into a final unpublished manuscript. Only in 2011 was this compilation finally printed (Hahn). Literary production, commemoration, marketing, reception, sociability—­salon women were involved in all these social practices that were linked in one way or another to print. In each case, femininity was integrally tied to the circulation of texts and ideas through elite European social circles. A particularly telling example of the range of ways in which a single woman could link salon conversation to print can be found in the work of the poet, biographer, historian, travel writer, and salon hostess Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–­1821). When Piozzi arrived in Florence in 1784, she was already internationally renowned as Samuel Johnson’s hostess for sixteen years; her Streatham salons had featured James Boswell, Fanny Burney, Oliver Goldsmith, Arthur Murphy, Thomas Percy, and others. In Florence, her house became a center for Italian poets (among them Ippolito Pindemonte, Lorenzo Pignotti, Angelo D’Elci, and Giuseppe Parini) and young British expatriates, including Bertie Greatheed, Robert Merry, and William Parsons. Their meetings in turn produced The Florence Miscellany (1785), a volume of Italian and English verse designed to replicate in book form the ease and repartee of their Florentine meetings. Piozzi, host but also active contributor to the collection, explained the process of remediation from writing to recitation to print in the following terms: “why we wrote the verses might not be easily explain’d, we wrote them to divert ourselves, and to say kind things of each other; we collected them that our reciprocal expressions of kindness might not be lost” (Piozzi et al., 5). The Florence Miscellany thus paid homage to the social networks and systems of patronage from which it stemmed, not only by highlighting how international salon culture could be but also by underscoring the collaborative nature of salon culture and salon publication.

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The book remains one of the first important eighteenth-­ century English engagements with modern Italian poetry, anticipating later English experimentation with Italian improvisation and with forms like ottava rima and terza rima. Though privately printed and distributed, the volume quickly found its way into the hands of the editor of the European Magazine, who began publishing its contents at the rate of a few poems per month. Thus, when the Florence coterie disbanded several months later and its members made their separate ways back to England, they arrived to find themselves literary celebrities. Of the four original members of the Florentine group, Robert Merry adopted a self-­consciously “Italian” style with the greatest success. Publishing poetry in The World under the sobriquet “Della Crusca,” he quickly became the central figure within an expanded group of poets—­the English Della Cruscans—­who all published under pseudonyms in the same paper, using the pages of The World as an arena of literary flirtation and as a kind of virtual salon. Speaking of the salons of his youth with Lord Byron in the spring of 1817, Pindemonte remembered the Piozzi Florentine assembly with pleasure, recalling it as a bygone relic of a more civilized, more elegant pan-­European literary culture. Pindemonte’s wistful attitude also gestures to another function of The Florence Miscellany: the book memorialized the coterie long after the group had disbanded and its members passed away, by exhorting its readers to “let its authors live!” (Piozzi et al. 217). However, the remediation and commemoration of sociable exchanges Piozzi did for this collection was secondary to the work for which she is best known, her Anecdotes of Johnson (1786). Published the year after The Florence Miscellany, it was composed out of the notes she transcribed into her Thraliana, an analect book in which she also recorded conversations with notable guests and, later, reflections on her own life (Barnes Rasmussen 286–­88). Moreover, remediation did not move in a single direction, from conversation to print. After the commercial failure of her world history, Retrospection (1801), Piozzi spent the following years annotating the margins of her own copy (in

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addition to those of others), tailoring each for a specific friend or acquaintance. In addition to correcting typographic errors (much as other readers would routinely do), Piozzi inserted substantial comments as a means of strengthening the bonds of friendship that were crucial to her social life in Bath near the end of her life (Hughes-­Warrington 905). ::::

Salon hostesses, as we have presented them here, were above all intermediaries. Existing literature on salons and salon women focuses on their role as social intermediaries, situating them relative to a public sphere, facilitating the mobility and integration between the center and periphery of political and intellectual life. Scholars accounting for the disappearance of salons, in particular, have subscribed to this interpretation, linking the decline of the salon to women’s declining influence in politics and in intellectual circles (Goodman; Kale). In this view, the emergence of new political configurations in the nineteenth century marginalized the aristocracy as a whole; and if modernity had little place for aristocrats, it had even less regard for aristocratic women. Ambitious men no longer needed them to ensure participation in political debates through connections made in women’s salons. But there is another way of understanding the afterlife of salons, one that calls into question the precipitous decline in women’s role in intellectual and political life. Salons were certainly venues of social integration, but they also played a role in the circulation of information, and thus could be characterized as much by the activities they promoted as the people they contained. Salon women ensured the diffusion of knowledge through print by recommending books and hosting readings, but salons also functioned as a means of appropriating and absorbing knowledge, allowing guests and their hostess to collectively negotiate an understanding of texts through conversation. This appropriation was reinforced in manuscript correspondence and in the copying of excerpts in commonplace

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books, and in some cases it became the basis for print publication by salonnières themselves. In other words, the fluidity of intermedial practices so characteristic of salons was closely tied to women’s investment in and identification with the process of education, involving the simplification and transformation of knowledge as it passed through various media. And these practices of knowledge transmission and creation did not simply disappear in the late nineteenth century; they transformed and shifted to other social and institutional spaces. Public school education, in which female teachers continued to ensure the circulation and appropriation of knowledge by teaching children to read, write, recite, and discuss, is in some respects the modern descendent of the old regime’s salon.

6

DISRUPTIONS Print sometimes presents an appearance of stability and reliability that makes it seem like a transparent medium for conveying ideas. On this appearance, print lends an inherent authority to the content it mediates. This aura of reliability may be more the result of long cultural work (Johns) than it is a property inherent to the medium (Eisenstein). Sophisticated readers have always understood print’s fallibility both in the sense that it conveys false as well as true information and in the sense that printed texts are often strewn with errors. Nonetheless, the notion that print was a transparent, reliable vehicle for conveying ideas was sufficiently widespread in our period that it inspired satirical or ironic commentaries, which themselves appeared in printed texts and images. Several writers, printers, and artists used print to draw attention to its own materiality and fallibility, and thus to disrupt the impression that print was a transparent vehicle for ideas. Those disruptions are the subject of this chapter. In some cases the object of satire was print itself and the claims made on its behalf, but in others disrupting print conventions became a weapon that satirists could aim at other targets. In Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–­1830, David McKitterick argues that the centuries-­long development of print technologies was spurred primarily by a desire for repeatability and the regular production of information—­and yet those technologies also inevitably produced disjunctions, variations, and disruptions. For all its cultivated appearance of reliability, printed matter emerged from interactions between fallible

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humans and flawed machines: misprints, reversals, omissions, damaged materials, and mistaken forms emerged alongside revisions, additions, and alterations of various kinds. As a result, print was less a stable, self-­identical entity and more a congeries of multiple, indifferently executed intentions. In the handpress period, each book bore the signs of its many makers, and the potential for individual variation always haunted the pursuit of sameness, like a ghost in the machine. By the eighteenth century, the processes and products of the press had attained a level of standardization that allowed departures from the expected standards to be exploited self-­ consciously. Authors like Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy (1759–­1767), with its blackened and misplaced marbled pages, or Charles Nodier in Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept chateaux (1830), with its typographic games, drew attention to the materiality of the book by disrupting readers’ expectations about the interfaces of print. As audiences increasingly brought to the scene of reading a familiarity with printing conventions, so authors bent on satiric purposes could deploy self-­reflective gestures that made use of the look of print. The comic tendency toward corporality (Bakhtin) was one that transferred with great resonance to the material, technical, and mechanical printing process. We offer four categories that try to explain how these local disruptions and irritations managed to create larger commentaries on the print culture of the period. First, we examine how printers’ errors and errata slips could be recruited for rhetorical purposes. Second, we show how typefaces—­far from offering transparent windows onto the content of printed matter—­ could be manipulated to produce effects. Third, we consider the mise-­en-­page—­the arrangement of the text block on the printed page—­as a satirical tool. Finally, we look at counterfeits and printed money and the extent to which print interrupted the smooth flows of emerging market economies. Throughout, we draw out the ludic exploitation of printing conventions. These typographic and visual disruptions bid readers to question larger social structures, drawing attention to another, albeit less

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discussed, way in which print is an agent of cultural change. Far from erasing the process of production, the disruptions we examine here foreground such processes, as distortions and exaggerations reflect a “counterimage to the ideal” (Oesterle and Oesterle 87). PRINTER’S DEVILS, PRINTING ERRORS

Satirists turned the fallible, error-­prone nature of printing to their advantage. By adding a little touch to the already-­existing disruptions or misprints and errata slips, satirists intentionally created comic effects of varying kinds. Foregrounding the familiar errata that accompanied artifacts of the handpress (and beyond), satirists drew attention to the latent risks of miscommunication between author and reader that accompanied print more generally. In this vein, the late Enlightenment German satirist Jean Paul would assume a rather mild, Horatian tone to reflect on the irritations print caused for authors, editors, and readers. Frustrated with the number of errors that had crept into his printed text, the author played the fictional role of corrector and editor for all editions, or subsequent versions, of his novel Hesperus (1795, 1798, 1819). He proposed the placement of errata lists at the beginning of each volume rather than as usual at the end. Disheartened to discover still more errors in the next printing, the editor asked readers to remove the errata lists and finally suggested that he had intentionally added some easily identifiable new errors to the novel (Hunfeld). To make the reader aware of the contingency of print, Jean Paul manipulates the errata list as paratextual communication physically and ideologically for comic effect. Other authors, like Johan Peter Hebel (1760–­1826) and Eduard Mörike (1804–­1875), or satiric periodicals published in France, England, and Germany after 1830, take a more abrasive Juvenalian tone, playing with the intentionality of errata satirically to address erotic, religious, or political questions. Johan Peter

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Hebel used the introduction to his calendar Der Rheinländische Hausfreund not to offer an apology for the numerous misprints and mistakes in the previous calendar or to provide a list of errata, but to ridicule the printer and the genre of printer’s apologies. Hebel implied that the printer’s errors were the result his ignorance, which was in turn the result of his religious education (Hebel 54–­55). While Hebel interprets the errors, Eduard Mörike highlights the comic effect of these Druckteufeleien, this “devil’s work in print” on so-­called model cards. Examples from misprints concerning prominent German authors show biting humor that plays with erotic and religious allusions (Mörike 199). Such satiric jabs provided models for the popular comic illustrated periodicals commencing in France with La Caricature (1830) and Le Charivari (1832), continuing in England with Punch (subtitled “The London Charivari”) (1841) and then extending to Germany with the Fliegende Blätter (1844) and Kladderadatsch (1848). Political satires work with print mistakes and their subsequent correction. The simplest form is an erratum note that explains an error (Punch 150) or an announcement full of printing mistakes, corrected immediately underneath (Kalisch 1849, 42, 105). The journals exhibit this interruption performatively by offering to the reader a model for emendation and correction. In all these examples, printers’ inevitable errors and the conventions that had evolved for correcting them were turned to advantage. T Y P E FAC E S , T Y P O G R A P HI C P L AY

These popular European illustrated periodicals present a great source for examining a second kind of disruption in print culture: the disruption of typographic conventions. The conventional modern view of typography is that it should aim for invisibility. In Beatrice Warde’s normative simile, type should be like a crystal goblet. As a crystal goblet should not impose itself between the drinker and the wine, but should allow the drinker to concentrate on the wine it contains, so good type should not

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draw attention to itself but should convey the text’s message as unobtrusively as possible. Type should not convey a message of its own but should allow the message of the author to be transmitted to the reader with as little “noise” as possible. When typography is doing its job properly, on this view, no one notices. But in fact typefaces do convey messages, and different typefaces may have different connotations. Those connotations will change over time and in different geographic locations and different kinds of printed matter. But the fact that typography is used according to a set of conventions and conveys a set of connotations to the reader (even if it aims to be as transparent as possible) means that typefaces can be employed to produce rhetorical effects. Such effects are nonverbal, and they may have different relations to the verbal effects the text aims to produce: in some cases, the choice of typeface may support or endorse the message of the text, and in others, as we shall see, the choice of typeface may undercut or ironize the text. In the German context, typographic choices drew on an historical background that engaged print’s different spatial and temporal identities through the use of two distinct kinds of typeface: Antiqua and Fraktur (fig. 6.1). Here the Fliegende Blätter uses two different typefaces to create a binomial nomenclature in the taxonomy of urban species in the series entitled “Natural History” (1845–­1846, 64, 72, 80, 126, 136, 144, 160, 168). In Kladderadatsch, we see how in the midst of the 1848 revolution, the journal prints first in Fraktur that the constitution by the king of Prussia allows everyone to present their thoughts freely in speech, writing, or images, only to switch to Antiqua a few lines down, printing in French “le roi est mort—­vive le roi!” (Kalisch 1848, 129). Change in typeface suggests a text image whose sociopolitical alternative is simultaneously present. The momentary irritation of adjusting to a new typeface pushes the reader to switch from what we might call code-­related reading (the interpretation of text) to one of context-­related reading (Wehde 185). While England and France used Antiqua typefaces to create an innovative composition with little grayness and an exact

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6.1. “The Doorman, The Bandit . . .” in “Natural History,” from the Fliegende Blätter 1.8 (1845). Verlag von Braun and Schneider, Munich. Photograph: bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, New York. Photography: Dietmar Katz.

centerline in the print image, Germany since the Reformation employed a dualism of Fraktur with a gothic effect for the larger German public and the Latinate Antiqua to print theological and scientific works. The attempt of booksellers from Leipzig in conjunction with the Weimar authors—­Christoph Martin Wieland, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—­to assert the Antiqua typeface at least for classicist literature, only made the distinction more pronounced between the already-­ developed semantic opposition: Fraktur was understood as German, popular, folk oriented, cheap, and reader-­friendly, whereas Antiqua was thought of as foreign, scholarly, and educated. German illustrated journals of caricature not only continu-

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6.2. Multiple typefaces from the Fliegende Blätter 2.34 (1845). Verlag von Braun and Schneider, Munich. Lipperheidesche Kostümbibliothek. Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photograph: bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, New York. Photography: Dietmar Katz.

ously played with the connotations between the two typefaces but also often went beyond the dualism between Fraktur and Antiqua. They used the new possibilities for print reproduction opened up through the advent of lithography by including facsimiles of handwriting, hieroglyphs, doodles, codes, Greek, Chinese, or other exotic types of print to develop an orientation toward intermediality between text and image (Kalisch 1848, 92; Fliegende Blätter 1844–­1845, 159; 1846, 2:73–­75, 95, 103, 118, 134; 1846, 4:104) (fig. 6.2). While the German examples tend toward addressing the issue of writing, notable intermedial combinations found in the French and English journals emphasized the quality of

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lithographic print to conjoin text and image, as for example in the “exèrcices calligraphiques” (volume 3 of La Caricature 1832: 838, plates 217–­18), in which we see individual portraits constructed from calligraphic flourishes. Text and image flow into one another to estrange familiar viewing habits and to put pressure on the cultural associations of printed conventions. P U N C T U A T I O N A N D M I S E -­E N -­P A G E

Our third category concerns disruptions to the conventions that govern how printed text appears on the page, dictating what kinds of blank space appear where, and which areas of the page are covered in type [spacing]. Some printed texts manipulate typography to signal gaps in the text, as when a dash marks a gap in utterance or a section break is marked with an asterisk. Wolfgang Iser in his reader-­response criticism describes the function of the gap, or Leerstelle, as a means to stimulate reader activity (Iser 302). The typographic sign most often chosen for this gap is the dash, one whose history is related to an intratextual intensification and escalation of suspense (Rönnepeter). The interruption of thought signaled by the dash could be used for both comic and serious purposes, as when the editors of Kladderadatsch write, “Die Redakteure wollen sie nicht aufnehmen—­hol’ der Teufel die Censur!” (the editors did not want to include it—­ the hell with censorship!) (Kalisch 1849, 195), versus the dash’s sentimental intensifications in works like Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther or Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. The situation is very different when a gap is not part of the strategy of reception but instead due to pressure from outside censorship. In contrast to errata or typography, this type of interruption no longer points to the material printing process but to the political context of the message. To avoid censorship, authors often used forms of typographic camouflage, sometimes more or less overt. An example is a text submitted by a subscriber to the editors of Kladderadatsch who print his text inserting the comment “written illegibly” at regular inter-

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vals (Kalisch 1851, 143). More famously, Heinrich Heine, who was persecuted by the post-­Carlsbad expansion of censorship on the Continent, opened his work Ideen: Das Buch le Grand, with the following typographic gag: The German Censors ——————————————————— —————————————————————————————— —————————————————————————————— ———————————————  idiots ————————————— ——————————————————————————————— ———————————. (134)

In La Caricature, the periodical’s editor, Charles Philipon, answered the censorship of his journal with a caricature that shaped the head of King Louis Philippe into the form of a pear. This pear shape became a collective symbol for the juste-­milieu, and it was drawn on Parisian house walls as graffiti and reflected and newly actualized in many variants in the caricatures of Daumier, Grandville, and Travis. One drew it, the next modeled it, and the third described it in words, such as “our fruit culture has received a new and much desired fruit, whose taste is unfortunately bitter; it is the political pear, named pear Philipon” (Fuchs 1921, 335). The boom in pear caricatures carries Philipon to his trial. During his court appearance, Philipon tries to refute the charges that he is attacking the king by showing how he can create a pear out of any head through the metamorphosis of a series of images (volume 2 of La Caricature 1832: plate 113bis; Bosch-­Abele 2:186–­93; Düring; see also fig. 6.3). The high point is the publication of the text of Philipon’s conviction in the shape of a pear (in volume 3 of Le Charivari, 27 February 1834: title page) introduced by this comment: “Comme ce jugement, tout spirituel qu’il soit, risquerait d’offrir peu d’agrément à nos lecteurs, nous avons tâché de compenser du moins par la forme, ce qu’il pourrait y avoir d’un peu absurde au fond” (Since this completely spiritual judgment risks not offering much agreement to our readers, we have marked com-

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6.3. Charles Philipon in La Caricature, no. 65 (26 janvier 1832). Photograph: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

pensating at least by the form, so that they can have a bit of absurdity as a background). After losing the court case, the journal continues to employ the shape of the pear in an intermedial satire on censorship. The pear shape is not only drawn in abstract contours in many variations but also used to print text in the shape of a pear (volume 4 of La Caricature 1834: 1678), leaving blank space around the shape. The final issue of La Caricature ends with a highlight in camouflage writing. The text printed in the silhouette of the pear quotes the prohibition of free speech. Philipon thus creates an intertextual and intermedial caricature about carica-

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6.4. “Pear speech” in La Caricature 251 (1835). Photograph: bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, New York. Photography: Dietmar Katz.

tures without drawing (volume 4 of La Caricature 1835: 2005–­6; and see fig. 6.4). COUNTERFEITS

Such categories of typographic disruption can similarly be applied to paratextual or ephemeral visual forms. George Cruikshank and radical publisher William Hone’s 1819 Bank Restriction Note, an etching that parodied the form and appearance of a paper banknote, complete with ornate typographic variations, vignettes, counterfoils, signatures, and even the sugges-

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6.5. George Cruikshank and William Hone, Bank Restriction Note (1819). Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

tion of a watermark, is a work that appropriates the regimented blank spaces of the banknote to disrupt hierarchies of print media while conveying satirical critique. The Bank Restriction Note criticized the ease with which paper notes, whose value was far in excess of gold reserves, could be forged. Notes in small denominations were a relatively new invention. The Bank of England released ten-­pound notes only in 1793, and notes of less than five pounds date from 1797 (Crosby 818–­19). As a result, many people were unfamiliar with small notes and paid with their lives for unwittingly circulating counterfeit notes in denominations as low as one pound (Crosby 820). Via a startling representation of a mass hanging and other deathly motifs, the Bank Restriction Note condemned the inequity of capital sentences or transportation for those convicted of forgery, which regularly included those who had merely handled the notes. Cruikshank went so far as to assert that “the most important design and etching I ever made in my life” had “saved the lives of thousands of my fellow-­creatures” (Patten 149). This image was the most famous among many satirical

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“banknotes”—­so-­called skit notes—­that appeared on the British print market at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century (fig. 6.5). These images are notable for the self-­consciousness with which they articulate the relationship between the market for printed images and commercial society, and for the ways in which they appropriated established signs of value in the interest of social and political critique. Combining text and image in striking, sometimes virtuoso arrangements, the skit note was a format that lurched between high and low, the bureaucratic language of the official banknote providing an effective contrast with its biting and often bawdy satirical content. Indeed, skit notes were employed to satirize a wide range of issues, from minor political spats and obscure social issues to the major events of the day. These images, whose emblematic quality marks them out as distinct from the fluid caricatures for which Cruikshank is better known, prompt a consideration of the interaction of ostensibly “ephemeral” print media with more securely established or institutionally valorized forms of printed image making [ephemerality]. The banknote itself, because of its virtual invisibility as an aesthetic object, operated as a kind of “blank” upon which a range of motivations and desires might be projected—­these satires destabilize by rendering visible that which is unseen, even if it is all around us. Nonetheless, such interactions were not unique to an English context, and these prints were likely informed, in part at least, by the widespread popularity of prints, of diverse quality, representing paper money in the aftermath of the French Reign of Terror. Many of these images used the printed paper debris of the tumultuous half decade that preceded them to narrate a tragic history of revolutionary failure (Taws 143–­65). These prints regularly provided the support for embedded representations of the dead royal family, often in the form of profile silhouettes torn into the edges of the “notes,” or of (less immediately recognizable) revolutionaries, whose demise paralleled that of the obsolete paper currency that characterized their particular phase of the

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Revolution (Goudie). Such prints, which flourished during the Directoire, following the failure of the assignat in 1796 and the corresponding relaxation of prohibitions against representing paper money in print, were not the only point in the 1790s when images of defunct or transient print media were deployed as a means of thinking about history or as a way of accommodating the trauma of revolutionary violence. However, in their invocation of error, malfunction, and desuetude, and in their use of techniques of silhouette and satire, they exemplify the disruptive power of print and point forward to the emergence of similar themes in Philipon’s caricatures of the 1830s. Most important for our purposes, they highlight the highly charged and complex transfers that were taking place between printed media. Indeed, such was the success of Cruikshank and Hone’s Bank Restriction Note that the initial run soon sold out and a range of pirate versions, antiradical imitations and high-­art appropriations appeared on the London print market. In fact, Nina Athanassoglou-­Kallmyer suggests that the suspended corpses in Cruikshank’s print may have inspired Théodore Géricault’s Public Hanging in London of 1820–­21 (Hunt 2003, 376n93; Athanassoglou-­Kallmyer 605–­6). Cruikshank himself had been prompted to produce the note as a result of seeing several men and women hanging from the gibbet opposite Newgate Prison, their crime having been to circulate forged one-­ pound notes (Patten 146). Beyond these circulations external to the work, Cruikshank and Hone’s satire was, itself, an object that thematized interaction between different images. The Bank Restriction Note was sold inside a printed broadside, Bank Restriction Barometer, which functioned as an elaborate wrapper. Hone insisted that these prints be sold together and took legal proceedings against street vendors who attempted to sell them separately (Patten 145). Via the motif of a barometer, Bank Restriction Barometer attacked the Bank of England’s policy of issuing paper money and suggested the positive results that would be obtained by

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the restoration of payments in gold, which had been suspended since 1797 to finance the war against Napoleonic France; specifically, to enable the sending of money overseas to support the troops, a situation exacerbated by a run on country banks. At the central point of the schematic barometer running down the left hand side of the image is “The Bank Restriction,” with good news, order, and public happiness increasing the further one moves above this line. Ten positive outcomes, including the end of forgery, the fall of rents and prices, and a decline in public executions, are topped by the summary “National Prosperity Promoted.” Below the medial line, the further one moves into the bank restriction scheme, the consequences invert the happy results associated with the return of gold coinage above, resulting in “General Distress Increased.” Cruikshank and Hone’s collaborative work was one of the sharpest of many contemporary critiques of the paper-­money system operating in Britain at this time, a scheme that it had been assumed would end with the defeat of Napoleon (Valenze 260–­78). William Cobbett’s Paper against Gold, published in 1815, had directly attributed to paper money a rise in “confusion and bloodshed,” whereas for Shelley, who had likely seen Cruikshank and Hone’s print, the falseness of paper money represented “a far subtler and more complicated contrivance of misrule” than even the use of alloy in the place of specie (Cobbett xiii; Cox). Early nineteenth-­century skit notes, such as Cruikshank and Hone’s Bank Restriction Note, point to the some of the complex ways in which printed images of diverse kinds interacted with one another, and with those who circulated them, in this period. Satires of money both exploit the universality of money as a form of equivalence between things, obscuring divisions between different kinds of print, and produce at the same time a form of political critique that focuses on the inequalities produced by such paper-­money schemes. By virtue of their printed representation of print, these images also call attention to both the materiality and the exchangeability of print itself.

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CONCLUSION

As our examples have shown, printed texts and images from the late Enlightenment at least until the revolutions of 1848 made meaning from disruptions in and irritations created through the printing process. Satirists took the many kinds of error that print was prone to—­t ypesetting mistakes, letters that fell out during printing, omitted sentences, skipped pages, pages printed on top of each other, and so on (Gerhardt; Blair 2007)—­ and turned them into motivated tactics for creative satire and political resistance. In doing so, they created a ludic tension between the weight of authority that print was often made to carry and the everyday experience of error-­strewn printed matter. Authors and printers played self-­consciously with typographic conventions, especially in Germany, where two different styles of type, each with its own connotations, were simultaneously in regular use. Periodicals deployed blank space on the page—­whether marked by punctuation marks such as dashes or created by the shape of the text block—­to make rhetorical points that went beyond what they could say in the text without censorship or reprisals. And graphic satirists appropriated and disrupted the conventions of the earliest printed banknotes to attack government policy. These disruptions also helped create a class of readers and viewers who were self-­conscious critical consumers of print, familiar with the processes that produced the printed matter they consumed, the kinds of errors those processes were prone to, and the kinds of political constraint or duress under which they operated. In this way, disruptions to the conventions governing the use of print are secretly allied, as it were, to print’s potential to disrupt wider social, intellectual, and political conventions.

7

E N G R AV I N G Any discussion of print must include an examination of printed images, and for much of the period between 1600 and 1900, intaglio engraving was a dominant mode of image transmission. Engraving played a role in producing commercial identities, consolidating scientific discourse, and structuring debates about artistic hierarchies. It was also, as we show here, vital to creating and circulating national identities, whose uneven development illuminates the stakes of interactions with print in broader processes of social and historical change. This chapter investigates connections between engraving and nation building in three very different cosmopolitan cities, to show how crucial practices of interactivity were to both. First, state-­sponsored engraving in Vienna provides a model for thinking about the mobilization of the reproduced image in the interests of a powerful state. Second, the example of John Boydell’s gallery in London demonstrates that nation building could be developed in concert with commercial interests. However, linking patriotism with art and print exposed tensions among the competing interests of painters, engravers, letterpress printers, and their financial backers. Finally, with particular reference to Paris, we consider how responses to engraving were inseparable from the technological transformations that shaped the media landscape of the period. In each case, we see that engravers were hardly passive participants in top-­down ideological schema. Because they considered themselves artists, not craftspeople, engravers fought to maintain prestige and economic status, using the aegis of nationalism to suit their own interests in struggles for professional integrity.

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Our inherited histories most often address the categories of print and prints as separate fields of inquiry. However, as we explain in the introduction to this volume, while so-­called print culture is commonly associated with letterpress printing, it was in fact highly visual in nature. Although the practices of reproductive engraving changed significantly in the years between 1700 and 1900, printed images consistently structured interactivity in a number of ways. Engraved reproductions affected the way spectators engaged with visual art. Pictures in books transformed the ways people engaged with imaginative texts as well as scientific ones, and people visiting galleries or print shops entered social spaces crucially structured by print. In his classic account of the formation and persistence of the modern nation-­ state, Ernest Gellner describes the part played by a training-­ sustained and state-­directed education system, which took as its task the establishment of widespread vernacular literacy, in the universalization of nationalist identities. With the emergence of nationalism, rather than operating merely as adornment or elite legitimization, “culture is now the necessary shared medium, the life-­blood or perhaps rather the minimal shared atmosphere, within which alone the members of the society can breathe and survive and produce” (Gellner 37–­38). This model of the dissemination and universalizing of knowledge as necessary—­vital in fact—­to the process of nation building, while somewhat schematic, nonetheless incorporates the useful notion that culture itself might serve as a “medium” promulgating new ideas and rephrasing old ones. Shared cultures are produced through repetition and reproduction, and the printed image is as at least as essential to this process as is letterpress printing. Furthermore, engraved images and texts were not, of course, mutually exclusive categories, but frequently they shared the same commercial and aesthetic spaces and, often, the same plate. These cultural and political repetitions rendered some aspects of national culture easily recognizable, and they also fostered distinctions and hierarchies that were developed to discriminate between self and other. Textual and visual artifacts

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were implicated equally in these processes, and they overlapped within a broader media ecology. The reproduced image served as a particularly tense site for the intersection of individual and wider national or community interests. Elite art promised its own separation from the artisanal and the local via its increasing professionalization and autonomy, its moral ambition, its unwieldy scale, its reference to universal classical or mythological archetypes. Printed reproductions of fine art, in contrast, threatened to reduce such grand aspirations to the level of pastiche or, more worryingly, to the realm of quotidian commercial interest, betraying the financial imperatives intrinsic to, but obscured within, “high” art practices. Engraving included a variety of processes with different characteristics and connotations. Intaglio copperplate engraving was the most practical way of mediating visual images for most of the eighteenth century; copperplate prints commonly illustrated books and remediated works of art for display. The status of engraving, however, was controversial. Opinion was divided between those who understood engraving as merely the mechanical reproduction of existing works and those who wanted to attribute to it artistic merit. Later in the period copperplate engraving became more closely associated with fine art as it lost its technological edge. The introduction of wood-­ end engraving around 1790 and the increased use of steel-­plate engraving in the nineteenth century altered interactions with print by enlarging significantly the number of impressions produced from a single block or plate. Wood engraving allowed fine detail, and wood was easier to work than copper. Steel plates were more difficult to work but more durable, allowing for more copies to be produced before the plate wore out. However, even before this efflorescence of new reproductive technologies that came to characterize the nineteenth-­century visual world, remediating images for ever-­wider audiences and producing new varieties of consumer in the process, engraving was uniquely situated to mediate the complex and interactive processes of nation building.

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Engravers were in constant demand in the increasingly bureaucratic Austro-­Hungarian Empire. In Vienna, Empress Maria Theresa (1717–­1780) was keenly aware of the work the letterpress and engraving could do for her war-­stricken empire on the brink of financial ruin. To preserve the Habsburg dominions indivisibiliter ac inseperabiliter, she set out to establish a centralist government and to initiate wide-­ranging reforms. Considering communication and culture as key to the successful unification and centralization of the sprawling, multiethnic empire, Maria Theresa strategically invested in engraving as one of the important media of nation building. Apart from reproducing administrative orders, theses, images of the empress as mater patriae (mother of the fatherland), or the newly introduced paper money (Wiener-­Stadt-­Banco-­Zettel, 1762), engravers illustrated schoolbooks, scientific works, works of fiction, almanacs, and pocket books. They produced maps and reproduced works of art. All these printed products were disseminated throughout the Habsburg territories, designed to reach even its remotest corners. Because of its mobility, engraving played an essential role in political administration and self-­representation, financial circulation within a national economy, as well as education and entertainment—­all of which aimed to produce a common culture and identity within a highly heterogeneous political entity. State control of communication and state sponsorship of the arts went hand in hand. A main motivation for sponsoring engraving was economic. According to mercantilist principles, outsourcing printing and engraving was detrimental to the national economy. An estimated six million to seven million florins were wasted each year on importing engravings in the early 1760s (Wagner 1967, 29). “This way,” councilor of commerce Doblhoff-­Dier complained, “the French and the English are robbing the other nations of huge sums each year” (Zmölnig 34). But, he argued, since the thriving engraving industries in Paris and London had just about exhausted their national collections of paintings to be reproduced, Vienna, with its rich collections of the Old Mas-

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ters, including unknown works by Dürer, Rubens, Titian, and Rembrandt had much more capital upon which to build. However, to tap into this market, the state needed to promote the Viennese engraving profession and art trade, which were in no way competitive. Unlike engravers in London and Paris, Viennese engravers worked under the tight control of the state. In 1766 Jakob Matthias Schmutzer (1733–­1811) founded the Academy of Engravers (Kaiserlich-­Königliche Kupferstecher-­Akademie) with full financial support of the state and strong backing from the state chancellor and patron of the arts, the Prince of Kaunitz. Schmutzer’s academy soon became a state institution. This new academy was based on the model of Johann Wille’s Teutsche Zeichenschule in Paris, which Schmutzer had attended upon the express wish of Kaunitz to import French expertise and equipped with the necessary funding. Apart from the obvious economic advantages of a national engraving industry, other arguments justified the state’s investment: engravings, Doblhoff-­Dier claimed, disseminate “good drawings and pictorial ideas,” thus training “the eyes of young artists, producers, and craftsmen and improving their taste.” The academy trained artists and craftsmen alike to become a new type of autonomous bourgeois artist, independent of the traditional sponsorship of the church or aristocracy. Although the Habsburg administration may have acknowledged losing market share to England, in mid-­eighteenth-­ century London, the line-­engraving profession was quite depressed. According to The London Tradesman, a midcentury handbook, the state of engraving was so poor that “if our workmen commit a Blunder, they are not such good Judges of the Mischief, and scarce know how to mend it” (Campbell 113). The book goes on to explain that good-­quality engravings were generally imported, and “the best Pieces we have in England [were] executed in France” (Campbell 113). However, by the 1790s English engravings were enjoying newfound status, and French collectors were snapping up prints exported from London (Roy). For reasons discussed later here, state sponsorship was out of

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the question. Instead, this temporary reversal of fortune can be traced in large part to London alderman John Boydell, a printseller-­turned-­gallery proprietor, who invented a new institution now referred to collectively as “literary galleries.” Ironically, although literary galleries promoted engravers to a place of prominence, it was ultimately the rejection of the literary galleries that propelled engraving from second-­rate trade toward the well-­respected position of liberal art in the later nineteenth century. In 1786 Boydell published a prospectus for his “Shakspeare Gallery.” Significantly, he meant gallery to refer both to a building filled with pictures and to a virtual gallery of printed reproductions of those pictures. His ambitious plan began with paintings of scenes taken from the plays of the “National Author,” but his real goal was to promote English art by selling English prints. Appealing to wealthy Londoners’ patriotism and literary taste, he sold subscriptions to copperplate prints painted and engraved by native artists and to a high-­end illustrated edition of Shakespeare’s collected works. The idea took off, and in the 1790s, several other literary galleries opened in Pall Mall, including the Historic Gallery, which sold subscriptions to Hume’s The History of England, as well as the Poet’s Gallery, the Milton Gallery, and even a competing Shakespeare gallery. While these institutions relied on revenue from multiple media—­ admission to see paintings in the galleries that housed them, as well as engravings, books, and catalogs—­they ultimately proved unprofitable. In the roughly fifteen years they stayed in business, however, they legitimized English history painting, created a fashion for large-­format illustrated editions of English literary works, transformed trade in copperplate prints, and improved the professional status of those who produced them. In this way, they did the double duty of consolidating a national culture around a shared literary identity and promoting the status of the visual arts. Boydell’s unique position, which enabled him to cast the Shakspeare Gallery with such nationalist thrust, stemmed from

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7.1. William Woollett, The Death of General Wolfe (1776). Photograph: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC (LC-­DIG-­pga-­03470).

events a decade earlier, when he proved capable of understanding the power of engraving to sell patriotic narratives. In the late 1770s, he made a fortune producing prints of The Death of General Wolfe, painted by Benjamin West in 1770 (fig. 7.1). The painting depicts the moment at the end of the Battle of Quebec in September 1759 just before the dying Wolfe is informed that the battle has been won. Boydell’s recognition of the painting’s importance was no small task given the turbulent backdrop of English art in the 1770s. The Royal Academy, only three years old when West exhibited The Death of General Wolfe, was not only beleaguered by constant infighting but also remained at war with its rivals, the Society of Artists and the Free Society of Artists (Brewer 1997, 232). Boydell recognized in West’s painting the potential to unite British subjects in their appreciation of something singularly tragic at a time of momentously heroic

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victory. Boydell’s print connected what John Barrell has called “the discourse of civic humanism” evident in the painting to his private interests as a printseller. He hired the best English engraver of the moment, William Woollett, to engrave the print and paid him more than any British engraver had ever been paid. Engravers had previously been looked on as mere mechanics, but Boydell advertised Woollett as the central “genius” behind his project (Bruntjen 36). Literary galleries deployed advertising rhetoric that repositioned engravers as integral to the artistic process, rather than as mechanical distributors of the message of the painter. Boydell used the successful formula he had learned with Wolfe, simply replacing momentous historical events with great literary productions. In these galleries, English engravers joined canonical British authors, along with native painters, typecasters and typesetters, printers and papermakers, to produce monumental objects that represented the nation as much in their material as in their intellectual content [frontispieces]. Reproduced images allowed spectators to participate in a shared national culture, bringing what had theretofore been a civic humanism only possible in public into the domestic world of private sensibilities. Prints allowed their owners to consume and display their participation in patriotic citizenship as well as to reexperience the affective power of a picture as many times as they liked. If the example of Boydell teaches us anything, it is that commerce played a fundamental, arbitrative role. The question of valuation was complicated by the fact that Boydell commissioned both painters and engravers of name and paid each well, and that he created a gallery that exhibited works in one medium but sold them in the other. Boydell commissioned painters to produce images from Shakespeare’s plays, and he offered a gallery catalog that reproduced lines of Shakespearean verse to accompany each painting. While the catalog was for sale, the paintings were not. They remained on display in the gallery at 52 Pall Mall and served as models for the engravings, which could be purchased either at the gallery or by subscrip-

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tion, along with the illustrated Dramatic Works of Shakspeare. This combination of factors invited viewers, customers, and critics to reconsider what it meant to make an engraving of an image, and to choose between two competing views. On the one hand, engraving can be understood as a mode of mere transferal, in that it retains the visual components of the original image rather transforming it into something fundamentally different, like sound or language. Yet, on the other hand, engraving can be understood as fundamentally unlike painting, requiring a different set of technical skills and tools from its practitioners. In this sense, to engrave an image is without question to render it in a new medium. And, like all adaptors, Boydell’s engravers were engaged at the most fundamental level in acts of interpretation. The paintings stayed in place until the Shakspeare Gallery closed, in 1804, when its stock was dispersed by way of a massive public lottery, which was well advertised across the London media. The closure of the galleries put engravers in a precarious position, and their newfound legitimacy was endangered. Engravers argued that producing printed images was an art, whereas producing printed text was simply a trade. The distinction hinged on the fact that although presswork—­the act of printing ink onto pages—­was a similar kind of labor that deployed a similar transfer technology, plate production was very different. While compositors and reproductive engravers both produced near-­identical copies in their respective media, assembling movable type into a form was nothing like preparing a copperplate for the press. Highly skilled laborers to be sure, compositors did not consider themselves authors. Engravers, however, wanted to be thought of as artists. Many resisted the analogy of type to engraving, and in so doing were forced to take a position against the literary galleries that had sustained and supported their professional aspirations for more than a decade. While painters like Prince Hoare and Martin Archer Shee were arguing that to paint for book illustration was to squander their talent in showing readers what was already avail-

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able to them in the text, engravers like John Landseer were looking to salvage their professional status by distancing themselves from the commercial model of engraving for illustration that had been popularized by the literary galleries. Engravers were also forced into defensive positions by generalized comments like that of the Duke of Suffolk, whom in May 1804 the Gentleman’s Magazine reported to have blamed the failure of the Shakspeare Gallery on “the slovenly and very inferior manner in which engravings are now executed by British Artists” (458). Landseer’s tactic was to agree—­and he did so by accusing the engravers who had done the bulk of the work for the Shakspeare Gallery of being “dull mechanical drudges” and “half-­formed, imbecile, swaggering pretenders to the art [of engraving]” (Landseer 1808, 437). He believed that the literary galleries ultimately hurt the status of engraving by linking it not to nationalism but to commercial book illustration. Landseer argued against the idea that engraving was mere illustration by rejecting Boydell’s book-­centered Shakespeare “chalk-­manner” prints, aligning them with other commercial forms of visual reproduction, including lithography and wood engraving, which he dismissed as “always accessory” to the texts they illustrated (1807, 116). While Landseer’s efforts failed to gain engravers full membership in the Royal Academy, his arguments about the history and nature of engraving had significant traction. Polemics like Landseer’s, shaped by and against the rise and fall of the literary galleries, restored some prestige to the profession in London. The 1818 Book of English Trades significantly cribs its history of engraving from Landseer’s own. In the four decades since the publication of The Death of Wolfe, engraving had undergone a significant technological transformation. While The London Tradesman cast significant doubt on the quality of English copperplate engraving, The Book of English Trades calls engraving “one of the fine arts” (Souter 157). The new reproductive technologies reinforced Landseer’s claim that copperplate engraving, less commercially viable in the new century, was not simply a mechanistic mode of reproduction.

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Landseer’s negative response to Boydell’s particular style echoes the response of French academic engravers to new intaglio techniques—­color mezzotint, pastel manner, aquatint, and wash manner—­in eighteenth-­century France, techniques used especially for the production of multiple-­plate color prints. A large market existed for these prints, although the taste for such works waned after the Revolution, when their subject matter, luxury status, and clientele came to be seen as politically and aesthetically outmoded. The dimensions of these so-­called printed paintings, which included original designs as well as reproductions of rococo paintings and drawings, were sometimes based on standard canvas sizes for cabinet paintings (Smentek 11), demonstrating an affinity with a commercial sphere of painterly activity often thought to be at odds with the moral ideals and autonomous professional identity of academic art. Technological change gradually shifted the terrain upon which these debates were played out. Engraving remained a privileged medium for the reproduction of fine art for many years to come, although the formation of English trade guilds and art unions such as the Printsellers’ Association, founded in 1847, which approved and stamped engravings as legitimate copies, betrays something of the anxiety prompted by competition from new technologies such as lithography, wood engraving, and later photogravure, even as it marked the ascendance of new print publishing monopolies. As Stephen Bann has demonstrated, in the context of early nineteenth-­century France, copperplate engravings after historical and contemporary artworks—­increasingly highly expensive and labor-­intensive affairs that took many years to complete—­were not displaced by new, more swiftly produced forms of mechanical reproduction. Rather, their value increased by virtue of their scarcity and close association with fine-­art practices, operating in dialogue with the paintings and sculpture they reproduced, and even, in due course, with photomechanical processes (Bann 2001, 2013). As in the case of Boydell’s Gallery, paintings were often commissioned to serve as the basis of prints, reversing conven-

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tional hierarchies of “original” to “copy,” and accentuating the extent to which images of diverse media might operate as components in a complex print ecology. Furthermore, in Paris in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the print market based along the traditional pilgrimage route into the city along the Rue Saint-­Jacques expanded into new commercial spaces, such as the arcades, with their gas lighting and glass shop windows, and into bourgeois interiors. Consequently, reproductions of fine art, as well as original printed designs, were increasingly affordable and accessible, although the quantity and easy availability of such works inevitably led to regular recalibration of their ability to mark distinction and status. The emergence of illustrated weekly magazines in the early 1840s catering to a well-­heeled middle-­class audience—­the Illustrated London News and its Parisian equivalents such as L’Illustration or Le Monde Illustré—­complicated these debates still further. As Tom Gretton has pointed out, until the 1890s, when handmade images were replaced in illustrated weeklies by halftone reproductions of photographs, “the difference between magazine illustration and fine art had to be established and maintained, and the relations of hierarchy between the worth of representations produced by journalists and by fine artists had to be negotiated, adjusted, readjusted” (Gretton 145). Here, the value in difficulty that had identified engraving as a fine art became even more marked, with the assimilation of wood-­ engraved images into letterpress printing pushing copperplate engravers toward ever more nuanced means of distinguishing the complexity and artisanal authenticity of their product, via limited editions, proofs, and repudiations of printmaking’s collaborative nature. That the ascendancy of engraving to the rank of a fine art came at the same time as intaglio printmaking began to diminish in reach and visibility, ultimately reduced to just one expensive and laborious outlier among many possible reproductive technologies, is no coincidence. We are, perhaps, more familiar with some of the ways in which mid-­nineteenth-­ century mass-cultural forms such as illustrated weekly news

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magazines explicitly remediated fine art in the interest of a nationalist and imperialist agenda. However, as the example of Boydell amply demonstrates, copperplate engraving had, previously, contributed significantly to the development of commercial, professional, and national identities, adumbrating a complex model of interactivity with and across media. Subsequently validated as fine art, it continued to do so for many years, long after the point when, according to conventional teleologies of technical progress, it had been replaced by more novel forms of mechanical reproduction.

8

EPHEMERALITY Traditionally, historians of print have divided the world into the durable and the ephemeral. The former comprises books, and perhaps the more ambitious sorts of pamphlets, periodicals, and printed images. The latter comprises everything else: tickets, handbills, playing cards, periodicals unlikely to be reread, crude woodcuts, completed or blank forms. Durable print is to be bound or framed for posterity; ephemeral print can be used and tossed away (or repurposed as wrapping paper or to line trunks). Durable print is manufactured with higher-­quality materials (which are often highlighted in advertising, such as “hot-­pressed,” “white,” “writing” paper); ephemeral print is made out of whatever is cheap and closest to hand (often “brown” paper). As a means of organizing the world, these distinctions have exerted tremendous power [spacing]. But like most binaries, they are based on questionable assumptions. In this chapter, while not abandoning the distinction altogether, we move from the idea of ephemera to ephemerality, to foreground new kinds of historical insight. Far from being an inherent quality of certain genres or the inevitable consequence of particular manufacturing techniques or materials, ephemerality is a potential condition into which all mark-­bearing paper can enter. While a finely bound Bible printed on hot-­pressed paper may be less likely to be considered ephemeral than a handbill hastily printed on the cheapest support available, the perceived durability of each will arise from a convergence of factors—­each calling for analytic attention—­

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rather than from any inherent property of the object. By considering ephemerality as a condition that can be imputed to an artifact, we can see how particular sorts of use could effectively protect it from becoming waste paper. For example, if a book has been signed by its author, owned by a famous person, given a gilt binding for inclusion in a collection, or presented as a gift on a solemn occasion, the odds are greater that it will not be thrown away. One can think of ephemerality, then, in two different ways: as a condition opposed to durability and as a condition opposed to value. The first of these takes the physical qualities of the object as paramount. Certain formats and particular materials are just more prone to damage and loss. When Keats spoke of his name as being “writ in water” (2:91) and Byron dismissed women’s vows as “traced in sand” (1980–­1993, 1:45–­46), both were evoking writing’s ability to be fugacious rather than lasting. But we might also focus on the reasons that printed paper gets saved. Even the most apparently ephemeral documents (ticket stubs, receipts, matchbooks) can last as souvenirs, records, or collectibles, so long as there are people who value and wish to preserve them. Today, many libraries boast large collections of so-­called ephemera, which have grown valuable as a direct consequence of the ravages of time. In proposing this second way of thinking about ephemerality, we are following the lead of some of the most fascinatingly self-­conscious genres of print in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Essay periodicals, for example, routinely meditated on the conditions in which they were read and preserved (or not). Similarly, paper money was deeply concerned with the scenarios under which it had value and fungibility, even as producers of banknotes were forced to confront paper’s relative fragility and capacity for forgery. Concerns like these amount to a theory of mediation by other means, a theory regarding the ways in which value is conferred or denied through the uses to which paper is put.

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OF M AY FL IE S A ND FLY ER S

Consider only the realization of “Mr. Town,” the editorial persona of The Connoisseur (1754–­1756): Were I obliged to follow my papers . . . through all their travels and mutations, I should certainly undergo the shame of seeing some of them prostituted to the vilest purposes. If in one place I might be pleased to find them the entertainment of the tea-­table, in another I should be no less vexed to see them degraded to the base office of sticking up candles. Such is the fatality attending these loose sheets, that though at their first publication they may be thought as precious as the Sibyl’s leaves, the next moment they may be thrown aside as no better than a last year’s almanack. Ever since my first appearance in a sheet and a half I have felt great uneasiness on account of the rude treatment, which my works have been subject to in their present form. I turned off my printer for a very heinous affront offered to my delicacy, having detected some foul proofs of my first numbers lodged in a very unseemly place; and I almost came to an open rupture with my publisher, because his wife had converted a supernumerary half-­sheet into a thread-­paper. A lady, whose sense and beauty I had always admired, forfeited my esteem at once by cutting out a pattern for a cap from one of my papers; and a young fellow, who had spoken very handsomely of one of my essays, made no scruple to defile the blank margin with a filthy list of foul shirts and dirty stockings. The repeated abuses of illiterate bakers, pastry-­cooks, and chandlers I know I am condemned to suffer in common with other mortal writers . . . : and as politicians, wits, freethinkers, and divines, may have their dust mingled in the same piece of ground, so may their works be jumbled together in the lining of the same trunk or band-­box (Colman and Thornton 171–­72).

Things grew even worse:

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My curiosity tempted me to examine the materials of which several paper kites were made up, from whence I had sufficient room to moralize on the ill fate of authors. On one I discovered several pages of a sermon expanded over the surface; on another the wings fluttered with love songs; and a satire on the ministry furnished another with ballast for the tail. I at length happened to cast my eye on one taller than the rest, and beheld several of my own darling productions pasted over it. My indignation was presently raised, that I should become the plaything of children; and I was even ashamed that the great name of town, which stared me full in the front, should be exposed . . . to every idle gazer. (Colman and Thornton 173)

The problem, for Mr. Town, is one of use: treating his paper as anything other than a text to be carefully read and then lovingly preserved is an affront because it illegitimately converts the self-­evidently durable into the insultingly ephemeral. This amounts to a desecration of his very person: note that he is the one who appears in a “sheet and a half” every week. Yet Mr. Town’s writing, though arguably even more ephemeral than other forms because of its sheer periodicity (a week after this issue came out on 15 August 1754, another was published, this time devoted to boxing), was no more subject to “rude treatment” than other sorts of printed matter: sermons, songs, political satires. And while he doesn’t acknowledge keeping the same company when it comes to the “raptures” prompted by the sight of “my numbers in the public coffee-­houses strung upon a file, and swelling gradually into a little volume!” (Colman and Thornton 172), we know that sermons, songs, and satires were every bit as present in coffeehouse libraries as essay periodicals like The Connoisseur (Ellis). Ephemerality is etymologically rooted in the natural sciences: before Samuel Johnson termed newspapers “the Ephemerae of Learning” (The Rambler, 6 August 1751), an ephemera referred to the mayfly, an insect born and gone in a single day (1750–­1752,

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867). The French éphémère derives from the same Greek source, meaning “to last a day,” and was initially used primarily in the entomological sense. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, éphémère broadened in use to encompass the similarly fleeting lives of flowers, illnesses, regimes, and persons. The term was closely linked to a specific genre, the éphémérides, a day-­by-­day account of an individual life. Éphémérides could also signify charts listing where stars would be on a given day (to facilitate celestial navigation), or, later, a calendar with sheets that could be torn off for each day. While there is no direct synonym in German for ephemera, the word Kleinschriftentum—­ “small” or “minor” “literature”—­is roughly parallel and refers to short, topical publications such as church newspapers, political pamphlets, and handbills. Similarly, in the German art-­ historical context, we can see the idea of ephemera having an only momentary currency in the terms Gebrauchsgraphik, which translates literally as “use-­art,” and Gebrauchstexte (“use-­print”), both of which appear in reference to commercial imagery produced for particular occasions. Broadsides, another quasi-­ ephemeral category, were referred to in German as Flugblätter, anticipating the English flyer, paper that flies about and so soon perishes. Newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, catalogs, journalistic accounts of quotidian life—­these up-­to-­the-­minute genres were lumped together to form the category of “ephemera.” Like its namesake, the mayfly, ephemera was thus defined by the supposed “nature” of its subject, not the quality of its materials; ephemera was that which was (putatively) defined solely by the immediate concerns of the day. This shift in usage over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stems logically from Johnson’s description of “the Drudges of the Pen” as those “who have no other rule than . . . the Fashion for admitting their Thoughts or rejecting them” (1750–­1752, 866–­67). In Britain, this etymological conjunction of ephemerality and fashion was quickly mobilized in polemics against the novel, the genre most emphatically committed to its own newness. In his Dissertation on the Idea of Universal Poetry, for

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example, Richard Hurd takes pains to distance himself from “those novels or romances . . . constructed on some private and familiar subject, which have been so current of late throughout all Europe,” as “things” that “vanish as soon as they are produced, and are produced as soon as they are conceived” (21–­ 22). Denigrating fashionable or current topics as mere ephemera was thus linked to concerns about the mounting volume of published material in the period: sensational or instrumental texts on immediate subjects defined, by negation, the rarer and supposedly more prized volumes whose intellectual durability should—­but often did not—­ensure their replication and circulation [proliferation; anthologies]. PAPER MONEY

Despite the insistence of eighteenth-­century moralists that the mayflies of print should die the same day they are born, effectively disappearing into an immense waste bin of useless paper, plenty of supposed ephemera endured. In fact, some of the most lastingly influential printed objects were those that were most allegedly perishable. An intriguing example of this may be seen in assignats, the paper money (or, technically, paper bonds guaranteed by seized clerical land) of the French Revolution. Widely condemned in the early 1790s for their flimsiness, illegitimacy, and transience, assignats might seem the most ephemeral of ephemera (fig. 8.1, plate 6). The life of an assignat was indeed short, and they were taken out of circulation and burned en masse in 1796. Satirical prints even show them being used as toilet paper, and they were subject to widespread counterfeiting [disruptions]. But assignats were also, both symbolically and financially, the bulwark of the new French state, and so a tremendous amount of energy and labor was invested in combating counterfeiting, in surrounding them with emblems that highlighted their continuity with earlier forms of money (including a blind stamp of the king’s head—­notes bearing this continued to circulate

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8.1. Fifty-­sol assignat (1793). Photograph: Richard Taws.

even after the execution of Louis XVI), and in otherwise establishing their importance and durability. With the introduction of watermarks, numbering, and stereotyped signatures, they became increasingly complex, multilayered artifacts at the forefront of printing technology. The ability of assignats to be both ephemeral and durable is nicely captured by the later assignats’ use of the Republican calendar, which marks them as both novel and, potentially, lasting. And more than most other sorts of documents traditionally deemed ephemera, assignats could have life-­or-­death consequences, not only for counterfeiters and those killed in the wars they financed, but even for the man whose image they bore until the foundation of the Republic in September 1792: Louis XVI was captured on his flight to Varennes because a postmaster recognized him from his portrait on an assignat—­a feat that, according to Elizabeth Eisenstein, wouldn’t have been possible with a coin, despite the latter’s supposed greater durability and self-­evident value (85). Without

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that capture, Louis would most likely have escaped France and survived to harass the revolutionary regime and give royalists an obvious rallying point. That particular assignat may have been technically ephemeral (in the sense of not lasting all that long as an artifact), but its consequences resonate to this day. Indeed, in the climate of political instability and conflict that characterized French life in the 1790s, widely reproduced and supposedly ephemeral forms of print—­paper money, but also playing cards, certificates, posters, song sheets, identity cards, and newspapers—­provided a powerful means for revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries to conceptualize their own relation to the historical transformations through which they were living (Leith; Taws 1–­11). All of these objects were “regenerated” in accordance with revolutionary principles, thereby inviting consideration of how their relation to their counterparts in the ancien régime might be analogous to the current moment’s relation to life before the Revolution. That is, while the notion of ephemerality posed clear problems for the legitimacy of revolutionary politics, especially given the absence of permanent monuments to the Revolution’s memory, the ephemeral print of 1790s France allowed its citizens and exiles a means of reflecting on the hitherto-­unimaginable changes the Revolution had wrought and the challenge those changes posed to the very structure of time. BL ANKS AND OTHER WASTEPAPER

Obviously, the events of the Revolution were extraordinary, and so the uses to which supposedly ephemeral print could be put in France in the 1790s might not seem illustrative of anything other than themselves. Yet the ephemerality or durability, in peacetime, of blank forms and other sorts of instrumental print was every bit as unpredictable and potentially far reaching [s pacing]. Peter Stallybrass has shown that, from the very beginning, one of the most significant outputs of the press, at least quantitatively, was “an endless series of ‘small Jobs,’” includ-

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ing a “bewildering variety” of blank forms: bills of lading, certificates, indentures, indulgences, permits, receipts (331, 333). These “little Jobs” were important to printers because they “regularly injected cash into the notoriously undercapitalized book trade” (324). However, very few of them have survived: most of these forms were meant to record a particular event or transaction and so were discarded once that moment had passed. Nonetheless, under certain circumstances, these documents can survive in remarkable numbers. Consider, for example, the printed forms prepared for the Foundling Hospital (fig. 8.2, plate 7), which admitted tens of thousands of infants and children, beginning in 1741. These forms include blank spaces for the date, time, sex, and approximate age of the child to be entered; a long list of items of clothing that could be marked to describe what the child was wearing upon entrance; and a final section, “Marks on the Body.” In “Received, a Blank Child,” published in Household Words (19 March 1853), Dickens wryly notices the appalling incongruity of using a preprinted form to record the arrival of a child: his piece begins, “The blank day of blank, Received a blank child.” In other situations, once a person or thing had entered into an institution’s keep, the form through which the initial entry was made would eventually be discarded. But the overwhelming demand for places in the Foundling Hospital meant that administrators continually held out hope that some mothers might return to reclaim their children (thereby freeing up a bed). Accordingly, tokens (mostly textiles) were pinned to the forms, with the mother retaining a matching token to be shown in the event that she came back, and the thus-­modified forms were carefully preserved. These tokens now form the largest collection of eighteenth-­century textiles in Britain. Here, an apparently ephemeral form—­a printed blank designed to facilitate the inner workings of an institution—­proves one of the most lasting, carefully preserved for centuries. The reverse of this scenario appears when we consider the fate of “printer’s waste”: printed texts that never made it into the form of a book. Unfolded, uncut, unbound—­these stacks

8.2. Admission form to the Foundling Hospital, with attached fabric token (1756). Photograph: © Coram.

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8.3. Printer’s waste reused as a specimen-­drying book from the Endeavour voyage of 1768–­1771—­material from Madeira (Natural History Museum, London). Photograph: © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

of printed sheets might well have become fixtures of a gentleman’s library, had circumstances been different [binding]. Such was the case with a 1738 edition of Joseph Addison’s Notes upon the Twelve Books of Paradise Lost. Collected from the Spectator, published by Jacob and Richard Tonson. The remnants of this edition were probably still lying around the Tonsons’ warehouse when the firm went out of business in 1767. By the later 1760s, the scattered leaves of the second edition of a book originally published in 1719 (which was itself a reprint and one whose text was widely available elsewhere) would not have been worth much—­except perhaps to someone in need of paper (fig. 8.3, plate 8). While the exact sequence of events is impossible to reconstruct from this distance, it is certain that Joseph Banks needed paper and that he acquired some or all of the remaining sheets of Addison’s Notes to use as specimen-­drying books on the first Endeavor voyage of 1768–­1771. From the specimens included, we can speculate that Banks

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and Daniel Solander used the Notes as a collecting book during their brief stop in Madeira on their way to observe the transit of Venus in Tahiti. Either during the voyage or upon his return to England, Solander removed the pressed specimens from the drying books and mounted them on heavy paper sheets. Apparently, though, he missed a few, and thereby made it possible for these waste sheets of the Notes to survive—­in the basement of the Natural History Museum—­as a testament to the capacity for ephemerality of even the most canonical and respectable of books (Addison on Milton, as published by the Tonsons). The combination of human error, chance, location, and the intuition or inertia of several generations of curators that kept this drying book from being discarded thus paradoxically allows its ephemerality circa 1767 to be visible to this day. However, the survival of a given artifact is not merely a matter of the contingent, local factors we have been tracing. It is also a function of broader systems of cultural value. For example, for most of our period (and long before), the “fair copy” of an authorial manuscript from which type was to be set was routinely sold as wastepaper once it had served its purpose, under the presumption that the printed book would more than replace the handwritten text [manuscript]. Typically, therefore, it is only unpublished manuscripts that are extant, especially for works of prose and in genres, like the novel, that were low or middling in the traditional hierarchies of value. So, for example, the only portion of any of Jane Austen’s published titles that we have are the two canceled chapters of Persuasion (that is, the text that didn’t make it into that title). However, some time around the turn of the nineteenth century a dramatic revaluation of authorial papers began to occur, whereby an increasing number of poets and even novelists began to retain their manuscripts, aware of their potential importance and monetary value. In 1815, Wordsworth wrote, “Every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” (1:368). The same could be said of authorial manuscripts, the taste for which was first

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cultivated, at least on an extensive basis, in Wordsworth’s own lifetime. One of the most prominent examples was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who assembled during the closing decades of his own life a team of scribes and secretaries to begin assembling and ordering his papers, which in turn gave birth to one of the largest and most prominent literary archives of the later nineteenth century. And yet such preservation was hardly automatic, as is evidenced by the destruction, in 1824, of Byron’s memoirs. Manuscripts meant to survive (like Byron’s memoirs) did not, while other handwritten documents—­such as Samuel Johnson’s journal—­were rescued from the fire, despite their authors’ wishes for them to perish (Boothby v–­vi). CONCLUSION

Survival thus depends on a combination of good fortune and historical shifts in the value and significance attached to different kinds of documents. As we have argued, any printed or manuscript object could enter the condition of ephemerality, but an expanding reading public and changes circa 1800 in what celebrity meant made it increasingly likely that certain sorts of previously ephemeral artifacts would be saved from what might once have been their fate. In the early nineteenth century, authorial signatures, marginalia, and correspondence came to possess a more obvious and putatively self-­evident value as a result of their aura of authenticity: even small scraps of writing (or printed objets trouvés) could supposedly bring us closer to a beloved author. Furthermore, the intersection of new printing technologies, like lithography, with the period’s elaborate cult of sensibility produced a culture of paper souvenirs and printed relics that transformed long-­held ideas about what ought to be preserved. What once would have been lost now was found—­so long as it bore the trace of genius, or national history, or affective investments that could override the otherwise apparent ephemerality of an artifact. The nineteenth-­century penchant for “rescuing” ephemera may seem more in keeping with our

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own archival practices, but that familiarity ought not to blind us to all the ways in which it is every bit as partial and illogical as earlier practices that now seem far less self-­evident, such as Lord Chesterfield’s recommendation, to his son, of the example set by “a gentleman, who was so good a manager of his time, that he would not even lose that small portion of it, which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-­house; but gradually went through all the Latin Poets, in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina” (1:244). As the nineteenth century progressed, ephemerality increasingly threatened to become a general condition. Machine-­made paper and the steam press meant that there were far more documents in circulation than ever before: more and larger newspapers, cities full of advertising bills, an exponentially increasing amount of bureaucratic paperwork, and all sorts of tracts, tickets, timetables, and telegraph forms. Being produced in large quantities was not a precondition for ephemerality, although it has often helped characterize objects as ephemera. But the beginnings of mass production did amplify the problems of value and preservation that we have been investigating here: when texts are produced by the tens or hundreds of thousands, it is easy to imagine that should any of them turn out to be worthwhile, there will be plenty of specimens available for collecting. However, the loss rates of much of this material can be astonishing: of the supposedly one million copies of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that John Murray Forbes printed as a small pamphlet for Union soldiers to distribute to the fugitive slaves they encountered, fewer than a dozen survive. Worries about a rising tide of ephemerality were part of what contemporaries were learning to call “the Spirit of the Age” and dovetailed with the secularizing trends of the century and the disturbing new temporal models offered by geology and evolutionary biology. In response, new disciplines of memory arose

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that could filter, preserve, and interpret seemingly quotidian objects: archaeology, archival and library science, historiography. Indeed, bibliography and book history began to take on something like their modern forms in the nineteenth century, and it is perhaps no accident that these attempts to arrest ephemerality have reemerged with a newfound urgency in our own era of rapidly changing and evanescent media.

9

FRONTISPIECES A frontispiece is a full-­page image that occupies a privileged place at the beginning of a book, and it is intended to structure readers’ expectations and interactions with that book. Frontispiece designs fall into three general categories: architectural, portrait style, or illustrative. While some frontispieces come discretely from one category, they are often found blended or in combination. As the frontispiece became more common in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the meaning of frontispiece itself shifted from its original architectural sense, meaning the facade of a building, to refer instead to the front matter of a book. Moreover, the architectural nature of the frontispiece is encoded not only into its etymology but also into its medium, since engraving was understood to be a form of relief carving. Frontispieces are closely related to title pages, which also regularly included architectural elements, often taking the form of an engraved portico. The printed doorway welcomes readers into the space of the text at the same time it references the material structure of the book. Architectural design elements signal a book’s monumentality. The title page of the 1747 Biographia Britannica, for example, declares itself “a kind of monument erected to the most deserving of all ages.” Of course with big folios or quartos like the Biographia, architectural monumentality suggests the imposing presence of the book itself. However, architectural frontispieces also index the cultural importance of the material contained within and often suggest a monument “erected” posthumously to the author. Portrait-­style frontispieces might be said to place a head onto

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the body of the book, which stands in for the body of works, and by extension, for the physical body of the author. Finally, frontispieces could be—­and commonly were—­illustrations from the text that attempted to represent the book’s argument or contents in a self-­reflexive, indexical, and/or iconic fashion. Like title pages, frontispieces are a key site of interaction between text and images; moreover, they use graphic media to gesture both out, to the reader’s lifeworld, and in, to the book’s own pages. In the handpress period, because engraved frontispieces had to be “tipped in” to a letterpress book, they were thought to signal added expense and attention to detail; we argue, however, that the frontispiece often complicated, rather than conferred, value, even during the handpress period. We also show that changes in book production after non-­intaglio printing became common further complicated the relationship between questions of value and the status of the frontispiece. The engraved frontispieces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries encouraged the idea of monumentality through the nature of the medium itself. Copperplate engravers wanted viewers to understand their craft as a branch of sculpture (Landseer 1807). Unlike painting, which has its own set of conventions for portraiture, frontispieces are very often “sculpted” busts on paper. As Marcia Pointon has noted, “the head” became the conventional representation for a frontispiece, but we wish to emphasize the intermedial nature of this convention, which blurs the line between portrait-­style and architectural frontispieces. The head is often represented as a sculpture in an architectural niche, or as a painting, complete with frame, that hangs on a wall, the details of which are included in the engraving. True to its etymological origins, frontispieces commonly remediated architectural spaces like buildings, doors, and interior walls. They also brought together fine-­art media like painting and sculpture, incorporating them into architectural space with drapery, laurels, wood or metal frames, and even picture hooks. To make matters more complicated, like heads, frontispieces could be separated from their bodies. A frontispiece, once lib-

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erated from its book, might find new life as a wall hanging, a scrapbook page, or an extra-illustration [thickening]. AUTHOR PORTRAITS

Portrait-­style frontispieces predate the printed book. Chaucer appears in a painted frontispiece to the manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde now in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which shows him reading the poem from a pulpit to the king, queen, and nobles. Whether or not such a reading ever took place, Chaucer is depicted as the originator of the poem, with an authority comparable to that of a preacher or teacher (whose iconography is borrowed in this depiction) and a connection to the highest echelon of society (Pearsall 1977). The engraved portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout that appeared on the title page of the First Folio in 1623 helped to reposition Shakespeare as an author of books, not just a writer of plays, and to construct a Shakespearian oeuvre unified around its author (Kastan). In both cases, the frontispiece elevated the author and functioned as a paratextual “threshold of interpretation” (in Gérard Genette’s phrase) shaping the reader’s approach to the book. Author portraits became common by the eighteenth century, and the portrait frontispiece was an essential element of authorial self-­fashioning in the burgeoning marketplace for print. The inclusion of an intaglio frontispiece often significantly raised the price of a book, at least until the end of the century, and therefore functioned as what Janine Barchas calls a “caste label,” reserved for prestigious publications. William St. Clair notes that after 1774, works in the “old canon” of out-­ of-­copyright texts were usually published with an author portrait in the frontispiece. However, the connections among the author, the author’s picture, and the author’s works were never simply mutually reinforcing. A common printers’ practice was to reuse existing engravings, so there was no guarantee the portrait really belonged to the book’s author. As early as the First Folio, for example, Ben Jonson’s poem “To the Reader,” printed

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opposite the frontispiece, emphasized not the mutually supporting authority of frontispiece and text but the discontinuity between them. He noted that it was impossible for the engraver to “have drawn [Shakespeare’s] wit / As well in brass, as he hath hit / His face,” and so counseled the reader to “look / Not on his Picture, but his Book.” In fact, even when an engraving was intended for the book, there was no guarantee that the head depicted in a frontispiece belonged to the author of the text. As Barchas argues, frontispiece portraits to books by Defoe and Swift—­including representations of Lemuel Gulliver as the “author” of Gulliver’s Travels—­“query the authority that they have come to represent in contemporary print culture” (21). Of course, placing the head of the author at the head of the book, and conferring prestige on both, would seem to offer material support and cultural capital to Romantic notions of literature as self-­expression. However, this authority could be co-­opted in any number of ways. For example, in the enormous 1721 edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer published by Lintot, a portrait of the editor, John Urry, replaced the author at the head of the book, suggesting that the authority rested not in Chaucer himself but in the new way Urry edited and arranged Chaucer’s works into a modernized monument. Roger Chartier (1994) has argued that the function of the portrait frontispiece is “to reinforce the notion that the writing is an expression of an individuality that gives authenticity to the work.” Critics such as Egan and Simonsen have argued that frontispiece portraits of Romantic poets in collected editions build moral authority and help secure a secular afterlife for their subjects. While the author’s portrait ostensibly guaranteed the continuity of the writing subject with the artist’s depiction and the texts that followed, then, it also inevitably raised the possibility of discontinuities. In Andrew Piper’s words, “The vogue for authorial portraits as frontispieces disclosed an important tension between person and personality as the frame of writing, between the individual and the simulacrum of individuality that the book promoted” (2009b, 59). Frontispiece portraits allowed

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the reader to think about how the literal picture of the author in the frontispiece might differ from the imaginative picture of him or her that a reader constructed from the author’s writings, and how both might differ from the historical individual who was ostensibly their “original.” The multiplicity of portraits and portrait styles could also contribute to representational tensions surrounding authorial personae. If we take as an example the numerous editions of Rousseau’s works that appeared in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, thereby establishing his reputation as a major canonical figure, we see multiple representations of the author that include the monumental laureate in profile to simulate the sculptural bust adorned with laurel leaves, the gentle wigged old man in three-­quarters view, the natural citizen sans wig and set among the trees, and the noble savage with his beaver hat looking directly at the reader. The standardization of collected editions and their title pages were contrasted with the multiple ways of generating a face-­to-­ face relationship with an authorial self beyond the grave. As the revival in wood engraving, the spread of lithography, and the widespread use of steel engraving all contributed to illustrated books becoming cheaper and more popular in the nineteenth century, frontispieces became more common, both on newly published volumes and on new editions of previously published texts. When an author’s head appeared at the start of a posthumous edition of that author’s work, it offered a visual memorial designed to support and supplement the textual memorial of his or her works. However, the frontispiece could also follow a Derridean logic of the supplement, displacing the thing it was supposed to stand alongside and revealing that the text alone could not hold up without external supports. Ostensibly, frontispieces supplemented the work, which was already complete and sufficient in itself. They acted as an embellishment. “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude,” in Derrida’s words, “the fullest measure of presence” (1998, 144). But the frontispiece could also be a reminder of absence—­the absence of the dead author and

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the absence of agreement about the value of his or her works. “The supplement supplements,” Derrida goes on, “it adds only to replace. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence” (145). Frontispieces therefore helped to assimilate authors to the old canon of the previous generation. But they also, inevitably, raised questions about the enduring value and self-­sustaining nature of their works. Many of these ambiguities go beyond simple questions of value. As the frontispiece became more widely used in the nineteenth century, its democratization threatened to upset long-­ standing hierarchies of cultural status inscribed into printed books. In the handpress period, the presence of a frontispiece may have signified a publisher’s willingness to invest in an engraved portrait as part of production costs, but the value conferred by that frontispiece must be eroded as the cost of visual reproduction shrank and as frontispieces became more common. In fact, however the presence of a frontispiece may have proclaimed an author’s established merit, such assurances invariably became increasingly unstable as frontispieces multiplied and took on new significances that displaced older, established ones. We find an early and formative example of the frontispiece’s increasingly ambiguous signification with the publication of Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson by John Bell in 1791. In spite of publishing an early volume of juvenile verse in 1775, Robinson’s fame had depended on her status not as an author but as an actress, fashion icon, and mistress. Before the publication of Poems, her celebrity as a poet was pseudonymous; beginning in 1788, she had successfully infiltrated the Della Cruscan coterie of poets publishing in the World and Oracle newspapers under the names of “Laura,” “Laura Maria,” “Oberon,” “The Queen of the Fairies,” “Cesario,” and “Petrarch.” In collecting Robinson’s verse into a single volume, Bell abandoned his earlier practice of retaining Della Cruscan pseudonyms even with book publication. Instead, Robinson’s Poems appeared under her true name and featured a portrait of the author as its frontispiece (fig. 9.1).

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9.1. Frontispiece and title page to Mary Robinson, Poems (1791). Photograph: Singer-­ Mendenhall Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

Engraved from Joshua Reynolds’s famous 1782 portrait of Robinson, the Bell frontispiece typifies the ability of author portraits to multiply rather than stabilize a text’s meaning. Rather than presenting Robinson in her newly acquired guise as distinguished poet, the image points back to Robinson’s earlier years of fame as a renowned beauty and setter of fashion, seeking less to introduce the author’s corpus than to exploit her earlier celebrity. From a strictly economic standpoint, this notoriety effectively underwrote the cost of engraving and printing, since Robinson’s earlier fame as a public figure could ensure at least reasonable sales. But Bell’s choice of the Reynolds portrait went beyond economics to cultural authority. Boasting a por-

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trait “from an Original Picture painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A,” Robinson’s Poems also claimed a kind of institutional authority through association with the Royal Academy and Reynolds, its founding president. Bell correctly wagered that the frontispiece would not only sell books but also act as a talisman authorizing his decision to collect and reprint poems originally published in the perishable medium of newsprint. IL LUS TR ATI V E FR ONTI S PIECE S

While the author portrait was a common type of frontispiece in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was not the only one. If authorial frontispieces aimed to establish a face-­to-­face relationship with readers, thematic frontispieces could offer either a proleptic synopsis of the book’s argument or an effort to recast its message into a visual icon. Perhaps the most famous example of this tradition is the frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), designed by Abraham Bosse in consultation with Hobbes. Bosse’s image shows a benevolent monarch, who literally embodies the commonwealth of his subjects: his body is made up of more than three hundred people, in an Arcimboldo effect reflecting Hobbes’s political philosophy. The monarch holds a sword in one hand and a bishop’s crozier in the other, uniting ecclesiastical and civil authority. Drawing on the emblem tradition, the Leviathan frontispiece condenses and visualizes the argument of the book it introduces and is aimed at cultural consumers who were as comfortable decoding visual symbols as they were reading written text. Illustrative frontispieces could serve a number of different purposes and genres, but one of their principal uses during this period was to adorn the increasingly prominent fictional genre of the novel. Already by 1795, the critic Friedrich Schlegel would complain of the vogue for “Kupferstichromane” (copper-­ engraved novels) (56). The illustrative frontispiece was meant to mark an immersive, imaginative engagement with the text rather than its author. One communed not with the author, as

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9.2. Tony Johannot’s frontispiece and title page to the illustrated edition of Don Quichotte de La Manche (1836). Photograph: Rare Books and Manuscript Library and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute of the Ohio State University Libraries.

in the authorial frontispiece, but instead with a fictional world that was crucially alive. Tony Johannot’s frontispiece to the illustrated edition of Don Quixote (1836) can serve as a useful starting point (Schmidt) (fig. 9.2). With more than eight hundred illustrations—­made possible through the new technique of wood-­end engraving [engraving]—­this novel marked a breakthrough in an emerging wave of illustrated novels that would come to define novel reading in the nineteenth century (Harthan; Ray; Timm). In the frontispiece, we see a gallant courtier and lady reading together, as the visual portal to reading foregrounds the act of reading itself. Unlike the frontispieces to ballad anthologies—­ another important visual bibliographic tradition that extended from Percy to late nineteenth-­century luxury editions like George

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Barnett Smith’s Illustrated Ballads (1881) [anthologies], in which reading was equated with hearing long lost voices of the past—­reading in the nineteenth-­century novel is framed as a self-­reflexive practice, with readers all the way down. The intercoding of looking and reading that would become increasingly prominent in the visual adornments to books crucially challenged one of the more enduring art-­historical paradigms inherited from the eighteenth century (Piper 2009b, 183–­223). In this narrative, embodied above all in Lessing’s parable of Laocoön, the visual arts stood for a moment arrested in time, while the literary arts captured thought through time. The image held fast where the text moved on. But the depiction of reading as a self-­reflexive portal to reading put pressure on the simplicity of any dichotomy. Time and again, we can see illustrative frontispieces wrestling with the tension between the pregnant moment—­the arrested narrative—­and the time of looking, giving rise to a new readerliness in bibliographic visualization. Frontispieces promoted an aesthetics of the momentary through a variety of visual cues of focalization, whether it was the common use of the doorway as a scenic prop (see the centenary edition of Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, 1890); the surprise hand on the shoulder (as in the Putnams’ luxury edition of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 1899); lines of site all drawn toward a single object (as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1892 The Wrecker, nicely complemented by overturned chairs and broken bottles); or captions that were unequivocally meant to emphasize suddenness, as in the frontispiece to Wilkie Collins’s The Haunted Hotel (1879), which contained the line “You lie! You lie!” Attentive eyes, grasping hands, and exclamations performed a tremendous amount of visual work in the novelistic frontispiece. And yet at the same time we find an equal and opposite emphasis on either visual evacuation or graphical polyphony in the illustrative frontispiece. Whether it was lusciously overpopulated scenes, as in Otto Roquette’s Waldmeisters Brautfahrt. Ein Rhein-­, Wein-­und Wandermärchen (The forester’s wedding

9.3. Frontispiece to Otto Roquette’s Waldmeisters Brautfahrt. Ein Rhein-­, Wein-­ und Wandermärchen (1897), in Die Gartenlaube 48. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Photograph: bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, New York. Photography: Dietmar Katz.

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journey: A Rhine, wine, and travel fairy tale) (1897), in which we see a fantastic space of fictional forest people looking in all directions (fig. 9.3), or arabesque-­inspired sketches that came to characterize Tony Johannot’s signature style beginning with Balzac’s La peau de chagrin (The wild ass’s skin) (1831), readers’ eyes were invited to wander across and off the page in the nineteenth century. A new temporality of looking came to inform the visual poetics of frontispiece illustration. Perhaps the most salient point to be made about frontispieces during our period is not simply the synchronic ways they establish an important paratextual site through which reading and seeing interacted. Rather, frontispieces were also important diachronic indices of the continual remediation of older visual styles and traditions. Just as the authorial frontispiece drew upon a variety of architectural and sculptural tropes to argue for the book’s timelessness and monumentality, illustrative frontispieces in the nineteenth century drew heavily on a variety of dramatic conventions from earlier periods to emphasize the new timefulness of reading. The pictorial conventions of the arrested moment recycled a visual tradition common to eighteenth-­century editions of plays, in which publishers like Bell had adorned the texts of older plays with scenes featuring actors in modern dress as a way of making them new again. Similarly, we can see how a frontispiece like Phiz’s to Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, a writer-­author combination that would soon become canonical for the British context, reuses a variety of theatrical conventions such as the pulled-­back stage curtain and the comical masked commedia dell’arte figures, to initiate our entrance into the book-­strewn study of Samuel Pickwick. This model of recurrent visuality achieves something of an apex when our two primary frontispiece traditions from this period—­ the authorial and the illustrative—­are themselves recycled: in the first edition of Dombey and Son (1848) we see Phiz using a device in which numerous narrative moments from the novel circle synoptically, and quite ethereally, around the central child characters, Florence and Paul (fig. 9.4). The narrative moment

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9.4. Frontispiece and title page to first edition of Dombey and Son (1848). Photograph: Rare Books and Manuscript Library and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute of the Ohio State University Libraries.

is integrated into a larger totality, one that recalls a familiar pictorial tradition of authorial apotheosis in the form of floating engraved heads that encircle Apollo and his laurel-­adorned lyre (see, for example, Pourrat’s 1833 edition of Rousseau’s collected works in which Rousseau is immersed in the pantheon of French writers; fig. 9.5). Narrative moment stands in for authorial persona, all the while continually positioned in some sort of heavenly context. Rather than imagine a number of possible rise-­and-­fall narratives surrounding frontispieces—­a narrative archetype, we would argue, could never do justice to the visual circus that is the bibliographic frontispiece—­we want to emphasize instead a historiographic model more akin to one of asymmetrical periodicity. Like repertory theater [stages], visual repertoires of

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9.5. Frontispiece to Rousseau’s Collection d’auteurs français (1833). Photograph: Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Libraries.

frontispiece illustration kept reemerging during our period to be put to service for different ideological ends, each with their own distinct timelines. They were brought to bear to frame reading and books in particular ways, but they could just as easily spiral out into the larger world of print visual culture. The frontispiece opened both in and out.

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INDEX To today’s reader, an index is an alphabetized list at the back of a book. When we read something, generally a work of nonfiction or especially an academic book, we can often access information more quickly by looking for key names or concepts as they appear alphabetically ordered in a list after the main portion of the work. This textual situation, however, was not always the case. The index has assumed many forms and functions, and these shifts in use and meaning—­changes that largely took place through interactions with the burgeoning world of print in the eighteenth century—­offer a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of printed texts and how people interacted them. This chapter surveys developments in the form and function of the index as eighteenth-­century readers were confronted with a world of books that seemed to be multiplying beyond measure and containment. Though indices existed as a form of print navigation well before our period (Blair 2000), we contend that the index became an exemplary navigational tool only in the eighteenth century. We consider the functions served by an index and how they came to be assumed by that familiar ordered list at the end of a work. But we also discuss more generally the kind of organizational work done by an index and why such work was increasingly necessary for eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century readers. In this sense, this chapter is not only about indices but also about “the index” in a different sense: an idealized vision of an organizing guide that one imagines can be installed, as it were, behind the world of print to organize readers’ expe-

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riences with books, newspapers, periodicals, engravings, and other forms. In the increasingly dynamic and complex media environment of this period, however, the sheer proliferation of print, the relentless appearance of more and more new books and new forms of printed material, makes the possibility of such a comprehensive organization increasingly difficult and ultimately impossible. DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDEX

An index is a system. It is a way to orient a reader to large amounts of text, from a single work to the world of books. Indices date back to well before print, and they have been praised as useful (as in Erasmus’s Adages, which contained an index to organize the otherwise miscellaneous order) or dizzying (as in Theodor Zwinger’s Theatrum humanae vitae). By the eighteenth century, indices were standardized as one of a systematic series of finding and organizing aids that also included footnotes, tables of contents, and branching diagrams. Singly or together, these aids were designed to help readers navigate the material contained within printed books. Indices allowed readers alternative and nonsequential ways of making their way through books. They facilitated a reading that was not simply linear or immersive but also desultory or selective. Definitions provided in dictionaries of the period point to the links between these aids as well as to their overlap and interchangeability, in terms of both form and purpose. Footnotes, for example, could have an indexical function. Like indices, they oriented and pointed readers to particular books, even to particular pages. As did footnotes, some indices—­such as a repertory or catalog produced separately from the work or works to which it referred—­pointed to the larger world of print production and dissemination. Thus, the 1734 edition of Il vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca defines indice as “che indica. Lat. index. Indice si dice anche al Repertorio de’ libri.” The index as a separate volume was the original format taken by the manuscript

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indices of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but separate indices persisted into the early modern period. Most famously, the Indice dei libri prohibiti, published by the Congregation of the Index in Rome, was a catalog of books prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church. An entry in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert suggests yet another context: “index” is one of several possible names given to the twenty-­four-­page “register” of names designed to help merchants or tradesmen navigate account books; each name pointed to the folio page that recorded an individual client’s debits and credits. Rather than keeping tabs on the circulation of printed matter, in this case the manuscript index makes it “facilement & sans peine” (easy and painless) to navigate an uncommonly “grand livre” and its complex system of mercantile exchanges. While separate indices persisted in some contexts, in the early modern period the index was more frequently printed and bound with the work that it indexed. Even so, the meaning of the term remained variable. An index could refer to a list of names, a list of words and things of note, or a list of headings. The last sense was particularly close to a table of contents, and, in fact, one of the definitions of index in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was “the table of contents to a book,” while the definition for table was “an index; a collection of heads, a catalog; a syllabus; a synopsis; many particulars brought into one view.” The Encyclopédie’s account-­book register referred to earlier was also known as an “alphabeth, table ou répertoire.” The index could also refer to the manicule or printer’s fist, “le second doigt de la main, & celui qui suit le pouce” (Encyclopédie), “the discoverer, the pointer out; the hand that points to anything” (Johnson’s Dictionary). This typographic symbol often appeared in early modern books to mark key passages: “the fore-­finger pointing, signifies the Passage to be very remarkable against which it is placed” (Accomplished Letter-­Writer 10). The manicule literalizes the indexical function of the index, making readers aware of its other uses beyond helping readers find their way through a text. An index could also select, order, hierarchize,

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and evaluate. Far more than a utilitarian guide, the index was a tool for establishing what and how texts signify. THE INDEX AND THE WORLD OF BOOKS

Despite the elasticity of meaning, the index was most often touted for its practical functionality. The inclusion of an index in a printed volume was already advertised as a selling point on title pages of sixteenth-­century books, and by the eighteenth century printers included indices in an increasingly wider range of texts. As a standard element in multivolume collected works, scientific treatises, travel writing, and editions of the Bible, indices themselves became continually more detailed and complex. Even the rise of the novel was marked by the proliferation of indices. Samuel Johnson, for example, advised Richardson to provide indices to his long novels to aid readers in the management of epistolary prolixity. In this guise, indices could also serve a rhetorical function. Richardson’s compilation of one for The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Janine Barchas suggests, registers his aim to secure the new (and less than reputable) novel genre a place “on the same shelf as other indexed books, and, by extension, to lend it an authoritative, referential status” (213; see also 200–­217). The extension of indices beyond single volumes was representative of the generally expanding function, meaning, and cultural power that they assumed over the course of the eighteenth century. As the forms and functions of the index extended well beyond the alphabetized lists that facilitated access to single volumes, indices also became ever more systematic and eclipsed their earlier commonplacing function. In a commonplace book, an index allowed the compiler to organize and quickly access passages on related topics. However, as Ann Blair has shown, commonplacing more often involved the experience of a single reader or multiple readers in a household: each one selecting, transcribing, cutting, and pasting passages from other printed material to make a personalized selection from a larger collec-

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tion of works (Blair 2000). Although early versions of the index served a similar function in allowing readers to find and locate those passages in other works, the contrast between a commonplace book and an index allows us to clarify the distinction between an index in general and what Brad Pasanek and Chad Wellmon (2015) have termed the Enlightenment index. For while commonplacing is almost always personal, the Enlightenment index is institutionalized. The index so conceived is akin to a commonplace book of all print. As this suggests, the printed index not only located topics or themes within a volume but increasingly sought to synthesize the full spectrum of printed matter. As an article in Johann Adelung’s Grammatisch-­kritisches Wörterbuch of 1811 put it, an index was a Verzeichniß (register) that located the particular “page or place” where a certain name or term could be found. It is, continues the entry, a “Blattweiser, Blattzeiger”—­a page indicator or a page pointer. While this might be understood simply as a statement of its utilitarian function, the definition also suggests the conceptual power of the index: pointing to particular printed pages might also orient a reader within the burgeoning realm of printed matter more broadly. An index might, in other words, point to connections and correspondences within individual texts but also across the world of books, newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets that proliferated throughout the century. As imagined by Enlightenment scholars, the index should thus be considered in relation to other print and manuscript genres—­dictionaries, encyclopedias, concordances, digests, compendia, lexica, catalogs, and advertising lists of recent publications—­that sought to synthesize and organize other printed texts. All of these forms included indexical elements, from footnotes, headnotes, and in-­text citations to alphabetized name or subject indices, which oriented the reader by pointing to particular printed pages. They were designed to make the realm of print more homogeneous and thus more easily navigable; they thereby transformed printed texts into modern forms

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of information. And whereas indices attached to a single volume oriented readers intratextually, the Enlightenment index often oriented them intertextually. To understand the attraction of such guides for producers and consumers of print, we need look no further than the many descriptions of the sheer abundance of books that populate late eighteenth-­century writing. Vicesimus Knox, for example, noted in 1785 that “the art of printing has multiplied books to such a degree, that it is a vain attempt either to collect or to read all that is excellent, much more all that has been published” (2:224). Describing a visit to a London bookshop in the same year, Sophie von La Roche observed that “absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, and in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy” (87). While books were commonly perceived as a healthy antidote to forms of madness, such a great quantity of books, as Paul Keen notes, also had the potential to make one insane, such that “books and Bedlam emerge, not as opposite worlds joined by the power of one to cure or at least ward off the afflictions of the other, but as two equally contagious elements of the same diseased milieu” (2012, 81; see also Connell). In the face of this maddening profusion, the index, as the textual apparatus that organized the world of books once and for all, might be understood as the panacea for profusion, the vaccination that could preserve the world of books as a mappable and ordered space [proliferation]. Whether the cornucopia of books available in the marketplace fueled the cacoëthes scribendi (the itch to write), or vice versa, the load of books for sale and the many authors contributing to the book market intensified what Isaac D’Israeli called, in his 1795 “Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character,” the “universal diffusion of books.” Despite the inclusive quality of the category “books,” D’Israeli’s concern here is really with the proliferation of periodical literature generally and literary journals in particular. “When I reflect that every literary journal consists of 50 or 60 publications,” D’Israeli notes, “and that of these, 5 or 6 at least are capital perfor-

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mances, and the greater part not contemptible, when I take the pen and attempt to calculate, by these given sums, the number of volumes which the next century must infallibly produce, my feeble faculties wander in a perplexed series, and as I lose myself among billions, trillions, and quartillions, I am obliged to lay down my pen, and stop at infinity” (xviii–­xix). This sense of a quantitative explosion was intensified by critics’ concerns about the proliferation of genres, from the rise of periodicals, miscellanies, dictionaries, and encyclopedias of various sorts, to the multiplication of types of work purporting to contain scientific or historical knowledge—­all of which were driven by a rapidly changing industry in which the promotion of culture was as important as the content itself. As the chapter on the proliferation of print discusses in more detail [proliferation], D’Israeli’s comments raise questions about distinction and the commodification of literature; for our purposes here, D’Israeli suggests just how overwhelmed readers felt by the constant output of the printing press. His comment both explains the desire to index and organize other printed texts (to make the world of books coherent) and the impossibility of that task, as publications spiral to increasingly fanciful quantities before reaching infinity. (It is also ironic that D’Israeli would issue his lament in a book—­and thus make one more contribution in that staircase to infinity.) THE ENLIGHTENMENT INDEX

As the sheer amount of printed material continued to increase over the course of the eighteenth century, the form and function of the index eclipsed its early modern origins in marginal notations and alphabetized lists in the back of books. This expansion was nowhere more evident than in a series of highly indexed texts published in Germany in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. One such text was conceived of and published by the German scholar and bibliographer Johann Samuel Ersch, who attempted to create what amounted to a multivolume index

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of periodicals in his Allgemeines Repertorium der Literatur für die Jahre 1785–­90 (Universal repository for literature for the years 1785–­1790) (Wellmon 2015). Ersch’s text was actually one of four distinct publications overseen and published by the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung. The first two volumes were organized according to what Ersch termed “the systematic index of domestic and foreign texts” (das systematische Verzeichniss in-­und ausländischer Schriften), which provided “a convenient and illuminating arrangement of the classes, orders, and sub-­orders” into which more than thirty-­t wo thousand periodical articles could be fit. Its primary objective was to synthesize the “world of books” (Bücherwelt) by organizing book reviews. It consisted not of themes or topics but of bibliographic information on individual books and reviews of them. In a move akin to the bibliophilic obsession with the physical object, it made books, not authors or topics, the basic organizational category. The last volume of Ersch’s text was an alphabetical listing of articles according to the title of the text, and it was cross-­referenced with the systematic register (fig. 10.1). The actual content was not new, but its intricately indexed form was: it was one massive index of German eighteenth-­century ephemera whose reduced, abbreviated form and exacting detail distinguished it from earlier indexical texts. Ersch’s text formalized print, especially periodicals, by collecting information about published texts. Consider a sample entry—­A.L.Z. 85, I. 1—­which translates as Allgemeine Literatur-­ Zeitung ( journal title), 1785 (year), volume 1, page 1. Authors’ names were also abbreviated: A. for August; Abr. for Abraham, and so on. Such an index put less focus on what was inside books or periodicals—­ideas, concepts, or content—­and more on external information concerning publication and reception. It collected and distributed information about texts as printed artifacts. Ersch’s goal was what he called absolute “completeness” (Vollständigkeit), that is, a total account of all printed periodical material (Wellmon 2015). He sought to achieve this by further integrating his own technologies. For example, he tightly interwove volumes 1 and 2 (the systematic index) with volume 3 (the

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10.1. Page from Johann Samuel Ersch’s Allgemeines Repertorium der Literatur für die Jahre (1785–­1790), 187. Digitized by Hathi Trust Digital Library. Original from University of California Libraries.

alphabetical index). Thus, in volume 3, under “Kant,” one finds “—­. Critik d. Urtheilskraft. 93. III. 1. SR. VI. 468.” The number 93 refers to the review of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment published in Allgemeine Literatur-­Zeitung in the publication year (Jahrgang) 93, and the following number indicates the particular pages. The rest refers to the systematic index, sixth Fach (Philosophie), entry 468, where one finds listed the Kritik and its

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reviews. The search of the systematic index is facilitated by the fact that the pages are numbered according to Fach and entries. Ersch’s extreme formalization of information about texts was an attempt to integrate fully the world of printed texts. The purpose of the index was not merely to locate a term in a single volume but to organize and facilitate interaction within the entire realm of print. Such an index provided information not just about a particular text but also about thousands of texts that, once indexed, existed in a virtual relationship. C O M P R E H E N S I V E N E S S , TOTA L I T Y, E N L I G H T E N M E N T, R O M A N T I C I S M

Spurred by the proliferation of print, the Enlightenment index also partakes of some of the same concepts that motivate other compendiary forms of the era. Alongside dictionaries, concordances, digests, lexica, almanacs, catalogs, and encyclopedias, the index was driven by the widespread interest in indexical comprehensiveness (see Rajan) and the emerging emphasis on “systemization” during the period (see Siskin and Warner; Macovski). Taken as a whole, such genres are part of the era’s attempts to manage the large bodies of information circulating in print by making them more accessible. But beyond their utility, these textual forms embody a specific epistemological position: they attempt to enact a comprehensive, synoptic, and systematic vision. Such indexical texts subscribe to the ideal of a containable whole, a vision articulated in works ranging from Isaac Newton’s “The System of the World” in the final section of the Principia to the broad, all-­encompassing system of systems posited by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations (Siskin and Warner). The vision of systematization embodied in indexical forms presumes a knowable world, one in which knowledge can be compiled, organized, and synthesized textually. This holistic concept envisions a repository of knowledge that, given the burgeoning corpus of eighteenth-­century print culture, demands to be indexed.

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But there is a vital distinction between Enlightenment concepts of indexing and what were subsequently formulated as Romantic notions of totality. The latter were driven by and organized around ideas of the whole. These discursive, paratextual notions of a unified whole differed from the material notions of wholeness enacted in Enlightenment pursuits of Vollständigkeit. Put another way, Romantic ideas of synthesis operated primarily at the conceptual level, whereas Enlightenment-­based notions of wholeness were explicitly textual. Figures like Ersch—­and to a lesser extent, Diderot—­sought to achieve an actual material completeness. Indeed, Ersch and other Enlightenment-­oriented thinkers often thought they were pursuing a complete account of all that had been actually printed. They were attempting to organize the world of print in print, but not merely through a discursive invocation of the whole of print. The index was both a material reality that could be achieved and a functional tool for navigating that reality. In contrast, post-­Kantian figures from Fichte and Novalis to Schelling and Hegel appealed to ideas of totality that actually corresponded to nothing in reality. They and their Romantic contemporaries abandoned material notions of comprehensiveness and appealed to idealized notions of unity that exceeded any attempt to figure or realize such a unity in space and time. Their focus turned toward reading processes—­experiences in time—­rather than reading artifacts. This change in conceptual orientation may be tied to a contemporaneous shift in the form and function of the index as a feature of the printed book in the Romantic period. Indices continued to proliferate in the decades around 1800, becoming ever more elaborate and information laden. Driven by charges of plagiarism and demands on authors to cite their sources, indices, footnotes, and other forms of textual pointing strove for greater precision and enhanced detail. In the dual pursuit of comprehensiveness and specificity, the index began to splinter, unable to perform the work demanded of it. For example, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) contains fifty-­one

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pages of index across two volumes, with entries ranging from “Deguer on remains of ships, &c., in the Dutch peat-­moss” to “Liverpool, a West Indian land-­shell naturalized near” to “Eider-­ ducks destroyed by a fox drifted on ice to the island of Vidoc” (2:323, 2:329, 2:324). The logic of Lyell’s index is unclear: some entries appear by author’s name, some by place, some by object. Despite attempts at cross-­referencing, this index would not help a reader find information on topics directly relevant to Lyell’s argument (naturalized land shells or the preservation of ships in peat moss) unless she already knew about the specific case in Liverpool or described by Deguer. Here, the demands of increased specificity ran counter to utility. Lyell’s index suggests one reason Romantic authors moved toward a conceptual, rather than material, understanding of wholeness and totality: printed indices themselves advertised the fissures in the Enlightenment index and its project of material completeness. This destabilization of the index is dramatized in texts produced in the final decade of the eighteenth century, as print saturation became an urgent topic of public debate across Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The fourth edition of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1799), for example, includes four separate indices: a “Catalogue of the Poetic Exhibition,” an indexical “Contents of the Notes,” “Contents of the Additional Notes,” and an “Index of the Names of the Plants.” This multilayered system of indexing corresponds with the composite form of Darwin’s text: comprising a long philosophical poem with a staggering amount of paratextual material—­including voluminous scientific footnotes referencing hundreds of sources plus 260 pages of additional endnotes; twenty-­three full-­page illustrations of plants, antiquities, and allegorical scenes; a separate preface, advertisement, and proem to the reader; and the indices noted above—­Darwin’s text refuses to be harnessed by a single, comprehensive index. Even so, Darwin sought to unite his book’s multifarious content—­a clearinghouse for cutting-­edge scientific research in fields from botany to galvanism, geology to

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chemistry to astronomy—­through poetic allegory by arguing that ancient hieroglyphs provided the key to recently rediscovered scientific knowledge. As its expanding editions, thousands of annotations, and increasingly complicated finding aids suggest, Darwin’s book participates in the goals of the Enlightenment index: it strives to produce a comprehensive account in print of knowledge on scientific topics, both ancient and modern. At the same time, the form and format of The Botanic Garden challenges the Enlightenment ideal of material comprehensiveness. Confronted with Darwin’s book, the emergence of a Romantic conceptual orientation to wholeness and totality may appear a very practical solution to a material morass. Originally published in 1789–­1791, Darwin’s book stands at a crossroads in the material and conceptual history of the index. As a strange and strained print object, it reveals why the line between Enlightenment notions of the index and Romantic notions of an ideal totality was never absolute. None of the Enlightenment projects ever achieved anything like a comprehensive account of print. There were always gaps in the indexical project. And the editors of such projects were oftentimes not only conscious of but even embarrassed by their failure to do so. Already in 1733, Christian Jöcher admitted that his Compendious Lexicon of the Learned was, in fact, “not yet complete.” He then explained that he just could not keep up with the volumes of printed material being produced everyday. The Enlightenment index may have represented an intention to produce material account of everything in print, but in reality these projects never achieved their ultimate aims. And scholars and publishers knew that. The fragile line between Enlightenment and Romantic notions of comprehensiveness and totality was especially evident, as Pasanek and Wellmon have shown in their forthcoming work, in the concluding footnote to one of the great essays of the period, Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” “In the Büsching’s Weekly News from the 13th of September,” writes Kant, “I read today the 30th of the same [month], the advertisement for the Berlinische

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Monatsschrift from this month, in which Herr Mendelssohn’s answer to this same question is printed.” Kant’s note is laden with indexical language: “the 13th of September,” “the 30th of the same month,” “today,” “this month,” “the same question.” Indeed, this citation seems to doubt its, or the editor or printer’s, ability to point a reader to the correct page in the broader network of print. Kant knows that Mendelssohn’s essay exists but cannot know what it says because he has not been able to secure a copy. The proliferation of indexical language highlights both the network’s sentience (the Busching’s Wöchentliche Nachrichten and the Berlinische Monatsschrift point to each other) and the fragile and contingent nature of the index. The indexical nature of the footnote exceeds the capacities of print, which cannot compensate for the delays and lapses that characterize the technology of print (Jordheim). Perhaps the printed edition of the Berlinische Monatsschrift with Mendelssohn’s essay had not been delivered to Königsberg, at the far eastern edges of Prussia, well beyond the print economy of Berlin. Was Kant giving up on the Enlightenment index or just expressing his frustrations with its limitations? In any case, the Enlightenment index lived on, and indeed lives on very much intact today. Romantic visions of a total unity of knowledge did not put an end to efforts to carry on the Enlightenment index and achieve a material completeness. Attempts to offer a complete account of knowledge in print continued throughout the nineteenth century in the form of the Konversationslexikon or Allgemeine deutsche Real-­Encyklopädie für die gebildeten Stände, or the Brockhaus Encyclopedia (fourteen editions through 1894) or Encyclopaedia Britannica (ninth edition in 1894). In contrast to Romantic theories of synoptic understanding, these networked structures aimed for completeness and, despite Romantic criticisms of their very impossibility, continued to flourish.

11

LETTERS Before the large-­scale adoption of the telegraph and the telephone, the letter constituted the foremost material means of communication in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Europe and North America. Whenever distance or other circumstances made personal visits or oral relay through messengers impracticable, people put pen to paper (or asked others to do so for them) to bridge the gap and connect with each other. In fact, this act of bridging, of “making distance, presence” (Samuel Richardson to Sarah Wescomb [1746?], in Carroll 65), not only undergirded the material machinery (such as pen, paper, ink, wax, and other epistolary paraphernalia; candles, spectacles, and writing surfaces; postal systems with their personnel, buildings, and vehicles; roads, canals, and rail) necessary for the systematic, large-­scale production and dissemination of letters; it also generated a body of ideas regarding the efficacy of letters in the world, creating what might be called the period’s “epistolary imaginary.” Under the aegis of such “epistolarity,” correspondence in letters helped to shape connections between people and traced the outlines of expansive social networks, anticipating later developments in communication in our highly “networked” world today. Letter writing was perhaps the most widespread form of writing in the eighteenth century, as what began as a largely administrative practice was gradually and then rather feverishly adopted by private individuals. Much of the communicative work done by manuscript letters was dependent on the social context of their production [manuscript]. One wrote

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letters not only to showcase subjectivity, virtue, or sentiment, but also to form and cement relationships, transact business, and transmit information of all kinds. Moreover, manuscript letters that were exchanged between friends and acquaintances permitted the adoption of informal and affectionate tones and the glossing over or elision of knowledge common to the correspondents. Familiarity gave credence to news that was reported and authority to opinions that were conveyed. It is important to begin by clarifying what we mean by “letters.” The archetypal letter of the period may be described a manuscript document, written by hand on single or multiple sheets of paper that are folded, addressed, sealed, and sent through the postal service. In an age when both work and leisure increasingly separated families, friends, and those engaged in trade and government, the handwritten letter was the essential means of long-­distance communication. So extensive was the exchange of letters in the period that the term Republic of Letters is often used to describe a multinational, transatlantic correspondence that knit communities and enterprises together throughout the period. Letters were the conduit through which social relations, scholarship, government, and trade were transacted. For many men and women, letter writing was a major occupation. It is not uncommon to hear accounts of individuals spending hours each day writing letters, and the eighteenth century in particular produced many prolific letter writers. Fortunately, some of these collections survive, enabling us to estimate their extent. For Elizabeth Montagu, some eight thousand letters (constituting both sides of the correspondence), written over a seventy-­year period, survive (they are available at the website Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking Circle; http://www. elizabethmontaguletters.co.uk). But these numbers are doubled by Dawson Turner, an antiquarian and book collector, who collected his own letters into eighty-­t wo bound volumes, now held by Trinity College, Cambridge. It has been calculated that there are more than sixteen thousand letters in these volumes, “many of them from men of eminence in the spheres of the natural sci-

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ences, botany, the arts, literature and antiquarian researches” (Munby 34). Correspondence between individuals could also be continued over long periods of time, even or perhaps especially amongst individuals with little personal contact. These examples can only hint at the extent to which letter writing structured social life in the period. The physical form of letters varied greatly, indicative of the many uses to which they were put. Letters could be very long and were often kept as pseudojournals running over many pages. The poet John Keats’s letters to his brother and sister-­in-­law in America offer a well-­ known example. Because of the length of time it took for letters to travel across the Atlantic, his letters were adapted to be more descriptive and less interactive. These letters are regarded as some of the finest in the language, perhaps in part because he was without a hope of immediate response, which allowed him to expatiate most fully on art and poetry. Letters could also be extremely short, as when announcing a visit or requesting a purchase, and these notes were often delivered by hand. These two examples—­the lengthy journal letter and the brief note—­ provide some indication of the range of forms, purposes, and lengths of letters. We can also detect the many practices that surround letter writing—­both of production and delivery, and of preservation and archiving. Letters were often kept tied together in packets, and it was not uncommon for an author to request the return of a letter or letters, after a relationship soured, for example, or to protect him-­or herself against unwanted or unlawful circulation. Letters (or copies) could also be recalled when print publication was contemplated. As we have seen, Dawson Turner kept bound copies of his correspondence, and it was common in business to keep copies of outgoing correspondence, in letter books, which archived copies of letters to provide a running account of a business or enterprise. Manuscript letters throughout the period were rarely regarded as strictly confidential. Pieces of correspondence to several recipients were either sent together through postal

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channels—­“my letter from Bath, that was sent thence by Mr. G—­, and which inclosed one for our mutual friend Mr. M—­ky” (Grant to Helen Dunbar, 11 April 1803, in Grant 3:243)—­or ran a relay via mutual acquaintances: “I wrote a hasty scrawl to accompany the poetical fugitives you wished for, which I sent to Barr to be forwarded” (Grant to Dunbar, 11 April 1802, in Grant 3:197). In this way, correspondence connected letter writers, carriers, and readers in far-­flung locations through the letters’ contents (news, greetings, wishes for health, invocations of physical and emotional proximity) as well as through their materiality and the modes of their dissemination. That letters were opened en route and circulated after their arrival reveals that they were not regarded as strictly confidential. Letters’ status as “group property” (Pearsall 2008, 37), read collectively and transmitted from hand to hand, meant that they constituted an important tool for building and maintaining communities. This comes through clearly in the scholarship on the Republic of Letters, an imaginary community of scholars whose devotion to the ethos of exchange was more important than difference of nationality, language, or religion (Ultee). Building on and overlapping with existing economic and political channels scholars constituting the republic engaged in a commerce de lettres with a variety of goals. They could disseminate the results of their own experiments and studies; they could share information on the latest publications and the location of books they wish to consult or buy; they could send or solicit samples of plants or minerals; or they could simply counsel their friends and acquaintances on the mechanics of the print trade, including how to deal with difficult printers (Maber 203). Anne Goldgar in particular emphasizes the social function of the scholarly exchange. The mutual obligation created in the commerce de lettres would strengthen the ties that formed the basis of the Republic of Letters, especially important in the eighteenth century, when many scholars felt that erudition was under attack (229). Of course, the Republic of Letters was not the only commu-

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nity in which letters brought its members closer together. As with Keats’s example, correspondence allowed families divided by the Atlantic Ocean to strengthen ties with regular expressions of affection, while business associates secured the reputations crucial to the extension of credit by fulfilling obligations and supplying information affecting economic transactions (Pearsall 2008; Dierks 84). In short, the regular rhythm of exchange constituted a lived experience that built trust and affection. FA M IL I A R L E T T E R S A N D S O C I A L K N O W L E D G E

Many scholars have emphasized the fact that the manuscript letter was supposed to stand in for the individual sending it. Familiar handwriting and letter-­writing sheets touched by the absent correspondent’s hand provided a link to a loved one’s physical presence, as David Henkin notes in The Postal Age: “Handwritten letters bore the trace of physical contact and not simply the recognizable imprimatur of individual identity” (55–­56). Correspondents ran their fingers over tears, ink, and the paper itself in an attempt to reestablish contact with one another—­and they wrote about doing so. As such, the materiality of the letter substituting for the material body constituted one of the many tropes of letter writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among others were references to “ease” and “sincerity” in letter writing, those ever-­present demands placed on letter writers by the period’s epistolary manuals. Samuel Johnson’s scoffing remark in his 1781 “Life of Alexander Pope,” that “a friendly letter is a calm and deliberate performance, in the cool of leisure, in the stillness of solitude, and surely no man sits down to depreciate by design his own character” (Johnson 2006, 4:58) should alert us to the fact that epistolary ease and sincerity, like the presence of absent correspondents, were to eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century letter writers tropes of mediation with which to achieve certain effects particular to the letter form. In fact, correspondents throughout this period were aware of the way that letters in manuscript highlighted mediation. The

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often problematic materiality of correspondence—­manifested, for example, in ink blotches, illegible hands, torn or lost pages and letters, and the vagaries of transportation—­also recalled for correspondents the perpetual rerouting of meaning in letters (as well as in other forms of writing) (Siegert). The trope that likened the writing of letters to “talking upon paper” (Alexander Pope to Henry Cromwell, 25 November 1710, in Sherburn 1:105)—­often misread by modern critics as an effort to evacuate the mediations of writing and to install in their stead an ethos of transparency—­likewise foregrounded the mediations inherent in epistolary correspondence. A legacy of an earlier tradition of epistolarity, this trope recalled the intersection of rhetoric and letter writing in the medieval ars dictaminis, which envisaged the oral composition, dictation, and delivery of letters (Chartier, Boureau, and Dauphin 34–­38, 45–­46, 64) and remained influential in epistolary discourse throughout the early modern period and the eighteenth century (Bannet 2005, 42–­53, 74–­77, 89–­94; Brant 21–­24; Schneider 28–­37). The trope of “talking upon paper” thus encoded earlier epistolary practices while updating them for an epistolary culture in which, though the conditions of composition and delivery had changed, the mediality of letters remained a central concern [conversations]. The invocation of absent correspondents’ presence in their letters and comparisons of epistolary correspondence to face-­to-­face conversation were therefore always, in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century use, self-­conscious tropes rather than displays of a naive faith in the immediacy of epistolary writing. Indeed, much rhetorical energy was expended in writing letters in order to shore up this trope and continually validate its efficacy (Altman 13–­46; Redford; Schneider 28–­37, 113–­23). Yet tropes of the presence of letter writers in their letters, as well as of the sincere, unaltered, and transparent representation of their thoughts and feelings, were also taken very seriously as elements central to epistolary discourse. Such seriousness was in fact a necessary precondition for the letter’s efficacy as a mode of communication or affective communion, as well as

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for its functioning as legal evidence or a political tool (Schneider). The period’s conception of the familiar letter as a form of communicative writing thus encompassed Richardson’s earnestness and Johnson’s skepticism simultaneously, a double vision that Hugh Blair displayed most cogently when he discussed familiar letters in his 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres: We expect in [familiar letters] to discover somewhat of [a letter writer’s] real character. It is childish indeed to expect, that in Letters we are to find the whole heart of the Author unveiled. Concealment and disguise take place, more or less, in all human intercourse. But still, as Letters from one friend to another make the nearest approach to conversation, we may expect to see more of a character displayed in these than in other productions, which are studied for public view. We please ourselves with beholding the Writer in a situation which allows him to be at his ease, and to give vent occasionally to the overflowings of his heart. (Blair 2005, 418)

Blair’s comments indicate that letter writers and readers could have faith in the letter’s transparency, intimacy, and authenticity while being aware at the same time of the many indirections, disguises, and mediations that the letter—­as a form of writing, a mode of communication, and a physical object—­invariably entailed. PRINTED LETTERS

Letters could pass into print in a variety of ways. Letters written for their intended recipients could be collected and printed, with or without the authorization of the author—­and indeed scandalous letters were often printed in this way. After the decision in Pope v. Curll (1741) that an author had a right to the intellectual property in his or her letters, even if the author was not in physical possession of them, publishers could not legally

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print letters without the author’s consent. Nevertheless, many letter collections were illegally published. Letters could also be drafted for the relatively broad audiences of print publications or stage performances, or “studied for public view,” in Blair’s terms, as opposed to letters “from one friend to another” which, on the other hand, offered writing that more closely resembles “conversation” in its circumscription of addressees. As letters came increasingly to be printed, their status as social documents came under pressure. Blair’s focus on intended audiences and range of circulation militates against the identification of the letter, as either genre or medium, exclusively with the “privacy” of individual subjectivity and the sociability innate to the form (Bannet 2000, 126–­ 32; McKeon). While letters may initially help form affective relationships between friends, such limited circulation exhaustively defines neither the epistolary genre’s functions nor its ontology. In Blair’s account, the letter attains its particular value only once it has been remediated and transferred beyond the conditions of its initial deployment. With the caveat that a letter writer’s sincerity may at its root be compromised (as Johnson also points out) by considerations for her or his reputation, Blair locates the special interest of familiar correspondence in the availability of the letter writer’s thoughts and feelings to an expanded readership. The same letter can thus be “private,” “social,” or “public” at various times, depending on its modes and range of circulation. Letters thus offer a particularly important site of intermedial exchange, one in which questions of publicity and privacy, as well as authority and credibility, are persistently worked out. Letters in print proved to be one of the more attractive and marketable forms of publication. However, readers were quick to observe that, once such letters were published, the social ties binding writer to reader disappeared, stripping letters of tacit understandings and implicit credibility. Under these circumstances, editorial paratexts emerged as central features of eighteenth-­century letters—­framing devices supplied by real or fictional editors that attested to the legitimacy and authority

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of printed letters and whose very widespread use in the period points to the cultural significance of remediation. Many commentators including Blair addressed the value in publishing familiar letters. For Blair, letters provided access to character. He was by no means original in this view; in his landmark decision on the copyright in familiar letters, Pope v. Curll (1741), Lord Chancellor Hardwicke had declared: It is certain that no works have done more service to mankind, than those which have appeared in this shape [i.e., collected letters], upon familiar subjects, and which perhaps were never intended to be published; and it is this makes them so valuable; for I must confess for my own part, that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very little worth any person’s reading. (Qtd. in Rose 153)

Though operating with a much wider remit—­the advancement of learning and the “service to mankind” that such advancement renders—­Hardwicke grounds his pronouncements on the value of familiar letters in the same concerns as Blair would forty years later. In both men’s formulations, the “public service” that familiar letters might render does thus not depend on the medium in which they appear (though Hardwicke was of course specifically concerned with the print publication of letters) but on the mode of circulation and the readership for which they were initially written. No wonder, then, that readers and reviewers of published correspondence in this period were concerned with the status of the letters they were reading: had these letters originated in familiar correspondence between individuals, or had they been composed deliberately for publication? In discussing the Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Lady Luxborough to William Shenstone, Esq. (1775), for example, the anonymous reviewer for the Monthly Review pronounces, “The genuine letters of persons of distinguished genius, learning, taste, or wit, judiciously

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selected, will always be a valuable present to the Public”—­with at least as much emphasis on “genuine” as on “valuable” since this concern with the reading of “genuine letters” recurs again in the next paragraph (54:58). And in a short notice of the publication of Fanny; or, The Amours of a West-­Country Young Lady. Contained in a Series of Genuine Letters (1755), another reviewer’s sarcastic comment also indicates the significance that was placed by readers on the “genuine” circulation: “If these letters are genuine, and the authors living, we are sorry their fondness to appear in public has got the better of their prudence” (12:237). Like Blair and Hardwicke, these reviewers place a premium on letters that were not crafted from their very inception for a print market—­they value “born-­manuscript” correspondence over letters that receive their first circulation in print. It is also important to note, however, that this preference does not arise so much from a concern with the authenticity of the text or of the writer’s voice as from the quality of a letter’s contents and the access it provides to the letter writer’s mind. The cleaning up of epistolary language and the editing of letters for content were assumed, even expected, by eighteenth-­century readers (McCarthy 1985, 135–­39; McCarthy 2001, 204–­6). Outrage over the reframing or reshaping of letters for print publication was reserved to nineteenth-­century readers like Charles Wentworth Dilke, John Wilson Croker, and the Reverend Whitwell Elwin, editors of Pope’s letters in the 1860s and 1870s (Stephanson 4–­5). The demand that published letters originate in a “genuine” correspondence was founded instead on the assumption, expressed by Blair previously, that familiar letters bore a particularly close relation to the letter writer’s mind and personality when “at his ease” (Blair 2005, 418). Familiar letters were thus thought to display a correspondent’s “genius, learning, taste, or wit” because they carried a distinct imprint of the letter writer’s personal character. Because letters mediated the mental worlds of individuals to a broad readership and in this way allowed readers to know (letter) writers better, they could function as elements in a wider

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system of national biography. On the one hand, the proffering of letters written by the famous and the notorious developed out of the publication of humanistic letters, a print genre with a long tradition on the European mainland (Jagodzinski; Schneider). The correspondences of Petrarch and Erasmus thus gave direct precedence for the printing of letters by the Marquise de Sévigné or Alexander Pope. On the other hand, it tapped into readers’ curiosity to find out about the private and not-­so-­private lives of others, a curiosity that always flirted with the desire for secret information and salacious discoveries. When some of Charles I’s letters to Henrietta Maria were seized and published as The King’s Cabinet Opened (1645), the personal was shown to be scandalously political at the same time. In 1737 Pope protested (too much, perhaps) against the “ungenerous” peeking into another’s correspondence when uninvited, whereas James Boswell openly addressed his readers’ desires and thus implicitly advertised what might be of interest in his letters: “Curiosity is the most prevalent of all our passions; and the curiosity for reading letters, is the most prevalent of all kinds of curiosity. Had any man in the three Kingdoms found the following letters, directed, sealed, and adorned with postmarks,—­provided he could have done it honestly—­he would have read every one of them” (Boswell 1763 sig. “Av”). It is therefore not surprising that collections of letters with an avowedly didactic, bio-­historical or religio-­ethical goal took great pains to downplay the potential for prurience in personal letters. When Anna Barbauld edited Samuel Richardson’s correspondence for print publication, she took great pains to assert the propriety both of the letters’ provenance and of their content. Nevertheless, she does acknowledge her readers’ “eagerness . . . to penetrate into the domestic retirements, and to be introduced to the companionable hours of eminent characters” (v) as the primary interest of the collection she has edited. And it is precisely this facility of collections of personal letters—­to offer access to the friendships and family feuds and love lives of letter writers of all calibers—­that earns published correspon-

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dence a central place among the genres of historical writing that circulate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Phillips). As an interest in individual lives merges with an approach to history that enriches political and military accounts with social narratives, personal letters crystallize as a privileged genre of national bio-­historical investigation where these currents meet. Nevertheless, as late as 1800, female authors could contrast “familiar letters” with historical discourse. In her preface to Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth observes: Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labors! The heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian; they talk in such measured prose, and act from such sublime or such diabolical motives, that few have sufficient taste, wickedness or heroism, to sympathize in their fate. . . . We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters. The life of a great or of a little man written by himself, the familiar letters, the diary of any individual published by his friends, or by his enemies after his decease, are esteemed important literary curiosities. We are surely justified in this eager desire to collect the most minute facts relative to the domestic lives, not only of the great and good, but even of the worthless and insignificant, since it is only by a comparison of their actual happiness or misery in the privacy of domestic life, that we can form a just estimate of the real reward of virtue, or the real punishment of vice. (i–­iv)

For Edgeworth and others, familiar letters provided authentic access to the “real characters” of individuals great and little, and it was a moral imperative both to publish and read letters. As we see in all of these commentaries, letters not written directly for print were held in the highest esteem, fostering the

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illusion of familiarity and authenticity. It was for this very reason that the novel adopted the letter, as a form known to all readers, and one in which they could implicitly put their trust. Epistolary novels could enable a close identification between the novel reader and the letter writer, hero, or heroine, as we find in the novels of Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney, and many others. Just as reading the letters of private individuals could result in a sense of intimacy, so, too, did novelists exploit this device to the same ends. Even when epistolary novels became less popular in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the inclusion of letters in novels could result in scenes of heightened emotion. Consider, for example, Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, or Captain Wentworth’s to Anne in Persuasion, where the inclusion of letters by the hero to the heroine delivers information of great affective power, as the letter becomes the device by which the heroine, along with the reader, first gains access to the hero’s inner thoughts. The letter was also adapted for use in many other genres; in poetic epistles; in conduct literature, as letters from parents or teachers to children; as letters to the editors in periodicals, and, as we discuss in the following section, in newsletters. PRINTED NEWS AND LETTERS

During this period, letters, manuscript newsletters, and printed newspapers constituted an interwoven and mutually dependent news media. Letters often appeared in altered form in newspapers and journals as a means of synthesizing news from various sources. For example, early newspapers in Britain would simply collate and print excerpts of early manuscript newsletters, which were themselves a modified form of personal correspondence (single letters, sold commercially as “separates”). Stripped of the names of the original correspondents, the reports still signaled the their epistolary origins by referring to their sources as “correspondents” (Randall 19–­22). Scholarly journals were more explicit in their remediation of manuscript letters. They

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often included a section entitled extraits de lettres, drawing on the letters the editor had received from scholars and readers (Bots 21). In contrast to the standard anonymity of newspaper “correspondents,” the letters printed in journals would be identified in varying degrees of transparency, from full names to initials, to indication of geographical origin, to no identifiers at all (Kronick). Printed correspondence offered obvious advantages over its manuscript counterpart. In the realm of news dissemination, printed newspapers had greater reach, informing readers of events in parts of the country or even the world where they did not have acquaintances (O’Neill). Similarly, scholarly journals functioned as “central nodes in a network of savants” (Goldgar 102), giving readers access to information formerly reserved for the best-­connected intermediaries in the Republic of Letters. Nonetheless, in increasing their reach, newspapers were often deemed slow and unreliable. These qualities sometimes had to do with state control (printed news was subject to censorship in a way that private letters were not) and sometimes with editorial practices. For example, early eighteenth-­century British papers frequently held news back for later publication, sometimes because of delays, sometimes as a result of space limitations, but also because journalists favored “a ‘critical mass’ approach to reporting” in which items arriving at different times were presented together in chronological order (Claydon 70). At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, newspapers were known to place priority on the freshness of news as opposed to its accuracy (O’Neill) and thus were often read with skepticism. As a consequence, newspapers had no greater authority in providing news than other media, leading individuals to consult a number of different sources, including their acquaintances. Those belonging to the upper classes (and thus tapped into political networks), as well as those living in centers like London and Westminster, were closer to the source of power, and thus deemed to be more reliable sources of news (O’Neill). The tendency of readers to turn to correspondents to supplement

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reports in newspapers was not simply a question of being “in the know”: personal, manuscript correspondence was also built on social ties linking two individuals. Faith in accounts furnished by friends and family was warranted by the intention to provide accurate news, even if reports ended up being mistaken (O’Neill 223). In the absence of a relationship of trust that could establish credibility, newspapers sought to shore up their authority with reference to eyewitness accounts. Scholarly journals did not face the same time pressures as gazettes, but they did face the same challenge of credibility in the absence of personal ties linking author and readers. Anonymous contributions raised the most opposition. Although anonymity could be considered a way of guaranteeing impartiality, an author’s unwillingness to publish his name could also call into question the reliability of the information or evaluation he offered. In the face of this skepticism, some editors refused to publish anonymous submissions while others, including Henry Oldenburg, editor of Philosophical Transactions, reassured his readers that he knew and trusted the author even if the author’s name was withheld. This affirmation was not simply a convenient fiction. Manuscript versions of articles in Journal de Trévoux found in archives do contain the name of contributions presented anonymously in print (Kronick). Readers, however, were right to be wary: it was common practice for editors to rewrite and even merge separate contributions. However, while the distinction between author and editor was not always maintained, the identity of the correspondent did matter, and when the author’s name was not listed, editors often attempted to shore up his authority by listing his academic affiliation. As might be expected, then, context and paratext were crucial to establishing the informational value of printed letters. CONCLUSION

Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness may be said to offer a concluding parable of the anxious power of letters as they were

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deployed and circulated in this long era. Marlow’s first meeting with Kurtz takes place amid strewn correspondence. As Marlow says: We had brought his belated correspondence, and a lot of torn envelopes and open letters littered his bed. His hand roamed feebly amongst these papers. . . . He rustled one of the letters, and looking straight in my face said, “I am glad.” Somebody had been writing to him about me. (137)

Letters of reference from England have brought Marlow to the Congo, and he in turn will carry letters back with him: specifically, the “slim packet of letters” sent by Kurtz’s Intended (152), which he will return to her in an act of generous bad faith, assuring her that Kurtz’s last word was her name (and not mere “horror”). And of course, Kurtz, too, had been writing reports for publication, himself a foreign correspondent full of “burning noble words” gone so wrong that they lead to his famous “luminous and terrifying” postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!” (151). Drawing on two centuries of practice, Conrad’s novella suggests the complex indeterminacy of epistolary authority as letters circulate among readers, traveling to the far reaches of empire and back again by means of various, and variously flawed, agents. As ever, the letters themselves have a material singularity that stands in tension with their multiplied meanings and misreadings, produced according to the vagaries of transmission along increasingly modern, deracinated vectors. Conrad’s mordant reflection upon the “epistolary imaginary” of his century suggests both the power and the failure of letters to forge connections.

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MANUSCRIPT We are now acutely aware that old media survives the introduction of new media, and we are suspicious of what Paul Duguid has called the “rhetoric of supercession,” whereby we assume that “each new technological type vanquishes or subsumes its predecessors” (495). Our digital era reminds us that older and newer media coexist and influence one another, and that media change occurs incrementally. Moreover, new media typically gain currency and credibility by imitating aspects of existing media, as when early printed books imitate the layout and script of manuscripts, or when the Windows operating system arranges data using files and folders derived from the paper-­ based office. These insights have been used to reconfigure our understanding of historical change. Thus, scholars of the early modern have gathered sufficient evidence “to argue that ‘this’—­ the printing press—­did not kill ‘that’—­the manuscript” (Chartier 2007, 511). Nevertheless, until very recently, most scholarship on the material history of this period seemed implicitly to support the theory of manuscript obsolescence. According to many eighteenth-­century scholars, it was during this century that print finally emerged as the dominant form, largely subsuming oral and manuscript culture (Haslett; Kernan 1987; McDowell; McKitterick; Zionkowski). Likewise, book historians examining the later part of the century have turned their attention to the causes and effects of this moment’s unprecedented rise in print production, and thus have left manuscript culture relatively unexplored (Raven 2007; St. Clair). Even scholars of man-

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uscript culture have rarely extended their analyses beyond the early eighteenth century (Ezell 1999; Justice and Tinker; Love 1998; Trolander and Tenger). The result has been a general view of print having finally triumphed over script sometime during the eighteenth century. One of the leading scholars of manuscript culture, Harold Love, has gone so far as to contend that “since 1800 at the very least, publication of this kind has been regarded as aberrant, or was the consequence of constraint rather than choice”; and he asserts that, even in the eighteenth century, “what was kept in manuscript was increasingly what lacked the quality required for print publication” (1998, 288). And yet as one of the eponymous heroes of nineteenth-­ century fiction, Wilhelm Meister, remarked: “One has no idea how much people write today. I’m not even talking about what is printed, although that is still plenty. One can only imagine what is circulated in silence through letters and essays about the letters, news, stories, anecdotes, and descriptions of individual lives” (Goethe 339). Meister’s insight is significant for this chapter for two key reasons: first, it challenges our long-­held assumptions about the hegemony of print during this period. If manuscript writing far exceeded printed writing, as Meister argues, can we still speak of a “print” culture? How might we think instead about manuscript-­print hybrids and about the mutual influences that they exert on each other? Second, Meister’s insight challenges methodological assumptions about how to research the material culture of the period. It is the quasi-­ public status of manuscript—­its ambiguous hovering between public and private—­that for Meister poses a problem of knowledge. One can only “imagine” what is circulated in manuscript because it is not as archivally or socially accessible. Following work on eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century manuscript culture (Levy; Piper 2009b, 121–­52; Stallybrass), this chapter begins with an assumption of coevolution rather than succession (Justice and Tinker 15). Rather than rely on a replacement model—­in which one media (print) overtakes and subsumes another (manuscript)—­we want to provide examples of how

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both media mutually develop. In what follows, we examine a set of material artifacts and cultural practices that illuminate moments of adaptation, resistance, and convergence between print and manuscript during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. R EMED I ATION

The principle of print imitating the look and feel of manuscript writing is well known, from the Gutenberg Bible’s aim of looking like a handwritten book in the fifteenth century to the popularity of engraved and lithographic facsimiles of authorial signatures in the nineteenth. Similarly, the growing body of printed handwriting manuals in the nineteenth century provides another, albeit contrastive, example (Nash; Thornton; Florey). In these, we see how manuscriptural flourish is meant to contrast with typographic linearity. Manuscript is remediated as print’s antipode. Less studied are manuscript imitations of print, of which many examples survive. Just as early printed books imitated what was known (manuscripts), by the early eighteenth century (and likely even earlier), manuscript imitates the ubiquitous example provided by print. Handwritten documents can adopt an attitude toward print ranging from the reverential to the parodic. The following 1713 manuscript copy of Eikon Basilike (now at the Beinecke), which is set beside a (nearly visually identical) print copy, might have served as a virtuoso self-­ advertisement of the skills of its transcriber, “I. Thomasen, School-­master at Tarvin.” Indeed, the manuscript calls into question the very distinction between print and manuscript. Both the manuscript (fig. 12.1, plate 9) and the printed book (fig. 12.2) involve marks made by ink on paper. Both can produce the same letterforms. Both can exist in multiple copies. Neither is obviously or necessarily more skillful or precise than the other. There may be felt differences between the two in individual cases: it seems quite possible that Thomasen, who tran-

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12.1. I. An opening from Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings (1713). Photograph: General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

scribed this copy, may have done so in part as an act of politico-­ religious devotion to the memory of Charles I, Blessed King and Martyr. But plenty of printed artifacts, including the early editions of Eikon Basilike, were produced in a similar spirit and often in even more fraught circumstances: it was not as dangerous to proclaim an allegiance to King Charles the Martyr in 1713, when Thomasen produced this copy and when the king’s granddaughter ruled as queen with a Tory ministry at her service, as it was during the 1650s or as it would be later in the eighteenth century when sympathy for the executed king could easily be conflated with support for Jacobite pretenders (com-

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12.2. An opening from Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings (1648). Photograph: General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

pare, however, Pittock 18, 43). The result is that the seemingly commonsensical difference between print and manuscript as technologies of writing proves far more slippery than our conventional analyses would have it. This is not to say that no difference exists: Thomasen’s copy was produced with a pen, not type; his ink was thinner and chemically distinct from that used in printed editions; the signature marks on his pages are probably more ornamental than those in the printed editions; further, it is unlikely this manuscript was actually imposed and folded in the way a printed sheet would be. And so on. But books like his question how much those differences ultimately matter and

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make it far harder for us to take them as self-­evidently foundational. The very qualities that Thomasen’s transcription seem to conjure up as characteristic of manuscripts—­aura, scarcity, an aspiration to produce a sacred artifact—­could also be found in printed books. Even singular works of manuscript evince a similar set of concerns, indicating that printed works and manuscripts rely on each other’s authenticity at the same time that they disrupt it. Stendhal’s unpublished autobiography, La vie de Henry Brulard (1835–­1836), for example, uses a number of conventions to make his manuscripts look like a printed book. He had the loose sheets bound together into three volumes prior to his death, and he included title pages with block letters, interleaved engraved prints, and tables of contents. At the same time, there are numerous examples of practices on display in Stendhal’s books that are unique to manuscript: the scribble, the cross-­ out, the drawing, the annotation, and the pasting in of extra sheets, leaving the verso side of each sheet blank, except in cases of annotation or illustration (Neefs) [marking]. Stendhal, in other words, seeks the authority of print by drawing on the conventions of the printed codex at the same time that he exploits the distinct advantages of manuscript, apparent in the flexibility of layout (in which words and images of various kinds can coexist on the same page without technological intervention) and binding choices (since he begins with various loose sheets) [binding]. The result is a hybrid production: three volumes that look and behave in some respects like a printed book, and in other respects, like a manuscript. Jane Austen’s three-­volume collection of her juvenilia, compiled between 1787 and 1793, is similarly constituted. On the one hand, as a series of handwritten fair copies, with some title filigrees and colored illustrations, and repeated references to her family and their social circle, these volumes seem to belong distinctively to the world of manuscript. On the other hand, with tables of contents, page numbering, and dedications, they are beholden to the world of print. Further, the pieces themselves,

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as burlesques, are utterly dependent on the contemporary world of print fiction, which they ceaselessly parody. The dedication to “Volume the First” makes this dependent, yet ironic relation to the world of print manifest: To Miss Lloyd My dear Martha As a small testimony of the gratitude I feel for your late generosity to me in finishing my muslin Cloak, I beg leave to offer you this little production of your sincere Freind [sic] The Author. (Austen 2013, 3)

By wedding the mundane, domestic, and social act of sewing a piece of clothing to the language of patronage (testimony, gratitude, generosity) and the commercial world of print (production, author), we see yet again the impossibility of dividing manuscript from print. INTER MED I ATION

The foregoing examples suggest some of the ways in which manuscript adapted to print; but print also adapted to manuscript. As both Andrew Piper (2009a, 121–­52) and Peter Stallybrass have illustrated, print could also function as an incitement to manuscript. Marginalia is one such highly researched area [marking]; with marginalia, readers engaged with print’s white space and in the process remediated an earlier manuscript practice of glossing texts (Jackson). But there were also numerous cases of what Stallybrass calls “printing for manuscript,” checks and bills of sale being the most common, but so, too, were mass-­ produced gift books, where print was designed to foster manuscriptural inscriptions that in turn facilitated the creation of networks of sentimental exchange. These are just some of the ways in which print invited the handwritten—­enabling customization and interaction, and disrupting the assumption that printed texts were (or remained) uniform or fixed.

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12.3. Charles Churchill, Gotham, A Poem, Book III (1764). Photograph: Houghton Library, Harvard University (EC75 W1654 Zz797p6).

An early example of this hybridity can be found in Charles Churchill’s practice of having the title pages of the verse he published in 1764, late in his brief career, printed with a blank space where his name was to go, and then filling in that blank, in every copy, by hand.

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This results in a handwritten attribution in the same position as a printed authorial name would appear, but one framed with a printed “By” (to make it seem like this is a blank form being completed, rather than a fully anonymous publication) and in the same hand as the manuscript verse that stands behind the printed book, but that most readers will never see. In making such a gesture, Churchill can have his authorship and eat it, too: he is able to condescend (in the good, eighteenth-­century sense) to his readers and act as if he were just another reader making a manuscript attribution—­as readers of political verse routinely did, while at the same time maintaining a control that the writers of truly anonymous publications had to forgo. As with the handwritten copy of Eikon Basilike, the supposedly inherent meanings of print and manuscript are blurred in cases like this: Churchill’s name here manages to have both the presence and individuality that allegedly characterizes manuscript and the uniformity from copy to copy that’s the putative hallmark of print. Perhaps the most socially significant space promoting these kinds of practices were the increasingly popular genre of books specifically designed to generate handwriting within them in the form of gift books and literary annuals that were produced in Germany, France, Britain, and North America (Piper 2009a, 121–­52; Klussmann and Mix; Le Men). These books came with a number of features designed to motivate handwriting, from dedicatory leaves with blank spaces where givers could inscribe their names to diaries and ledgers where readers were encouraged to account for their daily goings-­on. Such practices illustrated the growing attempt to make the book again personal as it came increasingly to be associated with a mass-­produced object, a practice that is in many ways still with us. The discourse of friendship and the practice of gift giving under which miscellanies were produced were intended to counteract precisely the anonymity of mass circulation that these formats were themselves engendering through their mass production. These examples also highlight, however, the way

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handwriting was being framed not simply under the sign of the personal and the possessive but also as a medium of circulation and sharability. Handwriting helped printed books move. The increasingly popular horizontal dedication between readers replaced the vertical dedication of authors and patrons that had formerly been so common in an early modern context of patron-­ driven publishing. In so doing, it reinscribed the circulation of books within a new debt economy. Instead of the giver’s indebtedness to the recipient—­as in the case of the patron-­author relationship—­reader dedications were most often framed in the opposite direction: books were increasingly being given “downward” by parents to their children, or husbands to their wives. Indebtedness was not being paid off but passed on. The printed ledgers and accounting tables that adorned so many of these miscellanies were visual reminders of this transactional logic that surrounded handwriting, inscription, and the sharing of books by the nineteenth century. In framing readers’ writing according to the logic of bookkeeping, writing was framed as a way of mapping lines of exchange rather than keeping books. In this way, the sociability inherent in manuscript culture was preserved and adapted to print. MORPHOMEDIALITY

The previous examples have suggested some of the ways in which the material forms of script and print converged and contravened one another in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But we can also identify ways in which they assume a more genetic relationship to one another, the way they grow into and out of each other. Alongside these more personal imitative or overlapping practices between manuscript and print, we also see larger institutional shifts that underscore a developmental understanding of the relationship between these two forms of mediation. Until the invention and adoption of the typewriter at the end of the nineteenth century, manuscript was the primary way of composing writing whether for personal or public use.

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And it remained the primary way of correcting printed writing until the onset of digital correction tools at the end of the twentieth. Manuscript was thus integral to the larger process of printing and came to be viewed as something worth preserving—­not only in isolation (as in state archives of bureaucratic records, all handwritten until the twentieth century), but also in conjunction with print [ephemerality]. The rise of the literary archive in the nineteenth century, whose primary mission was the preservation of an author’s “papers” (here meaning manuscriptural items, whether letters and unpublished manuscripts or annotated proofs), thus signaled this growing dominance of thinking about the relationship between manuscript and print in morphological terms, as systems that stadially grew from one another. The point of preserving the author’s posthumous papers was to better understand the creative process of authorship as opposed to the mediatic process of circulation. If scholarship has largely been indebted to a successionist theory of media until recently, this has been largely the result of the way manuscript was institutionalized during the nineteenth century. The status of the “fair copy” was in many ways the specific site where print’s influence on manuscript may be felt most keenly. Fair copies were copied-­out manuscripts (with minimal or no errors, hence “fair”) that could be used to make a set of further revisions, to typeset a work for the press, or as a presentation copy, for friends or family members or patrons. They were often the product of scribal—­or familial—­assistants. Fair copies could be circulated prior to publication, where the “preprint” was endowed with a higher social status. Even after a work that had been circulated in manuscript had been printed, it might be worth saving. Autograph copies in particular—­having been created with the body of the author—­were often perceived as valuable, possessing an ineffable aura. Fair copies might be the site of emendation themselves, but they could also be preserved by authors as indices of a creative process that could not be remediated in print. Fair copies were what print was not. In an example from Goethe’s posthumous papers, we can see how he had

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his notational schema to a late literary work (“Novella”) copied out as a fair copy or Reinschrift. In it we see a list of 107 keywords that were to serve as the narrative basis of his final literary tale (GSA 25/W1992, Bl. 5, Klassik Stiftung Weimar). While there is an earlier version that contains Goethe’s annotations, verbally dictated to his scribe, he had the corrected copy reproduced as a fair copy for posterity. The fair copy was not the medium of producing print, as that which would be typeset, but rather as that which was to be preserved to indicate something that resided beyond print. It was to illustrate not just writing’s ability to last through time but also how it came to be over time. The fair copy, one of the most culturally ubiquitous mediations between print and manuscript, was thus being framed as a means to capture personality and process in way that was muted, or unavailable, in the printed version. QUASI PUBLICS AND MANUSCRIPT SOCIABILITY

Margaret Ezell (1999) has advanced an influential model of social authorship, in which literary production is embedded in a particular community. It is a collaborative form of literary culture, with writers and readers regularly exchanging roles in the creation, revision, and dissemination of handwritten texts, and is generally used (by Ezell and others) to describe the practices of manuscript culture in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Ezell’s conception, however, can be carried forward into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, providing a helpful counterpoint to Romantic notions of solitary authorship that were promoted by many authors of the period, as we saw in the previous example of Goethe, and that have, in recent years, been challenged but perhaps not quite dismantled (Stillinger; Levy). Similarly, Donald Reiman’s concept of the private and, in particular the confidential, manuscript also delineates a nonpublic realm of literary culture. Reiman defines private manuscripts as those intended for the eyes of the author alone or only a very

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select few, and confidential manuscripts as those designed for a circumscribed audience either personally known to the author or situated as a group of like-­minded readers. Many handwritten texts of the period, however, were produced with a far more ambiguous status than either public or private. The best-­known example would undoubtedly be the manuscript newsletters that continued to circulate in France and beyond in the eighteenth century. Described by François Moureau as “a collection of manuscript articles providing information on current affairs in chronological order” (1999, viii), they could vary greatly in content, circulation, and cost. At the lower end, the Abbé Prévost’s Gazette de la Cour sold for twelve sous, about the cost of a printed gazette, while a subscription to the most renowned manuscript newsletter, Melchior Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, sold for an average of two thousand livres per year. Circulation could also vary widely. The reason that Grimm could demand such an astronomical price was that the product he supplied was exclusive: only fifteen copies were produced and these were sent to heads of state across Europe. Not everyone followed this model: the distribution of Cabaud de Rambaud’s newsletter rivaled that of a midsized gazette at 280 copies in 1740 (Moureau 2006, 18, 21–­22, 430). In terms of content, many of the French nouvelles à la main traded in gossip concerning Parisian high society, but they could also have a more literary character. Moreover, because they were not subject to the same level of state control, manuscript newsletters had more leeway in circulating domestic news. This was especially clear on the Continent, where the state granted monopolies to print news and then censored their content prior to publication (Belo). Even in early eighteenth-­ century Britain, however, parliament restricted circulation of information on its debates, leading readers to consult scribal news (Barber). Moreover, delays and the practice some papers adopted of printing news on a particular event together as a complete chronicle also meant that news arrived more quickly in manuscript form (Claydon) [letters]. Here once again we

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encounter the hybrid quality of these newsletters, mimicking print in terms of pricing, circulation, and layout, but retaining the flexibility of manuscript in terms of greater freedom from censorship. And we find that assumptions about print and manuscript break down: manuscript, in this example, could be at once a commercial medium and quicker at spreading news than print. Where manuscript newsletters moved cautiously around designations of publicness, we find other examples in which manuscript writings were produced with a social, as opposed to a public, audience in mind. Jane Austen’s collection of her juvenile writings provide just one example: fair copied into stout notebooks, the three volumes are indicative of a serious effort to gather and preserve material that might otherwise be lost. With tables of contents, page numbers, illustrations, and dedications, the juvenilia featured paratextual devices that made its contents intelligible to and navigable by readers and that drew on printed conventions—­conventions that nevertheless predate print and once again highlight this problematic distinction. The material form of the books, combined with external evidence as to their use, and the history of their dispersal after her death, enable us to reconstruct the ways Austen’s fair-­copy volumes were read, performed, shared, and valued over time. Further, as with many manuscript compilations, there is evidence that Austen (and others) returned to the volumes, making additions and emendations over the course of many years, yet more evidence of the ongoing and vital social role handwritten culture occupied well into the nineteenth century. We find proof of the widespread nature of these sociable practices in the miscellanies, commonplace books, albums, and other collections, compiled in ready-­made, store-­bought, or handmade books. Many of these preserved manuscripts are different from Austen’s three volumes—­which are in many ways modeled on print—­instead providing examples of what Ezell has called “messy” manuscript books, those without generic coherence that might contain a bewildering variety of material,

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from accounts to verse, from sketches to receipts; books that are contributed to by several, often unidentifiable, hands; books without a clear beginning, middle, and end, indeed that might “reverse” directions (that is, be written from front to back and back to front); and books without closure or completion that show signs of being unfinished or abandoned, often in the form of blank leaves (2009, 55, 58, 60). Such books, in large measure because they fail to satisfy the conventions of print, remain, Ezell claims, “largely invisible in studies of book history” (55). Yet even these highly domestic books, which exist without any ambition for print, are not somehow cordoned off from it: such miscellanies could contain both original material and extracts or complete texts copied from both handwritten and printed sources. Later examples could also include newspaper clippings, as in the increasing popular genre of the scrapbook [paper]. Another difference that emerges as we examine manuscript culture in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that many original texts, whether circulated in separate sheets or copied into miscellanies or albums, are ultimately printed, as social forms of writing were more likely to find ready outlets in print. John Aikin and Anna Barbauld’s introduction to their six-­ volume miscellany Evenings at Home (1792–­1796) describes the process by which texts migrated from more domestic and social audiences to more public ones. The short pieces, we are told, were originally composed for the entertainment and instruction of the family’s own children. Soon, however, additional contributions were made by visitors to the household, “the intimate friends or relations” of the family (1:1). Gradually, “other children were admitted to these readings,” such that the work became “somewhat celebrated in the neighborhood” (3). Finally, “its proprietors were at length urged to lay it open to the public” (3). The miscellany went on to become one of the most popular works for children in the nineteenth century, regularly reprinted in the Britain and America (Fyfe 1999a, 1999b). The transition made by Evenings at Home was a common one, and we can find numerous examples of how the print-

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ing of manuscriptural collections would become a staple of print by this time. The biography of the desk was one such genre, most famously in the case of Sophie von la Roche’s Mein Schreibtisch (1799), which was modeled on Barbauld’s collection and in which the manuscript preserve of the writer’s desk was reviewed in print (Pelz). Print is framed synoptically against the experiential diversity of manuscript. Even earlier in the century there is evidence that writers who achieved success in manuscript were frequently “urged to lay [their work] open to the public.” One such example is Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea’s “Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia” (c. 1685–­ 1702), an elaborate manuscript full of social exchanges including verse and two plays. It is, by Donald Reiman’s terms, a “confidential or corporate” manuscript because it circulated among a large group of personal or like-­minded readers (39). Nevertheless, Finch’s addresses to the reader suggest we should not too readily assume that manuscript was always a respectable form of literary dissemination. Finch plainly felt compelled to justify the circulation of her dramatic manuscripts: she first states her admiration of Katherine Philips, who had a play and a collection of poems published without her permission during her lifetime, and who excoriated those illegal publishers, stressing her desire never to have her work printed in a corrected, posthumous collection of her poems. In associating herself with Philips, Finch may be aligning herself with one who followed her aristocratic breeding and resisted publication, rather than more scandalous and socially “low” women like Aphra Behn, who published voluminously. Finch then writes of her plays: What they are as to the performance, I leave to the Judgment of those who shall read them; and if any one can find more faults then I think to be in: I am much mistaken. I will only add, that when they were compos’d, it was far from my intention ever to own them, the first was for my own private satisfaction. . . . I know not what effect they will have upon others, but I must acknowledge it: the giving some interruption to those melan-

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choly thoughts, which possesst me, not only for my own, but much more for the misfortunes of those, to whom I owe all imaginable duty, and gratitude, was so great a benefit, that I have reason to be satisfy’d with the undertaking, be the performance never so inconsiderable. (Finch [c. 1685–­1702], B3r)

Here Finch defends the circulation of her plays as providing both private and social consolation. Her comments remind us that women of the upper classes could be subjected to scrutiny for the circulation of dramatic manuscripts during this period, upsetting the assumption that manuscript was a safe method of literary dissemination in contrast to the more dangerous publicity of print, an assumption based on the premise that, with script, one’s audience was subject to greater control than in print publication. At the same time, the history of this collection suggests how, even in the early eighteenth century, authors found it difficult to resist the printing of their work, most especially when it had proved its worth via manuscript dissemination. As Edmund Gosse, a former owner of the “Miscellany Poems” manuscript, writes, by “1713 Anne was at last persuaded to publish a selection of her poems” as well as one of the plays, even allowing her name to appear on the title page of the third issue (Gosse 103). Almost an exact echo of the description of how Evenings at Home came to be published (“at last” instead of “at length”), the manuscript ends up semipublic, what David Fairer calls a “half-­ way publication,” with many poems and one of the two plays being printed in a 1713 octavo (5). The manuscript itself bears the layered traces of its journey from a confidential manuscript to press copy. Notes in red pencil in the manuscript are signed “J.B.”; the hand is contemporary with the manuscript, and that J.B. stands for John Barber, publisher of the octavo (Greer 153). And like Thomasen’s copy of Eikon Basilike, there are a number of features that imitate the conventions of print: a title page featuring three lines from Spenser’s Sheapheardes Calender, two commendatory poems, and (bibliographically incorrect) signa-

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ture marks, written at the bottom of each leaf (Solomon 50–­52). These examples suggest some of the ways in which the practices of manuscript circulation became unsustainable throughout the long eighteenth century in Britain, as the demand for printed works swelled, particularly for well-­known authors, from Phillips and Pope to Barbauld, Byron, la Roche, and Goethe, who could not prevent copies of their writing being taken and printed without their knowledge and consent. In part, however, it is the ease and efficiency with which handwritten copies could be taken and circulated that led to the porous boundaries between manuscript and print. Manuscripts could be produced in quite significant numbers and could circulate very far afield. It is one of our most cherished literary and scholarly myths that manuscripts are singular by nature, as we see, for example, in Richardson’s Pamela, where Mr. B can’t read the letters that Pamela managed to smuggle out to her parents until they return the packet to him. But the historical record simply doesn’t bear this out. Some manuscripts are unique—­as, indeed, are some printed books. But many more exist as multiples: correspondence would be copied before it was sent out; transcripts would be taken when people met; schoolchildren and clerks would routinely produce copies of the same text at the same time. Texts could also be memorized, and subsequently disseminated orally—­that is, without a physical copy having been taken. Moreover, there was usually a multiplier effect in operation, whereby even a single copy could be subject to many repeated acts of reading. There would obviously be minor and even major differences between different witnesses, but the point is that for the period under consideration, users of manuscript could access unprinted texts in a wide variety of ways. Finally, the manuscript record that survives, particularly of loose sheets—­those most likely to have been circulated outside the home—­undoubtedly underestimates and perhaps even obscures the ways in which manuscript actually worked in the eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century world. Even those living at the time had difficulty grasping the extent of textual

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dissemination outside of print: “one can only imagine what is circulated in silence.” We wish to close with one final example, one that seems to summarize nicely all the ways that manuscript and print interacted during our period. In a scrapbook donated to the McGill Library by Miss M. C. Gould of Montreal, we find a book of blank pages with a fine binding with the words “News Cuttings” printed on it that contains a variety of clippings from The Academy and The Athenaeum of reviews of Shakespeare plays from the year 1874. In the front of the book, the owner has written out a title in fine handwriting, “Shakesperiana Miscallanea,” and in the opening section, which consists of printed tabs ordered alphabetically, she has created an index to all mentions of Shakespeare’s plays in her clippings, arranged by title. Here the act of cutting and pasting [paper] intersects with the act of manuscript notation laid on top of printed tabs (see the “Intermediation” section earlier) to mimic (see “Remediation”) the print finding aid of the index [index], all the while highlighting print’s ability to create transnational communities of taste, as the reader in Montreal imaginatively participates in the cultural happenings of London through the medium of the book.

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MARKING In Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), Lydia Languish and her maid Lucy complain together about the state in which Lady Slattern Lounger leaves books that pass through her hands. Lucy observes that Lady Slattern “had so soiled and dog’s-­ear’d” one romance from the circulating library that “it wa’n’t fit for a christian to read”; Lydia Languish agrees that Lady Slattern has “has a most observing thumb; and I believe she cherishes her nails for the sake of making marginal notes” (act 1, scene 2). Satirizing bookmarking as untidy damage, especially in a library book, Sheridan’s quip also calls attention to the embodied nature of our interactions with print. Too lazy even to mark with a pencil—­let alone a quill pen, which would require sharpening, preparing ink, dipping, writing, and then allowing what one had written to dry before turning the page—­ the appropriately named Lady Slattern marks her pages with the tool that is literally nearest to hand, her thumbnail. Her “observing thumb” serves as an allegory for the physical interactions between printed matter and its readers, whose thumbing through books sometimes leaves traces behind. Many people see such traces and modifications as defacement, but recent scholarship considers the evidentiary value of marks in books, especially marginalia, and what they might tell us about the reading practices of the past (Jackson; Myers, Harris, and Mandelbrote). In this chapter, we consider bookmarking as involving a wider range of interactions, moving beyond reading to the social lives of books more generally and the marks left as a result of interactions by their everyday users.

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First, we emphasize marking as a materially determined phenomenon, one that has much to tell us about the domestic and social roles of book objects during this period. As Leah Price (2012) has shown, printed matter has many uses beyond its textual content; and marks in books often reflect a range of repurposings and appropriations outside of any explicit relation to reading. Because of the relative expense of paper, the blank spaces of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century books are full of handwriting exercises, drawings, lists, financial records, and other marks that implicate the extra-textual world in which the volume circulated [spacing]. Traces of human interaction remain, themselves reflecting the varied experiences of the book through time; one might consider the eighteenth-­century narrative entitled “The Adventures of a Quire of Paper” as exemplary of such experiences. Further, marking practices are determined by various physical considerations, such as the availability of pencils versus pens (or thumbnails), the amount of blank paper in a printed book, and the general proximity of volumes to bodies in the home and on the road. Second, we consider some examples of the ways that printed books in this period call forth certain kinds of conventional marking practices: not readers’ personal reactions but a kind of “fill in the blanks” augmentation or completion of the printed text. As against traditional understandings of marginalia as evidence of private reading, we offer these cases as signs of larger communities of practice. Thus, for example, eighteenth-­century readers added names on top of the dashed-­out references in topical poems, “reading à clef” and confirming their possession of insider knowledge that qualified them as collaborators in the finalization of the book. Such practices suggest a growing phenomenon through the period, as publishers increasingly produced texts that positively invited readers’ additions via blank spaces: ornamented flyleaves, pages for notes, and so on. As Andrew Piper has written of the late eighteenth century, “Numerous miscellanies contained a printed space or even a special leaf designed to allow givers to dedicate these

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books to their recipients. Whether it was ornamental presentation leaves . . . or dedicatory poems that included a blank space to write in the dedicatee’s name, . . . miscellanies consistently used white space to encourage their users to write within them” (2009b, 129). Finally, we examine some instances of nineteenth-­century bookmarking that emphasize the social, domestic, and commemorative functions of the inscribed codex. Book users found ways to turn books to interactive ends, as objects of exchange, spaces for expression, and platforms upon which to elaborate one’s identity in relation to social and familial circles. There is a quasi-­public quality to marking in books that evokes a larger, transtemporal community of potential other readers. In this way, marginalia express a desire to speak beyond the narrow author-­reader channel. As Hester Piozzi writes in Thraliana, the reader who marks “longs to say something”—­to the author, to herself, to posterity (780). But why should “saying something” take the specific form of marking a book? What is it about the location and materiality of the mark that made it so attractive to eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century readers? No doubt there were many pragmatic benefits: Jackson proposes that “as long as the notes are permanently attached to the text, the text stands as a reminder of the source and a corrective check on the interpretation. Annotated books also constitute a ready-­made filing and retrieval system” (88). But Piozzi’s language of longing suggests that marking books is a charged activity that transcends mere convenience and utility. We need to understand better the social and psychological functions that book marking played in and through its material forms. M ATER I A L INTER AC TION S

Active bookmarking is obviously a function of book use (though not necessarily a sign of reading); yet as the idiom “gathering dust” suggests, even an unread volume accumulates traces of its own history. Anna Barbauld observes that books such as nov-

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els “are seldom found unopened. . . . [T]hey occupy the parlour and the dressing room while productions of higher name are often gathering dust upon the shelf” (1810, 1). Dust and mold on books tell stories of their own. Surveying a range of ancient unread theological volumes at Westminster Abbey, Washington Irving remarks, “As I looked around upon the old volumes in their mouldering covers, thus ranged on the shelves . . . I could not but consider the library a kind of literary catacomb, where authors . . . are . . . left to blacken and moulder in dusty oblivion” (256). In the same vein, Hartley Coleridge’s parody of Wordsworth’s famous “She dwelt among the untrodden ways” mocks the condition of Wordsworth’s less popular poems: “Unread his works—­his ‘Milk White Doe’ / With dust is dark and dim: / It’s still in Longman’s shop, and oh! / The difference to him!” The headnote to the original publication foregrounds the connection between dust and inscription: the poem, it claims, was “written in a leaf of a volume of Wordsworth, from a circulating library” (Kent and Ewen 364). When dust turned to water, the book’s fate took a turn for the worse: annoyed by an old pedantic treatise, the speaker of Robert Browning’s “Garden Fancies” drops the book into a wet crevice in a plum tree, turning “the binding all of a blister,” with “great blue spots where the ink has run, / And reddish streaks that wink and glister / O’er the page so beautifully yellow” (lines 42–­45). Marks in books can be signs of an abandonment of reading, neglect, or outright destruction. Read or not, books traveled with their increasingly mobile readerships during this historical period, around domestic spaces and beyond. The marks left on their pages and spines can suggest the journeys they took. Circulating library books, as the category itself suggests, bear witness to heavy traffic: Charles Lamb spoke fondly of the “sullied leaves” and “the very odour (beyond Russia) . . . of an old ‘Circulating Library’ Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, which have turned over their pages with delight!” (1822, 34). Pages bear the deposits left by human fingers, by food and drink, and

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by the elements. De Quincey reports that Wordsworth, taking tea at the same time that an uncut volume was taken down from the shelf, and being impatient for a more suitable instrument, seized upon the butter knife, leaving “greasy honors behind it upon every page,” which, De Quincey reported, survive “to this day” (2:22). Marks on books can also suggest more dramatic usage. On his ill-­fated sailing trip, Shelley brought a new copy of Keats’s poems and, at one point, perhaps in a moment of imminent peril, he thrust it so hard into his jacket pocket that it doubled back and split the spine (Holmes 730). When Mary Shelley died in 1851, her husband’s heart was found among her belongings, apparently wrapped in one of the sheets of Adonais, Shelley’s famous elegy to Keats. The connection between books and the bodies that marked them was frequently thematized in eighteenth-­century novels, especially in the wake of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1741). Richardson’s epistolary novel introduces the technique of “writing to the moment,” and readers were quick to see Pamela’s written leaves (and their printed counterpart) as a corollary to her moral rectitude [thickening]. Richardson encouraged this equivalency by focusing on the material implements of Pamela’s writing as a guarantee of her virtue. As the counter to Mr. B’s complaint that she minds her pen more than her needle, Pamela supplies herself with the means to mark: “I had lost my Pen some-­how; and my Paper being written out, I stepp’d to Mr. Longman’s our Steward’s office, to beg him to give me a Pen or two, and a Sheet or two of Paper. He said, Ay, that I will, my sweet Maiden! And gave me three Pens, some Wafers, a Stick of Wax, and twelve Sheets of Paper” (56). With his gift, Mr. Longman saves Pamela’s “maiden” virtue while also making it possible for her to write the book we are reading. Pamela later imagines saving herself by the same means: “I resolv’d to hide a Pen of my own here, and another there, for fear I should come to be deny’d, and a little of my Ink in a broken China-­cup, and a little in another Cup; and a sheet of paper here-­and-­there among my Linen, with a little of the Wax, and a few Wafers, in several

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Places, lest I should be searched; and something, I thought, might happen to open a Way for my Deliverance, by these or some other Means” (143–­44). Conflating body and script, Pamela imbues the physical implements of writing with moral virtue. The indictment, trial, and sentence of Mess. T—­s K—­r, A—­w B—­n, and R—­t M—­n, before The Associate Synod, at the instance of the Rev. Mr. Adam Gib (Edinburgh, 1768) similarly associates writing tools with moral character. This parody of infighting in the presbytery of Edinburgh (presented as a mock trial that invited readers to mark the book by filling in the names of the plaintiffs) playfully suggests that the implements of writing might become the instruments of moral indictment. A bungling clerk should be dismissed from service in the following manner: “the aforesaid John Reid [should] be brought to the bar of the said Synod, holding a pen in one hand and an ink-­pot in the other. Then let either Mr. Gib, or the moderator, break the pen over his head, and empty the ink-­pot in his face: let a sheet of paper be affixed to his breast, by way of label, with this inscription, in legible characters: the reward of unfaithfulness and insufficiency.” As with Pamela, when broken and spilled, the tools of Reid’s trade materialize his faults—­or virtues, depending on whose perspective is adopted. Mr. Gib is the target of the author’s satire, so his treatment of Reid hardly speaks well of his own character. The materials of marking thus measure the moral height or depth of character, the act of inscription as aspersion or encomium. Connections between books and the body transcend inkpot melees and are more indelible. Some books contain human traces, such as locks of hair, or tracings of a reader’s hand, as can be seen in this University of Virginia copy of an 1853 New York edition of Shakespeare. On the free endpaper, one Miriam Trowbridge has traced the hand of her friend and annotated it, “Ruthie Whitehead’s ugly hand—Oh! No, I mean beautiful one” (fig. 13.1, plate 10). This is a nineteenth-­century book literally bearing the trace of a nineteenth-­century hand, a nice metaphorical illustration

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13.1. A tracing of hands in The Works of Shakespeare (1853). Photograph: Alderman Library, University of Virginia. Photography: Andrew Stauffer.

of the processes by which books get marked with bodies and tools as the pass through time. Many of us have by now seen similar interventions in Google book scans, as the hand of the scanning agent gets captured unwittingly in the page shot (see K. Goldsmith). The image of the hand in the nineteenth-­century book—Ruthie Whitehead’s or the Google scanner’s—­makes visible the haptic process of reading, calling us to attend to the historical book as a physical interface, even as it suggests the presence that remains within, or even haunts, the books we have inherited. INSCRIPTIVE PRACTICES

When readers came to write in their books, they tended to follow patterns learned from observing other marked texts. As H. J. Jackson has shown, the positioning of readers’ marks is quite highly conventionalized (18–­43). Ownership inscriptions go in

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the front of a book (usually on the top right-­hand corner of one of the first free rectos). Front endpapers will likely contain details of acquisition, attributions, anathemas threatening would-­be thieves, tables of contents, transcripts of material from other, supposedly relevant books, and broad assessments of a text’s importance and veracity. The top margins of text pages per se are generally reserved for finding aids, and the side and bottom margins are typically used to draw attention to or comment upon specific words and passages. Marks between the printed lines themselves are usually glosses or translations, or corrections of errata, and the end of a book is reserved for an overall judgment or summary and/or an index. Most of these marks quite closely imitate their counterparts in print: attributions, for example, are overwhelmingly found about two-­ thirds of the way down their respective title pages, right where a printed authorial name would customarily appear. Some bookmarkers go so far as to incorporate their inscriptions within the syntax of a printed sentence: in the University of Pennsylvania copy of Caroline; or, The History of Miss Sedley, a reader extended the typeset attribution “By a Young Lady” with a handwritten addendum: “who I hope will never write again” (fig. 13.2). Regardless of whether readers marked with pens, pencils, quills, or thumbnails, they inevitably added another medium—­ handwriting in the broadest sense—­to the printed page [manuscript]. Handwriting could serve to personalize printed books and transform a reproduction into a unique, personal(ized) copy; we find this appropriating gesture in ownership inscriptions, as indications of date of acquisition or reading. Handwritten additions could also display the reader’s knowledge of print-cultural conventions and actors, such as in indications of the date and real place of publication or attributions of authorship. Sketched-­in comments on the worth of the text (or lack thereof) displayed a reader’s taste, whereas corrections to the text (often well beyond the official errata) are testimony to an editorial mind-­set fostered by print culture. Finding aids, such

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13.2. Title page inscription from Sedley’s Caroline: or, The History of Miss Sedley (1787). Photograph: Singer-­Mendenhall Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

as pointers, running heads, sketched-in tables of contents, or summaries, help guide the reader’s eye and help navigate the pages, chapters, or the book as a whole. Comments, ranging from the odd remark to running commentary as well as a host of nonlinguistic marks—­such as underlining or exclamation points to indicate importance, agreement, or outrage—­reveal the reader’s intellectual and emotional involvement with the printed text.

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Among the most intriguing, and yet least considered, sorts of marks commonly found in eighteenth-­century books are the apparent traces of what could be called “reading à clef.” The phrase encompasses at least four different sorts of mark making: supplying the letters missing in dashed-­out words (typically names of some sort); writing those words at length in the margin closest to the dashed-­out words; writing, in the margin, the name of who an allegedly fictional character (or what an allegedly fictional place or institution) “really was”; and writing a list of names and page numbers on a flyleaf to serve as a “key” to the text. There is clearly a strong family resemblance between these marking practices, and they all testify to what Catherine Gallagher has referred to as “the period’s desire to open every book to some extra-­textual reality, to read everything double” (124). But each practice manifested “the rage for reference” (125) a bit differently, and so can help us better grasp not only why its characteristic marks took the form they did but also why readers even bothered, why all these alleged references had to become matter in order to matter. Eighteenth-­century books are full of words that have been dashed out or “disemvoweled.” Consider, for example, the opening poem in The Foundling Hospital for Wit. Number III (1746), which purports to be “from the E—­—­of B—­—”­ (fig. 13.3). There is no real disguise here, nor any detective work required. Anyone familiar with English politics of the early 1740s could figure out in a few seconds that the speaker is supposed to be William Pulteney, the newly created Earl of Bath, who had allegedly betrayed his allies in the opposition in return for a seat in the House of Lords. Moreover, the episode was notorious for decades: there is no reason to think that anyone with an interest in a poem about “Ambition” and “Party-­Rage” would have even momentarily forgotten Bath’s alleged apostasy. Why, then, should an early reader of the Ohio State University copy of The Foundling Hospital for Wit have taken the trouble to write arl after the printed E and ath after the printed B? The answer has to do with the materiality and positioning of those letters:

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13.3. Manuscriptural emendations of The Foundling Hospital, for Wit (1746). Photograph: Rare Books and Manuscript Library and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute of the Ohio State University Libraries.

they amount to a completion of the text in a medium both continuous with and opposed to that in which the blanks appeared. They are in black ink, and so can seem like they’re engaged in the same project as the printed poem: mocking Bath through letter-­shaped stains on paper. But they’re also handwritten, and so have all the significance that came to be attached to script in the eighteenth century by virtue of its not being print: scar-

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city (other copies are not marked this way), individuality, and a “positive relation to the hand” (see Thornton 24–­35). Accordingly, these marks are simultaneously capable of aligning their maker with the poet (as a fellow, still-­loyal member of the opposition) and distinguishing their maker from the poet by making the annotator seem bolder or this copy “more perfect.” But neither these continuities and alignments, nor these oppositions and distinctions, could be brought about without the presence of this ink in this position. The mark and its placement are not simply the trace of a prior act of reading; they are an integral part of the reading itself. A somewhat different configuration of these qualities can be seen in the marginal identification of “P———y” as “Pultney.” Here the physical separation of the handwritten name in full from its dashed-­out counterpart in print allows it to serve as a finding aid: if one is in search of a bit of partisan schadenfreude to liven up a drinking party, one can quickly flip through this copy of The Foundling Hospital for Wit and find a humiliating ventriloquism of “Pultney.” This suggests that the most important thing to know about this poem is the identity of its supposed speaker, the corollary of which is that any copy that allows its users to jump straight to that identification is necessarily superior to one without such an aid. And so, implicitly, the owner of this copy by providing such a tool is shrewder or more considerate than those benighted readers who leave their margins blank. There’s an even greater claim to superiority in another sort of marginal identification: the translation of a fictional name into a real one: say, “Varus” into “Chesterfield.” Readers cannot simply rely upon meter and guesswork to make this kind of identification, as they might with “P———y” (how many recently ennobled men with trochaic names beginning with P and ending with y could there be?). Rather, they need to know—­or at least think they know—­about the Roman Empire to be able to deduce which rising star is most akin to Publius Quinctilius Varus, a senator sent off to govern Germania with ultimately disastrous results, and also enough about contemporary politics to rec-

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ognize his analogue in Chesterfield, who had recently become lord lieutenant of Ireland. But so long as it remained immaterial, such a surmise had quite limited social value (it could be used only if the topic arose in conversation and then only with one’s immediate companions). One could demonstrate one’s political acumen far better by committing the identification to the margin and then letting one’s books circulate—­with all the attendant risks that might involve: embarrassment or a libel suit if one got it wrong, a beating or a challenge if word got back to Chesterfield’s friends. One last sort of mark associated with reading à clef deserves consideration: the handwritten keys often found on the flyleaves of romans à clef like Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760–­1764). Like the marginal identifications just discussed, these keys amount to a tacit assertion that the principal significance of the text lies in who its characters “really are.” By this logic, anyone who can systematically decode their referents must be in possession of an enviable amount of inside knowledge. Once again, however, materiality and positioning matter. By being assembled on the front flyleaves of the copy in question (now housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library), these identifications become a kind of table of contents by other means, thereby transforming whoever made the marks into another producer of the book, one every bit as vital to the experience of the copy at hand as Johnstone and his booksellers. Indeed, the creators of such keys may be even more powerful, within their limited domains, than the author himself, since the often significant jumps in pagination between the identifications override the narrative and imply that there’s nothing of interest between, for example, pages 56 and 127. SOCIAL OBJECTS

Reading à clef was one important mode of using marks in books to bring about a desired social end; other inscriptive modes were similarly outward facing. As gift books rose to prominence

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in the early nineteenth century, there emerged distinct print practices designed to standardize rituals of inscription through the provision of special illustrated leaves on which individuals could write their own name and that of the book’s recipient. Meant primarily to be purchased for another, these volumes were variously referred to as gift books, annuals, Taschenbücher, or almanacs, and they came with titles like The Ladies’ Pocket Book, The Keepsake, and The Forget-­Me-­Not. They were marketed for use within sentimental networks of exchange, wherein the book was transformed, through the act of inscription, from a purchased commodity into a gift. The marked book thus came to serve as one of the most potent symbols of affective exchange between individuals. Interacting with print was thus a means of interacting through print. Marks in books were used to further various sorts of social interaction, both real and imagined. They could serve as a record for posterity, an occasion for (sometimes cruel) wit, a tool for flirtation, a prop for the presentation of a particular social persona, a token of friendship, and a gesture of incorporation into a larger collection or polity. “If you mean to know yourself,” Johann Caspar Lavater advises his reader in Aphorisms of Man (1788), “interline such of these aphorisms as affected you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then shew your copy to whom you please.” The most famous reader to follow this invitation to self-­knowledge and friendship through responsive and shared marking was William Blake. Even before having it folded and bound, he began annotating his copy with emphatic underlinings, marks and remarks of approval, disagreement, or uneasiness (Xs or daggers in the margins) and a few longer, critical comments. When Blake’s heirs sold the copy, now held at the Huntington Library, the dealer complained that it was “in broken sheepskin, and more than dirty” (Lavater xvi). Whether the differences in ink and in handwriting mean that Blake kept coming back to the Aphorisms, or that he did in fact circulate his annotated version among friends who added theirs, cannot be determined.

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But the heart he penned around Lavater’s printed name on the title page and into which added his own in handwriting is evidence enough that the physical marks function as markers and makers of imagined social interaction in sentimental networks. Decidedly social in nature were the interactions around another of Lavater’s works, his famous Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–­1778)—­if only because the price for the original German four-­volume in-­folio edition was prohibitive. Reading societies were founded all over Germany with the express purpose of purchasing the lavishly illustrated volumes, which had quickly become community-­building cult objects. Communal reading of the Fragmente fostered the fashion of physiognomic interpretation, the social practice of characterizing individuals on the basis of their facial features—­of reading faces. Since one of the goals of Lavater was to define the essence of true beauty and genius, the Fragmente could also be read as a who’s who of the cultural elite across time—­ranging from antiquity with Apollo to the (then) immediate present with Goethe. Selected members of the Weimar court society would assemble over a volume of Duchess Anna Amalie’s private copy of the Fragmente to identify the anonymous portraits and silhouettes. By marking the names below the images, they demonstrated their insider knowledge, displayed their membership in the Republic of Letters, and claimed their share in the making and preserving of timeless beauty and genius. The marks in an annotated copy now in the Zurich archives reflect a more humble approach (Althaus 219). Less interested in elites, this reader cared more about documenting intimate knowledge of the pure and happy inhabitants of the Zurich surroundings and, by extension, the Swiss nation. The handwritten names, which identify the printed images of simple farmers and craftsmen, inscribe their owner in a community clearly defined in time and place. Even though these marks may be records of real social interaction, within the volumes subtitled For the Promotion of the Knowledge and Love of Mankind, they also work to construct imaginary communities. Marks in books can also foster unimaginary communities.

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An edition of Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria (London, 1806) once belonging to Robert Southey and inscribed with the date of his purchase (30 October 1812) also bears a second inscription from the year of Southey’s death: “For John Wordsworth from Katherine Southey. This book was purchased in the sale at Greta Hall June 1843, when a small portion of my father’s Library was sold—­Keswick, Oct. 1843.” With her gift of this book to the infant John (born on 21 September 1843, he could not have been more than six weeks old), Southey’s unmarried adult daughter reinforces the long-­standing connection between the Wordsworth and Southey families. This book’s particular binding—­it had been re-­covered by Southey’s wife or one of his daughters in printed cotton cloth—­invests Kate’s inscription with a double significance [binding]. It reveals that she has purchased, at auction, a product of female domestic labor (possibly her own) and promptly given it away to the great-­nephew of her father’s longtime neighbor and friend, William Wordsworth. John was born in Harrow-­on-­the-­Hill near London (far from Kate’s home in Keswick) into the clerical branch of the Wordsworth family: John’s grandfather Christopher was a scholar and master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and his father (also Christopher) would became bishop of Lincoln in 1869. Katherine’s gesture thus stretches backward and forward, forging a domestically anchored community through two families’ shared geographical past and theological present. An “elegantly illustrated” edition of The Poetical Works of John Keats (Philadelphia, 1855) similarly suggests how gift inscriptions materialize communities divided by geographic boundaries. On 30 July 1855, James de Barrios Dunlap Balen of Florida inscribed this book to James Benjamin Clark, Esq., of Mississippi, carefully specifying his current location, “Cambridge MA.” The gift inscription to “his sincere friend and well wisher” bridges the distance between two Southern states through the mens’ shared alma mater, Harvard College; the quality of the edition—­its heavy paper, wide margins, and elaborate illustrations—­confirms their position within a community of

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Harvard-­educated Southern gentlemen with a serious investment in literature. Their inclusion in this community is reiterated by edition itself, specifically the prefatory memoir of Keats by Richard Monckton Milnes, graduate of Trinity College and member of the Apostles Club, with Alfred Lloyd Tennyson and Arthur Hallem, among others. While indicating their current place of residence, marking a strategically chosen book inserts the two men into a literary community stretching from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (the place of the book’s publication), to Cambridge in Britain. Balen’s inscription replaces the impending North-­South division of the nation (Clark would enlist in the Eighteenth Mississippi Regiment of the Confederate army in 1861) with an international community of poetry lovers. Both individually and in the aggregate, these marks powerfully support Jason Scott-­Warren’s proposal that “the early modern book” ought to be regarded as “a quasi-­public environment” (375), an “adjunct . . . to everyday sociability” (379). For all the concern texts like The Rivals invoked about passive, solitary—­ indeed quixotic—­habits of reading, eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century books were fundamentally social objects inviting their users both to interact with them and to use them in their interactions with other people. Relatedly, one could mark books not to note the “true” identities of individuals who were concealed by initials, asterisks, or dashes but to appropriate a text for one’s own circumstances. Some readers noted in the margins of books of poetry occasions on which they had read the poem, sometimes including a note of whom they read it aloud to. In this way, poems could be put to use in the emotional lives of their readers; courting couples reading poetry together, for example, could choose to associate themselves with characters in a poem, or with its speaker and addressee. This kind of “appropriative” marking meant that not only could one mark a book as one’s own; one could also use marks as a way of connecting with individual poems, linking them to particular moments or relationships.

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Take, for example, the University of Virginia’s copy of an 1869 edition of the popular narrative poem Lucile, written in 1860 by Owen Meredith (the pseudonym of Bulwer-­Lytton’s son, Edward Robert). It carries a gift inscription: “To Jennie Tayloe / From a friend / August 1869.” The giver has used the language of a poem to convey a message, underscoring the line on page 79, “our two paths are plain, / And those two paths divide us,” and writing in the margin, “July ’69” (fig. 8). The poem itself is about rivalry between Lord Alfred and a French duke for the hand of the virtuous Lucile, and about the misunderstandings that separate lovers. Here, the unknown “friend” has date-stamped a portion and appropriated its language for his own lyric utterance, a timely comment on his relationship with Jennie Tayloe, presumably when it reached a crisis, a month before he gave her the book as an appeal or a valediction (she would go on to marry a Captain Mortimer M. Rogers in 1875). These markings help us see afresh the countless mute underscorings, check marks, and marginal brackets so common in nineteenth-­century books; they must often have been autobiographical appropriations of this kind. A few pages earlier in this copy, the unknown friend has marked such lines as “thy place in my life is vacant forever / We have met; we have parted” (74); “thou mightest have been to me much” (75); and, near the end, “how with love may be wreck’d a whole life!” (238). We can perceive the intention here because of the date stamps and the inscription to Jennie; for most books, the traces are more obscure. But a case like this one suggests a widespread practice of appropriation and repurposing. By means of various forms of marking and inscription, then, readers made books their own, moving them into the flow of personal interactions with traces that we can sometimes still read. Indeed, some of the most powerful instances of inscription expose the layered, multitemporal nature of the book page, which readers have revisited across the years. The many eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century family bibles that contain handwritten records of births and deaths through the generations may be emblematic here; such volumes always evoke a sense

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of books as living social objects and as foster children of slow time. For a similar lesson, we might also turn to Thomas Hardy’s poem “Her Initials,” first published in Wessex Poems and Other Verses: Upon a poet’s page I wrote Of old two letters of her name; Part seemed she of the effulgent thought Whence that high singer’s rapture came. When now I turn the leaf, the same Immortal light illumes the lay, But from the letters of her name The radiance has died away. 1869

Vintage Thomas Hardy, we might say of this post-­Romantic depiction of fading enchantment; and indeed, it comes bearing its own declaration of a vintage year: that closing date stamp—­ 1869—­which signals its place in the poet’s biography, nearly thirty years before its date of publication. The poem in turn evokes an even deeper past: that time “of old” when the speaker inscribed the initials of his beloved “upon a poet’s page.” Times and feelings have changed since then, but the marginalia abides, a monument to a moment of appropriative reading when the “high singer’s rapture” evoked thoughts only of her, when the page fairly glowed with love borrowed from its reader’s eye. Hardy’s poem emphasizes the layered temporality of the marked poet’s page, both in its subject matter and its own date stamp. Such marks help us to see books as evolving objects, as layered sites that bear the traces of ongoing change and of the various interactions they have experienced and enabled—­like humans, perhaps. Facing pages, we find a parable of embodiment and the wages of circulation that get to the heart of interacting with print.

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PAPER In the summer of 1769, the educational theorist Johann Bernhard Basedow went in search of paper. He was looking for sturdy, childproof paper for what was to be a groundbreaking new work in childhood education, the illustrated four-­volume Das Elementarwerk (1770–­1774). He found it, with the help of Johann Kaspar Lavater, in Switzerland (Schmitt 142). The Elementarwerk was one of the more visible indications of an emerging interest in child readers that came to define the eighteenth century across Europe. Basedow’s book was evidence of new ways of thinking about books for children as objects specifically suited to their ways of interacting with the world and with print specifically. But it was also indicative of what Robert Darnton has called the period’s unique “paper consciousness” (2007, 498). As a material support or foundation for a larger scriptural economy, whether letterpress, engraved, or manuscriptural, paper was integral in the segmentations that accompanied the growing commercialization of everyday life [proliferation]. By the close of the eighteenth century, publishers routinely invoked paper quality as a means of marketing to different reading audiences. Terms like holland paper, which was meant to indicate fine handcrafted paper, or velin paper, a type of paper that imitated the smoothness of vellum, were affixed to different editions to signal different kinds of value to readers (Erlin). Along with format or the size of paper, paper quality was a key marker of social distinction. By the nineteenth century, paper’s declining quality signaled to readers a different, yet related social phenomenon: the rise

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of the mass audience. Paper’s ubiquity in the era of machine-­ produced paper, as well as its fragility, allowed it to stand as a proxy for an undifferentiable and perhaps unregulatable whole, much like the seemingly endless rolls from which paper derived (McLaughlin). Where paper had stood as the ultimate marker of quality in the eighteenth century—­of something substantial—­by the middle of the nineteenth century it was an index of the growing insubstantiality of printed communication. Like fears surrounding the introduction of paper money, there was a larger sense of printed paper’s evanescence by the mid-­ nineteenth century [ephemerality]. With the specter of paper’s obsolescence having come sharply into view today, paper has become newly interesting (Basbanes). Paperwork, paper knowledge, paper consciousness are all so many terms introduced in the past decade to understand the work that paper performs in structuring social relations (McLaughlin; Darnton 2007; Kafka; Lupton 70–­95; Gitelman). According to this work, paper makes publics. Whether as bureaucratic demon, epistemic document, or metaphor of mass mediacy, paper is an agent that produces groupings in the world, that does something to people. In this chapter, we are interested in turning this approach on its head by capturing the types of interactions that individuals have historically undertaken with paper. Our question is not what paper did to people, but the other way around: what did people do with paper? In framing our inquiry this way, we want to take advantage of the recent turn that attends to questions of embodiedness when it comes to reading, the way our gestural interactions with media affect the meaning of what is mediated (Piper 2012). If paper was an important material paratext that helped construct new kinds of coherent reading communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it also conditioned new kinds of interactions with printed and nonprint material. With its “openness to alliances and ability to insert itself into a multitude of routines,” paper supported, shaped, and inspired a wide range of routines and techniques of culture (Müller),

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ranging from the pedagogical and scientific to the sociable and artistic. Accordingly, our focus here is on three principal forms of interactivity—­folding, cutting, and pasting—­and the ways these interactions served different kinds of purposes across different social groups, including child readers, domestic collectors, scholarly editors, and devotional communities. Rethinking paper “consciousness” around this notion of manipulability—­around finger-­mind relationships and the technologies that mediate between them—­can help move us away from larger abstractions like publics or audiences that have largely governed research on the topic. Attention to the gestural interactions between readers and their paper objects brings us not only into the realm of the quotidian and the concrete. It also challenges the very notion of the “reader” as the primary identity of users of printed material. In so doing, our aim is not to eschew an interest in the social but to understand it in reverse: not how certain types of documents make communities, but how communities can be defined by a set of interactive practices with the documents that unite them. FOLD

For theorists of reading’s materiality, the fold has been one of the privileged features of paper’s significance (Deleuze; Derrida 2005). The fold is what allows for conceptual duplicity, for a notion of modulation to reign over paper thought. And yet folds are also signs of the ordinary and mundane, daily practices of handling that surround the use of paper, from the dog-­ ears of a book’s pages to the enclosures of letters or notes to the use of unfolded maps for navigating roads to learning to read through the use of foldable tabs. The fold brings us into touch with an elementary tactility of paper, one that would become foundational in the eighteenth century for thinking about paper’s meaning more generally and the printed book’s more specifically. At the opening of his popular Bilderbuch für Kinder (Illus-

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trated book for children, 1790), Friedrich Justin Bertuch writes, “The child should be allowed free rein in handling it, as with a toy; he should draw pictures at any time” (Heesen 2002, 58–­ 59). For Bertuch and a host of other educational theorists of his day, under the sway of a Lockean theory of mind, young readers were being encouraged to engage with their books as objects as a way of gaining access to the complexities of written language (Klemann). As Locke stated about the child reader, “the pleasure of knowing things leads him on insensibly to the gaining of Languages” (289). Paper’s tactility was integral in facilitating the book’s accessibility to a new generation of young readers. But so, too, was its intermedial potential—­as Bertuch imagined, paper facilitated a movement between handling, reading, and drawing. Reading was in the eighteenth century being founded upon a mind-­body continuum or circuit of sensibility-­ insensibility that moved from hand to eye to imaginative vision. The sensorimotor theory of reading that was emerging in the eighteenth century would be accompanied by a variety of new forms of foldable features in children’s books. The best-­known early example is Robert Sayer’s series of pantomime books that he began publishing in the 1770s that contained movable flaps revealing humorous scenes of Harlequin’s behavior (Speaight and Alderson 89). Known as metamorphoses or harlequinades, these books could also assume more pedagogical purposes, as in Benjamin Sands’s collection of biblical tales, Metamorphosis (1816), in which textual riddles were answered by pictorial icons. “Now I’ve got gold and silver store, / Bribes from the rich, pawns from the poor; / What worldly cares can trouble me? / Turn down the leaf and then you’ll see.” The young reader who opened this flap would find the picture of a skeleton and man on his deathbed. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the flap would give way to more elaborate forms of unfolding. The association between tactility and the transformation of vision—­the sudden optical revelation of the flap—­was complemented by a new sense of the dimensional and developmental aspect of the fold.

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Book accompaniments, such as Carl Johann Sigmund Bauer’s foldable globe (1825) that comprised six foldable segments connected by thread and accompanied by an accordion booklet of the “54 representatives of the world,” visibly illustrated the world making that folded objects enabled. It was not until the 1870s, however, that we find the invention of the colloquially named pop-­up book, in which a world unfolds within the book. Designers like Lothar Meggendorfer in Munich and Ernest Nister in Nuremberg and London are today widely regarded as the early innovators of the form. Meggendorfer’s The Circus, for example, offers a delirious three-­dimensional visual panoply that unfolds page after page. Paper for these artists was no longer a mechanical device for changing the scene, but instead unfolded in its own self-­evolving way. While there might be tabs or flaps for the reader to engage with, the book now largely performed its dimensionality independently of the reader. It combined sculpture and automation in a single object. The book’s dimensional autonomy—­that it contained a world within—­was by the end of our period a foundational template of bookish immersion. Where folds and moving parts would become signs of a new developmental theory of reading that would gradually emerge over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were also important devotional practices in which folds and tabs played a role. Paper’s foldability helped establish personalized relationships between readers and larger moral codes. Consider the religious manual La confession coupée, which was first published in Latin in 1634 and reprinted numerous times, mostly in French, through the mid-­eighteenth century (fig. 14.1). This manual purports to offer “an easy method to prepare particular and general confessions,” in part by offering a list of close to a thousand sins, organized by the commandment against which they’ve offended. The idea is that in preparation for confession, a reader would go through the list and see which sins he has committed, thereby coming up with a fuller account than might have otherwise occurred to him on his own. So, for example, under the First Commandment, readers are asked to

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14.1. La confession coupée (1677). Photograph: Rare Books and Manuscript Library and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute of the Ohio State University Libraries.

consider not only whether they have engaged in heresy but also whether they’ve “provided arms and munitions” to Protestants (Leutbrewer 2)—­an offense that might seem merely treasonous rather than sinful. Similarly, under the Fifth Commandment (the injunction against murder), readers are questioned as to whether, in their debauchery, they’ve made “night the day, and the day into night” (52)—­presumably because drunken violations of the diurnal order can lead to lethal mayhem. The sheer breadth of the list seems like it could prompt relief or self-­ congratulation at all the sins one has avoided (“yes, I’ve learned

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magic, but at least I haven’t scandalized children or wanted to bribe any judges”), though, of course, it’s possible that it also opened up some new vistas of sinful possibility—­“ you mean I can prescribe unnecessary medicines in order to win the favor of apothecaries?” (54). What makes La confession coupée stand out, though, is not the comprehensiveness of its list of sins (medieval penitentials offer at least as extensive a menu), but the means through which they could be recorded: every sin is printed on its own long tab that can be pulled out from underneath the paper frame surrounding each page and placed on top of the frame to provide a visible and tactile record of which sins had been committed. Readers could thus force themselves to consider whether they’ve been truthful and exhaustive in their self-­scrutiny (or, alternately, they could create a false account of their own sinfulness, either to deceive someone in authority or in the hope of generating a more deeply felt piety through bodily action, something akin to Althusser’s paraphrase of Pascal: “kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” [168]). Once the sins in question had been expiated, readers were supposed to pop the tabs back underneath the frame, an activity that seems like it could have provided a different and perhaps more personal kind of catharsis than the physical discomfort of kneeling on a stone floor and repeating the same prayer again and again. And because of the physical properties of paper, the tabs could serve as a peculiarly material admonition if one kept on committing the same sin: there would be a crease, which with further use could turn into a tear. Through these means, one’s internal faults could be externalized to make them all the more powerfully felt internally. But all this is made possible, or at least powerfully heightened, not by the list of sins, or by the sacrament of confession per se, but rather by the tabs, by the movement in space of strips of paper in relation to other strips of paper. As such, La confession coupée combines the “finger piety” of telling the beads on a rosary with a lasting but reversible record of what one has

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done—­and it does so as part of an object associated with religious truth: it is probably no accident that the tabbed tables of sin are followed by reminders of church doctrine, psalms, prayers, and “reflexions pour se disposer a une bonne mort” (Leutbrewer 180). The manipulability of paper thus made a new privacy and thoroughness of confession not only possible, but (it seems, given the book’s sustained commercial success) desirable. The final community we wish to focus on is also perhaps the most familiar. The foldability of paper was part of a longer scholarly tradition that used foldouts to append tables and charts to the medium of the book. As a material supplement, the foldout both complemented the information contained in the book and disturbed the logic of the self-­enclosed codex. Through the foldout, the book expanded. At the same time, the act of unfolding the page interrupted the act of reading; the page must be refolded before the reader can continue reading. The foldout reveals that the boards and bindings of individual volumes do not fully enclose their own content [binding]. Over the course of the eighteenth century, paper, as well as books, got bigger. One of the Enlightenment’s “biggest” texts, Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, was first published in 1735 on the front and back of six folio sheets. The original text included eleven pages of observations and grids and was printed on some of the biggest sheets then in circulation. Linnaeus’s Systema, in its various editions, pushed the limits of paper technologies, but also the telos of the book: that the codex was the natural resting place of the botanical system. One copy of the Systema (at the New York Public Library) appears to have been kept folded for years. The untrimmed pages are still creased and may not have been bound until the nineteenth century. Presumably, some copies of the system were stored in rolls, as depicted in a famous image of Linnaeus in his Lapland dress, with a roll of folio sheets in the background. These loose sheets, unrolled or unfolded, could be arranged so that the complete gridded system might be taken in all at once. Set out on the surface of a

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table, the loose sheets afford a comprehensive view of the system of nature and invite the reader to arrange and rearrange the kingdoms of nature. The mature Linnaeus kept numerous loose sheets (in effect, index cards) in a cupboard, continuously sorting and resorting examples by species, genera, and the sexual system. Throughout his career Linnaeus strained against fixed, codicological knowledge, interleaving blank pages in all his personal copies of his publications to accommodate annotations and new examples [thickening]. Like the librarians of the later eighteenth century, Linnaeus abandoned bound catalogs for loose cards. His folded, extralarge sheets and his loose cards figure the expansion of bibliographic relations beyond the bounds of the particular codex. We take the increasing number of interleaved or foldout pages in eighteenth-­century books to be another sign of growth. In Newton’s Opticks (1704), for example, four separate bundles of foldout sheets are bound into the volume. These illustrations make visible the rays of light in numbered figures that fold out as a third leaf to the right of the recto page. In-­text citations reference illustrations of the refracted and reflected rays studied in the complicated experiments. The geometric diagrams exceed Newton’s prose description. Similarly, whole sheets fold out of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and the systême figuré in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, when unfolded, exceeds the boards of the volume in which it is included. Like Linnaeus’s system of nature, the system represents the encyclopedia’s encircling of knowledge in one synoptic view; a folio sheet bound lengthwise into a folio volume, the systême must be unfolded to be read. This tension between the synoptic identity of the foldout and the serial identity of the book did not abate but became a constitutive problem of reading by the nineteenth century [index]. In the preface to the second edition of his major work on educational theory, Chrestomathia (1815–­1817), the great theorist of the panopticon Jeremy Bentham would reflect on the nature of the presentation of his ideas in book form:

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On casting upon the ensuing pages a concluding glance, the eye of the author cannot but sympathize with the reader, in being struck with the singularity of the work, which, from the running titles to the pages, appears to consist of nothing but Notes. Had the whole together—­text and notes—­been printed in the ordinarily folded or book form, this singularity would have been avoided. But in the view taken of the matter by the author, it being impossible to form any tolerably adequate judgment on, or even conception of the whole, without the means of carrying the eye, with unlimited velocity, over every part of the field,—­and thus at pleasure ringing the changes upon different orders, in which the several parts were capable of being surveyed and confronted,—­hence presenting them all to-­gether upon one and the same place—­or, in one word, Table-­wise—­ became in his view a matter of necessity. (15)

For Bentham, the stakes of understanding the text of his educational system rested on the possibility of synopsis—­not seeing it all, but seeing it all at once: “carrying the eye, with unlimited velocity, over every part of the field.” As with the generation of Romantic intellectuals that came after Bentham, it was the momentariness of cognition that mattered to Bentham’s later theory of knowledge. The foldout became the material means of making possible that which the book could not. CUT

We often imagine that readers approach books with pen in hand, but less so with knives or scissors. However, at least through the opening decades of the nineteenth century, cutting a book’s pages would have been the first interaction that readers had with their books. When books were delivered bound from the binder, their pages would have been folded and gathered together, but usually left uncut. This was the first of many types of interactions that could involve cutting the pages of books. In this section, we focus on two examples in particular that foreground

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how the ease with which paper was cut contributed to the circulation of print during our period and, in the process, helped define different communities of users. As one reader reported in mid-­eighteenth-­century Paris regarding the vogue for extracting decorative prints to place on walls or to cover stovepipes: “everyone is cutting!” (Heesen 2006, 38). While some acts of cutting were designed to encourage paper to fly about with abandon, in many cases cutting also paradoxically served to reinforce the book as a preservative space of enclosure, whether in the form of the domestic scrapbook or the scholarly catalog. Books of scraps moved print around to maintain its availability through time. At the same time, cutting could also serve as a gesture of enlivening and generativity. Whether it was through the vogue of toy theaters for children or the rising popularity of the paper cutout, or Scherenschnitt in German, cutting paper stood in the service of bringing something—­an object or a life—­into sharper relief. Cutting helped give definition to the world of paper. The scholar with scissors was a visual commonplace that dated back to Quentin Massys’s iconic portrait of Erasmus (1517), who was seen writing in a book-­lined corner with a pair of scissors hanging from a nail. Cutting was an integral cultural technique that accompanied scholarly reading from print’s inception (Blair 2011; Heesen 2006). By the nineteenth century, books containing cutout scraps of paper would become a domestic institution (Tucker, Ott, and Buckler; Helfand; Garvey). As Jessica Helfand writes: “The scrapbook was the original open-­source technology, a unique form of self-­expression that celebrated visual sampling, cultural mixing, and the appropriation and redistribution of existing media” (xvii). By the 1830s, publishers began selling large-­format books with sturdy blank pages, elaborate bindings often stamped with titles like “Scrapbook,” and decorative frontispieces to encourage readers to cut and collect. In the frontispiece to an album sold by E. Lacey in London (1834), we see a fashionable husband and wife leafing through an album of cutout prints in their nicely appointed living room with an onlooker, either meant to be a friend or their

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grown-­up daughter. The careful labor of cutting out prints from illustrated books or loose-­leaf sheets was transferred into the book as an important format for display, equivalent to a fine frame. Scrapbooks were in this context part of an emerging fashionable sociability for the rising middle class. While scrapbooks could have a performative dimension, they were also very much in the service of establishing domestic records, mnemonic technologies of familial identity. In place of early modern books that recorded the noble lineages of households, either through heraldic emblematics or genealogical lists, the scrapbook preserved the printed and manuscript presence of a family out in the world. In the album of Mrs. J. F. Ehrenbacher of Liverpool that dates from the final three decades of the nineteenth century and is now held in the special collections of McGill University, we see assorted items that have been cut from printed and manuscript ephemera and pasted down on the pages, such as the Liverpool Needlework Guild Association’s rules of conduct, a ledger of the “number of articles sent in” for sewing (including gowns, petticoats, shifts, nightgowns, vests, stays, and aprons), an admission card to Shakespeare’s grave, numerous cutout autographs, and finally newspaper articles on a charity bazaar for which her husband, a local hop merchant, donated “1100 lbs of beef and 100 loads of coal” as a New Year’s gift. In one particularly telling example, we see a cutout list of donations for the construction of a new synagogue pasted down at its top strip, which when folded up reveals a pressed flower underneath. Cut, paste, and fold unite here to perform a sense of the book’s stratifications and the affective semiotics contained in such layering. The allure of any scrapbook is the way it pushes against long-­ held notions of either print or the book as primarily media of seriality (or as primarily any one thing). There is not only a deep-­seated intermediality to these books, the way they gather newsprint, greeting cards, prints, photographs, letters, and autographs into a single space. There is also a pronounced multidirectionality that belies ideas of immersive or straightfor-

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ward reading. Scrapbooks not only highlight the book’s dimensionality [thickening], the way books are good at containing things. They also highlight the book’s ability to be read in different directions and from different angles. Consider the example of the Hale family scrapbook, now at Ohio State, that contains elaborate juxtapositions of cutout prints (fig. 14.2, plate 11). On the recto of the third leaf we see an image of the newly crowned Queen Victoria playing chess, overlaid on top of a print purporting to show a fight between “Good Breeding” and “Education,” which in turn partially covers three more prints and two clippings and completely covers five other clippings that concern chamber pots, wife selling, naval feuds, and a country house. Whatever these visual cues have to do with one another, their meaning is inseparable from their placement, their navigation, and the different ways they position the viewer of the album in relation to them. As Margaret Ezell writes of the genre of family albums, “Such texts, one could argue, have too many beginnings and endings, titles and signatures that shape our expectations of what the contents will be only to bewilder and surprise us by what is actually there” (2009, 64). The rotatable plane of the book’s pages allowed for numerous points of entry and exit but also for simultaneous reading. In the case of Julia Margaret Cameron’s albums of photographs, she expressly placed photographs in different directions so that they could be viewed by two people at the same time. Cutting things out during our period was not only undertaken in the name of preservation and compilation but could just as readily be employed to liberate and animate as well. The Scherenschnitt, or decorative cutout, was one such practice that emerged as a popular activity in German salons around the turn of the nineteenth century and whose roots extended back into the rising interest in silhouettes and other outline-­based forms of art in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and even earlier to an early modern interest in collecting the portraits of famous men (Biesalski; Heesen 2006). The carefully cut silhouette profile became an idealized form of interpersonal projec-

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14.2. Reading in multiple directions in the Hale Family Scrapbook (nineteenth century). Photograph: Draper Hill Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.

tion, a blank screen against which one could project a profound affective response, one that mirrored the sensorimotor care that went into its extraction from the page. A similarly charged affective space were the highly intricate practices of floral cutouts

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14.3. Mary Delany’s Asperula made from 230 pieces of cutout paper (1777). Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

that became increasingly popular in the eighteenth century, as in the example of Mary Delany, who at the age of seventy-­t wo began producing a series of paper collages of botanical specimens. In her representation of Asperula (squinancy-­wort), we

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see 230 pieces of finely cut paper brought together to capture paper’s quiet, expressive potential (fig. 14.3, plate 12). Such affective relationships to paginal excision extended downward in the family as well, as shown in the nineteenth-­ century vogue for toy theaters that were aimed at the expanding class of child-­oriented consumption. Starting in the 1810s, publishers began issuing sheets, “a penny plain, twopence coloured,” with the characters from a current play printed upon them: an adaptation of Scott or Cooper, for example, or The Miller and His Men or The Forty Thieves (fig. 14.4, plate 13). Sometimes it was just the characters; sometimes it was the characters as played by particular recognizable actors. While publishers seem to have originally conceived of these sheets simply as souvenirs, children—­especially younger teenage boys—­quickly began to cut out the characters and mount them on cardboard in order to reenact the plays in question, or to devise their own stories involving those characters. In response, publishers expanded their offerings to include horses, complex multifigure scenes from plays (such as battles or processions), scenery from plays, and architectural ornaments of the sort that decorated the real theaters, all printed on sheets akin to those on which the characters appeared. Enterprising toy shops commissioned carpenters to build model theaters out of wood to supply the boys who didn’t have the skills (or servants) to do so themselves. And by the 1830s, shortened, though surprisingly unexpurgated playbooks of much of the current repertory were also produced, with special instructions for how to pull off various scenic effects with the resources of the toy theater. The more that was provided to children (scripts, scenery, battles, theater decorations), the less room there might seem to be for them to exercise their imaginations. Yet the reverse appears to have been the case: the sheer wealth of toy-­theatrical material that an affluent household could amass allowed for combinations and configurations that no one could have predicted. Far from being a passive activity, merely reenacting a prior performance, the act of cutting out and mount-

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14.4. Green’s Characters in The Red Rover (1836). Photograph: Rare Books and Manuscript Library of the Ohio State University Libraries.

ing the characters, coloring them if they didn’t come already colored, positioning and repositioning them vis-­à-­vis other characters and scenery (including ones from other plays) in a theater that was itself changeable in décor seems to have encouraged a level of improvisation well beyond anything on offer on the professional stage. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that the toy theater offered a mode of interacting with print otherwise unavailable in these years: namely, a treating of printed objects as if they were alive that didn’t involve a personification of the book. As such, toy theater can help us rethink the ways in which the “paper consciousness” of the age was caught up in a much larger system of relationships between people and objects, one invested in maintaining the possibility of a quasi-­magical vitality in even the most obviously mass-­ produced sheets.

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PASTE

As we saw earlier, the act of pasting paper onto other sheets of paper was an important technique of collecting within the world of domestic scrapbooking. Where pasting could serve a useful preservational function—­making loose leaves of paper stick—­it also played a vital role in a variety of annotative practices within scholarly settings. In collections of authors’ papers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is not uncommon to find sheets with corrections pasted on. In a highly revised text, pasting created more annotative space. Like the foldout, it expanded the boundaries of the codex. If pasted annotations became a common authorial practice, they were also useful devices for major edited volumes that began issuing from the press and that would eventually become a staple of the print economy in the nineteenth century (Piper 2009b, 85–­120; Buschmeier; Kolk). Take, for example, a proof copy of the Boydell Shakespeare edition (1802) in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Over the 1790s, William Bulmer printed the edition at the Shakespeare Printing Office in London. As he finished the sheets, a servant brought proofs to its editor, George Steevens, who lived at Hampstead Heath but often stayed in Cambridge. Steevens received uncorrected proof sheets from the printer, and he then corrected the text using a combination of marking and pasted strips that operated as foldouts. As he finished editing each folio sheet, he folded it as one would fold a sheet of letter paper and posted back to Bulmer in London. Because the two were rarely in the same place, Bulmer and Steevens used the sheets to communicate all kinds of things beyond their editorial content. As a bound book, the proof copy asks its readers to come to terms with an intensely media saturated form. The printed sheets, all of which are also written on in at least one hand, operate both as corrected proofs and letters. Readers contend with textual edits—­but also encounter folds, postmarks, and communications well outside the scope of the Shakespeare edition. The

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14.5. Pasted-­in emendation of George Steevens’s Works of Shakespeare (1802). Photograph: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library (ART Vol. a37 v.3). Photography: Thora Brylowe.

papers are in effect one form of circulation nested in another, recording the ephemeral documentation of life and work at the same time they index the editorial authority of this monumental edition. These two communication registers—­Steevens’s work as authoritative editor and as bodily agent—­profoundly affect the reading experience. In addition to the usual activities of turning leaves that all bound codices ask of their readers, this book must be closely inspected and turned, and the pasted strips of paper must be lifted and returned to their place. On many pages, Steevens pasted in foldout emendations (fig. 14.5). As with other handmade marks, Steevens’s pasted strips operate as traces of human interaction with the printed object [marking]. Beyond the visual mark, however, the pasted foldout invites readers to lift the strip to examine the original beneath. As an editorial choice, pasting paper over print has two important features. First, it demands that readers accept the

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emendations, which literally render invisible the printed text it has covered. Second, it goes so far as to invite readers to repeat the assertion of Steevens’s authority by allowing them to view but compelling them to re-­cover the printed text. Not only does this practice disrupt any narrative of print’s authority, overriding that authority with the editor’s own hand; it also means that each subsequent reader participates with both hand and eye in a hierarchy whereby Steevens’s erudition dominates Bulmer’s mechanical production. Cutting, folding, and pasting are not easily separable as practices. While they did demarcate distinct embodied interactions with paper during our period, they were most often undertaken in concert with one another. They could be employed for pedagogical purposes, as in the case of teaching young readers the perils of greed through the surprise flap that revealed a dead body. They could be used for scholarly purposes, as in the case of editors and natural philosophers in their expansionist bibliographic practices, where flaps, folds, and scraps were cut out and added to books. They could be used for domestic purposes of memorializing familial identities, as interacting with paper became a means of fixing a family’s identity through time. They could be used for aesthetic purposes, as in the examples of the Scherenschnitt or Mary Delany’s floral collages. Finally, interacting with paper could be used for the purposes of play and animation, as in the toy theaters that had to be cut out, folded up, and pasted together, or the satirical use of prints in scrapbooks that created multivalent political messages regarding the current events of the day. In all of these cases, the gestural interactions of cutting, pasting, and folding challenged the unity and stability of paper as a platform that gave definition to the culture of print during our period. Instead of serving as a medium that made publics—­that carved groups off into recognizable groups—­paper’s manipulability challenges a variety of identities that surrounded categories like “print” or “the book” and can help us see the distinct material as well as experiential heterogeneity that surrounded paper interactivity.

15

P R O L I F E R AT I O N As European societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries grappled with new ways of interacting with print, a frequent debate in coffee shops, salons, and bookstores across the continent was whether the spread of print would prove a boon or bane to knowledge in general and literature in particular. Although national and regional norms for literacy, consumer spending, and free speech resulted in the uneven development of print culture across Europe, the general proliferation of printed materials, especially by the late eighteenth century, is indisputable. Determining exact counts of printed books by country is impossible, but the digitization of national library catalogs and the creation of databases such as the English Short Title Catalogue have allowed book historians to make increasingly reliable estimates. While data remains spotty for the nineteenth century, Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden have provided detailed estimates of manuscript and book production across Europe from the sixth through the eighteenth centuries. In their conservative count, Buringh and van Zanden suggest that the aggregate number of printed books in Great Britain rose from 122 million in the seventeenth century to 228 million in the eighteenth century. Similar rates of proliferation occurred in other leading European nations: France went from 146 million books in the seventeenth century to 231 million in the eighteenth; the Netherlands from 45 million to 94 million; Italy (as defined by today’s borders) from 78 million to 123 million; and Germany (also defined by today’s borders) from 98 million to 195 million (Buringh and van Zanden 417). According to Bur-

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ingh and van Zanden, per capita book consumption in Great Britain was 14 percent higher in the eighteenth century’s latter half (1751–­1800) than in its first half (1701–­1750), and growth rates tended to be even higher elsewhere in Western and Central Europe. Again, comparing the data sets for 1701–­1750 and 1751–­ 1800, average annual per capita consumption increased by 23 percent in Germany, 25 percent in the Netherlands, 26 percent in Ireland, 45 percent in Belgium, 53 percent in Spain, 79 percent in Italy, 100 percent in France, 127 percent in Poland, 127 percent in Switzerland, and 149 percent in Sweden (Buringh and van Zanden 421). Even factoring in the population surges seen across much of Europe in the eighteenth century, the numbers still point to a rapid proliferation of total printed books per capita. While from the distance of several centuries such explosive growth in the eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century book trades might seem an indisputable social boon, critics in the period tended to align themselves in two polarized camps. What both sides had in common was a marked tendency to articulate their views about print in terms that resonated with larger and more fundamental ideas about social progress or decline. On the one side, cultural conservatives tended to view a world awash in new books and periodicals as one on the precipice of aesthetic, moral, and structural decline. Of course, living at the high point of print’s hegemony, these commentators often found themselves in the decidedly awkward position of having no effective means of publicizing their concerns without adding to the problem they were decrying (Algee-­Hewitt). On the other side were those who hailed the profusion of writing as the leading edge of a march of intellect that would fulfill the greatest hopes of Enlightenment philosophers. For these critics, the proliferation of print was evidence of the democratization of culture, a process that must itself inevitably be a harbinger of the blessings of real democracy. More print presumably meant more readers, and it seemed plain to many European thinkers that the emergence of a well-­informed, mentally alive reading public could bring about only the general improvement of society.

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In this chapter we chronicle this push and pull surrounding print’s quantitative rise during our period, surveying the diverse responses to print’s proliferation by common readers and famous tastemakers alike. In particular, we are interested in what might be called the “third rail” of print proliferation—­ namely, an emergent regulatory discourse less intent on limiting or promoting print than on controlling and managing it. What made this discourse so powerful was that, unlike the polemic or the diatribe, it could take a variety of forms. In terms of genre, efforts to regulate print took the form of style guides, reading primers, book reviews, conduct manuals, handbooks on good taste, and philosophical, novelistic, and evangelical treatises on the often dangerous power of readerly imagination. Beyond the printed page, this impetus to control and systematize published materials became manifest in the era’s enthusiasm for private lending libraries, rigid cataloging schemes, selective reading clubs, standardized indexing norms, and clearly demarcated academic disciplines (Wellmon 2015). In short, proliferation not only begat more language about print; it also generated an entire material and cultural infrastructure designed to make its diffusion more controlled and manageable. Information management, assuming a host of material, institutional, and discursive forms, therefore emerged as one of the great new industries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was in this that the real impact of proliferation was felt most deeply. DECLINE

One of the most pointed late eighteenth-­century responses to the proliferation of print was the 1795 Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character by Isaac D’Israeli, a respected scholar and the father of the future prime minister. In D’Israeli’s mind, the cheapening of literature via overproduction had left the “literary character . . . singularly degenerated in the public mind.” “The finest compositions,” D’Israeli laments, “appear without exciting any alarm or admiration, they are read,

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approved, and succeeded by others; nor is the presence of the Author considered, as formerly, as conferring honour on his companions” (vii–­viii). Literature, it would seem, had become yet another commercial mode, slavishly devoted to fashion and trapped in a cycle wherein virtually any new book would quickly be rendered obsolete by a more recent and modish competitor. Anticipating Hazlitt’s 1827 claim in “On Reading New Books” that “the taste for literature becomes superficial as it becomes universal,” D’Israeli casts the problem as not only one of surplus and excess but also of social and intellectual leveling. In D’Israeli’s opinion, “what Alexander feared, when he reproached Aristotle for rendering learning popular, has happened to modern literature; learning and talents have ceased to be learning and talents, by an universal diffusion of books” (xiv). It is not just the apparent glut of writing to which D’Israeli objects, then, but also the popularity of print, the near “universal diffusion,” or saturation, which has, in combination with “incessant industry,” pushed the price of books down to a level at which they are “accessible to the lowest artisans” (xv). D’Israeli offers a dizzying lament of what the apparently endless increase in the production of literature must have felt like to those experiencing it firsthand: “When I reflect that every literary journal consists of 50 or 60 publications, and that of these, 5 or 6 at least are capital performances, and the greater part not contemptible, when I take the pen and attempt to calculate, by these given sums, the number of volumes which the next century must infallibly produce, my feeble faculties wander in a perplexed series, and as I lose myself among billions, trillions, and quartillions, I am obliged to lay down my pen, and stop at infinity” (xviii–­xix). The ultimate result of this combination of so much writing and so many readers, D’Israeli concludes, is that literature has become but one commodity among many, and its producers, the composite “literary character,” no longer share the elevated quality that they once possessed. Of course, not all of those anxious about literary decline understood the saturation of print and the rise of a mass read-

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ing public as the sole (or perhaps even the dominant) explanation for the decline of literature. A short piece “On the Decline of Poetical Taste and Genius” in a February 1792 Town and Country Magazine offers the alternative suggestion that, since true poetry originates in the fusion of instinctive enthusiasm and cultivated rationality, modern societies, with their predilection for luxury and refinement, are inimical to great verse. According to this theory, the explosion of print was less to blame for literature’s purported decline than were luxury, effeminacy, and consumerism (85–­87) [paper]. A letter to Gentleman’s Magazine in January 1794 complained that “among the many luxuries of the present day, none appears to me more hostile to the general welfare of society than that which begins so extensively to prevail in the useful art of printing, and the other branches of the bookselling business. Science now seldom makes her appearance without the expensive foppery of gilding, lettering, and unnecessary engravings, hot-­pressing, and an extent of margin as extravagant as a court-­lady’s train” (47). This emphasis on the debilitating effects of luxury was part of a larger denunciation of modern commercial culture that began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. As Paul Keen has elaborated, “Literature took its place in Britain’s commercial modernity alongside a host of phenomena, from performing animals to the rage for air ballooning to scientific demonstrations” (2012, 13). Indeed, literature and the perceived luxury of commercial society merge most explicitly in the rise of “bibliomania,” the pathologized addiction to reading and buying books that for some, like the author of the 6 March 1779 installment of the Literary Fly, offered conclusive proof of cultural decline, since “the collectors of moths, monsters, weeds, and cockle-­shells” had transgressed their accepted terrain and were now “presiding over our public stock of Literature” (47). IMPROVEMENT

While many commentators perceived the universality of print—­ the abundance that allowed ever more people to read ever more

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new titles—­as the root cause of the decline of taste in general and literature in particular, this was hardly a truth universally acknowledged. Where D’Israeli saw a dystopian future of ever-­ accelerating literary production, others hailed the emergence of an expanded reading public and a host of new periodicals designed to cultivate new readers’ tastes. In 1820, for instance, the Retrospective Review introduced itself to an increasingly crowded field by acknowledging in its opening pages that even those who were “friendly to literature” must concede that “the number of books has been increasing—­is increasing—­and ought to be diminished” (ii). Having admitted as much, however, the essay invokes Pliny the Younger to argue, “The only real evil to be apprehended from the enormous increase in the number of books is, that it is likely to distract the attention, and dissipate the mind, by inducing the student to read many, rather than much” (iii). Accordingly, the Retrospective considers itself among those select periodicals that are the cultural equivalent of “dykes and mud-­banks,” which are “interposed between the public and the threatened danger,” in this case “an inundation of paper and print” (i). Among the many authors who, like those at the Retrospective, argued for the ameliorative effects of print, perhaps the most dogged was Anna Letitia Barbauld. Over a publishing career that stretched from the 1770s through the 1810s, Barbauld regularly attributed society’s improvements in both knowledge and manners to print. She therefore articulated a teleological model of media change that traces human progress through the invention of writing and, subsequently, the press. In her early essay “On Monastic Institutions” (1773), for instance, Barbauld reflects on the history of writing, attributing to print (and the invention of paper) an acceleration of the process by which knowledge could be preserved and disseminated. She contrasts the mental lives of medieval Europeans with little to no access to books and those of her contemporaries who lived in an “enlightened and polished age, where learning is diffused through every rank, and many a merchant’s clerk possesses more real knowledge than

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half the [medieval] literati” (99). Barbauld thus expresses her understanding of print as, to use Elizabeth Eisenstein’s phrase, an “agent of change”—­claiming, as Eisenstein would two centuries later, that print facilitates the advancement of knowledge because it can be preserved, standardized, and disseminated with far greater ease than is the case with oral or handwritten forms of communication. That Barbauld was far from alone in this view of history is evidenced in John McCreery’s 1803 book The Press, a Poem: Published as a Specimen of Typography. Charting the development of human knowledge, McCreery moves from orality, which limits the spread of knowledge to “memory’s stinted power” (2); to writing, which invests ideas with greater permanence but constrains the spread of these ideas by the incessant labor needed to make copies; and finally to print, which most fully enables human communication and development. In a passage describing this final transition, McCreery writes: A host of Scribes whose slow progressive art No public use to genius could impart, Astonish’d saw with what profusive hand The press could send its labours thro’ the land. (14)

The “profusive” quality of the press thus portends enlightenment rather than degeneration, progress rather than decline. Those inclined to view the spread of print as inherently salutary frequently pointed to the burgeoning trade in children’s books to support their cause. Once again, Barbauld was among the leading advocates of this position. In the prefatory “Advertisement” to her seminal work for young children, Lessons for Children. Part 1. For Children Two to Three Years Old (1787), Barbauld celebrates the “multitude of books” (3) recently written for children, arguing that publishing such titles is “humble, but not mean; for to lay the first stone of a noble building, and to plant the first idea in a human mind, can be no dishonour to any hand” (4). Over the course of her long career, Barbauld

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spearheaded a revolution in child-­centered education, one that emphasized, for example, the importance of stories, as she puts it in the preface to the edition, being “adapted to the comprehension” (3) of children at various ages. She also implicitly underscored the importance of print to this project through her innovations in the typography and layout of children’s books. Beyond this, she demanded as early as this preface that children’s books feature “good paper, a clear and large type, and large spaces” (3–­4). Nearly two decades later, Barbauld further emphasized the importance of getting well-­designed, thoughtful printed works into children’s hands in the epilogue to Evenings at Home (1796), an immensely popular collection of instructional tales for children that she coauthored with her brother John Aikin. Summing up thirty-­one nights of tales rehearsed in the preceding pages, the epilogue employs the metaphor of the seed to suggest the cultivating power of print: May Wisdom’s seeds in every mind Fit soil and careful culture find; Each generous plant with vigour shoot, And kindly ripen into fruit! (ll. 7–­10)

A few lines later, Barbauld borrows from Locke in comparing children’s minds to “a whiter page” (line 13). Between her emphasis on the “large spaces” of the printed page in Lessons for Children and the “whiter page” of a child’s mind in this epilogue [spacing], Barbauld makes a case for print’s links to intellectual and moral cultivation that would be further developed by Maria Edgeworth, Jane and Ann Taylor, and other writers heavily influenced by her work. Of course, Barbauld’s enthusiasm for life in a print-­saturated society extended beyond her advocacy of books for children, as in her introductory essay to her British Novelists collection where she famously defends the literary genre most frequently singled out by scolds of proliferation: “the humble novel” (1810, 47).

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Like Jane Austen, who in Northanger Abbey mocks reviewers for lamenting the appearance of “every new novel . . . in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans” (62), Barbauld questions the lack of respect afforded to this genre. Both women also praise the novel’s capacity to give pleasure, with Barbauld noting that “their leaves are seldom found unopened, and they occupy the parlour and the dressing-­room while productions of a higher name are often gathering dust upon the shelf” (1810, 1). But Barbauld also contends that novels “have had a very strong effect in infusing principles and moral feelings. . . . They awaken a sense of finer feelings than the commerce of ordinary life inspires” (1810, 48). Indeed, Barbauld makes the causal connection between the rise of the novel and improvements in domestic manners explicit, stating that “perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say, that much of the softness of our present manners, much of that tincture of humanity so conspicuous amidst all our vices, is owing to the bias given by our dramatic writings and fictitious stories” (1810, 49). Here Barbauld puts forward another direct benefit of the proliferation of print: its capacity to foster humanistic values through the category of fiction. CONTROL

D’Israeli and Barbauld thus embody the two poles of print proliferation, capturing it as a force for decline on the one hand and a vehicle of improvement on the other. For many, however, ensuring this equation between modern print culture and progress was possible only through the formation of particular types of readers. In the new world of print saturation, readers who lacked self-­restraint and discrimination might easily fritter away their lives on the lowliest productions of the press. As the German scholar Johann Georg Heinzmann put it in 1795 in A Plea to My Nation: On the Plague of German Literature, unregulated readers might easily be infected by a reading addiction (Lesesucht) or reading madness (Lesewut).

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Such complaints about too many books or an excess of reading were not only descriptive; they were normative as well. Every complaint about too many books was accompanied by a claim, either implicit or explicit, about how one ought to read, about how all these books ought to be engaged. As the German scholar Johann Gottfried Hoche opined in his 1794 polemic Intimate Letters: The Current Reading Addiction and Its Influence on the Reduction of Domestic and Public Happiness: The reading addiction is a foolish, detrimental misuse of an otherwise good thing, a really great evil that is as infectious as the yellow fever in Philadelphia. It is the source of moral degeneracy in children. It brings folly and mistakes into social life. . . . Nothing is achieved for reason or emotion, because reading becomes mechanical. The mind is savaged instead of being ennobled. One reads without purpose, enjoys nothing and devours everything. Nothing is ordered; everything is read in haste and just as hastily forgotten. (68)

The perceived saturation of print could not be managed simply through better, more efficient print technologies. It required ethical techniques and strategies that would form particular types of readers. This revised focus enabled scholars to shift the discussion to moral and ethical disciplines and technologies of the self. In essence, the regulation of print required a disciplining of the self: the individual who read not just the right books but read them in the right way. One of the more pronounced ways such self-­regulation was enacted in the European context was through a discourse of “taste” (Gigante). For early eighteenth-­century writers like Jean-­ Baptiste Dubos, author of Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719), taste was a form of discernment based on feeling. As such, taste enabled individuals deemed deficient in rationality or inadequately educated—­in other words, the “general public” of the era—­to develop and even voice aesthetic judgments with some legitimacy. Beyond this, even in deeply patri-

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archal cultures, sophisticated taste was often viewed as more commonly belonging to women than men (Conti). That said, however, many leading men of letters argued that truly refined taste was not purely innate. Both Voltaire and Melchiorre Cesarotti, in his Ragionamento sopra il diletto della tragedia (1762), for instance, stressed that those with good taste also needed some level of training in order to form proper aesthetic judgments, including an understanding of literary and artistic conventions (Tsien). Thus, while certain strains of the era’s discourse on taste promised to empower female and middle-­class readers [conversations], by the late eighteenth century competing strains threatened to foreclose the preferences and stylistic choices of those very readers. Another significant development in eighteenth-­century publications on taste was the increasing emphasis on concepts of limitation and excess (Noggle). As Hugh Blair remarked in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), “[I take] every opportunity of cautioning . . . readers against the affected and frivolous use of ornament; and, instead of that slight and superficial taste in writing, which I apprehend to be at present too fashionable, to introduce, as far as my endeavours can avail, a taste for more solid thought, and more manly simplicity in Style” (2:30). As with Wordsworth’s later programmatic invocation of simplicity in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), the excess of texts that print’s proliferation portended was increasingly associated with an excess of text itself. Quantitative concerns were increasingly interpellated with qualitative issues like stylistic embellishment and graphical ornamentation [spacing]. As a we have already seen in the January 1794 letter to the editor of Britain’s Gentleman’s Magazine, the author complained, “Science now seldom makes her appearance without the expensive foppery of gilding, lettering, and unnecessary engravings, hot-­pressing, and an extent of margin as extravagant as a court-­lady’s train” (47). Or as the German author Christoph Martin Wieland lamented to his publisher upon the publication of his collected works, “I must confess to an inner feeling, one that seems to me to be

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more than mere humility, that repulses me in the imagination that all of my writings will circulate in such an ostentatious edition” (qtd. in Erlin 38). Taste, too, however, could itself be seen as something foreign and excessive. For instance, the lukewarm review of James Ussher’s Clio; or, A Discourse on Taste in the June 1767 issue of the Critical Review situates the very idea of taste as an insidious and entirely modern concept with suspiciously foreign origins: “The antients knew of no such term,” the reviewer grumbles before alleging that “the term was first catched by the modern French from the Italians; from them it was transplanted into England, where it has been cultivated with so much success, that it has made more fops in literature than perhaps any other word in the English language” (422). The refinement that good taste promised, it seems, was a double-­edged sword, promoting the very sense of luxury and distinction it was presumably meant to combat. While questions of taste continued to surface in essays on the long-­term cultural impact of proliferating print, by the turn of the nineteenth century the focus increasingly turned to the need to regulate readers’ overstimulated imaginations. Alongside the now-­traditional fears of material excess in an age of print came a new set of worries over psychological excess. The widespread association of reading with dreaming was one of the more common ways of linking reading and imaginative excess (Piper 2009b). J. R. Smith’s The Dream (1791) is one of a host of turn-­of-­the-­nineteenth-­century images that associated books with the unconscious flights of fancy in the sleeping reader’s mind (fig. 15.1, plate 14). In the spirit of preemptive action, the very potential for excessive thought (Wordsworth’s “overflow of powerful feelings”) was deemed sufficiently dangerous to require regulation, especially in women readers. Case in point, in Charles Williams’s satirical print Luxury, or, The Comforts of a Rumpford (1801), a female reader warms her bare behind by a Rumford stove while holding a copy of Lewis’s The Monk in one hand and warming her

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15.1. J. R. Smith, The Dream (1791). Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

front end with the other (fig. 15.2, plate 15). Here print’s quantitative (note the other half-­read books on the table and floor), typographic, and semiotic excesses scandalously coalesce at the hearth, one of the archetypally feminine and domestic sites in the home. Clearly, as Williams would have us believe, the psychological excesses born of a surplus of books were in dire need of regulation. Such regulation would assume many forms over the course of the nineteenth century. The fashionable conduct books that

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15.2. Charles Williams, Luxury, or the Comforts of a Rumpford (1801). Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Austen caricatures in Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice trained young female readers how to choose the right books. In Germany, these books emerged from the press with bludgeoning titles like Die Kunst, Bücher zu lessen (The art of reading books; Johann Adam Bergk, 1799) and Plan im Leben nebst Plan im Lesen und von den Grenzen weiblicher Bildung (A plan for life, a plan for reading, and the boundaries of female edu-

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cation) (Karl Morgenstern, 1808; Wittmann 440f). In a similar vein, the manual of style would serve as the writer’s equivalent to the reader’s conduct book. The popularity of such guides to writerly self-­regulation is suggested by one midcentury commentator’s claim to have identified 548 separate handbooks on English grammar (Watson) and reports that Samuel Kirkham’s English Grammar went through fifty-­three editions in the first eighteen years following its 1823 publication and was into a 110th edition by century’s end (Lyman 81). The 1920 mass publication of William Strunk’s The Elements of Style as the authoritative handbook on standardizing and controlling writerly excesses marks the culmination of the nineteenth-­century concern for regulating writing in an age of mass print. Alongside the regulatory discourses (taste, style, conduct, imagination) discussed earlier and practices covered elsewhere in this book [index], dozens of inventive technological solutions emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to provide a basic infrastructure for controlling swelling archives of printed materials. Among the many regulatory technologies that might be mentioned here—­ranging from codified penmanship standards for librarians (i.e., the “library hand”) to reciting a mandatory oath to enter Oxford’s Bodleian Library to the construction of locked library cages for materials deemed blasphemous, seditious, or pornographic—­one particularly merits memorializing in the early twenty-­first century: the humble card catalog (fig. 15.3). Invented, as legend would have it, in Paris in the heady days following the fall of the Bastille (Kent, Lancour, and Daily 14:448), this simple technology functioned as archives’ primary organizational engine from the mid-­nineteenth through the late twentieth century, when the digital revolution rendered it virtually obsolete in the space of a generation. A descendant of the early circulating library’s paper slip [paper], the most widely adopted card-­based index system is attributed to Ezra Abbot, an assistant librarian at Harvard who began creating the university’s card catalog in the early 1860s. Abbot’s model became the prototype of a simultane-

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15.3. “The Card Catalog,” from Library Bureau Catalog (1890), 22. Photograph: Hollis Library, Harvard University (B 7770.8.5).

ously expandable and public information system (Krajewski and Krapp). “I would propose,” Abbot wrote, “to have the titles written on cards, about 5 inches long and 2 wide, of such thickness that they can be manipulated and separated with facility, and made of such material that they will not wear out by handling” (qtd. in Krajewski and Krapp 81). For Abbot, the durability of the card was one of its most important features, as the library catalog was no longer imagined solely as a tool for experts, but also for the general reader. Search and access went hand in hand. The book as container [binding] was therefore reimag-

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ined by Abbot as something that could itself be contained, now in desklike drawers. In essence, the bibliographic imaginary would recapitulate itself many times over. The card catalog, like the trolley cart or movable bookshelf, thus functioned as one of many new technologies that would make the library a vibrant space of technological innovation. And with the invention of Melvil Dewey’s decimal cataloging system, first proposed in his A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library (1876), quantification would finally overtake proliferation in the most literal of ways.

16

SPACING Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the printed page got whiter. The pages of early printed texts were generally filled from edge to edge with text or images. But as print expanded and developed, so, too, did the arrangement of the white space of the page. Printers and authors began to reorganize the page around innovations in the use of space and typographic elements. They used punctuation marks, margins, paragraph breaks, type size and color, and blank spaces to articulate the page and guide readers’ interactions with it. And the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries were periods of great experimentation in this history. In this chapter, we focus on the relationship between typographic elements and white space on the page, and the readerly ramifications of these various configurations. In mid-­eighteenth-­century Britain, for example, novelistic play with “blank, black, and marbled pages” and with typographic marks of omission, interruption, and pause (as in the asterisks, dashes, and floral ornament of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy) all highlighted the nonverbal as an active component in a broader system of meaning. The inexpressible, indecent, unthinkable, or forgotten and the silent or suspenseful passage of time were signified by the marking or framing of space on the page (Piper 2009b, 183; Henry). Here, we consider a number of exemplary typographic events that refocused, resignified, and reorganized page space and invited readers to engage with print—­and with each other—­in new ways. Such rearrangements of the page exhorted readers to interpret, to reflect, to comment,

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and to speak. They disrupted, mediated, modeled, and formed the experience of reading. In short, these typographic manipulations of the printed page facilitated interactions with print. This chapter, then, traces a fine line between material practice and phenomenological effect. The ways that publishers, authors, and readers (when they mark margins or otherwise mark the space of a page [marking]) use and work with the spacing of a printed page raise an important question about printed matter: how does the physical layout of the page as a product of print technologies form and inflect readers’ experience of and interaction with the printed page as an object of use and source of meaning? How does page layout lend the text an affective potential, a stimulating force? In all of our examples, the printed page is not simply an inert object of technical manipulation; it is rather a phenomenon with which humans interact. It is in this interaction, in the inextricable link of the technical and the human, that print exits. THE WHITENING OF THE PAGE

As print transformed over time, so, too, did the space of the page, both its physical configuration and its signification. Historians of print describe a “whitening” of the book page between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, brought on by innovations in typography, paper and ink making, and layout. Descended from classical, manuscript-­era poetics, early modern pattern poems exemplify the enforcing effects of white space in the age of print. In the English devotional work of George Herbert, such as the well-­known pattern poems “Easter Wings” and “The Temple,” the white space of the page functions to focus and frame the central typographic figures. Herbert’s devotional compositional act becomes a visual object of devotion for the reader (fig. 16.1). Page space isn’t a given, an a priori static entity, any more than a gutter, margin, or column. They are all elements of a system in which dynamic tensions work within a system of differen-

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16.1. George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” from The Temple (1633). Photograph: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library (STC 13183).

tial values. A margin is not an inert space, but a field of defining tension between text and page edge, and it exerts a graphical force in relation to other elements on the page (Drucker 11). In the earliest manuscripts and first print edition of Herbert’s poems in The Temple (1633), white space alone supports what is typographically and verbally expressed, without the use of bordering rule lines or illustrative engravings. It enforces visual form and verbal meaning, sharpening the texts’ “iconicity” and devotional power (Dane 101; McLeod 1994, 1998). The relationship of Herbert’s white spaces to the text parallels that between white space and the roman typefaces created in the late fifteenth century, such as those designed by Nicholas Jenson and Francesco Griffo, who modeled them on Italian

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humanist scripts. In contrast to the condensed black-­letter or texture typefaces that French and German printers brought with them from Mainz in the middle of the fifteenth century, the simpler roman lines of Jenson and Griffo increased space within the figure of the letter, clarifying form and facilitating reading. Rising to predominance in England and France by the middle of the sixteenth century, roman typefaces became key elements of Enlightenment-­era texts (Lawson 23). The eighteenth-­century French bibliographer Michel Mattaire sardonically wondered why Jenson bothered even to print in black letter, which Mattaire dismissed as “ugly . . . difficult to read and deformed to the sight,” after having introduced such “beautiful roman script” (qtd. in Dane 59). Along with the introduction of new typefaces across Europe, and the production of brighter paper and better ink, the slow but widespread adoption of the paragraph also whitened the printed page. Henri-­Jean Martin sees in the use of the paragraph the “definitive triumph of white space over black type” and points to the way that it “facilitated fluent reading” (329, 330). Illustrating what he calls “the greatest change in the way texts were cast into print between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries,” Roger Chartier shows how the inexpensive reprints of Bibliothèque bleue in France (issued from the early seventeenth to the mid-­nineteenth century) encouraged new readings “of the same texts or the same genres” simply by their typographic decisions. The printer-­publishers broke individual texts down into discrete “separate units,” introducing “breathing space onto the page” by segmenting long passages into paragraphs, indenting paragraphs, and inserting blank space and section headings between larger units of discourse; they also incorporated woodblock prints and other typographic signals of division. The visual articulation of the page was designed to “echo” and make immediately visible the discursive argument (Chartier 1994, 11). Through such typographic organization of the printed page, the Bibliothèque bleue reprints constituted a “new public” (12). They not only initiated less experienced or

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uneducated readers into the sphere of print but also helped form them into readers and consumers of print by organizing the page into more accessible spatial units. SPACES OF INTERACTION

White space and other forms of verbal gaps could also point to the unwritten, the unsaid, and thus take on more pointed meanings and invite new forms of interaction. Looking to a volume of poetry like The Florence Miscellany (1785), for example, one finds blank spaces in a number of poems where lines should be. Published in Florence at a time when the ruling Austrian Duke Leopold exercised aggressive censorship over all publications, the book’s several blank spaces mark its politics, not only signaling to readers where poems are most political but also inviting them to fill in those white spaces with lines of their own composition. For their own friends, the authors of The Florence Miscellany privately printed the missing passages, which then could be pasted into the original book. As a result, there now exist at least three separate versions of the book: those containing the original white spaces, those with printed lines pasted in, and those with original lines handwritten into the page. [paper; thickening] With Napoleonic censorship in France instituted as of January 1800 and in German states beginning in 1810, the marking of white space carried political signification as well. In his 1827 satire of German censorship, Heinrich Heine deployed white space, dashes, and the words “German censor” and “idiot” to signify the omissions and changes forced by the censor. Enduring similar censorship of their engravings and lithographs since 1820, French journals of the early nineteenth century demonstrate how the manipulation and design of white space could be intermedial. In 1831, for example, La Caricature employs dashes and white space to shape the image of a pear alluding to King Louis Philippe [disruptions], while the editor of Le Bouf-

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fon follows a more traditional practice to highlight censorship when he apologizes in a wordy discussion of contemporary censorship for a blank page in a previous issue where a caricature was to have appeared (2 February 1868). In all of these examples, publishers and authors sought to provoke particular types of interaction with the printed objects. But not all dashes and blanks were manifestly political or the delayed effects of a busy censor. Perhaps the most famous dash in all of German literature can be found in the second paragraph of Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Marquise von O. After Graf F. rescues the marquise from the conquering Russian troops, he then addressed the lady politely in French, offered her his arm and led her into the other wing of the palace which the flames had not yet reached and where, having already been stricken speechless by her ordeal, she now collapsed in a dead faint. Then—­the officer instructed the Marquise’s frightened servants, who presently arrived, to send for a doctor; he assured them that she would soon recover, replaced his hat and returned to the fighting. (Kleist 2–­3)

Kleist has traditionally been read as using the dash to mark the rape of the Marquise von O. by Graf F., who before this scene was presented as the gallant soldier. Many scholars have read such blanks as a failure of representation, but as we have shown they can also be understood as an exhortation to interactivity. They invite the reader to supply—­by imaginatively, vocally, or inscriptionally filling in—­what the censor omitted or what the author decided to leave unsaid. The gaps are read emphatically; they say more than what they purport to say. And insofar as they move the reader to think, speak, or write, they have an illocutionary force of sorts. They achieve by materially pointing their expressive circumscription. It is the typographic and formal organization of page space that makes possible this interactive production of meaning and formation of communities and affiliations.

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SPACES OF TIME AND FEELING

In the second edition of Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1741), Samuel Richardson uses page space at a crucial moment in the novel’s plot. Having finally been married to Mr. B that morning, Pamela prepares for her wedding night—­a tricky subject, but one that could not be passed over in a book so deeply concerned with male sexual desire and female sexual virtue. At this moment, Pamela records the movement of time meticulously, dividing it into segments separated from each other by a single black line running across the page: “Eight o’Clock at Night” to “Ten o’Clock at Night” to “Eleven o’Clock Thursday Night,” when it is clearly time to go to bed (2:184–­86). After committing herself “to the Mercies of the Almighty, who has led me thro’ so many strange Scenes of Terror and Affrightment, to the Happy, yet Awful moment,” Pamela asks for her parents’ prayers, adding that they won’t, of course, see her letter until after the moment has passed. She closes the entry with repetition, extending the final lines of text: “Good-­night, Good-­night! God bless you, and God bless me. Amen, Amen if this be his blessed Will” (2:186). Another thick black line divides Pamela’s inscription from the entry, headed “friday evening” and opening with an exclamation on Mr. B: “O How this dear, excellent Man indulges me in every thing!” (2:186). The lines and the white space around them thus represent Pamela’s continued delays before the consummation of her marriage, and the act of consummation itself, materializing her fear and the sexual act itself in the space of the page. Janine Barchas has detailed Richardson’s use of typography to manage temporality in his novels. Barchas pays special attention to the use of printers’ flowers (or fleurons) in Clarissa, arguing that these graphic additions allowed Richardson to “narrow the temporal fissures attendant upon the epistolary form and exert greater control over the novel’s nagging moments of narrative dissonance” (Barchas 120). Noting Richardson’s dual role as author and printer, Barchas argues that ornaments allow

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Richardson to “articulate within the visual space of the printed page the temporal space of the fiction” (Barchas 120). This graphic experimentation in mid-­eighteenth century novels reflected contemporary philosophical interest in the influence of the passions on thought; it also reflected practical developments in print and vernacular instruction. These developments are exemplified in the work of John Mason whose 1748 Essay on Elocution and Pronunciation incorporated the space of the page into the mechanism of punctuation. Mason aimed to improve the art of public speaking in Britain, and crucial to his project was the reform of reading printed texts aloud. He turned to punctuation to achieve his elocutionary ends, arguing that these marks were visual indicators of pauses in speech rather than signals of the grammatical structure of the sentence. Recognizing the importance of appealing to the emotions as well as the understanding, Mason urged a “proper and just pronunciation” that functions sympathetically to “raise” in the audience the “same ideas [the author] intended to convey” and the “same passions he felt.” Allotting temporal values to the existing marks and to those he newly defined, Mason advocated the use of what he called the “double-­period, or blank line”—­a long rule following the period—­which he made equivalent in quantity to the time of two periods. He gave the paragraph break a pause equivalent to two “blank lines,” and he recommended the insertion of a “vacant line,” or blank space, between two paragraphs, which he made equivalent to the time of four “blank lines.” Long pauses have a communicative function, he claimed. They work on and within the reader and listener; they “at once compose and affect the Mind and give it Time to think.” “And therefore,” he continued, “in printing the most affecting parts of a Discourse, there should be (as we sometimes see there is) a frequent use of long Pauses . . . the periods, blank Lines, and paragraphs” (Mason 23). In a radical move, Mason thus invoked the space of the page to signal affecting and thought-­permitting pauses. He also tied the sphere of punctuation to the mid-­eighteenth century’s

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broader concerns with affectivity and sympathetic response, thereby raising basic concerns about intersubjective relations between and among people. Questions about the location of ideas and feelings in minds, how to transmit them, and the time sympathy requires were all brought into a discourse about the typographic organization of the printed page. “Blank lines” and vacant spaces on the printed page thus came to image the spaces between thinking and feeling subjects as well as the means of bridging that distance in reading aloud and speech (Carlson 2016, 186–­87). SUBLIME SEAS OF BL ANK

By 1800 in Britain, authors had begun triumphantly to proclaim the importance of controlling nonverbal elements of page space. Perhaps the most famous instance appears in Coleridge’s letter to Joseph Cottle during negotiations for the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Coleridge writes: Cottle, my dear Cottle, I meant to have written you an Essay on the Metaphysics of Typography; but I have not time.—­Take a few hints without the abstruse reasons for them with which I mean to favor you—­18 lines in a page, the lines closely printed, certainly, more closely than those of the Joan—­(Oh by all means closer! W. Wordsworth) equal ink; & large margins. That is beauty—­it may even under your immediate care mingle the sublime!—­—­(1:412)

The parenthetical insertion in Wordsworth’s handwriting draws attention to the physical proximity of the authors in their collaborative endeavor, but it also indicates a shared investment in typography and the spacing of the line. Comparisons to other octavos from the same period are illuminating. In contrast to the cluttered, double-­column pages of popular educational miscellanies like Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts in Poetry (1796) or the text-­packed pages of contemporary editions of Cowper’s

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Poems (1798), Coleridge and Wordsworth aim for clear text and wide margins. Unlike some of Cottle’s previous publications—­ Southey’s Poems (1797), for example, which is littered with ornate printer’s flowers throughout (fig. 16.2)—­the only adornment in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads is the double solid line separating title from poem (fig. 16.3). The volume pointedly preserves a sublime sea of blank paper. While numerous explanations have been offered up for Coleridge and Wordsworth’s interest in typography, it has not yet been linked to a broad shift in printing practice occurring around 1800. As in Lyrical Ballads itself, the foot of the pages of late eighteenth-­century books of poetry were often littered with notes. Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789–­1791) is perhaps the most extreme example of the practice of authorial annotation, but Thomas Gray had famously added footnotes to the collected edition of his Poems (London: Dodsley, 1768), which William Mason expanded exponentially in his posthumous The Poems of Mr. Gray (York, 1775). By the turn of the century, however, the typographic tide was changing, and endnotes began to replace footnotes. Charlotte Smith sums it up in a letter to publisher Joseph Johnson, in 1806: “It seems to be the fashion of the day to print the notes at the end; sometimes with a (V.N.). In this instance they would be rather numerous because of historical, biographical, & local facts relative to Beechy & the Coast” (2003, 741). As Judith Phillips Stanton suggests in her editorial note to this letter, V.N. stands for vide notam, a direction meaning “see note” which Lord Strangford used frequently in his Poems, from the Portuguese of Luis de Cameons (1803). Smith has effectively instructed her publisher to put her extensive notes in the back of the book rather than on the foot of the page. Robert Southey’s troubles with the reception of Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) indicate why the endnote became fashionable around the turn of the century. After much back-­and-­forth between Southey and Longman about where to put the notes, the poem appeared in print with footnotes. With this format, the book materialized Southey’s commonplace method of com-

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16.2. Last page of “To the Genius of Africa,” from Robert Southey’s Poems (1797). Digitized by: Google. Original from: University of California Libraries.

position, his process of compiling, selecting, and arranging quotations from other sources to build the plot and imagery of the poem (Porter 2009). This condition led the reviewer Francis Jeffrey to scoff that the poem was “little else than his commonplace book versified”: because Southey “generally lays before his readers the whole original passage from which his imitation has been taken,” it is obvious on every page that the poem was “entirely composed of scraps.” As a result, the harmony of the work was, for Jeffrey, very much like the pattern of a “patchwork drapery” (Smith 2003, 741). In the effort (he claimed) to fend off charges of plagiarism, Southey opened himself to the perhaps more damning charges of incongruity and disunity. As if to flaunt his disregard for linear reading and epic conventions, Southey often accentuates the disruptive tendencies of the clatter of prose running across the bottom on the page, adding tan-

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16.3. From Wordsworth’s “Lines left upon a seat of a Yew-­Tree,” Lyrical Ballads (1798). Photograph: Rare Books and Manuscript Library and the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute of the Ohio State University Libraries.

gents and emendations until the original subject of the annotation has been lost in a string of tenuous associations (Porter 2011) As has often been argued of the estrangement cultivated in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, Southey seems interested in using the space of the page to throw the reader off kilter. Critics of annotation practice have long argued that footnotes shift how the reader approaches and experiences the text (Lipking; Benstock; White; Cosgrove; Labbe; Porter 2007). Patricia White’s discussion of scholarly editions illustrates the possible effects of reading the annotated page: as the reader’s eye moves from one block of text to another, the continuity of linear reading is fragmented, giving way to a potentially disorienting experience. The page layout of eighteenth-­century annotated texts, in which notes are often signaled by an asterisk at the beginning of the passage that the note explains, invites readers

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to choose how they interact with it, reading the text then note, or note then text, or just the text, or just the notes. By setting blocks of text in different fonts and typefaces up against each other on the page, and separating them with equally noticeable blocks of white space, the annotated page presents the reader with a dizzying array of possibilities. In the aftermath of the elocutionary movement and its attention to the cognitive effects of punctuation and page space, it makes sense that Southey, Smith, Wordsworth, and Coleridge came to imagine that one might, as the preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads proclaims, disrupt “certain known habits of association” by manipulating the layout of the page and the space of the printed line (1:ix). In other words, at the turn of the century, poets began to believe they could change readers’ mental habits by printing a book of “poems so materially different from those, upon which general approbation is at present bestowed” (our italics). The typographic organization of a printed page’s space could mold (or disrupt) not only a moment of reading but also the entire practice of reading, leading the reader to “think, and think, and think again” (in the 1798 edition). But the typographical elements of the printed space could also have deleterious effects on readers as well. In the conclusion to Conflict of the Faculties, Immanuel Kant admonished contemporary printers for damaging the eyes of readers. Their use of gray instead of black ink, letters with “small feet, not with broad heads that would correspond to their name” [Buchstaben], and small text were an assault on readers’ eyes. The ways in which ink color and letterspacing organized the page interrupted the moment of thought. Kant complained that sometimes when he read, “a certain brightness suddenly spreads over the page, confusing and mixing up all the letters until they are completely illegible.” The very materiality of the printed page preempted the “speech” that the printed text was purported to transmit. It made philosophical reasoning impure. But in an implicit concession to the phenomenality of thought, its need of technologies like print, Kant called not for a purer metaphysics

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but rather for a better typography. What philosophical thinking needed in 1798 was a clearer, more legible typography. It needed a better printed page with which to think.

17

STA G E S In the world of eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century cultural spaces, the stage presents an especially complex site of interactivity. Theater historians from Leo Hughes and Marc Baer to Gillian Russell and Daniel O’Quinn have vividly captured the unruly and riotous nature of British playhouses, and Angela Esterhammer and Erik Simpson have reminded us of the attraction that Italian performers—­not only commedia dell’arte actors but also improvisatori—­posed to European audiences. Part of the interactive nature of their performances, of course, can be attributed to the spaces in which they performed. Theaters in those days were well-­lit, noisy, and boisterous spaces, illuminated by hundreds of candles so that performers and audience members were equally visible to one another. In this sense, they present us with a truly social form of media in which audience members came to cheer favorite performers and ogle each other, and where their contributions, for good or for ill, were frequently constitutive of an evening’s performance. For confirmation of this one need only remember that two key moments in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) occur in the Orchard Street Theater in Bath. In the first, Catherine Morland manages to melt the frost of an affronted Henry Tilney, whom she spots near the beginning of the performance occupying a box opposite to hers. In the second, more important episode of that evening, John Thorpe spots General Tilney among those present, joins him, and proceeds, in his rattling way, to exaggerate Catherine’s wealth, thus prompting the general’s greed and her invitation to Northanger Abbey. All this happens while the play is going

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on—­because the playhouse was every bit as much a social space as the Pump Room or any of Bath’s other attractions. This interactivity, however, extended well beyond performers and audience members to the printed page itself. Plays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may often have entered the world first as performances, but that did not stop them from being accompanied by a host of printed texts, including newspaper advertisements, playbills, broadsides, and short pamphlets containing favorite speeches, songs, and choruses. Performances were advertised and reviewed, and actors’ memoirs and behind-­the-­scenes accounts of various green rooms retain their popularity to the present day. In addition, once a play was well into its initial run, the playwright frequently published its script to achieve still greater profits. Herein lies yet another kind of interactivity—­an intermedial one—­in which the transitory nature of performance comes into dialogue, if not conflict, with the more permanent nature of print. For a number of book and theater historians, this relation between performance and print has remained at best problematic, at worst fundamentally vexed. Recovering past performances through print has sometimes seemed an impossible task because of the instability of dramatic texts and the unreliability of theatrical data. D. F. McKenzie has gone so far as to claim the relation of textual criticism and theater to be one of “embarrassed impotence” (50), and Peggy Phelan has insisted that performance can neither be saved nor recorded without “becom[ing] something other than performance” (146) [ephemerality]. But others, including Robert Hume and Jeffrey Cox (1999), have addressed some of these issues by showing that printed works about the theater nevertheless can tell us about, among other things, acting styles and celebrity status, about the political stakes of individual performances, and about what mix of genres might best constitute a full evening’s entertainment. Accordingly, this chapter insists on the inseparability of print and performance. While limiting examples mostly to the London stage, the fundamental argument about theater’s

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relation to print extends beyond Britain to a larger claim that the interaction between page and stage constituted a European experience of theater in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even when the specific forms vary. PR EPL AY

For the majority of eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century British theatergoers, dramatic performance began hours before the doors of the theater opened, usually with reading the morning paper [advertising]. There one could find area theaters advertising that evening’s fare, often highlighting various enticements, such as the addition of new performers or dresses, original music, or special scenery. That many papers placed theater advertisements at the top left of their front pages confirms theater’s centrality to urban culture. For London readers, at least, no other piece of publicity could hold equal importance to the performances offered that day. The shared diurnal rhythms of theaters and daily papers, moreover, made for intimate relations between these cultural media [ephemerality]. As Stuart Sherman has noted of David Garrick’s public relations strategies, “it is precisely the shared ephemerality (etymologically, the ‘day-­ness’) of the press and playhouse—­the perception, common to actors and audiences, news writers and news readers, managers and publishers, that today’s ‘product’ must be supplanted by tomorrow’s—­that drove Garrick’s interactions with the papers” (Sherman 968). Having arranged and set the type for the rest of the next day’s news, editors would send a messenger to each of the theaters late in the evening to await the announcement of the next day’s performance. Part of the uncertainty lay with that night’s audience, whose applause or disapprobation often determined the next day’s offering. Only when this final, essential piece of news was received would the dailies go forward with printing. Even those theatergoers lacking daily access to newsprint faced no shortage of printed sources with which to interact.

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In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the fame of performers like Thomas Betterton, Anne Oldfield, Dorothea Jordan, Sarah Siddons, John Philip Kemble, Fanny Kemble Knight, Edmund Kean, Charles Macready, Ellen Terry, and Henry Irving transformed actors into celebrities, and engravers and printmakers found a lucrative industry in producing theatrical portraits and scenes from popular plays. Unlike commissioned portraits, these engravings were priced well within reach of the middle class, and many were printed in formidable numbers. Theatrical engravings, as Shearer West notes, wielded such influence because print shops displayed them in shop windows—­intertheatricality at work—­and, because many print shops lined the streets near the theaters in London, patrons experienced these images before and after a given performance. Put another way, what Richard Schechner identifies as the liminal processes of approaching, entering, and leaving the theater were framed by visual displays of performers, which prepared an audience to experience and then relinquish the performative stage (Schechner 122). Playbills perform this same process of framing a performance even more directly, presenting a wealth of pertinent information in a manner at once economically efficient and graphically arresting. Like other forms of broadside, they constitute a portable, powerful form of print advertising and distribution. Theatergoers saved playbills from particular performances; theater fans collected and scrapbooked them systematically. In truncated form, they provided the templates for newspaper advertisements and for the opening of performance reviews. They even served as vehicles for political satire; as John Barrell has demonstrated, the popularity and effectiveness of mock playbills in the 1790s testifies to their ubiquity as cultural forms everyday print. PL AY

On arrival to the theater, one’s interaction with print might even intensify. Playbills would be posted at the entrance, sometimes

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explaining last-­minute changes to casting. Occasionally handbills were smuggled in by audience members wishing to support or condemn a particular performer or managerial practice, as with the riots over raising prices of 1737 at Drury Lane and 1809 at Covent Garden (Baer 58, 18–­37). And with that most popular of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century theatrical forms, pantomime, print served an essential role on the stage itself, often supplying the role of speech in this frequently wordless mix of music, dance, trick work, and buffoonery (Mayer 19–­74; O’Brien 33–­59). These print supplements were especially necessary in the “illegitimate” theaters, so called because they did not possess royal patents and, consequently, were banned from performing spoken drama. Where language could not be spoken, it had to be sung or printed, with actors deploying print in place of speech through the use of signs or large scrolls with printed speeches on them, which they would unroll to display to each other and to the audience. Thus, in the hippodramatic pantomime One Foot by Land, & One Foot by Sea; or, The Tartar’s Tartar’d (New Olympic Theatre, 1811), we find Baghwan Ho, after leading a grand procession, judging a hunting competition, and bestowing the prize on Baron Rubeninski, declaring to the Baron via scroll, “Now for our Attack / Upon the Usurpers” (Male 8). The printed word here takes on the same function as the captions of silent films. The newer, more spectacular, or more pantomimic the production, the more likely print was to play a constitutive role in an audience’s experience of a given performance. Part of the reason for this is commonsensical. Well-­known plays from the repertory need little introduction, although theaters periodically would sell printed versions of them on site in the event of a particularly successful or controversial revival. Whenever possible, authors of new plays would wait for a few weeks before publishing to guard against piracy by rival houses. This was especially possible of new plays premiering at legitimate theaters, which, enjoying the luxury of spoken exposition by characters on stage, did not require printed aids—­not so of new or lesser-­

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known productions of the illegitimate houses. There, audiences usually needed some kind of outline, summary, or script of the wordless action they were about to witness. Theaters were happy to oblige, selling texts to help identify characters and, where appropriate, to provide audience members with the words and underlying tunes (if familiar) for songs in the production. Others were still more complete, supplying dramatis personae, summaries of scenes, and lyrics of featured songs. The earliest preserved document of this kind carries the full title The vocal parts of an entertainment, called the Necromancer or Harlequin Doctor Faustus. As perform’d at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s-­Inn-­ Fields. To which is prefix’d, a short account of Doctor Faustus; and how he came to be reputed a magician, published in 1723 or 1724 and “printed and sold at the Book-­Seller’s Shop, at the Corner of Searle-­Street,” next door to John Rich’s theater at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Though not programs in the sense that we know them, texts like this one served some of the same purposes. Much in the same way modern operagoers often read the plot synopsis before the beginning of each new act, audiences of pantomimes and other spectacular genres used these guides to parse how the action of a given scene fit into the larger story being told. Here, the “experience” of theater is constituted from the interaction between printed guide and actors’ performance. One might forgo the purchase, but in the case of an unfamiliar spectacle it could materially detract from the fullness of one’s experience. R EPL AY

Full play texts stand as extreme versions of this sort of theatrical guide because of the power with which they can remediate stage performances. This is true both for contemporary audiences and for modern cultural historians. Where they exist, published play texts provide among the most complete records we have of dramatic performances, although they were intended primarily for theatergoers and sometimes sold inside theaters. Patrons may have collected them as souvenirs to memorialize

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their experience, or to clarify their perception of the production. Eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century readers thus could expect play texts to evoke performance and anchor their memory of it, since play texts provided a host of theatrical elements, including prologue, epilogue, dramatis personae, and stage directions, in addition to the play itself. The versions of these elements contained by a given play text, moreover, could further affect reader perceptions and experience. The original printing of William Congreve’s Love for Love, for example, featured the dramatis personae and actors’ names of the 1695 premiere, an epilogue, and two prologues: one “propos’d to be spoken” at the play’s opening by the actor Anne Bracegirdle, and a second one actually spoken by the great Restoration actor Thomas Betterton. All of this seems specifically designed for readers interested either in recalling the 1695 production or experiencing it by proxy. The decision to include the unspoken prologue can even be said to provide a peep behind the scenes, a way of eavesdropping on the process of the play’s production. Except for a 1731 Dublin edition, the unspoken prologue was dropped after 1720, after which publishers routinely printed the 1695 cast, prologue, and epilogue until midcentury. With two printings of 1768 and 1770, however, the text again changed. These no longer feature the names of the original actors in the prologue, dramatis personae, and epilogue; in addition, the 1770 printing contains a frontispiece scene with actors in modern (1770s rather than 1690s) dress. The effect is to strip the play of its late seventeenth-­century origins, inviting readers to imagine a performance in some ideal or modern form. Just over two decades later, John Bell’s 1791 edition completes this process of modernization while reinstating earlier bibliographic forms. Determinedly modern, its dramatis personae features the actors from the most recent Drury Lane and Covent Garden productions. Taken as a whole, these editions embody a practice Joseph Roach has called surrogation (2), whereby present performers attempt to make themselves fit substitutes for predecessors

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of stature. Here the process is assisted by reprinting the original cast until either the memory of the original performance is forgotten or adequate replacements are found. At the very least, reprinted texts complicate the aftermath of a particular performance by placing it alongside one long mythologized by historians of the stage. This pattern of idealization and modernization is even echoed in the illustration of play texts [frontispieces], where some pictures recall particular actors, gestures, and scenes, while others come from fantasy. Bell’s editions of the 1770s and 1790s popularized, if not pioneered, this practice; later collections of plays like Cumberland’s British Theatre extended the practice to include printed descriptions of each character’s dress alongside the obligatory frontis portrait of a recent actor in a particular role. Here the aim is at once to print the play in its most modern dress while at the same time providing readers with assistance in making particular characters their own through home performance. The point here is a straightforward, though often overlooked, one in the history of theater’s interaction with print: print shaped not only readers’ experience of performance but also a performance’s afterlife. Within this economy, the choices that editors make with editions—­or that artists take with their subjects—­have the potential to shape both the experience of theater and one’s memory of it. In published play texts, this becomes most clear in those cases when artists present actors in roles they didn’t actually play. In the theater itself, switching roles could be anathema. Generally speaking, major roles belonged to specific actors, so that when eighteenth-­century audiences arrived to see Love for Love, they expected its hero, Valentine, to be played only by Thomas Betterton and no one else until he retired. Thus audiences in 1772 rioted one evening at the announcement that Charles Macklin was to play Macbeth, and in 1813 we find Jane and Henry Austen giving up their seats on discovering that Sarah Siddons was not to play Constance in King John (Byrne). With theatrical texts, however, audiences appear far more willing to

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entertain alternative castings [frontispieces]. Here, the publisher John Bell appears again as an innovator, since, as Kalman Burnim and Philip Highfill have noted, nearly one-­third of the frontispieces to Bell’s British Theatre “present actors in roles that they did not play” (22). We might be tempted to find in this practice an early version of the modern craze for “fantasy” sports, in which participants can assemble together combinations of players impossible in reality; but the effect of these collections and their theatrical portraits goes deeper. Since most of the dramas in Bell’s series and its rival, The New English Theatre (1776), were older plays from the established repertory, the effect was not just to reprint the repertory as a printed dramatic canon but also to recast repertory performance into an equally ideal form. Not all imaginary castings, of course, were chosen for their elevating propensities. One example of a very opposite tendency is Bell’s 1786 frontis portrait of the popular actress and singer Mary Ann Wrighten. In that year’s edition of Bell’s British Theatre, Wrighten is depicted in The Taming of the Shrew as Katherine, a role she never performed. She had, however, played the role of Catherine in Garrick’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, called Catherine and Petruchio, on multiple occasions during the 1780s. So there is a strong logic present, but nevertheless the three-­act Catherine and Petruchio is no Taming of the Shrew, and Bell was hardly making a case for Wrighten as a quintessential Katherine. It is far more likely that he wished to capitalize on Wrighten’s notoriety; having experienced serious illnesses in the months before the picture was commissioned and published, she proceeded to leave her actor-­husband and daughters and for another man. The picture shows her in a somewhat unruly stance, and thus reads as a reminder of her prior role—­a reasonable remediation of The Taming of the Shrew—­and a coupling of her celebrity to the wildness of Shakespeare’s heroine. Most fundamentally, it shows Bell seeking to exploit a public hungry to know the details of actors’ lives. Both of these tendencies come together in the practice of “thickening” a play text by adding further illustrations and por-

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traits to it [thickening]. In many ways, this activity represents an extension of the tendency of theatergoers in this period to collect together illustrations, used tickets, playbills, and scraps bits of print into scrapbooks. Here, however, the process is taken further: a given play text or collection of plays is first disbanded and then interleaved with blank pages, to which illustrations and other printed documents are attached, expanding the original volume’s content and size. Usually, such projects were reserved for favorite dramatists. Predictably, many are preserved in archives are of Shakespeare; but it would be a mistake to consider these thickened editions merely as monuments of appreciation. As Stuart Sillars has noted, many extra-illustrated volumes of Shakespeare combine documentary evidence of their compilers’ theatergoing with a blend of actors’ portraits and more “picturesque studies of character and scene” (216–­19). As such, they provide us with detailed examples of audience involvement in a play’s afterlife. What they make clear is the collaborative nature of this process of making meaning: that after seeing a play the compiler of an extra-illustrated volume interweaves theatrical artifacts, portraits of actors, and illustrations made for books, all of which constitute a patron’s reaction and augmentation of a play. At the very least, they testify to the more general tendency of theatergoers to use a variety of printed documents to create their own annotated, personalized versions of plays—­the results representing no particular production but rather an individual theatergoer’s accumulated experience of text and performance. MENTA L PL AY

Thus far, we have focused exclusively on print’s role in helping to constitute theatrical experience. As a way of concluding, we shift to its historical function when unaccompanied by public performance: whether because the play was never performed, or was performed only in the private, or read alone in the imaginative space of the closet. An increasingly common phenome-

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non in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, many plays were printed prior to, and often in lieu of, public staging. As a result, a number of dramatic works were experienced through the page rather than the stage. Whether this phenomenon helped to produce a vogue in theatrical criticism—­in which commentators argued for the superiority of reading drama to witnessing its performance—­is uncertain. But by the early nineteenth century, theater critics, among them Samuel Coleridge and William Hazlitt, were periodically arguing that even dramas that were regularly staged like the tragedies of Shakespeare could be better experienced through solitary reading. That this strain of criticism became popular in the age of great actors like Siddons, Kemble, and Kean is remarkable enough. That it also appears in various dramatic works—­such as Lord Byron’s Manfred: A Dramatic Poem (1817) and Sardanapalus, a Tragedy; The Two Foscari, a Tragedy; and Cain, a Mystery (1821), and Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama (1820)—­indicates the stage’s centrality to authors’ imaginations even when they sought to look outside of it. Yet, as a number of recent theater historians have argued, it would be a mistake to consider Byron’s notion of a mental theater to be merely an antitheatrical one, particularly given his energetic participation on the committee that oversaw Drury Lane in the mid-­1810s. That all of his plays were staged successfully—­and repeatedly—­during the Victorian era testifies at least to his knowledge of stagecraft. Within this debate over the function of play texts either never performed or published before performance, Joanna Baillie’s dramatic works provide one of the most important clarifications of Romantic closet drama. Though she first printed her Plays on the Passions in three volumes (1798, 1802, and 1812), her critical introductions make it plain that she intended her works to be staged, and even hoped them to become part of the repertory. In her 1804 Miscellaneous Plays, she explicitly announced her intention “to add a few pieces to the stock of what may be called our national or permanently acting plays” (iii). At the same time, however, her dramaturgy seeks to harness the early nineteenth-­

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century taste for closet drama by projecting that space onto the stage and transforming it into a locus of spectacle. Her best and most harrowing scenes, therefore, whether in Ethwald or Orra, De Monfort or Witchcraft, are those that feature characters alone and in some form of anguish. Nevertheless, when De Monfort was first staged in 1800 at Drury Lane, featuring the two leading tragic actors of the day, John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, its success was muted. Baillie found rousing success in 1810 with The Family Legend, which opened the new Edinburgh Theatre, but even this triumph and later revivals of De Montfort could not dispel the widespread sentiment that Baillie’s plays were better read than performed. This preference for page over stage finds its apotheosis in the criticism of Charles Lamb, who theorized that theatrical experience had the power to usurp the readerly imagination. For Lamb, reading allowed for imaginative possibilities which suffered “a change and a diminution” once fixed by performance (1811, 310). There can be no doubt that this strain of criticism invokes a high Romantic argument, which elevates vision over sight and imagination over the senses (Park 170), as did Lamb’s famous “opinion that the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any other dramatist whatever [because of t]heir distinguishing excellence” (1811, 300). Lamb’s privileging of print assumes reading to be an immersive experience, one difficult to achieve in the unruly space of the public theater. Still, it is equally important to remember that Lamb and Coleridge were also dramatic authors. Both had stage ambitions; both succeeded in having their plays mounted on the London stage. In the case of Lamb’s two farces Mr. H and The Pawnbroker’s Daughter the results were unsuccessful, the former damned so resolutely by its Drury Lane audience that Lamb joined in the hissing of his own play. In the case of Coleridge’s Remorse (1813), however, stage success was immediate and spectacular. In the first months of its performance, Remorse became the longest-­running play of the then-­ young nineteenth century.

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And so the fundamental point of print’s constitutive role in theatrical experience remains, even in the face of Lamb’s pronouncements on the superiority of reading drama in the closet or Coleridge’s observations on dramatic imagination and Shakespeare’s characters. Both arguments came from seasoned dramatic writers who relished drama both on the stage and in the closet. Both came from writers who understood not only the difference between the two media but also their relation to one another. Both, in other words, reflect not an insistence on the hierarchical superiority of print over the stage, but rather reveal most fully what we have presented as the fundamental—­ and fraught—­interpellation of stage and page. As Lamb noted, he was “not arguing that Hamlet should not be acted, . . . but how much Hamlet is made a different thing by being acted” (1811, 302). It is this understanding of print’s relationship to performance, both on the part of the author and on the part of the public, that constitutes the common thread linking the British experience to that of the Continent, uniting them despite their at times significant differences. In the print market of the Continent, daily papers were rare before the French Revolution and performances relied heavily on affiches to draw audiences in eighteenth-­century Paris (Feyel 2000). Moreover, prepublication censorship was the norm in most of Europe, meaning that, for example, the Riformatori in Padua had to approve the content of libretti before they were published. But these particularities did not change the fact that both print and performance together contributed to a dynamic understanding of what constituted the work in both contexts. As such, if playbills supplied the text for staged pantomimes in Britain, the printed libretti in Venice provided the authorization for words to be spoken on stage, even when they didn’t appear in the text (Selfridge-­Field). In Britain, as in Europe, spectators were also readers and social actors, who, together with performers, printers, composers, and playwrights, all contributed to the cultural impact of the stage. In France in the years after 1789, this cultural impact was itself

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a subject of consternation. Critics of the theater attacked its tendency to dissimulation and the way it was presumed to separate actors from their audience and inculcate an unhealthy degree of passivity in spectators. As scholars including Paul Friedland and Marie-­Hélène Huet have described, the line between theater and the new forms of political representation that the Revolution brought to bear was often troublingly thin, and the theater increasingly came into conflict with the requirement for political transparency. These issues came to a head in the grandiose public festivals organized regularly throughout the 1790s to commemorate and replay the Revolution’s key events. Festivals and the stage shared a history, actors, and props. Famously, at the Festival of Reason in Notre-­Dame Cathedral in November 1793, an actress from the Opéra represented Liberty, seated atop a plaster “mountain.” It was appropriate, if coincidental, that this living sculpture was the wife of Momoro, a printer. While performances such as this one were short lived, they were perpetuated in printed texts and images, which offered a means of participating in a festival beyond its temporal limits. Here, as elsewhere, etchings and engravings representing revolutionary festivals, along with the songs, poems, maps, tourist guides, itineraries, and other printed material produced to accompany these vast outdoor stages, and circulating far beyond those in attendance on the day, played a crucial role in defining the cultural and political meanings of theatrical representation.

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THICKENING When John Bull expanded James Granger’s two-­volume Biographical History of England (1769) to thirty-­five folio volumes, he started a craze for “grangerizing,” as it became known in the 1880s. Bull dismembered Granger’s book by cutting the text into pieces that he subsequently reaffixed to the backing paper on which portrait prints were mounted [paper]. As Robert Wark points out, Bull must have consumed at least two copies of Granger’s book to make up his extra-illustrated volumes. This was not exactly what Granger had in mind when he published his “methodical catalogue of engraved British heads,” which had the stated aim of “reducing our biography to a system” and giving the reader a “knowledge of portraits” (Granger, title page, our emphasis). Granger imagined the Biographical History might be used as a guide for organizing one’s collection; Bull repurposed the catalog text into a series of captions in a hortus siccus of mounted prints. Flipping through the sixty Queen Elizabeths and more than a hundred Charles the Firsts included in Bull’s collation indicates that the result of Bull’s process was not a “reduction” but rather wholesale transformation by amplification. We begin with this salient example of book history because it typifies a broader spectrum of readerly interactivity related to the customization of individual volumes [marking]. Here, we consider the practice of “thickening” by pasting or “tipping in” prints, autograph letters, printed pages, maps, original art, or other materials into published books. To describe these processes simply as “adding” misses the point. In contrast to the practice of binding a series of pamphlets or plays together

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[binding], interleaving and extra-illustration reveal readers engaged in more radically altering and remaking printed books. We argue that the practice is both dialogic and self-­reflexive: formally, thickened books consciously reflect on augmentation as a form of interacting with the printed text. As a form of annotation, interleaving and extra-illustration function in ways akin to an individual reader’s marginalia: inserted materials variously reiterate, elucidate, emend, recast, argue with, and critique the existing text. But thickened books also replicate the condition of the print paratext, particularly the armature of footnotes lining the pages of historical and literary books in the second half of the eighteenth century. As with Edward Gibbon’s infamously destabilizing notes to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Robert Southey’s unwieldy annotated epics, tipped-­in materials threaten to disrupt or even swallow up the printed text, raising questions about its primacy. Through the first decades of the nineteenth century these unique, multimedial objects often staged a violent form of interactivity, one bent on obfuscating, misdirecting, disordering, or mocking the printed text. In doing so, they dismantled the encyclopedic goal of completion pursued by Bull and his contemporaries. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the practice of thickening books was itself undergoing a transformation. As we show, the dialogic, reflexive, and interactive nature of thickened books became increasingly homogenized as publishers began to produce books with blank leaves ready-­made to receive specific, commercially produced images. This shift responds to new technologies of print production like lithography and to the expansion of networks for print distribution, including the greater speed and ease of dissemination enabled by railways. While books purpose-made for thickening still admit a degree of personalization of the print commodity—­and still invite interaction between reader and text and/or book—­the practice of extra-illustration became more scripted as its material foundation became more homogeneous and widely accessible. In the democratization of an aristocratic pastime, the thickened book

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became a regulatory mechanism for organizing experience, for navigating the world of objects and people by interacting with the text [proliferation]. COMPLETION: A BULL IN THE PRINT SHOP

Readers were thickening books and cutting out prints well before the fad took hold in Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century. Earlier readers engaged in this process for a variety of reasons, from personal devotional concerns to scholarly collecting to fashionable decoration. An example housed in the Huntington Library gives a sense of the way interleaving prints could meld public and private concerns (fig. 18.1, plate 16). An authorized English version of the Holy Bible, bound with the Book of Common Prayer and The Whole Book of Psalms, includes art by Catholic dissident William Faithorne tipped in to the text. Through interleaving, Catholics who were forced to attend Protestant services in seventeenth-­century England could gaze at devotional images even in stripped down Anglican churches. Thickening thus provided a platform for the expression of personal theological beliefs while also entering into a heated public debate over state mandates on faith and the political disenfranchisement of Catholics. Cutting and pasting illustrations could also serve in the pursuit of knowledge. The seventeenth century abounded in what came to be known as “paper museums,” collections of drawings and prints that had encyclopedic aims, the most famous of which was Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Museo Cartaceo in Rome (Heesen 2006, 38). In one of the last canonical examples of historia literaria, the Outline of a Universal History of Erudition (1752), the German scholar Johann Andreas Fabricius advised readers to use his text as the “basis for a commonplace book,” so that they could “interleave it with paper and thus add additional and curious items that they have found here and there and over time without much cost or effort collect good historical treasure” (4). For Fabricius, thickening a book was a means of storing the raw

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18.1. Authorized English version of The Holy Bible (1890), bound with the Book of Common Prayer and The Whole Book of Psalms, including art by Catholic dissident William Faithorne tipped in to the text. Photograph: Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California (B 7770.8.5).

material, the information, that scholars could retrieve and use in their own works. In some cases, however, the book was not imagined as the final product in this practice of collecting and collating. As the German scholar Sigmund Jacob Apin would write in his Anleitung wie man die Bildnisse berühmter und gelehrter Männer mit Nutzen Sammlen soll (Introduction on how one should usefully collect the portraits of famous and learned men, 1728), while everyone around him was busy pasting portraits into books, he was hard at work taking them out (22). The cabinet, not the book, was considered the ideal container for the compendium of knowledge. While sharing attributes with earlier practices of extraillustration and those in other national traditions, Bull’s volumes of Granger’s Biographical History set off a massive, unprecedented craze for extra-illustration in Britain. Bull’s volumes thus offer a template for understanding some of the key attributes of thickened books and their relationship with other forms of print

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interactivity in the second half of the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth. For example, Bull meticulously annotated many of the portrait prints he acquired, noting the auction where he purchased a given print, the price he paid, and the relative status of the print compared with other engraved impressions. Bull’s “annotations” often include other tipped-­in materials like manuscript letters, which add more layers (and voices) to the dialogism of autograph annotations in the margins of books (Jackson). Multiplying quantity and kinds of responses to the printed text was typical of thickened books produced in the Bull-­ Granger circle. Thomas Pennant, for example, extra-illustrated his own published and manuscript topographical tours (both real and imaginary), and Bull’s interleaved editions of Pennant’s works include watercolor illustrations commissioned from Moses Griffith, Pennant’s personal draftsman. Beyond linking Bull and Pennant through the original art they commissioned, these examples confuse published and unpublished text, print and manuscript, author and reader, text and paratext. These extra-illustrated volumes showcase a specific kind of multimodal and transmedial print interactivity, one that functions as metacommentary on the practices of responding to and/or transforming print objects. Like other ancillary materials—­ including reader’s marginalia, authorial prefaces, and publisher’s advertisements—­the pasted-­in or tipped-­in prints and marginal illustrations of the thickened book comment on the text while also extending it diachronically. Unlike annotations or printed paratexts, the thickened book redoubles the text both conceptually and materially, multiplying the physical and conceptual space of the book by an order of magnitude. This aspect of spatial amplification has special relevance for the interleaving craze in eighteenth-­century Britain. Even as Bull’s thickening radically transforms Granger’s text—­both the physical copies he chopped up and repurposed as captions, and the subsequent print edition, which Granger amended to include new prints discovered by Bull—­Bull’s thirty-­six-­volume version retains a fundamental consonance with the original

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printed book. Beyond their personal and social connections, a shared idea of history underwrites Granger’s text and Bull’s extra-illustration practice. From the first appearance of Granger’s volumes, collectors treated the Biographical History not just as a gathering of biographical sketches or a guide for portrait collecting but as a bona fide history. This perception derived from Granger’s method of reducing biography to a system: unlike earlier schemes for organizing prints by engraver or category of person, Granger’s catalog follows the historical progression of royal succession; it is a chronological record of rulers and their respective reigns. Granger’s text thus traces an ongoing chain of royal reigns by way of a history of artists, engravers, and prints, a schema materialized and extended in Bull’s thirty-­six volumes. In Bull’s compilation, nineteen volumes bring him to the end of the original text’s timeline (Granger’s chronology stops in 1688), but Bull adds sixteen more volumes to extend the trajectory to the reign of George III, his contemporary era. More than an instance of indefatigable versioning, Bull attempts to fulfill the promise of Granger’s catalog: the desire to illustrate, quite literally, the full scope of royal succession indicates a concept of history that is at once proleptic, ongoing, and comprehensive. Bull’s process of thickening, in other words, materially enacts the synoptic, encyclopedic vision of history implied in Granger’s catalog [index; catalogs]. Bull instantiates this idea of history through a self-­reflexive engagement with print, specifically with the production and reproduction of prints. Annotating relationships between prints, Bull seeks to represent a kind of generational provenance by tracing a series of reproduced prints back to a known original painting. In this, Bull also takes his cue from Granger’s text, which repeatedly highlights generational relations between prints, taking pains to trace the lineage from original source and venue to the reproductions he has identified. Bull’s volumes thus extend Granger’s catalog of prints, fulfilling the desire for an ekphrastic progression from original drawing (or painting or sculpture) to engraving to particular reproduction.

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More than just a reiteration of the same Charles or Elizabeth, the relationship between portrait prints in Bull’s extra-illustrated compilation replicates the diachronic, synoptic vision of history embedded in the Granger’s procession of royal reigns. Thickening materializes the idea of history promoted by Granger; it functions as a reflexive commentary on the process of mapping historical time on and into print genealogies. The consonance between Granger’s text and Bull’s extraillustrated volumes that we have emphasized thus far depends to a large degree on access. Both Bull and Granger were part of an elite social circle that also included Horace Walpole and Thomas Pennant. This group had the time and expendable income to acquire rare portrait prints, and their research methods moreover depended on tightly knit social networks that facilitated the exchange of information and duplicates. The hierarchical organization of Granger’s catalog, in which each royal reign was subdivided into a list of classes running down the social ladder, served to reiterate the centrality of wealth and social status to the idea of history promoted in Granger’s original text and the practice of thickening that materialized it. But as the practice of thickening books moved out of antiquarian circles into a more economically and socially diverse public, the class-­coded synoptic goals of this small coterie was challenged and remade by competing drives of personalization and commercialization. DISRUPTION: BODIES AND TEXTS

Much like eighteenth-­century encyclopedic projects themselves, the synoptic ambitions of thickened books were often thwarted by the very abundance they sought to order and account for. As with Bull’s Granger, the most ambitious thickened books go beyond simple interleaving or pasting in images smaller than the leaf at hand. Rather, these books attempt to envelop as much as they can, regardless of size of the original printed book. The result is a tremendous amount of folded and overlapping paper, which not only thickens the physical volume but

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also adds an additional set of complications to interacting with it [paper]. When prints or documents larger than the available leaf or the available space on a leaf are added to a book, they need to be folded, sometimes multiple times, to fit within the volume when it is closed. As a consequence, anyone wishing to see the images or text they bear must carefully unfold this larger sheet, immediately shifting their spatial and temporal relation to the bound book. Unfolding without tearing the paper requires the reader to touch and view the book as a material object, suspending, however momentarily, whatever train of thought was under way to focus on manual manipulation. The processes involved—­touching, looking, paying attention—­thus work against absorption in the text, much less reverie or revelation. Anyone attempting to “read” the Huntington Library’s Kitto Bible, for example, with its more than thirty thousand insertions, will immediately recognize this point. The reader’s inability to see the entire opening at a single glance compounds this detachment from content: the legibility of one part of the thickened book will always be at the cost of another. The result of all this is a revealing paradox: the greater the ambitions of thickened books to be systematically inclusive and encyclopedic, the harder it is to see the full array of evidence they want to muster and to keep one’s attention focused upon the subject at hand. The compiler may propose any number of ordering and regulatory schemas in the act of thickening, but the material object powerfully disrupts the reader’s experience of temporal or spatial continuity [catalogs]. Like a collection of anecdotes, aphorisms, or biblical verses, the catalog as a genre cultivates disjunction in place of continuity. Interleaving Granger’s biographical snippets and catalog of prints thus presented less of a problem than, for example, an extra-illustrated copy of a play or novel. But even in the case of genres defined by a greater degree of concatenation, selectivity could be as disruptive as attempts at comprehensiveness. Charles Walmesley’s interleaved volumes of the 1793 edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare, edited with notes by Samuel John-

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18.2. Francesco Bartolozzi’s late-­eighteenth century engraving of John Henderson as Iago, opposite a footnote reference to “henderson” (1793). Photograph: By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library (ART Vol. a37 v.3).

son and George Steevens, suggests why. Here, a portrait print of the actor John Henderson as Iago from Othello was interleaved into the text of The Tempest facing the page where a different Henderson (a textual editor) is mentioned in a footnote. Even if Walmesley has made an error in substituting one Henderson for another, when the reader is routed through one paratext into another, the interleaved print rewrites the printed annotation. Functioning as a gloss on a gloss, the portrait increases the distance between reader and text: literally, by interrupting reading, and conceptually, by adding to the cast of characters. The action of The Tempest is thus doubly waylaid by visual and verbal annotations, but unlike in Bull’s edition of Granger, here thickening accentuates the portrait print as

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supplement rife with disruptive potential. Walmesley might be using portrait prints listed in Granger’s Biographical History, but his interleaving practice refuses Granger’s carefully plotted royal genealogies and class hierarchies. As editors morph into actors and characters migrate between plays, typologies break down (whom does Iago hate? Can he, does he, speak for Caliban?). In the remediated space of the thickened annotated edition, a chain of associations replaces methodical history, leveling hierarchies by conflation and infiltration. Readers of literature were clearly aware of the disruptive potential of thickening even before the craze took hold in the second half of the eighteenth century. When Samuel Richardson presented a specially bound two-­volume copy of Pamela to the daughters of his friend Aaron Hill, he interleaved it with blank pages in the hopes that they would register their reactions to the novel on the blanks. Astraea and Minerva demurred: as Astraea suggested, to “inscribe our Notes on the interleave’d white Emblems of [Pamela’s] innocence” would be akin to staining it. Rather than responses to the novel, the young ladies decided to fill the blanks with “progressive Memorandums of the benefits her Conversation brings us” (Nace 109). Responding to Richardson’s alignment of Pamela’s body with Pamela the printed book, the Hill sisters treat the thickened book (and its unblemished interleaved pages) as the material corollary to Pamela’s virtue. In deciding to converse with the text rather than to comment on it, Astraea and Minerva literalize the dialogism of thickening as a practice by refusing to enact its disruptive potential. The Hills’ refusal finds it antipode in Thomas Beddoes’s concerted effort to meddle with Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, With A Few Other Poems (1798) by thickening it. Beddoes composed a parody titled “Domiciliary Verses,” had it printed in the same font and on the same paper as the original text block of Lyrical Ballads, and bound it into his copy of the volume between Wordsworth’s “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-­Tree” and Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” (Wu 333). By purposefully matching paper and font to disguise his act of thickening, Beddoes erased

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what the practice most forcibly proclaimed, the reader’s manipulation of the book. Like an annotation in invisible ink, Beddoes marked his copy as his own by entering into dialogue with the text, but he also effaced the material difference between text and commentary, print and script, parody and poems with a purpose. With its clandestine thickening that mimics and mocks the content and style of the original printed book, Beddoes’s interleaved copy suggests the desire to personalize while intervening in broader literary debates. But by making thickening invisible, Beddoes has paradoxically rendered his volume more, rather than less, intimate and exclusive. In each of these instances, the resulting volumes derange rather than reiterate the conceptual trajectory and goals of the printed text. In contrast to Bull’s version of the Biographical History, which attempted to consolidate a set of related social, cultural, and national positions articulated in Granger’s text, interleaving could and did diverge from a book’s ideological agenda. Indeed, the more prescriptive the text or its author, the more likely the reader’s interleaving is to be disruptive. Walmesley’s interleaved portrait print of Iago pushes back against the authoritative voice of the editorial footnote; Richardson’s demand for reading responses leads Hill’s daughters to talk with Pamela instead of the author; Wordsworth and Coleridge’s confrontational “Advertisement” to the 1798 edition, with its demand that readers discard their own “own pre-­established codes of decision,” inspires burlesque disguised as self-­satire (ii). Within the archive of interleaved and extra-illustrated books, however, such contrarian acts of thickening are by far the minority. Regardless of the disruptive potential contained in the physical experience of interacting with a thickened book, most such books strive for consolidation and containment. As the practice was commercialized in the nineteenth century, consolidation verged into regulation. More than a mechanism for cementing existing social structures, books commercially produced to be thickened made personalization an act of managing and rewriting one’s experience of the world.

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HOMOG ENI Z ATION: TOP OG R A PHIE S OF PR INT

Beddoes’s odd mode of disguised personalization may have been fueled by the trendiness of thickening, which publishers stimulated and exploited around the turn of the nineteenth century. The 1793 edition of Thomas West’s Guide to the Lakes in Westmorland, Cumberland, and Lancashire comments on this trend. The edition’s back matter lists artist Joseph Farington’s twenty Views of the Lakes available for purchase “from Mr. Pennington, Kendal” (ix). Purchasers could also independently augment their texts with a more “expensive species of ornament,” which a work “intended for general use could not be expected” to supply. Noting that “A Series of Views of the Lakes, in aqua-­ tinta, of a proper size to bind with West’s Guide” would be published in the “present year,” the Guide’s advertisements offer a blueprint for its own easy and systematic thickening-­—a­ nd at a price “not [to] exceed one Guinea,” it appealed to an upwardly mobile class acquiring the taste “for such an appendage” (ix–­x, back matter). Lake District authors and publishers increased sales, and abetted the practice of book thickening, by offering a range of forms and prices to their consumers. In 1814 the Ambleside artist William Green published A Description of a Series of Sixty Small Prints of the English Lakes. The book had two parts: descriptions of the etchings merged with descriptions of the “scenes” they depicted were followed by the series of etchings, either uncolored or with monochrome watercolor washes. At his shop in Ambleside, tourists could purchase the book with or without five of Peter Crosthwaite’s popular Maps of the Lakes; they could also acquire a separate series of colored etchings to be interleaved into the Description or preserved as a separate volume in a set. These potential additions presage the increasingly multimodal (and prethickened) guidebook of the mid-­nineteenth century (Carlson 2010), and it is therefore unsurprising that Green’s advertisements promoted interleaving as act of consumption of both print and landscape. By choosing interleaved

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maps or scenes, the buyer might elevate himself above the landscape, thus mimicking the stance of ownership established by the prospect view, and indicate the sweep of his expendable income through the number and colors of the interleaved prints. The Lake District artists and booksellers were not alone in seeing the market potential of a made-­to-­order thickened book. Across Europe, the commercialization of thickening in the nineteenth century arose in conjunction with a burgeoning tourist industry and changes in technologies of image reproduction. A particularly illuminating example, the Tauchnitz edition of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), indicates the cultural currency of thickening in the nineteenth-­century tourist industry. Tauchnitz was a German publishing firm that specialized in inexpensive reprinting of already-­published books. Located in Leipzig, a city at the crossroads of book trade on the Continent, its location allowed the firm to take advantage of a rapidly expanding network of railway lines. The Tauchnitz edition of The Marble Faun is of particular interest because by the end of the 1860s, Italian booksellers began to convert it from a cheap reprint to a valuable souvenir by rebinding it in white vellum (which replaced original cloth wrappers), often embossed and gilded with decorative gold-­leaf embroidery. They also added marble endpapers and inserted albumen prints or photographs of the scenes described by Hawthorne. If customers did not like the photographs that had been preselected, the volume could also be purchased with blank pages interspersed at increments through the text. Purchasers could then choose their own pictures, either those that corresponded to scenes described by Hawthorne or scenes that held particular meaning to the book’s purchaser. This process of self-­selection increasingly took precedence over purchasing a copy with a preselected set of images, signaling the degree of personalization that could be achieved even with a mass-­produced commodity. The numerous examples of the Tauchnitz Marble Faun now held by various libraries suggest how interleaving, in the hands of Italian booksellers, functioned in two ways: as an invitation

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to interact with the printed book and as a script dictating the experience of place. The process of using a book to tip in pictures representative of one’s own personal experiences in Rome produced a participatory experience whereby the reader became a coauthor, one invited into the process of making meaning for the text with the production of a personal slide show of Roman views. As many travelers followed Hawthorne’s story through the actual landscape of its setting, Hawthorne’s novel became a kind of elevated Baedeker and sightseeing became a way of interacting with print. In this triumphant and inclusive account, we see how nineteenth-­century travelers to Rome used the novel to make sense of their experience and in turn used their experience to construct a meaning for the novel expressed by producing a material souvenir of their travels. But even as democratic expansion opens out the novel to a range of individualized readings, the experience of travel is also manipulated for a commodified and commercial marketplace, a process that disciplines and contains the experience of travel in Rome. Personalized construction of Rome through Hawthorne’s novel would often be limited to the postcards for sale in Italian booksellers’ shops, and many of the pictures in the Tauchnitz catalog still bear the signs of such commercialism in a bookseller’s identifying numbers etched into the image. As many extant editions indicate, the freedom to choose images produced a certain amount of sameness and standardization. Certain images became so canonical that we commonly find them at identical places in volumes produced by different compilers. This is not to suggest that editions like the Tauchnitz didn’t enable an innovative kind of participation in a fictional narrative, one that turned reading and traveling into a form of self-­ expression and self-­creation; they certainly did. But we must also recognize that along with that participation came a different kind of constraint. One’s visit to Rome was not an occasion for unlimited discovery if one limited oneself only to the scenes presented by Hawthorne and ascribed value to them merely because Hawthorne chose to describe them—­as many

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visitors to Rome clearly did. The project enabled by the Tauchnitz edition disciplined the experience of travel to Rome and memorialized a very particular image of Rome, and indeed of Europe more generally. It is significant in this context that virtually none of the hundreds and hundreds of images tipped into the Tauchnitz edition offer any hint that there is a modern Rome with its daily life, a place whose native inhabitants do not simply lie about all day decorating ancient ruins and Renaissance palazzi, but who, like their contemporaries throughout Europe, trade, walk, and chatter. This is precisely the Rome that resists the kind of systematization that one achieves when one follows Hawthorne’s narrative through the city and preserves that pursuit by collecting and interleaving the volume with a series of commercially produced photographic illustrations. This more disciplined, sanitized, and systematized Rome became even more pronounced in the 1889 printing of The Marble Faun published by Houghton Mifflin. This edition established a supposedly definitive set of fifty photographic images illustrating the statues, paintings, and buildings referred to in the text. It was marketed to prospective and accomplished tourists as an improvement on the method of tipping in pictures of one’s own choosing, which it suggested was “apt to be displeasing to the fastidious collector.” Purchasers of this edition, the publisher promised, need not collect their own pictures, for Houghton had already taken the trouble to compile an authoritative set of views for them. These images may be beautiful, but their beauty is marked by a certain pristine quality, one that works diligently to preserve the image shown as a distinct image, and one that crops out and eliminates any reminder of the actual, material Rome that surrounds the image shown. While nineteenth-­century thickened books orient the reader’s experience toward specific aesthetic and cultural norms, we should not overlook the many ways that prescriptive, commercialized interleaving was itself interrupted, either by the ghostly imprint of a dislodged specimen or by the unceasing

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and disruptive drive of print to create more print [proliferation]. Just as so many eighteenth-­century publications dwell on their own materiality and their existence as commodities, but do so in a manner that then generates more print, so, too, the nineteenth-­century commercialized practice of thickening generated its own representations in print. Not only do processes of extra-illustrating Hawthorne’s novel feature as a plot point in William Dean Howells’s later novel of Americans in Rome, Indian Summer (1886), but numerous poems from the later nineteenth century play with the disruptive potential of extra-illustration in the era of books ready-made for thickening. The Century Magazine, for example, published a poem by Elia Petie in 1891 entitled “On a Blank Leaf in ‘The Marble Faun.’” Despite its later date, the title alludes not to the standardized and apparently complete Houghton edition, but rather to one more like the earlier Tauchnitz version, in which one of the blank pages has ostensibly been filled with an original poem and not with a preselected tourist photograph. Our case studies of thickened books illustrate how processes of readerly engagement with books amplify the distinct and often competing aims of interacting with print. From Bull to Walmesley to Beddoes and onto Lake District and Roman tourism, these interactions with print might be described diachronically as a movement from extra-illustration as a way of continuing the apparent intentions of an earlier work that gives way, with the saturation of print in the later eighteenth century, to the disruption of that very continuity, before the whole process is eventually swallowed up by the increasingly rampant consumer culture that surrounds the book in the nineteenth century. Such a strictly schematic account, however, misses the way that eighteenth-­century book culture was also rampantly consumerist and, more importantly, the way that all of these processes—­completion, disruption, and homogenization—­ can also be collectively located within each of our examples. In this sense, the thickening of books as a way of making them ever more comprehensive and encyclopedic helps underscore

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both the drive for completion engendered by the proliferation of print and the very impossibility of such completion. In this context, the often eclectic practices of addition known as grangerizing were given a more utilitarian, disciplinary twist by the German botanist Georg Wenderoth. In his Lehrbuch der Botanik (1821), Wenderoth tried to solve the taxonomic expansionism that had beset the field of botany since the eighteenth century. He suggested that readers punch holes (durchschiessen, meaning “to shoot through”) in the pages of his handbook so that they could continue to add new material (x–­xii). In being “systematically ordered,” Lehrbuch der Botanik could facilitate its own growth, staving off the time when it would need to be replaced by an entirely new system or edition. As disciplinary knowledge began to expand at increasing rates in the nineteenth century—­one of the many forms of print surplus through the growing output of specialized journals and multivolume handbooks—­it challenged the codex’s ability to function as a satisfactory instrument of knowledge [paper]. The codex’s bound nature meant that it had difficulties evolving to accommodate the speed and growth of knowledge in various subspecialties. Users of books responded accordingly by developing similarly aggregative strategies to maintain their books’ currency. Wenderoth’s method of interleaving thus became an important means of maintaining the printed book’s timeliness in a world of research and knowledge expansion. Further, as we have shown, expanding the physical space of the book repeatedly performed the conceptual work of remapping the reader-­viewer’s temporal and spatial location. Whether the goal was reinforcing the progression of royal reigns through print genealogies (as with Bull’s edition of Biographical History), or interrupting the linear progression of continuous reading, or mapping a specific route through the Lake District, or scripting the tourist’s experience of Rome, expanding the space of the book constitutes a particular form of print interactivity, one that moves, plots, reroutes us even as it attempts to order, contain, and fix the universe of print.

EPILOGUE By way of conclusion we offer two different representations of the contents of this volume (figs. 19.1 and 19.2). The first shows the connections between the chapters that are explicitly named using our system of renvoi in square brackets [advertising], in honor of the great eighteenth-­century encyclopedia project of Diderot and D’Alembert, one of the more interactive texts of the era of print saturation. The second shows the relationships between chapters that have been generated using a topic-­ modeling algorithm, where latent linguistic patterns contained in the chapters are used to draw connections between them. In the same way that media (books, manuscripts, and volumes) mark hidden pathways and connections throughout the eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century world, so, too, do these networks offer otherwise invisible routes through our own text. Both point to a future in which our printed past will be mediated to us increasingly through digital media, one more way of interacting with print. As a growing body of work has shown, computational representations of print history have much to tell us about the practices, habits, and beliefs of historical actors and communities. The immediate contact with artifacts that forms the bedrock of book and print history—­we might call this contact theory—­is certainly not going to be replaced by digital interactions with print. But it can be productively complemented. The immersive modes through which we try to understand artifacts make us blind to the larger settings in which those interactions once took place. There is a global complexity to print and the media

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ecologies that have been the focus of this book that is not readily identifiable at the local level. With their ability to operate simultaneously at greater and more detailed scales, digital tools will necessarily form a core aspect of studying the history of print in the future. The networks we present here are an experiment in reimagining the print convention of the table of contents or even the subject index. They are intended to provide alternative systems of navigating the book’s contents, one based on the self-­conscious labeling of connections by authors, the other based on the latent topics within chapters. If the first represents the authors’ own understanding of the text as a whole, the second reveals the underlying thematics and shared concerns that make the renvois possible. One could imagine a third, even more radical version, in which the chapter divisions were entirely discarded in favor of a passage-­level map. “Chapters” would be decided upon not by authors, but by algorithms generating thematic clusters. Whatever the case, these representations give us a preview of the way digital tools can help us become more self-­aware about our own intellectual constructions, let alone those of the past. For example, it is interesting to us as authors that “Binding” is the most highly connected chapter in the book according to the renvoi (it has the most in and out links to the other chapters). While we would not have anticipated this, it is telling that the chapter about constructing books seems to generate the most linkages among chapters, with a chapter about expanding books, “Thickening,” right behind. Opening and closing form the core of the book’s concerns. Also of interest are the way the visual chapters, “Frontispieces,” “Engraving,” and “Stages,” mark out one pole of the network while the nonprint spaces of “Letters,” “Conversations,” and “Manuscript,” mark out the other. We note, too, the causal connections that the directionality of the network seems to suggest: letters lead to manuscripts, advertising leads to catalogs and spacing leads to disruptions which leads to ephemerality. Overall, gerunds seem to win out. Chapters concerned expressly with actions rather than things

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19.1. Network Representation of Renvois Links. Edges between chapters follow the system of renvois (e.g., [ephemerality]) that point to other chapters from within each chapter. The more references to a target chapter in any single chapter, the thicker the edge. The chapter names (nodes) are sized according to eigenvector centrality (which means the more nodes that a given chapter is connected to that are also connected to a large number of nodes, the larger that chapter is in the figure). This detects both chapters that are highly connected and communities of interconnected chapters. Networks reproduced courtesy of Mark Algee-­Hewitt.

appear more central to the connections between the book’s parts. If we turn to the topic network, we see how “Ephemerality” and “Paper” are now the most central to our book. The conscious connections surrounding the making of books in the renvoi network—­these are links that authors themselves inserted—­are replaced here by the latent thematic connections that make concerns with ephemera and the medium of paper more important. Abstractions like “Ephemerality,” “Prolifera-

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19.2. Network Representation of Topical Similarity. Edges between chapters in this network are determined by the degree to which chapters share similar topics. Topics were derived using an LDA topic model with a preset number of fifteen topics. Only those edges were kept in which the similarity between chapters was one standard deviation above the mean similarity between all chapters. Edges are sized by how similar the chapters are to each other and the chapter titles are sized once again using eigenvector centrality. Networks reproduced courtesy of Mark Algee-­Hewitt.

tion,” and “Disruption” replace the actions of the renvoi network as more centrally located. The topic network is particularly interesting for the pathways one can chart out within it. These are after all forms of navigation, ideally offering new ways of nonlinear reading. For example, “Catalogs,” “Spacing,” “Disruptions,” “Engraving,” and “Index” all point to “Proliferation.” Some of these are outcomes of print proliferation during our period, like engraving or disruption, while others are techniques meant to manage it, like catalogs, page layout (spacing), and the index. Finally, there are also distinct circuits one can follow from one chapter to the next. For example, one can move from “Con-

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versations” to “Letters” to “Paper” to “Binding” to “Thickening” in a burrowing down into a kind of media rabbit hole: we start in an interactive oral space, move into the handwritten interactive medium that helped support it, then traverse to the physical medium upon which these forms of writing are based, and on to the acts of compiling, constricting, and expanding sheets into recognizable, distributable, and interactive objects, much like the one you are holding in your hand. It is not lost on us that this pathway mirrors almost perfectly the process through which this book was created. We hope readers find their own roads in and through it.

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Wark, Robert R. 1993. “The Gentle Pastime of Extra-­Illustrating Books.” Huntington Library Quarterly 56.2: 151–­65. Warner, Michael. 1990. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-­Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2002. Publics and Counter-­Publics. New York: Zone Books. Watson, Cecilia. 2012. “Points of Contention: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of Punctuation.” Critical Inquiry 38: 649–­72. Wehde, Susanne. 2000. Typographische Kultur: Eine zeichentheoretische un kulturgeschichtliche Studie zur Typographie un ihrer Entwicklung. Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyr. Wellmon, Chad. 2014. “Big Humanities.” Infernal Machine. http:// iasc-­culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2014/05/big-­ humanities/. ———. 2015. Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wenderoth, Georg Wilhelm Franz. 1821. Lehrbuch der Botanik. Marburg, Germany: Kriegerschen Buchhandlung. West, Thomas. 1793. A Guide to the Lakes, in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire. By the Author of The Antiquities of Furness. 5th ed. London: W. Richardson. Wettlaufer, Alexandra K. 2001. Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac and the Myth of Pygmalion in Post-­Revolutionary France. New York: Palgrave. White, Patricia. 1991. “Black and White and Read All Over: A Meditation on Footnotes.” Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 5: 81–­90. Whyte, Ryan. 2013. “Exhibiting Enlightenment: Chardin as Tapissier.” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 46.4: 532–­54. Wilhelmy-­Dollinger, Petra. 2000. Die Berliner Salons. Mit historisch-­ literarischen Spaziergängen. Berlin: de Gruyter. William West & the Regency Toy Theatre. 2004. Exhibition catalog. Text by David Powell. London: Sir John Soane’s Museum. Williams, Raymond. 1993. Writing in Society. London: Verso. Wittmann, Reinhard. 1991. Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels: ein Überblick. Munich: C. H. Beck. Wood, Marcus. 1994. Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–­1822. Oxford: Clarendon. Wordsworth, William. 1815. “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface.” In Poems, 1:341–­75. London. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 1798. Lyrical Bal-

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lads with a few other poems. Bristol, England: Briggs and Cottle; Longman. Reprint by London: Arch. Romantic Circles Electronic Edition edited by Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault. http://archive. rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/index.html. Wordsworth, William [and Samuel Taylor Coleridge]. 1800. Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. 2 vols. London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees. Wrigley, Richard. 1998. “Between the Street and the Salon: Parisian Shop Signs and the Spaces of Professionalism in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” Oxford Art Journal 21.1: 45–­67. Zionkowski, Linda. 2001. Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–­1784. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zmölnig, Brigitte. 2008. “Jakob Matthias Schmutzer (1733-­1811) –­Die Landschaftzeichnungen aus dem Kupferstichkabinett der Akademie der bildenden Künste in Wien.” PhD diss., University of Vienna.

ABOUT THE M U LT I G R A P H C O L L E C T I V E

is assistant professor of English at Stanford University, where he is also associate research director at the Stanford Literary Lab. His research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. In particular, he is interested in the history of aesthetic theory and the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophical concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. His book The Afterlife of the Sublime is forthcoming. M A R K A L G E E -­H E W I T T

is associate professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Western Ontario. Her research concentrates on everyday cultural and poetic practices, primarily in Weimar from 1750 to 1830. She has published articles on the Weimar fashion journal Das Journaldes Luxus und der Moden, fashion history, dance, and occasional poetry. She is the author of Poetische Praxis: Gelegenheitsdichtung und Geselligkeitsdichtung an Herzogin Anna Amalias Hof in Weimar, Ettersburg und Tiefurt (2015). ANGELA BORCHERT

is associate professor of English at Ohio State University. His research focuses on eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century literary, theatrical, and visual culture, and the history of authorship and reading more generally. He is the author of The Afterlife of Character, 1726–­1825 (2005) and editor of modern editions of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals and George Colman the Elder’s Polly Honeycombe (2012). His current book project investigates the uses to which authorial names were put in the eighteenth-­century Anglophone world. DAVID BREWER

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: a b o u t t h e m u l t i g r a ph c o l l e c t i v e

is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on British Romanticism and print history. Her current book project examines a group of professional printers, authors, editors, painters, and engravers who worked in and around London during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She is interested in the labor that went into making and mediating Romantic-­era literature and visual and decorative art. THORA BRYLOWE

is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on reading with the hands, Romantic cartographies, and historical poetics. She is the author of Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print (2015), which approaches Wordsworth’s writing as a material practice—­scriptorial, visual, metrical, and typographic—­ occurring within a matrix of inscriptional projects not traditionally considered part of the Romantic canon: the charting of terrain and the notating of language by cartographers, elocutionists, prosodists, and guidebook writers. JULIA CARLSON

is associate professor of history and classical studies and the Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History at McGill University. His current research involves the politics of celebrity in Britain from the regicidal revolution to the American Revolution. He is the author of The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005), which won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association, and The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (2012), which uses book history to provide a new understanding of the most important political trial of the eighteenth century. BRIAN COWAN

is associate professor of history at the Université de Montréal. Her research involves women’s history in the eighteenth century, with a particular interest in issues of gender and the public and private spheres. She is a founding member of the Interacting with Print research group and was its principal investigator from 2006 to 2008. She is the author of Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-­Century Europe (2003). Her current book project involves working on sociability among women who hosted Venetian salons and the men who visited them. SUSAN DALTON

is a Banting postdoctoral fellow at McGill University. Her research focuses on the history of self-­publishing in M A R I E -­C L A U D E F E L T O N

a b o u t t h e m u l t i g r a ph c o l l e c t i v e :

345

the eighteenth century, as reflected in her first book, Maîtres de leurs ouvrages: L’essor de l’édition à compte d’auteur à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (2014). Her current book project consists of a comparative study of self-­ publishing in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Europe, especially France, England, and Germany, and the role of author-­publishers on the European book market, the reception of their works, and the significance of their claims for the genesis of modern copyright. M I C H A E L G A M E R is associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research focuses on the history of British theater. He is author of Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (2000), Romanticism, Self-­Canonization, and the Business of Poetry (2016), and Recollections in Tranquility: The Romantic Art of Self-­Canonization, 1765–­1832 (forthcoming). He is the editor of The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama with Jeffrey Cox (2003) and with Dahlia Porter (2008). He is also associate editor at EIR: Essays in Romanticism, and the editor of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (2002) and Charlotte Smith’s “Manon L’Escaut” and the Romance of Real Life (2005).

is professor of English at Carleton University. His interests include Romantic and eighteenth-­century print culture, literature and politics of the Romantic period, the cultural impact of commercial modernity, and changing constructions of authorship. He is the author of Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–­ 1800 (2012) and The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (1999) and the editor (with Ina Ferris) of Bookish Histories: Books, Literature and Commercial Modernity, 1700–­1900 (2009) and The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth-­Century Print Culture (2013). PAUL KEEN

is associate professor of English and chair of the graduate program in English at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on the material practices that defined literary production and dissemination in the Romantic period, with a particular interest in the history of women’s writing and the interplay between the cultures of manuscript and print. She is the author of Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (2008) and the editor (with Anne Mellor) of Lucy Aikin’s Epistles on Women and Other Works (2011). She is currently working on a book project that investigates the widespread circulation of unprinted literary works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. MICHELLE LEVY

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is associate professor of communication, culture, and technology at Georgetown University. His research involves book history and Romanticism, material culture, and the new media. He is the author of Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (1994) and the editor of Dialogue and Critical Discourse: Language, Culture, Critical Theory (1997). He has also published articles on literary dialogism, nineteenth-­century publishing history, copyright law, translation, censorship, historiography, hypertextual theory, and digital culture. MICHAEL MACOVSKI

is professor of English and coordinator of the European studies program at Brigham Young University. He specializes in British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the Romantic period, with wider interests in literary history, the British novel, and contemporary Europe. He is the author of Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (2013), and he collaboratively produced a digital edition of William Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes (2015). He is also the editor of Edward Kimber’s The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson (2008). NICHOLAS MASON

is associate professor of world literatures at the Université de Montréal. Her research includes manuscript and early modern print culture, with a focus on the complex interactions of oral, visual, and textual modes of communication from the Middle Ages to the Reformation. She is a founding member of the Interacting with Print research group and is currently finishing a book project titled “Reading the Book of Nature: Natural History in Books for Children (1650–­1848).” NIKOLA VON MERVELDT

is reader in English literature and director of the Centre for the History of the Book at University of Edinburgh. His research involves literature of the Romantic period in Britain, with particular interests in the poetry of Lord Byron, book history and print culture, the cultural history of reception, periodical writing, and reception history. He is a founding member of the Interacting with Print research group and was its principal investigator from 2008 to 2013. He is the author of Byron’s Romantic Celebrity (2007) and the editor of Romanticism and Celebrity Culture (2009). He is currently studying the reception of Romantic authors in Victorian Britain. TOM MOLE

a b o u t t h e m u l t i g r a ph c o l l e c t i v e :

347

is associate professor and William Dawson Scholar of German and European literature at McGill University, where he is also an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies. His current research involves computational literary analysis, the visual nature of the page, character networks in fiction, and mapping sentimental linguistic communities in the long eighteenth century. He is a founding member of the Interacting with Print research group and the author of Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (2009), which won the Modern Language Association’s prize for a first book, and Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (2012). ANDREW PIPER

is assistant professor of English at the University of North Texas. She specializes in literature of the Romantic period in Britain, with particular research interests in the relationship of science and literature, the history of books and printing, children’s literature, women authors, and poetry. She is the editor (with Michael Gamer) of an edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (2008). She is completing a book on eighteenth-­century hybrid forms. DAHLIA PORTER

is associate professor of English at Concordia University, where he specializes in British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with particular focus on the uses of antiquity in forging literary and political modernity and print culture. He is currently the PI of the Interacting with Print research group and the author of Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–­1832 (2010). He is currently finishing a book about cultural decline circa 1800. JONATHAN SACHS

is associate professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-­century British literature, theater studies, comedy, women writers, and print culture. She is the author of Prologues and Epilogues to Restoration Theater: Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print (2013) and is currently at work on a book about comedy and repetition in Restoration and eighteenth-­century theater. DIANA SOLOMON

is associate professor of English at University of Virginia, where he specializes in nineteenth-­century literature and digital humanities. He is the director of NINES (a networked infrastructure for nineteenth-­century electronic scholarship), the author of She: A History of Adventure (2006) and Anger, Revolution, and RomanANDREW STAUFFER

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ticism (2005), and the editor of works by Robert Browning and Ryder Haggard. is a reader in the history of art at University College London, where his research focuses on eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century French and British art, with a particular interest in the visual culture of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Taws is the author of The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (2013) and coauthor of Le trompe-­l’oeil: Plus vrai que nature? (2005). RICHARD TAWS

is associate professor of German at the University of Virginia, where he specializes in German Romantic writing, with broader interests in European Romanticism and the Enlightenment, European intellectual history, media studies, and social and cultural theory. He is the author of Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom (2010) and Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University (2015). CHAD WELLMON

INDEX

Abbot, Ezra, 258–­59 Academie de Saint-­Luc, 24–­25 Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 24–­25 Academy, The, 203 Academy of Engravers (Kaiserlich-­ Königliche Kupferstecher-­ Akademie), 117 Accademici della Crusca (1734), 156 Accomplished Letter-­Writer, The, 157 Addison, Joseph, Notes upon the Twelve Books of Paradise Lost (1738), 136–­37 Adelung, Johann, Grammatisch-­ kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart (1811), 159 Adventures of a Flea (1785), 32 “Adventures of a Quire of Paper, The,” 205 advertising, 6, 15, 305; in books, 17, 25, 27; in Britain, 16, 23, 25–­26, 28–­31, 32; in catalogs, 17, 20, 23; as commodity, 23, 75; constituencies, 19, 26–­30; of exhibitions, 71–­72, 74; in France, 16–­18, 21–­22, 23, 24–­25, 286; in Germany, 20–­21, 26–­27, 28, 31; markets, 18, 26; of medicines, 31–­32; in newspapers and periodicals, 16, 20–­21, 24–­25, 27, 61, 276; of performances, 275, 276, 277

affiches. See advertising: in France Aikin, John, and Anna Barbauld, Evenings at Home (1792–­96), 199–­ 200, 201, 250 Algarotti, Francesco, Il newtonianismo per le dame (1737), 89 Algee-­Hewitt, Mark, 244 Allgemeine deutsche Real-­ Encyklopädie für die gebildeten Stände, 168 Allgemeine Literatur-­Zeitung, 27, 28, 162, 163, 164 Almanachs des muses (1765), 41 almanacs, 40, 41, 217 Althusser, Louis, 229 Altman, Janet Gurkin, 174 Am eigenen Herd (1887), 36 Anderson, Benedict, 5, 13 annuals, 40, 41, 43–­44, 46, 217 anonymity, 39, 183, 193 anthologies, 9, 33–­34; in America, 36; anthological reading, 38, 39, 42; of ballads, 149–­50; in Britain, 35, 38–­40, 41, 44; in France, 35, 41; in Germany, 35–­36, 39, 40–­41, 42–­43; introductory material, 41–­43; materiality of, 48; reception of, 38, 47–­48. See also annuals Antiqua (typeface), 101–­3 antiquarianism, 35, 170 Apin, Sigmund Jacob, 291

350

: index

Appadurai, Arjun, 68 archives, 134, 136–­37, 138, 139, 170, 195, 257 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 148 ars dictaminis, 174 Asquith, Ivon, 16 assignats, 131 Athanassoglou-­Kallmyer, Nina, 110 Athenaeum, The, 203 audiences: of children, 223, 225–­26, 238, 242; of manuscripts, 177, 178–­79, 201; of print, 34, 47; socio-­ economic, 64–­65, 72; of theatre, 274–­75, 287 Austen, Henry, 282 Austen, Jane, 282; juvenilia, 190–­91, 198; Northanger Abbey (1818), 251, 256, 274; Persuasion (1817), 137, 181; Pride and Prejudice (1813), 181, 256; “The Watsons” and “Sanditon” (1817), 53 authority, 13, 30–­31, 39, 97, 112, 242; cultural, 113, 148. See also cultural capital authorship: as authenticity, 138, 144; communities of, 89–­91; narratives of, 39, 143–­45, 153. See also anonymity Aveline, Pierre, 23 Baedeker, Karl, 301 Baer, Marc, 274 Baillie, Joanna, 284–­85 Baker, Samuel, Bibliotheca Dormeriana (1764), 68 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 98 Balen, James de Barrios Dunlap, 219–­20 Balzac, Honoré de, La peau de chagrin (1831), 152 Bank of England, 108, 110 Banks, Joseph, 68, 136–­37 Bann, Stephen, 5, 123 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 174, 176 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 179, 202, 206–­

7, 248–­51. See also Aikin, John, and Anna Barbauld, Evenings at Home (1792–­96) Barber, John, 197, 201 Barchas, Janine, 143, 158, 266–­67 Barker, Mary. See Southey, Robert Barnes Rasmussen, Celia, 94 Barrell, John, 120, 277 Bartolozzi, Francesco, “Henderson” (1793), 296 Bartram, William, 69 Basbanes, Nicholas, 224 Basedow, Johann Bernhard, Das Elementarwerk (1770–­74), 223 Baudrillard, Jean, 69 Bauer, Carl Johann Sigmund, 227 Becker, Ferdinand, 36 Beckford, William, 80 Beddoes, Thomas, 297–­98, 299, 303 Behn, Aphra, 200–­201 Bell, John, 152; British Theatre, 282; Love for Love (1791), 280, 281; Poems by Mrs. M. Robinson (1791), 146–­48 Belo, André, 197 Benedict, Barbara, 34–­35 Benstock, Shari, 271 Bentham, Jeremy, Chrestomathia (1815–­17), 232–­33 Bergk, Johann Adam, Die Kunst, Bücher zu lessen (1799), 256 Berlinische Monatsschrift, 167–­68 Bern, Maximilian, Before the Hearth (1887), 39 Bertola, Aurelio, 90, 91 Bertuch, Friedrich Justin, 26–­28; Bilderbuch für Kinder (1790), 225–­26 Bestelmeier, Georg Hieronimus, Preiss-­Courant (1803–­), 67 Betterton, Thomas, 277, 281 bibliomania, 35, 58, 162, 247 Bibliothèque bleue, 64, 263–­64 Biesalski, Ernst, 235 binding, 7, 49, 136, 258, 306, 309; affective power, 57, 58; in Britain,

index :

50, 52, 56–­60, 61–­63; commercialization, 39; in France, 50, 61, 64, 190; in Germany, 64; as performative, 41, 44, 61–­62, 64–­65, 136; by readers, 54–­55; rebinding, 51, 58–­60, 219, 288–­89; techniques of, 50, 51–­53, 64, 230, 232. See also grangerization Biographia Britannica (1747), 141 Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes (1850), 82–­84 Blair, Anne, 112, 155, 159–­60, 233 Blair, Hugh, 176, 177, 178; Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), 175, 253 Blake, William, 52, 217–­18 Bluestocking Circle. See Montagu, Elizabeth Bollème, Geneviève, 64 Bolter, J. David, and Richard A. Grusin, 6 book clubs, 86 book history, 4, 140, 185, 199, 288, 305 Book of Common Prayer, 290, 291 booksellers, 18, 21–­23, 24, 26–­28, 30, 50, 63, 66–­67, 74, 90, 102, 216, 300–­301 Boothby, Miss Hill, 138 Borchert, Angela, 21 Bosse, Abraham. See Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (1651) Boswell, James, 93, 179 Bots, Hans, 182 Boucher, François, Madame de Pompadour (1758), 55 Bowrey, Thomas, 73–­74 Boydell, John, 113, 118–­21, 122, 123–­24, 125 Boye, Frau von, 92 Bracegirdle, Anne, 280 Brant, Clare, 174 Brewer, John, 119 Brinckmann, Karl Gustav von, 91, 92 Bristol Education Society Library, 68, 69

351

British Museum, 60, 70 Brockhaus Encyclopedia (1894), 168 Browning, Robert, “Garden Fancies,” 207 Bruntjen, Herman Arnold, 120 Bryant, William Cullen, New Library of Poetry and Song (1870), 36 Bücherwelt. See Ersch, Johann Samuel Bull, John, 288, 291–­92, 293–­94, 297, 298, 303, 304 Bull, Richard, 54 Bulmer, William, 240–­42 Buringh, Eltjo, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, 243–­44 Burke, Peter, 87 Burney, Fanny, 93, 181; Evelina (1778), 26 Burnim, Kalman, 282 Burns, Robert, 209 Busching’s Wöchentliche Nachrichten, 167–­68 Buschmeier, Matthias, 240 Butchell, Martin von, 15–­16 Byrne, Paula, 282 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 12, 28, 39, 127, 138, 284; Beppo, 12; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), 28; “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” 48; Don Juan, 17, 38; Hebrew Melodies, 60–­61 Calhoun, Craig, 6 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 235 Campbell, R., The London Tradesman (1969), 117, 122 caricature, 104–­7, 109; “skitnote” (n.d.), 108 Caricature, La, 100, 104, 105–­7, 264–­ 65; caricature (1832), 106; “Pear speech” (1835), 107 Carlson, Julia, 268, 299 Caroline, 211; title page inscription, 212 Carroll, John, 169

352

: index

catalogs, 6, 66, 67, 257, 308; of art, 67, 71–­73, 78–­79, 118, 120; associative reading, 77–­79, 81–­83, 295; in Britain, 69–­72, 73–­74, 77–­79, 118, 293; card catalogs, 258–­59; “The Card Catalogue” (1890), 258; in France, 72–­73; in Germany, 75, 80–­81; as gothic, 79–­80; illustrations of, 72–­73; from museums, 69, 70; of specimens, 68–­71, 75–­77, 81–­84 Caxton, William, The Pyes of Salisbury (1477), 17 celebrity, 39, 147 censorship: by anthologies, 39; in Britain, 278; in France, 17–­18, 105–­6, 264; in Germany, 16, 104, 264; in Italy, 157, 264, 286; of newspapers, 182, 197 Century Magazine, The, 303 Cesarotti, Melchiorre, Ragionamento sopra il diletto della tragedia (1762), 253 Chambers, Ephraim, Cyclopaedia (1728), 231 Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 16 Chamisso, Adalbert von, 88 Chardin, Jean-­Baptiste-­Siméon, 23 Charivari, Le, 100, 105 Charles I (king), 188, 288; The King’s Cabinet Opened (1645), 179 Charlet, Nicholas Toussaint, 24 Chartier, Roger, 4, 5, 66, 75, 144, 185, 263 Chartier, Roger, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin, 174 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 143, 144 Chesterfield, Lord (Philip Stanhope), 139 Churchill, Charles, 192–­93; Gotham, A Poem (1764), 192 circulating libraries, 204, 207 Clark, James Benjamin, 219 Clarkson, Catherine, 28 Claydon, Tony, 182, 197 Clayton, Timothy, 5 Cobbett, William, Paper Against Gold

(1815), 111 coffeehouses, 129, 243 Coleridge, Hartley, 20 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 268–­69, 271, 284, 285–­86, 297–­98; Christabel &c. (1816), 28–­29 collected editions, 39, 60–­61, 118, 144–­48 collecting, 35–­36, 58, 68–­69, 75–­77, 127. See also bibliomania Collins, Wilkie, The Haunted Hotel (1879), 150 Colman, George, and Bonnell Thornton, 128, 129 commedia dell’arte, 274 commemoration, 86, 92, 94 commonplace books, 7, 10, 40, 77, 95–­96, 158–­59, 198–­99, 233, 270–­71, 290 Companion to the Museum (Late Sir Ashton Lever’s), A, 68 Condor, Josiah, 29 Congreve, William, Love for Love (1695), 280, 281 Connell, Philip, 160 Connoisseur, The (Britain). See Colman, George, and Bonnell Thornton Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (1899), 184–­85 Contarini, Elisabetta Mosconi, 90, 91 Conti, Antonio, 253 conversations, 6, 85, 90, 91, 96, 253, 306, 308–­9; “talking upon paper,” 174. See also orality: in salons Cooper, James Fenimore, 238 copying: by engravers, 123–­24, 293; of manuscripts, 193, 202; piracy, 278–­79 copyright, 2, 175–­76 Cosgrove, Peter, 271 Cottle, Joseph, 268–­69 Cotton, Robert, 60 counterfeits, 98, 107–­11, 131 Covent Garden (theatre), 278, 280

index :

Cowan, Brian, 62, 73, 85 Cowper, William, 268–­69 Cox, Jeffrey N., 111, 275 Croker, John Wilson, 178 Cromwell, Henry, 174 Crosby, Mark, 108 Crosthwaite, Peter, Maps of the Lakes, 299 Cruikshank, George, 109, 110; Bank Restriction Note (1819), 107–­8, 111 cultural capital, 24, 25–­26, 29, 118, 144 Cumberland, John, British Theatre, 281 curiosity cabinets, 70 Dalton, Susan, 4, 6, 12 Dane, Joseph A., 262, 263 D’arcy Wood, Gillen, 5, 47 Darnton, Robert, 4, 17, 223, 224 Darwin, Erasmus, 79; The Botanic Garden (1799), 166–­67, 269 Daumier, Honoré, 105 Deffand, Marquise du (Marie Anne de Vichy-­Chamrond), 92 Defoe, Daniel, 144 DeJean, Joan, 87 Delany, Mary, 237–­38, 242; Asperula, 237 D’Elci, Angelo, 93 Deleuze, Gilles, 225 Derrida, Jacques, 145–­46, 225 De Quincey, Thomas, 208 Dewey, Melvil, 259 Dickens, Charles: Dombey and Son (1848), 152–­53, 153; Household Words, 134; Pickwick Papers, 152 Dickinson, Emily, 52, 54 Diderot, Denis, 165 Diderot, Denis, and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie (1751–­ 65), 157, 231, 305 Dierks, Konstantin, 173 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 178 D’Israeli, Isaac, 160–­61, 246–­47, 248, 251

353

disruptions, 10, 13–­14, 97, 101, 112, 131, 191, 264, 289, 308 Doblhoff-­Dier, Baron Anton von, 116, 117 Donovan, Edward, 67 Drucker, Johanna, 262 Drury Lane (theatre), 278, 280, 284, 285 Dubos, Jean-­Baptise, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719), 252 Duguid, Paul, 11, 185 Dürer, Albrecht, 117 East India House. See Bowrey, Thomas Echtermeyer, Theodor, Auswahl deutscher Gedichte (1836), 35, 36 Eclectic Review. See Condor, Josiah Edgcumbe, Lord (Richard). See Walpole, Horace Edgeworth, Maria, 250; Castle Rackrent (1800), 180 Edinburgh Review, 40 editing, 35, 144, 195, 211, 240 Egan, Gerald, 144 Eger, Elizabeth, 91 Ehrenbacher, Mrs. J. F., 234 Eichendorff, Joseph von, “Es war, als hätte der Himmel” (1887), 45 Eikon Basilike (1713). See Thomasen, I. Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 4, 16, 97, 132, 249 Elizabeth I (queen), 288 Ellis, Markman, 129 Elwin, Whitwell, 178 emblem books, 43, 148 Encyclopaedia Britannica (1894), 168 Encyclopedia Metropolitana (1849), 25 endpapers, 8, 211, 300 Engelsing, Rolf, 2, 42 English Della Cruscans, 94, 146 engraving, 7, 10, 41, 42–­43, 45, 47, 89, 306, 308; in Austria, 113–­17; in

354

: index

books, 114; in Britain, 113, 116, 117–­22, 123, 277; on currency, 116, 121; in France, 113, 116, 117, 123, 124, 149; on frontispieces, 141–­42; of handwriting, 187; technologies of, 113, 115, 123, 124, 145, 149 Enlightenment, 57, 85–­86, 112, 165, 230, 244, 263; the Enlightenment index, 159–­64, 166, 167, 168 ephemera, 15, 107, 129–­39, 307; in archives and catalogs, 7, 69, 162, 195, 234; bindings for, 56; lifespan, 148, 224, 241, 275–­76; materiality, 75, 107, 223; value, 109 Erasmus, Desiderius, 179; Adages, 156 Erlin, Matt, 223 errata, 97–­100, 112 Ersch, Johann Samuel, 161–­64, 165; Allgemeines Repertorium der Literatur für die Jahre (1785–­90), 163 Esterhammer, Angela, 274 Ezell, Margaret, 88, 186, 196, 198–­99, 235 Fabricius, Johann Andreas, Outline of a Universal History of Erudition (1752), 290–­91 Fach. See Ersch, Johann Samuel facsimiles, 7, 103, 187 Fairer, David, 201 Faithorne, William, 290, 291 Fanny (1755), 178 Farington, Joseph, Views of the Lakes, 299 fashion, 34, 130–­31. See also taste Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-­Jean Martin, 4 Feilchenfeldt, Konrad, 93 Felton, Marie-­Claude, 25, 26, 50, 61 Ferris, Ina, 58 Ferris, Ina, and Paul Keen, 41 Festival of Reason (1793), 287 Feuille du Bureau d’adresses. See Renaudot, Théophraste Feyel, Gilles, 22, 286

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 165 Fielding, Henry, 26; Tom Jones (1749), 207 Finch, Anne (Countess of Winchilsea), “Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia” (c. 1685–­1702), 200; on Aphra Behn, 200–­201 fine art, 115, 124–­25 fine books, 25, 33, 43–­44, 123, 127, 149–­50, 218, 247, 253–­54; bindings, 56–­57, 58, 300 Fliegende Blätter, 100, 101; “Natural History” (1845), 102; typefaces (1845), 103 Florence Miscellany, The (1785), 93–­94, 264 Florey, Kitty Burns, 187 Flugblätter, 130 Fontenelle, Bernard de, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), 89 footnotes, 156, 165, 166, 168, 269–­71, 289 Forbes, John Murray (printer). See Lincoln, Abraham, Emancipation Proclamation (1863) forgery. See counterfeits Forget-­Me-­Not, The, 217 Forty Thieves, The, 238 Foundling Hospital, 134; Admission form with attached fabric token (1756), 135 Foundling Hospital for Wit. Number III, The (1746), 213–­14; manuscriptural emendations, 214 Fraktur (typeface), 101–­3 Free Society of Artists, 119 Friedland, Paul, 287 Friendship’s Token of 1855, 44; binding, 46 frontispieces, 6, 10, 42, 47, 120, 233, 281–­82, 306; architectural, 141–­42, 152; illustrative, 148–­52; portrait-­ style, 142–­48, 152

index :

Fuchs, Eduard, 105 Fumaroli, Marc, 87 Für Haus und Herz (1881), 36 Furst, Lilian, 88 Fyfe, Aileen, 199 Gallagher, Catherine, 213 Gardiner, Ann T., 88 Garrick, David, 276; Catherine and Petruchio, 282 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 233 Gavarni, Paul, 24 Gebrauchsgraphik, 130 Gebrauchstexte, 130 Gellner, Ernest, 114 Genette, Gérard, 143 Gentleman’s Magazine, 122, 247, 253 Gérard, Baron (François Pascal Simon), 24 Gerhardt, Claus, 112 Géricault, Théodore, 24, 110 Gersaint, Edme-­François, 23 Gibbon, Edward, 289 Gidal, Eric, 70 Giesecke, Michael, 4 gift books, 33, 40, 191, 217–­18 Gigante, Denise, 252 Gitelman, Lisa, 5, 224 Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey B. Pingree, 6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 36, 39, 75, 80–­81, 92, 102, 104, 138, 202, 218; on literary fashions, 34; posthumous papers, 195–­96; Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821), 186 Golden, Catherine, 67 Goldgar, Anne, 172, 182 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 210 Goldsmith, Oliver, 93; The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), 207 Goodman, Dena, 85, 87, 95 Google, book scans, 210 Gosse, Edmund, 201 Goudie, Allison, 110 Gould, M. C., 203

355

graffiti, 105 Grandville, Jean-­Jacques (Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), 105 Granger, James, Biographical History of England (1769), 54, 70, 288, 292, 293–­94, 295, 297, 298 grangerization, 54, 93, 288, 304 Gray, Thomas: Elegy, 8; Poems (1768), 269 Greatheed, Bertie, 93 Green, William, A Description of a Series of Sixty Small Prints of the English Lakes (1814), 299 Gretton, Tom, 124 Griffin, Dustin, 91 Griffith, J., Travels in Europe, Asia Minor and Arabia (1805), 59 Griffith, Moses, 292 Griffo, Francesco, 262–­63 Grimm, Melchior, 197 Groth, Helen, 16 Grub Street, 73 guidebooks, 82–­84 guilds, 17, 22 Habermas, Jürgen, 6, 88 Hachette, Louis, 64 Hahn, Barbara, 93 Hale Family Scrapbook, 235, 236 Hallem, Arthur, 220 Hallett, Mark, 22 Handford, Thomas W., Illustrated Home Book of Poetry and Song (1884), 36, 37 handwriting, 47, 191–­94, 198, 203, 211 Häntzschel, Günter, 35 Hardwicke, Lord Chancellor (Philip Yorke), Pope v. Curll (1741), 177, 178 Hardy, Thomas, “Her Initials” (1869), 222 Harth, Erica, 85, 87 Harthan, John, 149 Haslett, Moyra, 185 Hauke, Marie-­Kristin, 27

356

: index

Hausschatz, 38 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Marble Faun (1860), 300–­303 Hazlitt, William, 284; “On Patronage and Puffing” (1822), 30–­31; “On Reading New Books” (1827), 246 Hebel, Johan Peter, 99–­100 Heesen, Anke te, 6, 226, 233, 235, 290 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 165 Heine, Heinrich, 264; Ideen (1827), 105 Heinzmann, Johann Georg, A Plea to My Nation (1795), 251 Helfand, Jessica, 233 Hemans, Felicia, “Casabianca,” 48 Henderson, John, 296 Henkin, David, 173 Henrietta Maria (queen), 179 Henry, Anne C., 260 Herbert, George, 261–­62; The Temple (1633), 262 Herder, Johann Gottfried, Stimmen der Völker (1778), 35 Hesse, Carla Allison, 4 Highfill, Philip, 282 Hill, Aaron, 297 Hill, Astraea, 297 Hill, Minerva, 297 historia literaria, 290 Historic Gallery (London), 118 Hoagwood, Terence Allan, and Kathryn Ledbetter, 4, 44 Hoare, Prince, 121 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (1651), 148 Hoche, Johann Gottfried, 252 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 12 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 36 Holmes, Richard, 208 Holy Bible, 290, 291 Hone, William, 107–­8, 110–­11 hortus siccus, 288 Houghton Mifflin (publisher), 302 Household Words. See Dickens, Charles Howard, John, 32

Howell, William Dean, Indian Summer (1886), 303 Hudson, Thomas, “Because ’Tis in the Papers” (1818), 32 Huet, Marie-­Hélène, 287 Hughes, Leo, 274 Hume, David, 87, 118 Hume, Robert, 275 Hunt, Leigh, 61–­62; “Pocket-­Books and Keepsakes” (1828), 40, 41, 44 Hunt, Tamara L., 110 Hurd, Richard, Dissertation on the Idea of Universal Poetry (1766), 130–­31 Illustrated London News, 124 Illustration, L’, 124 illustrations: in books, 44, 45, 121–­22, 148–­49, 239, 270, 291, 296; in periodicals, 102–­3, 106, 124 improvisatori, 274 index, 13, 52–­53, 66, 74, 158, 203, 257, 293, 308; in the Enlightenment, 159–­64; history, 155–­57; in the Romantic period, 165–­67, 231 Indice dei libri prohibiti, 157 indictment, trial, and sentence of Mess. T—­s K—­r, A—­w B—­n, and R—­t M—­n, before the Associate Synod, at the instance of the Rev. Mr. Adam Gib, The (1768), 209 instrumentality, 19, 22 Intelligenz-­Blatt, 21, 27 interactivity, 1, 7, 8–­9, 11–­14, 17, 217, 225, 242, 275, 304, 305, 309 intermediality, 6, 11, 22, 36, 47–­48, 103, 191, 203 Irving, Henry, 277 Irving, Washington, 207; The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1899), 150 Iser, Wolfgang, 104 Isselstein, Ursula, 92 Jackson, Heather J., 54, 191, 204, 210, 292

index :

357

Jagodzinski, Cecile M., 179 Jajdelska, Elspeth, 5 Jarvis, Charlie, 77 Jefferson, Thomas, 69 Jeffrey, Francis, 270 Jenkins, Henry, 6 Jenson, Nicholas, 262–­63 Jöcher, Christian, Compendious Lexicon of the Learned (1733), 167 Johannot, Tony: Don Quichotte de La Manche (1836), 149; La peau de chagrin (1831), 152 Johns, Adrian, 5, 88, 97 Johnson, Samuel, 26, 93, 138, 158, 175, 295–­96; on advertisements, 18; Dictionary, 40, 157; “Life of Alexander Pope” (1781), 173; The Rambler, 129–­30 Johnstone, Charles, Chrysal (1760–­ 64), 216 Jones, Robert W., 18 Jonson, Ben, 143–­44 Jordan, Dorothea, 277 Journal de la Librairie, 21, 24–­25, 49–­50 Journal des Luxus und der Moden, 21 Journal de Trévoux, 183 juste-­milieu, 105 Justice, George, and Nathan Tinker, 186

(Philadelphia, 1855), 219–­20 Keen, Paul, 4, 160, 247 Kemble, John Philip, 277, 284 Kent, Allen, Harold Lancour, and Jay E. Daily, 257 Kent, David A., and D. R. Ewen, 207 Kernan, Alvin, 4, 185 Kichuk, Diana, 49 Kiesel, Helmut, 4 Kirkham, Samuel, English Grammar (1823), 257 Kittler, Friedrich, 5 Kladderadatsch, 100, 101, 104 Kleist, Heinrich von, Die Marquise von O, 265 Klemann, Heather, 226 Klussmann, Paul Gerhard, and York-­ Gotthart Mix, 41, 193 Knight, Fanny Kemble, 277 Knox, Vicesimus, 160; Elegant Extracts in Poetry (1796), 269 Kolk, Rainer, 240 Konversationslexikon, 168 Koschorke, Albrecht, 5 Krajewski, Markus, and Peter Krapp, 258 Kriz, Kay Dian, 69 Kronick, David A., 182, 183 “Kupferstichromane.” See Schlegel, Friedrich

Kaeppler, Adrienne, 67 Kafka, Franz, 224 Kale, Steven D., 95 Kalisch, David, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105 Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 79 Kant, Immanuel, 163, 165, 167–­68; Conflict of the Faculties (1798), 272 Kastan, David Scott, 143 Kaunitz, Prince of (Wenzel Anton), 117 Kean, Edmund, 277, 284 Keating, Jessica, and Lia Markley, 78 Keats, John, 62, 127, 171, 172, 208; The Poetical Works of John Keats

Labbe, Jacqueline, 271 Ladies’ Pocket Book, The, 217 Lamb, Charles, 9–­10, 28, 61, 207, 285–­86; “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” (1822), 56–­58 Lanckoronska, Gräfin Maria, and Arthur Rümann, 41 Landseer, John, 122, 142 La Roche, Sophie von, 160, 202; Mein Schreibtisch (1799), 200 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 223; Aphorisms of Man (1788), 217–­18; Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–­78), 218

358

: index

Lawson, Alexander, 263 Leerstelle, 104 Leith, James, 133 Le Men, Ségolène, 193 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 150 Lethbridge, Stefanie, 38–­39 letters, 91–­93, 169, 170–­71, 306; authenticity of, 177–­78, 180; “epistolary imaginary,” 169, 184; materiality of, 173–­74, 184, 198; in print, 175, 176–­78, 179, 181–­83, 208; as property, 172, 175–­76; readership of, 179 Letters Written by the Late right Honourable Lady Luxborough to William Shenstone, Esq. (1775). See Monthly Review Leutbrewer, Christoph, La confession coupée (1634), 227–­30, 228 Lever, Ashton. See Donovan, Edward Levin, Rahel, 91–­93 Levy, Michelle, 12, 186, 196 Lewis, Matthew, The Monk (1796), 254 Lilti, Antoine, 85, 90 Lincoln, Abraham, Emancipation Proclamation (1863), 139 Linnaeus, Carl: Species Plantarum (1753), 77; Systema Naturae (1735), 230–­31 Lintot, Bernard, Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1721), 144 Lipking, Lawrence, 271 literary canons, 34–­35, 120, 143, 145, 146 Literary Fly, 247 literary galleries, 118–­22 livres bleus. See Bibliothèque bleue livret, 72 Locke, John, 226, 250 Longman (publisher), 269 Looby, Christopher, 69 Love, Harold, 186 Lupton, Christina, 224 Lüsebrinck, Hans-­Jürgen, 41 Lyell, Charles, Principles of Geography (1830), 165–­66

Lyman, Rollo LaVerne, 257 Lynch, Deidre, 58 Maber, Richard, 172 Macklin, Charles, 282 Macovski, Macovski, 164 Macready, Charles, 277 Male, G., 278 manicule, 157 Manning, Susan, 69 manuscripts, 7, 10, 306; culture, 185–­ 86; “fair copy,” 137, 195, 198; handwriting, 211; as imitations of print, 187–­90; letters, 169, 171, 181; in salons, 85–­86, 89–­90, 95; sentimental networks of exchange, 47, 191, 217–­18; sociability of, 28–­29, 196–­202. See also commonplace books; grangerization marchand-­mercier. See Gersaint, Edme-­François markings, 10, 52, 77, 204–­5, 260; cuts, 208; finding aids, 211–­12, 215; folds, 209, 225–­27, 230, 231, 241, 294–­95; human traces, 208, 209–­ 10; inscriptions, 210–­12, 213–­15, 217–­18, 219, 221; marginalia, 7, 190, 191, 205, 220, 289 Martin, Henri-­Jean, 4, 263 Mason, John, Essay on Elocution and Pronunciation (1748), 267–­68 Mason, Nicholas, 15, 16, 28 Mason, William, The Poems of Mr. Gray (1775), 269 mass culture, 64, 139, 193, 223–­24, 239, 246, 257 Massys, Quentin, 233 materiality: of anthologies, 48; as counterfeit, 107–­11; of letters, 173–­74, 184, 198; of reading, 225, 261, 271–­72, 295–­97; as reliable, 13, 30–­31, 97 Matheson, C. S., 72 Mathews, H., Characters and Scenes, 239

index :

Mattaire, Michel, 264 Mayer, David, III, 278 McCarthy, William, 178 McClellan, Andrew, 23 McCreery, John, The Press, a Poem (1803), 249 McDowell, Paula, 185 McGill, Meredith, 34–­35 McKendrick, Neil, 16 McKenzie, D. F., 275 McKeon, Michael, 176 McKitterick, David, 4, 97, 185 McLaughlin, Kevin, 224 McLeod, Randall, 262 McSparran, John, 209–­10; tracing of the owner’s hand in Robert Burns’ Poems (1825), 210 media ecology, 4, 10–­11, 72, 114, 159, 305–­6 media history, 10, 97–­98, 113, 123, 140, 169, 185–­87, 248–­49 mediation, 3, 12–­13, 14, 127, 173–­75, 187, 224, 279 medley prints, 22 Mee, Jon, 86 Meehan, Johanna, 6 Meggendorfer, Lothar, 227 memory, 139–­40, 280, 281 Mendelssohn, Moses, 168 Mercure de France. See Panckoucke, Charles-­Joseph Meredith, Owen, Lucile (1860), 221 Merry, Robert, 93, 94 Michelin (publisher), 64 middlebrow, 44 Miller and His Men, The, 238 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 220 Milton, John, 57, 137 Milton Gallery (London), 118 miscellany, 47. See also annuals; anthologies mise-­en-­page, 98, 104 Mole, Tom, 39, 60–­61 Momoro, Antoine-­François, 287 Monde Illustré, Le, 124

359

Montagu, Elizabeth, 91, 170 Monthly Review, 177–­78 monuments, 133 Morgenstern, Karl, 257–­58 Mörike, Eduard, 99–­100 Morning Chronicle, 28 Morphew, John, 63 Moureau, François, 197 Mozer, Hadley J., 17 Müller, Lothar, 224–­25 Munby, A. N. L., 170–­71 Murphy, Arthur, 93 Murray, John (publisher), 28, 60–­61, 75 Musenalmanach, 41 museums, 60, 67–­70, 137, 290 Myers, Robin, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, 204 Nash, Ray, 187 nationalism, 5, 13, 113, 114–­18, 120, 124–­25; national literary production, 35, 69, 70, 179–­80, 291 Necker, Suzanne, 87 Neefs, Jacques, 190 networks, 74, 93, 168, 169, 182–­83, 306–­7 Neumann, Gerhard, and Günter Oesterle, 5 Nevett, Terry, 16 New English Theatre, The (1776), 282 Newlyn, Lucy, 5 Newman, Steve, 35 Newton, Isaac: Opticks (1704), 231; Principia (1687), 164 Nister, Ernest, 227 Nodier, Charles, 12; Essais d’un jeune barde (1806), 35; Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept chateaux (1830), 98 nouvelles à la main, 197–­98 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 165 novels, 26, 87–­88, 130–­31, 137, 250–­51; epistolary, 181, 208, 266; illustrated, 148–­49

360

: index

object books, 44, 58, 60, 68–­69, 205. See also fine books O’Brien, John, 278 obsolescence, 185, 224 Oesterle, Günter, and Ingrid Oesterle, 99 Oldenburg, Henry, Philosophical Transactions (1665–­), 183 Oldfield, Anne, 277 O’Malley, Andrew, 4 One Foot by Land, & One Foot by Sea (1811), 278 O’Neill, Lindsay, 182, 183 O’Quinn, Daniel, 274 orality, 4, 185, 202; in letters, 174; recitation, 47–­48; in salons, 86–­ 87, 243 Otley, Jonathan, 81–­82 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 79 Palgrave, Francis, Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861–­), 35 Panckoucke, Charles-­Joseph, 22, 30 paper, 6, 223, 242, 307, 309; currency, 127, 131–­33, 224; cutting, 7, 232–­ 33, 304; economies of, 205, 247; pasting, 236, 240–­41, 264, 288; scrapbooks, 7, 77, 126, 127, 199, 233–­36, 240, 283, 294–­95; sheets, 231, 258; wastepaper, 135, 136, 137 Parini, Giuseppe, 93 Park, Roy, 285 Parkinson, James. See Donovan, Edward Parsons, Wiliam, 93 Pasanek, Brad, and Chad Wellmon, 159, 167 patronage, 24, 25–­26, 77, 93, 191, 194; state-­sponsored, 113, 114, 116–­18 Patten, Robert L., 108, 110 Paul, Jean, 99 Paulson, Ronald, 23 Peale, Charles Wilson, 68, 69, 70–­71 Pearsall, Derek, 143

Pearsall, Sarah M. S., 172, 173 Peltz, Lucy, 54 Pelz, Annagret, 200 Pennant, Thomas, 292, 294 Percy, Thomas, 93, 150; Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), 35 periodicals, 127, 130, 181–­82 periodicity, 129, 234, 276 Petie, Elia, “On a Blank Leaf in ‘The Marble Faun’” (1891), 303 Petiver, James, 75–­77, 82, 83; Hortus siccus Cappensis (n.d.), 76 Petrarch, Francesco, 179 Phelan, Peggy, 275 Philipon, Charles, 105, 110; La Caricature (1832), 106 Philips, Katherine, 200 Phillips, Mark Salber, 180, 202 Philosophical Transactions. See Oldenburg, Henry, Philosophical Transactions (1665–­) Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne), 152–­53 Pignotti, Lorenzo, 93 Pindemonte, Ippolito, 90, 93, 94 Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 93–­95; Thraliana, 206 Piper, Andrew, 3, 4, 150, 193, 254; on anthologies, 34–­35, 39, 240; on authorial portraits, 144; on manuscripts, 47, 80, 186, 191; on mediation, 224; on spacing, 205–­ 6, 260, 267–­68 Pittock, Murray, 188–­89 plagiarism, 165 Platière, Imbert de la, Galerie Universelle (1785), 61 Pliny the Younger, 248 pocket books, 40, 41, 42–­43, 64, 217 Poet’s Gallery (London), 118 Pointon, Marcia, 54, 142 Pompadour, Madame de (Jeanne Antoinette Poisson), 54–­55 Pope, Alexander, 174, 179, 202; Pope v. Curll (1741), 175, 177 Porter, Dahlia, 270, 271

index :

Porter, Dorothy, and Roy Porter, 32 postal service, 67, 171–­72 posthumous publication, 91, 92, 141, 145, 200 Postman, Neil, 11 Pourrat (editors), 153; Collection d’auteurs français (1833), 154 Pozzo, Cassiano dal, Museo Cartaceo, 290 Prévost, Abbé, Gazette de la Cour, 197 Price, Leah, 4, 34–­35, 205 print culture, 2, 114, 191, 242. See also proliferation printing, 99–­100, 112, 120, 133–­35; handpress, 142, 146; industrial, 139; intaglio, 113, 115, 123, 124, 142, 143; letterpress, 5, 114, 124; lithography, 2, 103–­4, 138, 145, 289; printer’s waste reused as a specimen-­drying book, 136 Printsellers’ Association, 123 privilège. See censorship; Darnton, Robert professionalization, 115, 117, 121, 123 proliferation, 7, 13, 131, 160–­61, 223, 243, 303–­4, 307–­8; decline, 245–­48; regulation, 251–­57, 290 Public Advertiser, 32 Punch, 100 Quarterly Review, 75 Quiller-­Couch, Arthur, Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), 35 Rajan, Tilottama, 164 Rambaud, Cabaud de, 197 Ramberg, Johann. See Royal Academy Rambler, The. See Johnson, Samuel Randall, David, 181 Raven, James, 4, 16, 186 Ray, Gordon N., 149 reading: à clef, 213–­16; anthological, 38, 39, 42; appropriative, 222; associative, 77–­79, 81–­83, 295;

361

elevator, 36; materiality of, 225, 261, 271–­72, 295–­97; theories of, 226, 252 reading public, 138, 224–­25, 242, 244, 248. See also audiences reception: of anthologies, 38; of print, 244–­46; in reviews, 28–­29, 40, 177, 178, 203; in salons, 88–­89; of theatre, 275, 277, 284 recitation. See orality Redford, Bruce, 174 Reiman, Daniel, 196–­97, 200 Rembrandt (Harmenszoon van Rijn), 117 Renaudot, Théophraste, 17–­18 renvoi, 33, 305, 306–­8; Network Representation of Renvois Links, 307 reprinting, 35–­36, 39, 74, 136, 148, 199, 227, 263, 281, 282, 300 Republic of Letters, 85, 170, 182, 218; commerce de lettres, 172 Retrospective Review, 248 Reynolds, Joshua, 71, 147–­48 Richardson, Samuel, 26, 169, 175, 179, 181; Clarissa (1748), 260; The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 158; Pamela (1741), 202, 208–­9, 266, 297 Riformatori. See censorship: in Italy Rippon, John, 69 Roach, Joseph, 281 Robbins, Bruce, 6 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 28, 61–­62 Robinson, Mary, 146–­48; Poems by Mrs. Robinson (1791), 147 Rogers, Mortimer M., 221 Romanticism: genius, 120, 138; solitary authorship, 196; totality, 165–­66, 168 Rönnepeter, Joachim, 104 Roper, Abel. See Tonson, Jacob, The Tryal of Doctor Sacheverell (1710) Roquette, Otto, Waldmeisters Brautfahrt (1897), 150–­52, 151 Rose, Mark, 4, 177

362

: index

Ross, Trevor, 35 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 145, 153; Collection d’auteurs français (1833), 154 Rowlandson, Thomas. See Royal Academy Roy, Stéphane, 117 Royal Academy, 71–­72, 119, 122, 148 Rubens, Peter Paul, 117 Russell, Gillian, 274 Sacheverell, Henry. See Tonson, Jacob, The Tryal of Doctor Sacheverell (1710) Sadleir, Michael, 60 Saint-­Aubin, Gabriel de, 72–­73 Salmon, Mrs., handbill for “Mrs. Salmon’s Royal Wax-­Work in Fleet-­Street,” 20 salons, 72, 85–­92; in Britain, 91, 93–­ 95; decline, 95; in France, 87, 88, 92; in Germany, 88, 91, 93, 235; in Italy, 89–­91, 93–­94. See also conversations Sands, Benjamin, Metamorphosis (1816), 226 satire, 73, 97–­99, 105–­12, 131, 209, 254–­ 55, 264, 277, 298 Saunders, J. W., 88 Sayer, Robert, 226 Schechner, Richard, 277 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 165 Scherenschnitt, 242 Schiller, Friedrich, 36, 39, 102 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 88 Schlegel, Friedrich, 149 Schmidt, Rachel, 149, 223 Schmutzer, Jakob Matthias, 117 Schneider, Gary, 174, 175, 179 Schön, Erich, 5 Schönfuß, Walther, 27 Scott, Raymond, 52 Scott, Walter, 28, 238; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–­3), 35; Old Mortality, 150

Scott-­Warren, Jason, 220 Seibert, Peter, 91 Selfridge-­Field, Eleanor, 287 Selwyn, George Augustus. See Walpole, Horace Sévigné, Marquise de (Marie de Rabutin-­Chantal), 179 Seward, Anna, Letters of Anna Seward (1811), 59 Shakespeare, William, 57, 118, 120, 203, 240–­42, 283, 284, 285, 295–­96; Dramatic Works of Shakspeare, 121; First Folio (1623), 52, 143; The Taming of the Shrew, 282 Shakspeare Gallery, 121, 122 Shee, Martin Archer, 122 Shelley, Mary Godwin, 28, 208 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 28, 111, 208, 284; Queen Mab, 38; “the Spirit of the Age,” 139 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The Rivals (1775), 204, 220 Sherman, Stuart, 276 Siddons, Sarah, 277, 282, 284 Sidney, Philip, 57 Siegert, Bernhard, 174 Sillars, Stuart, 283 Simpson, Erik, 274 Siskin, Clifford, 4, 5 Siskin, Clifford, and William Warner, 164 skit note, 108–­9 Sloane, Hans, 69 Smentek, Kristel, 123 Smith, Adam, 164 Smith, Charlotte, 269, 270, 271; Elegiac Sonnets (1789), 25 Smith, George Barnett, Illustrated Ballads (1881), 149–­50 Smith, J. R., The Dream (1791), 254–­55, 255 Smollett, Tobias, 26 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. See Royal Academy Society of Artists, 119

index :

Socrates, 7 Solander, Daniel, 68, 69, 137 Solomon, Diana, 201–­2 Somerset House. See Royal Academy Souter, John, The Book of English Trades (1818), 122 Southey, Charles, 60 Southey, Katherine, 219 Southey, Robert, 58, 219, 271–­72, 289; Cottonian bindings, 59, 60, 219; Poems (1797), 269, 270; Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), 269 spacing, 104, 126, 133, 205, 211, 250, 253, 260, 308; whitening, 261–­62. See also mise-­en-­page Speaight, George, and Brian Alderson, 226 specimen books, 35 Spenser, Richard, Sheapheardes Calender, 201 Spoerhase, Carlos, 64 Staël, Germaine de, 86, 87–­88, 91 stages, 6, 274, 306; in Britain, 274–­86; in France, 286–­87; in Italy, 286; in print, 281, 284–­87; repertory theatre, 154; surrogation, 281–­82; toy theatre, 238–­39, 242 Staiger, Emil, 80 Stallybrass, Peter, 133–­34, 186, 191 Stamp Act (British, of 1712), 16 Stanton, Judith Phillips, 269 St. Clair, William, 4, 5, 143, 185 Steevens, George, 240–­42, 296; pasted-­in emendation of Works of Shakespeare (1802), 241 Stendhal (Marie-­Henri Beyle), La vie de henry Brulard (1835–­36), 190 Stephanson, Raymond, 178 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy (1759–­67), 98, 260 Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Wrecker (1892), 150 Stewart, Susan, 69 Stillinger, Jack, 196 Stoddard, John, 28 Stone, Sarah. See Donovan, Edward

363

Strachan, John, 15, 16 Strangford, Lord (Percy Smythe), Poems, from the Portuguese of Luis de Cameons (1803), 269 Striphas, Ted, 3 Strunk, William, The Elements of Style (1920), 257 Sutherland, Kathryn, 53 Swift, Jonathan, 144 table books, 40 Taschenbücher. See pocket books Taschenbuch für Damen auf das Jahr 1818, 43 taste: literary, 21, 34–­35, 40, 41, 137, 177–­78, 180, 203, 245–­48, 252–­54, 257; personal, 19, 25, 60, 61, 64, 79, 117–­18, 123, 211, 285, 299 Tauchnitz (publisher), 300–­303 Taws, Richard, 109, 132, 133 taxonomy, 68–­71, 75–­77, 81–­84, 101; specimen-­drying book from the Endeavour voyage of 1768–­71, 136 Tayloe, Jennie, 221 Taylor, Jane, and Ann Taylor, 250 Tennyson, Alfred Lloyd, 220 Teotochi, Isabella (Marin Albrizzi), 89, 91 Terry, Ellen, 277 Teutsche Zeichenschule, 117 textiles, 134 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 44, 46 Theresa, Maria (empress), 116 thickening, 143, 208, 235, 282–­83, 288, 292, 306, 309; additions, 6, 231, 264; commercialization, 299–­302; interleaving, 54, 70, 77, 290, 292, 295–­98, 304; “paper museums,” 290 Thomas, Sophie, 70 Thomasen, I., 188–­89, 193, 201; Eikon Basilike (1713), 188, 189 Thomsen, Mette Ramsgard, 6 Thornton, Bonnell, and William Hogarth, “Grand Exhibition of

364

: index

the Society of Sign-­Painters,” 23 Thornton, Sara, 5, 15 Thornton, Tamara Plakins, 187, 214–­15 Timm, Regine, 149 Tinker, Chauncey Brewster, 85 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 117 Tlusty, B. Ann, 85 Todd, Christopher, 17, 22 Tonson, Jacob, and Richard Tonson (editors). See Addison, Joseph, Notes upon the Twelve Books of Paradise Lost (1738) Tonson, Jacob, The Tryal of Doctor Sacheverell (1710), 62–­64 Town, Mr. (persona). See Colman, George, and Bonnell Thornton Town and Country Magazine, “On the Decline of Poetical Taste and Genius” (1792), 247 Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria (1806), 219 Travis, Charles, 105 Trolander, Paul, and Zeynep Tenger, 186 Tsien, Jennifer, 253 Tucker, Susan, Katherine Ott, and Patricia P. Buckler, 233 Turner, Dawson, 170–­71 Typographische Monatsbericht. See Bertuch, Friedrich Justin typography, 42, 98, 100, 104, 262–­63, 272–­73; in Britain, 101, 103, 107–­ 9, 111, 250, 260, 266–­67, 268; in catalogs, 66, 82–­83; on currency, 107–­12; in France, 101, 103–­4, 105–­7, 109–­11; in Germany, 101–­3, 104–­5, 112 Ultee, Maarten, 172 Unfer Lukoschik, Rita, 85 Urry, John, Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1721), 144 Ussher, James, Clio (1767), 254

Valenze, Deborah, 111 Varnhagen, Karl August, 91–­93 Vernet, Claude-­Joseph, 24 Vichy-­Chamrond, Marie de, 92 Viscomi, Joseph, 52 vocal parts of an entertainment, called the Necromancer or Harlequin Doctor Faustus, The (1723, 1724), 279 Vollständigkeit, 162, 165 Voltaire (François-­Marie Arouet), 253 Vossische Zeitung, 16 Wadsworth, Sarah, 4 Walmesley, Charles, 303; The Plays of William Shakespeare (1793), 295–­97 Walpole, Horace, 68, 71, 78, 294 Warde, Beatrice, 100–­101 Wark, Robert, 288 Warner, Michael, 4, 5, 6 Watson, Cecilia, 257 Watteau, Jean-­Antoine, L’enseigne de Gersaint, 23 Wehde, Susanne, 101 Wellmon, Chad, 161–­62, 163, 245 Wenderoth, Georg, Lehrbuch der Botanik (1821), 304 Wescomb, Sarah, 169 West, Anthony James, 52 West, Benjamin, The Death of General Wolfe (1770), 119 West, Shearer, 277 West, Thomas, Guide to the Lakes in Westmorland, Cumberland, and Lancashire (1793), 299 Westminster Review, 31 Wettlaufer, Alexandra K., 5 White, Patricia, 271 Whole Book of Psalms, The, 290, 291 Whyte, Ryan, 73 Wieland, Christopher Martin, 102, 253 Wilhelmy-­Dollinger, Petra, 91 Wille, Johann, 117

index :

Willer, Georg, 66 Williams, Charles, Luxury (1801), 254–­55, 256 Williams, George James. See Walpole, Horace Williams, Raymond, 5 Wilmans, Friedrich, Taschenbuch der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet (1823), 42 Wittmann, Reinhard, 4, 257 Wolfe, James (major general). See Woollett, William women: as an ideal public, 88–­89; reading, 43, 44, 254–­56; rebinding, 58–­60, 219; in salons, 85, 87–­89, 93–­96; writing, 53, 86, 88, 91, 95–­96, 180 Woollett, William, 120; The Death of General Wolfe (1776), 119, 122 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 28 Wordsworth, John, 219 Wordsworth, William, 25–­26, 28, 207, 208, 219, 254; Lyrical Ballads (1800), 253, 269, 271, 272, 297–­98; on manuscripts, 137–­38 World, The. See Merry, Robert Wrighten, Mary Ann, 282 Wrigley, Richard, 23–­24 Zettel, Friedrich, In zarter Frauenhand (1887), 43–­44, 45 Zionkowski, Linda, 185 Zmölnig, Brigitte, 116 Zwinger, Theodor, Theatrum humanae vitae (1565–­1604), 156

365