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Chapter 8 Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers’ Marks Abusus non tollit usum. [Misuse does not preclude use.] —Latin axiom This book has been concerned with the kinds of marks that Renaissance readers made in and around their books and with the kinds of things we can learn from them. This final section will consider the fate of those marks as they have come down to us today, passing through auction houses, rare book libraries, conservation labs, and exhibition halls— and, above all, the hands of later owners. The marked-up books of Renaissance readers have much to teach us not only about the uses of books in the past but also about attitudes toward books where the past meets the present. We can begin by considering two typical descriptions of sixteenth-century books from the middle of the twentieth century: • ‘‘[B]lack letter, each title within a woodcut border; the blank margin . . . skilfully renewed; each work rather soiled by use but sound copies’’ (Sale catalogue, Bernard Quaritch Ltd., January 1952). • ‘‘This volume, printed during the reign of Elizabeth I, has been well and piously used. Marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand— comments and scriptural quotation—bring to life an early and earnest owner’’ (Dorothy Bowen’s exhibition catalogue, The Book of Common Prayer [Huntington Library, 1953]). What makes these descriptions particularly useful, in the context of this book, is that they offer sharply contrasting views of—and vocabularies for—signs of use in rare books: one volume has been ‘‘rather soiled by use’’ while the other has been ‘‘well and piously used’’ by ‘‘an early and earnest owner.’’ And what makes them the perfect point of departure 152 Renaissance Readers and Modern Collectors for the issues I will explore in this concluding chapter is the fact that they are both describing the same volume—the same copy, that is, of the same book. It is a small folio, now housed at the Huntington Library, containing the 1586 Book of Common Prayer and Psalter along with a second Psalter from 1583—a deluxe edition of the metrical psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins, featuring musical notation ‘‘to sing them withall.’’1 This volume came to the Huntington as part of the James R. Page Collection, the source of the ‘‘uncommon Book of Common Prayer’’ and many of the other volumes discussed in Chapter 5. The first description above is the entry from the January 1952 catalogue of the antiquarian bookdealers Bernard Quaritch Ltd., from whom Page acquired the volume for $210, and the second text is the caption from the catalogue accompanying a 1953 exhibition at the Huntington, where Page’s prayer books were first displayed nine years before they joined its permanent collection .2 What the sale catalogue describes as dirt, then, is what the exhibition catalogue identifies as a thorough set of contemporary manuscript notes (Figure 32). The unidentified reader who produced them—in the first half of the seventeenth century, judging by the hand—left us with a detailed record of his reading habits and devotional practices. First, by binding in a second Psalter he was able to compare different translations for verses he considered particularly important;3 and the fact that it was what he called ‘‘the singing version’’ allows us to extend his reading from the apparently private context of the marginal annotations into the realm of public, oral, and musical performance. In the margins of all three texts he entered short summaries of important points and copied out phrases he found particularly resonant. In both Psalters he supplied verse numbers, supplemented the printed running titles with the numbers of the psalms found on each page, and compiled lists of cross-references to related lines (in other psalms and in various books of the Bible); and in the 1586 version he inserted marginal labels for the seven penitential psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143), the seven consolatory psalms (15, 27, 34, 37, 43, 49, and 73), and the seven psalms of thanksgiving (8, 30, 34, 103, 111, 138, and 145), along with a tabular finding guide for them beneath the opening psalm.4 And he filled virtually all of the larger blank spaces in the volume with pious meditations and detailed notes on matters theological and liturgical. Beneath the table of contents for the Book of Common Prayer, for instance, he grimly acknowledged that ‘‘The whole life of a Christian is nothinge else but a Contynewall tryall of his constancy in his...

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