Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History

III.4. Fragments

III.4. Fragments Bowdoin College Library has what I call a run-of-the-mill early sixteenthcentury psalter in a cheap contemporary binding. Bound in as an endpaper is an equally routine sheet of another nearly contemporary psalter or breviary. There is nothing unusual about this. Loose sheets or leaves of books are routinely used as pastedowns or binding material, whether originally printer ’s waste (that is, proofsheets or unused sheets) or binder’s waste (leaves from books that have been in circulation). Binder’s waste, that is, leaves with evidence of having been used or read, are less likely to appear as visible flyleaves or endpapers. I don’t recall ever having found an endpaper with interesting contemporary annotations (that is, written in before it became an endpaper for another book), or even signs of heavy use, although I am certain they exist. All the annotations on the pastedown in the book here—ownership, herbal recipe—were added after the leaves were incorporated into this book-copy. The endpaper and its inclusion here raise a number of questions, not the least of which is broached in the preceding paragraph. Immediately upon confronting that endpaper and thinking about it, I attempt to come up with some general principle regarding it: binder’s waste/printer’s waste, aesthetic rules involving endpapers of all kinds. And I consider this despite my claim to distrust all general principles, and despite my usual emphasis on the way in which actual books and book-copies defy the very principles required to understand them and talk about them. What is important about fragments such as this one is that they reflect not so much on the history of books in general (how could one possibly make Fragments 157 a comprehensive study of endpapers?), but rather on the relation between chronological history (that is, events that occurred over time) and the perception of that history by the modern bibliographer. A book fragment is difficult to abstract into the realm of bibliographical categories such as editions, issues , states. When a leaf from a book is used for something else (an endpaper), that instance of use remains stubbornly singular as well: the leaf is no longer part of a book; it is rather a feature of a unique copy. The fragment, or bit of binding material, might be a witness to or index of certain abstract things such as bibliographical states and editions or the conventions of a bindery, but it is rarely a perfect exemplar of them. Figure 8. Pastedown, from Quincuplum Psalterium, 1515. Photo courtesy of the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine. 158 iii.4 Fragments such as this turn up whenever you deal with large numbers of rare books, and in that sense, there is nothing particularly rare or noteworthy about them in and of themselves. How one speaks of them or classifies them bibliographically or intellectually is what matters, and among the more interesting I have run into from this standpoint are the following: 1. A leaf from a verse grammar printed by Theodoric Rood, the earliest piece of English printing at UCLA’s Special Collections. I assume the book was bought more for the endpaper and the early English binding than for the text. 2. Fragments of a Carolingian MS of Bede’s Homilies, contained in an early binding at the Huntington. 3. Fragments of Donatus, Ars Minor, the earliest example of Netherlands printing at the Huntington. 4. Also at the Huntington, what appears to be a partial page (red impression of a page intended to be printed in two colors) of an unrecorded edition of a legal text by de Tudeschis, Panormitanus included in several copies of Ratdolt’s 1484 Ptolemy. These are disconnected. I am able to group them here for what will seem to be completely arbitrary reasons. They could be held together more generally by the notion of “early,” and without that notion, I would never have bothered with them; for most historians of early books, a binding fragment from, say, a nineteenth-century newspaper is defined, somewhat tautologically, as of no interest. In some sense, any conclusion I could draw from this particular group of fragments would be included in the assumption I used to categorize them as a group. They are interesting not because they are representative, but rather because they can serve as allegories for something beyond themselves . Somewhere in my files, I have a...