“Furnished” for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?”

—Walter Benjamin

In among the manuscript classes at the Bodleian Library is a copy of Ilium in Italiam, an emblem book composed by the vicar-poet John Sandsbury and printed at Oxford in 1608.¹Ilium in Italiam normally consists of seventeen woodcuts displaying the arms of Oxford’s colleges, each with a complimentary verse in Latin. This particular copy is classified as a manuscript because it contains, in addition, a great deal of nonprinted material: handwritten lists, financial records, poetry and doodling, a selection of Francis Bacon’s essays, household recipes “to cure fits” and “to perfume a doublet of leather.” But if it is inaccurate to call this volume a printed book, it is equally inaccurate to call it a manuscript, produced in part as it was by the press. In fact, the volume’s handwritten additions—the features used to establish its classification—sit alongside printed additions of the same variety: scraps cut out of other books ranging from small tables to whole pages of text.² All of this material, manuscript and print, has been bound with, glued to, or written directly in the pages of Ilium in Italiam, now scarcely recognizable as a collection of heraldic woodcuts. The composite book survives in an original binding, with a cover page signed by its seventeenth-century compiler, Simon Sloper of Magdalene College.³

Systems of classification in libraries and collections (and in the fields of knowledge that rely on them) reflect, and to some extent reinforce, an accepted range of uses for books. When these systems long postdate the objects they classify, their inadequacies can sometimes offer an important reminder that ways of using books have a history.⁴ For modern readers at the Bodleian, Ilium in Italiam is useful in the study of printed poetry and emblems. If it has been altered or enlarged by hand, it becomes useful in the study of manuscript miscellanies, commonplacing, or some other agreed-upon, if slightly less prescriptive, modern category.⁵ But for Simon Sloper, Ilium in Italiam was something more than the sum of its printed text and images, and certainly something other than what is now called a manuscript miscellany or a commonplace book. Rather, Sloper’s Ilium in Italiam was transformed into a storage device—a “volume” in the textual and spatial sense of the word.⁶ Its function became that of a filing cabinet, a deed box, or some other kind of container for material largely unrelated to the heraldry of Oxford’s colleges. How are we to classify books like this one, whose uses exceeded (or simply disregarded) its printed content? Where in our taxonomies are books that, for earlier readers, were valuable less as texts and more as things?

Sloper’s book highlights a set of practices, still operative but generally devalued in modern textual culture, that involve making books useful as material objects or artifacts, not just for reading or owning for their ideational content alone. The “use” of books in the era of early print has recently become a topic of substantial interest to both historians of reading and scholars interested in the materiality of literary works;⁷ but conceptions of utility, I would like to suggest, remain largely bound to modern categories, making room enough for texts but little for textual objects. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine first aroused interest in “book use” in their influential essay “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” which reinterprets Renaissance reading habits through the now-famous book-wheel illustration of Agostino...