Revolution and the Antiquarian Book: Reshaping the Past, 1785–1815 by Kristian Jensen (review)

Based on the 2008 Lyell Lectures, Revolution and the Antiquarian Book has all the appearance of a typical product of that distinguished series, namely a book by an eminent specialist, intended for other specialists: more than a third of its 318 pages consists of notes and bibliography. Within the chronological limits announced in his subtitle, however, Kristian Jensen makes a significant contribution to l’histoire des mentalités of those troubled years, as shifting attitudes towards the earliest printed books turn out to reveal a great deal about how men brought up under the Ancien Régime needed to reshape the past generally, in order to adjust to the rapidly changing world around them. By their very nature, incunabula were controversial objects. For some observers in the 1790s, they were embarrassing relics of a much despised past. For others, true to the philosophe tradition — Malesherbes, say, or Condorcet — early printed books had a symbolic importance as tangible evidence of the benefits of printing, which they saw as the first, crucial step on the road leading to the democratization of knowledge. Drawing on his experience as cataloguer of the Bodleian’s incunabula, Jensen gives us a guided tour of the relevant primary source material: the acquisition lists of the great national libraries, correspondence between book dealers and their potential customers, and, of course, the books themselves, no less than one hundred and thirty of which are referred to in the text. In addition to the scholarship, what is particularly impressive is Jensen’s emphasis on people — people as agents of change, rather than abstract concepts such as reification. War on a European scale raised radically new problems, both ideological and practical, as the marketing of hitherto unavailable artefacts brought into contact men of very different backgrounds: French bureaucrats anxious to add to the gloire of the young Republic, English milords and book dealers, often more knowledgeable than the other interested parties but with very different agendas. Of the five chapters, the most revealing — and, for this reader the most surprising — is the last, ‘Commemorating and Obliterating the Past: “Old Books, Very Displeasing to the Eye”’. Surprising in that it shows the extent to which the new owners were prepared to go to bring these three-hundred-year-old treasures into line with eighteenth-century taste, bleaching the paper so that the type would stand out more clearly (thus obscuring or even obliterating marginalia that had accumulated over the years), or replacing the crude original boards with fine modern bindings, sometimes costing as much or more than the books themselves: the lovely plates reproduced between pp. 159–64 are more reminiscent of Fragonard than of Gutenberg. In short, a splendid and — appropriately enough, given the topic — beautifully produced book, one that should be enjoyed not only by fellow librarians but by cultural historians of the period in question.