Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature by Jeffrey Todd Knight (review)

‘How we collate is how we think’ writes Jeffrey Todd Knight near the end of Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature. ‘Collating’ here is somewhat broadly interpreted: Knight’s new volume begins among the myriad Renaissance texts and booklets that were issued in small formats and then ‘collated’ (that is, collected) and bound together by or for their owners into miscellaneous volumes that would survive on the shelf longer than a single casual pamphlet. The result is the sammelband, a format anyone frequenting libraries well-stocked with books from the period before 1800 will have encountered: tract volumes, collections of plays or political pamphlets, miscellaneous writings bound together for little reason other than that they were roughly the same size. Knight is interested, however, not only in how such texts were brought together but also in printed books and personal manuscripts that were recompiled, interleaved, and annotated by their authors. ‘For generations of collectors and owners whose legacy is still visible in archives,’ he writes, ‘the relatively flexible composite volume was the most conventional, practical means of storing and using most kinds of literary texts’ (p. 61).

Bound to Read, moreover, is situated at the intersection of bibliography and literary criticism, for Knight contends that such early collections exhibit practices of reading and interpretation ‘significantly at odds with modern textual categories and standards of literary value’ (p. 70). ‘Modern’ collectors and librarians, by disbinding and recataloguing their contents, have destroyed much evidence for practices of reading and thinking about texts to which the original bound-up miscellanies testified. Building on the work of William Sherman and others who have shown how more recent collectors privileged ‘clean’ copies with marks of authorship and annotations removed, and mindful also of David Pearson on binding and Paul Needham on disbinding, Knight shows that the desire for a quite different ideal of complete -ness has induced collectors, antiquarian book-sellers and rare-book librarians to break up such miscellaneous volumes into single texts. In doing so, he argues, they created artefacts that not only fed, but had some role in initiating, an insistence on the individual text as the authentic ‘authorial’ work, focusing attention on certain culturally ennobled authors, Shakespeare in particular, and constructing what Knight sees as a factitious break in literary history. ‘The more a rare book was sought after by modern collectors’ he tells us, ‘the likelier it was to be severed from its material history and reconstituted according to modern specifications’ (p. 28).

An initial chapter, ‘Special Collections’, traces in exemplary detail two records of how such assembly and disassembly took place. First is the unfinished catalogue of the eccentric late eighteenth-century Cambridge cataloguer William Pugh. The books Pugh listed in obsessive detail were later disbound and given new press-marks, but his catalogue is still extant, and provides ‘a detailed snapshot of an early printed book collection as it looked to previous generations of readers’ (p. 23). Second is the library of Archbishop Matthew Parker, also in Cambridge and housed at Corpus Christi College. The Parker Register inventoried hundreds of texts in varying states of compilation, but in this case the Archbishop’s books, by his own provision, were never assimilated to any later system, and can be studied today for the way books of the time were ‘customizable, always subject to enlargement and rearrangement in the hands of users’ (p. 25). Chapter 2 looks at several rare Shakespeare volumes that are as much the products of the modern conservation lab as the seventeenth-century printer: quartos of Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets bought by Sir Thomas Caldecott in 1796 from a minor bookseller who had already cut them out from their original binding. Cropped, washed, and elegantly rebound together, they exhibit today almost no record of their centuries of...