Apothecaries' Cornets: Books as Waste Paper in the Renaissance

Recycling a book's pages as waste paper was a literary commonplace in Antiquity and the early modern period, a way of imagining literary and physical mortality, but it was also a material practice. This article explores the material and the textual culture of the motif in sixteenth-century France, focusing on the printed page as material object. The underlying preoccupations of the motif – waste, copiousness, and materiality – offer ways of analysing the relationship between the material book and the immaterial text and how Renaissance writers conceived of the book and its recycling.