Vibrant Material Textuality: New Materialism, Book History, and the Archive in Paper

The epigraph to washington irving’s 1819 sketch, “the art of Book-making,” is drawn from Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy: “If that severe doom of Synesius be true—‘It is a greater offence to steal dead men’s labor, than their clothes,’—what shall become of most writers?”¹ The sketch itself is a meditation on this question, observing the work of “authors … in the very act of manufacturing books … in the reading-room of the great British Library” and reflecting on their use of the archive.² The narrator observes writers dipping into “one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature,” seeking to “swell their own scanty rills of thought” by copying the work of previous writers into a pastiche of their own without respect for the integrity of the originals. Particularly troublesome for the narrator is the “kind of metempsychosis” that the original works undergo in the hands of writers who borrow without paying respect to a source’s genres and styles. For example, “what was formerly a ponderous history revives in the shape of a romance.”³ Subsequently, Irving’s narrator falls “into a doze” during which he has a vision of the reading room wherein books are transformed into “garment[s] of foreign or antique fashion” and out of which authors (now a “ragged threadbare throng”) clothe themselves by taking “a sleeve from one, a cape from another, a skirt from a third … decking [themselves] out piecemeal.”⁴ If it is worse to steal a dead man’s labor than his clothes, then these writers double down by decking themselves in “the patchwork manner” of both.⁵

In Irving’s sketch, the reading room of the British Library is transformed from a space of reading and writing text, to a “book manufactory” and authors become rag pickers and assemblers of apparel.⁶ Surely, Irving is out to satirize the unoriginality and inaccuracy of writers who cut and stitch from the archive with less than meticulous attention to context or detail. Additionally, however, Irving’s figuring “book-making” as the work of assembling text from rags is a reference to the technology of papermaking. Like the motley attire assembled by the authors in the narrator’s daze, almost all paper was made from collected shreds of rags until the last third of the nineteenth century. Perhaps not all authors stole the labor of their predecessors, but all texts on paper wore the clothes of the dead.

I begin with the central device of Irving’s “The Art of Book-making” because it raises questions about agency and the archive that link both contemporary theory and contemporary book history’s investments in materiality. First, Irving’s characterization of writing as “manufacture” in the act of “book-making” illuminates a central question of material textual studies. That is, “Book-making” stages a fantasy about the relationship between the material embodiment of a text and its linguistic content, querying how material form makes meaning. If books in the archive contain the labor of writers in their words, what do they archive within the raggy content of paper? And, to bring the language of new materialist theory to bear on material textuality, what force does that raggy content have on the reader who not only reads the words of the dead but also touches their clothes? The tradition of book history, stretching back through philology and textual editing as well as through the present, has long been concerned with certain elements of a text’s materiality. Following bibliography’s traditional attention to material instantiations of texts to construct an idealized work, however, book history has tended to look to things like paper in service of a linguistic work printed on it.⁷ Instead, here I look at the ways material textual studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted.

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