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  • Rééditer Don Quichotte. Matérialité du livre dans la France du XIXe siècle by Ana Utsch
  • Mirjam M. Foot (bio)
Rééditer Don Quichotte. Matérialité du livre dans la France du XIXe siècle. By Ana Utsch. (Études et essais sur la Renaissance, 120.) Paris: Classiques Garnier. 2020. 315 pp. €76 / 38. isbn 978 2 406 09557 6 (hardback); 978 406 09556 9 (paperback).

This worthwhile book is not well served by its title. Students of Spanish literature will be disappointed, those interested in publishing history will find it too limited, while binding historians at whom the bulk of the text is aimed, and who will find it both of interest and of use, will not be inspired to pick it off a bookseller’s table.

In his clear and well written preface, Roger Chartier summarizes the essence of the book and points out its importance for binding history. The text that follows, with its long and convoluted sentences, liberally peppered with jargon, quotations, and reference notes, is harder work, at least for a non-native French speaker, but the hard work is worth it. In this study of nineteenth-century French edition bindings, Ana Utsch approaches the book as a material object, considering all aspects of its production, with emphasis on its binding, its structure, its decoration, and its intended public.

With the help of a large number of publishers’ and booksellers’ catalogues, Utsch demonstrates that there is no such thing as ‘an edition binding’. Per contra, there is a whole range of possibilities in which the same edition of the same text is presented [End Page 239] to the book-buying public. A specific text can be illustrated by a variety of artists in a variety of techniques, it can be printed in several different formats, but perhaps the greatest choice is in the many ways in which it can be bound. Structures range from sewn, in boards, in half bindings, to fully covered in a wide selection of materials. These include paper, cloth, linen, calico, buckram, shagreen, imitation and real leather. Bindings are offered plain or decorated by a variety of techniques: with lines, with a plaque, with small tools, embossed, printed with letterpress or with woodcuts, engravings or lithographs, and with or without gilt edges: a whole gamut from the very plain to the luxurious, with prices for the same format ranging from 50 centimes to 60 francs.

As the nineteenth century moved on, mechanization of printing, illustrating, and binding techniques increased and developed, enabling ever-larger numbers of the same text to be produced. At the same time, the reading public was growing and the same text when published in different formats and with a choice of illustration, and especially of binding, was quite clearly aimed at different categories of readers. Publishers offered the same text in series for the Christian Youth, for different ‘libraries’, such as the ‘Bibliothèque rose illustrée’, the ‘Bibliothèque des chemin de fers’, their bindings meant to attract a different public. A series for young girls is bound in pink embossed paper or cloth, while books aimed at collectors are available in gold-tooled leather. We find different binding styles, from the well- known ‘Cathedral’ bindings, plaques showing Gothic arches, plaques with romantic scenes, those with fantasy characters surrounded by emblems, or with coats of arms (real and imagined), to those showing scenes from the book inside. The rise of the novel gave a great impetus to heavily illustrated bindings, giving a preview of what was to come once one opened the book.

Ana Utsch has taken the popular, much translated, much illustrated, much re- published text of Cervantes, Don Quixote, in editions which appeared in France between 1799 and 1878, as a case study, showing all the variety in technique, style, and price that one can observe in nineteenth-century ‘edition’ bindings, but she ranges more widely, using other popular texts which show similar varieties. She has consulted a very wide spectrum of sources, among which perhaps the publishers’ and booksellers’ lists and catalogues are the most revealing.

This is a book that should be read by...

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