Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork by Whitney Trettien (review)

With the rapid development of book history as a discipline, recent work has focused on breaking down the book's elements, forms, genres, and agents into discrete units for close study, zooming in on title pages, frontispieces, and indexes, for example, or singling out exceptional publishers, illustrators, and binders. Whitney Trettien's new book and digital project is a much-needed step back that explores how these delineations obscure the messy world of "bookwork."

Throughout Cut/Copy/Paste, Trettien defines and deploys "bookwork" as everything from the making of books to how they can be used. Bookwork is implemented as a framework for understanding the book as an "assembled product of knowledge and itself an engine of knowledge production; it crystallizes ideas through historically contingent processes of labor and disperses them back into the world as particles for others to gather" (21–22). Using the concept of bookwork in conjunction with her well-chosen case studies, Trettien shows the entangled identities of consumers and creators in a world where print, manuscript, and decorative papers were dissected and reassembled into new works. Each chapter explores bookworkers or collectives of bookworkers who creatively blend the book culture of their time with their presses, scissors, and paste, manipulating fragments of text and images and creating anachronic works that are best understood not as texts but as "multidimensional media objects designed with meaning and purpose" (146).¹ These include, for example, the women of the seventeenth-century Ferrar/Collet family in Little Gidding, England, who created Bible concordances, or "harmonies," by cutting and pasting text and images from diverse sources onto a single page. This particular case shows how items created for mass consumption could be used to create unique works.

Like the women of Little Gidding, Trettien's work intentionally creates endless paths of discovery for her reader. To review this book is also to review the rich collection of digital assets that populate the open-source edition of the book. Hosted on the platform Manifold, the online edition of Cut/Copy/Paste is embedded with links to digital facsimiles from libraries around the world, as well as spreadsheets of bibliographic metadata, maps, a draft copy of one of the chapters with editor's comments, and images of bindings and ballads, to name a few. As she explores early modern people's remixing of fragmented media, the open-source book parallels these ideas and takes seriously the role of the digital turn on the history of collecting and collective bookwork. Throughout her work, Trettien describes the bookwork of the seventeenth century using terms such as "semantic web," "hypertext," and "makerspace" to remind us how seemingly disruptive innovations have long been embedded into book making and collecting practices. By using new media to generate knowledge about old media, Trettien challenges the false binaries that pervade book historiography: that printing supplanted manuscript, that e-books are the death of material books, and that digital resources threaten libraries. The project's framing of media transformation and fragmentation as a creative rather than destructive force decenters grand publications, collectors, and publishers to highlight the marginal and marginalized.

The first chapter, "Cut," spotlights the aforementioned women of Little Gidding and their biblical concordances. This chapter adds to the recent work on the women by Michael Gaudio by exploring this type of book "hacking" as a "protofeminist technology," even invoking comparisons to Riot Grrrl zine culture (6, 36). While it is this chapter that most explicitly draws attention to collaborative feminist book practice, the whole project embraces these collective principles.

The focus on homosocial networks of bookworkers continues in the second chapter, "Copy." This chapter takes for its case study the bookwork that came out of the domestic press (or makerspace) at Brent Hall by Edward Benlowes and his companion Jan Schoren. The bulk of...