Books are more than the sum of the words and images they contain; they are also physical, material objects. We hold them, touch them; they exist in the world. Even a book containing information that has become outdated or that no one wants to read any longer continues to be a book.
As contemporary readers, we are generally not used to seeing what happens to books once they are no longer needed or desired for their content; they may be pulped, remaindered, or occasionally turned into visual art. When the materials that made contemporary books are transformed, we are used to their new forms being completely unrecognisable – we do not expect to be able to learn anything about what was once printed on the materials that have become a sheet of recycled paper, for example.
However, this was not always the case. While the paper and ink that make up the books we are familiar with today are relatively inexpensive commodities, the creation of a book was once a highly costly endeavour. In combination with the time- and labour-intensive processes that went into creating the materials used to make a book, this meant that bookmakers were often incentivised to reuse what they had available to them with as little modification as possible. For example, an unwanted book written on sturdy parchment might be taken apart so that its parchment pages could be used to reinforce the binding of a completely new, unrelated book.
When we consider the history of the book, we might thus think of books as physical objects that tell stories about how people use and reuse the materials available to them. These are objects that bear traces of particular practices that have been undertaken over time, that can grant us insight into the way our approaches to books have changed.
With this in mind, this section of the exhibition focuses on objects that reflect these processes of reconfiguration – putting to the fore works that invite readers to confront the material reality of books. Spanning from the 15th to the 19th century, these texts (or indeed what is left of them) collectively unveil the afterlife of the book, detailing what has become of the physical substance of books as we know them after they have outgrown their original use.
ITEMS IN THIS SECTION
The Floral Gift (1863)
Published in the 19th-century, this gift-book by illuminated by Samuel Stanesby highlights a completely different way in which people might have engaged with books – by systematically dismembering them and preserving their individual pages as works of visual art. This particular copy of the title demonstrates how books may survive into posterity not through an appreciation of their written contents, but through a reconsideration of their material status as an aesthetic object.
Thomas Madox, Formulare Anglicanum (1702)
The Formulare Anglicanum is a compilation of legal instruments and charters by Thomas Madox, published in 1702. With its extensive documentation and additional notes by Madox, the Formulare Anglicanum goes beyond being a mere vessel of texts. Instead, it essentially serves as a museum of sorts by illustrating the forms of earlier documents. This makes the documents identifiable, comprehensible, and verifiable in the centuries to come. Through introducing this longevity to the books that came before, it is itself an afterlife.
Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (1603)
The Decameron is a collection of short stories and canzones by the Renaissance Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375). This particular copy of a French translation of the Decameron, published in 1603, is a highly weathered hide-bound codex, with parts of its spine seemingly ripped off. This exposes the volume’s most prominent feature: that of waste print paper utilized in the constitution of the binding. We can also view the cords that were used to tie up the binding. This volume has clearly undergone great physical trauma over the centuries. There is an irony in how the book’s binding is composed of the afterlife of other (scrapped) books, but while it has survived over the years, it spends its own afterlife looking alike… a scrapped book.
Manuscript miscellany (17th century)
This book owes its striking appearance to the printed sheet music used to bind it – antiphonal plainchant from the Christian religious tradition, printed in two colours. It contains a collection of handwritten Latin texts that deal with a variety of subjects, including theology, medicine, and law.