The Afterlife of the Afterlife of a Book
The Decameron is a collection of short stories by the Renaissance Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375), for which he is famous. Written in the years between 1349 to 1353, the Decameron consists of an overarching main narrative of ten Florentines, all of whom have escaped from the ongoing plague in the city of Florence to a villa in an Italian town called Fiesole. Each individual, pegged to a day, offers to tell a couple of short tales, and the Decameron contains all these stories told over ten days by the ten Florentines. Each day also concludes in a canzone (a type of Italian ballad), and these songs are representative of the best poetry by Boccaccio. This text that inspired countless other Renaissance writers, for dealing with humanist themes, and highly engaging narrative.
This copy is a dilapidated French edition of the Decameron, printed in 1603. Here, we are interested in the afterlife of books, and this copy of the Decameron is filled with clues that point beyond its intended shelf life.
Fig 1. Cover of the 1603 French edition of the “Decameron”. Both printed text and handwritten inscriptions are legible.
As we can see from just the cover page, the inside of the volume is in a fair condition: the ink is still extremely clear and legible. We also see signs of direct inscription – above the center of the crest, in slightly faded ink, handwritten cursive words spelling “Sum Pauli Prunmaisteri” (“I belong to Paul Prunmaister”). This gives us the name of one owner the book has had in its lifetime. Similar inscriptions in that color of ink were found on the first leaf of the codex, behind the front board, but nowhere else in the contents of the book. The lack of annotations suggest that the book was likely not used for scholarly purposes.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this codex is in its binding, which has largely fallen into disarray:
Fig 2. The exposed binding.
Here, we see how scraps of waste print are used as part of the binding material, sewn together by cords (the rope-like threads wound across the spine). We can claim here that the afterlife of failed books has ironically been exposed in the extreme weathering that characterizes the afterlife of this particular codex. There is an ingenuity to be found in the binders’ use of waste print to bind complete texts, such that even waste print produced by the printers are not actually wasted. It is not clear as to what sort of physical trauma has led to the removal of a segment of the parchment that originally concealed the spine.
One final major sign of decay is the presence of cavities towards the end of the codex:
Fig 3. Cavities in the later pages.
There can only be one cause for such damage: bookworms. These are not real worms, but the larvae of various species that may chew through books seeking food.
Despite the literary significance of the text it was translated from, this codex has fallen into disrepair over many centuries, surviving long enough just to be a monument to poor bookkeeping.
Prepared by Lune