5325/libraries.1.2.0171?seq=1&cid=pdfreference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
he 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 of fence 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, observ ing 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 orig inal works undergo in the hands of writers who borrow without paying re spect 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 "garments] 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 an other, a skirt from a third. .. decking [themselves] out piecemeal."4 If it is
Because nineteenth-century paper was made from rags, the materiality of paper money became a likely ground from which to debate the nature of value in modern capitalism. On one hand, if paper money was backed by nothing but itself, then it was worth little more than itself: a gathering of lowly rags. On the other hand, the process of turning trashed rags into valuable paper modeled how capital could seem to grow out of nothing. Two nineteenth-century literary narratives provide examples of how rags performed considerable social and metaphorical work in the construction of an epistemology of capitalism and its "paper technologies."
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.