Vibrant Material Textuality: New Materialism, Book History, and the Archive in Paper

Abstract

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

Paper and the poor: Romantic media ecologies and the Bank Restriction Act of 1797

“…Paper is everywhere. It is so pervasive as to be invisible, although recent work by Lisa Gitelman (), Jonathan Senchyne (, ) and Richard Taws () has been particularly influential in bringing it to the attention of media theorists. Book history, however, which focuses on the processes of making and distributing (Darnton, ), seems largely uninterested in paper, except as it is folded and printed upon.…”

“…A more romantic version of the rag recycling fantasy appears in a 1775 newspaper advertisement encouraging young ladies to save rags, because “by sending to the Paper Mill an old Handkerchief, no longer fit to cover their snowy Breasts, there is a possibility of its returning to them again in the more pleasing form of a Billet Doux” (quoted in Bidwell, , p. lvi). For John Senchyne (), this kind of advertisement captures “a peculiar quality of rag paper that eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century writers found worthy of exploration. That is, without regard to what might be printed or written upon it (and sometimes actually dictating what might be written upon it), rag paper was thought to retain traces of the people it touched or the experiences it ‘witnessed’ while a piece of cloth” (p. 70).…”