The Mutilated Text

This chapter explores the history and affordances of personifying unfinished or materially altered books as violated and dismembered human beings. While medieval book catalogs sometimes alerted readers to books with partial contents, early Italian humanists such as Francesco Petrarca, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, and Angelo Poliziano forged a new language for textual loss, using metaphors of mutilation to register their grief and to announce their project of cultural repair. Appropriating classical myths of dispersal and reassembly to lament damage done by the ravages of time, humanists cast the scholar-critic in the redemptive role of physician and healer, inventing in turn some the tropes for thinking about lost texts that textual critics still use today. If humanists shifted the language of mutilation from the book’s integrity to the text’s correctness, what poetic language do we use to register and experience textual loss in the digital age?

Extra-Illustration and Ephemera

In “A Friendly Gathering: The Social Politics of Presentation Books and their Extra-Illustration in Horace Walpole’s Circle,” Lucy Peltz plays with the technical and metaphorical senses of “gathering” to reflect on the materiality and sociability of altered books in the Strawberry Hill set. The practice of extra-illustration consisted in unbinding the book, cutting loose the gatherings of leaves that make up its quires, in order to interleave them with additional pages, or to inlay each page into windows cut through larger sized paper. The process is captured in Walpole’s correspondence: “Mr Bull is honouring me, at least my Anecdotes of Painting, exceedingly. He has let every page into a pompous sheet, and is adding every print of portrait, building, etc., that I mention and that he can get, and specimens of all our engravers. It will make eight magnificent folios, and be a most valuable body of our arts.” Specimens collected and collated with the text anchor, document, and illustrate the words on the page. As a result, an identical multiple in a print run was turned into a unique object. Through the art of extraillustration, the extra-illustrator Richard Bull “erected for himself a monument of taste.” In its monumentalizing aims and dimensions, extra-illustration could be considered an antidote against ephemera, yet transience is inherent in its attempt to document the text with reproductions that might be dispersed. The concept runs the gamut, from Walpole’s paratexts—his title Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose (1758), which he presents as “trifles” and “idlenesses”—to his supposedly “diminutive” house, which he called “a paper Fabric and an assemblage of curious Trifles, made by an insignificant Man.” In this essay, I will read the practice of extra-illustration against the grain to recuperate the ephemeral side of “the pompous sheet,” the composite object unbound from its gatherings, and alternative forms of the page as a detached piece, a scrap, a caption appended to objects in the house. I will focus my discussion on two complementary book collections produced by Richard Bull: his extra-illustrated copy of Walpole’s Description of Strawberry Hill, now at the Lewis Walpole Library, and his curious compilation of occasional publications bound with the title-page A Collection of the Loose Pieces printed at Strawberry-Hill, and the alternative title Detached Pieces Printed at Strawberry Hill, now at the Huntington Library.

Book arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol

This article describes some of the research projects investigating contemporary artists’ books at the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University of the West of England in Bristol. As part of its remit, the Centre explores and promotes many aspects of the book arts including contemporary creative processes and outputs. Some recent projects include the Arcadia id est touring exhibition of 118 artists’ books on the themes ornature and the landscape; Bookmarks: infiltrating the library system; and the Regenerator altered books project. The Centre also works with artists, academics, curators, institutions, galleries and bookshops to promote the book arts to a wider community. In addition it publishes reference information, guides and critical essays on artists’ books through its Impact Press imprint; these include the Artists book yearbook and The blue notebook, a journal for artists’ books.