New Directions in Book History Series editors: Prof Jonathan Rose (Drew University, USA) and Dr Shafquat Towheed (The Open University, UK) As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish monographs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new frontiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars. Its scope is global, extending to the Western and non-western worlds and to all historical periods from antiquity to the 21 st century, including studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives, debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic fields. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiography of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book scholarship. New Directions in Book History will be published in three formats: single-author monographs; edited collections of essays in single or multiple volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave s e-book (EPUB2) Pivot stream. Book proposals should emphasize the innovative aspects of the work, and should be sent to either of the two series editors: Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and he is an editor of SHARP s journal, Book History. His works include The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation, A Companion to the History of the Book (with Simon Eliot), and, most recently, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor. Shafquat Towheed is Lecturer in English at the Open University, UK. He is director of the Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED) project and the Open University s Book History Research Group. He is co-editor of The History of Reading (Routledge: 2010), The History of Reading, Vol.1: International Perspectives, c.1500 1990 (Palgrave, 2011) and The History of Reading, Vol.3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics (Palgrave, 2011). Editorial Board: Marcia Abreu, University of Campinas, Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University, Matt Cohen, University of Texas at Austin, Archie Dick, University of Pretoria, Martyn Lyons, University of New South Wales, Claire Squires, University of Stirling Titles include: Bethan Benwell and James Procter (editors) READING ACROSS WORLDS: TRANSNATIONAL BOOK GROUPS AND THE RECEPTION OF DIFFERENCE
Jason McElligott and Eve Patten (editors) THE PERILS OF PRINT CULTURE: BOOK, PRINT AND PUBLISHING HISTORY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (editors) BOOK DESTRUCTION FROM THE MEDIEVAL TO THE CONTEMPORARY New Directions in Book History Series Standing Order ISBN 978 1 137 44325 9 hardback 978 1 137 45429 4 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary Edited by Gill Partington Birkbeck College, University of London, UK and Adam Smyth Oxford University, UK
Selection, introduction and editorial matter Gill Partington and Adam Smyth 2014. Individual chapters Contributors 2014. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-36765-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-47455-4 ISBN 978-1-137-36766-2 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137367662 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Book destruction from the medieval to the contemporary / edited by Adam Smyth, Gill Partington. pages cm (New directions in book history) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Book burning History. 2. Books Mutilation, defacement, etc. History. 3. Libraries Destruction and pillage History. 4. Altered books History. 5. Waste books History. 6. Books Psychological aspects. I. Partington, Gill, 1970 editor. II. Smyth, Adam, 1972 editor. Z659.B66 2014 363.3109 dc23 2014022061 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
Contents List of Figures Notes on the Contributors vii ix Introduction 1 Gill Partington and Adam Smyth Part I Burning 1 Burning Sexual Subjects: Books, Homophobia and the Nazi Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin 17 Heike Bauer 2 Burning to Read: Ben Jonson s Library Fire of 1623 34 Adam Smyth Part II Mutilating 3 From Books to Skoob; Or, Media Theory with a Circular Saw 57 Gill Partington 4 Book Torture : An Interview with Ross Birrell 74 Adam Smyth, Gill Partington and Ross Birrell Part III Doctoring 5 Belligerent Literacy, Bookplates and Graffiti: Dorothy Helbarton s Book 89 Anthony Bale 6 Doctoring Victorian Literature A Humument: An Interview with Tom Phillips 112 Adam Smyth, Gill Partington and Tom Phillips Part IV Degrading 7 Miss Cathy s riven th back off Th Helmet uh Salvation : Representing Book Destruction in Mid-Victorian Print Culture 135 Stephen Colclough 8 Waste Matters: Charles Dickens s Our Mutual Friend and Nineteenth-Century Book Recycling 152 Heather Tilley v
vi Contents Part V Deforming/Reshaping 9 The Aest hetics of Book Destruction 175 Kate Flint 10 Kindle Recycling and the Future of the Book: An Interview with Nicola Dale 190 Adam Smyth, Gill Partington and Nicola Dale Select Bibliography 208 Index 213
List of Figures 0.1 (photo: MacMillan) 3 0.2 (photo: Gill Partington) 10 3.1 John Latham, Book Plumbing (photo: Jennifer Pike) 58 3.2 John Latham, The Laws of England (photo: Jennifer Pike) 60 3.3 John Latham, Unedited Material from the Star (photo: Latham Estate) 66 3.4 John Latham, Unedited Material from the Star (photo: Latham Estate) 69 4.1 Ross Birrell, Heidegger s Being and Time thrown into the Grand Canyon (video still: Courtesy Ellen de Bruijne Projects) 78 4.2 Complete Works of Kafka Burned (1997) (photo credit: Robert Johnson. Artist s own collection) 79 4.3 Ross Birrell, Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp (1997) (photo: Artist s own collection) 81 4.4 Ross Birrell, Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp (1997) (photo: Artist s own collection) 82 4.5 Ross Birrell, Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp (1997) (photo credit: Robert Johnson. Artist s own collection) 83 5.1 Huntington Library MS HM 136, f. 99r. Brut with top-margin bookplate, Thys ys her boke wyche bereth thys name dorethe 93 5.2 Huntington Library MS HM 136, f. (vii)r. Abbreviated bookplate, Liber Johis Leche de Wico Malbno in Com. Cestr., with later rebus below 99 5.3 Huntington Library MS HM 129, f. 231r. Northern Homily Cycle with effaced scribal and ownership inscription 102 6.1 Tom Phillips, A Humument (2011 edition Tom Phillips. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2013) 114 6.2 Tom Phillips, A Humument (2011 edition Tom Phillips. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2013) 116 vii
viii List of Figures 6.3 Tom Phillips, A Humument (2011 edition Tom Phillips. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2013) 122 6.4 Tom Phillips, A Humument (2011 edition Tom Phillips. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2013) 126 8.1 Marcus Stone s illustrated front cover to Our Mutual Friend (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864 65) (Ada Nisbet Archive, University of California, Santa Cruz) 163 10.1 Nicola Dale, Down (photo: Artist s own collection) 192 10.2 Nicola Dale, A Secret Heliotropism (photo: Artist s own collection) 196 10.3 Nicola Dale, Sequel (photo: Artist s own collection) 198 10.4 Nicola Dale, Sequel (detail; photo: Alan Seabright) 199 10.5 Nicola Dale, Kindle (photo: Artist s own collection) 203
Notes on the Contributors Anthony Bale is Reader in Medieval Studies and Director of Graduate Research at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of, among other books and articles, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (2010), and The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350 1500 (2006). Anthony Bale convenes the Research Network Remembered Places and Invented Traditions (2012). In 2011, Anthony Bale was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize to support his research on European ideas of the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. Heike Bauer is a Senior Lecturer in English and Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and founding director of Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies (BiGS). She has published widely on the history of sexuality, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury literary culture, and on translation including a monograph, English Literary Sexology, 1860 1930 (2009), a three-volume anthology on Women and Cross-Dressing, 1800 1939 (2006) and a collection of essays on Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, edited with Matt Cook (2012). Ross Birrell is an artist, writer and lecturer at the Glasgow School of Arts. In 2007 Birrell was awarded an SAC Artist s Film & Video Award to make a collaborative film with David Harding in Cuba and Miami: Guantanamera launched at Glasgow International 2010 and has subsequently been exhibited and screened in the Swiss Institute in Rome, and at the Americas Society, New York. Previous films include Port Bou: 18 Fragments for Walter Benjamin (2006) and Cuernavaca: A Journey in Search of Malcolm Lowry (2006). Birrell s exhibitions have reached audiences in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, Paris and New York. Birrell is also the editor of Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. Stephen Colclough is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature and the history of the book in the School of English at Bangor University, Wales. His publications include Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695 1870 (2007) and (co-edited with Alexis Weedon) The History of the Book in the West: 1800 1914 (2010). He is a contributor ix
x Notes on the Contributors to The History of Reading, Vol. 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics (2011), The Brontës in Context (2011) and The History of Oxford University Press (vol. 2, 2013). He is currently working on a monograph on the representation of reading spaces in the early nineteenth century. Nicola Dale studied at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is based at Rogue Artists Studios in Manchester. Recent exhibitions include Function (2011), BLOC, Sheffield; Working Title (2011), Aspex, Portsmouth; Re-Covering (2011), Untitled Gallery, Manchester; Exchange-Experimentation-Collaboration (2011), Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester; The Open West (2011), Summerfield Gallery, Cheltenham; The Manchester Contemporary 2010 (2010), Castlefield Gallery; Dream Machine (2010), Metal, Liverpool; and The First Cut (2013), Manchester Art Gallery. Her work is in numerous collections, including the Tate s Artist Book Archive. Kate Flint is Provost Professor of English and Art History at the University of Southern California. Author of The Woman Reader 1837 1914 (1993), The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000) and The Transatlantic Indian 1776 1930 (2010), she is currently at work on two projects: a cultural history of flash photography, entitled Flash! Photography, writing, and surprising illumination and a study of displaced and transformed books and images. Gill Partington writes and researches on the material text, reading and readers, and the shifting constructions of fictional and real worlds. She has published on diverse topics including German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, book burning, fictional spaces in contemporary literature, and humous. She is currently completing a book about the figure of the believing reader in twentieth-century culture. Tom Phillips is a painter, printmaker and collagist, and the creator of A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (1970, 1980, 1986, 1998, 2004, and in 2010 as an iphone and ipad app). He has had major solo exhibitions of his work at the National Portrait Gallery (1989); the Royal Academy of Arts (1993); the Dulwich Picture Gallery (1997); the South London Gallery (1997); and at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth (2001). He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1989 and was Chairman of the Royal Academy s Exhibitions Committee from 1995 to 2007. He curated the Royal Academy s exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent (1995) which subsequently travelled to the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He is an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine s College, Oxford, Leeds University, and the London
Notes on the Contributors xi Institute as well as an Honorary Member of the Royal Institute. Tom Phillips is also a writer and a composer, and recently collaborated with Tarik O Regan on a chamber opera of Joseph Conrad s novella Heart of Darkness (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 2011). Adam Smyth is a Tutorial Fellow in English at Balliol College, Oxford, and a University Lecturer in the History of the Book. He works on, among other things, book destruction; laughter; autobiographical writing; error; the circulation of texts; editorial theory and the history of the book; and poetry and the cultures of manuscript and print. Adam Smyth is the author of Autobiography in Early Modern England (2010) and Profit and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640 82 (2004), and the editor of A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth- Century England (2004). He writes for the Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books. Heather Tilley is British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research specialisms are in nineteenth-century literature, visual, material and tactile culture, disability studies and Dickens. She has published articles on Wordsworth, Dickens and Frances Browne and is currently working on a monograph based on her PhD research, Blindness and Writing: Wordsworth to Gissing.