The material and textual value of manuscript and print binding waste

In 2019, The Foundation of Christ’s Hospital at Lincoln made a bequest of early printed books to the Bodleian Library. The collection is rich in sixteenth-century tooled bindings, many of which preserve manuscript and printed waste in the form of pastedowns, endleaves, and endleaf guards. Using this collection as a case-study, this article explores the interactions between manuscript and print in the bindings of sixteenth century books.

Today, we understand ‘waste’ to mean ‘refuse matter’ (OED, ‘waste, n.’, III.11.a.), that is, material which, no longer fit for purpose, has been consigned to the scrapheap. But in the early modern period, waste paper and parchment were not ‘unserviceable materials’ or ‘useless by-products’, but rather material commodities fit for a variety of secondary uses, which included the binding of other books. However, rather than simply looking backwards from these surviving scraps in an attempt to reconstruct what has been lost, in this article I propose that the printed and manuscript fragments that mingle in the bindings of early modern books are generative, focusing ideas about ‘the book’ as both immaterial, ideal, and whole as well as material, real, and susceptible to destruction and decay.