Abstract
Thomas Bodley did not plan to include cheap books in his library. In the course of refurbishing the University of Oxford’s library in the early seventeenth century, Bodley repeatedly worries about shelving “riffe raffe bookes” that “will but proue a descredit to our Librarie.”1 Specifically, he wanted to exclude “Almanackes, plaies, & proclamacions” and other such genres “daily printed, of very vnworthy maters & handling.”2 He offers a spatial rationale for excluding certain kinds of books, writing that “it doth distast me, that suche kinde of bookes, should be vouchsafed in a rowme, in so noble a Librarie.”3 Literary scholars have taken particular note of Bodley’s reluctance to include “plaies,” a decision motivated partially by Bodley’s refined, continental taste and perhaps a general perception of English drama as mere popular entertainment.4 Bodley does not entirely dismiss English drama, allowing that “hardly one in fortie” play is worth keeping, as opposed to other “baggage books” such as almanacs, of which Bodley does not propose keeping even one in forty. At least one English play would soon appear in the Bodleian: Samuel Daniel’s Tragedy of Cleopatra, included in a folio collection of his Works, first published in 1601, which he presented to a Bodleian, with a dedicatory poem to Bodley, is unique to the volume.
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Notes
Thomas Bodley, Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James, ed. G. W. Wheeler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 35. In 1607, Bodley expresses skepticism about taking more of “those pamphlets left of D. Reinoldes bookes” because the library cannot take “euery riffe raffe” (171).
Heidi Brayman Hackel, “‘Rowme’ of its Own: Printed Drama in Early Libraries,” A New History of Early English Drama, eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia, 1997), 113–30.
Peter W. M. Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare (Washington, DC: Folger Library Publications, 1991), 1.
Jeffery Todd Knight, Bound to Read (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013), 27.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994), 175, 171.
Kevin J. Donovan, “Jonson’s Texts in the First Folio,” Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, eds. Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1991), 23–4.
Paul Collins, The Book of William (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 25–6.
See Allardyce Nicoll, Chapman’s Homer (Princeton: Princeton UP), 1956, 2/e 1967, xiv–xix. Publication dates for editions of Chapman’s Homer remain conjectural. Richard Field printed the folio Illiad around 1611; Nathaniel Butter published Odyssey around 1614, both collections appearing under the title page The Whole Works of Homer sometime after that, with the ESTC estimating 1616. Conceivably the Illiad and Odyssey, despite about three years separating their publications, were designed to be bound toghether, so the usual characterization that Whole Works was created from unsold sheets of the 1611 Iliad may be misleading. Some new prefatory matter to Iliad needed to be created for Whole Works because of the death of Prince Henry, to whom Chapman had dedicated the Iliad.
For this see John Buchtel, “Book Dedications and the Death of a Patron: The Memorial Engraving in Chapman’s Homer,” Book History 7 (2004), 1–29.
G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Concept of Format,” Studies in Bibliography 53 (2000), 113.
For Moxon’s folio illustration, see Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, eds. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (Mineola: Dover, 1978), 224.
Measurements are of the size of the text block, which refers to the size of the type page and the total type page. The type page is the measurement of the space available for text on a typical full page, measured from the ascender on the first line of text to the descender of the final line of text; the total type page includes headlines, footnotes, marginal notes, and other presswork to illustrate the maximum space available on the forme. All measurements will be in millimeters, and will accord to the following formula: Text block = Type page height × type page width (Total type page height × total type page width) The size of the text block gives a better sense of the size of a book. Paper can be trimmed, so the size of the individual leaf cannot reliably tell us how large or small a book was intended to be. The text block, for obvious reasons, will rarely be cut, and its measurement gives us, at the very least, a sense of the absolute smallest size a folio can be. See Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographic Description (Princeton, 1949; rpt. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 1994), 300–6.
On purchasing books as sheets in early modern England, see Knight, Bound, 4–5; McKerrow Introduction, 123–4; Raven 138–9; Margaret Benton, “The Book as Art,” A Companion to the History of the Book, eds. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell, 2007), 500–1;
Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (New Your: Knopf, 1999), 152–3. Raven notes that trade bindings were more common in the late seventeenth century than bibliographers previously thought, but they were generally rare in the period covered here.
David McKitterick, Print , Manuscript, and the Searchfor Order (Cambridge, 2003), 165.
D. F. McKenzie, “Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve.” Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, eds. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F., Suarez, S. J. (Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 2002), 200.
Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 68–70.
Steven Galbraith, “English Literary Folios 1593–1623,” Tudor Books and Readers, ed. John N. King (Cambridge, 2010), 49–61.
Charles Forker, “How Did Shakespeare Come by His Books?” Shakespeare Yearbook 14 (2004), 113.
John Milton, Areopagitica, John Milton: Prose, ed. David Loewenstein (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013), 185.
The best outline of the publishing practices of Caxton and de Worde, and their uses of Chaucer as an early model for the commercial book trade, is Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author, esp. pp. 67–117. For Caxton as a literary publisher see William Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2008), esp. 29–49. Paul Needham offers a handy primer on “The Aldine Shape,” see “Res papirea: Sizes and Formats of the Late Medieval Book,” Rationalisierung der Buchherstellung im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Peter Rück (Marburg, Germany: Institut Fur Historische Hilfswissenschaften, 1994), 130–5.
For a catalog of early editions of Chaucer and Lydgate, see Gillespie 266–9; for a succinct overview of literary publication in the period, see Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, “Literary Texts,” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume III: 1400–1557, eds. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999) and A. S. G. Edwards and Carol Meale, “The Marketing of Printed Books in Late Medieval England,” The Library, 6th series 15 (1993), 95–124.
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© 2014 Francis X. Connor
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Connor, F.X. (2014). Introduction. In: Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438362_1
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