Unmooring the Literary Word

Abstract

Romantic bibliomaniacs have lately become a lot more interesting: ‘pests’ disturbing literary relations, ‘garish’ twins of sober bibliographers, and avatars of ‘all types of wild, inordinate, improper and forbidden reading practices’ (including the practice of non-reading).¹ No longer negligible book fools to be ridiculed or indulged, the extreme bookmen of early nineteenth-century bibliomania—disorderly figures all—are increasingly read in terms of provocative energies, forms of interference within a literary system which may not block its operation but crucially nudge it from the margins. Thus in Philip Connell’s important reading of the bibliomania (which sparked much of the new literary interest in this phenomenon), the sudden ardour for collecting early printed books that swept wealthy patrician circles in the first two decades of the nineteenth century was a spur to the highly consequential, broadly conservative gentry project of remodelling the literary past into a common ‘national heritage’. Significantly, however, this function depended on the expulsion of the more extravagant ‘effete’ fringes of the mania.²

The Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, may be called the Typo-Dandy. He has long been well known in the literary world as the Beau Brummell of book-makers.

The London Literary Gazette, 26 May 1821

The idea of writing books germinates out of the material book and not the converse; the furniture invents for itself a character out of its own cloth.

Régis Debray, ‘The Book as Symbolic Object’