TY - JOUR

T1 - Old books, new beginnings: Recovering lost pages in Bangor’s early modern printed books

AU - Durrant, Michael

N1 - Inscription is a double-blind, peer-reviewed, gold open access journal. In addition to physical copies of each issue being available for purchase by subscription, all the journal articles published in each issue of Inscription are freely available on the public internet from the date of publication: permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. Correspondingly, all creative content of each issue is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 International License.

PY - 2020/9

Y1 - 2020/9

N2 - Title pages and other prelims are often missing from early modern printed books, and this is particularly true of well-used family bibles and prayer books. Over the decades and centuries, these textual beginnings bear the brunt of use and re-use, opening and closing, turning and folding, and as a result front matter and titles pages can get ripped out, or they crumble to dust. Some early readers attempted to intervene on these scenes of loss, and this essay will reflect on their manuscript interventions, which are usually geared towards recreating the lost mise-en-page arrangement of a printed page, including typeface, decorative initials, and other ornaments. It focuses on several religious and devotional printed book objects from Bangor University’s Archives and Special Collections—including a 1541 edition of the Great or ‘Cranmer’ Bible, Bangor Cathedral’s copy of a 1611 King James Bible, and a 1664 Welsh-language Book of Common Prayer—in which we find early modern readers lovingly repairing the beginnings of their texts, offering up new paratextual starting points in the absence of lost or damaged ones. The devotional, and sometimes even the parodic, implications of these restorative interpolations will be explored, and particular attention will be paid to the highly sociable nature of such forms of reader-generated recovery and conservation.

AB - Title pages and other prelims are often missing from early modern printed books, and this is particularly true of well-used family bibles and prayer books. Over the decades and centuries, these textual beginnings bear the brunt of use and re-use, opening and closing, turning and folding, and as a result front matter and titles pages can get ripped out, or they crumble to dust. Some early readers attempted to intervene on these scenes of loss, and this essay will reflect on their manuscript interventions, which are usually geared towards recreating the lost mise-en-page arrangement of a printed page, including typeface, decorative initials, and other ornaments. It focuses on several religious and devotional printed book objects from Bangor University’s Archives and Special Collections—including a 1541 edition of the Great or ‘Cranmer’ Bible, Bangor Cathedral’s copy of a 1611 King James Bible, and a 1664 Welsh-language Book of Common Prayer—in which we find early modern readers lovingly repairing the beginnings of their texts, offering up new paratextual starting points in the absence of lost or damaged ones. The devotional, and sometimes even the parodic, implications of these restorative interpolations will be explored, and particular attention will be paid to the highly sociable nature of such forms of reader-generated recovery and conservation.

KW - Book History

KW - Early Modern

KW - Print Culture

KW - Materiality

M3 - Article

VL - 1

SP - 50

EP - 61

JO - Inscription: the Journal of Material Text - Theory, Practice, History

JF - Inscription: the Journal of Material Text - Theory, Practice, History

SN - 2634-7229

IS - 1

ER -