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Figure 4. A leaf from the AB catalog, in which Pugh only recorded two books. The second (shelf mark AB.10.53) was a composite volume containing Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1611). In the catalog entry, Pugh has added, “N.B. E.K.’s Preface.” Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

      The processes of archival selection and reorganization that I open up for discussion in this chapter touched most institutional libraries in Anglo-American modernity; the AB class at the University Library is one prominent example that permits a degree of reconstruction. Outside the literary-historical domain, where “rare book” is perhaps not a guiding category in the same way, we find that reconstruction is in some key instances unnecessary. In the second part of this chapter, I turn briefly to a comparable Renaissance-era collection kept fully intact less than a mile down the road from the University Library in Cambridge, at the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College. Here, in the later part of the sixteenth century, the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker undertook to generate, as Pugh would in the 1790s, a full inventory of hundreds of early printed texts in varying states of hybridity and compilation, as they were encountered by their earliest readers. But unlike the texts in Pugh’s AB catalog, the books that were recorded in what became known at Cambridge as the Parker Register were not reorganized or reclassified in the modern period.¹³ Because of a series of unusual provisions that Archbishop Parker himself built in to the catalog, the collection remains, we might say, unprocessed. The new mode of book preservation, in which valuable early texts are individually rebound and protected as clean, integral copies, did not supplant the older one. The library, as a consequence, is messier and less accessible by modern standards, baffling at times even to resident Parker librarians. Yet, as I will argue, the collection at Corpus Christi College reflects the largely unacknowledged extent to which books were in the early years of print customizable, always subject to enlargement and rearrangement at the hands of users. Because Matthew Parker himself, whose projects and published works are known to us, was the primary collector of these books, the Parker Library also begins to suggest some of the ways in which the malleability of early printed materials could become intellectually generative for Renaissance writers, a theme I explore in the second part of this study.

      The Modern Collector and the History of the Book

      William Pugh is a liminal figure in the transition to modern practices of collection management and conservation, practices that have recently come under study for their reforming effects on books from earlier periods of production.¹⁴ In both individual and institutional collections in modernity, the task of preserving premodern books was often one of reorganizing them into discrete, systematized units—one text per binding, print with print and manuscript with manuscript, in the author-title-date catalog model with which we are most familiar. Modern custodianship rationalized bodies of written information and maximized a particular kind of accessibility while also reducing wear and deterioration, which the handling of books in older, fragile, or multitext bindings is likely to bring about. These efforts also increased returns on investments since clean rare books would fetch more individually on the book market than those bound together.¹⁵ Indeed, the first significant incentives for reorganization were likely book auctions, which debuted in the later seventeenth century in England, along with the rise in trade bookbinding toward the end of that century.¹⁶ But the process reached its apex in the nineteenth century, when the industrialization of binding and book production made the single, ready-bound printed text the standard.¹⁷ The legacy of this period, as Alexandra Gillespie has shown, is on display in our best-known rare-book rooms, where valuable early printed texts are almost always clothed in grand Victorian-era bindings. In her study of Middle English Sammelbände in print, Gillespie relates the story of a nineteenthcentury book buyer who, at an auction of the Duke of Roxburghe’s library in 1812, mused on how “enchanting” a certain early English compilation would be “when divided into parts and encased in dark red morocco surtouts.”¹⁸

      This is, for the most part, how we find the former AB-class texts at the Cambridge University Library today: individually bound in calf, sheep, or goat, often with gilded edges or matching protective book boxes. Julia Miller describes this artificial contemporaneity and uniformity: “Our hand binders, including our book conservators, have tended to learn their craft from that relatively recent tradition and have tended to apply its procedures to books that are from much older and much different binding traditions.”¹⁹ Paul Needham explored the potential losses involved in such practices in an early account of English Sammelbände, and Gillespie, Nicholas Pickwoad, and John Szirmai have since nuanced our understanding of the anachronism of modern bookbinding.²⁰ Early binding, we know, was not an absolutely integral part of the production process; over the course of the sixteenth century and into the Renaissance, the work of determining a material assembly fell to retailers and, increasingly, to readers.²¹ Books formed according to the desires of the early consumer—whether sent to the bindery after the purchase or placed on sale ready bound owing to popular demand—could at any point in their life span be broken down and reconfigured as new desires or changes in ownership arose. More important, the cost of binding a book in the period has been estimated at 1s 6d, many times higher than the cost of most printed texts themselves.²² So especially in the case of small formats such as quartos and octavos, which encompass most printed works in the emergent European vernaculars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, single-text volumes in leather bindings were all but impracticable as a mode of storage.²³ The demands of book ownership were such that vernacular works were, as a matter of routine and preservation, compiled into flexible, anthology-like formats that do not easily map on to classification systems in modern libraries. Text producers in this early period, as we might imagine, designed and marketed texts accordingly, as “annexed” or annexable to other texts. Early printed works, as Gillespie has explained, “suggest a remarkable openness on the part of printers and owners to the malleable, multiple forms of books.”²⁴

      Occasionally in archives we find traces of these malleable, multiple forms, which give us a

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