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      Special Collections

      Book Curatorship and the Idea of Early Print in Libraries

      It is the deepest enchantment of the collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where, as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), it turns to stone.

      —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1927–1940)

      This and the accompanying 11 volumes had been bound together as one, full calf of poor quality over pasteboards…. Book taken down. Pages washed/deacidified in limewater bath and all folios strengthened using Crompton 10 gsm tissue with “lamatec” adhesive. Sewn on 3 tapes, attached to split boards. Bound ¼ Oasis with vellum tops and marbled sides.

      —A modern binder’s note in a copy of Shakespeare’s Richard II (1634)

      Bookbinding and collecting, like other aspects of the history of reading, are “on the order of the ephemeral.”¹ The acquisition, ordering and shelving, use, and conservation of texts in libraries are activities that leave little evidence behind. Firsthand accounts of text assembly and the organization of knowledge in early print are scarce and most often rooted in the perspective of producers, whether in manuals or as documentary by-products of printinghouse accounting.² In modern rare-book rooms, we might find binders’ tickets or unusually detailed collectors’ notes in the flyleaves of texts showing later curatorial activities. But artifacts in special collections, particularly the highly prized ones, are unforthcoming about their material histories. Only under exceptional circumstances of cataloging or record keeping are we able to learn much about the past lives of the most valuable written works. Two libraries at Cambridge University, however, do give us an exceptional record of the order of books in the handpress era and a surprising look at the reordering of early works in modern archives.

      In 1799, a Cambridge cataloger named William Pugh was dismissed from his post for making insufficient progress on a new category of books, the “AB class,” which was to comprise all valuable specimens of early printing then held in the university’s Royal Library.³ Pugh, a respected fellow at Trinity College, had been at the job for nearly ten years, having been hired almost immediately after taking his bachelor’s degree on the strength of his reputation as a voracious reader. He was widely knowledgeable and passionate about working with rare books. But according to contemporary accounts, he was also eccentric, and eventually he became slovenly, obsessive, and antisocial. After his dismissal from the library, Pugh reportedly “dreaded the society of everybody.”⁴ He would lock himself in his room for long periods, emerging suddenly to scandalize the college by throwing all his linens in the River Cam. One evening after a rash of unexplained vandalism in the town, Pugh was spotted outside of his room and followed. On leaving the college grounds, he retrieved a stick from the water’s edge, walked into town, and proceeded to smash street lamps, shrieking and calling them Robespierre, Danton, or St. Just. Tolerance for fellows’ eccentricities was high at the time, but the incident was enough for Pugh to be dismissed from college and declared insane. Years later he was said to have regained some of his former reputation, but he never returned to work. According to contemporaries, “He still had a somewhat insane look.”⁵

      Pugh’s undoing has interested scholars of the book because, by all accounts, it began with a near-pathological tendency to read rather than merely catalog the texts in the AB class. To the dismay of the university librarians, Pugh would often become fixated on a single volume when adding it to the shelf list; if it was unfamiliar, “he was not content with looking at the title page, but applied himself to reading the contents.”⁶ This diversion, of course, is the sort of thing the cataloger striving for efficiency is trained to avoid. And indeed, Pugh’s unfinished AB-class catalog, long since superseded, survives today in the Cambridge library archives as a monument to inefficient bibliography.⁷ Its entries are digressive, unsystematic, and sometimes speculative. Pugh recorded not only titles, authors, and imprints, but also formal features, curiosities in the texts, cross-references, and notes to himself and to posterity with relevant thoughts that crossed his mind as he read. With such a taste for detail, Pugh frequently used up to ten folio-sized pages (rather than the customary line or two) to catalog a single book, piece by piece, at a rate that eventually exhausted the patience of his colleagues (Fig. 4). His waywardness, so the story goes, had no place in a modern library on the verge of reform—of blossoming, as it would over the next century, into a national institution.⁸ He simply had to be let go.

      But what was William Pugh reading on the job? What was so fascinating about a collection of early printed texts to this modern archivist? This chapter begins by investigating the peculiarities of Pugh’s reading materials, which I suggest can be instructive

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