8 In accidental book destruction, water is often a culprit. As Gill Partington and Adam Smyth describe from their visit to a book pulping plant, the volumes are shredded, crushed, and reshaped into new objects.

Today’s paper books endure a mechanized form of wholesale mutilation when they are recycled. (.)Ħ Books can meet their demise by physical abuse, but sometimes they simply dissolve into their constituent elements.

10 Kate Flynt, “The Aesthetics of Book Destruction,” Partington and Adam Smyth, op.

9 “50th Anniversary of Florence Flood Inspires Exhibition at the American Bookbinders Museum,” Americ (.).

8 Gill Partington and Adam Smyth, Introduction to Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contempor (.).

The personified book narrates first the indignities to which its vellum leaves are subjected in the preparation of a writing surface: As far back as Riddle 26 from The Exeter Book, we find the construction of a bible described in terms of corporeal torture.

Mutilated Books and Decaying PagesĤ From a historical perspective, discourse about books and their history often rests on the metaphor of the book as a mutilated body. 4ģ This essay argues that contemporary narratives surrounding the circulation and consumption of William Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623 figure the cultural fate of that text in elegiac terms of mutilation and dissolution, but that the celebratory tale of “Shakespeare unbound” emerges in our discourse about the bard as a counter-narrative, sustained by the First Folio’s increased circulation, in both material and virtual terms, during the twenty-first century. 68, A4r, (.)Īnd art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,Īnd we have wits to read, and praise to give.

4 Folger Shakespeare Library First Folio, no.

Notable for this sentiment is Ben Jonson’s dedicatory poem to Shakespeare’s First Folio: 3 Donaldson highlights as well the book’s inherent fragility-a wish for the book to outlast brass and stone that evolves in tandem with anxiety about its vulnerability to dissolution. Take, for example, Byron’s ironic discovery that leaves from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela were being used to wrap a gypsy’s bacon in Tunbridge Wells. In 1998, Ian Donaldson would write, in a hopeful vein, “Like the death of the author, the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated.” 2 Nonetheless, he offers copious examples of the indignities to which books (and by extension, their authors, even when long dead) are subjected. As early as 1992, Robert Coover mourned the passing of printed books, their end paradoxically signaled by a misleading abundance: “The very proliferation of books and other print-based media, so prevalent in this forest-harvesting, paper-wasting age, is held to be a sign of its feverish moribundity, the last futile gasp of a once vital form before it finally passes away forever, dead as God.” 1 The specific threat in 1992 was hypertext, although hypertext’s dismantling of the page’s integrity through metonymic linkages did not survive the passing of Web 1.0.

The book’s demise demands elegy it presages cultural degeneration, even apocalypse. 2.Ģ More frequently in our post-print era, the end of the book is figured as a tragedy. 2 Ian Donaldson, “The Destruction of the Book,” Book History, 1, 1998, 1-10, p.1 Robert Coover, “The End of Books,” New York Times, 21 June 1992, (.).

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