Old texts and new readers

Adam's posting on traces made me think about how texts are reused but still carry traces of previous forms and contexts. This image is of a page from a small book I found in a secondhand bookshop. It has no date, but was printed in London, and looks to be c1800. It is a Natural History of Birds & Fishes, and seems to have been intended for non-expert readers. Inside the front cover is the signature Fanny, in what might be a child's copper-plate handwriting; and there are pencil scribbles and outlines around several of the engravings. The book is also small - only 14cms x 9cms. 'Traces' appear in several forms. Firstly, the plates were designed for a larger book, and some are turned on their side to fit this little book. Secondly, both the illustrations and the descriptions carry traces of much older books and texts. The entry on the Torpedo has information in common with medieval Bestiaries, which borrowed it from classical authors like Pliny. Bestiaries and early-modern works on natural philosophy incorporated Pliny's view that the Torpedo is an antaphrodisiac, and that it aids in parturition when the Moon is in Libra. This has been edited out of the simplified text here - but the old information on the strength of the Torpedo's power to shock is still being presented to new readers. And the engraving, like that of the Dolphin, reuses (very) old images.

Traces

I've been looking at traces left by objects in seventeenth-century books. Here's one: the rust marks from a once-present pair of scissors, left between the pages of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I, in his First Folio (1623). I like this image for all kinds of reasons. The scissors perhaps once belonged to a binder, and so this image suggests the material production of the First Folio – the labour that is behind the book, any book, a labour that is largely effaced by that familiar myth of disembodied artistic creation. I also like the image because it vividly conveys a sense of something that is no longer there – and illustrates that, for a thing to be felt as lost, a trace needs to remain. I also like the way that the scissor marks suggest other shapes: a swinging pendulum, for example. Perhaps, more than anything, it's a compelling image because it records a potentially destructive instrument resting within early modern literature’s most valued book.