ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates practices relating to the keeping and collection of unburnt books and deliberates on their materiality. Three themes are discussed: unburnt books kept in libraries, unburnt books used as religious objects, and the presentation of unburnt books in book illustrations. The chapter shows that contemporaries habitually donated these books to libraries and archives, and that there was in fact a demand for such books. The most imaginative and significant usage of unburnt books as objects, indeed as religious objects, emerged when such books had a public or communal function. Freed from their conventional role as reading material or as library items, unburnt books had the capacity to participate in religious rituals and ceremonies and to take on a significance that was, strictly speaking, material rather than textual.
