ABSTRACT
In recent years, as the history of the book has become more and more interested in physical stuff, it has become less and less invested in the book, the codex as privileged container of text. The focus of attention has been the non-book, whether in the form of pamphlets, broadsides, manuscript separates, or printed ephemera such as blank forms or trade-cards. Where there is still a book in view, it is what we might call ‘the book unbound,’ with critics exploring the interplay between books and their environments, the permeability of compilations, and the reshapings created by consumption. 1 One of the most visible forms of bibliographic unbinding is cutting. As the contributors to a recent special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies entitled “The Renaissance Collage” have shown, a lot of reading was undertaken in this period with scissors and knives, through the cutting of the page and associated processes of sewing, stitching, gluing, and filing. These processes command attention partly because of their obvious kinship with commonplacing. But as Juliet Fleming (introducing “The Renaissance Collage”) suggests, the picking out of details is also a description of “what we all do when we read (from Latin lego, legere, ‘to gather or pluck’):” “cutting,” she says, “is not the exception but the rule” of reading, as of writing. 2 For Fleming, cutting means not destruction, but pruning, grafting, tree surgery. Cutting makes for growth.
