Beyond the Book: Recycling Print in Early Modern England

This essay considers the status of recycled pages of print in early modern English culture. The wide scope of this culture is noted (including the practice of re-using pages in book-bindings, and in the repair of musical instruments), and then the essay focuses in particular on the use of recycled pages of print to line boxes. A number of case studies are detailed to raise questions about the status of these texts as both waste papers drained of literary content, and as literary texts that continue to signify. The essay considers the broad implications of these case studies, in terms of the dominance of the idea of the book in literary studies, and in terms of the ways the study of material texts intersects with literary interpretation. [A.S.]