In his ‘Post-script to his Book-binder’, the one-time-in-publication poet and student of Lincoln’s Inn Henry Fitzgeffrey concludes his Satyres and Satyricall Epigrams (1617) with a jesting consideration of the cultural and literary value attached to the format, and consequently the fate, of his printed book. ‘I woo’d have thee put / Mee in the Folio: or the Quarto cut’, Fitzgeffrey initially informs his ‘Stationer’, but if this is not possible, suggests that they ‘Rather contrive mee to the Smallest size’,

Least I bee eaten under Pippin-pyes.
Or in th’ Apothicaryes shop bee seene
To wrap Drugg’s: or to dry Tobacco in.
First (might I chuse) I would be bound to wipe,
Where he discharged last his Glister-pipe (sig. G4).

Contained within and reinforced by these rhyming couplets is the bookish teleology familiar to every individual in early modern England, including those within the four Inns of Court.

What is waste paper?

From papyri shopping lists used to line sarcophagi in ancient Egypt to classical Roman poets wrapping fish in mediocre verses, the practice of repurposing and recycling handwritten or printed texts in new forms was prolific, dating back thousands of years. Although the term ‘waste paper’ was first recorded in the mid-late sixteenth century (in this article, the term ‘waste paper’ covers both parchment and paper), the process of (re)assessing, cutting up, remodelling, and then reusing inscribed (and sometimes blank) paper or parchment that was deemed superfluous to requirement and therefore unwanted and unsold (such as from copies of a book that was unpopular or had an excess number of copies printed), or spoiled in some way (such as those containing typos or proof sheets used on the printing press) (Figure 1), was commonplace in both England and the Continent during the early modern period. As such, the creation and distribution of printed and parchment waste during this time was, contrary to popular modern thought, relatively cheap, operating within a developed and distinct paper trade that was well known to both the public and a large network of different book-making professionals.

The trade in waste paper was at once unsystematic (for example, a deceased individual’s library could be sold to a bookbinders to be broken apart into waste sheets) and organised, with the Stationers’ Company both seizing illegally imported titles to dismantle and purchasing surplus pages or byproducts from printers producing popular English Stock (patented) texts. Afterwards, the Company would sell these loose fragments of waste to bookbinders, decorators (at the close of the seventeenth-century, it was common for waste to be used to make damasked or marbled wallpaper), merchants, and shopkeepers. Although the cost of it would differ depending on the size, quality, quantity and age available, as well as the location of and identity of the seller, sale records suggest that a quire (25 sheets) of waste paper typically sold for one quarter of the price of ordinary writing paper, with the Stationers’ Company receiving just over 1 penny for one in both 1602 and 1621 (around 75 pence in today’s money).

Papery poetics

From female “ragpickers” collecting used linens from houses and tailors to sell to paper makers, to shopkeepers and merchants assembling and selling their superseded shop accounts to bookbinders to pulp into pasteboards, early moderns were acutely aware of, and directly involved in maintaining, the lifecycle of paper and its shape-shifting material affordances. As a result of this physical familiarity with the ubiquitous presence of ordinary and waste paper in the streets, the household, and the book trade, many authors imaginatively seized upon the different ages of a sheet of paper’s life and the way it could be literally manipulated to make funny, poignant, and didactic arguments. Similarly to Fitzgeffrey’s mocking lamentation on the non-textual fatalities of his repurposed poetry, many authors used waste paper as a literary trope to explore issues of physical and figurative mortality, moral and religious corruption, and the endurance of authorial and political fame and influence. The most prolific author in the period to deploy the waste paper trope was the poet and playwright Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), who across his corpus frequently depicted books existing on the threshold of breaking and regeneration. In the introductory address to the readers in his picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller: or, the Life of Jack Wilton (1594), Nashe informs the reader that Wilton

hath bequeathed for waste-paper here amongst you certain pages of his misfortunes. In any case keep them preciously as a privy token of his good will towards you. If there be some better than other, he craves you would honour them in their death so much as to dry and kindle tobacco with them. For a need he permits you to wrap velvet pantofles in them also, so they benot woe-begone at the heels, or weather-beaten, like a black head with grey hairs, or mangy at the toes, like an ape about the mouth. But as you love goodfellowship and ames-ace [a game of dice], rather turn them to stop mustard-pots than the grocers should have one patch of them to wrap mace in: a strong, hot, costly spice it is, which above all things he hates. To any use about meat and drink put them to and spare not, for they cannot do their country better service. Printers are mad whoresons; allow them some of them for napkins (sig. A2).

Although he is not thinking about waste in a strictly bibliographical sense (i.e., reusing loose pages from an unwanted or unsold book, or sullied pages from the printing press, in book production), Nashe utilises the trope to playfully entreat readers to ‘honour’ the deaths of ‘better’ authors by breaking apart, repurposing their work, and breathing new life into their work in the form protective waterproof ‘wrap[pers] for velvet pantofles’ (slippers), ‘napkins’, and (with a pun) ‘privy tokens’ or toilet paper.

Despite Nashe’s literary utilisation of the non-textual, bathetic function of (waste) paper, a highly symbolic, hopeful one can be found in in ‘the water-poet’—named as such for his position as a river worker and winning a bet to successfully sail down the Thames in a boat made from brown paper and air-filled animal bladders—John Taylor’s encomium to paper, The Praise of the Hemp-seed (1620). In this poem, Taylor applauds the power of printed paper, regardless of whether it remains bound in a book or as a loose waste sheet, to immortalise the words, ideas, and identities of authors, where

In paper, many a Poet now survives
Of else their lines had perish’d with their lives,
Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
Sir Philip Sidney, who the Lawrell wore,
Spencer, and Shakespeare did in Art excell,
Sir Edward Dywer, Greene, Nash, Daniell.
Siluester, Beumont, Sir John Harrington,
Forgetfulness their works would overrun,
But that in paper they immortally
Do live in spite of death, and cannot die.

In this verse, Taylor optimistically imagines that the ‘immortality’ of medieval and early modern writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare is permanently woven into the natural material fibres of the paper into which they are inkily pressed, where the original sources of the rags collected (such as from the dresses of ‘some Countess, or some Queene’) causes them to transform into ‘tatters allegorical’. While Nashe and Taylor imagine different outcomes for the survival (or death) of published authorial legacies, both demonstrate a strong, and highly imaginative, familiarity with a material and literary (waste) papery landscape.

Waste paper in the Inner Temple Library

In addition to these uses, the majority of waste paper and parchment was used by bookbinders to assemble and support the main structure of a wide range of book sizes, genres, and types, such as through the use of spine supports, guards (Figure 2), flyleaves (Figure 3), pastedowns (Figure 4), and as limp (flexible) binding covers. Fortunately, there is a wealth of material in the Library’s rare books and manuscripts collection that demonstrates this.

 

 

One example of waste in the collection remains in situ in the binding of a large, mid fourteenth-century manuscript copy of English jurist and cleric Henry de Bracton’s detailed treatise on English jurisprudence, De Legibus Angliae (‘On the Customs and Laws of England’). This mid fourteenth-century volume, which has had its original spine and boards replaced, contains a huge number of parchment scraps and sheets—39 in total—from medieval manuscripts of varying types, genres, periods, qualities and sizes, remodelled to support and protect the physical integrity of both the binding and Bracton’s manuscript (Figure 5). Most of these fragments have evidence of being cut and removed from previously bound manuscript volumes and have been reconstituted as flyleaves at both the front and back of the volume. Included in this wide selection of manuscript sources are leaves from different collections of music (Figure 6), four pages and more than 100 lines from one late twelfth/early thirteenth-century copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a narrative poem frequently, and surprisingly, read in monasteries) (Figure 7), and trimmed scraps of uninscribed vellum sewn in as guards between other waste leaves (it is possible these were originally from the edges of a written manuscript or a manuscript that was scraped down). The high volume of various torn apart medieval manuscripts in this palimpsest, as well as in (Figure 8) the bindings of other volumes in our collection, is likely the result of the violent seizure, breakage, and dispersal of manuscripts from monastic libraries after the dissolution of the monasteries in the early-mid sixteenth-century. Significantly, there are a number of annotations present from both the early modern and Victorian periods, evidencing interactions between its readers and the torn, colourful waste snippets.

 

 

 

 

Another exciting instance of waste in our collection is in our copy of the anonymously penned A brief discovery of Doctor Allens seditious drifts, which was printed by John Wolfe in Distaff Lane near St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1588 and is still in its original vellum binding. At the front and back of this small book—the only printed rebuttal of Cardinal William Allen’s (1532-94) published treatise supporting the Spanish Armada’s invasion of England and his case for the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I—are two flyleaves taken from the title page and an extract of a copy of the first edition of Raphael Holinshed’s hugely popular and influential Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577). Printed in London by John Hunne (a haberdasher and the son-in-law to the book’s original printer, Reyner Wolfe, who printed it as part of a consortium with three other printers also based in the City), the first edition of the Chronicles is a sweeping narrative of the history, language, and people of England, Scotland, and Ireland from antiquity to the reign of Elizabeth I. Furthermore, the first edition is smaller in scope than the expanded second one of 1587, the latter of which is famously one of the main sources of many of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies, such as Richard II and Macbeth, and of John Milton’s historical knowledge and political philosophy, as evident in sections of his Commonplace Book (BL Add. MS 36354), Trinity Manuscript (R.3.4, Trinity College, Cambridge), and heavily annotated personal copy of the Chronicles (REF 942 H717c 1586, Arizona Public Library).

While the chopped up, rotated title page bearing Hunne’s name and Holinshed’s coat of arms (Figures 9 & 10) were primarily sewn in to protect and strengthen book’s front pages and spine, its stark inclusion alongside this specific text highlights not only that extra copies of the first edition were becoming redundant with the publication of the second, censored version, but may also, unintentionally, produce some symbolic significance for an attentive reader examining it. More specifically, enclosing a commentary that simultaneously supports monarchical power and rejects papal influence over religio-political affairs (A brief discovery), with clear portions of text from a popular historical work likely known by readers to be positively biassed towards the Tudor dynasty (Chronicles), potentially generates a conversation between the two sources on historical and contemporary realpolitik in Britain, particularly about the influence of the English monarchy (and Elizabeth I) in national and global affairs at a time of great uncertainty. A brief discovery closes with a rallying cry, directly asking its readers to follow both God’s and Elizabeth I’s truth and knowledge to ensure that the ‘strength of [the] Realme’ continues to remain ‘far greater’ than it was in ‘any Princes age’ (p. 127) that had come before, periods of time which readers may, through viewing the encapsulating printed waste, remember that the Chronicles traverses and explores in thrilling detail.

Afterlives of early modern waste paper

So how do we know so much about the material origins and literary reception of waste? Between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, the practice of locating and salvaging waste paper from bookbindings was popular amongst collectors, librarians and antiquarians, often as part of personal projects. Amongst this group of gatherers, which also included the diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Tenison (1636-1715), was bibliophile (or, some would argue, biblioclast) John Bagford (1650/51-1671) and Dorothy Schullian (1906-89), Curator of Rare Books at the Armed Forces Medical Library (now the National Library of Medicine) in Maryland. Armed with a bookseller supplying him with ‘waste books […] [and the] liberty to take out of them what [he] though fit’, Bagford set about deconstructing books and giving a second life to waste manuscript fragments and other printed material—such as title pages, frontispieces, and woodcut borders)—in the creation of an 800-page record of typographical developments. Unfortunately, Bagford did not complete this bibliographic chronicle. Schullian, on the other hand (and like many other collectors in Oxford and Cambridge college libraries during the nineteenth- and twentieth-century) ‘entered a bibliographer’s paradise’ in 1953 by soaking and loosening layers of book bindings in water to recover dispersed manuscript and printed waste fragments and restore them back into their original volumes. Schullian’s project, named the ‘Bathtub Collection’, reconstituted printed fragments from both well-known classical authors and unfamiliar texts, one of which was used to create uncut sheets of playing cards.

Compared with manuscript waste, such as the title page and text from Holinshed’s Chronicles, printed waste has only relatively recently received scholarly attention from book historians, bibliographers, and literary scholars, especially if it remains in situ within early modern bindings. However, the last decade has seen a shift in attention to and reception of waste, with researchers like Anna Reynolds, Adam Smyth, and Tara Lyons approaching it as something not merely as a forgettable, superficial non-textual material but as pieces of literature that can and should be read to reveal both the lives and imaginative workings of their individual authors and the book tradespeople involved in their creation (and destruction).  How many more lives and stories is the waste paper in the Inner Temple Library’s early printed books and manuscripts waiting to tell to a reader that wants to listen…?

Written by the Graduate Trainee Librarian.