the invention of rare books
McKitterick suggests, by the production of type-specimens in book- form that could be bound and shelved with other books, inspired fashions for purchasing and lavishly binding (though apparently seldom reading) handsome books from the contemporary presses of, for example, Tonson, Baskerville, Bodoni and Didot. Once a concern for the appearance of books had developed taste naturally turned to matters such as paper quality (and size, with an increasing attention paid to Large Paper copies) and ‘external appearances’, by which we mean fine bindings. This applied equally to older books and ‘was driven less by antiquarian enthusiasm than by taste in modern books. Their importance was more social than textual. They provided a measure of wealth, masquerading as taste.’ It’s important to recall though, as McKitterick warns, that such tastes were always for the minority with economy usually overcoming extravagance - ‘for most book collectors these were irrelevancies’. Most copies of most books were plainly bound for utility rather than show. The fine balance between economy and extravagance can be par- ticularly seen at work in auction and trade catalogues where the costs of printing dictated that descriptions should be as short as possible, as indeed they were until such copy-specific information as large paper, morocco bindings or gilt spines began to be detailed, albeit often contracted into a system of initials, after 1660. While noting that ‘tastes developed among sections of the bibliophile community in the second half of the seventeenth century for books with deco- rated spines, as part of the furnishing of a room’, McKitterick does not equate this ‘surge of interest’ with the great turn-round that took place as books that had been stored ever since they were removed from chests or desks and placed on shelves with their spines inwards were turned-round and replaced with their spines outwards. This created a sudden demand for gilt-tooled spines with title-labels both on new bindings and added to old ones, a taste most obvious to vis- itors to Samuel Pepys’s library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Nor does he consider the economic imperative: it could well be cheaper to buy an older edition in a handsome binding at auction or from a bookseller than to buy a new one and then have to pay to have it bound as well.
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