Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork

Abstract

This is a subtle, absorbing and important work of scholarship. In her multi-layered text, Professor Trettien pursues a number of objectives. Her core material on the ‘ bookwork ’ of three individually centred collectives is explicitly concerned with the future of publishing in the humanities as well as with the relationship of computerised data to print and other media forms during this time of radical change. The character of her book is signalled by its primary title. Cut/Copy/Paste are basic terms in computer use, which can also be referred back to the scissors and paste methodology of writing and publishing adopted by her three seventeenth-century subjects. As they reassembled old texts and other materials to create something new in multi-media forms, they also take on cur-rency as models for contemporary practices in the individual gathering, reordering and integration of electronic data with print. The women of Little Gidding and their ‘ harmo-nies ’ , composed from pieces cut from editions of the bible, John Benlowes, their neigh-bour, continuously extending and reinventing his own printed books, and John Bagford gathering quantities of surviving remnants of books and manuscripts for his fi nally unpub-lished history of print, are brought clearly into view each under one of the three terms in the book ’ s title. Her subjects are collectively described by Professor Trettien as outsiders. This derives in part from the geographical positioning of the fi rst two groupings located in self-contained isolation well away from the centre of print culture in London. Bagford ’ s outsider-ness arose from other causes. Both his modest social status as a former shoe-maker and his omnivorous approach to the collection of specimens, which never trans-ferred into the standard product of the printed book, left him on the fringes of both the book trade and elite culture. The subsequent view of her protagonists as outsiders is also identi fi ed in other ways. It was partly, she claims, a product of institutional conser-vatism; a failure of classi fi cation by scholars and to challenge the whitewashed, patriarchal, heteronormative brand of historicism still dominant in bibliography and literary studies that sees questions of identity as irrelevant to early modern Europe, and to do so speci fi cally by promoting objects, histories, formats, and arguments that evince a diverse (in many senses of that word) past, freely and across multiple platforms.