Remade

Calè, Luisa (2020) Remade. In: Lynch, D. and Gillespie, A. (eds.) The Unfinished Book. Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198830801. (In Press)

Abstract

This chapter explores how the book is remade through extra-illustration, a practice that alters the codex by augmenting its corpus with additional materials such as prints, watercolours, manuscript pages, often motivated by a desire to bring to the eyes of the reader visual specimens documenting names and places mentioned in the text. Extra-illustration reclaims a published work from its status as a commodity produced in a print run of supposedly identical multiples. Different kinds of intervention integrate extraneous materials into its bibliographical form. The smallest level of intervention involves pasting materials in the margin, but if the copy is not printed on large paper with wide margins, its gatherings are likely to be disbound, and each individual page mounted on a larger sheet to obtain wider margins, while additional sheets may also be interleaved into the book to accommodate the additional materials. As its format and size are altered from octavo to folio, from one to many volumes, its new partitions rearticulate the act of reading, its units of perception, and the hand-eye coordination that marks its rhythm, while the tactile experience of leafing through the pages reveals its heterogeneity. The extra-illustrated book is a composite of objects and interventions from different periods. The chapter considers the case of Shakespeare. While some extra-illustrated copies document the process of historical accretion involved in establishing the text and identifying characters and places, others remake Shakespeare as a classic for the present. While modern editions illustrated by modern painters and engravers update Shakespeare as a contemporary, they can also be used as a support for interventions that discard the present and choose instead to emulate fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts. A further temporal disjuncture illuminates the conditions under which a text can be remade. Adding leaves to a copy of the second folio seems justified when restoring the integrity of a mutilated copy, but using it as a support for extra-illustration reveals its changing status as an object that can be recycled as a suitable repository for drawings and watercolours in the first decade of the nineteenth century. What happens to the medium of the book when it is remade? Is it an updated, backdated, embellished support for reading or does it become something else? At what point does the book stop being a book?

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