The materiality of literary publishing

It has often been pointed out that what appears to be a single medieval book is frequently nothing of the sort: commonly between the wooden boards of such a volume will be a range of manuscript texts which may or may not be congruent. Many survivals from our period might suggest that this tradition had not wholly died out. Publishers could often issue between the covers of one volume a collection of literary works that had little or no relation to each other; booksellers could also do the same. Quite apart from what one might call ‘accidental anthologies’, there were the intended anthologies: collections of selected literary pieces, many specially commissioned, that would appear as expensive gift-books or, from the mid-nineteenth century, as a collection of ‘gems’ culled from the works of a particular author. In addition there were the serious anthologies such as Palgrave’s Golden treasury (Macmillan, 1861) and the Oxford book of English verse (OUP, 1900). We who are used to having a relatively clear demarcation between complete single literary works and anthologies might find the reading experiences of the past rather odd.

Putting literary texts into different material forms can change the reader’s perception of them and, equally importantly, can alter, enrich or diversify the context in which those texts occur. A prose account of a murder or a hanging (frequently ‘fictionalised’ for sensational effect) in a broadside would usually be accompanied by a dramatic if crude woodcut (which may very well be reused from an earlier broadside), a poem or song, and decorative typographic devices: it was the multimedia experience of its day. Later, cheaper book editions of novels often contained bound-in and cover advertisements.