Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 195
194 Milli mála 13/2021
with fixity calls for qualification. Preparing a volume for publica-
tion involves a rearrangement of lines, reversing the sides of a page,
cutting paper, and assembling separate pages. In other words, dis-
integration forms the basis upon which the totality of a print book
becomes possible. Whatever fixity the invention of printing intro-
duced was achieved through the uses of movable type. Human and
mechanical errors and corrections were frequent accompaniments of
the printing process, which often produced “changed, mutated,
imperfect copies.”40 Smyth aptly describes print technology as “a
combination of the permanent and the transient.”41
A host of additional factors shaped poetic ontology in early mod-
ern England. An intellectual and affective process, reading is as
much a physical, material activity—oral, visual, manual—that
brings human bodies into close contact with books. Readers’ hands,
Roger Stoddard notes, “stain and wear away ink and colour, fraying
paper thin, breaking fibres, and loosening leaves from bindings.
Rough hands sunder books, and over time even gentle hands will
pull books apart.”42 Even as a purposeful intellectual pursuit, read-
ing often involved intentional material alteration—marking, sepa-
rating, splicing, supplementing, rearranging, collaging—that de-
stroyed some texts but created new ones.43 Writing in the margins
was likewise both creative and destructive. Amalgamating manu-
script and print and text and annotation, marginalia took place “at
the intersection of generic norms and technological affordances.”44
But what it also did was invade the space of the page, violate the
text, collapse the distinction between reading and writing, and
challenge the finality of the book.45
If print regularized such aspects of the book as typography and
layout, it hardly made books any more enduring. Like in any other
age, books in the Renaissance were frequently damaged, both by
accident and design: fires, floods, wars, censorship, neglect, book-
40 Zarnowiecki, Fair Copies, 18.
41 Smyth, Material Texts, 7; on errors in printing, see esp. 75–137 and McKitterick, Print, 97–138;
and (from a different perspective) Fleming, Cultural Graphology, 31–50.
42 Stoddard, “Looking at Marks,” 32.
43 See Fleming, “Renaissance Collage.”
44 Acheson, “Marginalia,” 4.
45 See Orgel, “Margins;” Sherman, Used Books; Scott-Warren, “Reading Graffiti.”
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8