by Price, Leah
In this analysis, “after-uses” would provide Mayhew with a lever to topple books from their taxonomic pedestal—to simultaneously defamiliarize and deflate printed matter by lumping it among a long list of humbler commodities that lose value as they pass from hand to hand. (Such a list would encompass every consumer good that turns up in the pages of London Labour, with the possible exception of women’s stays [2:29]: in Mayhew, no such thing as what Igor Kopytoff calls “terminal commodities,” those that make only one journey from production to consumption [75; compare M. Thompson 9].) The question of whether books stand outside the market becomes a test case of whether anything at all stands outside the market. Anything, or even anyone: the value of used paper provides a measure for the value of the human beings who sell it: one “dealer in ‘waste’ (paper)” “had been brought up as a compositor, but late hours and glaring gas-lights in the printing-office affected his eyes, he told me; and . . . a half-blind compositor was about of as little value, he thought, as a ‘horse with a wooden leg’” (1:289).
From wastepaper to blind person to lame horse: as so often in Mayhew, what sounds like a hyperbolic analogy will turn out in retrospect to have been a perfectly serious cross-reference, because the price of the goods and services derived from horse carcasses will form the subject of a tabular breakdown in the next volume (2:9). Books, persons, and horses are all expected to form privileged categories, exempt from base uses. (Or at least, this is the case in England; the French, Mayhew reminds us, are less sentimental about their horses. And even in England, as we’ve seen, books not only resemble horses but are made from their dead bodies.)7 Yet each exemption dwindles with age: what can’t be eaten turns out to be not horses, but young horses; what can’t be pulped turns out to be new books, not books tout court. The same aging that most poignantly humanizes books (in it-narrative, at least) also reduces them most ruthlessly to objects.
If books begin their life as an exception, then, they end up exemplifying the rule. Mayhew’s uncertainty about whether to place books in parallel with, or contradistinction to, other kinds of object prefigures the tension between internalist accounts of print culture—those that emphasize what sets books apart from other commodities—and those that draw on nonbibliographical analogies, situating debates about copyright in the context of pharmaceutical patents or reducing the history of authorship to a subset of the history of branding. Even structurally, the tension between exceptionality and typicality can be measured by the placement of paper within London Labour. The volume devoted to the resale trade opens—before moving briskly along to secondhand backgammon boards and used mattress ticking—with a set piece describing “a body of men in London who occupy themselves entirely in collecting waste paper.”
It is no matter what kind; a small prayer-book, a once perfumed and welcome love-note, lawyers’ or tailors’ bills, acts of Parliament, and double sheets of the Times, form portions of the waste dealers’ stock . . . [M]odern poems or pamphlets and old romances (perfect or imperfect), Shakespeare, Molière, Bibles, music, histories, stories, magazines, tracts to convert the heathen or to prove how easily and how immensely our national and individual wealth might be enhanced, the prospectuses of a thousand companies, each certain to prove a mine of wealth, schemes to pay off the national debt, or recommendations to wipe it off [a bad pun?], auctioneers’ catalogues and long-kept letters, children’s copybooks and last-century ledgers, printed effusions which have progressed no further than the unfolded sheets, uncut works and books mouldy with age—all these things are found in the insatiate bag of the waste collector. (2:9)
The breathlessness of Mayhew’s syntax levels generic “kinds” into undifferentiated “matter.” But the reduction of absorbing reading to absorbent paper doesn’t necessarily imply a social fall, because Mayhew conflates wrappers with readers. “Some of the costermongers who were able to read,” the narrator tells us, “or loved to listen to reading[,] purchased their literature in a very commercial spirit, frequently buying the periodical which is the largest in size, because when they’ve ‘got the reading out of it,’ as they say, ‘it’s worth a halfpenny for the barrow’” (1:26).
What might it mean to “get the reading out of” a newspaper? Before wood pulp, esparto grass, and other raw materials began to replace rags in the decades following the publication of London Labour, the obvious answer would have been that paper outlasts its contents.8 That quality isn’t unique to paper, of course. Mayhew notes elsewhere that brass doorplates fetch a fraction of their original value when they fall into the hands of scrap metal dealers after their owners’ death: there, too, the value of the material medium paradoxically hastens the erasure of the text (2:10). And recent media theorists have emphasized the gap between the life expectancy of hardware (slow to break down in landfills) and software (replaced on an increasingly short cycle) (Sterne 25; Parks).9 There’s something especially poignant, however, about measuring the ephemerality of a text against the adaptability of a book, because that contrast inverts the traditional hope that words will survive the surfaces on which they’re inscribed—whether brass, stone, or marble and gilded monuments, much less paper. Within that tradition, pages transcend the temporal limits that paper embodies. If texts broker a transhistorical meeting of minds, the book—“Poor earthly casket of immortal verse” (Wordsworth 160)—can never break free of a particular location in space and time. Mayhew turns that contrast on its head, pitting the durability of paper against the disposability of words.
Where stone connotes immortality, paper is associated with death: in imperial China, paper “spirit-money” was placed in tombs five centuries before it was used among the living (D. Hunter 207). In pairing the afterlife of paper with the death of text, Mayhew inverts a paradox most succinctly stated by Drummond of Hawthornden in 1711, the year when paper taxes began the climb that would end the year before the volume publication of London Labour. “Books have that strange Quality,” he observed, “that being of the frailest and tenderest of Matter, they outlast Brass, Iron and Marble” (Drummond et al. 222; West 199). But do they? On the one hand, the high resale value of stone makes it likelier to be erased (Green and Stallybrass 21); on the other, ephemerality makes paper cheap, and cheapness allows each text to be produced in multiple copies that will go on to be stored in multiple locations and transmitted through multiple channels—channels that include the pastry-cook as often as the librarian.
The intertwining of preservation with destruction is not unique to paper: Sumerian clay tablets, for example, often survived thanks to accidents like fire, which baked them into greater durability. Movable type sharpened that paradox, however, for redundancy forms at once an effect of, and a counterweight to, the fragility of printed paper. Texts survive in proportion as books decay. Bibliographers all know that preservation varies inversely with use: not only do small books circulate most widely and reach libraries most rarely, but the genres that get the most handling (such as almanacs) are the hardest for modern scholars to lay their hands on. This paradox is hardly unique to books (printed labels that survive in collections of ephemera usually do so because they were surplus to requirements and sent direct from the manufacturer) or even to print: Jane Kamensky has pointed out that a similar logic governs the survival of clothing: ceremonial articles and those made for infants are preserved in disproportionate numbers (personal conversation). As Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker note, “popularity tends to operate positively on the text and negatively on the book” (Adams and Barker 33): the more readings a work undergoes, the more reprintings are likely to be produced, but the less likely any given copy is to survive. To which a second paradox could be added: the better preserved a book, the less evidence we tend to have about the ways in which it’s been used: the survival of the book itself, in other words, stands in direct conflict with survival of traces of its readers.
William Sherman reminds us that “printed images and texts were part of a dynamic ecology of use and reuse, leading to transfo
rmation and destruction as well as to preservation”: the more heavily a book was used, the more vulnerable it was to decay (6). The proof is Jan Stock’s argument that for popular prints produced in Renaissance Antwerp, “the larger the quantity of impressions made and the larger the number of people they reached, the smaller was the chance of the material being preserved.” That so few have survived can be explained, Stock argues, “not through indifference, but because they served their purpose”: “cherished to destruction,” they may have been “attached to the inside of a travelling case . . . cut up and pasted to a wall as decoration . . . recycled as lining for a book cover or as the flyleaf in a register of archives . . . In the Antwerp city archives, a sixteenth-century woodcut advertising the work of a pin-maker was fortuitously preserved, because it spent centuries serving as wrapping paper for the wax seal attached to a document” (quoted in Sherman 6). In the opposite direction, however, books’ “serviceability may partly explain why so few of them have survived. We find printed paper being used . . . for stuffing cracks in chimneys and windows, . . . and as spills to light a fire or a pipe” (Cressy 93).
In Mayhew’s own time, the battle lines were clearly drawn between those who saw circulation as life-giving and those who understood it to be life-shortening—or, more specifically, who credited or blamed the library either with putting books into circulation, or with withdrawing them from use. (From it-narratives’ characterization of pristine books as “banished” or “imprisoned,” it’s only one step to imagine them being buried alive.) Because bibliographic debates draw on the language of saving and exchange, it comes as no surprise that economists were among the most prominent participants in early debates about free-library funding: Jevons, for example, acknowledged that free-library books wore out faster than those in private collections, but insisted “how infinitely better it is that they should perish in the full accomplishment of their mission, instead of falling a prey to the butter-man, the waste-dealer, the entomological book-worm, or the other enemies of books which Mr. Blades has so well described and anathematized” (Jevons 30). The image of books as heroes “perish[ing] in the full accomplishment of their mission” makes a valiant attempt to translate ephemerality into a martial language.
Such mock-heroics can do little, however, to counter the less high-flown imagery of a 1871 article on circulating libraries which observes that if unpopular books have a short life span (because no one reprints them), popular books die for the opposite reason: too “torn, dirtied, and ‘read-to-death’” to serve even as food wrapping, “they will not carry butter; nor will they ‘to the trunk-makers.’ Their purpose is—for manure!” (Friswell 522). Friswell’s two possible destinations for a no longer readable book—butter wrapping and manure—remind us that paper ended its life as an aid to ingestion and excretion. And as it accumulated traces of its successive users’ hands, or intestines, the book reneged on its traditional mission of transcending the body.
The secondhand bookstall provides an emblem of mortality: asked by Mayhew why he has no new works, one bookstall-keeper answers that “they haven’t become cheap enough yet for the streets, but that they would come to it in time . . . Yes, indeed, you all come to such as me at last. Why, last night I heard a song all about the stateliest buildings coming at last to the ivy, and I thought, as I listened, it was the same with authors. The best that the best can do is the book-stall’s food at last. And no harm, for he’s in the best of company, with Shakespeare, and all the great people” (1:296).
The metaphor of paper’s life cycle makes books look less like the timeless works that they contain than like the mortal beings who read them. This may explain in turn why paper seems to change hands only at the latter’s death. “I think we should all be tired” (as Mayhew says) if I repeated a full catalog of examples from the scrap heap of London Labour, but here are two:
“I’ve had Bibles—the backs are taken off in the waste trade, or it wouldn’t be fair weight—testaments, Prayer-books, Companions to the Altar, and Sermons and religious works . . . perhaps a godly old man dies, and those that follow him care nothing for hymn-books, and so they come to such as me, for they’re so cheap now they’re not to be sold second-hand, I fancy.” (2:113)
And a second informant:
“[I’ve had] Manuscripts, but only if they’re rather old; well, 20 or 30 years or so; I call that old. Letters on every possible subject, but not, in my experience, any very modern ones. An old man dies, you see, and his papers are sold off, letters and all; that’s the way; get rid of all the old rubbish, as soon as the old boy’s pointing his toes to the sky. What’s old letters worth, when the writers are dead and buried?”
Yet what sounds like a rhetorical question turns out to have an answer: “Why, perhaps 1 1/2d. a pound, and it’s a rattling big letter that will weigh half-an-ounce. O, it’s a rattling queer trade, but there’s many worse” (2:114). Ghoulishness isn’t enough to explain the ease with which Mayhew’s informants slip from “old manuscripts” to “old men,” from dead letters to dead bodies, from valuing letters at one-thirty-second of a penny to terming their authors “an old boy pointing his toes to the sky.”
It’s unclear why paper should survive at the expense of its owners, especially in a class where the selling and pawning of goods during an illness or to pay for a funeral leaves little scope for inheritance. (Unlike rich bibliophiles, the poor don’t bequeath their books to libraries.) Yet Mayhew is hardly alone in this association of ideas. Even those Victorian genres that most strenuously celebrated the diffusion of knowledge, whether Useful or Christian, associated circulation with death—both of the book and of its owners.
It-narratives hinge on misfortunes: the deathbed scene during which a bible is willed to a spendthrift, the bankruptcy after which it ends up in a secondhand bookstall, the drinking binge during which it’s exchanged for a single dram. This generic convention doesn’t contradict what we know about the transmission of nineteenth-century books: closer to home, many of the holdings of our own research libraries are available to scholars today only thanks to the death of their donors. (Once one of many objects whose usefulness outlived their first owner, books are now one of only a few consumer goods that even—or especially—rich persons and institutions buy secondhand.) And that association of ideas shouldn’t be entirely foreign to book historians, for whom probate inventories have provided a crucial source.
Even the prospectus for a book fumigator concludes (like Jevons) that contagion is a lesser evil than isolation: “When we have foregone or disinfected our books, . . . killed our cats, declined to use a cab, adopted respirators, and sternly refused to shake hands with our friends, and adopted all the other precautions which are recommended against our microscopical bugbears, will it be worth while to go on living? Happily for our peace of mind the majority of us prefer to take our risk” (T. Greenwood 494). This paean to circulation is confirmed by the history of the volume in which it appears: most of the copies now in circulation on secondhand bookselling Web sites come from library collections. (My own was advertised as “a few marginal blind stamps, library stamp on back of title, but a good copy of the entirely re-written third edition of this seminal work” [my emphasis]).
The fear of contagion took on special poignancy, then, when expressed by the most energetic public-library advocate of his generation. Like Gladstone, Greenwood compares private collections with graves: “Oh! ye gentlemen of England, who are said to ‘live at home at ease,’ if this not worth remembering? . . . By placing your treasures upon [the empty shelves of public libraries] a new lease of life would be given to books you have prized, and it is impossible to say where, along the lines of the generations to follow, they would cease to gratify and enlighten” (T. Greenwood 4). “Books, like coins,” he adds, “are only performing their right function when they are in circulation . . . Hoarded up,” they remain “only so much paper and leather,” but “in a Public Library, books begin to really live” (5). Yet what breathes life into
books seems to kill their owners.
If Greenwood’s “book disinfecting apparatus” assumes that the sharing of books can cause death and disease, reciprocally owners’ death or ruin can set books into motion. One measure of the value that readers attach to books (as opposed to, say, newspapers) is that they enter into circulation only against their owners’ will. Where object narratives involving coins take circulation as the precondition of financial health, those narrated by books counterbalance their structural need for change (for something to narrate) with their thematic assumption that books can change hands only in consequence of misfortune. Where financial health is marked by the shucking off of old clothes and furniture to replace them with new fashions, new books enter the house without old books ever exiting (a problem that anyone reading these words must have experienced firsthand).
