Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch. The Unfinished Book

Abstract

In their introduction to this important collection, the editors relate that ‘advisors’ warned them against the title ‘The Unfinished Book’ (p. 5). Their resistance to this advice is to be welcomed, for ‘unfinished’ captures the twin aims of the volume: the unfinishedness of the codex as a ‘robust and resilient’ carrier of the written word and ‘the unfinished business of book studies’ (p. 5). ‘Unfinished’ proves not only a fruitful way of thinking about the ‘book’ and its history, but also a means of unsettling easy assumptions about the fixity of the form. For, as Brian Cummings notes in the opening chapter, the bound codex ‘always has finitude, a beginning and an end’ (p. 24). That is to say, its physical construction, appearance to the eye and feel in the hand—or lap if, as in this case, the book is a heavy one—greet us as something finished or whole. Furthermore, the very boundedness of the codex seems to impose a compulsion—a bind—to read the whole, so much so that, as the editors remind us, it has supplied readers and non-readers alike with metaphors of closure—‘Let us close the book … and turn down the leaf’ (p. 7).