Francis x. connor. Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England.

Abstract

Only in a very Shakespeare-centric view of book history could Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623) usurp the title ‘First Folio’. Francis X. Connor’s book discusses and tabulates a sweep of literary folios from John Harington’s translation of Ariosto in 1591 to Thomas Bayley’s Herba Pareitic of 1650, arguing that these books establish a sense of literary prestige during an intense period of canon-formation. Connor demonstrates that the folio format is the bibliographic triumph over the old idea of the ‘stigma of print’, and argues that by publishing these big books (folio does not denote standard dimensions in the period, but is a term popularly used to signal relative large size), authors and stationers attempted to reconcile literary quality, monumentality, and the demands of the marketplace. The History of Text Technologies series takes its intellectual coordinates from the new histories of the book inaugurated by D.F. McKenzie, Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier. One notable strength of Connor’s analysis is his combination of bibliographic and readerly approaches. Comparing folio publications of the works of Sidney and Daniel, which enable readers to participate in their evocation of literary culture, with the closed form of Jonson’s 1616 Workes, places potential readers’ interactions with these books at the centre of their effect. These readers are, however, hypothetical: conjured into being by the paratexual apparatus of the texts. It would be fascinating to trace—as Heidi Brayman Hackel has for the Arcadia—the ways in which actual readers left marks of these encounters on, say, those temptingly wide margins of Jonson’s single-column centred pages. Connor’s scholarship is also lucidly sensitive to metaphors for the book, particularly in his account of the ways Daniel’s use of architectural imagery establishes his folio as both collaborative and functional. Daniel’s ready acceptance of the necessity of printing errors—‘who so looks/ T’have all things in perfection … never must read books’—gives readers a participatory role: by correcting mistakes, they enter into the mechanic and intellectual labours of book production.