"Miscellaneous collection of sermons"

In a previous post on a collection of plays, published separately but bound together I mentioned that other kinds of relatively small pamphlets -- like sermons -- were often bound together in the same way. In fact, sermons and plays share many features in their printed forms: they are records of a performance (or at least relate to a performance event, however you want to define "record" in this instance); they were often considered as equivalent literary or stylistic texts; and of course they are materially similar -- usually slim pamphlets in quarto that could conveniently be bound together. So in this post I want to show you just such a collection -- as it is cataloged (record here), a "miscellaneous collection of sermons." But this collection of sermons is not as straightforwardly religious  as you might expect, since the binding includes a surprise of sorts.

Red Velvet

In the last two posts, I looked at several civil war era pamphlets: some which had once been bound together, but which now possess only ghostly traces of their onetime companions, and a couple of single-sheet pamphlets in quarto which remain unopened to this day. This post likewise looks at several separately published works -- this time in folio -- which remain bound together, far more sumptuously than the slim, cheap quartos in those previous posts. No, unfortunately the title of this post isn't an allusion to cake, but the binding is no less rich.

in quarto

In my last post I looked at a few short pamphlets from the era of the English civil war -- pamphlets that were so short, in fact, that they consisted only of a single sheet in quarto. These slim pamphlets were, at one point, bound together in a larger volume, both for convenience and for preservation -- thin quartos were notoriously ephemeral, which is why few copies of each edition often survive. In this post, though, I'm going to look at a couple of pamphlets that were never bound with anything -- and indeed, never quite made it through the entire process of becoming proper pamphlets.

Laudian Ghost

In my last post I looked at a collection of plays, published separately, that had been bound together by an early owner. This was a very common practice, particularly for slim pamphlets printed in smaller formats like playbooks, sermons, and newsbooks. In this post I want to look at some newsbooks that were, at one time, bound together, but which have since been broken apart -- along with some ghostly evidence that reveals what one of the pamphlets was bound with.

A very straightforward title

"a collection of plays, published separately"

For reasons that will become clear, an alternate title for this post would be "PLAYS are not BOOKS," which might also have served as an alternate title for the previous two posts.

Those last two posts, on Shakespeare and on Jonson, considered their respective folios not as monumental books, but instead as collections of removable parts -- collections, that is, of sections (and even individual works) that could be, and indeed were, removed from the book, and which subsequently lived textual lives of their own. This called into question the very definition of a "book," as a coherent material object, not to mention, due to the canonical status of both authors, the very definition of a coherent form of authorship.

This post builds on the previous discussions by showing an actual exemplar of the kind of play collection that, particularly, the Jonson folio resembles. Printed plays would normally have been sold without a binding -- as slim quartos, they simply weren't substantial enough to bind on their own -- and, since they were normally printed in the same format, and thus were about the same size, many owners and erstwhile play collectors would bind several plays together into one volume. It was a natural and convenient way to preserve and organize a collection, and other similar kinds of pamphlets (particularly sermons and newsbooks) were often treated the same way. These collections are variously called nonce collections, or coupled books, or sammelband. The best known such volumes today are the few surviving volumes of the Pavier quartos, the collection of ten Shakespearean plays published c.1619 by Thomas Pavier, and which were meant to be (and in some cases were) bound together. (Here is an example, from the library at TCU).

Iowa doesn't have any 17th century play collections, but we do (remarkably) have a few from the 18th century, the oldest, best and most interesting of which is shown here:

Breaking Jonson Apart

In my last post (Breaking Shakespeare Apart) I showed how one of the most important and monumental literary books in the world--the Shakespeare first folio--is anything but monumental, and is, indeed, perhaps not even a book. Rather than a definitive and complete whole, it is better thought of as a collection of removable parts--both within the printing house, where the contingencies of business impacted its contents, and in its subsequent life, where copies have suffered the vagaries of time (and of owners keen to sell off their copy bit by bit). In this post I want to look at the book that is often seen as the crucial model for the Shakespeare folio--Ben Jonson's Workes (first published in 1616), a book that is quite literally Jonson's own monument to himself. However, even though Jonson presents his book as a definitive, whole object--the embodiment of (his idea of) his complete works--it, too, is easily broken apart.