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Reading the Endpapers: Five French Texts with Paper Bookbindings Using Printed Waste as Endpapers, and the Influence of Censorship on the Eighteenth-century Book Trade Margaret Lock* Before the nineteenth century, virtually all paper was handmade, and relatively more expensive than it is today. As a cost-cutting measure, bookbinders routinely reused paper that others had discarded, such as pages from account books and other manuscripts; ‘spoils’ (sheets rejected by printers due to overruns, serious misprints or other errors); pages from unwanted printed books; old newspapers and the like. On leather bindings, such paper might be used for lining the boards, and would be hidden under plain or marbled endpapers. On cheap bindings, however, which used paper as the covering material, the binder sometimes did not disguise the use of waste paper for endpapers and covers. When they were made, many paper bindings were intended to be temporary (a reliure d’attente). The French book trade used the term carton for paper bindings using boards, and broché for bindings using a sheet of paper as a cover, irrespective of whether 1 they were sewn through the fold or stitched through the margin. * Margaret Lock is an independent scholar. She has written Bookbinding Materials and Techniques 1700-1920 (Toronto: Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild, 2003), and Trade Bookbindings in Cloth, 1820-1920 (Kingston, ON: Queen’s University Library, 2005). She is currently researching Pinnock’s Catechisms and other English school-books c. 1800 to 1850. She is grateful to Professor Nicholas Pickwoad for kindly reading the manuscript of this essay and making valuable suggestions and corrections and would also like to thank the three anonymous readers for their comments. 1 Michèle Valerie Cloonan, Early Bindings in Paper: A Brief History of European Hand-made Paper-covered Books, with a Multilingual Glossary (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991), 108, 109. Paper bindings vary in structure, style and quality; some were meant to be permanent bindings. There is still no precise and universally accepted terminology for the various types of bindings that use only paper as a covering material. Those bindings described as carton or “paper over boards” have two boards (as in a leather binding). These boards may be made of sturdy paper (about as thick as the box-board used in modern packaging); or a pasteboard, made from laminating (with paste) sheets of already-made paper; or millboard (manufactured in various thicknesses). In contrast, cartonnage ccahiers-papersahiers-papers 448-28-2 FFinalinal pproof.inddroof.indd 225757 22010-12-14010-12-14 009:01:079:01:07 258 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 48/2 This essay examines five paper bindings dating between 1742 and 1794 which use old manuscripts or printed waste as endpapers, and which are preserved in the W.D. Jordan Special Collections and Music Library at Queen’s University, Kingston. Relatively few eighteenth-century paper bindings survive in public collections, as many of these books have been rebound. Books in paper bindings have sometimes been admired and exhibited for the decorative paper on their covers, but those with commonplace covers have generally been ignored. Those with waste paper as endpapers are generally regarded as being particularly low grade bindings, unworthy of study. Setting aesthetics aside, is there any knowledge to be gained by reading waste paper endpapers? If they can be identified, they may shed light on where and when the binding was done. Yet there are problems in identifying the source of the binder’s waste, where and when this paper was first printed. Other information, such as when it was discarded, is needed for an understanding of how the book trade operated, but can only be conjectural. Even when the waste paper can be identified, and there is a plausible link to the text block, it is impossible to be certain that the explanation is correct. There are many imponderables. For example, the waste paper merchant may have stored the paper for years before transporting it many miles to the buyer. So although some of these endpapers illustrate aspects of eighteenth-century book publishing, and some even add to our knowledge of the book trade, many bindings remain inexplicable. However, there is a bonus in this study of waste paper as endpapers. Occasionally the endpapers themselves contain texts of unexpected bindings are made from a single sheet of hand-made cover paper which was sometimes laminated to make a thicker board, folded around the text block. The text block of paper bindings using boards were usually sewn through the spine folds onto cords or tapes (supported sewing). To be done neatly and efficiently, this technique requires a sewing frame. Many of these bindings show a level of skill that suggests that they were made at a bindery. The text blocks of broché bindings could be sewn in the same way, but were more often sewn through the folds without cords (unsupported sewing), or stitched, (stabbed through the inner margin). Both types of paper bindings (those using boards and broché bindings) which were intended as temporary bindings had the deckle edges of their text blocks left uncut. (Information on terminology from Nicholas Pickwoad, Feb. 2010). Broché bindings could be produced by booksellers or their assistants at the back of a shop: David T. Pottinger, The French Book Trade in the Ancien Regime, 1500-1791 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 330. ccahiers-papersahiers-papers 448-28-2 FFinalinal pproof.inddroof.indd 225858 22010-12-14010-12-14 009:01:079:01:07 Reading the Endpapers 259 interest. An intriguing example is on my last book, whose endpaper is a cancelled leaf of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires. Figure 1. Histoire critique de la philosophie (1742), showing the upper cover of vol. 2. Height: 18.3 cm. My first example is a 1742 London imprint with endpapers from at least one discarded account book (Figures 1 and 2).2 Histoire critique de la philosophie, ou l’on traite de son origine, de ses progrez, & des diverses révolutions qui lui sont arrivées jusqu’à notre tems by “Mr. D***” [André-François Deslandes]3 had been first published in Paris in 1737. Although this first edition omitted the more controversial part of Deslandes’ treatise, it was nevertheless banned by the French government in July 1737.4 Prohibiting the reading of a text usually 2 Rare B74 .D4 1742, English Short Title Catalog (hereafter ESTC) n33280. 3 Deslandes is also called André-François Boureau-Deslandes (1689 or 1690-1757). 4 Françoise Weil, Livres interdits, livres pérsecutés, 1720-1770 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999), 34-5, No. 108. A complete edition (4 volumes) was published in “Amsterdam” in 1754-56. Weil does not list a 1742 edition, nor are there copies of this edition in the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale, or major ccahiers-papersahiers-papers 448-28-2 FFinalinal pproof.inddroof.indd 225959 22010-12-14010-12-14 009:01:079:01:07 260 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 48/2 Figure 2. Title-page. ccahiers-papersahiers-papers 448-28-2 FFinalinal pproof.inddroof.indd 226060 22010-12-14010-12-14 009:01:109:01:10 Reading the Endpapers 261 stimulated demand for the book. However, it is initially surprising that a London bookseller would finance the printing of a three-volume treatise in French on the history of philosophy. Although some in the middle and upper ranks of English society could speak and read French fluently, the number likely to buy such a book would be small. A few of them might have remembered meeting Deslandes when he had visited London in 1713 (he mentions meeting Newton in the Histoire critique).5 However, a more likely local audience was the French-speaking population in London, of merchants, diplomats, and Huguenot refugees (Protestants, many of them artisans, who had fled France to escape persecution after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685).6 The bookseller-publisher, Jean Nourse, had been active as a bookseller in London from 1731,7 so could assess local demand. He cannot have hoped for sales of more than 200 copies in London.8 There is also a possibility that the imprint is false. Eighteenth-century French bookseller-publishers of texts which they knew would not pass French censors routinely had the printer substitute a false location and bookseller’s name on the title-page in order to protect the author, the printer and the bookseller.9 The first French libraries. Deslandes’ two earlier books, published in Amsterdam and Cologne, had also been declared “prohibé” by French government censors. 15 A.-F. Deslandes, Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont mort en plaisantant, ed. Franck Salaün (Paris: Champion, 2000), 11. 16 David J. Shaw, “French-language Publishing in London,” Foreign Language Printing in London, 1500-1900, ed. Barry Taylor (London: British Library, 2002), 101-122; on 120. The number of French booksellers in London was highest in the decades around 1700. 17 H.R. Plomer, G.H. Bushell, E.R. McM. Dix, Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932, reprinted 1968), 183. Nourse took over the bookshop of W. Mears, who had been in business at the “Lamb without Temple Bar” (at the east end of the Strand) from 1713 to 1727. Nourse specialized in French literature and scientific works; he died in 1780. In the fifty years that he was in business, he participated in at least 1138 imprints: James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 160.