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42 Chapter 1
not the principal concern: and of course most other genres would
not be further di·used by the oral ‘multiplier’ e·ect that has just
been discussed.
Binding and the great book massacre
One of the stranger phenomena of book history is the great destruction
of books around 1500. Destruction of books in the Reformation
need not surprise us, but this elimination of a large part of the book
stock had nothing to do with religious di·erences. The phenomenon
was uncovered by Gerhardt Powitz in an essay that no historian
of the transition from script to print can a·ord to ignore. Its implications
for the present argument are considerable, and in fact they
ought to a·ect the whole way we look at the impact of printing:
hence the liberal quotations from a paper that could easily escape
the attention of non-specialist readers.
Old manuscript books were broken up to provide parchment to
help bind more favoured books, according to Powitz, for parchment
was in demand for binding, used for pastedowns, flyleaves, and in
the structure of the spine. Thus, for instance:
The Dominican house at Frankfurt possessed the Summa dictaminis of
Guido Faba in a manuscript of the thirteenth century. Even towards the
end of the fifteenth century the the librarian of the convent . . . gave
the volume the call number N4and the ex-libris ‘fratrum predicatorum
in Franckfordia’ [Dominicans in Frankfurt]. Not long after (around
1500) the manuscript was cut up; remains of it can still be found in
the bindings of incunables which belonged to the convent, among them
the sheet with the call number and the ex-libris. (Powitz, ‘Libri inutiles’,
300)
Or again:
new books in a modern form were appearing in an abundance hitherto
unimaginable; in view of this, it was inevitable that a replacement of the
textual foundations within genres, a change of repertoire, should take place.
The sermon collections of Pierre de Reims and Jacques de Lausanne, neither
of which got into print in the fifteenth century, were in the possession
of the Frankfurt Dominican house in manuscripts of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. Around 1500 these preaching texts were recycled—
G. Powitz, ‘Libri inutiles in mittelalterlichen Bibliotheken: Bemerkungen •uber
Alienatio, Palimpsestierung und Makulierung’, Scriptorium, 50 (1996), 288–304.
The key word is ‘Makulierung’, which I translate as ‘recycling’. I am very grateful
to Marc-Aeilko Aris for drawing my attention to this article.