n.material from damaged or discarded publications reused in the production of new onesPrinceton 2004Bookbinders have often used waste material from broken and discarded books to make new ones. During the late fifteenth century numerous manuscripts in monastic libraries were replaced with printed copies, and the discarded parchment became useful material for new bookbindings. Many medieval manuscripts survive only as waste material reused in a subsequent bookbinding. Although today this reused waste is regarded as a valued element of a book, its first appearance represented a step toward economizing: a fresh, clean sheet of parchment or paper was not employed where a leftover scrap would serve just as well. Binding waste can be both visible and hidden. Book covers and endleaves composed of waste can be easily identified as such. Waste used as spine linings and as pasteboard layers becomes apparent only when the book is damaged in a way that exposes what lies underneath the current binding.Haight Smith 2014When repairing older books, the Smithsonian Libraries conservators occasionally uncover evidence of recycling by the original bookbinders. Paper from damaged and discarded volumes was frequently used when binding new books. Why use a new, clean sheet of paper when a leftover scrap would work just as well? ¶ With the development of moveable type in the mid fifteenth century, numerous manuscripts were replaced with printed copies and eventually, the discarded parchment became useful material for new bookbindings. While the use of binding waste has varied throughout the centuries (having been used on all parts of books from covering material to paper repair) we most frequently see it used to line spines.Reynolds 2017, par. 19In the early seventeenth century, Sir Robert Cotton dismembered his duplicate or unwanted medieval manuscripts, inserting them as “stuffing” or binding waste into other, partially disassembled books (Carley and Tite 1992: 94-99). His “cut and paste” approach was often aesthetically driven, with fragments of highly illuminated works used as decorative borders, frontispieces and end-leaves in other manuscripts and printed books (Brown 1998: 291-98).Reynolds 2017, par. 22Ideally, confessional labels would determine the material fate of manuscripts, with popish pages enacting a suicidal agency, voluntarily leaping from library shelves and cases to become book-wrappers and binding waste. This would neatly align the manuscripts’ corrupt nature with an appropriately base function. Peeking from the margins of reformed texts, binding waste might demonstrate Protestant supersession of the Catholic past as Bale so desired.White 2020, 254Binding waste is the paper or vellum that bookbinders of past centuries recycled from obsolete books for use as the external coverings, internal linings, or sewing supports of newer books. Such recycling was the norm in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, and virtually no book, once it fell out of use, was immune to serving as raw material for the binding of another book. Numerous discoveries of cuttings from magnificent medieval manuscripts pasted within later bindings show that early modern binders saw these older books as little more than useful scrap parchment. Whereas the practice of repurposing older books as binding waste continued for three centuries into the period of the printing press, peaking in the seventeenth century, it began to be abandoned gradually during the eighteenth century in the wake of the emerging antiquarian interest in notable manuscript or typographic fragments as historical objects.
Notes
Binding waste is also called printer’s waste or binder’s waste.
