Books in Pieces : Granger, History, and the Collection

Part of : Γράμμα : περιοδικό θεωρίας και κριτικής ; Vol.21, 2013, pages 145-162

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145-162
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This article analyzes the influence of James Granger's Biographical History of England (1769), a volume that spearheaded a remarkable praxis of collecting, interleaving, and rebinding during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This praxis reflects not only radical changes in concepts of collecting during this period, but also three central dimensions of book history. These include the era's passion for artefactual collections; its propensity for annotative forms, such as marginalia and prefaces; and its burgeoning publication of compilatory, systematized texts—such as catalogues, almanacs, encyclopedias, and other compendium forms. The article goes on to suggest that grangerized texts extend beyond simple, stochastic gatherings to reveal key precepts of historiographie continuity, serialized succession, ekphrastic reproduction, and synoptic collectivity.
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