A collection of 32 interleaved playscripts and cookbooks, technical handbooks, pocket almanacs, botanicals and bibliography which contains hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of work freely given by the books’ owners as they added to the printed texts on subjects as diverse as gothic architecture, early music, surgery, roses, illicit marriages, and calculus. The act of interleaving – the insertion of (typically) blank leaves into a printed text – is to expand the possibility of a book, to offer a reader the chance to shape its contents, purpose and meaning. This wide-ranging collection allows a historical and thematic survey of this practice, examining the ways in which interleaved books have been adapted by their owners for a myriad of uses and incorporating texts from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and across a broad range of subjects. Annotated books have become a fashionable collecting area but Interleaved books take the process a step further - they positively embrace the possibility of an immediate reader response.
Within this collection we find the meticulous observations of the botanist, antiquarian or collector, recording their personal discoveries, or even the revelation of something entirely new; the scrupulous commentary of the historian, classicist or mathematician, documenting, critiquing and correcting; and the careful notes of the student of medicine, literature or engineering, earnestly preparing for examination or practical application, alongside the occasional rebellious doodle. Here we also encounter authors themselves, attempting to rectify errors, add subsequent thoughts, or even begin preparations for a new edition, as well as the more mundane – albeit equally revealing and fascinating – jottings of previous owners, recording the more ephemeral details of their day-to-day lives.
Together, the collection explores these curious combinations of printed text and original manuscript, probing the admiring, critical, perfunctory, creative, studious, and obsessive relationships that can be developed between the individual and the book.
Our first category takes in authorial and performing copies - John Southerden has interleaved his edition of The Fleet Register in order to continue the book’s job of recording clandestine marriages. The historian Charles Firth has used an earlier historical work - Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson - to prepare a new edition via annotated interleaves and the playwright Ronald Millar has adapted his own play via annotated interleaves in a Samuel French edition of 1960. Interleaving is particularly favoured by scholarly antiquarians. Here these include W S Symonds on the Gothic Architecture and additions to Charles Plumptre Johnson’s guide for Dickens Collectors. Encyclopaedic books in the fields of bibliography and botany seem to have been particularly favoured by interleavers in order to extend the printed text. Language learning and the study of texts printed in foreign languages as well as medicine seems to have encouraged interleavers; similarly theological and religious texts. Cookery is a category that deserves special scrutiny as interleaving allows a combination of print and manuscript that has obvious advantages. A single almanac from 1760 has to represent this category of interleaved works which might merit an entire collection in its own right. A collection with significant research potential - PLEASE DO REQUEST A FULL DESCRIPTION.
