Unbe-leaf-able! A Thynne-ly disguised secret appears in a library book

skr23

Wednesday 16 October 2024

In this blog PhD candidate Phoebe Macindoe discusses leaf books and a new acquisition for the Library.

All the volumes in the library are made up of leaves, they are the pages that constitute the book. Some books, however, have more leaves than first appear. This is the case for the 1963 edition of The Book of Geoffrey Chaucer by Charles Muscatine which contains an original leaf from the third edition of William Thynne’s edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, dating from 1550, stuck onto page 25.

A leaf book is a book that contains a leaf or leaves from other books attached by its publisher. Muscatine’s leaf book describes the printing and editing practices of notable editions of Geoffrey Chaucer’s work and so was required reading for my chapter on editors of The Romaunt of the Rose as part of my PhD thesis. As most students now do, I initially looked online for an eBook before checking the library: no luck. I then went to Inter-Library Loans where, again, St Andrews did not have access to the volume as it was kept in Rare Books collections around the UK and so was reference only. As it was only published in 1963, this protective attitude seemed odd but, undeterred, I asked the library to purchase a copy.

Scanning through the book at my desk I was impressed by the detail in the reproductions of blackletter printed pages and woodcut images but, when I came to page 25, there was a flutter at the corner of the illustration. This was not an image, but a single page of the 1550 William Thynne edition of Chaucer’s Complete Works stuck onto a page.

The leaf is captioned “original leaf from the undated edition of Chaucer’s works ca. 1551” showing that it was always supposed to be there. Muscatine does not identify the printer as Thynne, even after detailing his two previous 1532 and 1542 editions and including the colophons and title pages in the illustrations. The leaf is 297 x 193mm on a page that measures 352 x 253mm and is folio number cxv, the end of The Parson’s Tale. This final detail is particularly frustrating as only three leaves following this would be the title page for The Romaunt of the Rose, the subject of my own work. It is attached to the page on the left side vertically, so that the leaf may be turned over and the verso inspected.

But how did this leaf come to be in this book? Muscatine’s book was published by The Book Club of California (BCC), an organisation based in San Francisco for book collectors and those interested in book making and fine printing. Started in 1912, the Club produces limited edition and letterpress books for collectors. Now the books printed are primarily concerned with print history in California, but they have previously published nineteen leaf books, twelve of which contained leaves from books published pre-1700. Indeed, the BCC was the foremost producer of leaf-books even in an area particularly expert in it. Of the 240 leaf books detailed by John Chalmers in Dismembered and Dispersed, 85 were produced in California, making the state responsible for 35.4% of the total number of leaf books in the world. The books themselves were designed around the leaves available to the club. The original book would then be cut up and pasted into the new editions. There is only one leaf in the St Andrews copy, meaning that the bifolium (a larger sheet of paper folded in half), that it would originally have been part of, has been cut down the middle.

The practice of creating leaf books is especially discouraged today. In Italy, it has always been banned but, in the USA where this book was manufactured, the law is more flexible; the owner of the book has the right to do whatever they wish with their property. Only 450 copies of The Book of Geoffrey Chaucer were printed. The BCC library has one in its collection with the leaf taken from The Knight’s Tale. In 1965 a further 88 copies of Muscatine’s Book of Geoffrey Chaucer were printed, this time by another press and containing two leaves, one from the 1550 edition and the other from another edition printed in 1561 by John Stow. The original full printed books from the 16^th century ran to over 700 pages but there is no indication as to where the remaining leaves have gone. Perhaps the edition used by the BCC was missing a number of pages before they began inserting the leaves into their editions.

The book, and the leaf will now be returned to the library to be housed with other rare books, away from the regular stacks. The leaf book is a reminder that the pages of books carry much more information than the text initially printed on them. This leaf was printed in London in 1550, travelled across the world to California (attached to the remainder of the book or otherwise), travelled to the BCC’s members individually as part of a new book, and then was sold on back to its country of origin. It is now being examined not for the famous Tale printed on it, but for the form of printing and appearance of the page. It is no longer just a conveyer of literature, but also a fragment of book history.

Phoebe Macindoe
PhD Candidate
School of English