'IT DOOST NO GOOD LYENGE STYLL IN MY CHEST': MEMORIES OF MANUSCRIPTS IN EARLY ENGLISH PRINT

What does it mean when we see mentions of books in early English print? The question is more difficult than it might at first appear. Probably our first assumption, that the word book in this context denotes a similar object to the printed book in which it appears, is quickly belied by descriptions of what are evidently manuscript books during the first half century of printing in England. In addition to this, as in modern usage, the word book when encountered in early English print can also refer to a written composition occupying multiple volumes, or even abstract literary content seemingly detached from materiality entirely – whether the transcendent words of Scripture or the 'noble books' of ancient authors. The potential for slippage between these senses becomes especially tricky in printed paratexts – the dedications, letters to the reader, envoys, etc. attributed usually to a printer-publisher or one of his associates – where the book being described is explicitly connected to the material book before the reader, perhaps as its putative copytext, another title by the same printer-publisher, or an earlier edition upon which the new one improves. Until relatively recently, printed paratexts remained mostly the preserve of descriptive bibliography, as evidence for printers' copy (usually lost) and the activities of the early modern print shop; but in the wake of important studies by Jerome J. McGann (1983) and D. F. McKenzie (1999), more holistic approaches to the early modern book have included a reappraisal of these writings. In the past twenty years, the work of, for example, Alexandra Gillespie (2006), William Kuskin (2008), Kathleen Tonry (2016), and Rachel Stenner (2019) has demonstrated the deliberate and imaginative strategies by which early English printer-publishers worked to authorise and socially anchor authors, texts, and print itself before an expanded and diversified readership. Not least among these strategies is the use of printed paratexts, and literary scholarship is now drawing attention to 'the careful rhetorical performances that paratexts stage' (Stenner 2019: 16). What follows is intended as a contribution to this research: a selection of allusions to manuscript sources in early English printed paratexts, in which writers and printer-publishers voice abiding concerns about the accuracy of reproduced texts, while also making claims for the meritorious activities of the emerging figure of the printer. Running through each of the paratexts examined is an evolving discourse about the potentialities of print and, an outlook for further research, a reimagining of (printed) books as co-created and socialising, in contrast to the solitary, faulty manuscript left lying unread in a chest.