From Text Carrier to Heritage Object: Book Review of The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840

Abstract

The work of David McKitterick, former librarian of Trinity College and now emeritus professor at Cambridge, offers profound insight into bibliophilia and the concept of the book as an object. What is the value of a book? What makes a book rare? Why are some old books so sought after by collectors? The author is among the first to clearly establish a connection between the politics of memory and the book as a physical object of cultural heritage. The common understanding of a book is often limited to its text, rather than its material embodiment. This is partly because a text must be distributed to reach a wide audience. Yet, replication is incompatible with terms like uniqueness or collectible value. Modern cultural studies question the primacy of information over its physical carrier. This new perspective calls for seeing a printed book not merely as a passive vessel for information, but as a “thing in itself”, which demands new methods and approaches. David McKitterick emphasizes that digitization, though increasingly in demand today, strips a book of its material dimension. The availability of digital copies can make readers oblivious to the existence of tangible books. The other extreme is to attribute excessive value to any old book. The author employs the method of historiography to define rarity as the core criterion for a book's value. Rarity involves not only a scarce number of copies but also a wide variety of individual aspects specific to an entire edition or a particular copy. McKitterick's work clearly demonstrates how a rare book, regardless of how we define the term, becomes an object of memory akin to a work of art, reflecting the cultural experience of a country and its generation.