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1 results

  • Coda

  • Luisa Calè, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book:
    The Book Unbound
    Published online:
    13 December 2025
    Print publication:
    08 January 2026, pp 198-205

  • Summary

    The Coda explores the afterlives and archival formats of unbound or disbound leaves. Between the 1830s and 1850s, publishers’ bindings redefined the textual condition of the book as a bound object, but unbound, bound, and disbound forms document its uses in knowledge formations, as a paper archive for specimens ready to be redeployed in different formats and practices of collecting, reading, and viewing. This changing material culture is documented through the corpus of William Upcott’s unbound books in the 1830s and disbound plates from the 1770s to the 1830s that Robert Balmanno pasted in albums and deposited at the British Museum in the 1840s, where Anna Eliza Bray wrote her Life of Thomas Stothard (1851). Meanwhile, at the British Museum, Blake’s separate plates underwent a series of archival transformations, reconfigured under the questionable bibliographic encoding of Books of Designs, and later disbound and mounted as pictures for exhibition.