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As Heather Wolfe has shown in demolishing the myth that paper was “expensive” in early modern Europe, a single sheet of good writing paper cost a small fraction of a penny in England in 1600, despite the fact that the great majority was imported, with the added cost of shipping and tax. But paper in large quantities was always valuable enough to preserve for reuse – as wrapping paper, lining for chests, even as wallpaper. For a variety of reasons (from printers’ mistakes to bankruptcy), millions of sheets of paper were printed but never sold as texts; they were, however, recirculated. One reuse was by booksellers and binders who, from the eighteenth century in Europe and colonial America, marbled over these waste sheets and pasted them down on the wooden boards of a variety of books. The American Antiquarian Society now classifies them as “overmarbled printers’ waste.” Among this reused waste are fragments of an edition of Fanny Hill that was printed but never published in Philadelphia. Building on the discoveries of Jim Green, I will argue that one only finds early sheets because the printing was stopped by Mathew Carey in 1806, after the complaint of a journeyman printer who, as “a Gentelman that Incorage[s] all Kind of Good Morrels,” wrote to Carey that his “Small Pica” type was being put to “a bad use.” The letterpress sheets from this edition were transported to Massachusetts for marbling, and were then reused by, among others, Isaiah Thomas for books in his library and by New England booksellers as pastedowns. As a result of these reuses, children who read an 1811 copy of The American Reader, published to “train up a child in the way he should go,” could also read about the “languid stretchings, sighs, short heavings” of Fanny as she is brought to orgasm by “that experienced wanton” Phoebe.
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Peter Stallybrass is Annenberg Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and Visiting Professor at Yale University. He is collaborating on overmarbled printers’ waste with Jim Green and Jennifer Chuong. He is also working with the artist Peter Kitchell on an exhibition on “Erased Words” that will attempt to rethink both censorship and what a book exhibition can be.
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