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campaign, that the Bible had been a common property in the Middle Ages, freely appropriated and rewritten by lay communities. Overall, Romantic antiquaries in these decades collectively created the first sense of a long, various, and dynamic cultural history to be investigated in the British localities that stood apart from urban homogeneity. Theirs was thus avital enterprise of great consequence. Brydges certainly thought that contemporary copyright law represented a mortal threat to it. And although he did not succeed in his quest, in a fittingly antiquarian sense neither did he entirely fail. One lasting consequence of the assault he mounted was to be the creation and preservation of a mass of facts -the "novel antiquities," as it were, of publishing itself. Archived in Westminster during the parliamentary inquiries Brydges provoked, they were quietly stored away for years, until the information pioneer Charles Babbage rediscovered them. For at least the next century these archived facts would then be dusted off and re-exposed to view, informing a series of challenges that would define many of the terms of modern intellectual property debates.2

In Brydges's own eyes, the publishing industry that was coalescing around the copyright principle was a monstrous mechanism for the triumph of commerce over true genius. But his campaign was never targeted at authorial rights per se. On the contrary, he and his allies insisted that by this time nobody would deny the legitimacy of such rights, and they claimed to be upholding them. Their quarry was copyright itself- a distinct and much more equivocal target. In particular, they opposed the practice known as legal deposit. This was a requirement that a number of copies of each book published in Britain had to be turned over to select libraries for their collections. It was written into the statute law of copyright-which is whywe still call the beneficiaries "copyright libraries" to this day. The rule had long been something of a dead letter, but the libraries had recently attempted to collect on it. The Brydges camp maintained that this aggressive demand was a real infraction on property, and that if successful it would kill off all Britain's most valuable publishing ventures. In principle, the deposit promised to realize the potential ofprint for enlightenment by creating universal libraries; in practice, Brydges's side argued, it was an "evil" doomed to destroy that potential. They maintained that in late Georgian London copyright had given rise to a plot for public-interest piracy on a massive scale. And so they concluded that the law underpinning that plot- the law of copyright- had to go.3

UNIVERSAL LIBRARIES AND THE ENDS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The ideal of the universal library has a long history, extending back to the Library ofAlexandria and forward to utopian visions of the Internet. In some ways, ironically, its nadir was reached just when the ideology of enlightenment placed greatest weight on it. Plans for aBibliotheca Univer- salis, envisaged in the early decades of printing and pursued doggedly by Conrad Gesner and others, had fallen ever further behind the exponentially increasing number of printed works. Library science originated in a doomed attempt to master the range, if not the population, of books. And notions of aphysical librarywith pretensions to universality became Enlightenment dreams, for which visionary architects like Etienne Louis Boullee even created bombastic designs (fig. 9.1). The logic was simple, compelling, and impossible. If printing was what made progress and enlightenment possible, then its products must be collected and organized in order to preserve knowledge and facilitate progress. They must be made accessible, too-no more priestcraft and mystery of state. The appeal of the ideawas evident. Only slightly less so were the economic, political, and epistemic problems attending it-problems that Borges and Eco would famously allude to in modern times.4

In England, however, the approach to creating a universal library was more pragmatic. It rested