Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [137]
Brydges was already a much-published author of poetry, novels, and "literary antiquities" by the time he moved to Lee Priory in i8io. Now he began to think in terms of a more direct intervention in the practice of publishing. In the late 179os he had become fascinated by the enterprise that contemporaries were learning to call bibliography. Today this is an established field of knowledge, essential but somewhat dry. Such was not the case in Brydges's day, when it was unsettled andvery fashionable. Since the seventeenth century bibliographia had come to mean the knowledge of books, by analogy to geographia. Such knowledge typically took one of two forms. One was discursive, embracing the state of aparticular branch of learning; the other, which proved more lasting, was taxonomic, addressing the classification and knowledge of books qua books. It centered on lists, called bibliothecae (libraries), which had multiplied after the invention ofprinting. The question theyposedwas how to organize, classify, and represent the world of printed knowledge. Answering it called for a new science. This science developed alongside those for classifying the natural world. Linnaeus-and Gesner before him-produced both. By Brydges's day the dream of a single universal reference source had long proved unrealizable, however. Even bibliographies of bibliographies were obsolete before they could see print. In response, bibliography came to mean a classificatory science not so much of knowledge as of the book: of typography binding, andpaper.The shiftwaspartlyaresponse to the upheavals of the French Revolution, which resulted in the dispersal of many collections and therefore a need to specify the details ofparticularvolumes closely and systematically.43 Out of two revolutions - the printing revolution and the French Revolution- thus came anew, systematic science of the book.
Brydges was at the forefront of bibliography, but-as always-in an idiosyncratic sense. He was a founder-member of the Roxburghe Club, which originated after the famous sale of books from the Duke of Roxburghe's library in 1812, and a regular interlocutor with Thomas Dibdin and other bibliophiles. But his version of the enterprise was not quite what others conceived it to be. Above all, his bibliography would not be a science at all. He professed distaste for the minutiae of typography and binding-and especially the idolatry of sheer scarcity-that motivated most contemporary bibliophiles. He thought such details "petty," and confessed to finding them "revolting." Instead, his object, he said, was not merelyrare books, but neglected books.The distinction was all-important. He wanted bibliography to be an endeavor ofrecovery- the literary equivalent of today's rescue archaeology, perhaps-devoted to literature that would otherwise be obliterated beneath the commercial structures of the public sphere. Brydges was utterly unconcerned with analyzing typefaces, characterizing bindings, and developing rules of bibliographical descrip- tion.44 What mattered to him were inscriptions of creativity- fragments of a lost antiquarian idyll of genteel authorship.
This was the literary equivalent to the antiquary as activist. Brydges wanted the bibliographer to be an active participant in a cultural conflict. He wanted to hold up to judgment "the casual prevalence of momentary fashion" that prevailed now that copyright reigned. This he would do by confronting it with the different voices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-and, later, by those of Renaissance Italy and France too. His ultra-Burkean hope was to put elite opinions to the test (he despaired of popular ones) by confronting them with previous wisdom. The paradox was that he believed the very practice of publishing and reading in his time to be incompatible with such a project.
So Brydges adapted to this paradox. He pursued his campaign, not by co-opting the existing publishing