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By Root 1930 0

whom Brydges collaborated in bibliographical projects, and of whose genius he was convinced-achieve such success?69 In his critical judgments, for every Wordsworth Brydges got right, he got a Southeywrong. For the most part his alternative genealogy of printed bards (Wither, Greene, and so on) seems, and seemed at the time, a parade of insipid second-raters. Above all, perhaps, Brydges had little to say about the rise and consolidation of scientific discovery and invention as modes of creativity, generally disdaining them as mere techniques. Later, as the Decline of Science debate raged, the distant Brydges did condescend to contrast literary and scientific claims to genius in potentially intriguing terms:

Discoverers in science may be useful; But all their merits are transmissible: They are, like money, things of circulation, And equally available to all. But the fine essence of imaginative Genius eludes transmission, and thus lives

And breathes alone in the identical words Of its creator. Therefore poets live Forever in the presence of posterity.7°

But this too went nowhere.

Yet as the sciences underwent their own upheavals in the era of Romanticism-upheavals that would culminate in the formation of modern disciplines and the invention of the scientist-strategies close to Brydges's heart had a place. His own associations may have been with country rather than city, lords rather than commons, and patronage rather than profession. But in some intellectual and technical fields, too, smallrun publishing made sense. (After all, the average impression of an academic monograph today is about 250-400 copies, which would be at the high end of Brydges's domain, and that number is falling fast.) With this in mind, Thomas Fisher-antiquarian, pioneer lithographer, and passionate antagonist to library deposit-claimed that "the union of the Arts of Design with Literature" had given rise to a new kind of book. This new medium incorporated finely rendered images that were not merely aesthetically beautiful, but epistemologically essential. They were necessary, Fisher noted, for "conveying ideas with a minuteness, accuracy, and force, unknown to the book prints of former times." He listed the major disciplines that stood to gain: not only topography, local history, and antiquarianism, but botany, zoology, conchology, natural history, architecture, astronomy, and the mathematical sciences. In all these endeavors, knowledge could for the first time be presented with precision, accuracy, and impact-with objectivity, it might be said. But these objects were expensive to produce and addressed very small, dedicated readerships. It was because the deposit imperiled them that the issue was urgent in the extreme. It stood to suppress knowledge itself 71

Two brief examples may suggest how this kind of publishing could work in practice in the sciences. The first is one of the works directly imperiled by the deposit: John Sibthorp's Flora Graeca (fig. 9.5). An elegant work of Levantine natural history written in Latin, this mammoth project was inching its way into publication by fascicles as the deposit became a live issue. In all, it would consume some thirty-four years and ten volumes. Its small run (about thirty copies) and enormous cost made it highly vulnerable. In 1825 the British Museum actually sued for its free copies-a deadly threat, since producing back issues at that stage would have cost another £3,000 and delayed the enterprise by a decade. After prolonged arguments, the Museum lost because the courts determined that such a bijou publication was not a book at all.72

FIGURE 9.5. Small-nut publishing in natural history: Sibthorp's Flora Graeca. J. Sibthorp et al., Flora Graeca, to vols. (London: R. Taylor for J. White,18o6-4o), vol. i, frontispiece. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library.

The second example is that of the Sussex physician, poet, antiquarian, and fossil hunter Gideon Mantell. Mantell was an early pioneer of paleontology, devoting himself to seeking out in quarries the remains of what looked like giant reptiles.