Waste Paper

Once upon a time it wasn’t uncommon for old waste paper to be re-used when binding or re-binding books. The one example of that practice in my possession is shown above, a sheet bearing a register of handwritten names and dates – partly obscured by a strip of adhesive tape – repurposed for the front endpaper in a copy of Vol. 3 of Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature as published by John Murray in 1817. The binding is rather flimsy and seems to have been improvised by a former owner, with only one board at the back and some thinnish blue card glued to it that wraps around the spine and serves as the front cover. There’s a label on the spine with title, author, publisher and publication date neatly written on it.

It seems plausible that the re-binding job might have been done in the later 19th Century, but I don’t know if that’s any help in dating the inscribed sheet. Above the list of names is the number 453, above the dates is written 14 Days. I can’t construe all of the names but recognise surnames like Wright, Barnard, North, Dobson, Goodwin, and Morris. There’s one name I can’t unsee as Mrs. Fiend, which I don’t suppose can be right! On a barely-related note, the book’s title page carries an epigraph – a maxim attributed to the Marquess of Halifax – “The struggling for knowledge hath a pleasure in it, like that of wrestling with a fine woman.”