As Long It's Covered: Medieval Page about Arthurian Tale Used As Book Cover
Don't judge a book by it's cover but literally
After a certain CNN news article dropped about a 13th century ripped-out medieval manuscript page being used as a book cover for a 16th century book of property records of all things, I knew I just had to cover it.
Let’s discuss the big Q: why did whoever bound it do that?
Dr. Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, French specialist in collections and academic liaison at Cambridge University Library, was quoted in the article, positing that it’s possible the page was ripped out and reused due to three reasons:
The use of Old French for the text rendered it hard to read two to three centuries later, when the book got bound;
The rise of the printing press devalued inconsistent handmade works; and
The old but famous Arthurian legends and stories need a narrative makeover for new generations, making older versions for those who don’t have stakes in archival/archaic literature irrelevant or inaccessible, entertainment-wise.
Essentially, the paper and where it came from, was of no value to then-contemporaries or at least for the person who procured it for binding an archival property record. They probably didn’t care too much for fiction, I suppose. I, on the other hand, am aghast someone would just rip out book pages for this purpose but you know what they say: one man’s trash is another’s treasure. For that person, it was more or less trash. For us, it’s treasure.
A tangent on value
I’ve discussed the business importance of book covers in previous posts (see the following):
To sum, advertising (or marketing promotions more broadly) has been around for ages, but it wasn’t until the Second Industrial Revolution of mass production and the decades of innovations since did the need for the field of advertising became more necessary in the 14-17th century, scaling up, and evolving to help businesses and individuals to attract attention and stand out amongst exponentially-growing competition. 1
The evolution of book cover marketing and publishing likely got swept up in this societal change that eventually led to book covers being a critical first-impressions marketing tool with aesthetic appeal today.2 Hence, in the publishing process, there’d be stages dedicated to creating the book cover.
Now, property records are likely papers bound in binders and files or digitised and since such things aren’t commercialised products or art, no book cover is necessary.
But wow, isn’t it a win for the archivists who found a rare surviving fragment of a famous Western tale, despite it being in the oddest of places? Just goes to show you can’t always predict everything.
Anyways, that will be all!
Until next time!
https://twinrams.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-ads-from-print-to-digital/