In August 2023, I wrote about the phenomenon of 'unopened' copies of private press books, and expensive commercial books. [See blog 627 about A House of Pomegranates]:
This was the fashion of the untouched book, the book as it came from the bindery to the collector who did not cut open the sections, but left them unopened, untouched and thus unread. It was a kind of tribute to the ideal book, where the object had become more important than the text.
We are talking about books whose quires have been folded but not cut. These may be commercially published works up to roughly about the mid-20th century or they may be private press or other types of deluxe publications.
Meanwhile, I wonder if there could be more cases where a book is not cut open.
The Reader / Collector
As for the collector's behaviour, I see four possibilities:
1. The reader cuts open the book while reading it;
2. The reader uses a knife to open several sections, but stops because (s)he abandons the book and stops reading;
3. The collector does not cut open the book, and reads what is visible by looking between the unopened sheets;
4. The collector places the book unread on the shelf to keep it in an 'untouched', 'original' condition.
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| An uncut copy of Michael Field, The Race of Leaves (Vale Press, 1901) |
This creates three versions:
a. A book with all the sections cut open;
b. A partly opened/unopened book;
c. An unopened book.
But the buyer is not the only one who can cause this condition.
A potential buyer in a bookshop or antiquarian bookshop is unlikely to ask for a knife and start cutting open the sections. In a library, such a thing may happen and then it is the researcher or borrower who turns an unopened book into a (partially) cut open book. In Special Collections Departments (such as that in the National Library of the Netherlands) specific rules try to prevent such behaviour, and the cutting is done (if necessary), after consultation with the curator, by a conservation officer.
The Thief
It may sound unlikely, but after theft, the curious thief may be inclined to cut open the sections of a book. I would like to know of examples of such acts. After all, the thief may be a reader as well.
The Publisher
There may be two situations where the publisher takes care of the persistence of the unopened state: when the publisher places a copy in the publisher's archive and when an unsold stock emerges after the publisher's dissolution.
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| Reading an uncut copy of Michael Field, The Race of Leaves (Vale Press, 1901) |
There may thus exist both archival copies and unsold stock in uncut form. The former does not actually occur with Ricketts and the Vale Press books. The sample copies from the shop, At the Sign of the Dial, were, to my knowledge, all cut open to show the reader all the pages. This does not apply, incidentally, to the copies printed on vellum. The sections of these copies were cut or trimmed only in the bindery.
But after Ricketts and Shannon passed away, it turned out that several issues of their magazine The Dial had not sold out. There was quite a pile of unsold and unopened copies in their original wrappers, almost a hundred in total. There were ten copies of the third issue (1893), seven copies of number four (1896), and no less than eighty-three copies of the last issue - see Catalogue of Valuable Books and Manuscripts […] Valuable Books on the Fine Arts from the Collection of C.H. Shannon, Esq., R.A. and the late Charles Ricketts, Esq., R.A. […] London, Christie, Manson & Woods, December 4, 1933, p. 49, no. 403.
Unopened copies of the fifth number of The Dial may be less rare than copies that have actually been read without struggling to hold open the pages and look between them to read the text.
