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T he epigraph to Washington irving’s 1819 sketch, “the art of Book-making,” is drawn from Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy: “If that severe doom of Synesius be true— ‘It is a greater of fence to steal dead men’s labor, than their clothes,’—what shall become of most writers?”1 The sketch itself is a meditation on this question, observ ing the work of “authors . . . in the very act of manufacturing books . . . in the reading-room of the great British Library” and reflecting on their use of the archive.2 The narrator observes writers dipping into “one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature,” seeking to “swell their own scanty rills of thought” by copying the work of previous writers into a pastiche of their own without respect for the integrity of the originals. Particularly troublesome for the narrator is the “kind of metempsychosis” that the orig inal works undergo in the hands of writers who borrow without paying re spect to a source’s genres and styles. For example, “what was formerly a ponderous history revives in the shape of a romance.”3 Subsequently, Irving’s narrator falls “into a doze” during which he has a vision of the reading room wherein books are transformed into “garments] of foreign or antique fashion” and out of which authors (now a “ragged threadbare throng”) clothe themselves by taking “a sleeve from one, a cape from an other, a skirt from a third . . . decking [themselves] out piecemeal.”4 If it is

Vibrant Material Textuality: New Materialism, Book History, and the Archive in Paper