On January 18, 1716, a stocky, aging John Bagford wandered out onto the frozen Thames. Though the day was bitterly cold, the ice float bustled with life. Sides of meat crackled and spit over fire pits. Children slipped and skated into each other and dogs, slid between carts and sleds cutting tracks across the frozen waterway. The smell of smoke and steaming manure rose in the frosty air to meet the cries of street vendors hawking their wares from an alleyway of tents, an ad hoc “Thames Street” stretching from St. Paul’s to Southwark. Gingerbread and gold jewelry, roasted mutton and ox, tea and tobacco, ballads and books, brandy and ale; most goods that could still be bought on the streets of London in this winter of austerity could be purchased and consumed on these slippery, shifting mounds of ice. According to one report, published a few days earlier in Dawk’s News-Letter, there was even “a great cook’s-shop” lately erected, “and gentlemen went as frequently to dine there, as at any ordinary.”1 At least one “enthusiastic preacher” had taken to the frozen river, where he “held forth to a motley congregation . . . with a zeal fiery enough to have thawed himself through the ice, had it been susceptible to religious warmth.”2 So had a poet William Ellis and his wife Bess, according to a woodcut illustration commemorating the event, where they can be spotted in the foreground “Rhiming on the hard frost.”3 And there was plenty of sport. Catching a raucous crowd gathered along the south bank, Bagford may have stopped to watch a bull being baited, play a game of nine-pin bowling, or take in a puppet show. It must have seemed to him much as an earlier frost fair of 1684 had been described by John Evelyn: like “a bacchanalia, a Triumph or Carnoval on the Water.”4

Among the tents that Bagford visited was that of a London printer who had assembled a common press on the frozen river, a massive machine of iron and wood. The printer had with him or her (we do not know the printer’s name) a bit of standing type: a small poem surrounded by a short history of “the Noble Art and Mystery of PRINTING,” with a woodcut border. A blank spot above the poem marked the place where frosty fairgoers like John Bagford could spell out their name in movable type, perhaps fingering with wonder the small, backwards “J” and “B” before setting it carefully on the press-bed. He may have helped ink the type, beating the dark metal letterforms with large leather balls, sticky with a black substance that must have been tough to keep viscous in the cold air. After the type was inked, Bagford and the printer carefully set a piece of blank paper on top of the text, slid it under the platen, and perhaps together pulled hard the heavy bar that would press the platen against the paper, forcing it down against the inked type. When carefully peeled away, the result was a scrap of paper with Bagford’s name set above the poem, which reads:

For many fairgoers, holding this sheet must have been a moment full of awe. While early eighteenth-century London was replete with printed words—books, of course, but also playbills and ballads, form receipts, the newsletters and catalogues scattered across coffeehouse tables—few readers probably encountered the immediate workings of the press as a material technology. They had seen text, but not as fiddly pieces of lead type, and had perhaps smelled fresh printers’ ink in their books, but not known the dexterity needed to pound wool-stuffed leather balls onto an imposed page, nor the strength to pull a press bar. By dragging a heavy common press out of a dank workshop and into the festive atmosphere on the frozen river, this printer turned a functional machine, inconspicuously churning out printed texts for the book trade, into an engine of wonder and curiosity. That is, she or he forged in the frozen thoroughfare a collaborative makerspace, where curious passersby could, perhaps for their first time, participate in the mechanical process of printing and then publish-ing a text, making it public.

Where does this fragment, Bagford’s frosty scrap, fit into our histories of books, collections, and media technologies? There are a few angles from which we might approach this question. From the perspective of the industry, it is a prime example of “job” printing, the name for the many small tasks that presses completed in between larger runs of books, like the blank forms, receipts, posters, and advertisements that Bagford collected. The term “job printing” did not come into common use until the nineteenth century, when, as Lisa Gitelman has pointed out, newer, smaller machines like the platen press helped support “a panoply (or, rather, a pan-opoly) of institutions large and small, inspiring a prolific babble of corporate speech.”6 But even before the rise of bureaucratic and documentary cultures in the nineteenth century, printers would undertake minor jobbing to generate cash flow in between bigger jobs. For instance, in the early seventeenth century, the Cambridge press stayed in business by printing book labels and forms to remove vagabonds from town, as we have seen. By bringing their common presses out onto the ice to print small, one-off slips, printers were capitalizing on a moment, and apparently to great profit, making as much as £5 a day according to John Evelyn’s estimate.7

From the perspective of the categories and subject headings that divvy up modern libraries and archives, though, Bagford’s scrap operates more like ephemera, and we might place it alongside ballads, maps, and other mediated evidence of the many frivolities consumed on the frozen Thames. As with so much ephemera, fragments printed there only survive because individuals carefully tucked them into portfolios or pasted them to the flyleaves of books more likely to be saved for posterity. For instance, two similar slips from the frost fairs of 1684 and 1716 were ferried into the future on the front board of a family bible, where someone, perhaps the John Ford whose name is on them, had pasted them. Bagford’s own scrap persists in one of his volumes of specimens, Harley 5936, which also includes printers’ marks, borders, engraved title pages, music, and quires from small books. Perhaps because it contains so much seventeenth-century printed ephemera, the items in Harley 5936 are now microfilmed and digitized as part of the Tract Supplement of Early English Books Online (EEBO), which is where I first encountered Bagford’s slip from the Thames. The Tract Supplement was intended to augment EEBO, which originally focused on printed books in the Short Title Catalogue, with fugitive sheets and “small items such as broadside and pamphlets” culled from tract volumes and scrapbooks; however, because these fragments lack robust metadata, they can be surprisingly difficult to come across in the database. One needs almost to know Harley 5936 is there and search for it in the “bibliographic number” field. Moreover, although ProQuest claims readers can “see the material in the same order as they would when leafing through the original volume,” each specimen in Harley 5936 has been photographed individually, thus erasing the original, meaningful design and layouts of Bagford’s pages and openings.8 Even as modern archival infrastructures attempt to make visible these ephemeral fragments as clues to a lost popular culture, they occlude other evidence of how individuals like Bagford saved and curated them.

From yet another perspective, there is something odd about categorizing Bagford’s frost-fair fragment as ephemera at all—from the Greek ephemeros, meaning lasting only one day (literally “on a/the day,” epi+hēmera). As mentioned above, the edge of the piece of paper contains a short history of how movable type came to England, while the poem in the center explicitly establishes print as a memorializing technology. The printed slip is not fleeting, according to its own text, but a thing to be “la[id] by, that Ages yet to come / May see what things upon the ICE were done.” Many of the other scraps pumped out of presses on ice from 1684 onward also extol themselves as monuments of the event. Clearly these printers imagined themselves as demonstrating the endurance of their technology, even as they did so on easily lost bits of paper. This seeming contradiction might nudge us to consider this frost-fair fragment within a cultural history of souvenirs, ephemeral objects meant to nevertheless commemorate an encounter. As Susan Stewart has so memorably written, “we do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are repeatable,” but rather “events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative.”9 That is, the souvenir embodies an experience that thereby imbues it with a story. By considering the place of commemorative objects not just in archives but in popular culture, theories of the souvenir hold out the potential to return to Bagford’s scrap what it has lost in EEBO: a sense of its own place within an intimate history of curation.

Already, we can see how this small specimen is pulling bibliography out of its comfort zone and toward new questions, methods, and disciplines. Such is the power of the fragment in the archive. Picking up trails that Little Gidding, Edward Benlowes, and John Bagford have left for us, this project has attempted to demonstrate the social stickiness and staying power of just such seemingly frivolous remnants and fringe practices. I have taken seriously the urge that scraps engender to collect, gather, assemble, and constellate new patterns of meaning, naming that desire as a form of bookwork. In so doing, I have tried to underscore the immensely creative and culturally critical labor that inheres in cutting, copying, and pasting pieces from the past. Many of the compositional techniques and technologies that I have traced are unique to the media environment of seventeenth-century England, which bore its own affordances and limitations. As I have argued, they emerged in part because of their inventors’ marginal or outsider status, whether that position was socially imposed upon them through hierarchical structures of gender, sexuality, and class or purposefully adopted through a defiant retreat from London to the rural peripheries. Yet, even as I have emphasized the historical circumstances in which the women of Little Gidding, Benlowes, and Bagford worked, I have attempted to show how their delightfully imaginative, sometimes fanciful bookwork has transcended the constraints of their own moment, inspiring later readers to pick up scissors, collect fragments, or shuffle waste. Thus their books are not just repositories of physical evidence, but small-scale cultural interventions that bend and shift future relations to the past. That is, they are not just material texts, but text technologies.

While the bulk of each chapter has focused on narrating the long histories of these seventeenth-century experimental publishers and their bespoke books, the pressing concerns of our own revolutionary moment in the humanities and higher education were with me as I worked on this project, inevitably affecting (with all the richness of that word) how I chose to narrate their stories. It was my contention when I began, and remains so today, that the books assembled by the women of Little Gidding, the partnership of Benlowes and Jan Schoren, and Bagford’s scrapbooks demand our attention not just as narrow bibliographic curiosities, but because they speak to the questions that we as scholars, readers, collectors, librarians, and writers face today, questions like: How might, and more importantly how should, digital tools and technologies mediate the remnants of the past? What kinds of objects, histories, and human stories do we want and need to share today, from within our own chaotically fragmented culture? And what platforms, formats, methods, or designs best fulfill those goals? If one aim of this project’s historicist work has been to show that how something is published changes what can be said—that the medium still shapes the message—then a corollary point has been made by its form: humanities scholarship’s print-centrism has inadvertently contributed to the narrowing of canons, obscuring marginal people and practices while amplifying those already centered. Transforming our methods and modes of publishing, as I have attempted to do in this hybrid print-digital project, thus opens a space to “find something new in the old,” as the Siegfried Zielinski passage I quote in the introduction exhorts us to do. Remember: “If we are lucky and find it, we shall have to say goodbye to much that is familiar.”

When Bagford pasted this scrap from the frost fair into one of his portfolios, he knew exactly the purpose of his project, the value of this fragment, and where it fit into his own history of books, collections, and media technologies. It is we who need to relearn his method.