As a book collector with a budget that certainly can't stretch to reach my book collecting dreams, I often buy books that are in poor shape - that's one of the main reasons that I got into bookbinding and book restoration in the first place!

Due to that reason, I have more than a few books in my collection with illustrations cut out, title pages missing, and maps removed to furnish the walls and albums of victorian homes. Unfortunately, especially during the 19th century, this was a very common practice - and there are plenty of stories of ancient books being thrown into the bin after a few sought after engravings had been cut out by a collector, who then saw no worth in the rest of the text and just got rid of it.

The most common books in this state are books like Camden's Britannia, where it's very rare to find a copy that contains all of the original maps, or books of hours where the text is complete, but the initials and miniatures are missing.

There is one exception to this pattern in my collection - a small 12mo edition of Dominici Baudi Epistolae Semicenturia Auctae, printed in Leiden in 1650. The pages of this book still sit within a good condition contemporary vellum binding - but they're not attached to it. Pages 141 onwards are still sewn onto three vellum tapes, but before that the tapes have been cut cleanly away with a knife, and all the pages are missing except for the engraved title page and an illustration of the author.

This book is the opposite of the ruined books left behind by victorian collectors - the boring pages of text have gone, but the nice engravings have been kept.

So why would this happen in reverse? Why would someone want to tear out pages of a book, when the binding was obviously in good condition and had to be cut apart.

There was no obvious evidence from the past ownership - the book must have been in England since the 18th century, as a bookplate in the front has the name Peter Bardon M.D., and it probably belonged to "Doctor Peter Bardon" of Epping in Essex, who died in September 1755. (Interestingly, although a tangent to this blog post, is that a Peter Bardon is recorded as a Huguenot who came to England in 1706, it would be interesting if it could be proved that this was the same person - and that this is how the book came to England.)

Well, this book ended up leading me back to a poem by Allan Ramsay, which I had read decades ago, and describes him imagining the poor fate of one of his own books after it got old and was no longer useful:

These lines come from The Conclusion, published at the end of his collected poems in 1721. It describes a very common, although now largely forgotten practice of recycling old books by using their pages for daily domestic work such as cooking. One famous example of this is Betsy Baker, who was a cook working for an English antiquary in the 18th century, she supposedly destroyed the last surviving Shakespeare manuscripts in her kitchen because she mistook these old manuscripts for scrap paper and used them to line pie tins.

This is also how an important 19th century book collector built his collection - unfortunately at the time of writing this I have misplaced his name - but from memory he was a salesman who traveled the country and would stop at places where old books were bought to be recycled, and he would buy anything he thought interesting that would otherwise be destroyed - through which he came to own several Caxton editions.

This book in my collection, then, could be a rare surviving example of this practice. A cook or someone in a shop who had cut the binding and was removing individual pages to cook or wrap things with, but who kept the engraved images aside to sell on later. And then for whatever reason, they got through the first hundred odd pages and didn't come back to finish the job - leaving it half cut up and taken apart, with the remains tucked into the original binding.