Unopened, uncut, half cut, and a butterknife

‘To introduce Wordsworth into one’s library is like letting a bear into a tulip garden’

Quite often you come across rare and old books where the pages have ragged edges. This means that the printer or binder hasn’t trimmed the block of pages with a knife or guillotine.  These books are called ‘uncut’.

You also can find books where the top or side (fore) edges of pages have not been cut and so you can’t open them. This means that the printer or binder hasn’t opened all the pages, and such books are called ‘unopened’. Pages in a book were originally folded when being printed, as many times as the size determines, in four for quarto and eight for octavo book sizes, for example. The folded pages, known as gatherings or signatures, where then assembled in order for binding. The confusion around the two terms arises from knowing that you have to cut open an unopened book.[1]

There is a third description, a deckle edge, where the edge of the pages are retained in their natural, slightly scalloped state, or sometimes such an edge has been artificially made. There is sometimes a bit more value on such books.

Unopened books mean that they haven’t been read – something some dealers and collectors think is of greater value, but don’t we prefer old and rare books to have been read, held in the hands, particularly where there is some famous association? 

You can cut open pages with a sharp knife of blade. Or you can use a butter knife.  In 1807, Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an Opium Eater), mingling for some time with the lake poets Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge, gives us some fine observations and anecdotes about these rarified men, and women, since we would need to include Dorothy Wordsworth, William’s sister, about whom De Quincey was less than generous. De Quincey, in the 1830s, wrote a number of long articles on his memories of the poets and his time among them.[2] This period of his memories, in the first decade of the 19^th C, was when Wordsworth was becoming the great man, Southey as Poet Laureate increasingly mocked, and Coleridge brilliantly talking and writing his way to his death from opium addiction.

But back to butter knives. Here is De Quincey on Wordsworth and books – the latter a man you would not want in your library.

‘Wordsworth lived in the open air: Southey in his library, which Coleridge used to call his wife. Southey had particularly elegant habits (Wordsworth called them finical) in the use of books. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was so negligent, and so self-indulgent in the same case, that, as Southey, laughing, expressed it to me some years afterwards, when I was staying at Greta Hall on a visit—”To introduce Wordsworth into one’s library is like letting a bear into a tulip garden.” What I mean by self-indulgent is this: generally it happens that new books baffle and mock one’s curiosity by their uncut leaves; …………. Such were Wordsworth’s feelings in regard to new books; of which the first exemplification had was early in my acquaintance with him, and on occasion of a book which (if any could) justified the too summary style of his advances in rifling its charms. On a level with the eye, when sitting at the tea-table in my little cottage at Grasmere, stood the collective works of Edmund Burke. The book was to me an eye-sore and an ear-sore for many a year, in consequence of the cacophonous title lettered by the bookseller upon the back—”Burke’s Works.” …….. which, however, on the old principle, that every day’s work is no day’s work, continued to annoy me for twenty-one years. Wordsworth took down the volume; unfortunately it was uncut; fortunately, and by a special Providence as to him, it seemed, tea was proceeding at the time. Dry toast required butter; butter required knives; and knives then lay on the table; but sad it was for the virgin purity of Mr. Burke’s as yet unsunned pages, that every knife bore upon its blade testimonies of the service it had rendered. Did that stop Wordsworth? Did that cause him to call for another knife? Not at all; he

“Look’d at the knife that caus’d his pain:

And look’d and sigh’d, and look’d and sigh’d again”;

 

and then, after this momentary tribute to regret, he tore his way into heart of the volume with this knife, that left its greasy honours behind it and then, after this momentary tribute to regret, he tore his way into the upon every page: and are they not there to this day? This personal experience first brought me acquainted with Wordsworth’s habits in that particular especially, with his intense impatience for one minute’s delay …….. Had the book been an old black-letter book, having a value from its rarity, I should have been disturbed in an indescribable degree; but simply with reference to the utter impossibility of reproducing that mode of value. As to the Burke, it was a common book; I had bought the book, with many others, at the sale of Sir Cecil Wray’s library, for about two-thirds of the selling price: I could easily replace it; and I mention the case at all, only to illustrate the excess of Wordsworth’s outrages on books, which made him, in Southey’s eyes, a mere monster; for Southey’s beautiful library was his estate; ……….. Meantime, had Wordsworth done as Coleridge did, how cheerfully should I have acquiesced in his destruction (such as it was, in a pecuniary sense) of books, as the very highest obligation he could confer. Coleridge often spoiled a book; but, in the course of doing this, he enriched that book with so many and so valuable notes, tossing about him, with such lavish profusion, from such a cornucopia of discursive reading, and such a fusing intellect, commentaries so many-angled and so many-coloured that I have envied many a man whose luck has placed him in the way of such injuries; and that man must have been a churl (though, God knows! too often this churl has existed) who could have found in his heart to complain. But Wordsworth rarely, indeed, wrote on the margin of books; and, when he did, nothing could less illustrate his intellectual superiority.’

So we have Southey the sensitive gentleman in his beloved library, Coleridge scribbling on any volume he can find, and Wordsworth ripping into unopened books with a greasy butter knife.  Is there a copy of “Burke’s Work’s” around somewhere with roughly opened pages and grease stains?

You might note that De Quincey uses ‘uncut’ to mean ‘unopen’ in our modern terminology. While we are tossing terms around, ‘cut’ was also a 17^th C term for being very drunk, thus we use half cut for moderate drunkenness, though not with much approval.

[1] You can read a good illustrated description of all the terms here: https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/uncut-unopened-untrimmed-uh-oh/

[2] Thomas de Quincey. Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets. London, Penguin, 1970. pp. 217-218.