Marginalia | Ann Wroe | An 1820 Shelley

Why do we love old books? Perhaps for their leather bindings, worn
and shiny as the pelt of a live animal. Perhaps for their tooling,
trimming and stitching, summoning up ancient workshops, forgotten
implements and skilled, gnarled fingers. Perhaps for their thick rag
paper, porous and slightly ridged, still bright and flexible after
centuries. Or for the sheer smell of them: dust, spice, learning, earth.

But the old book I have just bought, for a serious sum
of money, is nothing to look at. Its plain blue boards are stained and
worn away at the corners. Its pages are untrimmed and grubby at the
edges. Many pages have pencil marks, and on the back inside pastedown
(after the bookseller's advertisements) comes this bit of doggerel, in
an early 19th-century hand:

I wish I could but find a line
Which would express these thoughts of mine
I wish I could the Muse engage
To deck with eloquence this page.
But

We
know that this edition didn't even please the author, because there
were a dozen or so mistakes in it. He sent an erratum list, but there
was no second edition; the first sold too badly. ("Absolutely and
intrinsically unintelligible", said the Quarterly Review.) The book,
published in 1820, was Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound",
together with the "Ode to the West Wind", the "Ode to Liberty", "To a
Skylark", and several other works which, all bound together in those
blue boards, carried the unmistakeable message that the world could be
seen differently, could be changed, and could be free.

My copy, judging by those random scribblings, was
probably bought at the time. It cost nine shillings, a large sum, and
perhaps the purchaser could not afford to get it bound. But he read it
with attention, signalled the passages he liked, underlined favourite
phrases, and marked whole sections or poems with stresses for reading
aloud. This is a book of poetry that has been perused, used, loved and
listened to until it is almost worn out. That was the point of it; and
that, to me, is still the thrill of it.

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