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Chapter 7 deals with the issues involved in the construction of the Chinese Buddhist canon, including fund-raising, collecting and collating works, copying, proofreading, carving, printing, and distributing the copies in the late imperial China.

Deals with some aspects of the author's own ongoing research on Mandaean colophons, including the postscripts, which are called tariks. Colophons form family trees because they list names and thereby show the vital threads of scribal lineages through the centuries. The names of a great number of copyist priests, the colophons present nothing less than an unbroken Mandaean history. A translation of an entire tarik from one of the Manuscript A (1560) in Petermann's Ginza is included.

This Epilogue begins with a discussion of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Although much studied, Malory's self-presentation is rarely considered in itself, no doubt because autobiographical concerns appear minimal in the text, and as such Malory's Arthuriad is beyond the scope of this book. However, the narrative does possess a first-person narrator, together with authorial addresses to the reader in the colophons, which possess elements of self-definition, and present an imprisoned author. The Epilogue therefore discusses these facets of the Morte, including the controversial question of authorship, and arguing that only the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth colophons are the author's own — the colophons that also contain (auto)biographical expression, albeit in varying degrees. The Epilogue argues that it is incorrect to assume that there is no thematic, autobiographical, or political relation between the colophons and the main narrative.

Chapter Six explores Smith's use of story outlines as the narrative anchors for his oral composition of the Book of Mormon. By reviewing the sketch outlines, or "skeletons," of stories in advance of his dictation sessions, Smith could use such outlines as a mental guide, which he expanded extemporaneously into fully developed narratives in the moment of delivery. The original Book of Mormon summary headings for internal books, chapters, and sections provide explicit examples of this method of oral composition. Smith dictated the outlines of stories before dictating the stories themselves, revealing his advance knowledge of the narrative shape and structure of his stories, which he expanded extemporaneously during dictation to his scribes. This chapter also challenges the apologetic claim that such outlines represent ancient colophons, along with exploring Smith's use of mnemonic cues and embedded outlines. Finally, based on internal and external evidence, the chapter argues that Smith was fully aware of the overall story structure of the Book of Mormon before he started dictating the work.

This chapter examines self-portraiture in contemporary graphic novels and how they oppose the standard theoretical skepticism regarding the viability of cognitive mapping, or the ability to plot oneself in a social order defined by the arrangements of late capitalism. Autography's peculiar textures of visuality and capitalism in self-portraiture are explored through an analysis of Julie Doucet's cover image of My New York Diary (1999) and David Small's Stitches (2009). Doucet's cover image resembles two types of the medieval colophon: one showing scribes and illuminators busy at work, and the other showing them transfixed in spiritual rapture. Doucet's colophonic cover invests in a fantasy of artistic self-representation that is replicated in Stitches Stitches. The chapter argues that Stitches aligns with the tradition of the künstlerroman, or narratives of the artist's development. It concludes by considering how artistic escape and expressivity produce narrative stitches for artistic labor to cover over.

Chapter two focuses on the prayers inscribed in colophons to sutra manuscripts that were vocalized at the dedication ceremonies studied in chapter one. It argues that ritual and literary expectations generated a particular expression of the cosmos and moral responsibility derived from diverse cultural and literary repertoires not limited to canonical Buddhist texts. It highlights shared structural and stylistic features in prayers throughout East Asia. It looks at the ways patrons praised scripture, mourned the dead, and imagined the realms of rebirth in creative ways that synthesized metaphors and concepts rooted in the Chinese literary tradition with ideas from Buddhist texts. It reflects more broadly on the relationship between literature and ritual.

This chapter examines how the educated Confucian elites of the late Qing empire interacted with art and antiquities before, during, and after the arrival of the Western archaeologist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It finds that scholars and officials such as Luo Zhenyu, Duanfang, and Wang Shu’nan “accumulated culture” as a means of enhancing their social and political prestige within private networks of Confucian scholars and officials. An analysis of the Chinese colophons they appended to newly unearthed manuscripts from Dunhuang and Turfan reveals their preference for the private accumulation and transfer of the social and political capital embodied by art and antiquities rather than the valorization of any sort of collective national heritage. This realization provides the theoretical groundwork to understand why the Chinese elites not only did not criminalize the collecting activities of Western archaeologists, but actively assisted them in their removal of objects from China.

The tablet collections discovered in the Hittite capital are the largest collections of cuneiform texts in the Hittite language. In this paper the organization of the Hittite tablet collections will be examined on the basis of internal and external factors, i.e. colophons, labels, and catalogues. In particular, catalogues are not exhaustive lists of texts, but inventories of texts that were intended to be preserved for a longer period of time, and which were therefore continuously monitored and copied, and, in the course of time, reworked in various ways. Finally, collections management allows some reflections on genres of texts collected, copying practices, and typology of text collection (libraries or archives).

The half-millennium 700–200 BCE was the heyday of the cuneiform ‘library’: Pedersén counts nearly forty of them from that period in his foundational book Libraries and Archives in the Ancient Near East (1998). Yet there have been surprisingly few studies of cuneiform libraries per se. This chapter first summarizes, updates, and evaluates Pedersén’s survey, then uses a selection of this impressive array of evidence to explore some questions, raised in the authors’ respective recent work, about the functions of ‘libraries’ in first-millennium Assyria and Babylonia. The chapter focuses on three case studies which examine the relationships between Mesopotamian ‘libraries’ and two other notoriously complex Mesopotamian institutions: the temple and the scribal school. In particular, it is argued that ‘libraries’ as collections of artefacts were much more mobile within the scholarly community than many have acknowledged. Single archaeological find-spots will rarely reveal an intact collection, even assuming perfect conditions of preservation.

This introduction reviews the production of the First Folio from the perspective of its publishers. It treats the book’s imprint and colophon as neglected sites of rhetorical significance and cultural conditioning and argues that we can use these brief texts––together with the personalities they name––as interpretive keys to learn more about the ways in which Shakespeare’s books were made. It introduces the four book-trade businesses that financed Shakespeare’s collected works and provides an overview of how the Folio was made. Methodologically, the introduction argues that we need new ways of working with early modern stationers. Rather than limiting ourselves to the riveting but isolated case study, books like the Folio urge us to think about communities of stationers in relation to one another. Bringing these stationers together allows their individual tactics and strategies to emerge in sharper relief, and encourages us to consider the interpretive life of a networked model of literary production.

Chapter 5 presents the presence of competitive textualization in John’s Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas. The chapter argues that the Gospel of John claims superiority to prior Jesus books at John 20:30–31 and 21:24–25, the so-called Johannine “colophons.” Particularly in reference to the knowledge of other Jesus books reflected in John 21:24–25, the chapter also suggests that these texts support arguments that the author of John’s Gospel knew one or more of the Synoptic Gospels. The chapter then highlights how the incipit of the Gospel of Thomas continues attempts to outbid predecessors by portraying its Gospel as dictated directly from Jesus.

Chapter 5 builds on the discussion of marginalia in Gospel-books to describe and evaluate the importance of words written into blank spaces in manuscripts throughout the period. Challenging the assumption that names and other short notes are just doodles or pen-trials, this study shows the spiritual and personal significance of writing one’s name deliberately and carefully into a book: not to mention the skill, time, and tools required to do this. The famous colophon and English gloss of the Lindisfarne Gospels is read as transforming that book’s form and function. Spaces in manuscripts are shown to be invitations to interaction from readers and passers-by, and to give literal room to conversations between scribe and constructed audiences. Being attentive to filled blankness allows new voices and scribes to be identified, including one of the earliest vernacular bird fables.

In this chapter I show how pyrite was at the heart of our early understanding of the composition of substances and how it was central to the acceptance of the revolutionary idea that substances have fixed compositions. This, in turn, was the evidential basis for the modern atomic theory. Taxonomists will argue that naming things accurately is important since otherwise no-one will know what you are talking about. They would disagree with Shakespeare that a rose would smell as sweet whatever it was called on the grounds that you would not know that a rose was being described. Even so, the only reason things are named is because of need. Thus Homer did not have a word for blue because he never needed it: the blue sea became wine-dark, for example. By contrast, contemporary ancient Egyptians had a word for blue because they used the blue mineral lapis lazuli for decoration. The mineral pyrite has been employed by humankind for millennia, and it needed a name. Its long history means that a variety of terms have been used to describe it, often reflecting the technology available at the time. In order to understand the role that pyrite has played in the past, we need to interpret the various names given to this mineral by earlier authorities. This problem is compounded since its history is determined by ancient texts and these were commonly written down by scribes from direct dictation. The scribes rendered the sounds of words as best they could within the limitations of the current orthography. Before the advent of printing, copyists made reproductions of these original texts according to the customs and mores of their local culture. The texts that have come down to us are usually the result of the work of several generations of copyists, and the interpretations become like a game of Chinese whispers. Whether or not a word in an ancient text means pyrite is, at best, a matter of relating it to a description that reflects key properties of the mineral. At worst it may mean probing the etymology of the word and considering its context.