The quest for libraries: mission impossible? (3)
Books recycled in bindings
A particular and extreme case of secondary context is provided by the reuse of books in binder stuffing. Here again, the remains of the leaves we manage to extract from them tell us little about their readers, and can hardly be linked to the occupants of the places where the books from which they came were found, since there is nothing to prove that they come from the same context as the book itself. The same applies to the reuse of papyrus, after scratching or washing, in palimpsests.
Fluctuating origins: the odyssey of books
Books are valuable objects that are handed down from generation to generation and passed from hand to hand. The long life of a book adds a further disruptive element: a library is constantly being reconfigured through inheritance and donation. So it's not easy to reconstruct the profile of the last user of a group of books found together, and to draw conclusions in terms of cultural sociology.
This review of the conditions under which books are discovered suggests that the task we have set ourselves in this lecture is almost impossible; in fact, it should sound like a methodological warning to identify the pitfalls so as to better guard against them.
