A Case of Un-Crossing Out

I always love it when I run across something in the world of books that I've never encountered before. Often enough, I've seen a book that has something crossed out; in fact, I'm sure that I've even crossed things out in books before. 

Crossing out is one of the things owners do when a book they have is being used: it's a kind of modification or revision, changing the contents of a book to more closely reflect the owner's interest or understanding or practice. And yet, interests and understandings and practices can change over time, and sometimes book owners are faced with the challenge of excising their own marks of eradication.

That's what clearly happened in this book.

A close look at the picture above will show that thin paper strips have been glued over this paragraph in the form of an X; these strips have letters written on them corresponding to the printed letters they cover up. Though it can't be seen in the image, one of the strips is a bit loose, and I can easily see beneath it that the strips cover over a large ink X that had previously crossed out the paragraph, excising everything above "Item Romae sanctarum", where the underline that accompanied the original crossing out has been left to stand.

Though the illusion is not perfect, the added strips effectively restore the original text, un-crossing it out.

That this book was a well used one is clear from other signs. There are marginal notes (as also shown on the page above) in Dutch, and other text is sometimes crossed out. At two points, manuscript pages are bound in (and one page at the beginning has had a half-page of manuscript deleted by the expedient of pasting in blank paper over it). The latter set of pages, bound in immediately before the printed Index, is thirty-two leaves, some of which have also later been modified or revised. 

The beginning of this lengthy addition, one might note, is accompanied by a vellum tab affixed to the top of the printed leaf that precedes it; this tab was surely useful for a reader who needed to flip back to this section often.

Even when the book was first bound, then, it was modified for usefulness, and it underwent further modifications even after that: this was a working book, and it is grubby and stained and damaged. 

Because it was a working book, its condition is far from perfect. But as is sometimes the case, I think its flaws make it more interesting, rather than less.