The Material Book
The physical copy of Night and Morning is as revealing as the story inside it. While holding the book, it feels like the world of early nineteenth-century American print culture. Since Harper & Brothers printed this book so fast and cheaply, it was meant to be handled, read, borrowed for generations, and that it was.
The binding appears to be a cloth-covered publisher’s binding which became the standard in the 1830s and 1840s as publishers began producing books in uniform, affordable formats rather than custom bindings. This shift democratized book ownership, allowing everyone to be able to read fiction, on an everyday scale. The cloth on this copy of Night and Morning has been softened with age, the edges are worn, and the boards have loosened slightly, these are sins of genuine use.
Inside, the paper shows foxing, browning, and light spotting. These marks are typical of the period’s low-acid, machine-made paper, which was cheaper and more fragile than earlier paper. They’re also common in the humid climate of the American South, where books do age faster. This reflects the environmental journey the book survived from New York printing houses to Georgia homes.
One of the most intriguing features of this book is the pair of faint handwritten inscriptions on the inside cover. They are extremely difficult to decipher, but both appear to repeat the same short phrase, written one above the other. Each version uses a slightly different handwriting style and two different shades of ink, suggesting that two different people wrote the phrase at two different times. Although the handwriting is fragmentary, I was able to decipher “liber,” the Latin word for book. I began doing some research and find the phrase “ejus liber” to be commonly written in rare books.[1] “Ejus liber” means his book in Latin and was a conventional Latin ownership phrase used in personal libraries.
What makes this phrase more interesting, is most of the times people write their names before writing “ejus liber,” but the Fontaine family did not. Their names are not familiar to the Fontaine family tree within this book, but it is likely it was passed down from father to son. Rather than being a personal name, the inscription seems to function as a generational possession to this prestige Fontaine family in Columbus, Georgia, in their personal library. The repetition of this phrase, and the slight differences in handwriting explain how it was read by two different people in the Fontaine family, likely a father and a son.
This copy of Night and Morning also contain a handwritten set of parentheses on page 70. Edward Bulwer-Lytton did begin his chapters with a quote, most from Shakespeare, but this one was from King John, saying, “My life, my joy, my food, my all the world, my window comfort.” Someone intentionally highlighted this quote, to remember that it was important and to be able to find it again. Although we cannot know the reader’s specific motivation, the emotional tone of the quotations suggests this line personally resonated with them. This annotation shows that the book was not just owned, but also actively read and responded to.
[1] Marianna Stell, “Who’s or Whose Book Is This? Pronoun Trouble in Early Modern Book Inscriptions,” Library of Congress Blogs, November 6, 2024, https://blogs.loc.gov/bibliomania/2024/11/06/whos-or-whose-book-is-this-pronoun-trouble-in-early-modern-book-inscriptions/.