John Aubrey and the Printed Book

John Aubrey was purposefully engaged with an emergent discipline of bibliography. He negotiated a subtle relationship between print and manuscript, collecting and annotating books to ensure the survival for posterity of information about their texts or authors; and he stored precious manuscript material in printed books to protect it. He contributed writings to numerous print projects, paid for the reprinting of rare works, and collected printed ephemera. His books were stored in several places during his peripatetic life, circulated and sometimes lost; he had frequent recourse to bookshops and private libraries. While writing Brief Lives, he collected rare books and papers of his biographical subjects and investigated their reading practices.