Useless Books

The catalog is a technology that mediates access to books and also mediates its users’ cultural categories. In a 1657 catalog, the bookseller William London effectively created a category for what we now call literature a century earlier than the familiar histories suggest this was conceivable. This essay explains this seeming oddity, while also proposing an alternative to the story, advanced by scholars from René Wellek through Raymond Williams to John Guillory, about the gradual restriction of “literature” from encompassing the entire field of written knowledge to denoting imaginative writing.