To the (0) UNINITIATED, the antiquarian's obsession with first editions and incunabula can seem an exercise in fetishistic pedantry — a willingness to pay ruinous sums for objects whose textual content is, to all and purposes, identical to the paperback on the supermarket shelf. Yet to dismiss the trade as mere vanity is to miss the subtle intellectual pleasure that it. The scholar handling a Caxton does not merely admire its age; she is, however , communing with the material conditions under which knowledge once circulated. Each signature, each marginal annotation, each variant of a woodcut quietly to the historical record, sometimes overturning received wisdom on matters that textual editions, however meticulous, could never This is scholarship of a particular : slower than the archival, more tactile than the theoretical, and stubbornly resistant to the digitising impulse that has swept through other disciplines. The objects it studies cannot, in any meaningful sense, be reproduced — a photograph of a vellum binding is not a vellum binding — and so the antiquarian's patient of books remains one of the few forms of research for which no digital shortcut has yet been devised, nor is one ever to materialise.