Time's teeth: narratives of preservation in the eighteenth-century Cotton Library

In 1701, the Cotton Library became Britain's first nationally owned manuscript collection, before entering the newly instituted British Museum in 1757. In the intervening years it was threatened by damp, neglect, inadequate organization, and a fire that wrought havoc on its material's survival. Through a detailed analysis of the content, form and language of contemporary inventories and catalogues, this essay explores how the library could sustain a hybrid identity as both a durable, nationally significant repository and a precarious assemblage of fragile paper and parchment during the eighteenth century. Analysing the ways in which custodians of the Cotton Library articulated their work reveals a historically repeating narrative of neglect, loss and recovery that echoed from the collection's seventeenth-century inception to the major restoration work carried out in the mid-nineteenth century. Instrumental in shaping the Cotton Library's identities, as well as how the discipline of antiquarianism perceived itself, this dialectic of preservation depended on, and was threatened by, the eroding forces of time's teeth.