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This paper argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Walt Whitman's manuscript books informed how and what they wrote during the antebellum decades. It begins by establishing that between 1830 and 1860 readymade manuscript books began displacing the loose-leaf assemblages that were more common around and long before 1800. The readymade manuscript book consequently facilitated renewed abstractions of the labors of reading and writing, as well as their remove from the resistances and complications of writing materials that trace back to earlier shifts in the history of literacy. From these shifts in antebellum material culture came Emerson's efforts to transcend mere readymades and Whitman's embrace of the readymade as the medium of transcendence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rag paper is a common denominator for many Romantic‐era medial forms. The term "media ecology" has become increasingly accepted in media theory, and its spatial and ecological affinities connect it to the urgent topic of climate change. Media ecology invites book historians to consider the labor as well as the origins of the materials that underwrite our culture. This consideration of paper recasts the literary archive as an accretion of physical as well as intellectual labor. The physical labor necessary for the making of rag paper included increasingly industrialized agricultural work and textile production, as well as rag collecting and sorting, as many period authors were aware. At the inception of the Bank Restriction Period (1797–1821), the introduction of low‐denomination paper banknotes changed the London media ecology in ways that had a devastating effect on the English poor, including the very orders of agricultural and textiles workers, rag collectors, and papermill rag‐room women who had a hand in paper making. The Bank of England investigated and prosecuted hundreds, resulting in poverty, transportation, imprisonment, and executions. Paper notes and their forgeries invited considerations of other forms of cultural value and circulation, including literary authorship, and the article ends with the Bank of England's current celebration of Jane Austen as a literary icon by including her portrait on the polymer £10 note. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]