What's so funny 'bout EEBO, state, and ideal copy?

(Note: This post was originally intended for 11 May, not 21 May.)

My old colleague from OSU, Aaron Pratt, was engaged in an interesting Twitter conversation with Whitney Trettien (whose work on the Little Gidding Harmonies I've been admiring from a distance):

First of all, I don't want to reduce or simplify either party's insights about the structure of book catalogs. As a result of this conversation, I learned a bit about the comparative advantages of relational databases. Like Whitney's creative projects, there's many branching paths in this conversation. I can follow none of them, except one. Here's the branch that Aaron follows on his blog:

 And [Whitney] is surely right that by taking the edition or issue rather than the individual volume as its unit of organization, EEBO demonstrates a disinterest in the kinds of juxtaposition and packaging that scholars have increasingly looked toward in an effort to understand reception and use.

In response to Whitney's call to include "books + texts" on a combined EEBO+ESTC, Aaron asks this question:

But what would it mean to turn EEBO on its head—to flip EEBO—and make its primary unit of organization the individual extant volume, the physical “book”?

 One of the reasons that Whitney and Aaron suggest looking at the physical book is that each of them studies binding. Binding is literally integral to the book. From this perspective, anyone who wants to study early English books online must study the binding as well as the text-block.

But consider what Philip Gaskell wrote about binding in the New Introduction:

The evidence of the binding cannot be accorded so much weight as that of the physical make-up of the book itself, since it may have been added long afterwards and in quite a different place. Nevertheless a binding of the hand-press period is more likely than not to be approximately contemporary with the book it covers—say within a decade or two—while, if it appears to be a trade rather than a bespoke binding, it is also quite likely to derive from the same part of the world. It will of course be remembered that a book may have been rebound at any time; and there is also the possibility, though a remote one, that it may have been rebound in a binding taken from another, possibly earlier, book. Edition bindings of the machine-press period are more useful in placing and dating than hand bindings, since they were carried out for the publisher in large batches, usually near the place of printing and often within a few years of publication. [emphasis added]

In context, Gaskell's chapter instructs readers to identify a printed copy with its author, publisher, site of location, etc. That is, what really matters is the accurate relation of a text-block to a social context. Consider the relative emphasis that each side would place on the phrase "early English books online":

• Gaskell might want to make sure that we're studying early English books online--which is to say that the New Introduction emphasizes the identity of these books
• Pratt might want to make sure that we're studying early English books online--which is to say that his blog posts seem to foreground the importance of binding to the conception of the text
• Trettien might want to make sure that we're studying early English books online--which is to say that her posts seem to foreground the digital structures that emphasize, obscure, prioritize, or flatten certain conceptions of the early English book.