A Commodious Apparatus
By:
August 24, 2010
Yesterday, must-follow Oberlin professor and GOOD columnist Anne Trubek tweeted this terrific example of the HiLo combination of reading and crappery. Sold by Bloomsbury auctions at New York in 2008 for $1500, this commode consists of the battered boards of a 17th-century book — the Floseuli historici delibati nunc delibatiores redditio, sive, Historia universalis tam sacra, quam prophana verum memovabilium tam pace quam bello gestarum (1663) of Jean de Bussières (1607–1685), by the looks of it — transformed into a commode.
Bussières was a Jesuit scholar and poet; a copy of this work in the Bodleian Library (Wing B6258, for antiquarians keeping score) contains a manuscript note on the verso of the half-title page stating that “this Book, compiled by some ____ Papist, and (as I comment) a frenchman … (but was found) innocent, and had nothing prejudiciall to the Church of England.” It’s tantalizing to think that this piece of furniture was built to meet the needs of some anticlerical revolutionary or officer in the Grand Armée. The structure itself, likely pieced together in the 18th century, is ingeniously contrived: folding shut like a book, it opens to reveal a hinged board, seat, and base upon which a chamberpot was to be placed. It appears that the boards were taken from an actual volume, chipped and broken from much use. Of the leaves — made of fine rag paper, soft and sturdy — one can only surmise their fate.