What can early modern paratexts contribute to the way we think about ‘the early modern period’? It would be easy to assume, from a too-casual reading of recent studies such as Rhodes and Sawday’s Renaissance Computer or Cormack and Mazzio’s Book Use, Book Theory, that this period indeed represented – as was once widely believed – a Renaissance. Thanks to print, as Walter Ong suggested several decades ago, words were technologised; they became newly manipulable, whether in terms of their spatial organisation on the page, or through the ramifying paratextual apparatus that surrounded them. Prefaces, tables, marginal annotations, and indices opened books up to ever more sophisticated kinds of engagement, making the multiple-entry-point technology of the codex ever more useful, allowing the resources of this unique tool to be harnessed to the full. This is certainly one way of understanding what was happening in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is, however, only one way, grounded in a rather partial selection from the evidence. Here, I want to focus on a book that would probably get left out of the master-narrative; a case of paratextual breakdown and technological failure, which has never been sufficiently recognised and pondered. My chapter sets out from a virtual exhibition of four books, one of which stands out as particularly problematic and unusual.