During the early modern period, books were frequently composed by compiling and editing parts of other works, often without attribution. Over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, combinatorial labour was demoted to “mechanical” status, and authors were recast as autonomous creators of intellectual property, inspired by “genius,” that required legal protection. Manufacturing Literature investigates how—and how fast—the ways book-text was created changed in this context, as authors and other book-trade workers negotiated changing laws and ideas about what writing should look like. An article published in Book History in 2023 outlines some findings from my earlier work on this history. My current project uses several different methods to address questions raised in the article, including computational text analysis to identify, classify, and model text reuse, and archival research to help me better understand the labour practices involved in creating compilations during the nineteenth century, how book-trade workers thought about them, and the different ways they negotiated the changing categories of ‘original’ and ‘copy.’