arrachement ☜☞ desglosada


The French verb arracher means to snatch or rip out; the noun arrachement, describes an item (in this case a play) that has been intentionally removed from a volume of collected works. This was perhaps done by a collector who was interested in one or more plays within the volume, but not the entire volume; or perhaps by a book dealer who saw more profit in selling the plays individually. The Spanish word is desglosada, and it is the one that we have used consistently in the General Notes section of our database. The English word “disbound” is ambiguous. It may mean that that the entire text block has been removed from the binding, but it does not convey that the individual plays from within the originally complete volume have been separated.