A brief overview of the history of the book, as outined by the readings for the ENGL 2033 class and Dr. Richard Cunningham
The background image is of laid paper, one of the early developments of print culture in turning away from vellum.
A Descriptive Bibliography of the Nuremburg Chronicle held by Acadia University's archive.
This chapter quickly describes the history of writing from the beginning of human history to the invention of the codex, the first iteration of the book. It illustrates the four distinct times and regions wherein systems of writing and writing tools were created and established (Ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and Mesoamerica) then traces the evolution of human literacy through the establishment of writing systems and through the evolution of writing materials (clay, stone, papyrus, parchment) to end at paper as the most versatile material for writing on, and the most amenable to codex form. This chapter concludes with a concise summation of the origins of the book, citing the Ancient Greeks as the developers of the phonetic alphabet and libraries, which is not far away from the state of modern Western literacy. This chapter contains a lot of valuable information regarding the origins of the book, however, in its haste to be at once very informative and concise, the text can gloss over what the author may think is not as important or interesting in the origins of human literacy.
These excerpts from a larger text by Febvre and Martin describe the history of the physical printed book through the visual and practical changes made over time through type founts, title pages, formats, and bindings. In the section on type founts, Febvre and Martin track the evolution of modern type fonts through the geographical location and popularity of the four predominant type founts (blackletter, fractured gothic (called Fraktur), bastard gothic, and littera antiqua or roman), which standardized into roman because of the expense of continually making new punches. Febvre and Martin then describe the history of the title page from non-existent, to sparsely detailed at the end of the fifteenth-century, to overdone through the sixteenth-century, and then to a modern layout which came about through the rise of humanism. The next section describes the emergence of page numbers from folio numbers, as well as the emergence of “portable” books as popularized by the humanists, and the decline of illustrated books during the same period. In the final section, Febvre and Martin examine the changes in the binding of books from the intricately pressed designs of early book covers, to commercially made wooden boards, to unbound copies for private libraries, and finally to mass-produced flimsy bindings found in modern books.
This essay details the two stages of printing that have existed from the origins of the printing press to modern printing. The first stage is “origination” which is the organization and production of the thing that is to be printed. Twyman differentiates between relief and intaglio printing methods before introducing the more modern lithography. The first two were the main modes of printing and relied on the reversal of all work to be printed, but during the nineteenth-century lithography and photography changed this process. The second stage of the printing process is “multiplication,” wherein the work to be printed is actually printed in near-identical copies. Twyman records that paper has always and globally been recognized at the best material for printing because of its absorbancy, flexibility, and versatility, and that inks have not changed much in composition, mainly remaining pigment and oil-based since the fifteenth-century. Twyman also includes a section on printing pictures in the two main methods of printing. This essay concludes by stating that while many things have been printed since the invention of the printing press (ephemera like playing cards, posters, etc.), books are the most well-preserved because of their home in cared-for libraries.
This chapter details the movement of scribal culture to print culture in Europe, beginning with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press to the printing press arriving in the colonized Americas. Though before Gutenberg some books meant for the semi-literate masses were printed from wood block. It was the invention of the printing press that accelerated the spread of print culture across the West. This chapter describes Gutenberg’s inventions that made the press possible, and then further improvements made to the original design up to the nineteenth century when printing became industrialized. Robinson describes how these original books, called incunabula until 1500, were made from the punches, type and fonts, paper, inking, pressing, to the binding in folios and quires. Eighty percent of these incunabulae were Latin texts, and the other twenty percent were romances and histories printed in the vernacular. Robinson briefly explores how the Protestant reformation of the Church expanded the reach of printing, far past the limited licencing that the Roman Catholic Church enforced on print shops, by printing new discourses and arguments that helped the spread of Protestantism. This chapter concludes with mentions of further expansions of printing like the movement to the Americas by Juan Pablos, periodicals and other ephemera, and finally the spark that began the Enlightenment: Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
These excerpts from Eisenstein’s larger work lament the lack of scholarly research into the ongoing effects of the invention of the printing press on human culture and behaviour. Eisenstein describes the shift from scribal to print culture as a “cataclysmic event” that revolutionized learning, laws, and all aspects of human behaviour. In her continuing resentment of historians focusing on extant scribal culture instead of lasting effects of print culture, Eisenstein does acknowledge that collecting hard data (i.e. literacy rates, book outputs, and other numbers) is easier than tracking behavioural shifts. She does assert that the novelty of book printing has worn off, despite new innovations in the field. Scholars focus on newer, more unfamiliar media like televisions, rather than improvements made to the printing process: this shift in focus is more pronounced the more printed material appears. Eisenstein argues that the swift pace of human innovation diminishes attention on earlier innovations: there is more concern with the latest change than the history of human inventions leading to this new modern moment. Like industrialization distanced publishers from printers, scholarship has distanced the different aspects of book history: technological study of printing from artistic study typography from the study of printed books. Eisenstein concludes these excepts with the assertion that as Gutenberg’s continual inventions led to the printing press, there are always further innovations in print culture, and yet scholarly focus seems to be exclusively on persistent scribal culture.
This piece from Adrian John’s book The Nature of the Book looks into the historicity of print culture from its incarnation in Western society. While the characteristics of modern books are inherently assumed trustworthy, this was not always the case: this is certainly true of the first printed books. Johns asserts that the claim printers made for the power of preservation over scribal reproductions is the basis for the assumed textual stability modern readers have in books. He refutes this assumption in readers of early printed books with two historical examples. Tycho Brahe had his own printing press for his scientific revelations as he trusted no other presses in Europe: upon his death, his claims became widely mutable and unstable. Galileo Galilei got the patronage of the prominent Medici family in Italy, but when he switched patrons and that new patron became untrustworthy, so did his printed works, and thus Galileo fell from authority. Johns argues that print culture has often meant standardization, dissemination, and fixity (thus giving rise to the “Scientific Revolution” through credibility of text), but that these traits were not always inherent, but rather transitive. Johns concludes that trust of a printed text was hard-earned as piracy and claimed (but false) authorship was rampant in the beginnings of print culture. He ends by saying that sources of print culture are found in both civility and technology, and in the study of book history, one should consider the immediate cause and effect, rather than the lasting assumed modern characteristics of certain authorship and textual fixity.
Darnton begins his text with his own definition of the history of the book: a social and cultural history of communication by print. In defining it this way, he limits book history to the time since Gutenberg first invented his press. He broadens this discipline by arguing that it is an intersection of many fields of study. He dates the beginning of book history as a subject to the nineteenth century when people were interested in analytical bibliography. Book history as a field of study took off across Europe, but especially in France. The field initially focussed on socio-economic history: patterns and statistics of the creating and selling of ordinary books at an ordinary consumer level. Darnton then argues that books are a communication circuit; author to publisher to printer to shipper to bookseller to reader, and because authors are readers and informed by other readers, this circuit is completed. He demonstrates this circuit and its dependence on the transmission of the text and varying outside sources with the example of Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopédie as sold by Isaac-Pierre Rigaud of Montpellier. Then Darnton moves on to the history of reading as an integral part of the history of the book: he argues that it is a sociological field dependant on access to printed material and the transformation of intensive and oral reading to extensive private reading. He concludes this text by arguing that people loose sight of the enormity of book history because of specialization: “the history of books must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method” (247).
This chapter details the history of authorship from the rise of the modern author to modern publishing systems. Robinson begins by offering a definition of the author as someone who originates or creates with words and is influenced by various outside forces. The rise of the modern author begins in the late seventeenth century when the Enlightenment and Reformation emphasized individuality and responsibility of the self. This new accountability of an author was mitigated by anonymous or pseudonymous publishing which protected identities of prominent figures in society from their work and allowed women and those of lower classes to join the ranks of serious literature. As a profession, authorship took off after the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when writers were able to disentangle themselves from patrons, instead writing what suited them most. This rise was dependant on the concurrent rise of copyright, which gave credit and financial benefit to the author. Other new financial innovations benefitted authors like governmental funds, subscription publications, profit sharing, and royalties, whereas copyrights and contracts arose to benefit both the author and the publishing company. The new system involved legal proceedings and advertising to publishing houses which made positions like literary agent and author’s associations necessary to professional authors. Self-publication became relevant for authors of controversial or experimental work, limited readership, or inferior writing. Transformations of author’s work into formats like e-books, audiobooks, translations, and adaptations became a viable source of income.
This chapter begins with a brief overview of the 20th century as the “age of the book”. With the increase of kinds and qualities of books, namely paperback editions, there was an increase in interest and careers within the literary world. The consumption of books has been evolving since paperback editions began to be produced, and more evolutions have been made to literacy with the invention and mass-use of new technology, such that printed books have now been digitized and some are exclusively digital books. In the section about education and literacy, Robinson explains how the revolution that printing started made educational reforms in the west for better quality and longer education systems. Social movements like the creation and building of libraries and lending systems as well as specialized periodicals further spread mass readership and encouraged literacy. There is then a brief summary of the “paperback revolution,” wherein books were formatted for mass audiences in domestic consumption, to be carried around in pockets as a light-weight book. Paperbacks brought in a new wave of popular genres, like detective fiction, science fiction, and later, in the 1970s, the romance genre. Aided by tie-ins to new media like movies, television and radio programmes, more books were being printed, in their first editions, in paperback. As publishers began to recognize that more people were buying paperback rather than hard-covers, two formats of paperback began to emerge: the mass-market, formatted to consistent size, inexpensive, and easy to produce; and the trade format, flexible in size, though often the same size as its hard-cover edition, and which could be sold for more.
This section of Chartier’s work aims to answer the question of how the circulation of printed materials changed sociability, modes of thought, and relationships to power. Chartier begins by arguing for three main factors of book history, which are often separated: textual criticism, bibliography, and cultural history. Chartier is more interested in the history of reading as separate from what is read, however, and is interested in distinguishing communities of readers and traditions of reading, reading ability, and the in-between of literate and illiterate. He highlights three shifts in emphasis that he argues must be made when studying the history of reading: re-examining cultural divisions, looking at the inequal distribution of printed texts as different to who is actually reading them, accounting for varied readerships; examining reading as not uniquely an abstract or intellectual activity, paying attention to ways of reading; and not separating that which is read from the physical object, the immaterial from the material. Chartier also looks at readability as affected by format, like folio vs. octavo, decoration, numbering, or paragraph breaks. He uses examples of bibliothèque bleue, William Congreve’s plays, and the works of William Shakespeare. Next there is a list of the three major contradictions that show a chronological change in the history of reading: technological oral vs visual reading, formal “intensive” vs “extensive” reading, and cultural solitary vs collective reading. Chartier concludes by noting the impossibility of establishing numbers of readership as access to print materials has never meant ownership of said materials.
This chapter is a detailed analysis of the role of the bookseller in the communications circuit of the book trade as established by Darnton. Robinson begins with the emergence of bookselling as a distinct entity in the book industry in the nineteenth century. She sums up the evolution of this piece of the circuit by arguing that it is all about the convenience of getting books to the reader, wherever the reader may be. There is then an analysis of the different kinds of booksellers: independent booksellers, the most common and oldest method, that reached its peak in the mid-twentieth century, and consists of sellers of new books as well as used and rare old books; bookstore chains, first founded in England in the mid-nineteenth century, had major impact in the 1960s and 1970s, and made impulse book-buying possible; and the big-box stores that began as destination bookstores due to their size and location in urban centres, and ability to provide incredibly low prices on their books. Each of these diminished the preceding, so much so that there are less than one thousand independent bookstores in most countries and chain bookstores have been all but replaced by big-box stores. Robinson then investigates the evolution of booksellers into the electronic era, particularly at Amazon which launched e-commerce, and other aggregators that provided an online marketplace that compiled online stores of independent bookstores in an attempt to fight Amazon as the superstore of the online market. The chapter concludes with a summary of the differences between distributors and wholesalers as the middlemen between publishers and booksellers, and book fairs which connect publishers with booksellers.
This chapter is an in-depth investigation of the history of censorship within the book trade and the emergence of protections of printers, publishers, and authors. Robinson begins by establishing who censored the book industry (the government or religious authorities), the why and how they did so (to maintain doctrines and loyalty to them), and how states and censors shaped the relationship between the book and society. There was increasing difficulty in regulating the circulation of information as the printing press and its influence spread across Europe, and was established locally by regulating paper production or printing licenses, or on a national level through taxes. Censorship, though first put into law in England, took off through the Inquisition in 1515 that sought to stamp out anything that was contrary to the Roman Catholic Church, and was reignited by the Third Reich during World War Two who restricted the freedom of assembly, press, and expression of anything contrary to official Nazi policies. After the war, it was hoped that censorship would stop, but it was used extensively through the Cold War in North America and the USSR. Turning from the negative influence of states on printing, Robinson looks at the promotion of print through the examination of who owns a certain text and who is allowed to reproduce it. Freedom of the Press was established during the Enlightenment period in Scandinavian countries. As for copyright itself, an author’s rights were rarely considered prior to the eighteenth century, and though many nations set up their own copyright laws, this did nothing for international printing of texts. Thus, conventions like the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention were established and signed by many separate countries to guarantee copyright protections across international borders. Robinson then examines the limits of copyright, in a system called “fair use” wherein someone is allowed to reproduce a portion of a text so long as the claim and status of the original work is respected, though education and humour are two areas that are hard to police. The copyright laws of the modern era protect any work that has also printed the word “copyright” and the author’s name and the date of completion, so that plagiarism and piracy cannot occur for any work, however, problems have risen for works made before the electronic era and the reproduction of them into electronic formats is a tricky situation. Robinson briefly looks at the “copyleft” movement that promotes open access works, usually accessed by the web and are collaborative or “wiki”-based initiatives. Finally, Robinson outlines a brief history of the harnessing of print, especially by governments in the form of propaganda. Propaganda rose to importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but took off during the World Wars, on both sides of the conflicts, in the form of official propaganda departments that produced print works to boost recruitment, civilian support, maintaining morale and supress dissent.
W. W. Greg begins his address to the Bibliographical Society by describing “bibliography” as a science. He then advocates that though etymologically, “bibliography” should mean the writing of books or the description of books, it has a much wider scope than this: bibliography should be a science that goes beyond describing or categorizing, rather a means of understanding and discovering. He further widens the scope of bibliography by advocating that the method of bibliography should be applicable many different forms of written word as it is the method that gives unity to a science, not the object studied. He lists as examples of what should be studied through bibliography as printed book, manuscript books, clay, papyrus, and codices of vellum or paper. Greg then categorizes two kinds of bibliography: systematic (descriptive) and critical bibliography. Systematic bibliography studies format and other factors as the “salient” history of the book, that is, processes that leave marks on the character of the finished book. He argues that knowledge of manuscript books (and paleography) is essential to mastery of printed books (and subjects like typography), and that this kind of bibliography is a wide field, comprising subjects of the study of bookmaking, the manufacture of materials, the conditions of transcription and reproduction, the methods of printing and binding, publication and bookselling. Critical bibliography, on the other hand, is the study of the material transmission of literary texts, and the investigation of textual traditions. He argues that this kind of bibliography should be taken up by editors of books, and not only left to bibliographers. Greg ends with a description of his ideal course on the history and methods of bibliography.
This version of the essay by W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” discusses the choices made when choosing an authoritative edition of a “copy-text.” Though Greg resists actively defining the term, it becomes clear that a copy-text is a version of a particular text that is taken as the closest to the author’s original work, and thus should be used as a basis for all further editions. Greg begins by arguing that the usual way of defining an authoritative text, the genealogical method (i.e. manuscript is best) has reduced textual criticism to a set of rigid rules, which does not make sense to Greg, as manuscripts are fallible to different scribal errors in every copy, where printed editions are not. Greg defines the two modes of textual criticism: substantive readings, the meaning or essence of expression of the author; and accidentals, the spelling, punctuation, and word-division. Unfortunately, the decision on which method is better for preserving the text has changed over time, as copies made closer to the writing of the text often had the same types of accidentals but different words, and later copies had modernized spellings but kept the original words. Greg claims that it is easier to choose an authoritative printed text as they have linear ancestry, whereas manuscripts were often copied independently. He does note as a caveat that an author’s later revisions of a text make choosing an authoritative copy-text through substantive reading difficult. Greg argues that early editors of texts never had any intention of creating the “perfect” edition from the true authoritative copy-text, but rather to prevent gross error in the future in using the wrong copy as copy-text. Greg’s contention, found on page 130, is that the copy-text should ordain the accidentals, but that the choice of substantive readings is ultimately up to the editor’s knowledge of textual criticism, and may go beyond the one copy-text, and thus there should never be “undue deference” (132) to any one copy-text.
Tanselle begins this essay with the assertion that the goal of scholarly editors is to discover exactly what an author wrote and the form they wished it to take in the world, to discover authorial intention. He then interprets Greg’s essay “The Rational of Copy-Text” to assert that Greg's goal of a scholarly edition is to represent the author's final wishes about a text, to distinguish from authorial revisions and external revisions, and not to “improve” upon the author’s extant work according to the opinion of the editor. Tanselle’s first section is about intention and what that means for an editor. He argues that accidentals are clear, but substantive variants make authorial intention difficult to uncover, but that ultimately, decisions about author's intention are always left up to the editor, unless the author themselves have stated their intention in the book being edited. His next section discusses the separation of authorial variants from non-authorial alterations. And, as with the first section, decisions on variants, whether from the author, printer, or earlier editor, are up to the editor, whether in manuscript or print editions, so long as all research has been exhausted and there is no conclusive historical proof of authorial intent towards one variant over another. In the third part, Tanselle notes that final intent should not be considered as ultimate goal of editor when the extent of the revisions results in a “new” work, or when an author allows for several different readings and changes between them over the course of several editions. The final section discusses two final questions about editing: “what does ‘intention’ signify, when is it final?”; and “Does it matter whether the author's wording is recovered, particularly when emendations by others are improvements?”
McGann begins his essay, as printed in this anthology, with a distinction between the scholarly/scientific and the artistic/aesthetic focus on physical character of literary works (audial or visual). He argues that art focusses on the physical character of the text as important to how the text functions, while the scholarly method focusses on the physical character of the text as a means rather than an end. McGann’s first section asks, and then answers, the question: “why take up new digital tools/new editing methods?”. He explains that electronic/digital mediums expand the use of books and the study of them, as symmetry of tool and subject makes it hard to study the subject, and so the computerization of hardcopy books means that multiple things can be looked at simultaneously, information can be found faster, etc. He uses the digital Oxford English Dictionary as an example of this as it can be used as a book or as an electronic resource. McGann’s next section focusses on the why of hyperediting, arguing that it frees the editor from the limits of hardcopy codices, adding that while hypertext programs are not necessary for hyperediting, they are certainly best model of good hyperediting. In the third section, McGann shows the necessity of hypermedia through a number of examples which were excluded from this hardcopy edition because they could not be accommodated, which only furthers McGann's point of the necessity of hyperediting and electronic books as printed editions of text are limited to what a printer can do en mass and on paper. McGann then addresses major problems of hyperediting, like copyright or the vastness of the internet, but still asserts that hyperediting is still the way of the future (as of 2001). McGann argues that the shift from paper to electronic-based text is as elementary as the shift as manuscript to print was in 1450. In his final section, McGann explains how a hypertext functions as a library, allowing for infinite expansion, and thus that it is a decentralized, but not unorganized medium.
Katherine Hayle’s essay focusses on the issue of the decline in literacy at the same time as there is an increase in digital reading, though there is a rise in print novel reading by young adults. Hayles asks “what can be done to fix this?” and she argues that literacy teaches close reading but does not make the move from print to digital texts, nor does it encourage such transfer of skills. In the first section, Hayles writes that there was an expansion of literacy and close reading in the 1970s and 1980s to include more than just traditional literature, but that close reading remained a common denominator across study of all texts. She then discusses what close reading actually means and concludes that symptomatic reading is the most common and popular technique of close reading. In the next section, Hayles argues that people should not be expected to learn close reading with print materials when they do not normally have contact with print, and thus should be encouraged to learn close reading in digital materials. With the example of the short story of Harrison Bergeron, Hayles notes that internet induced distraction has been a concern from at least the 1960s. The next section asks the question “what evidence is there of web effecting attention?”. Hayles answers this with several examples of tests that have been done on digital reading, concluding that links in the text (hypertext) reduce retention of content, print-like linear mode of reading improves comprehension (rather than jumping around via links), and that repeated actions help comprehension and retention. In the penultimate section, Hayles records the importance of anecdotal evidence by arguing that reflexivity is important and thus personal experience is the best tool. She then examines the cognitive shift in hyper-reading versus close-reading. Hayles then looks at how hypertext can be useful is one pays deep attention when reading it, but that it is helpful for moving between kinds of text. Hayles concludes this section with an analysis of hyperreading as computer-assisted human reading, and then its reverse in human-assisted computer reading. Hayles’ final section discusses synergies between close hyper and machine reading and that new forms of teaching involve all three kinds of reading, close, hyper, and machine, and is thus interdisciplinary.
Grafton begins his chapter with the fear that libraries are becoming a thing of the past. As Google Books has taken promenance, Grafton highlights that some have worried about it and the forced population of the internet of solely English books which might condemn books in other languages to obscurity. Grafton assures his reader that this is not the case as Google Books contains a vast array of books in many languages from many different places, and thus the more open and widespread online libraries and archives become, there is greater accessibility and efficacy. The first section of his chapter discusses the myth of the “universal library.” Grafton argues that the internet will never bring such a thing. Grafton illustrates, in very brief detail, the history of libraries and archive, writing that collections of texts began to be catalogued and organized as early as the third century BCE in Mesopotamia, but that the greatest achievement of libraries was the library of Alexandria, which, at its height held more than a half million scrolls, and bibliographies began to be created to separate forgeries from genuine works which led to focussed scholarship. Grafton’s next section discusses “Google’s Empire” and the change in scholarship from initial research done in physical encyclopaedias to a quick Google search. He records that Google’s roots are in books and that its search algorithms resemble footnotes, as the database was initially started to create an electronic database of all the books at Stanford University. Now, Grafton argues, Google sets out to give searchers access to any book in the world - whether in print via their partners (publishers and booksellers) or out-of-print via the Google Library Project. Grafton then describes many critics’ decisions about the failings of Google’s digital database and other book-related projects. He ends this section with the caveat that material libraries and archives are still important in an echo of Hayles’ essay (reading techniques of “dipping,” “cross-checking,” and “power skimming” on the internet). Grafton’s third section discusses publishing without paper, and the changing ways people have decided to or are told to publish. Grafton examines websites as a form of publishing, although often with vastly different outlooks: hypertext and different emphases (pictures over text, for example). He then argues that the world of “serious reading” is changing, as there is now access to texts online from anywhere in the world rather than libraries creating a community of readers sitting in the same (sometimes restricted) location. Grafton’s final section looks at the future of reading, and he argues that in the future, serious readers will have to both use material libraries and archives, as well as know how to navigate digital databases and search engines.