The Broadview Introduction to Book History

Michelle Levy, Tom Mole

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781460406038
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Editoria

Book history has emerged in the last twenty years as one of the most important new fields of interdisciplinary study. It has produced new interpretations of major historical events, has made possible new approaches to history, literature, media, and culture, and presents a distinctive historical perspective on current debates about the future of the book. The Broadview Introduction to Book History provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to this field.

Written in a lively, accessible style, chapters on materiality, textuality, printing and reading, intermediality, and remediation guide readers through numerous key concepts, illustrated with examples from literary texts and historical documents produced across a wide historical range. An ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in book history, it offers a road map to this dynamic inter-disciplinary field.

CHAPTER 1

MATERIALITY

Reading Books

Book history involves paying careful attention to the material form of the book and how it was made, circulated, and used. Some people think that this is exactly the wrong way to approach a book. The most important thing about a book, they say, is the text it contains. The material form of the book—the paper, the binding, the typeface, the format, the dust jacket—is just the vehicle that allows words to reach their readers. It’s the words, not the vehicle, that should command our attention. This view, which dismisses the materiality of the book, has a long heritage. It stretches back at least to the eighteenth century—not coincidentally, the period when books first became cheap enough to circulate widely. In one of Alexander Pope’s poetic epistles, from 1731, he introduces a rich fool who wastes his money on a flashy but tasteless house and its contents, including a study lined with beautiful and expensive books that their owner hasn’t read. Pope writes: “In books, not authors, curious is my Lord.”¹ The mark of an idiot, Pope said, was to pay too much attention to the physical form of the book and not enough to its contents. Lord Chesterfield advised his son in 1749 that “[d]ue attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books.”²

This attitude extends into modern academic discussions of the book. The Belgian literary critic Georges Poulet wrote in 1972 that “[b]ooks are objects. On a table, on shelves, in store windows, they wait for someone to come and deliver them from their materiality, from their immobility.”³ Even as Poulet acknowledges the physical form taken by the book (“books are objects”), he is keen to leave that material dimension behind in order to get to an experience of the text (and, through the text, the mind of the author). Poulet imagines us “deliver[ing]” the book from its physical existence, as Christians pray “deliver us from evil” in the Lord’s Prayer. The body of the book is cast aside in order that the soul of the text may be experienced in a realm of pure language, or a space of thought unsullied by contact with the world of things. The desire to look through the book, rather than at the book, is a common one. It’s a desire that book history resists. Book historians linger over the physical form of the book—its thingness—in order to learn what it can tell us.

And it can tell us quite a lot. The physical form of a book sends us messages about how it might be or have been circulated, used, and valued. When we talk about the meaning of, say, Jane Eyre, we’re normally talking about the meaning of the work written by Charlotte Brontë; but the material form of the book in which we read that work is also part of how meaning is constructed. The literary critic Jerome McGann makes this point by distinguishing two kinds of semiotic system, or two codes, that combine in a book. “Every literary work that descends to us,” he writes, “operates through the deployment of a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes, on one hand, and the bibliographic codes on the other.”⁴ The “linguistic code” is composed of the words in the text. The “bibliographic code” is composed of the messages sent by the paper the book is printed on, the way it’s bound, its size, the appearance of the dust jacket, and so on.

Most of us are actually quite adept at deciphering these bibliographic codes, even if we don’t realize we’re doing it. Imagine you’ve got three books in front of you: one is a cheap popular thriller, another is an academic monograph, and the third is a prayer book. Now imagine, for a moment, that these books are all written in a language you can’t read. You can still understand a lot about them by paying attention to their physical format. The first one is printed on cheap, off-white paper. It’s a paperback. The spine has been glued rather than stitched. The cover is brightly coloured and has big silver lettering on it. It’s light and small enough to fit in a coat pocket. What do these facts tell us about the book? We can tell that it’s portable and not meant to endure: the pages would start to fall out after only a few re-readings. It’s basically disposable: the cheap, acidic paper will become brittle and crumble over time. When you read the book you will damage the spine, producing visible creases (and so, incidentally, you can usually tell if someone else has read this book before you). The bright, shiny cover is designed to catch your eye in a shop display, which tells you that this might well be an impulse buy rather than a book you would seek out. You could read the book anywhere, because it’s designed to be easy to read on the go. You could certainly take it on a journey with you, or read it on the bus. In fact, you know from your experience of seeing similar books that this is the kind of mass-market paperback often sold in airports for people to read on planes. You probably wouldn’t give it as a gift on a significant occasion, take it with you when moving house, or display it on your shelves with any special pride. Without reading a word of the text, then, you know quite a lot from the physical format of the book about where this book is sold, how it is valued, and how it is supposed to be used.

Now examine the second book. It’s printed on bright white paper, which is comparatively thick. It’s a hardback. The spine is sturdy and has been stitched. It has either no dust jacket or a comparatively plain one. It’s significantly larger than the first book. This is obviously a more expensive book than the first one. It’s made to last: the paper is probably acid-free and will not deteriorate over time. The binding will stand up to multiple readings, so the book can either be read by one person many times or by many people once. If you open it up, it will probably lie flat on the desk, allowing you to take notes from it or put it aside while you consult another volume. You know from your experience of seeing books like this one that you might find it in a university library. This is one reason why it doesn’t need an eye-catching dust jacket: most libraries discard dust jackets, and in any case, this book doesn’t need to attract attention from a traveller in an airport bookstore: its intended purchaser is a professional scholar or a librarian, who will likely learn about it through other channels, such as publishers’ catalogues or reviews in scholarly journals. At the bottom of the spine this book bears the name of a university press, a sign of its academic prestige. The physical format of this book tells you that the text it contains should be taken seriously. It makes possible certain kinds of use, such as taking notes, comparing, and checking citations, and it ensures that the text the book contains can be read by many people and will be accessible for many years. It also discourages other kinds of use. You’re more likely to read this book at a desk or in a study than on an airplane.

Finally, consider the prayer book. It’s a very small book that easily fits into your hand. It’s printed on very thin paper (actually known as “Bible-paper” in the book trade). It’s a hardback, and the spine is sturdy. It has no dust jacket, but it has gilt lettering on the front cover. The edges of the pages have also been gilded, making them shine gold. On one hand, then, this is a portable book—you’re supposed to keep it with you. On the other hand, the book has comparatively high status: it comes with some of the trappings of authority, such as a hardback cover and gilt lettering and edging. These features also make it more expensive. It is durable and would last a lifetime if you looked after it. In the front it has a presentation plate with spaces for the names of the giver and the recipient, to allow it to be given as a gift. If you inhabit the religious tradition this prayer book belongs to, you will almost certainly have seen similar books. The physical form of the book, in this case, tells you that the texts it contains are at the same time highly valued and intended for regular use.

As well as taking on a particular physical form, these books also come with textual elements that don’t form part of the main body of the text. These elements may be written by the book’s author or by someone else: an editor, reviewer, or another author, for example. The critic Gérard Genette notes that the text is “rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations.”⁵ He calls these elements of the book “paratexts.” The popular thriller will probably have quotations from reviews on the back cover, or endorsements from other thriller writers. The academic monograph will have endnotes documenting the research its author undertook. These paratexts can send messages even if you don’t read their text. The presence of a long section of endnotes displays the scholar’s erudition even before you start to read them. The absence of paratexts can also be significant. The fact that the prayer book has no blurb or introduction might suggest that its authority can stand without any reinforcement from others.

We’re all able to read these bibliographic codes because we’re familiar with the conventions that the publishing industry has developed to distinguish different kinds of books from one another. Most of the time you don’t notice that you’re reading the bibliographic code, but you would notice it if the conventions were broken. You’d think it strange if you were browsing in an airport bookstore and suddenly, among all the small-format paperbacks with their shiny covers, you came across a large, academic-looking hardback with a sober dust-jacket. And you’d also find it strange if you were looking along a shelf of academic books in a university library and came across one packaged like the latest novel by a popular thriller writer. Although they are familiar to us now, these bibliographic and paratextual codes took a long time to become established. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin have shown in detail how the basic conventions of the printed book emerged in early-modern Europe (BRBH 15–36). For example, they note how, in the earliest printed books, no title pages existed. Details about the production of a book would appear at the end of the text in what is known as the colophon. The colophon, they observe, was “a residue from the manuscript,” and it took some time for the title page to replace it (21). Paratextual conventions have thus evolved over time. Just as we sometimes have difficulty reading the unfamiliar language of older texts, we have to make an effort to learn the bibliographic codes of older books.

Book historians, then, think of the book as a complex artefact that constructs and conveys meanings through both its physical form and its linguistic contents, rather than simply as a container or vehicle for the meaning of the text. This leads them to think about the other people besides the author who are involved in the production of the material book. Authors, after all, don’t write books. They write novels, poems, plays, political treatises, religious tracts, histories, memoirs, and so on, and these are then turned into books—into material artefacts made of paper, ink, and so forth—by other people, usually many other people. In some cases, authors exercise quite a lot of control over the physical production of their work: the eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne, for example, paid minute attention to the punctuation of his novel Tristram Shandy, making the printer change the length of dashes on some pages.⁶ But in most cases, recognizing that the material form of the book shapes how it is read means acknowledging that people besides the author are involved in making meaning.

It also means that, when a work is reprinted in different books, the relationship between the linguistic code and the bibliographic code changes. If a piece of writing is republished in a new edition, included in an anthology, or embedded in a school textbook, then McGann’s “double helix of perceptual codes” is untwisted: the linguistic code is detached from its bibliographic code and attached to a new one. When you read a classic novel in a modern edition, with the paratexts of an introduction and notes, you have an experience of that novel that is different from that of its first readers. Even before you read the introduction or notes (or even if you skip them), the fact that an editor and a publisher thought it was worthwhile to edit and publish the text in this format tells you at least two things. First, they must have thought the novel worth studying and analysing in detail. Second, they believed it to be sufficiently difficult that modern readers would need some help to understand it. The novel’s first edition would have appeared without these paratexts, or with different ones. By encouraging us to pay attention to these details, book history can sensitize us to the distance between our own reading experiences and those of readers in the past, including those reading the same words.

If some of the information we can glean from the material form of a book originates with the publisher, other aspects of a book’s physical appearance may originate with the purchaser or reader. Book historians call this “copy-specific information,” because it appears in only one copy of the book, not in every copy of an edition. Often this information tells us who has owned the book in the past. Many people write their names in their books. Books given as gifts often have inscriptions in the front pages naming the giver and receiver, and the occasion for the gift. Libraries often stamp their books to indicate ownership. Book collectors may also use stamps or paste decorative labels (known as bookplates) into their books. Bookplates may also appear in books given as prizes—a practice very common in schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. M.O. Grenby, who has studied children’s books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, discovered that some children not only wrote their names in their books but also wrote threats to beat up children who might steal them.⁷

Books often bear traces not only of the people who owned them but also of how they were used and valued. Many people write in the margins of their books, entering into dialogue with the printed text and sometimes with other readers of the same book in a process of social annotation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote extensive marginalia, weaving his words around the text block until the white space at the edges of some pages was almost covered. His marginalia often reveal his thought processes while reading, and scholars have collected, transcribed, and published them.⁸ All kinds of people wrote in their books, and not only in order to engage intellectually with the work, as Coleridge did. When paper was in short supply, people sometimes used the blank pages at the beginning and end of the book (the endpapers) to write things that had no relation to the text in the book. In extreme cases, they might overwrite the printed text altogether. The booktraces project (www.booktraces.org) collects examples of signs of use in nineteenth-century books, including, for example, books in which people have traced around their hands on the endpapers.

Even when previous owners did not write in their books, they sometimes left physical traces that allow us to discover something about how they used them. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most books were sold with unopened pages—that is, readers often had to use a paper-knife to cut along the edges of the leaves, allowing the pages to be read. When the leaves of a book like this were left untouched, we know that it wasn’t read. A story from the history of science gives us a good example of this kind of evidence. Charles Darwin had a persistent problem in his evolutionary theory: his discovery of natural selection couldn’t explain how, for example, two brown-eyed parents could have a blue-eyed child. To solve this problem he needed the theory of genetics (which showed, to simplify a little, that the allele for blue eyes was recessive and therefore could be carried by both brown-eyed parents without being expressed). Gregor Mendel developed this theory in Darwin’s lifetime, and Darwin actually owned a copy of a book that described it. But after Darwin’s death, the pages of the book in his library were found to be unopened. It would seem that Darwin never read of Mendel’s discovery.⁹

Finally, the binding of a book may offer copy-specific information. In some cases, books were sold in paper wrappers and bound according to the specifications of their owners. Sometimes these bindings were fairly generic, but the choice of materials—and their price—can tell us something about how the owner valued the book. And the fact ...