What to Read…

…if you’re interested in book history: a short list of foundational works and other helpful material.  This list is very Europe and print-centric, but I would encourage you to become comfortable with the theoretical aspects of the material and then branch out to whatever sub-topics interest you.

The Coming of the Book (L’Apparition du livre) by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (1958):  Lucien Febvre was one of the founders of the influential French Annales School, which emphasized a sociological approach to history rather than the ‘important people/events’ perspective that had dominated nineteenth century historical discourse.  Whereas earlier historians had analyzed the impacts of specific printers or nations, Febvre and Martin saw printing as a social movement intimately connected to the intellectual and cultural environments of early modern Europe.  The Coming of the Book provides a detailed overview of printing history, beginning with the introduction of paper into Europe and moving on to the technological issues of printing, the structure of printing firms and the journeyman system, the geographical distribution of printing, the book as commodity, and the cultural impact of print.

Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts by D.F. McKenzie (1986):  This book, based on a series of lectures given in 1985, is a crucial theoretical work in book history.  McKenzie explains that the importance of bibliography (the description and classification of texts) lies in what it can tell us about history.  Rather than a dry recitation of facts about the structure of a text, bibliography should be used to establish a broad socio-historical understanding of text producers, book readers, and their cultures.  Most importantly, he demonstrates that the structural aspects of a text (of any kind) affect its reception and use, and explains the impacts of evolving materiality on reception.  (Some of his ground-breaking work was done on New Zealand history and the reception of the Treaty of Waitangi; it is included in the volume.)

The History and Power of Writing (Histoire et pouvirs de l’écrit) by Henri-Jean Martin (1988):  Writing is such an integral part of our lives that we seldom step back to look at it critically, asking what meaning it had to past societies and what it means today.  It is important, though, to understand the ways that our ancestors viewed the written word.  Similar to The Coming of the Book, The History and Power of Writing is a social history of writing throughout western history, from the development of the first alphabets to industrial printing.  My favorite part was Martin’s discussion of writing in ancient Greece, where the art was viewed with skepticism as a mental crutch, particularly by Plato.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979):  This is definitely the most controversial work of book history.  Eisenstein’s thesis is that the fixed and stable nature of print led directly to the scientific and Protestant revolutions because, for the first time, many accurate, identical copies of books could be quickly produced and distributed.  Her book generated intense debate immediately upon its release and in the years following, but today most book historians reject the bulk of Eisenstein’s theory as overly deterministic.  Rather than social change occuring as the result of a specific technology, they see printing as one part of a complex of cultural, intellectual, religous, and technological changes.  Additionally, historians such as Adrian Johns have pointed out that printed text, especially in its first centuries, was not as fixed or reliable as Eisenstein described it.  For responses to Eisenstein, see ‘How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?’ by Anthony Grafton, in The American Historical Review, volume 107 (1) pp. 87-106 and also ‘The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book’, the introduction to The Nature of the Book by Adrian Johns.  Digging deeper, Eisenstein’s work owes a debt to that of Marshall McLuhan – The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962).

The Nature of the Book by Adrian Johns (1998):  Our society automatically attributes different forms of authority to books.  We trust that the title, author, and publisher listed are accurate and that the contents are what they claim to be, but this has not always been the case.  Johns’s lengthy but thoroughly engaging work provides an in-depth description of the culture of book production in early modern London, from the roles of authors, booksellers, and printers to the influence of the government and the powerful Stationer’s Company.  But, beyond the descriptions of everyday life in the early modern book world, he lays out a powerful argument about the nature of print and the ways that authority is not inherent in the technology (as Eisenstein states), but is constructed by individuals and social forces.  I would recommend this work not only to those studying the histories of books and technology, but to anyone interested in modern copyright law and piracy issues.

The Business of Enlightenment by Roger Darnton (1979):  I’ve been a fan of Darnton since my undergrad days, before I even knew that book history was its own field.  A cultural historian focusing on eighteenth-centuy France, Darnton directs much of his gaze to books and their creators.  The Business of Enlightenment explores, in great detail, the personalities, business decisions, and social forces behind the publishing history of Diderot’s Encyclopédie.  If you’re not up to 600+ pages on an encyclopedia then I definitely recommend his other books, especially The Great Cat Massacre (1984), a collection of essays on ‘episodes in French cultural history’ revolving around text and written in Darnton’s lucid and engaging style.  And yes, there is a real cat massacre.

ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter and Nicholas Barker (first published 1952, continually revised and updated):  This is a delightful book for anyone interested in book collecting and book history.  A reference work that’s actually intended to be read, it’s essentially an encyclopedia of important book terms with often witty explanations (as an example, see the entry for ‘chronological obsession’).  While the ABC is available as a free pdf from the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, I recommend checking out the print edition, as part of the enjoyment of the book comes from the labeling of its parts with their correct names such as ‘free-endpaper’, ‘fore-edge’, and ‘pagination’.

A few more that I don’t have time to write about:

• A History of Reading in the West ed. by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier
• A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
• The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose
• The Order of Books and The Culture of Print by Roger Chartier
• The English Common Reader by Richard Altick
• A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism by Jerome McGann
• Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong

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