Essay Review

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Essay Review

THE BOOK IN, AND AS, AMERICAN HISTORY adrian johns

A History of the Book in America, 5 vols. David D. Hall, General Editor. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in association with the American Antiquarian Society, 2000–2010. Pp. 664; 712; 560; 688; 632; illus. $300.00 the set.)

HE publication of the final volume of the History of the Book T in America in 2010 marked the culmination of one of the great scholarly projects of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Any review of the five-volume set should first acknowledge the scope and scale of that achievement. The History is a miracle of extensive and intensive scholarship, sustained over decades and across continents. The quality of the work hits a high level at the beginning of volume 1 and, astoundingly, that level is sustained consistently throughout the later books. All of the editors and sponsors—and in particular David D. Hall, who initiated the project in the early 1980s and saw it through to completion—are to be congratulated. Their work sets new standards for the field and deserves to be embraced by anyone interested in the broad history of American culture. Hall and his co-workers presumably had to struggle against all the obstacles large and small that inevitably get in the way of any major enterprise. It was worth it. A history of the book appearing in the early twenty-first century is not for historians alone; it speaks to all of us, as both readers and citizens. One can hardly approach this History without suspecting that, as well as being one of the great multivolume histories of the modern age, it may also be among the last. That it may well be so is only partly owing to the myopia of our research institutions, which find it increasingly difficult to accept that some questions require more than three years to answer. The suspicion also, and more obviously,

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reflects anxieties about the book itself. Jeremiads about “the end of the book” have rarely been wanting, but they are louder now and more pressing than ever. As even major booksellers go bankrupt, libraries close—or turn into “libraries without books,” which amounts to the same thing—and the lines that trace e-book and print-book sales cross on corporate graphs, the temptation is to see ourselves as living at the end of a great historical arc extending from the first introduction of print in the early modern period, through its golden age in the nineteenth century, to celebrity-saturated decadence in the late twentieth, and then . . . extinction. One opens a history of the book in America hoping to understand that arc and, hence, our own predicament. These five volumes do satisfy that need but they do so, paradox- ically, because they disdain a common, overarching narrative. This “lack” is a great strength, and it was intended from the outset. Too many works devoted to the book have not really been about the book itself, certainly not, in a deep sense, about its historical character. They have tended to move very quickly from commonsense asser- tions about the book—or, rather, about “print,” which they tend to hypostasize—to their real concerns, which are typically modernization theses of one kind or another. So the book becomes an agent of major, progressive change, even of revolution, acting on culture rather than as culture, and it is deemed of interest only in that light and for that reason. The approach is familiar and time honored—think of Marshall McLuhan and Elizabeth Eisenstein or, for that matter, of any number of media revolutionaries going back to Condorcet and forward to Wired—and it is not without its virtues. Grand theses tend to seem coherent and plausible. They sell. People read them, and they act on what they read. The trouble is that the very coherence of these theories makes them brittle. What we think we know securely about the nature and power of print is often not appropriately said, or indeed even true, of past times and other places, and this makes them systemically vulnerable. I do not mean to imply that the articulation of long-term narratives is “premature,” or that it should, or could, be dispensed with. Such efforts would, however, benefit from a dose of epistemic modesty. As is so often the case, more flexible and resilient views may come from attending closely to what we can discover of the mundane, practical, constitutive labors that sustain what we re- fer to as “print” or “the” book—or “digital media,” for that matter. What we want, then, is not so much a theory as a sensibility. Beyond its authoritative statistics, exhaustive coverage, and fine writing, this

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sensibility is what consistently distinguishes A History of the Book in America.

The series’ five volumes cover the entire period from the early colonies to the present (Amazon’s Kindle and the Google Books case make it in under the wire; the iPad does not). Volume 1 (The Colo- nial Book in the Atlantic World, edited by Hugh Amory and David Hall) takes the story as far as the Revolution. In the colonial period, it shows, the American book—that is, written by American colonists and manufactured in the colonies—barely existed. Much that was written by colonists still circulated in manuscript—including major texts of the Revolution itself—whereas the printed works they read were yet another commodity exchanged within the transatlantic trade that sustained an empire. Colonists’ reading choices were remarkably stable: they read sermons and almanacs by the cartload, which printers in Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere regarded as dependable labor. Laws and other government documents were always welcome work too, because so secure, and news was an increasingly popular commodity, endlessly recycled. But a printer’s lot was largely jobbing work, as was broadly true in Europe as well. For other fare, elite readers got hold of books from London (or sometimes Dublin). Ben- jamin Franklin’s printing of Pamela was an almost unique exception, and not even Franklin himself repeated it. There was no concern about literary property, because printers’ markets were local enough not to overlap, and neither writers nor readers were valuable enough for London’s book trade grandees to care about them. That was why Americans could produce almanacs for colonial readers, even though London’s Stationers’ Company still held the legal monopoly to produce them. There is certainly no high road to modernity discernible here. Even the adoption of copyright in the early days of the newly independent United States seems odd; although it is always seen nowadays in terms of subsequent history, in light of the previous 150 years, it was a strange and scarcely necessary innovation. Ideology seems the most plausible explanation for the legislation. Literary property was adopted because it—and the entire Enlighten- ment cultural economy it stood for—seemed the virtuous course for a new nation to follow. And that decision marks a real, substantial development, one justifying a transition to a second volume. By the middle of the eighteenth century one could already find a few figures—often

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politically committed arrivals like the bookseller Robert Bell, experi- enced in the pirate trades of Scotland and Ireland—who saw different possibilities in the printer’s craft. The controversy over the Stamp Acts suited them perfectly. American printers fanned the passions that drove non-importation agreements. Those passions, once aroused, forged lasting memories and commitments. In future decades, their legacy helped drive the development of an autonomous American book trade. Volume 2 (An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley) traces that development. The distinctly unpromising situation at Independence gave rise, in a generation or so, to a thriving com- merce in publishing, conceived as integral and essential to the new republic. Central to the phenomenon was the publisher—a specula- tor in literary properties who emerged and, by the mid–nineteenth century, had become the dominant figure in the book trades. Pub- lishing took advantage of new techniques like steam printing and papermaking, but it relied no less on new distribution networks and financial structures. And it faced obstacles, because those machines, networks, and structures were all still ill defined and unstable. Credit arrangements were tied to honor and patterns of acquaintanceship. As networks grew, so markets coalesced, and frictions developed among what were now rival centers, notably Philadelphia and New York. As a result, domestic accusations of piracy arose for the first time. During the same period, the trade’s leading houses—those who made such accusations—came to depend on transatlantic reprinting, which Lon- doners like Dickens denounced as the epitome of a piratical trade. So booksellers, printers, and publishers struggled to define some kind of morality and community for themselves in hopes that they might create a self-regulating order and live up to their desired reputation as the enabling force of a virtuous republic. By the end of the era, a many-layered publishing trade—ranging from the great houses like Harper’s down to the hawkers of newsprint—would be in full swing. The industrialization of print is the subject of the third volume in the History (The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship). By its end, in around 1880, large-scale publishing had become mechanized and, to an extent, centralized. Yet the book trade was not merely industrial but systematically financial too—a branch of high capitalism—which may, in fact, be its greatest distinguishing characteristic in this era. Indeed, major publishers were no longer

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manufacturers of books at all but speculators in stock and copyrights. Reaching out by rail and telegraph, the enterprise could operate at a distance across the now-continental United States. As it did so, New York became its national hub, the free-trade city winning out in its long duel with protectionist Philadelphia. The book (along with newspapers and other printed works) became a defining aspect of the nation’s everyday life and, thus, finally realized the role citizens had envisaged for it from the start. Printed materials shaped the nation’s identity, and they shaped its catastrophic rupture and decline into civil war. Nevertheless, for every trend one could nearly ascribe to mechanization, there was a countertrend. Papermakers, for example, retained their craft customs even in the presence of machines. Under- ground and otherwise unorthodox printing, publishing, and reading put older machines to new uses. Still, publishers, printers, and workers continued to pursue the apparently endless quest for some kind of internal order: the volume begins with the latest in the long line of such initiatives, the American Book Trade Association, founded in 1873. The History’s pivotal volume is perhaps the fourth (Print in Mo- tion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940). Editors Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway argue that it was only in the sixty years between 1880 and the outbreak of World War II that the United States truly deserved to be called a “culture of print.” During that period, everyday life across the nation became characterized through-and-through by print. The era of high mod- ernism was, it seems, the era when the modernizing communications engine par excellence enjoyed its “salad days.” The publishing industry grew fat on legally ring-fenced commodity works, the copyright for which was much more elaborate and geographically extensive than it had ever been before. Newspapers thrived and carried authority as never before or since, as Michael Schudson notes, and the advertising industry became an autonomous cultural force. These are, perhaps, familiar themes. Less familiar is the insistence that the expansion of higher education, the rise of great research universities, and the ad- vent of an academic publishing system (a much younger system than many today suppose) must be seen as occurring in tense alignment with other venues of expertise such as the middlebrow press and the literature of business. Much of the information infrastructure of scientific and humanistic knowledge alike dates from their complex interactions in this period. Radway’s chapter tracing the relations among communities of expertise to the intricate connections that

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obtained among print’s various cultures of learning is a particular tour de force. It also demonstrates the history of the book’s potential for speaking to issues of undoubted urgency and importance. One could hardly imagine, now, writing about the fate of the humanities without beginning here. The editors (David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson) of the final volume in the series (The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America) had perhaps the most difficult task of all, for they had to characterize a history that is still in process. The postwar era has been marked by proliferation and diversification, both within the world of the book and across media. Indeed, we are still in the thick of changes that began in the mid–twentieth century, changes, arguably, that digitization only accentuates and accelerates. Even before digital networks and e-books, volume 5 implies, it was becoming unclear what a “book” was. Yet through 2000, the statistics on publishing continued to belie the pessimists. In 2005, America’s publishers produced almost 175,000 titles. There are questions about the consistency of such data over time, but this is roughly five times the number of books issued in 1965, at the height of what is often remembered as a golden age. The number of bookstores has certainly fallen recently, but there are still roughly three to four times as many as there were in the sixties. And the major publishing houses remain dominant in the commercial trade, as the major learned presses do in academia. But numbers tell only part of the story, of course, and they do not necessarily tell even that part well. The proliferation of self- and vanity-publishing in recent years, for example, is remarkable. Short-run digital printing, as has been the case with so many printing technologies, has given rise to both centralization and decentralization. The argument for the endurance of the book is ingenious and reassuring. It makes sense. But—again, as has often been the case in the past—the book will endure by changing, not by defying change.

Freed from the obligation to cleave to one overarching narrative, the ﬁve volumes offer up themes and threads that intersect and cohere in that more modest fashion I mentioned earlier. First, they link the everyday lives of printers, booksellers, publishers, readers, and others—all the various communities of the book— to higher-level trends like industrialization. And, second, they al- low us to glimpse lines of relation—of resemblance, inﬂuence, and

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difference—across the long period the History covers. The cumula- tive effect is a history that is both large in scale and attentive to ﬁne textures and distinctions. Supplanting in our attentions the old tele- ology of modernization, three fundamental agents loom large: time, space, and practice. But they do so not as the familiar static concepts but as entities set in motion through the making and use of books. One motif that recurs is the tension between stasis and change, or between tradition and innovation. Books have never been solely in- struments for novelty and divergence. Indeed, volume 1 shows clearly that throughout most of the eighteenth century, American reading sustained, and was sustained by, tradition. In use—and, to its credit, the History insists throughout that a book’s uses cannot be inferred but must be investigated—the “colonial book” was a point of access to the past, to established laws, to the metropole of London, and es- pecially to the truths of Christianity. In the nineteenth century, as an emerging publishing enterprise embraced industrial machinery and social organization, across the country ostensibly obsolete machines were simultaneously being commandeered for alternative publication functions. In each period, and at each site, printing and books could be vehicles for reinforcing tradition as well as for introducing change. Jonathan Zimmerman’s engagingly mordant treatment in volume 5 of how the modern textbook industry proﬁts from the promulga- tion of mediocrity is a consequential, if disheartening, example. Still, the point is clear: the book endures by changing, not by remaining static—or, perhaps more accurately, readers redraw, or hopefully will redraw, the distinction between tradition and innovation. If the book has been a mediator of time, it has been a mediator of space too. A History of the Book in America is as much a historical geography as a history per se. (An early plan to commission maps to 1 make this intention explicit did not come to fruition.) The places the History visits are not just the usual ones, like printing plants, publishing houses, and libraries, but also the less obvious, such as city streets, laboratories, and alcoholics anonymous meetings. You need to “see the sites,” as Kaestle says, to get a grip on the historical varieties of books in use. As one proceeds through the series, a marvelously rich sense of such differences builds, but so does an appreciation of commonalities and tensions. In particular, tensions persist throughout the centuries between metropolis and province, between centralization

1 “Prospectus: A History of the Book in American Culture,” Supplement to The Book, November 1988, pp. 1–2.

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and decentralization, or—as is described in the introduction to volume 4—between “centripetal” and “centrifugal” forces. The first two volumes are explicitly framed by these forces, and they extend im- plicitly to the later ones as well. For example, as the markets of major centers like Philadelphia and New York extended to the south and west, they began to clash, and, as volume 3 shows, the new enterprise of publishing sought to resolve those tensions. But eliminate them it could not, for the story of the history of the book is a tale of tensions and pressures, of ebbs and flows that alter their form or direction but do not disappear. Such an understanding casts our own age’s dream of a placeless book (and a virtual library) in a new light, as Kenneth Cmiel elegantly demonstrates in a valuable account of the changing meanings of such visions since 1940. The role of the book in use is the third broad category explored in the series. If the book is a major force in modern history, it is because of its uses as much as its textual content, appearance, or material form. In America, books in use have been instrumental in creating and sustaining what are generally taken to be the elements of society itself—the fundamental classifications of gender, class, and race very much included. Herein we encounter a notorious terra incognita, or at least a terra imperfecte cognita. But it is clear that if books endure by continually changing, so, as Joan Shelley Rubin remarks, do readers. That is, the reader is a historically constituted figure. Readers are taught, brought into communities, exhorted to read certain things (and not others), advised how to read them, and urged to act on what they read. They should read in certain places (during travel, notably) and not others (at the family table). They should perceive commonalities and distinctions in their peers’ reading, forming gendered, ethnic, and other associations. All of these activities and postures give rise to institutions, artifacts, images, and literatures. Such is the very stuff of historical inquiry, and the writers of the History of the Book in America have had an eye to these sources from the outset. As a result, they are able to provide the first sustained account of the rich history of Americans’ reading practices over the long term. And, as with the themes of time and space, those practices speak to our current anxieties. Rubin refers to these concerns obliquely when she invokes Daniel Boorstin. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Boorstin warned that the “private island” of the individual reader— where “only one person, each of us, is sovereign”—is essential to the common good as never before and yet increasingly under siege in

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the age of intrusive, proliferating media. His was a hoary image—it dates back to Kant, and perhaps to Milton—and perhaps an idealized one. But the point is as pressing as it has ever been. In the age of digital networks and e-books, decisions about reading are increasingly going to be recorded and made available for analysis as data. It is pos- sible that this will be the most consequential aspect of the digital book “revolution”—and it is by no means an unambiguous development. Some dispassionate historical perspective on what it means—what we gain by it and what we lose—is sorely needed.

It can be all too easy to take a book, in our revealing common- place, “as read.” But if there is one thing that the history of the book has taught us, it is that books are not self-explanatory. They do not bring themselves into being. They do not shape themselves, distribute themselves, or dictate their uses. All of these endeavors require work—often hard work—to overcome friction, obstacles, and sometimes outright opposition. A book is a product of time, money, technology, community, and knowledge (both formal, in the sense of expertise, and informal, in the sense of skill). As an object, its stable form can incorporate residues of conﬂict as well as consensus. Once one begins excavating any book, one rather marvels that it exists at all. What about the History of the Book in America? What is the history of this book? In fact, there is more than one history behind the History. It is certainly a monument to a long-term social enterprise, of which these ﬁve books are themselves but one manifestation. But to appreciate the larger import of the enterprise, one must understand that, when launched in the 1980s, it became an event lodged within a bigger story. That story extends back to the origins of the history of the book and the place it was assigned at the creation of the modern historical profession. As a practical activity, the history of the book is often portrayed as having followed two trajectories over the twentieth century, one broadly French and the other broadly Anglo-American. The French path may be traced back to Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s l’Apparition du Livre, the pioneering account of the impact of Guten- berg’s invention in Western Europe. L’Apparition was published in 1958. But it was in fact a very late realization of a much older project that, at volume 49, had yet to achieve its midpoint. In 1900, with his

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own Revue de Synthese,` the positivist scholar Henri Berr launched his grand plan for a “Library of historical synthesis” to comprise 100 volumes. Envisioning a sweeping “synthesis” grounded in systematic interdisciplinarity, Berr hoped to enlist the services of the then-new “sciences” of sociology, anthropology, and ethnology to develop a universal science of human history. The implications of this new enterprise would extend to government, because, as he insisted, “the ideal politician is the perfect historian.” Subsequently renamed the “Evo- lution of Humanity,” the scheme was divided into four chronological sections, ranging from prehistory to the present. Its fulcrum—the volume dividing Antiquity and the Middle Ages from Modernity—was to be a study of the introduction of the printed book in Europe. The title l’Apparition du Livre was Berr’s, and it was explicitly intended to evoke a unique, almost providential transformation. Lucien Febvre took over the long-planned volume in 1929, after its original author withdrew in protest over Berr’s presumptuously grandiose scheme for the book. But Febvre was overcommitted and did not really turn to the work until after World War II, when he met the bibliographical scholar Henri-Jean Martin. As editor of Annales, Febvre wrote a laudatory introduction to Martin’s classic paper on the Paris book trade when it appeared in the renowned journal. “L’Histoire du Livre,” Febvre announced, was a “terra incognita” that must now be explored (language I have borrowed earlier in this 2 review). By this time, however, out-and-out positivism was out of favor, and Febvre was recasting the series to accommodate his own interest in the history of mentalities. Although he retained Berr’s title, Febvre now intended l’Apparition to contribute to this new mission— one that was in its way no less ambitious than Berr’s. That was why, in urging Martin to take on the task, he made what must be one of the most remarkable statements ever to accompany the birth of a new discipline: whatever else l’Apparition might be, at all costs it “must 3 not be a history of the book.” What Febvre meant was that l’Apparition must not be pedantic, trivial, or antiquarian. Speciﬁcally, perhaps, it must not follow too

2 H.-J. Martin, “l’Edition Parisienne au XVIIe Siecle:` Quelques Aspects Econo- miques,” Annales E.S.C. 7.3 (July–September 1952): 303–18, quotation p. 303. 3 Correspondence cited in F. Barbier, “Postface” to L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, l’Apparition du Livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), p. 558 (my italics). The whole of my discussion here rests on Barbier’s fascinating account of the origins of l’Apparition.See also H.-J. Martin, Les Metamorphoses´ du Livre: Entretiens avec Jean-Marc Chatelain et Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 2004), pp. 53–99.

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closely the other, Anglo-American, tradition—that of analytical bibliography. This tradition, too, dated back to the turn of the century and had its own aspirations to scientific rigor and consequence. It, too, was positivist, although in a different way. In a bid to create a science of the book that could uphold the claims to objectivity of critical editions, analytical bibliography prized close analyses of particular volumes and impressions. It had a reputation as a technical field pur- sued by Dry-as-dusts. Anything but that! Febvre wanted l’Apparition to deal with the book as a “thought-tool” (“outil de pensee´ ”). The “book book” would be the keystone of a history of mentalities resting on his notion of “mental toolkits.” In the event, of course, it did not happen that way. Febvre died in 1954, leaving Martin to write the “book book” largely solo, and l’histoire du livre emerged in alignment with the social-scientific, positivist wing of Annalisme. Mental toolkits would forever be associated solely with volume 53 of the “Evolution” series—Febvre’s best-known work, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. By the mid-1970s, however, both French and Anglo-American traditions were being freshly challenged. In Britain and his native New Zealand, D. F. McKenzie was using the techniques of analytical bibliographers to question their positivistic assumptions. Noting that printers’ practices varied in ways that the scientific ambitions of Anglo-American bibliography could not easily accommodate, he argued that those practices always “mediated” works and, in so do- ing, structured their meanings. McKenzie advocated abandoning the old analytical schemas for “a new and comprehensive sociology of the text” that would attend to how printing-house practices shaped works like William Congreve’s Way of the World, which took on quite 4 different forms in different editions. In France, meanwhile, Martin and Roger Chartier, influenced by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, focused on readers. Implying a return of sorts to Febvre’s concep- tion of books as tools, Martin and Chartier insisted that prevailing approaches underestimated the power of reading communities to put texts to uses beyond the control of their creators. In other words, a class of books could not be treated as an index of a discrete culture;

4 See D. F. McKenzie’s essays, collected posthumously as Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. P. D. McDonald and M. F. Suarez (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), and Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1985). The long-awaited fruit of his work, ﬁnally published this year thanks to the labors of Christine Ferdinand, is D. F. McKenzie, ed., The Works of William Congreve, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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the cultural distinction lay in the ways in which they were put to use. Together, the two critiques—the one centered on production, the other on use—demonstrated the urgent need for a historical enterprise that would integrate printing and typography with reading practices. L’histoire du livre was to be that enterprise. The major sign of the impetus they gave to the field was the four-volume Histoire de l’Edition Française, edited by Martin and Chartier and published in 1982–86. The French initiative stirred a good deal of excitement in Britain and America, where conversations were already under way about the challenges represented by l’histoire du livre and the idea of a history of reading. In time, Histoire de l’Edition Française would become the model for “national” histories of the book planned in several countries: Great Britain and America first, followed by Italy, Germany, Canada, and Australia. In the United States, the center for the initiative was the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts—an institution that traces its own origin to the first historian of American printing, the Revolutionary-era printer Isaiah Thomas. As early as 1980, a conference on “Printing and Society in Early America” had already convened there. In 1983 David Hall, then at Boston University, and Marcus McCorison, director of the AAS, circulated a prospectus to historians, libraries, and bibliographers in America and Europe calling for a venture to apply to American history the techniques and perspectives of the new French approach. Suggestions arrived in response from Robert Darnton at Princeton, Chartier in Paris, and many others, endorsing the need to combine the new bibliography ala` McKenzie with the French cultural history. “In this combined approach,” Chartier wrote, “lies without doubt the purpose of a renewed history of the book.” The ensuing project deserves to be accounted one of the more successful efforts in modern American intellectual life to remake a research field. A new Program in the History of the Book in American Culture was established at the AAS under Hall’s leadership and with a board including McKenzie and Chartier. A principal aim from the outset was to create an American History along the lines of the French series, but this was not its only role. The Program also undertook the mundane work of creating a disciplinary community. It hosted regular conferences, large and small, served as a focal point for a developing community of researchers, and issued a regular newsletter, The Book. Launching an annual lecture series on the topic, Hall issued a clarion call for a new cultural history of the book in America. (Chartier gave

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the fifth in the sequence.) Summer seminars spread the message and methods of the enterprise to new generations, who would return to embed them in institutions across the country. At this distance, it looks like an exemplary model for how to forge an intellectual enterprise. And it worked. Today a multitude of universities and libraries have “centers for the book.” A History of the Book in America is a testament to this broad social effort as much as it is to the research and writing that the volumes display. The original plan for the printed History reflected its programmatic setting. Three volumes covering the period before around 1880 were envisaged because that was where the AAS’s archival strengths lay. The series’ purpose was, largely, “to apply to the American setting the 5 cultural perspective of European practitioners of livre et societ´ e´.” Its “research agenda” would be set through AAS conferences, supported by the NEH. (A notable example was the meeting in 1984 on “Needs and Opportunities in the History of the Book,” in which Chartier, Eisenstein, Darnton, and others participated, the published version 6 of which became something of a bellwether.) The initial hope was that the series would be published in the early 1990s. As that optimistic schedule inevitably slipped, and the local intellectual culture of the Program blossomed, so was the History’s international ambience strengthened. Hall seems to have been instrumental in that development. He spoke at meetings in France and Germany, which fortified ties to national projects in those countries. He used the newsletter to proclaim McKenzie’s superbly iconoclas- tic Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts “a redefinition of what bibliography is about” and to advocate combining its methodology with that of the French l’histoire du livre. A few years later, he declared Chartier’s l’Ordre des Livres “the best introduction to the possibilities for the ‘history of the book’ as the history of culture.” Representatives from the British project attended his meetings in America; those from Worcester visited corresponding events in the U.K. By 1993 Cambridge University Press had agreed to publish both the History and its British counterpart, which was a product of McKenzie’s zeal. (Cambridge, however, published only volume 1;

5 The Book, November 1983,p.1. I have compiled my account of the project from the occasional reports issued over the years in this newsletter. The event held to mark the conclusion of the History included speeches by the editors, which are also informative: http://www.americanantiquarian.org/hob.htm (consulted 20 May 2011). 6 D. D. Hall and J. B. Hench, eds., Needs and Opportunities in the History of the Book: America, 1639–1876 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1987).

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after a period of limbo, the remaining volumes, as well as a reissue of the first, appeared from the University of North Carolina Press.) In time, the very scope of the History as it developed broke the bounds suggested by its host’s holdings. It expanded to take in the decades from 1880 to the present, with two additional volumes added to the prospectus even before the first had been published. In short, what has become the standard riposte to all the national histories of the book—that they are not sufficiently cosmopolitan—is incorrect for this project at a deep level. Its original inspiration was international, and its practical management was no less so. Thus, far from being too parochial, A History of the Book in America confirms, and splendidly confirms, the end of the era of national traditions in the history of the book.

The question that inevitably arises at the successful completion of such a mammoth project is, of course: What next? One might offer various answers, some obvious (international histories, histories of reading) and others not. An explicit attempt to refine the event-based timescales of mainstream American history in light of the chronology of the book might be proposed, for example: the American Civil War and World War I are addressed somewhat obliquely in the History, and a mischievous pedant could point out that, with volume 4 ending in 1940 and volume 5 starting in 1945, World War II seems to have been skipped entirely. But there is another question that should be asked, because it finally can be. The history of the book now exists as real history. The time for advocating that agenda has passed. But what do its practitioners now want it to be: A discipline in its own right? A constituent of the traditional humanities? Or some new kind of enterprise, not really identifiable as a conventional discipline, that operates across and beyond the landscape of academic fields? Any of these goals would be plausible, and perhaps all of them are achievable. But it is not so clear that all are achievable together, and each carries costs that dim its attractions. Disciplinary status, for example, implies longevity, authority, and influence; but it may also imply a certain isolation. And in practical terms, this is not an auspicious time for a new discipline to garner institutional resources. Putting the matter another way, in terms of practitioner rather than practice, may be more manageable. Who is the historian of the book?

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The ethos is in some sense odd, insofar as it mixes precision and a certain antiquarian sensibility with a conviction that one’s metier´ is—or should be—a vital part of any respectable humanistic inquiry. Moreover, the historian of the book is entitled, or rather obliged, to ignore conventional disciplinary boundaries. To pursue printed materials and their users wherever they lead demands that the researcher deal with the objects of literary criticism at one moment, social history the next, and science a moment later still. By analogy to the rule allowing police officers to cross state lines when chasing suspects, one could call this a principle of “hot pursuit” or, in more conventionally academic terms, interdisciplinarity not as a self-consciously virtuous pose but as itself a disciplined enterprise. And there are real reasons to embrace that kind of role. Think, for example, of Zimmerman’s critique of the textbook industry, which churns out consistently boring, mediocre, and stultifying books that the states force on millions of children each year. Dreary as they are, Zimmerman finally argues, they need not give rise to boring, mediocre, and stultifying citizens—if students are taught to read them enterprisingly. He concludes with a call to educate teachers in hopes that they might learn how to foster active reading of this sort. What one needs to know to do that, I suspect, is very close to what historians of the book can provide. And that is a small instance of what is quite a general problem in the twenty-first century: the inculcation of critical reading habits appropriate to other cultures’ objects, rhetorical strategies, logics, and so on. In other words, the issues we now face have to do, in essence, with how different practices of representation, transmission, and reception intersect with knowledge-making institutions and conventions, and to what effect. Where one used to speak of “print culture,” “manuscript culture,” and “digital culture,” we increasingly find ourselves speaking instead of cultures—plural—of activity: of reading, viewing, and browsing. And this shift, as well as our new reality, is intrinsically, inescapably historical. No traditional discipline has dibs on these new cultures. Nor, perhaps, could it: the principle of hot pursuit is a sine qua non for investigating how those cultures have emerged from everyday practices. The topic is at once mundane and universal. His- torians of the book may come as close as anyone to “owning” it. Not for the first time would a new scholarly persona merit respect simply for meeting the most traditional and fundamental of humanist needs. Perhaps the historian of the book is precisely the educator we require for a post-disciplinary age.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00113 by guest on 23 September 2021 ESSAY REVIEW 511 Adrian Johns is a Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he also chairs the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. Originally raised in Great Britain, he was educated at Cambridge before moving to the United States in the late 1990s. He is the author of The Na- ture of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Mak- ing (Chicago, 1998), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago, 2009), and Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age (New York, 2010).

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