Book History Scholarship: Creation, Transmission of Knowledge and Archives

This document is downloaded from DR‑NTU (https://dr.ntu.edu.sg) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Book history scholarship: creation, transmission of knowledge and archives Ojeda, Danne; Lommen, Mathieu 2016 Ojeda, D., & Lommen, M. (2016). Book history scholarship: creation, transmission of knowledge and archives. Visible Language, 50(2), 181‑199. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/88014 © 2016 Visible Language. This paper was published in Visible Language and is made available as an electronic reprint (preprint) with permission of Visible Language. The published version is available at: [http://visiblelanguagejournal.com/issue/202/article/1442]. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic or multiple reproduction, distribution to multiple locations via electronic or other means, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper is prohibited and is subject to penalties under law. Downloaded on 27 Sep 2021 03:30:16 SGT When writers die they become books, which is, after all, In this text we will examine books’ materiality and form with its paratextual elements, as they defne both the history of the not too bad an incarnation. book from its infancy and that of reading. The former will help us to understand how books have infuenced not only thinking but also human Jorge Luis Borges ergonomic behavior towards these artifacts. Danné Ojeda will look into the development of book forms by examining why certain transformations or deviations to the traditional form took place and their impact on the history of book development and reading. This is in order to ascertain the consequences of the book’s physical transformation on the reader’s Introduction by Danné Ojeda use and appreciation of it as a basic object of knowledge. Following this Books are artifacts that communicate and preserve a specifc kind of human line of thought, Danné will frst ofer a succinct overview of the changes knowledge; they are time capsules that survive in myriad formats, materials, and transformations of the book’s physical forms. Second, she will focus and platforms. David Pearson calls them emblems of our culture while regard- on the Special Collection of the University of Amsterdam — which hosts ing them “as one of the defning characteristics of developed civilizations” an extensive archive of historical printed books — and converse with (Pearson, 2012, 7). History provides compelling examples of the signifcance the design historian and curator Mathieu Lommen, in order to defne the of books as empowering artifacts that transmit knowledge whereby the criteria, guidelines, and parameters which classify a book as a “‘collectable burning of books fares angrily as an exercise of power to erase political, object’”, to be sheltered and archived in order to preserve a record of the cultural, or religious dissent. We might recall the Qin Shi Huang Dynasty history of books and their forms. who in 213 BC ruled the burning of any book that excluded subjects such as Pearson states that the book form as we know it “emerged in agriculture and medicine; the annihilation of Maya codices deemed hereti- the Near East in the frst centuries AD” with the appearance of the frst codex cal by Fray Diego de Landa in the sixteenth century; and the destruction of (Pearson, 2012, 34). Codices were usually made of papyrus, and they almost Jewish texts in 1933, as they were considered disobedient to the Nazi idea of immediately began to substitute the scroll, which was the common written Nation. The complete destruction of libraries during the last century remains format of the time. It was the codex’s ease of reading that established its scorched into our memory: the Jafna Public Library in Sri Lanka, the National spread; the scroll had to be rolled upwards and downwards with both hands, and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Iraq National Library in a fashion similar to that of a computer screen’s scroll function today. The and Archive, Al-Awqaf Library in Baghdad, and the Saeh Library in Tripoli, reader had access to a fragment of the scroll’s information, but was unable Libya, are emblems of culture that have recently been reduced to ashes. to visualize it in its totality. The codex amply overcame this impediment by These events occurred as a book’s content is generally allowing the reader to have a better sense of the content as a whole. It also perceived as the carrier of unorthodox thinking. Leslie Howsam notes, made browsing easier and allowed the possibility of cross reference. Codices however, that the book is not only a text — a point of interpretation grew in number of leaves and size, enabling a vast amount of information to between authors and readers — but also a material object. He also remarks be stored, while parchment or vellum progressively replaced papyrus. how this latter quality is frequently overlooked as a result of the power of When looking at the book as object from the viewpoint of the the former and signals its importance as follows: history of reading, Robert Escarpit defnes it as a “reading machine” (Escarpit, ‘…the book-as-object holds the evidence of its own making; it 1968, 15). Alejandro E. Parada adds that the book is indeed a machine, carries not only the obvious text on pages but a further “text” a maker of diferent readers based on a textual script (Parada, 2010, 95). in its formats, materials, design and impression… Such design Alternatively, in the same decade, Alberto Manguel referred to the book elements are sometimes called the ‘paratext’, a useful concept as the result of the evolution of formats that have been adapted to their introduced by the literary theorist Gérard Genette. Paratextual intended use: reading (Manguel, 1996, 125). This reminds us of the maxim elements (bindings, blurbs, design, and so forth) supplied by “Form follows function”, a Modernist principle and almost a manifesto that editors and publishers can afect the meaning of the text… It is defned “good design”1. the combination of textuality and materiality, perhaps unique among human-made artefacts, that gives the book its power to 1 Form follows function is a well-known principle associated with Modernist design and architecture in the twentieth century. Many designers have adopted this way of doing as a mantra. For example, Dieter Rams revealed in his Ten convey a sense of its past.’ Principles of Good Design: “Good Design Makes A Product Understandable: It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it (Howsam, 2015, 4) can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.” See Rosenfield, Karissa. 2012. Dieter Rams Ten Principles of “Good Design”. http://www.archdaily.com/198583/dieter-rams-10- principles-of-%25e2%2580%259cgood-design%25e2%2580%259d (Accessed December 31, 2015). 182 1 8 3 Visible Language Book History Scholarship 50.2 Ojeda & Lommen of the book title, a title page, the name and location of its producer, page The incunable: the infancy of numbers introduced in the early sixteenth century, and the development book forms of indexes (Shaw, 2011, 222). Moreover, when examining technological The increasing use of paper for writing between the tenth and twelve and industrial advances, punch-cutting, type-founding, bookbinding, and centuries, together with the advent of printing around 1440–50, gave the papermaking were broadened and developed into separated activities. fnal impulse to the production of current book forms. The invention of the Several factors contributed to the reafrmation of the age printing press by Johannes Gutenberg — born in Mainz, Germany — trig- of the printed word. When referring to the period of Gutenberg’s printing gered the mass production of books in a magnitude never before seen. revolution, Lotte Hellinga observes a change in the readership of books These frst printed books, produced before 1501, were called incunables2 as by the middle of the ffteenth century, when both the readership and the Nicole Howard explains in her timeline drawn in The Book. The Life Story of a ownership of books were no longer solely for the privileged few (Hellinga, Technology. Transitional forms produced in this period of the infancy of the 2011, 207). This was partly due to some more technological aspects book were intermediate versions between the manuscript and the book for- of printing discussed extensively by Adriaan van der Weel in his book mat as we know it today. Their pages served as an experimental platform on Changing our textual minds: the increased speed of copying which allowed which to examine diferent printing and letterpress techniques and to test information to be disseminated faster than with manuscript production; new materials and sizes that would defne the physical form of books in the the consequent increase in copies so that readership could be multiplied, to years to come. Although printed with movable metal type, one of the most which I would like to add the resulting lower cost of the book due to ease visible characteristics of the incunables was their fondness of handwrit- of reproduction; and lastly, legibility, thanks to the printing press facilities ten letterforms, and they may therefore be regarded as manifestations of a which made identical reproductions of typographic applications possible, longing for the continuation of what I call “the canon of handwritten culture” allowing texts to be read more easily than those that were handwritten inherited to date in books that passed on the trace of physical human (van der Weel, 2011, 82)4. Other socio-historical conditions that contributed presence or, indeed, its absence: ink strokes, amended errors in rubrica- to the signifcant expansion of the printed book include, on the one tions, columns, and marginal notes.

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