6

The History of the Book

Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray

The history of the book (HOB) has much to offer media historians. The book, after all, was arguably the first long-format mass medium; it set precedents for later non-book media developments. Books, too, have been seen as culturally germinal worldwide, especially in Europe and East Asia (Brokaw, 2005; Eisenstein, 1979; Kornicki, 1998; Son, 1982). The book heralded the transition from orality to literacy wherever it went (Easterling, 1985). Books, moreover, have variably facilitated community building, (in) formed publics, fueled revolutions, forwarded technologies, and, in general, fired imaginations, but they also have fostered ignorance and intolerance. All said, the book, for its long-standing originary power as a form of mediated communication, deserves special regard by media historians. (For an introduction to the approach, see Zboray & Zboray, 2000.)

HOB as an approach, however, has not been widely embraced by them.¹ This essay aims to remedy that by sketching out what HOB entails, albeit with a critical perspective to make it useful for media historians, who may find it off-putting for its argot and, to them, too obvious findings (like the medium influences the message). One book historian even waggishly dubbed HOB the “new boredom” (Kastan, 1999, p. 18). Because of its ungainly fit with media studies, the discussion below goes beyond merely describing the approach to situating it in its scholarly context as a practice. The concluding sections selectively present approaches to print production, distribution, and consumption, which media historians may find useful.

HOB is founded on a duality it shares with studies of other forms of media, for its object of study is at once economic and cultural as a material conveyancer of textual (and visual) meaning (Gilmore-Lehne, 1989, p. 255). “The book,” as fundamentally a material artifact, required work to produce, wherewithal to circulate, and willingness to consume. It is thus heuristically amenable to analysis, like any other commodity, in its sequence of production, distribution, and consumption or in some other form of schematic representation of circuitry.² Culturally, however, a term like “consumption” becomes metaphorical, not literal; reading, for example, is not exactly like eating or other types of consumption (Price, 2009, pp. 122–123; Radway, 1986). Moreover, culturally considered, book production, distribution, and consumption overlap to the point at which distinctions among them fade.³ To wit:

• Every author is inevitably a reader (Darnton, 2009, p. 180).
• Editors not only produce but “consume” and distribute (Harris & Garvey, 2004).
• The pattern of circulation helps produce the book's received meaning (Ogborn & Withers, 2010).
• Publishers' advertisements can precondition reception (Wigelsworth, 2010).
• Non-literate people can participate aurally and orally in book culture (Fox, 2000).
• Purchasing, owning, borrowing, shelving, and reading books are distinct practices – irreducible beneath a single consumption rubric, yet also partaking of distribution – that can coincide in the same family or individual (Colclough, 2000; Gilmore-Lehne, 1989, pp. 255–269).
• And readers, as they discuss the text, reproduce their version of it, becoming virtual co-authors (Long, 1993).

Books can be paratextually iconic (Bornstein & Tinkle, 1998), auratic (Brandes, 1998; Rodger, 2008), or totemic (Cressy, 1986), aside from anyone reading them. Books received as gifts can become tokens of the giver and valued and beloved more for their associations than for their texts (Davis, 1983; Zboray & Zboray, 1996). Ideas nested in books can take wings far beyond the covers, diminishing the salience of book sales or production data (Raven, 1998, pp. 276–278; Zboray & Zboray, 2006).

HOB distinguishes itself from earlier print culture approaches by self-consciously embracing the cultural aspects of its object of study, without jettisoning the material realities underpinning its production, distribution, and consumption. True, the approach's materialism elides political economy (exceptions include Frankel, 2006; Jackson, 2008; St. Clair, 2005; Whalen, 1999; Zboray, 1993; Zboray & Zboray, 2005). HOB's resistance to structural analysis of socioeconomic power relations supports its postmodern cachet sometimes at odds with its almost premodernist print triumphalism (Basbanes, 2005; Piper, 2009, p. 5). For practitioners, the book is key to unlocking the cultural history of a given time and place, and that provides the main rationale for studying it.

Problematical Definitions

But what is HOB's object of study? It may seem obvious, but the answer is far from certain (Hench, 1994, p. 15). One problem is that the book antedates printing (Diringer, 1982). The manuscript book remained vital well after Johannes Gutenberg's Bible of the 1450s (Johns, 1998) and Korea's development of metal movable type perhaps two centuries earlier (Son, 1982). Manuscript books not only circulated as single unique copies, but, rather, scribal duplication in scriptoria could yield multiple handwritten copies (Love, 1993). The manuscript production system was initially near-equivalent to print in productive capacity and textual accuracy (Crick & Walsham, 2004; Johns, 2003).⁴ The book's genealogy in the West goes back much further to ancient Roman codices (ca. first century CE), but long-format works in its media predecessor, the scroll (ca. 2,400 BCE, Egypt), also were called books (Roberts & Skeat, 1983). Books could be subdivisions of longer texts, too (Haran, 1993, p. 61). To complicate matters, the first printed book that can be firmly dated, to 868 CE in China, The Diamond Sutra, was produced on a scroll (Wood & Barnard, 2010). Thus, a long lineage of prior media forms converged into the modern book.

Historically, then, “the book” is a floating signifier unmoored to any specific type of artifact per se. Instead, it has transcended its differing contingent manifestations to become, across time and space, a cultural trait of cognitive expectations and related information-organizing behavior, with a variable material print or scribal referent, that can make meaningful large, detailed, and complex fields of text and other visual matter presented on the page.⁵ HOB has thus moved beyond an initial object-centered orientation toward a recent focus on reading and other forms of reception – from what books have been, to what they have meant (Chartier, 1994; Zboray & Zboray, 2000, pp. 5–8, 79).

Yet HOB encompasses more than books. Included in its scope are just about all print artifacts (e.g., newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, posters, broadsides) and, increasingly, those of a non-typographic scribal nature, as well (West, 1998).⁶ Of course, the information field of single-sided broadsides or posters may not be large, detailed, or complex, but it would be perceived through its similarity to more extensive formats (Twyman, 2008). Indeed, it is difficult to separate any particular item conceptually – because of its commoditization within the “world of goods” (Kopytoff, 1986; Zboray & Zboray, 1996) and intertextual relationships to other books (Orr, 2004) – from the expansive universe of print and scribal production, dissemination, and reception it participates in. Any single book is both a synecdoche of this bibliographical intertexture and a unique conversational node within it. In short, as long as the object of study is rooted in a material artifact conveying textual (and visual) meaning on pages receptive to ink, it has fallen within HOB's scope.⁷

Obviously that is an almost incomprehensibly vast base of objects for study. It at least begins to answer the “what” question in HOB's definition. Widening that definition even more, HOB also examines not just the object, but also the processes of producing, distributing, and consuming it (e.g., the “sociology of texts”; McKenzie, 1999). “How” the book is studied narrows the definition: a contextualism that materializes and culturalizes the book amid the processes leading to its appearance and continuing presence within a particular media ecology.

Navigating between cultural materialism (Prendergast, 1995) and a traditional history of ideas (Lovejoy, 1936) has made HOB, for many practitioners, an exercise in liberal cultural poetics, avoiding both grounded radicalism and ideational conservatism.⁸ Consequently, the approach has a postmodernist performative dimension, often expressed as a recoil from master narratives (Lyotard, 1984) and a corresponding penchant for anecdotal storytelling (le petit récit), in a conspicuous display of scholarly-ness. The writer summons broad interdisciplinary literatures in a scholarship-saturated performance of “interpretative freedom” (Howard, 2007). Book history, in resisting determinations by larger socioeconomic structures, invites a reception mode of imagined historical possibility that might otherwise have been foreclosed. Such symbolic reassertion of aesthetic-historicist scholarly values (Jacoby, 1992, p. 408) laudably contradicted the mounting anti-intellectualism (Ross, 1989) and conformist corporatism (Molina & Rhodes, 2002) of the twentieth century's last few decades. However, it neither challenged the period's regnant neoliberalism nor absorbed the afterglow of the post-1968 New Left (Elbaum, 2002), either or both of which might have given the field greater theoretical depth. This deliberate “depthlessness” (Jameson, 1991, p. 12) is but part of HOB's postmodern performance aesthetic.

Such poetics, for example, shape Robert Darnton's (1984) swirling scholarly arabesque on a retrospective printed account written by a journeyman-artisan about a great cat massacre in a 1730s Parisian printing shop. The essay's setting and attention to the everyday work of printers (with little bibliographical analysis of the reminiscence as a printed artifact) is all that marks it out as HOB. In the essay, Darnton thematizes “workers revolt” as an amusing narrative framing device, not a serious engagement with the history of class struggle that the felinicide signified (Mah, 1991). Thus, poetics trump rhetoric; his essay does not really argue anything. Instead, it aims, according to Darnton's peroration, to “recapture [. . .] laughter, sheer laughter, the thigh-slapping, rib-cracking Rabelaisian kind, rather than the Voltairian smirk with which we are familiar” (Darnton, 1984, p. 101). Darnton, echoing William Blake's poem “Mock on, Mock on Voltaire, Rousseau” (1982, p. 177), thus deploys his anecdotal conceit to de-rationalize and de-philosophize France's pre-Revolutionary era. At the same time, like most other scholars in the field, Darnton does not reflect upon the paradox of writing a book about book history – he leaves no reflexive opening for his book to be understood within its own peculiar system of production, distribution, and reception. That legerdemain aside, his poetics cut a middle ground between what could be a plausible workplace class-conflict analysis (Gutman, 1977; Thompson, 1963) and a situationally transcendent Lovejovian history of ideas.⁹

Obviously, not all HOB scholars do such dual-pole dancing, but many share with Darnton a descent from intellectual history and an aversion to left social history, which together create the academic performance space for their work. The blur between the intellectual and cultural, and the tension between the cultural/intellectual and the social may, on the surface, seem mystifying to all but cognoscenti, but it is rooted in the approach's genesis in American academe, as discussed in the next section.

In other countries, different tendencies appear. British book historians, for example, remain closer to both conventional bibliography and social history than their American counterparts. The French combine quantitative analysis techniques with a more grounded than symbolic sense of culture than Americans. The distinction led one leading French book historian, Roger Chartier (1985), to criticize Darnton's treatment of the cat massacre and later posit his own theory of “Frenchness in the History of the Book” (Chartier, 1988; cf. Smith, 1998). Ironically, the coming of print putatively enabled nationalism (Eisenstein 1979, vol. 1, pp. 117–118; McLuhan 1995, p. 243), so it seems to continue with print historians: these various national groups of scholars scarcely intersect and rarely cite one another's work. Thus, generalizing about HOB risks reproducing the approach's national boundaries. Yet because loco-centrism shapes the approach, it cannot be ignored, either.

Origins in the United States

The approach's disciplinary formation in the United States dates to a June 1980 landmark preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) meeting in Boston. The venue is significant, for the ACRL membership had a special need to connect with academic units on their campuses. It was felt peculiarly by RBMS members, for they had a narrower campus clientage, but also looked to national and international communities of scholars, while keeping close to book collectors and dealers. Simply put, the 275 preconference attendees wanted to hear of rare books' importance across disciplines. They would not be disappointed. For the first time in RBMS preconference history, the program brimmed with professors from academic departments outside of libraries, archives, and rare books (Nelson, 2009, pp. 42–44).

At the preconference, prominent book history scholars, including Darnton (he gave a version of his cat massacre paper there), Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Henri-Jean Martin, signed “The Boston Statement on the History of the Book,” drafted by West German literary scholar Paul Raabe (Carpenter, 1983, pp. xi–xii). Both Darnton's Business of Enlightenment (1979) and Eisenstein's Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) had appeared the previous year. Martin was the doyenne of the French School, for which he named his Histoire du livre (1964); his co-authored L'Apparition du livre (Febvre & Martin, 1958) had appeared in English translation only four years earlier. Also contributing was G. Thomas Tanselle, representing the older tradition of bibliography (Gaskell, 1972). The Boston Statement claimed that the “historical study of society” (p. xi) was inseparable from book production and distribution (readers' reception was tucked inconspicuously into a dependent clause). It conflated society and culture (cf. Williams, 1958), however, calling “the book [. . .] by its nature a cultural force.” Encompassing history, culture, and society, the Statement applied for the first time the term “history of the book” to this formation (Copeland, 2006, p. 128) with such insistence and prominence that it stuck permanently. Although the Statement leaves the book's relationship to ideas only implicit, most of the papers presented underscored that intellectual history as much as sociocultural history was at stake (Carpenter, 1983).

The preconference's injection of sociocultural considerations involved in the circulation of ideas represented a decisive departure from the field of bibliography (Spadoni, 2007; Tanselle, 1988). That field had found a home principally in library schools, but also in departments of English willing to tolerate the very historical detail-grubbers the New Critics reacted against in interpreting texts regardless of systems of production and even authorial intent (Greetham, 1996). Bibliography licensed reverse-engineering from typography and other features in the make-up of a specific book to the processes producing them; its intensive descriptiveness yielded a welter of details centripetal to the artifactual book. By contrast, this group of HOB founders was dominated by neither bibliographically minded librarians nor English-department footnoters, but by practicing historians of the generalizing, centrifugal ilk. Hence, this newly expansive bibliographically tinged HOB promised a more rigorous and comprehensive understanding of the sociocultural past. The Statement argued that it thus merited a correspondingly new set of institutions supported by government and foundation funding around the world.

The Statement's pervasive internationalism is often overlooked (e.g., Jenisch, 2003, p. 230; Shevlin & Lindquist, 2010, p. 60; cf. Gross, 1998, pp. 9–10). If the book is by nature “a cultural force,” it is one “that transcends national boundaries.” Hence, “the design and compilation of basic tools require international cooperation” (Carpenter, 1983, p. xi). That, for HOB, would be a road less traveled (Suarez, 2003, pp. 147–149). Nationalism, not only of focus but approach, appeared during the preconference in the opposition, noted in the subsequently published proceedings by convener Kenneth Carpenter (1983), “between the Anglo American bibliographical approach and French histoire du livre” (p. vii). Indeed, the bristly, almost admonitory, volume introduction by Tanselle (1983) tries to rein in, with his bibliocentricism, the more expansive French approach instantiated in Darnton's replacement essay for the cat-killing one, “What is the History of Books?” “For book history,” Tanselle) 1983) insists, “the book is central, both as a physical object and as a conveyer of ideas” (p. xx). Darnton rejoins with his very different definition: “the social and cultural history of communication by print” (1982b, p. 65). The interchange signals a transitional moment from the old bibliography to the new HOB. The American HOB would become aligned with Darnton's communication vision, though restrained and tempered by Tanselle's bibliography – ideas nexus.

But what of the history of the American book (HOAB)? For that, the scene shifts to Worcester's American Antiquarian Society (AAS), whose Dartonian plans in the 1980s for a “History of the Book in American Culture” would issue by the turn of the millennium in the five-volume, collaborative History of the Book in America (Hall, 1990, 2000–2010; Hench, 1994)¹⁰ – thanks to the persistence of the project's bibliographical advocates, “culture” would eventually become, as suggested by its disappearance from the title, less a topic subject and more of a referent effect. Before that denouement, however, the cultural approach, with bibliography as its handmaiden, accented with intellectual history, prevailed at the AAS. In fact, in the October following the RBMS preconference, the AAS hosted “Printing and Society in Early America,” a conference that would produce an eponymous volume of proceedings (Joyce, Hall, Brown, & Hench, 1983). The book's appearance coincided with the AAS launching its Program for the History of the Book in American Culture, under whose auspices the multivolume book project advanced, thanks to assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Hench, 2011).¹¹ That first conference volume and an ensuing one (Hall & Hench, 1987) set the stage for the future HOAB.

The volumes' highly eclectic set of essays spanned the range of what HOAB could be. Like Darnton's cat massacre piece, it results overall in an impressive scholarly display with little argumentation. The research made clear one point: that the HOB was essential for understanding culture and society in early America. But this was a specific vision of what culture, society, and America was. Hence, the two volumes spoke for what HOAB should be, and that meant a certain partiality for a cultural history not far from the old intellectual history of the consensus-school sort. It would be a print history of a place (“America”), and not, as Darnton (1982b) had it, of a process: communication. Tellingly, the one paper presented at the 1980 conference that had the most to say to media and communication scholars, that of William Gilmore-Lehne (1980), did not make it into the conference volumes. In it, he considered, foreshadowing Alasuutari's (1999) “third phase” of reception studies, the evolving popular meta-discourse of “speed, accuracy, and precision” concerning innovations in print production and distribution. Its view of changing print media's effects as discursively constructed stood opposed to that of one editor's published essay, based on autobiographies taken as fact, not discourse, which cast print instrumentalism as part of a “cultural style” (Hall, 1983; cf. Hoggart, 1957, p. 16).

Since 1980, then, national institutions like the AAS did indeed do their work as the RBMS's “Boston Statement” called for: multivolume projects were launched (Bell, Finkelstein, & McCleery, 2007; Fleming, Gallichan, & Lamonde, 2004–2007; Hall 2000–2010; Lyons & Arnold, 2001; Martin & Chartier, 1982; Maslen, 1993), fellowships and study grant money flowed (e.g., William Reese Company, 2008), and scholarly societies, conferences, and refereed journals emerged (see Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, 2010). HOB, by these outward signs, seemed to be a thriving interdiscipline, but there were residual limitations upon its influence from each national founding. The American case treated below is not alone in this, but it suggests, perhaps more clearly than any other, why the immense promise of the approach remains, in many disciplines, unrealized.

American Academic Politics and Founding Motives

HOB's and HOAB's emergence around 1980 coincided with the succession from the New Social History (NSH) to the New Cultural History (Cook, Glickman, & O'Malley, 2008) that took place from the late 1970s through the 1980s. The timing allowed book historians to participate in the so-called cultural turn (Bonnell & Hunt, 1999) to help justify their enterprise, albeit without fully embracing it – a half-turn. NSH came in several flavors, one of which was seeing history from the bottom up (Lemisch, 1967), in keeping with the movement's New Left roots. To recapture the lives and experiences of the putatively inarticulate working class, new social historians were unafraid to employ quantitative social science techniques (Wiener, 1989).¹² These historians challenged the earlier consensus view of US history, shared among leading intellectual historians in the 1950s, that diminished evidence of social conflict in the past (Bernstein, 1967; Higham, 1962). NSH also demonstrated that rags-to-riches upward mobility was far from universally true (Thernstrom, 1964). NSH, to some displaced intellectual historians gravitating to HOB, countered an affirmative myth of longterm national synthesis (Higham, 1989). Moreover, the myth-keepers, the consensus historians, were part of an influential establishment rooted in the expansive postwar US university.

Many HOB scholars, like intellectual historians, would define themselves against the NSH. Some in HOAB emerging from the history of ideas gestured toward materialism strategically to support superstructure over base (cf. Williams, 1973): ideas matter, but they have material means of circulation worthy of tracing. A material history of ideas, like HOB, afforded intellectual historians cover from NSH charges of methodological imprecision (Gilbert, 1971, pp. 92–94).

A key event in this move was the 1977 Wingspread Conference of high-powered US intellectual historians in Racine, Wisconsin (Higham & Conkin, 1979).¹³ Among them was David D. Hall, who gave a paper on print culture in Puritan New England (Hall, 1979); he would become a HOAB driving force as general editor of the AAS's multivolume history, inflecting it with Wingspread's NSH reaction. After the conference proceedings appeared as a book, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1980) damned it with faint praise: “a useful report that reflected the malaise that afflicted American Intellectual History in the 1970s” (p. 888). He also noted, along with the absence of citations to Eisenstein and but a single dismissive one to McLuhan, that “the indifference to Marxism is striking” (p. 890) – NSH was being sidestepped.

Intellectual history would find salvation in the emergence of the New Cultural History during the 1980s, as part of the “linguistic turn” (Miller, 1997, pp. 364–367), easily bringing HOB under its aegis, as witnessed in the rise of Robert Darnton. The same year that Eisenstein's book and the Wingspread essays appeared, his definitive publishing history of Diderot's Encyclopédie (1979) took European historiography by storm. Darnton followed with a string of volumes (1982a, 1984, 1990, 1995), all of which highlighted HOB. As a measure of his success, he would in 1999 head the American Historical Association – his presidential address concerned eighteenth-century Parisian media and news (2000) – and in 2007 he became the Director of Harvard University Libraries. He frequently speaks out on the necessity of preserving the book in the digital age (2009). Perhaps because of his national topic of study, however, he did not shy away from the quantitative-history “Frenchness” that Chartier (1988) had identified in his own book tradition, and that would very much set Darnton apart from most HOAB scholars (but see Gilmore- Lehne, 1989; Pawley, 2001; Winans, 1983; Zboray, 1993; Zboray & Zboray, 1997a, 1997c). At the same time, they would eschew both long-standing US scholarly precedents and, as Schlesinger (1980) perceptively discerned among the 1977 Wingspreaders, the McLuhan-Eisenstein spectrum that set the stage for their emergence.

French Origins, US Antecedents, and McLuhan-Eisenstein Precedents

Darnton naturally owes a great debt in his book history research to the Annales School, associated with the phrase “total history” (histoire totale histoire événementielle) that had its genesis under Marc Bloch in the 1930s. Under Ferdinand Braudel in the 1950s the school had moved to macro analysis of the longue durée, trends unfolding over centuries (Burguière, 2009). Book study became part of the long durée in Febvre and Martin's (1958) work on the book's fifteenth-century arrival, and a welter of subsequent studies followed from Annalistes. The group's approach to book history could involve marshaling massive detail and undertaking quantitative analysis of book production and circulation, and that methodological rigor was expressed in the four-volume Histoire de l'édition française (1982–), edited by Martin and Chartier among others, which became the gold standard of national HOB projects, from the United Kingdom to New Zealand (and, of course, the US) wanting to tell their national story (Suarez, 2003).

Martin, Chartier, and Darnton, among other historians of the French book, benefited from this legacy of methodological rigor. Their work was based on multitudinous smaller yet intensive studies that had accumulated over decades, so the Histoire effectively synthesized highly systematic prior research, much of it quantitative in nature and, if not, still resulting from qualitative inquiry into vast data fields. HOAB simply did not have these traditions, but perhaps more crucial was that it was developed by a group reacting against the NSH that was itself distantly related to the Annales School (Fox-Genovese & Genovese, 1976).

As for local traditions, there certainly were prior historians of print culture for Americans to look to, beginning with Isaiah Thomas (1810), basically a collective biography. McMurtrie in the 1930s tried to generate interest in American book history through his publications and radio talks (e.g., McMurtrie, 1936), and that decade also saw the monumental Book in America (Lehmann-Haupt, Wroth, & Granniss, 1939), the product of bibliophile librarians. Coming from outside academe, this work was marginalized by the later HOB. One beleaguered group consisted of literary historians in US departments of English. The most prominent of these was William Charvat; from the 1930s until his death in 1966 he sought, in a series of articles and a slender monograph (1959), to establish a literary history grounded in authorship, publishing, distribution, book-reviewing and criticism, and to a limited degree, reading (1968). His work predicted the way literature scholars would adopt HOB in their work a half century later (e.g., Gilmore, 1999). Nevertheless, his map of literary history little fazed the later HOB (e.g., Winship, 1995, pp. 2–3).

From a very different disciplinary base came Frank Luther Mott, whose multivolume survey of American magazines (1930–1968) took nearly four decades to complete, and John Tebbel, who produced an equally gargantuan history of book publishing (1972–1981), polishing off the last volume around the time of the Boston Statement. Both were heavily immersed in journalism and mass communication education, at least in the last decades of their careers, and, thus, unlike the McMurtrie generation, were firmly ensconced in academe. So, it would have been natural for HOAB to encompass Mott and Tebbel followers and students in journalism history. But this, apart from a few exceptions, would not be the case.

Perhaps one reason was that the Mott-Tebbel tradition was systematic insofar as both tried for as complete coverage as possible of magazines and book publishing firms, respectively. Given the anti-NSH temper of HOAB originators, that seemed too much like the systematic inquiry they were acting against.¹⁴ Moreover, Mott and Tebbel were associated with social history and, as journalism historians, were not averse to seeing conflict as a perennial factor in US sociocultural life and press history (Sloan, 1990, pp. 91–98). Such journalism historians, were, like later NSH scholars but in a different way, the wrong type for the new HOB.

Finally, HOB eschewed the spectrum of interest in print culture spanning from McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) to Eisenstein's Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). It may seem odd to pair them. Eisenstein's book, after all, was a self-avowed reaction (pp. x–xii) to McLuhan's supposedly imprudent celebration of the emerging electronic global village and the end of Typographic Man in his Gutenberg Galaxy. Both scholars, however, were epic visionaries open to the charge of technological determinism. So, although Eisenstein was present at the 1980 RBMS preconference and remained in the HOB fold, she became increasingly sidelined and, with Johns's (2003) attack on her presumed determinism, pilloried. American HOB scholars little tolerated any determinations limiting their poetics.

Indeed, their self-styling as the “history of the book” itself deliberately demarcates them from previous print culture investigators. Because the term is a literal English translation of histoire du livre, it redirects HOB's genealogy transatlantically away from conceivable North American forebears. But the term conveys more the redirection than it describes actual HOB practices, which have been selective, at best, in reflecting European scholarship. The genealogy the term signifies, instead, is the approach's descent from the peculiar form of intellectual history that, distinguishing itself from NSH, migrated to the New Cultural History during the 1980s as discussed above. Little wonder, that when a more open-minded and NHS-like group of University of Wisconsin scholars institutionalized in 1992, they dubbed their unit the “Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America” (Pawley, 2008). The term “print culture” (McLuhan, 1960, pp. 75–79; Eisenstein, 1980) has become an antidote against the “history of the book” that has promulgated its own approaches to production, distribution, and consumption.

Approaches to Production

From its beginnings as a practice of study, HOB developed techniques for investigating production through two related foci: the author and the publisher. Some of these techniques were adapted from bibliography. For example, enumerative bibliography was summoned to establish not only the fullest recoverable range of titles by specific authors or publishers, but to map larger universes of print that gave material evidence of the distribution of intellectual activity. This allowed for more grounded generalizations about what types of books were available in any given time and place (e.g., Darnton, 1995), and how that universe expanded or contracted over time or changed in nature. Analytical bibliography's aforementioned “reverse engineering” that traditionally simply tracked imprint variants has been applied forensically to reveal production processes no longer recoverable by other means. For example, typography in Gutenberg's Bible, when subjected to computational analysis, suggests that the movable type used was technologically evolving as the edition proceeded through the press (Agüera y Arcas, 2003). Textual bibliography, usually involved in comparing a text close to the author's hand to one further from it in pursuit of establishing authorial intent, has been employed by book historians to explore the cultural negotiations between authors and editors over perceived readerships instantiated in a specific edition (e.g., Thorne-Murphy, 2010).

HOB authorship studies were enriched from a different direction, that of literary biography (West, 1994). The conventional details about writing and placing manuscripts, shepherding them through the press, and engaging in book promotion, moved from out of the background in this research. An early example was Mary Kelley (1984), who delved into the personal papers of mid-nineteenth-century “literary domestics,” popular “sentimental” female authors, to ponder the conundrum of private women performing on a public stage of publication. Shortly after, Anesko (1986) applied archival work to recast a canonical author, Henry James, from otherworldly to market-conscious. Such probing through archives and rare books repositories was soon applied to subliterary figures (Reynolds, 1988), even to convicted criminals having their say in print (Cohen, 1993). These efforts were joined by a few generalizing works based on author-archival materials on writing for the market (Newbury, 1997; West, 1988; Wilson, 1985), followed by wider-ranging considerations of authorship in a larger market culture (Ingrassia, 1998; Jackson, 2008; Zboray & Zboray, 2005). These have yielded some interest in “social authorship,” that is, writers eschewing print but addressing, through manuscript production, known coteries of reader/authors (Ezell, 1999).

Similar archivalism has influenced studies of publishing, taking it far from previous anecdotal histories of publishers and their houses. Though only a few such records have survived proportionally to the number of houses that existed, those remnants have been intensively and systematically scrutinized, as Darnton (1979) did for the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, to pose the aristocratic origins of revolutionary ideas. Alexis Weedon (2003) pooled together vast internal business documentation to portray Victorian publishers adjusting production techniques to deal with mass market fluctuations. Publishers' archives can reveal author–publisher correspondence, accounts with printers, book distributors, or advertising agents, and cost accounting data suggesting the profitability of any given title, author, and genre.

Approaches to Distribution

Much of the material HOB researchers have called upon to investigate production touches also on distribution (Hackenberg, 1987). For example, records about where publishers advertised can suggest where they thought their books might sell, probably with good reason (Zboray, 1993, pp. 59–68) and such material also contains evidence of direct marketing, through salespeople (Thomas, 1998; Zboray & Zboray 2005, pp. 131–139). Yet publishers' records scarcely identify end- users, but rather a host of middlemen, like wholesalers (Schurman, 1996) or bookstores (Wolf, 1988). Among these intermediaries are libraries, which although they purchase books like individual consumers, provide a service to readers, making patrons the end-users. No wonder that library history converged easily into HOB (Augst & Wiegand, 2001), as seen in the venerable Journal of Library History being renamed in 1988 Libraries and Culture (Wiegand, 1990). Some concerns, like nineteenth-century tract and Bible societies, pioneered systematic corporate recordkeeping for their distribution (Howsam, 1991; Nord, 2004, pp. 89–112). Distribution studies extend beyond individual houses to entire national literatures: Fabian (1976), for example, analyzed imprint checklists to establish the distribution of English-authored texts in eighteenth-century Germany.

Distribution is only one term applied to what happens to print matter between publisher and reader. Brown (1989) summoned diaries and newsclips to time the increasing reach and velocity of “contagious diffusion” of signal news stories from the American Revolution's start to the Lincoln assassination (pp. 245–267). “Circulation” is applied, of course, to periodicals and library items regularly in conventional parlance, but for HOB scholars, to books mostly in the preindustrial era; estate inventories have been scrutinized, for example, to suggest the extent of European titles in colonial Peru (González Sánchez, 1999). Such end-user-based evidence for print circulation also appears in Leonard's (1995) discussion of Depression-era Farm Security Administration photographs that reveal “elite” magazine covers on the walls of sharecropper shacks (p. 112) – one cannot read actual distribution from the seeming population a periodical addresses textually. A final term is “dissemination.” It owes to the history-of-ideas genealogy of book history, which is why the term turns up in science studies (e.g., De Renzi, 2000), but it has recently been applied to encompass after-market activities of readers or other users who might give quotes, clips, or entire books and periodicals to other people in their circles (Zboray & Zboray, 2006, pp. 71–147). “Dissemination” also acknowledges a book's “seeding” potential to influence minds, hence it gestures more than the other terms to reception.

Approaches to Consumption

Perhaps because “consumers” as a term evokes the cash nexus too much and suggests passivity, HOB scholars prefer “readers” to stand for all types of end-users. The move weakens the conceptual articulation between users and the system of production and distribution they engage, and so discourages economistic analyses. To be sure, the printed book was imbricated in capitalist development: some measure of profit from selling to consumers has kept the publishing system going (Raven, 2009). The commodity aspects of books involve not just mass-market generated profits, but issues of consumers' status and cultural distinction (Benton, 2000; Joshi, 1998), as well as circulation in local systems of para-market exchange (Zboray & Zboray, 1996, 2006).

The rise of the reader in HOB reoriented the approach shortly after it was launched. No wonder: to justify its approach, HOB's first generation had relied upon largely circumstantial evidence that books were important to society and culture. Harder evidence would be required, and that would come better in the form of thickly descriptive case studies of specific individuals and smaller groups than through relative abstractions like “the public” – interpretative ideationalism (Keesing, 1974) exerted influence on HOB through anthropologist Clifford Geertz's centrality in the New Cultural History (Miller, 1997, p. 365). Quickening the move was an alliance with theories of subject-identity construction, often with feminist underpinnings, and a practice of grounded inquiry. Radway (1984), for example, interviewed book club women about their reception of romance novels that exposed a multiplicity of responses challenging producer-centricism, i.e., meaning imposed from above instead of generated below. Davidson (1986) delved into the archives to discover, even by examining readers' marginalia, the meanings of the early American novel for women and men; she subsequently edited a journal issue that led to a landmark book of essays on reading and social history (Davidson, 1989).

The move toward readers was pushed by larger currents, too. Notable was the widening impact of German reception studies in two flavors: one textual, rezeptionasthetik (Iser, 1972), leading to a search for readers in the text, and the other contextual, rezeptionsgeschichte (Jauss, 1970), as instantiated in readers' “horizon of expectations” (set by similar works previously encountered) when engaging a text (pp. 12–14). It was but a short step from theories of readers' meaning-making from texts, to research addressing how books impacted readers. Rarely acknowledged support for this step came from audience research in media studies (Allington & Swan, 2009) that underscored “audience sovereignty” (Butsch, 2000, pp. 3–12) and the “active audience” (Fiske, 1987, pp. 223–224). This meshed well with HOB's performance practice of interpretative freedom. Darnton (1982b, pp. 78–79) at one point even argued that reading might always remain an unsolvable mystery, perhaps to shore up the producer-centric early HOB.

A generation of scholarship that attempted to demystify reading soon came to the fore. Patterns in library charge records were discerned to link “readers” and genres (Pawley, 2001; Zboray, 1993, pp. 156–179) or specific authors (Todd, 1999). Some scholars connected specific authors with readers through archives of fan letters (Blair, 2008; Williams, 1990); others shifted to the text, using readers' letters responding to specific items, like pulp magazine stories about unwed women's pregnancy (Kunzel, 1995). Rose (2001) deployed working-class British autobiographies to argue the pervasive influence of mainstream canonical authors, rather than class-situated ones, upon laborers; E. Smith (2000) reconstructed working-class readers from advertisements targeting them; and Nord (1988) availed himself of subscription lists containing artisans' names. Records of book clubs and other reading groups have proved particularly rich, especially for recovering African American readerships (McHenry, 2002). Readers' diaries and letters provide the most complete contextualizations of not only a universe of reading but how it plays into everyday life. Research began at the individual or family level (e.g., Colclough, 2000; Sharpe, 2000; Zboray & Zboray, 1997c), but has been moving toward encompassing larger groups, such as seminary-schooled early American women (Kelley, 2006) and partisan-minded ones of an overlapping later period (Zboray & Zboray, 2010). To date, the most extensive study has ethnographically surveyed reading practices of 931 informants leaving testimony in nearly 4,000 diaries and letters from a single region over three decades (Zboray & Zboray, 2006). Even larger- scale collective projects are afoot to pool together data, but these still await suitable analytical procedures for making sense of the resulting vast data fields (Halsey, 2008). After all, readers' diaries and letters are themselves texts that require perhaps even greater contextualization than the printed texts produced by the publishing industry, to which those readers refer.

The Future HOB

HOB's pursuit of what books have meant culturally in different societies over time has advanced immeasurably since 1980, thanks to the turn to the reader, which has pioneered essential methods for exploring that meaning. Much spadework remains to be done for varying times and places, especially beyond Britain, France, and the United States, before firm generalizations can be developed or cross-cultural comparisons can take place. Transnational work is already underway on modern technical and scientific translations (Rupke, 2000), and, particularly through them, the problematic of bridging the highly divergent, virtually incommensurable, and equally ancient book cultures in Europe and China (Fu, 2011). Although HOB nationalism will eventually need to be overcome beyond these rare analyses of translations, the language-based nature of reading and reception studies makes this unlikely in the short run, except perhaps in the former empires of Spain and Great Britain, whose colonies shared a common tongue of governance. Even within each national HOB, a fuller integration of the reading-based research accomplished so far into production and distribution awaits (for an early attempt, see St. Clair, 2005). For example, one can compare how publishers and authors perceived their market with how the consumer/reader self-reports received their printed products. Whether political economy will play a role in the future HOB is an open question: certainly, with reader/consumer testimony at hand, a re-evaluation of the book as hegemonic is in order to see how large-scale power structures express themselves in seemingly benign consumer choice and self-culture. Investigating those expressions on the physical page (Barnhurst & Nerone, 2001), and plumbing readers' reception of them, promises to align the often antagonistic bibliographical and cultural history traditions in HOB. Finally, HOB will need to explore further the impact on readers of explicit regulation by governments and tacit shaping of print culture by its industries to effect social silencing and agenda setting.

So, as a culturally interpretative approach, HOB should add greater analysis and deeper criticism to its practice of scholarly performance and contextual description. Ironically, the very success of HOB in raising bibliographical awareness across disciplines has led some non specialists to do just this (e.g., Feener, 2007, pp. 269–271; Hoeflich, 1997; Hofmeyr, 2004): to make these scholars rethink the highly mediated nature of print and scribal evidence they too often take for granted. Rather, these scholars have learned from HOB that such evidence results from specific systems of production, distribution, and consumption that together may affect that evidence's sociocultural meaning. Ultimately, then, HOB's greatest contribution may turn out to be a broadly shared, new “print-culture imaginary” in the minds of media historians and other scholars and students.

NOTES

1 Nerone (2006) points to the history of the book as one of three “interdisciplinary scholarly formations” (p. 254) that promised to bridge communication history's heretofore divided mind between the cosmically interpretive (e.g., the New York and Toronto schools) and the concretely descriptive (e.g., histories and biographies emerging from journalism schools). See also Nerone (2003). Zboray and Zboray (2011) provide quantitative substantiation of communication studies' disregard of the history of the book.

2 Media scholars familiar with the Weaver-Shannon (1963) model of communication will recognize the similarity to book historian Robert Darnton's “Communication Circuit” (1982b, p. 68). Even in the narrow economic sense, the relationship between production, distribution, and consumption is murky, as Marx (1973, pp. 83–100) points out.

3 Recognizing the overlap, Zboray and Zboray (2006) apply the triadic scheme ethnographically to a specific group of “real” readers or consumers, putting production and dissemination in their hands as much as reception. For an early discussion of the “real reader” concept in English, see Schmidt (1979, pp. 160–161; cf. Radway, 1984; Zboray & Zboray 1997b).

4 To encompass scribal production, Adams and Barker (1993) advocate denominating the object of study as the “bibliographical document.” An alternative label is “material text” (Moylan & Stiles, 1996), but this hazards occluding non-textually based meanings and practices. “Print culture” is, of course, yet another alternative that was early on jocularly derided by HOB-founder Hugh Amory's (1984) reference to his contemporary “xerox culture” (p. 345): “‘print culture’ is what men and women thought of printing or did with printing, and it has no clear relation to” bibliography and, by extension, the history of the book.

5 On cognition and HOB, see Enenkel and Neuber (2005); and on the related book-inspired imaginary, Piper (2009).

6 The web page of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (2010), the main international HOB association, captures this expansiveness: “Research addresses the composition, mediation, reception, survival, and transformation of written communication in material forms including marks on stone, script on parchment, printed books and periodicals, and new media.” Tanselle (1971) advances the term “imprint” (pp. xii–xvi), which can account for non-book materials, but not scribal ones.

7 HOB has been moving from an exclusive focus on the paper page toward encompassing electronic communication, like web pages, that employ traditional bibliographical formats and typography (Erickson, 2003; Hillesund, 2007).

8 See White's (1975, pp. 52–55) historiographical gloss on Roman Jakobson's thoughts regarding linguistics and poetics. On materialism versus ideationalism, see Tang (2011, pp. 217–220). “Cultural poetics” is the preferred phrase of Greenblatt (1988, p. 5) over the more widespread “New Historicism” associated with him. “Conservative” here refers to the nineteenth-century origins of the history of ideas in Hegelian idealism (D. Kelley 1990).

9 Darnton (1999; 1990, pp. 254–256) addressed his distinctions from Marxist history, and the history of ideas (Darnton, 1971).

10 We were invited to contribute to volumes 2 and 3 (we declined), and one of us participated in a planning meeting for the project.

11 The Library of Congress's Center for the Book antedated the AAS's program by six years (Shevlin & Lindquist, 2010). Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin (1978) explicitly linked its founding to the history of ideas and their future: “The Book is the reservoir of the ideas we have forgotten, and will be the reservoir for all ideas still unborn” (p. 182).

12 The quantitative element in the New Social History has been exaggerated, testifying to the success of its opponents' charges of positivism and unreadability. Many new social historians either did not use quantification (e.g., especially those who tried to recapture voices of African Americans and White women, like Blassingame, 1972; or Cott, 1977), or did as part of a broader methodological arsenal that included qualitative approaches (Dublin, 1979; Gutman, 1977).

13 A corresponding event took place for Europeanists in 1980 (Miller, 1997, p. 362).

14 Hench (1994) quickly dispatches Mott with a brief quote cribbed from the AAS's NEH grant proposal of building on his work for a “history of literary cultures” (p. 12).

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