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152 Reviews Chartier, Roger, The order of books: readers, authors, and libraries in Europe between thefourteenth and eighteenth centuries, trans. Lydia G Cochrane, Oxford and Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994; paper; pp.xi, 126; 8 plates; R.R.P. AUS$34.95 [distributed in Australia by Allen and Unwin]. The present volume,firstpublished in France in 1992 as L'ordre des livres, consists of a reflective musing over the fate of the book, particularly from the later Middle Ages through to the end of the Age of Reason. A speculative 'Epilogue' is a short coda concerned with the all too likely death of the book in its traditional physical form in favour of its new millenial appearance on a screen which will afford 'a universal access to texts available at the reader's location' (p. 90). As the penultimate paragraph reminds us, 'the book has been one of the most powerful metaphors for conceiving of the cosmos' (p. 90), and its impending loss must face us with the question of a possible revolution in the forms of dissemination and appropriation of serious or talented writing which had earlier been presented in book form. The author's purpose is to examine the different post-medieval systems required to regulate the world of writing. His text contains three long main chapters: (1) Communities of readers, (2) Figures of the author, and (3) Libraries without walls. These are all concerned largely with the four centuries which attempted to master the manuscript book and then the circulating of printed text. They also contain probing reflection on the two aspects of culture: aesthetic or intellectual appreciation, and the way in which a community conceives of its relationship to the world, to others, and to itself. Chapter One sees readers as travellers moving 'across lands belonging to someone else' (p. 1), a notion linked to degree of access and to social and gender-based divisions. Yet attention is also drawn to the frequent appropriation of texts by those for w h o m they were not specifically designed, as was the case with English chapbooks and the French publishing formula known as the Bibliotheque bleue. Equal attention is paid to the ubiquitous reading aloud or orality, accompanied by patterns of gestures now long forgotten. Here, as at many points throughout the text, D. F. McKenzie, is invoked, as with his fine 1977 analysis of a milestone in the book trade in eighteenth-century Europe: 'Typography and meaning: the case of William Congreve'. A like (post-) Renaissance one was 'the definitive Reviews 153 triumph of white over black', particularly with the printing of Scripture, an advance followed by the arrival of new and non traditional readers who would read a given text in private in ways differing from previous readers. All were 'revolutions' as significant as the shift from 'scribal culture' to 'print culture'. Chapter two, 'Figures of the author', explores the various fates of the author, as compared with printers, merchant-booksellers, engravers, and others. In the Middle Ages a creator of fiction was not of interest as a person, whereas a 'scientist' was, while more modern times have seen 'the return of the author'. M a n y of these metamorphoses anticipate Michel Foucault's essay, 'What is an author?'. Close analysis is then paid to the English statute of 1709 which attempted to break the monopoly of the London booksellers by giving authors the right to demand a copyright themselves. This is then related to the ensuing debate about the very nature of literary creation, one to which Becker, Kant, and Herder all contributed. From the fourteenth century there was a developing tendency to make manuscripts, which were hitherto miscellanies by divers hands, into repositories of the works of but a single author. Chapter three is concerned with the notion of a library, particularly from the seventeenth century on, as the achievement of a dream to bring together all accumulated knowledge and all the books ever written (p. 62). The library was progressively thought of as encyclopedic, useful to the public, diffusing knowledge, exhaustive for a particular subject, and then as exasperatingly incomplete. The conclusion is that our world has inherited all these earlier views...

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