Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History by Joseph A. Dane (review)

Joseph Dane’s new book on (mostly English) book history and bibliography makes seemingly simple questions complex, challenging, and often interesting. What is a ‘book’? What is an ‘edition’? What counts as bibliographic or textual evidence? Dane is known for his witty, inventive, sometimes acerbic style of critical scholarship, and that is not a bad thing.

Well travelled in the Huntington Library’s (California) collection of early printed books, Dane challenges a number of myths and assumptions about how early book history is to be reconstructed. In one of his key chapters, ‘Bibliographers of the Mind’, Dane takes on Donald McKenzie’s influential essay, ‘Printers of the Mind’ (1969) and the insistence on ‘facts’ among ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Bibliographers. For Dane, McKenzie’s essay, using printer’s records, focuses more on purpose than method: What do we think we are doing when we try to reconstruct the printing history of a seventeenth-century book? What do we think we know when we have such a reconstruction? Dane uses the occasion to reflect on the purposes of the three types of bibliography – analytical, enumerative, descriptive – in relation to the distinction between ‘books’, idealised objects of bibliographic analysis, and ‘book copies’, physical, individual objects. Dane concludes that evidence from the printers’ records (idealised books) is not compatible with evidence from the books themselves (book copies). Physical books, book copies, as material objects disrupt and escape printers’ records, bibliographers’ methodological theorising, and library cataloguers’ descriptions.

Dane reads bibliographers’ statements of purpose, method, and scope sceptically, with an eye for the impossible claim. When an editor declares an edition is ‘invaluable’, Dane asks, For whom? When an editor claims to have collated five copies of the many printed copies of the play, Dane asks, Which copies? copies of the same edition? different editions? collated against what? Dane challenges the discourse of bibliography – his own scholarly discourse – to account for its references, assumptions, and implications. Dane is a practising bibliographer who is also a myth buster.

Dane’s book is made up of methodological, topical, and case study chapters. Chapters 1–3 take up the kinds of questions raised by McKenzie’s ‘Printers of the Mind’ and by problems of periodising early printed books as sometime between manuscript culture and a magical ‘Ca.1800’ as the beginning of modern printing. He presents a marvellous critique of the uses of type fonts as primary evidence for reconstructing printing history. Chapters 4–6 are devoted to the intricacies and contradictions of cataloguing, especially in light of the Huntington Library’s collection of early printed books. The third section, almost one half of the book, is devoted to individual case studies of bibliographic problems: two-colour printing, compositor analysis, book illustrations, the status of the ‘fragment’ in bibliography and cataloguing, and the significance of digital archives. Dane writes a meta-book on bibliographic discourse.

Dane is a contrarian, as anyone who has read his earlier works knows. His meticulous close readings of bibliographic method and analysis often turn up contradictions, paradoxes, and (unwitting) sleights of hand in scholars’ claims about books as objects and their printing histories. But Dane is not interested in gotcha scholarship. Rather, he unpacks in quirky prose the unexamined assumptions that undergird received narratives of early print culture, especially the grand narratives of early printing proposed by Elizabeth Eisenstein, Mark Bland, Lucien Febvre, and Henri-Jean Martin.

Dane narrativises his experiences in early printed book collections in ways that supplement his textual analyses. For instance, his narrative of his project to test accounts, including his own, of early two-colour printing, using the Huntington’s extensive collection, is exemplary for its candour and for its representation of the failure which is knowledge. What Dane narrates is a tale of inferential inevitability: ‘Yet once I began to see the pattern of history in these books, I found nothing but confirmation...