Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History

Introduction

Introduction To write on print culture, one might start by selecting a monumental book from the presumed history of that culture: it might be the Gutenberg Bible; it might be an edition of Aldus Manutius, Shakespeare’s First Folio, the French Encyclopédie. We might choose less grand things as well: a run-of-themill edition of an Elizabethan play, a fragment of an early grammar book. One of these books, or a set of its characteristics, might epitomize whatever print culture is. The book might mark a point in the history of print culture, a stage in its development perhaps, or, to invoke a nineteenth-century phrase no longer in fashion, the growth and progress of this thing or entity. We could single out this book as marking a transformation in the history of printing, a crisis, if that is what our critical language calls for. For the first time, in this singular book, or once again, or now and for all, the function of books or The Book has changed: books are no longer transparent things; they are not these run-of-the-mill repositories of texts (so rarely discussed in histories of printing) to be “looked through”; they have lost their representational aspect and no longer transmit the text, thought, or intentions we once imagined are the raisons d’être of these things we call books. They are, rather, markers in a cultural history that the author and publishers only dimly imagined . Or so we might think. As bibliographers or book historians, we perform our work by changing the function of the objects we study. We rarely pick up an Aldine edition to read one of the classical texts it contains. No one reads the Bible in Gutenberg ’s version, and as for books by Koberger, staples of histories of early printing , we don’t read the texts they contain at all, and perhaps would not even recognize them. Bentley’s Milton has nothing to do with Milton, nor does the mythology surrounding it have much to do with Bentley, and no one 2 introduction learns Latin by reading Donatus. Print culture, under this notion, is not a medium for writing or thought, but a historical object of study; our bibliographical field, our own concoction, becomes the true referent of the objects we define as at its foundation. When we consider print culture in this way, as a significant subject of investigation rather than an event in history, the singular book that initiated our thinking becomes less important. That book, whether an abstraction (the Shakespeare First Folio) or a material object (my copy of this book), is just one member of a series. The First Folio is only one of many editions; my copy is interchangeable with any other copy. Print, in a bibliographical sense, produces editions, as manuscripts can never do; and editions eliminate the singularity of the individual object, the book-copy we are holding now. Our book is repeatable, a mere exemplar of something else. Editions too are in some sense repeatable. This is what a book is. This is what print culture is. Even as I outline these sometimes contradictory possibilities, I can see that the privileged beings in these histories are not those who produced the textual and bibliographical material (book-makers and writers); the privileged beings are bibliographers, particularly contemporary ones, and most specifically ourselves. Book history? It is us. Yet the singularity of that material book asserts itself. And perhaps this is a way out of the self-reflective circularity of the above paragraphs. The physicality and materiality of the individual book-copy—that must be other than a pure reflection of our thinking. Perhaps our book, selected and seen as the epitome of book culture, print culture, literary culture, or some sort of culture (always in the West) can be seen as something else again: not the epitome of this abstraction of culture (however we define it) but its antithesis, the thing that marks the limits of the abstraction, or perhaps the line in the sand where the abstraction loses force. This object defines our abstractions more rationally in a negative sense. To single out a particular book-copy is to de- fine what such a copy is not. It reveals our abstractions only by insisting in its very materiality that those abstractions do not exist “out there” in the culture or history or series of events we claim to be interested...