Books as History: The Importance of Books beyond Their Texts (review)

In 1994 David Pearson published Provenance Research in Book History, which has become the standard handbook for studying the history of individual copies of books through the traces that have been left in them by their authors, owners, and readers. That book is part of a welcome development in recent decades: greater understanding of the importance of objects in human lives and greater recognition of the usefulness of objects as witnesses to the past. It is not surprising that Pearson should now turn his attention to a broader survey, for a general audience, of what can be learned from books as artifacts. He does not, and does not intend to, make a scholarly contribution: he is simply summarizing the kinds of information conveyed by the physical evidence in books. The most distinctive feature of this handsomely produced book is its lavish use of color photographs: indeed, far more pages (about 140) are devoted to these illustrations than to the verbal text (about 50). The pictures are imaginatively chosen, and for the most part they serve their function well, letting readers (who may never have thought about this use of books) see what the relevant evidence looks like.

Whereas Pearson's earlier book dealt with postpublication additions to books, he recognizes that his broader topic also requires some attention to the clues of manufacturing history that books contain. He has accordingly included a brief chapter called "Individuality within Mass Production," which glances at the variations that can occur among copies of a single edition—such as those caused by stop-press alteration, the cancellation and replacement of leaves, and the inclusion of sheets from a different edition. The likely result in each case is one or more textual variants. Readers' responses can thus be affected by the differing texts in different copies—as well as by the typographic design and paper of the whole edition (a point Pearson makes elsewhere). Yet he does not seem to keep the physicality of the text in mind at the places where he argues for the preservation of books once their texts have been digitized. After "the printed heritage is largely accessible via digital surrogacy," he says, "the preservation of that heritage will be harder to champion"—unless, that is, we recognize the other information, besides the text, that the physical book conveys. By implying (incorrectly) that the textual information in originals (relevant to textual history and the history of reading) is adequately supplied by digital reproductions, he is not making as strong a case as he could.

Another puzzling aspect of the book is Pearson's insistence on the need for standards of selectivity in preserving printed books in a future when books have become "history." In the first chapter he speaks of "the importance of selectively preserving them"; in the last he says, "There will be choices to be made over the preservation of our existing printed heritage: what is worth saving, and why, if texts are readily available in other ways?" It is difficult to see why Pearson would ask this question when the whole drift of his book is to suggest that every copy of an edition is likely to be unique (certainly through the traces it bears of its postpublication history but often through the evidence it contains of prepublication events as well). Obviously not every copy is going to survive; but there is no theoretical justification for arguing that anything less than all of them ought to survive. We should be grateful for what Pearson has attempted and should hope that his book will enlighten many people; but it is hard not to wish he had been more assertive.