The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (review)

The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. By Adrian Johns (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998) 753 pp. $40.00.

This volume brings together the "history of science" and the "history of print" by replacing the traditional notion that science depended on print's objectivity with the more nuanced idea that "print" and "natural knowledge" were mutually constructed repositories of truth and reliability. Johns argues that technologies like print are components, rather than causes, of cultural transformation, and that any new technology is "unlikely to be monolithic or hegemonic" (638). In an age of rapidly changing communications technologies, his measured perspective is especially welcome.

To defend his thesis, Johns describes, in impressive detail, "print culture in the making" (3). He suggests that the modern consensus about books--that they are reliable and trustworthy conveyors of information--is socially constructed, and he describes how early modern print communities developed sources of reliability and "credit" within an unruly industry. Before this consensus developed, inaccurate placement of a few letters could undermine an entire book, as when a 1653 Bible printed by John Field contained the erroneous line, "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?" (424). Johns' most broadly suggestive methodological advance revises and interrogates the terminology of early modern print. In place of anachronistic words like "publisher" and "author," Johns deploys and explores terms like "propriety" (linked to "property"), "credit," "copy," and "civility." He portrays a web of relationships to replace the monolithic notion that print was reliable simply because reproducible. He emphasizes that "civility" between the various partners in the printing enterprise was crucial to producing a reliable text. Portraits of varied characters from stationers to "undertakers" to congers, correctors, and compositors flesh out print culture as a group practice, a "Stationers' Commonwealth" (183).

Amid an erudite interweaving of characters, incidents, and texts, a clear polemic emerges, directed against technologically determinist print history, in particular Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Cultural Change (Cambridge, 1979), 2 v. Johns believes that "In [Eisenstein's] work, printing itself stands outside history" (19), and he re-"historicizes" with a vengeance. Noting his debt to histoire du livre works--from Lucien LeFebvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book (London, 1976) to Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, 1987)--Johns describes how "natural philosophy" (especially astronomy) dealt with the uncertainties of print publication. Connections between print culture and social history inform thick chapters about revolts against the Stationers' Company in the context of mid-seventeenth-century republicanism, the reconstruction of print's history in relation to the Faust legend, the impact of "passions" physiology on the social discourse of reading, and the creation of the Royal Society as a reliable community in which scientific knowledge could be publicized via print. An engaging final chapter on the struggle between John Flamsteed and Isaac Newton over the publication of the Historia Coelestis Brtannica suggests that the Royal Society was dependent on the uncertain infighting and manipulation surrounding print, even as it sought to provide reliable alternatives to these practices. Scientific truth, Johns argues, was worth little without shrewd manipulations of the "domains of print" (621).

In Johns' telling, the pressure of objectivity in the pursuit of "natural knowledge" worked to limit the "culture of discredit" that grew up around print (423). At times, Johns overstates his case, suggesting that "natural philosophy" holds the only viable key to print culture. His emphasis on "veracity," in particular, works well for astronomy and the natural sciences, but might not generalize clearly to theology or historiography, to say nothing of poetry or popular fiction. Johns defends his focus because of "the widely accepted status of modern science as the most objective, valuable, and robust kind of knowledge currently available" (6). He argues that what would become modern science (a problematic term...