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Technology and Culture 42.4 (2001) 778-780



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Book Review

The Evolution of the Book


The Evolution of the Book. By Frederick G. Kilgour. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. 180. $35.

"Through historical analysis of the societal needs that have invoked the transformation of the book, and the technologies that have shaped them," Frederick Kilgour aims in this book "to shed light on the present emergence of the electronic book" (p. 1). A distinguished research professor in library and (now of course) information science at the University of North Carolina, Kilgour helped to establish the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a worldwide consortium of library databases. In this volume, which his publisher keeps short with fairly small type and economical margins, he foretells the doom of the book as we know it.

Well, the news is out. To the long view of the book--definable as a means of retrieving information that one can hold and carry or easily transport--Kilgour contributes an application of Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould's concept of the "punctuation of equilibria." Things tend [End Page 778] to stay the same while workable; they change with comparative suddenness after, say, meteor strikes and technological breakthroughs. Looking back over nearly five millennia of human history from a vantage point around 1970, Kilgour locates five such events: the development of the clay tablet, the rise of papyrus rolls, the appearance of bound pages (the codex), the invention of the moveable-type printing press, and the adaptation of steam power to presswork. Since the late twentieth century, the book, by Kilgour's reckoning, has undergone two more seismic changes: photo composition and offset printing, which in the 1970s and 1980s rendered letterpress, hot-lead technology obsolete except for specialty titles, and the advent of the electronic book, which, writing in 1996 or 1997, he dates in 2000 (when this reviewer received his book).

Kilgour draws almost exclusively on published sources, even quoting from reference works. He is occasionally repetitive, and now and then one wishes for further tightening of the text, a bit less detail, or a working drawing (see, for example, the passage on pp. 87-88 describing how, in Gutenberg's design, a hose prevented the platen from turning with the turn of screw). Even so, as a general reader's summary The Evolution of the Book succeeds admirably in making a long and rich story accessible and instructive.

Kilgour's survey amounts to a bibliophile's world history. It outlines the economies of the ancients and the direct link between the need for tax records and the invention of writing and bookkeeping. It explains how advances in writing instruments, cursive writing, and inks prompted experiments with papermaking. The codex of the second century c.e. solved the storage problems of tablets and the difficulty of readily recovering information on rolls. Christendom demanded a literate clergy and monastic life required reading, particularly during Lent, when Saint Benedict's rules required each monk to read one book. Kilgour thus explores the scriptoria and how they worked, lending policies, copyediting procedures, the training of copiers, and their travails (at the bottom of the last page of one assignment, a monk wrote "Now I've written the whole thing; for Christ's sake give me a drink" [p. 71]).

We find out how the book index emerged and the role of eyeglasses in extending a person's reading life. Besides block printing and early type making, Kilgour's reprise of Gutenberg includes business and intellectual- property issues, the rise of universities and professions, and the religious wars that turned on texts. While Kilgour leaves no doubt of the importance of population growth and rising literacy in driving the search for easier ways to copy books or, later, to print them more quickly, he also has an eye for the serendipitous. Playing around with limestone and an ink made of wax, soap, and lampblack, Aloys Senefelder's mother suddenly asked him to write a short list for the washerwoman. His success, with different ingredients, led to lithography. [End Page...

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