Book History, Sexy Knowledge, and the Challenge of the New Boredom

We are in the Hollywood public library, and this is what we see. On the case, Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks's chaotic 1946 noir The Big Sleep, takes notes from a reference work on first editions, returns the title to a woman with platinum hair who wonders about his interest in rare books, and says, "Well, I collect blondes in bottles, too." The next scene finds Marlowe in A. G. Geiger, Rare Books and DeLuxe Editions. Bogart is now copping a high-pitched lisp—conjoined with, for Marlowe, affectations of eyewear, flipped brim, expressive hand gestures, and a light step—a lisp that insists on "a Ben Hur 1860," the third edition, the "one with the erratum on page 116," and the complete "Chevalier Audubon 1840." Her expertise challenged, the uncertain secretary's voice modulates between clipped refinement and sharp, déclassé rebuke. Marlowe has confirmed that the dealer's store is a front—seeming to let the secretary in on his front by mispronouncing "ceramics"—and he wanders across the street to the Acme Book Store. He banters with the young woman staffing the shop, enlisting her help in determining Geiger's identity while she strokes a pencil. As she looks Marlowe up and down, her description of Geiger's appearance parallels the aspects of Marlowe's body at which her eyes arrive. Waiting out Geiger in the rain, they agree to a drink in the shop—"I'd rather get wet in here," Marlowe says—and the clerk closes the store for the afternoon. An edit cuts to evening in the shop; Geiger shows up across the street; Marlowe and the clerk enter the frame from the back of the store, and they bid an affectionate farewell.

The Big Sleep is an inviting test case for textual studies: its different authors can be construed as Hawks, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Bogart and Lauren Bacall, or Bacall's agent Charles Feldman; a version of the film circulating in 1945 predates the revised 1946 release; and the unwieldy convolutions of plot derive as much from editing choices as noir sensibilities. Yet these expository scenes might tell us more about the state—and perhaps fate—of bibliographical inquiry in the academy. The institutions—libraries, rare book dealers, the print marketplace—displayed in the scenes strike one initially as relevant to book-based scholarship. More fundamentally, book specialists might recognize through this depiction their psychic predicament in the academy. In English departments over the last 20 years, along with the undeniable influence of New Historicism and the controversial advent of cultural studies, there has been a quiet but pervasive concern for the history of the book. It has been pervasive due in part to an infrastructure of support—major research centers such as the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society commit resources to the history of the book, the professional organization SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) and its successful journal Book History have evolved, historians and literature specialists find common ground in book history's referential agenda, and brilliant scholarship such as Robert Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment, Margaret Spufford's Small Books and Pleasant Histories, and D. F. McKenzie's Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts have made for a paradigm shift. But book history has been quiet enough that interest in the physical properties of texts and the conditions of their production and consumption has been called—delightfully, by a leading scholar in the field no less—the "new boredom" (Kastan 18). David Scott Kastan's label here is reinforced by Bogart/Marlowe's performance at Geiger's: the fussy rare-books connoisseur with a precise interest in collecting and cataloguing a title exaggerates the stereotype of the traditional bibliographer's descriptive and quantitative impulses.

But of course the scenes are as antic as they are antiquarian. The heated...