New Books for Old

Peter Shillingsburg, contemplating with awe the tidal wave of fiction in Victorian Britain, has recently acknowledged ruefully that he has read little of it, except, of course, "his" author, Thackeray; facing a scholarly world that looks at less than 5 percent of all Victorian novels published, he has asked important questions about the phenomenology of the novel as a product of the unflagging industry of writers and commercial publishers in nineteenth-century Britain.¹ His reflections were prompted by hands-on familiarity with several large collections of Victorian publications, and a similar encounter with the Mitsui Collection in Berkeley runs through Mary Elizabeth Berry's Japan in Print, a work that reeks of the must enveloping large collections of block-printed books. That is as it should be, for we should not allow the editors of Nihon koten bungaku taikei and other useful modern collections either to determine what texts we look at or what they look like when we do confront them. The sheer bulk of the literary archive of nineteenth-century Japan, hidden by the small percentage of it we usually consider, also drives Jonathan E. Zwicker to focus on prose fiction as a social phenomenon. Berry and Zwicker have both turned archaeologist, making sense of puzzling finds, challenging expectations in their different ways, and rehistoricizing the published products of the past; in Berry's case, the unglamorous staples of the publishing trade, and in Zwicker's, the lachrymose world of sentimental fiction.

Berry identifies in the vast archive of print in the Edo period a distinctive strand made up of quite different types of book, and she christens this the "library of public information." These words are chosen carefully: "library" to indicate plurality and heterogeneity, "public" to indicate accessibility by means of print, and "information" to indicate a new category of knowledge in which readers select what they need out of what is offered. Commercial publishing, she argues, "had created a 'public' where there had been none" (p. 18), and this brought hitherto private or privileged information about geography, medicine, chess, tea ceremonial, and so on into the hands of this public. Literary texts, too, had been taken out of the courtly or other restricted circles in which they had been produced and consumed and, by virtue of print, were offered to an unrestricted "public," but Berry's focus is the forms and uses of information. There were, to be sure, limitations on the information provided. Berry draws attention to the fact that it did not encompass "news" (p. 53); we can understand the difficulties with political news, but why, for example, did not economic news find a legal outlet for publication? Should this limitation be laid at the feet of excessively cautious publishers or of an undemanding public? Another feature of the information purveyed by the works she discusses was that, as Berry puts it, "Making society visible to itself, they conspired in the making of society" (p. 17). That is to say, there were invisible political limitations on the information purveyed. On maps, for instance, castles and daimyo residences were represented simply by crests. Information had frontiers that publishers in the Edo period were loath to breach; that is understandable enough, but why was there not more of an effort to bypass these barriers with underground publications?

Commercially printed maps are the first works Berry considers, goods that were packaged like books and sold alongside them. She shows how spatial knowledge and its political symbolism underwent dramatic changes in the early seventeenth century, surmising, undoubtedly correctly, that these developments depended upon cartographic knowledge that had been elaborated by the bakufu; what remains unclear is how that cartographic knowledge came to be released from its official context and incorporated in commercial maps.² The remarkable thing about these commercial maps...