Across Boundaries: The Book in Culture & Commerce (review)

Across Boundaries: The Book in Culture & Commerce contains nine scholarly essays derived from presentations delivered during a 1996 conference organized by the English literature and French departments at the University of Edinburgh. Saintsbury Vineyard of California's sponsorship of the conference is acknowledged in the volume's final essay, a biography of George Saintsbury (1845-1933) that is loosely related to the theme of boundary crossing that characterizes the rest of the collection.

This collection of essays is remarkably broad in scope, but the theme of boundary crossing successfully unifies these otherwise diverse investigations of the relationship between economics and literary culture. In addition to bridging the gap between the book's role in commerce and its role in culture, the authors address the book's crossing of temporal, national, continental, and disciplinary boundaries throughout history.

Roger Chartier's essay, "Orality Lost: Text and Voice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," offers advice on the mindset required for studying the history of the book. More important than his exploration of Elizabethan ballads and the romances of Golden Age Castile is his advice that the study of the history of the book requires the reader to "break with the uncritical posture which assumes that all texts, all works, all genres must reasonably be read, identified, and received according to criteria which characterise our own relation to the written word" (1). Sylvia Huot's "The Writer's Mirror: Watriquet de Couvin and the Development of the Author-Centred Book" echoes Chartier by stepping outside of the modern concept of the author to reflect on the shifting nature of the early relationship between reader and author. Huot uses medieval metaphors of the book and demonstrates how they reveal different concepts of the book's relationship to both author and reader, ultimately showing how the manuscripts of Watriquet de Couvin not only mirror "the preoccupations of the reader, but also [embody] its author" (43). She identifies this shift to the author as a turning point in the production of books that resulted in "a type of book that was endlessly susceptible to reproduction" (44) as it sought to represent the author rather than reflect the reader.

Lisa Jardine's "Book Ventures, Cultural Capital and Enduring Reputation in the Italian Renaissance" and Wallace Kirsop's "Patronage across Frontiers: Subscription Publishing in French in Enlightenment Europe" both look at the role of the private patron in the production and dissemination of books. However, while Jardine emphasizes the book's importance as "cultural capital" (54) in a "programme of self-promotion and public commemoration of a family name" (50), Kirsop dismisses ideological considerations in favor of a purely economic analysis of subscription publishing in French. The tension between these two essays not only reveals the geographic and temporal differences in their topics but also illustrates the diversity that characterizes modern studies of the history of the book.

In James Raven's "Commodification and Value: Interactions in Book Traffic to North America, c. 1750-1820" and Fiona A. Black's "Beyond Boundaries: Books in the Canadian Northwest," the boundaries crossed are continental as well as national. Black focuses on the Canadian Northwest, where book flow was shaped by the governing Hudson's Bay Company, to show how the economic and political policies of the company influenced the acquisition and distribution of books in this area. Raven explores a broader arena, demonstrating that "cultural agendas underpinned literary (and thereby ideological) commercial [book] transactions" (73) in North America at large. Bill Bell echoes this emphasis on the importance of cultural motives in the flow of printed works in "Crusoe's Books: The Scottish Emigrant Reader in the Nineteenth Century," demonstrating that the printed word from home, whether public or private, gave Scottish immigrants to the New World an illusion of "cultural synchronicity" (121) with those in their homeland. In...