A Social History of Books and Libraries from Cuneiform to Bytes by Patrick M. Valentine (review)

Social history emerged in the 1960s when scholars pushed back against rigid disciplinary walls that defined history as the study of nation-states, wars, and the deeds of great dead men. These new historians were interested in the experiences of ordinary people who had previously found themselves on the fringes of historical study, including women, laborers, gays and lesbians, immigrants, Aboriginals, and nonhuman actors, such as cities and the environment. The history of the book has its roots in work by British and French librarians, literary scholars, historians, and sociologists to understand the production, consumption, and uses of texts through the study of printing technologies and evidence of book circulation and survival. More recently, this kind of bibliographical archaeology has attracted researchers in multiple fields, and book history has now established itself as something like a coherent, if decidedly interdisciplinary, field with its own conferences, teaching programs, and journals. Library history, meanwhile, is book history’s unglamorous poor relation, in large part because most library historians are not professional scholars but enthusiastic amateurs who write and publish almost exclusively for other library historians. This, however, may be changing with a recent promising turn toward the history of information and information repositories, including books and libraries, archives and electronic communications systems, as well as the role of information in state building, identity formation, and cultural and economic production.

It is within these contexts that Patrick M. Valentine, an assistant professor of library science at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, has attempted a comprehensive overview of the history of books, printing, and libraries from Mesopotamia to the present, with an emphasis on the United States. In relatively few pages, Valentine seeks to demonstrate that books and libraries are dynamic agents that have shaped cultures and civilizations and are in turn important evidence of the intellectual, social, and political climates that created, celebrated, banned, or burned them. The resulting narrative is a chronological, yet decidedly haphazard, progression across time. A chapter on the book from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century recounts the history of the book in Asia, Europe, and the Americas in just twenty-seven pages. Other chapters consider the early history of books and libraries, libraries in the Renaissance, modern printing and computers, and the American library. The result of this geographic and thematic cavalcade is that most countries or cultures apart from the United States get a paragraph or two describing important local developments or are overlooked. For example, the history of printing in Russia receives two paragraphs, there is nothing on the book in the Middle East aside from references to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts, religious and philosophical writings dating from the second century. Africa gets short shrift altogether.

The length and scope of A Social History of Books and Libraries mean that there is little room for analysis of the events and topics Valentine introduces and there is even less social history save for short flashes, as when he briefly describes segregated library services in the American South or the feminization of American librarianship in the nineteenth century. Other assertions are made and left to hang without support or elaboration. Considering the spread of printing after the development of movable type, Valentine asserts, “As more books were published in large editions, more people could buy them and were encouraged to learn to read.” (pp. 64–5) This claim is not supported by historical statistics listing the number of books printed in a given place in a given year, situated within a context of the cost of a book versus the earnings of a sixteenth century laboring man or woman, or anything else. Valentine also references, but does not cite, important scholars and critics such as Marshall McLuhan, Caroline Bynum, Harold Innis, and Walter Ong, leaving the curious to their own devices. A Social History of Books and Libraries includes an...