The Body of Text

I have spent my entire life reading these things called books, but there is no such thing as a book. That is to say, books exist but they are not things. They are notional objects: ideas that pass themselves off as material objects but exist only as a category in the imagination. That thing with pages, binding, and spine? That thing illustrating the letter B in the abecadarium? That is a codex, the physical format that books have taken for the last 1600 years or so. Before that, books were rolls of papyrus—but the rolls of parchment that record pre-modern British legal cases, the plea rolls, have never been considered books, despite their identical length and format. So content is somehow implicated. Meanwhile, one need only glance at the Bible or Plato’s Republic to see that “book” is also a subdivision of a larger text. You know you’re dealing with a notional object when a thing is made up of a number of itselves.

The discipline of book history is emerging from a period of intense self-examination, in which scholars have been re-envisioning the field and the questions that need to be asked. The history of the book was originally known as “bibliography”—what the great bibliographer W. W. Greg described as “the science of the transmission of literary documents” (1966, 239). This definition suggests the reason it was valued, and valued so much that it was once an essential part of a scholar’s training: without a firm foundation in textual criticism, paleography, collation, and so forth, one would not be able to prepare a robust and reliable edition of an author’s work. After World War II, however, and with the efflorescence of new perspectives on literary study, bibliography became “book history,” and the realm of inquiry expanded beyond what would be useful in the transmission of literary texts. In short, the material culture of the book has come to be valued for its own sake. Recently, we have been rethinking the discipline even further. If the book is a notional object, and we are embarked on the study of material objects, what exactly are we meant to be working with?

Joseph A. Dane and Lisa Gitelman have set goalposts for us on opposite ends of the field in their respective books Blind Impressions (2013) and Paper Knowledge (2014). Dane has collected a number of careful case studies in order to argue against generalizations, broad-scale explanations, and big-picture, capital-letter History Of The Book. Gitelman, on the other hand, sketches out a history of the document, which she sees as a form of text that is inherently authorless but which, through its essential role in our daily lives and its close connection to copying, manages to embody the modern condition. Read together, they almost constitute a history of book history—a historiography of the book.

Joseph Dane is upfront about his idiosyncratic and personalized approach to the work of Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History. “I am,” he writes, “not attempting to formulate a thesis or enforce an argument or lead anyone step by step toward a conclusion” (2013, 3). Rather, it is a collection of meditations on the specifics of printing, meditations that gradually come together to indict grand narratives and lift up the careful specialized knowledge that has ever been the forte of bibliography. This is very much in keeping with much of his recent work, and particularly his 2010 volume Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture. In fact, Blind Impressions could just as easily be entitled Still Out of Sorts, for it is a continuation of that pointillist portrait of bibliography and early print history.

This history is indeed a pointillist one, and Dane makes no bones about it. He writes:

The chapters below are not designed to offer...