Science in Print: Essays on the History of Science and the Culture of Print

Foreword

vii Foreword james฀a.฀se฀ cord What a stupid book!” As the children’s author Annie Carey pointed out in The History of a Book of 1874, such a dismissal was only possible in an era in which printed materials were common enough for some to be dismissed as trash. Books, journals, preprints, catalogues, and publications of all kinds have long been central elements in the modern world, and specifically to scientific understandings . What is offered in the present book—which, I hardly need add, is far from stupid—is a remarkable conspectus of current approaches to the history of print in relation to science, medicine, and related technical disciplines. The lively variety that this methodological range encourages is, in large part, because the so-called history of the book, like the history of science and medicine, is (thankfully) not a unified discipline with an agreed approach. Although often portrayed as a single field, the study of print culture is in many ways better seen as an unstable alliance among at least four different approaches. The first grew out of technical bibliographical studies, particularly of the early modern period, and focused on the physical description of printed materials. The second focused on publishers and has tended to use the tools of economic and business history. This has led both to histories of individual firms and to overall surveys of longer periods and different countries—notably James Raven’s The Business of Books and William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Third, there has been a variety of literary approaches, most notably centered on understanding forms of address in texts and the expectations brought to texts by potential readers. And finally, cultural historians have looked at the uses of print in society. Much of their writing, as in works such as Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance and Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class, deals with the actual experience of readers. Historians of print do everything from examining minute typographical variations to constructing grand theories about reception. The great virtue of Robert Darnton’s famous “circuit of communication,” when first published in 1995, was its openness to all these approaches at once, of allowing a very diverse array of scholars to focus on the book as an object viii ฀ james฀a.฀secord that passed successively through a range of producers of meaning, from authors to publishers, from publishers to printers, from printers to readers, and from readers back to authors. Itinerant tract sellers and anonymous readers could suddenly stand as legitimate next to the great authors. Not only did it make the simple but crucial point that the meaning of print was the result of many hands, other than those of the author; the circuit also connected a range of hitherto disparate academic enterprises in a nonhierarchical way. There was, in effect, something for everyone to do. These perspectives have been brought together in a wide variety of works, but the balance between them is likely to remain unstable and subject to fruitful debate. This volume is no exception. Take two of the contributors at opposite ends of the chronological spectrum covered by this volume. In her essay, Meghan Doherty shows how a close attention to seventeenth-century engraving manuals can shed light on contemporary attitudes toward natural philosophy in the Royal Society of London. In doing so, she makes it possible to provide close readings of materials that have previously been described only in general terms. Rima Apple, in contrast, has less to say about the effect of forms of production and the industries of print and mass communication that underwrite her story, but she provides a rich picture of the way printed materials were used to shape public opinion. The difference between the two essays is the result not only of asking different questions but of different ways of thinking about the relation between form and content, between production and use. If there has been a basis for gathering under a single banner, it almost certainly lies in a focus on the material basis of communication. Whether seen as objects of bibliographical enquiry, manufactured objects, or cultural goods circulated in society, books are constrained by their materiality. Books, pamphlets , handbills, journal issues, and all other printed documents are things; their making and fortunes can be traced just like any other objects (to use a language that has become current since writing about print became widespread). It matters that they have...