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History is a subject about which everyone seems to have a heated opinion, including the determination to ignore it. Fashions in the way history is approached are a product of history itself, with one set of attitudes toward the past, and the place of the past in the present, succeeding another. The study of history, or the use of history in intellectual endeavor, has periodically been out of vogue among prominent critics of the arts; but the perennial attempts to reject history, in one form or another, show how insistently present, how inescapable, history always is. To the human mind, it appears to be a ubiquitous concern, for we bring past associations to our surroundings. G. M. Trevelyan summed up this phenomenon when he mused that "once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are to-day, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone."[1] A related point was made, no less eloquently, by Noël Coward in his song "London Pride" (1941): "Cockney feet mark the beat of history. / Ev'ry street pins a memory down."[2]
Indeed, Coward's reference to "memory" may be taken as a significant enlargement of the concept of historical associationism, adding personal experience to acquired knowledge. One can bring to one's current surroundings a sense of the distant past, developed through learning the so-called facts about the occurrences that took place there over the centuries. But even if one has never been exposed to this information, or has no interest in acquiring it, one's memory is constantly at work,
But our engagements with our surroundings are complex transactions, in which what we bring is mixed, in varying proportions, with what we encounter. We are surrounded by what we take to be physical masses, material objects; some are products of nature, some of human artifice, but all are from the past, from some moment prior to the present one. Our individual associations and temperaments may make each of us see these entities differently; but the masses themselves—however obscurely their objective status may be identified—do seem to contribute their share in setting the associations in motion. If, as R. G. Collingwood has said, the aim of historical study is "thought" or "mental activity,"[3] our means of getting at it must nevertheless be principally the examination of physical objects; for thought is not tangible, and the thought of the past resides mainly in the artifacts it produced, since artifacts, being physical, have a chance of surviving, though perhaps in altered form, from one moment or era to another. Oral traditions, which form the other link with past thought, should be examined as well; but they may often be suspected of reflecting a greater change through the passage of time than physical objects usually undergo.
Thus one may say that the study of human history is largely the study of physical objects,[4] for the double reason that they both reflect and
Of the rich variety of artifacts, I wish to concentrate on one category, printed items with verbal texts, as a way of looking at material culture. These printed items—books, pamphlets, newspapers, and so-called ephemera—are certainly one of the largest classes of artifacts from the past five hundred years, and possibly the most influential class.[6] The
These fields have long been recognized specialties within the overarching field of History with a capital H. So have many others, of course: economic history, diplomatic history, intellectual history, cultural history, biography, the histories of literature, of music, of architecture, and so on. It is true that not long ago the history of the book would not have been seen as on a par with these inquiries; people who stated their interest as book history—and there have always been such people—would have been regarded as narrow specialists obsessed with a tangential topic. What they were doing was history, yes, but almost as far removed from real history as the work of amateur genealogists pursuing their family
The development of the new kind of book history is in general, therefore, a cause for celebration. But its rise in stature has not brought about a greater appreciation of all the studies that it necessarily comprises. The history of printing and typography, which one might logically assume to be a fundamental part of book history, does not seem to have acquired greater glamour within the new approach, and one even hears disparaging hints about its narrowness. Some superb scholarship has been produced in a number of countries during the past century in the areas of the history of letterforms, of typefounding, and of printing; but there has been a tendency on the part of some of the newer book historians to associate Britain, and the English-speaking countries generally, with the study of the physical production of books, and then to contrast the French school of histoire du livre and its broad social concerns with a supposed English school of more strictly technological history. Although this view of the so-called English approach is unfair, the association of the English with the study of books as physical objects probably arose from the fact that they were indeed the pioneers in what is now called analytical bibliography—the analysis of the physical evidence in books for clues that reveal information about the printing process—and in the application of this information to literary study.[8]
There is an irony in the fact that this field, analytical bibliography, has never been fully understood or accepted by the more traditional printing historians. Perhaps its development in connection with the textual criticism and scholarly editing of literary works has caused it to seem a branch of literary studies. In any case, analytical bibliography has remained on the fringes of printing history, just as printing history
The first step in the argument is to note that texts are affected by the printing process. This simple, but profoundly important, point has remained outside the ken of most readers (even highly perceptive ones) over the centuries. The reasons for this neglect, along with an account of the emerging interest from the mid-nineteenth century onward (at least on the part of a few scholars) in the relationship between text and object, constitute one of the most fascinating stories of intellectual history. It is largely unsung, however, because the point at its core is still not widely understood; and thus the accomplishment of that band of British scholars who were the forerunners and founders of the Bibliographical Society is not properly appreciated.[9] Yet what they set in motion was a revolution in the way we approach printed texts, a revolution still in progress and unlikely to be completed for a long time, judging from the slow pace of its inroads into entrenched patterns of thinking. (I should say, parenthetically, that any prognostication about attitudes toward printed texts in the future is likely to seem quixotic in an age full of predictions about the demise of the printed book; but of
The revolution instigated by the pioneers of the "New Bibliography" consisted of approaching artifacts that have words in or on them as one would approach other artifacts—treating them as objects produced by artisans skilled in particular crafts, as objects that can be studied for physical details revelatory of their own production history. These bibliographers' view was in contrast to the notion, still prevalent, that books are merely the containers of texts, which can readily be extracted without the necessity of paying much attention to the containers themselves. The approach also necessitated a recognition of the individuality of every copy, in opposition to the common assumption that copies from the same edition are identical. Examining books as objects suggests to most people an interest in the graphic arts; what is less readily understood is that an interest in the texts of books also requires the reading of physical evidence (which, because it is physical, may vary from copy to copy).
Even sophisticated historians of material culture sometimes have difficulty regarding books as just another category of artifact, for the presence of words in them tends to suggest that they can speak to us in a more direct way—in our own language, as it were.[11] When words are
When Henry Bradshaw in the nineteenth century observed a correlation between textual divisions and paper stocks (or gatherings of sheets) in certain incunables, he was noting a connection between printing and text;[12] so is a present-day editor who discovers that a blank-verse passage in an Elizabethan play was set as prose at a point where the space would not otherwise have held the pre-assigned text.[13] Some recent students of
Another, more visible, residue of the printing process is also always present: the design of the pages. Every book, whether by default or by careful planning, has a design, created by the letterforms, their sizes,
That problem is not a simple one, however. For even if everyone granted that the details of what happened in the printing shop are a fundamental ingredient in the study of the dissemination of ideas in printed form, there would remain the question of how those details can be known. And on that issue there is no unanimity of opinion among printing historians themselves. The primary reason for this situation is uncertainty over the nature and respectability of analytical bibliography. Some printing historians have neglected it on the assumption that it is a branch of literary study, of little relevance to printing history; others have actively rejected it because they believe it to be suspect as history. The first response results from a simple misconception; the second raises the basic question of what constitutes validity in historical study.
As to the first, one need only observe that printing history clearly encompasses information on such topics as how many compositors were at work on a given book, whether they set the type pages in numerical order (or according to the sequence in which the pages would be placed on the press), and how proofreading and correcting were accomplished.[19] Generalizations about printing-shop procedures in particular periods and places can be made by combining such data from large numbers of individual books. And these data are precisely what literary scholars
If printing historians and other historians have frequently shared a misunderstanding of what analytical bibliography attempts to accomplish, they also have shared a skeptical view of the procedures it follows. In the first place, historians are inclined to prefer archival records—manuscript and typescript documents—over printed books when they are available. Obviously printing historians do know that to discuss typography and layout they must look at the actual printed items, just as the newer historians of reading understand why the visual appearance of printed pages is a key class of data for their work. But when historians wish to know something about how books were produced, rather than how they finally looked, the books themselves are not routinely thought of as an archival source, presumably because of the number of inferences often required in the attempt to coax their own stories out of them. If a printer's ledger records the format of a book, or the amount of paper needed for the edition, or the number of compositors who set the type, or the number of presses used for the printing, those pieces of information are conveyed as direct (or relatively direct) statements, whereas extracting the same details from the finished books would entail inferences, often a network of inferences. Archival records are frequently regarded as "primary" documents, and printed books as "secondary"; but primariness is relative to the subject of the inquiry, and when the subject is printing-shop procedures, the evidence from the objects that resulted from those procedures (objects that have survived and are available for first-hand examination) must take precedence over statements about the procedures in other contemporary documents.
Printers' and publishers' records are valuable, of course, but no one
Elementary this point may be; but a tendency to assume that archival records are correct is curiously persistent. One telling example is J. D. Fleeman's investigation of William Somervile's The Chace (1735) in the light of the surviving ledgers of its printer, William Bowyer. He notes several discrepancies between the record of presswork in the ledgers and the press figures printed in the book—one of which is that both formes of sheet A are listed in the column for press number 3 in the ledger, whereas the figure 8 appears in printed copies on a page of the outer forme of this sheet (the verso of the second leaf), and the inner forme bears no press figure. Fleeman does not suggest the possibility that the ledger is incorrect. Instead he concludes that figure 8 here must refer to the pressmen named in the ledger as operating press number 3 (Fowle and Davis); the other two occurrences of 8 in the book, however, he attributes to a different pair of pressmen (Mazemore and Jethro, named in the ledger as operating press number 8), because the two formes involved are credited to press number 8 in the ledger. In other words, the assumption that the ledger is correct forces Fleeman to conclude that the printed figures designate pressmen and that their signification can shift—a conclusion that leaves one wondering what purpose the printed figures serve, if the ledger is the only true (and thus necessary) guide to the allocation of presswork. A simpler hypothesis that maintains the accuracy of the ledger is to regard the printed figure 8 in sheet A as an
A similar instance is Robert Darnton's discussion of what he calls "hidden editions" of Diderot's Encyclopédie.[23] He examines the wage book of the printer of the quarto Encyclopédie to learn "what actually happened in the printing shops" (p. 78), and he makes no attempt to verify the data from that record by reference to surviving copies. In other words, "what actually happened" in the printing process can be known, he implies, independently of analyzing the actually surviving product of that process. Indeed, he explicitly rejects such analysis: "It would be vain to draw inferences about the printing process from the examination of actual copies of the book, because the copies must vary endlessly" (p. 81) —as if complexity were grounds for refusing to examine evidence.[24] It is hard to imagine any other class of available evidence that a historian would so willingly ignore.
A more realistic attitude toward bibliographical evidence and its
The essence of any inductive process, such as the search for scientific "laws" or the pursuit of the past, is uncertainty; and what are called facts—scientific or historical—are simply conjectures that seem relatively certain (that is, relatively unlikely to be overturned by contrary evidence) to a substantial number of informed observers. (The historian's conclusions are testable in the same way that the scientist's are: by repeated reenactments of the events that led to the conclusions, whether those events took place in a laboratory or in a library.)[26] If the validity of analytical bibliographers' hypotheses is frequently questioned, those bibliographers are in no different position from other historians, or other sifters of inductive, and thus effectively infinite, evidence. Yet sometimes bibliographical analysis is criticized for involving the same inferential process that is taken for granted in other branches of history. A notable example, which goes to the heart of the issue, is D. F. McKenzie's statement that compositorial analysis has exhibited "virtuosity in discovering patterns in evidence which is entirely internal, if not wholly fictional."[27]
What we agree to call historical knowledge is built up by the accretion of individual acts of pattern-finding, some of which invalidate previous acts and some of which confirm and extend them. It is true that each act must be interpreted in the light of whatever relevant context has already been formulated; any "internal" analysis that does not at some point recognize appropriate available sources "external" to it can of course be criticized, for we should obviously use all relevant data that we can locate. But McKenzie's belittling of analyses based on evidence internal to books, if not corroborated by evidence external to them, ultimately fails to acknowledge the limited nature of all bodies of evidence, however broadly conceived. In the first place, documents external to books hold just as many pitfalls for interpretation as do the books themselves, and any conclusions based solely on such evidence are potentially flawed for the same reasons that conclusions based on any other single body of evidence are. Beyond that, one does not in many instances have the option of checking books against printers' ledgers, for the survival of printer's archives is not common. One has to use whatever is available and interpret it in the light of what is already considered established. McKenzie overstates the authority of the latter, however, when he says that bibliographical analysis "depends absolutely upon antecedent historical knowledge" (p. 2): such knowledge (as in every other field) is itself always an hypothesis, and the new analysis may modify it. This kind of interplay, after all, is what produced the antecedent knowledge, and each new analysis plays a role in determining what is regarded as established by the next analyst. In the end, all evidence is "internal," for sooner or later one reaches a point where there is nothing outside to relate to. We are trapped in Wallace Stevens's "island solitude, unsponsored, free, / Of that wide water, inescapable." Virtuosity in making sense of what we have is thus the only procedure available to us. The degree of ingenuity
Analytical bibliography seems to me a perfect paradigm of historical scholarship because it illustrates, with particular clarity, how dependent our view of the past is upon the creativity of those who engage in historical investigations. A current instance is Paul Needham's hypothesis that three works were printed by the Catholicon Press of Mainz in ca. 1459-60 (and reprinted later) from two-line slugs, cast from a setting of movable type, rather than being printed from the type itself. This startling thesis is an example of creative thinking on the part of a learned bibliographer who argues with careful deliberation and logical rigor. Whether it is accepted as "true" depends on whether it can stand up under criticism. Since its first announcement in 1982, it has in fact been criticized, and an alternative explanation has been proposed for the puzzles raised by these editions. Needham has shown, to the satisfaction of many but not all, why the direct criticisms of his position have missed their mark and why the alternative thesis does not adequately account for the observed evidence. His hypothesis is well on its way toward acceptance as a significant fact in the history of early printing. Needham fully understands the nature of this process and has on more than one occasion invited his readers to evaluate the controversy as an exercise in clear thinking (the requirements of which are themselves a human invention, of course). In 1993, for example, he said, "The issues in question do not depend in any way on a specific knowledge of incunables, but should be accessible to anyone familiar with the fundamental principles of analytical bibliography."[29] If a consensus forms in support of
The idea that history is revised by each generation, that what we see in the past is contingent on who we are in the present, is of course not new; most historians by this time surely subscribe to it in some form, and it is a natural element in any skeptical or antifoundational philosophy. As Charles Gullans wrote in his poem "Research," "It is ourselves we summon from the past."[30] Yet surprisingly it is still easy to arouse controversy by embracing the subjective element in historical writing, to say nothing of openly accepting the role of creativity in it. A prominent recent illustration is the celebrity achieved by Simon Schama, in both the journalistic and the academic press, from proclaiming this view in lectures and in Dead Certainties (1991), a book that mixes archival data and invented details in retelling the divergent accounts of the deaths of General James Wolfe (1759) and Dr. George Parkman (1849). The teasing subtitle of the book, placed in parentheses, is Unwarranted Speculations, a phrase that accurately conveys what some readers feel the book contains; but its parenthetical apposition to the
Some reviewers were predictably bothered by this position and felt that it presented an overly negative outlook. But even persons sympathetic with Schama's general view may find him strangely reserved here, for in his "Afterword" he repeatedly undercuts his own relativistic remarks. He says, for example, that he does not "scorn the boundary between fact and fiction"; perhaps not, but what he does in the body of his work is to show brilliantly that such a boundary is always in flux. Similarly, he calls the narratives in his book "works of the imagination, not scholarship" (p. 320); yet presumably one of his purposes is to raise questions about how scholarship is defined, as in his assertion that scholarly reports involve "the inventive faculty." He states as an article of faith "the rather banal axiom that claims for historical knowledge must always be fatally circumscribed by the character and prejudices of its narrator" (p. 322). But why "fatally"? The banality of the observation, if it is banal, arises from its restating of a universal condition, one that can be taken for granted. In that case, the hint of a complaint underlying the word "fatally" is pointless. Historical study is not prevented by our inherent subjectivity; the limit that human perception places on verification is simply a given in everything we do, and we proceed from there.[31]
An equally fundamental point is that, even if we could be objective in reporting observed data, what has survived for us to inspect is inevitably fragmentary and requires supplementing by informed intuition. A creative account written by a learned historian may bring us closer to the past than documents alone. Whether we believe that it does so in any given instance depends on our evaluation of the process by which the account is constructed. Setting standards for responsible and irresponsible argument is not in any way incompatible with recognizing the
In the approaching years, as we are constantly being told, electronic texts may become the dominant form of visible language.[33] Whether the study of the processes of producing these texts will be carried out under the rubric of "printing history" is less important than seeing the continuity from handwriting to letterpress to offset to electronic digitization. In his Centenary Lecture to the Bibliographical Society in London, D. F. McKenzie appropriately called for the Society to include in its domain the electronic production and dissemination of texts. Indeed, if bibliography is thought of as the field that deals with the processes resulting in the placement of texts in physical objects,[34] along with
The history of the production, use, and influence of letterforms is fundamental to humanistic study not only because letterforms are one of the dominant vehicles for the transmission of language but also because their shapes and deployment—as with all artifactual details—convey
E. M. Forster, in his memoir of Edward Carpenter, said that Carpenter would not "figure in history," because his life did not produce the kind of "words and deeds" that attract chroniclers; but Carpenter's genius, according to Forster, was to make those who came "under his spell" realize how inadequately the human spirit has been recorded by historians.[37] Forster's observations, both on Carpenter and on historical tradition, are themselves a part of history through their embodiment in visible language printed on the pages of a book (and subject to the vicissitudes of the printing process). Our best chance of capturing the human spirit, as it has existed in different times and places, is through studying the artifacts it has produced, reading their significance in the light of how they came into being. Printing history is essential for examining a major class of those artifacts by helping us to decipher, in the fullest way possible, the physical marks that constitute verbal messages from the past.
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