University of Virginia Library

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES IN
BOOK HISTORY AND NATIONAL HISTORIES OF THE BOOK

BOOK history is still a relatively new form of interdisciplinary inquiry that
has yet to develop historiographical understandings adequate to the
complexities of the questions it typically seeks to answer.[1] The truth of this
troubling and troublesome assessment is especially evident, I believe, in the
highly ambitious national histories of the book currently in progress. As a
co-editor, with Michael Turner, of The Cambridge History of the Book in
Britain, Volume 5, 1695-1830 (hereafter, CHBB5), I have been considering
for several years now the theoretical and practical implications of current
book-historical knowledge about the hand-press period in Britain. I have also
been thinking about how the collective understandings of our intellectual
enterprise as book historians—that is, the historiographies of book history—
affect the ways in which scholars proceed in their investigations. Drawing on
the experience of editing CHBB5 (and, to a lesser degree, of working as co-general
editor, with Henry Woudhuysen, on The Oxford Companion to the
Book, now in progress), I offer some observations on ten salient and various
book-historical topics. Although some of the examples come from a particular
book-history project, I attempt to raise more general concerns of wider applicability
in the hope that presenting this salmagundi of problems and
possibilities will stimulate further reflection and discussion among—and indeed
between—bibliographers and book historians.

1. The Interdisciplinary Nature of Book History

Writing in 1977, the distinguished Blake scholar Morris Eaves sought to
combat the "parochialism" that characterized the study of publishing history

by promoting a "comprehensive view that can see a fact in its context, even
when that context violates the boundaries of specialized areas of knowledge."[2]
The difficulties attendant upon such interdisciplinarity notwithstanding,
Eaves advocated a Janus-like program of research, affirming "that historians
of publishing have a right and a duty to set their sights very high, working in
decades to come towards a comprehensive history that looks both inwards
and outwards." We must direct our scholarly attentions "inwards towards a
more precise account of the everyday facts of buyers, sellers, and products"
so that our knowledge of book history is adequately grounded in close investigation
of the historical record. Yet, we also bear a concomitant obligation
to marshal our intellectual energies "outwards towards a more comprehensive
account of publishing in its evolution as part of a large history that
includes all the aspects of culture that affect and are affected by publishing"
(77).

Though highly ambitious, this second aspect of Eaves' twin remit is by
no means eccentric, and has long been considered a basic tenet of book-historical
inquiry. When some of the most consequential scholars pursuing
such studies gathered in June 1980 to produce a "Statement on the History
of the Book," their manifesto acknowledged the difficulty and the centrality
of addressing the impact that books have made on society—and the influence
that society has had on the making of books. "The history of the book is
fundamental to the historical study of society," they declare, "but we are far
from understanding the factors that have shaped the writing and the dissemination
of books." Emphasizing the dynamic and reciprocal relationship
between the book and culture, they insist "These factors have changed over
time and have varied from one cultural area to another; hence the impact of
the book has also been ever-varied and changing."[3]

The exigencies of book-historical research accordingly appear to require
a range of specialized knowledge that is genuinely intimidating. "Consider
the demands on the book historian today," Robert Darnton invites us. First,
he or she must command a variety of expertise about the businesses of the
book trade: "know[ing] how to make paper, cast type, impose formes, operate
presses, correct copy, keep accounts, ship freight, place advertisements,
collect bills, satisfy readers and pacify authors." And he or she "must master
the variations of those activities at different stages in the evolution of technology
and business practices." Fair enough. If this were all, if knowledge of
bibliography and the operations of the trades were sufficient, then "the demands
on the book historian today" would be ample, but not excessive. Yet,
Darnton reminds us that, if we are to attend to the larger purview of book
history, then we also "must keep up with the latest varieties of bibliography,

library science, literary criticism, sociology, history and economics."[4] The
scope of knowledge required of those who undertake book-historical research
is so broad in part because books "refuse to be contained within the confines
of a single discipline when treated as objects of study. Neither history nor
literature nor economics nor sociology nor bibliography can do justice to all
the aspects of the life of a book." According to Darnton, "By its very nature,
therefore, the history of books must be . . . interdisciplinary in method."[5]

Kevin Sharpe recognizes that many scholars "do not always feel at home
with sociologists and Annaliste historians, let alone critical theorists," but
nevertheless also argues that book history must incorporate a variety of disciplines
because "certain types of historical enquiry . . . need to be an interdisciplinary
endeavour."[6] Peter D. McDonald so thoroughly insists on the
interdisciplinarity of book history that he decries attempts to institutionalize
book-historical scholarship into a formalized academic discipline, preferring
instead to emphasize the fluidity of its method: "Bokhistorie er en tverrfaglig
undersøkelsesmodus og ikke en `disiplin', et skjæringspunkt og ikke et sted."
["Book history is an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry, not a `discipline', an
intersection not a place."][7] The consensus among book historians that the
nature of texts and the aims of contemporary scholarly inquiry require more
than a passing knowledge of several academic disciplines does not alter the
fact that most practitioners of book history received their professional training
in one, or at most two, disciplines. Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker
have keenly observed, "The passage of the old bibliography to the new
history of the book is not simple: it is accompanied by an abrupt change
from a reductionist to a maximalist philosophy."[8] Yet, most of us have been

prepared—both by our education and by the demands of the profession—
for intellectual undertakings more appropriately described as minimalist.

Although there certainly are notable exceptions, most book-historical
scholarship published since the first issue of Publishing History appeared in
1976 has not been authentically interdisciplinary. In book history, as elsewhere,
interdisciplinarity too often means doing more than one thing inadequately,
the gesture of tacking on a few purloined paragraphs to satisfy a
notional demand, a shallow obeisance to subjects the investigator does not
genuinely know. No wonder that in an important review, "History of the
Book: An Undisciplined Discipline?," Cyndia Clegg appropriately admonishes
us:

"Integration," with its cognate "integrity," should be a principal characteristic
of our interdisciplinary endeavors, informing the answers we provide
and, most importantly. the questions we pose.

The Introduction to the first number of Book History, an annual produced
under the auspices of SHARP, enthusiastically declares that the history
of the book "is a new kind of history," "that book history is information
history," and "that book history provides a more rigorous and empirical
approach to such issues as reader response, canon formation, and the politics
of literary criticism."[10] Although the editors, both accomplished book historians
themselves, promise "new perspectives and innovative methods," they
discuss neither historiography nor any of the analytical, historical, sociological,
or critical methods by which this new kind of historical investigation
might be conducted to produce scholarship of a standard allowing them to
"promise . . . that every issue of this journal will . . . change the way we
read words on paper" (xi). Almost everywhere in this area of scholarly endeavor
there is much Panglossian confidence and little facing up to the stark
realities of how little we know and how much we need to think deeply about
what we are doing.

2. Periodization

How do the time periods we routinely use to demarcate our book-historical
investigations shape our understandings by opening up certain perspectives
while foreclosing others? The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,

Volume 5 begins with a specific event, the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695,
and ends with the generalized marker of 1830, a date that serves as a terminus
ad quem by which the industrialization of the book is firmly established.
Thus, CHBB5 chronicles the proliferation of print, the rise of what Samuel
Johnson called "the common reader," and the efflorescence of a thoroughgoing
"print culture" in Britain. One practical problem we have encountered
is that very few scholars are comfortable covering the whole period 16951830;
many students of the eighteenth century do not dare to trespass beyond
the French Revolution, or 1800, or the start of George IV's Regency in
1811. Of course, this difficulty obtains in the other direction as well: scholars
of the "Romantic Age" (roughly, 1789-1832) are typically loathe to delve into
the early or mid eighteenth century. Periodization is a practical matter, of
course, but it also profoundly influences how groups of scholars conceptualize
and write about developments in the production, distribution, and reception
of printed matter. Just as the periodization of literary history has had a
thoroughgoing effect on how that subject is researched, taught, studied, and
understood, so too do the ways in which we partition book history, both
national and international, have a significant impact on future patterns of
perception and knowledge.

In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain we have sometimes
selected boundaries based on particularly significant legal developments
(e.g., the granting of the royal charter to the Stationers' Company in 1557
and the lapse of Licensing), sometimes delineated major changes in the conduct
of the book trade (such as the industrialization of book production),
and sometimes chosen temporal limits rooted in a more general heuristic
purpose (e.g., 1400 "when Geoffrey Chaucer died" for the start of Volume 3.
or 2000 for the end of Volume 7 and the History itself).[11] All this seems
straightforward enough. Yet, mindful that the forms our questions take
often dictate the nature of the answers we develop, it may be salutary to
interrogate the matter of periodization in book history, if only as a means
of revealing our tacit assumptions and often-unarticulated biases. Every
period construction necessarily promotes certain kinds of observations while
obscuring others.

One way of thinking about periods might be to give more consideration
to the kinds of books being produced. If, for example, religious and theological
works overwhelmingly constitute the largest category of publishing
activity for the first three centuries of printing, then should ecclesiastical
and theological developments and events not enter more fully into delineating
our concepts of print culture in the hand-press period? Neither Shakespeare
nor Pope, but John Wesley, is the most published individual author
in eighteenth-century Britain, while the best-selling corporate works are, of
course, the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.[12] For play texts, it might

well make sense to consider the so-called "long Restoration" from the reopening
of the theaters in 1660 to the establishment of stage licensing in
1737. Such a category could help book historians discern more clearly the
complex relationships between dramatic productions of the stage and the
production and publishing of the dramatic page. Practitioners of book history
have often adhered to traditional divisons operative in either literary
or political history because we have inherited these temporal categories as
a consequence of our professional training. Yet, it is by no means clear how
the reign of Queen Victoria—or, as some prefer, the interval from the passage
of the Reform Act (1832) to the accession of Edward VIII (1901)—is
especially meaningful for book history as an investigative tool for framing
our inquiries, however well it may serve as an heuristic expedient.

As we strive to move toward more international histories of the book,
should we use wars, or treaties bearing on trade, or the invention of technologies
to demarcate the field? Employing technological milestones seems especially
appealing, at least for pan-European book history, though such markers
in a global context are of limited utility during most of the history of printing.
For certain kinds of works, thinking about the timeframes of international,
intellectual, or cultural history can help book historians to cross new
boundaries and consider their subjects from a fresh perspective. The notion
of the Romantic century, 1750-1850, for example, could stimulate new
research.[13] Considering the ways that book histories might be most helpfully
partitioned, we may decide that national histories ought to be rich with
"thick description" that attends closely to the significance of local events and
circumstances, while international accounts could reasonably adhere to a
different chronology in seeking to establish a more capacious view.[14]

There is a sizeable body of scholarly literature on periodization, but
book historians have generally seemed unconcerned about how the partitioning
of history affects our perceptions and conditions our understandings.[15]
One instance of a temporal boundary that has had a profound effect

on scholarly research and the structure of our investigations is the decision
to terminate the English Short-Title Catalogue at 1800, thereby forestalling
the possibility of our having a comprehensive bibliography of the hand-press
book in Britain.[16] The consequent lack of bibliographical control for 18011830
vitiates scholars' ability to understand more fully the impact of many
significant developments on the book trade, including: government censorship
of the press as a response to Radicalism; changes in banking and credit
arrangements that fostered the shift from bookselling to publishing; and
technological innovations such as stereotyping, lithography, the advent of
iron presses (Stanhope, Columbian, Albion, etc.), and the mechanization of
paper production. It is a lamentable reality that virtually all the statistical
data presented in CHBB5 necessarily terminates in 1800. The Nineteenth-Century
Short-Title Catalogue, based on radically different principles than
the ESTC, does not pretend to the same inclusiveness and is particularly
weak in provincial printing, which in the decades under discussion accounts
for the production of vast numbers of titles.[17]

3. Boundaries

If temporal borders have a significant impact upon the ways we think about
the histories of printing and publishing, of authorship and reading, then
what other kinds of boundaries might help to construct and circumscribe
our understandings? As editors of CHBB5, we have had to consider a variety
of questions concerning additional boundaries: national, geographical, cultural,
legal, linguistic, and economic. (For disciplinary and temporal thresholds,
see sections 1 and 2 above.) There is a history of the book in Wales;[18]

the four-volume History of the Book in Scotland is in progress,[19] as is a
History of the Irish Book.[20] Nevertheless, the Cambridge series is presumptuously
called The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. [21] CHBB5,
to varying degrees, takes cognizance of the book in Wales, Scotland, and
Ireland, although—because of constraints on the size of our printed volume—
nowhere is the attention devoted to these regions as extensive as the editors
desired. In much the same way, CHBB5 includes articles on the British book
in North America and in India, but, as the first volume of A History of the
Book in America, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World tantalizingly
suggests, there is a great deal more that might usefully have been said from
the British perspective about the traffic in books and cultural consumption.[22]
Perhaps the most challenging boundaries we as editors have had to negotiate
are those imposed by the limitations of space in a single-volume printed
book (see section 10 below). Robert Darnton has rightly observed that "books
themselves do not respect limits either linguistic or national,"[23] but the
reader of CHBB5 will perceive that our geographical reach has been effectively
constrained by the boundaries of a physical book.

Despite Darnton's assertion in 1982 that "By its very nature . . . the history
of books must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method,"
most book-historical research in the past twenty-odd years has been genuinely
neither.[24] Writing five years after making his initial declaration, Darnton
acknowledged that "the history of the book . . . faces a danger that has restricted
the development of other disciplines: nationalization," and urged
book historians to "study concrete problems in a comparative manner" that
cuts across the boundaries of the nation-state in order to do justice to an

object of study that is "international by nature."[25] Darnton was by no means
the first to affirm that, because books cross borders, book history must do so
as well. The 1980 "Statement on the History of the Book" produced at the
Association of College and Research Libraries' Rare Books and Manuscripts
Preconference observed that "since the book is by its nature a cultural force
that transcends national boundaries, both the design and compilation of
basic tools require international cooperation."[26] The tremendous amount
of scholarship on national histories of the book that has been published, or
is now in progress, may make international book history on a broad scale
genuinely feasible for the first time. When read together, such national histories
will enable more comparative scholarship across traditional boundaries,
a development that bodes well for the future of the field.

National histories of the book will also promote international book
history by underscoring the degree to which the book trade in any individual
country has been allied to the business of books elsewhere. The last
two volumes of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, covering the
years 1830-2000, will be global in their reach, but even earlier volumes in
the series have necessarily emphasized the importance of international commerce
in the conduct of the book trade. From the time that Caxton printed
the first book on English soil in 1477 until the early decades of the eighteenth
century, most of the paper and type used in the manufacture of English books
was imported from the Continent. The experience of Caxton himself, working
as a printer in Cologne and Bruges, reminds us too that book trade
personnel also frequently crossed international boundaries. Of course, part
of the story that CHBB5 has to tell is how England in the eighteenth century
went from being heavily dependent on imported books to developing a thriving
trade in books for foreign and colonial export. When considering the
British book trade, one might also usefully think about the borders and
boundaries—geographical, political, financial, and technological—that obtained
within the country itself, not least the role of London in relation to
the provinces, even after the lapse of Licensing in 1695. For the Renaissance
and eighteenth century, it may be useful when thinking about the provincial
book trade in Britain to apply a modified version of the "internal colony"
paradigm proposed in a different context by Robert Blauner and Michael
Hechter.[27]

Still another boundary concerns the kinds of books we study. In book-historical

studies of the hand-press period, and in book history more generally,
literary texts have been investigated out of all proportion to their
representation in the marketplace. The program for the Annual Meeting of
SHARP in July 2003 (at Scripps College in Claremont, California) may be
taken as generally representative of the work being done by SHARP members
and may therefore be used as a convenient snapshot of current research
activity among (mostly British and American) practitioners of book history.
The range of topics covered was genuinely impressive; yet, approximately
thirty-seven percent of the papers delivered in the panel sessions were directly
concerned with literary topics: chiefly the publishing or reading of
fiction, poetry, and drama.[28] Given that most scholars conducting book-historical
investigations come from literary studies, this tendency toward
imaginative literature is understandable, but it may reasonably provoke us to
ask, to what extent do `literary' concerns determine the dominant practices in
book history? To what extent is this belletristic emphasis desirable? Book
history is not literary history; literature, as traditionally conceived, constitutes
a relatively small percentage of the books printed in the eighteenth century.
In 1753, for example, literary works in English from all genres comprised
about 11 percent of all surviving published titles. In the same year, books on
religion and theology made up some 21 percent of published works, and
writings on government some 20 percent. Nevertheless, such genres are
seldom the subject of book-historical investigations. Similarly, the deluge of
print necessary for the conduct of business is typically neglected in book-historical
studies.[29] It seems that the reluctance of many book historians to
traverse disciplinary borders by directing their investigations outside the
literary field may in time have a much more far-reaching effect on the practice
of book history than the difficulties presented by the prospect of negotiating
any other boundary.

4. The Sociology of Texts

As every pioneer well knows, crossing borders and venturing into new territories
can be a difficult and dangerous undertaking. When D. F. McKenzie
delivered the inaugural Panizzi Lectures, "Bibliography and the Sociology
of Texts," in 1985 at the British Library, it was his application of sociology
to bibliography that attracted attention, both pro and con. McKenzie's marshalling
of these conjoined disciplinary perspectives was hardly new, however.
He first used the concept, "the sociology of the text," and began to

develop the idea as a component of his revisionist program in the second of
his Sandars Lectures in 1976,[30]
making further applications in "Typography
and Meaning: the Case of William Congreve" (delivered in 1977, but not
published until 1981).[31] "Type-Bound Topography" (1982) and his 1983
Presidential Address to the Bibliographical Society both enlarged and
extended his intellectual project well before the Panizzi Lectures were
established.[32]

In his first lecture, McKenzie—expert bibliographer, printing historian,
and chronicler of apprentices' entrance into the Stationers' Company—explained
in summary fashion the necessary elements for conducting a sociology
of texts, first by invoking some fundamental principles from Herbert
Spencer's classic work, The Study of Sociology (1873): " `Sociology has to recognize
truths of social development, structure, and function.' "[33] Dilating on
Spencer's text, McKenzie then commented:

Although it would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that the marrying
of sociology to bibliography produces the offspring of book history, it is
nevertheless true that an amicable and generative partnership between these
subjects is essential if the nascent interdisciplinary endeavor we call "the
history of the book" is to mature toward its full potential. Because the future
stature of book history depends upon the accommodation—if not the integration—of
these two disciplines in scholarly research, it is deeply worrying
that at present most of us currently undertaking book-historical investigations
are not truly conversant, much less genuinely adept, in either bibliography
or sociology. Believing that such an emphasis is consonant with McKenzie's

intentions and achievements, it seems both fitting and constructive to stress
the "and" in the title of the last book he published in his lifetime: Bibliography
and the Sociology of Texts. [34]

Yet, McKenzie himself never developed the sociological program he inaugurated
with the thoroughness that one might have hoped for, so that
Hugh Amory's critique—" `Sociology', so conceived, has . . . apparently, no
methodological content"—must be accepted as an insightful diagnosis.[35] If
the `sociology' in our evolving understanding of the sociology of texts is to
be more than a generalized marker for vague and uncritically examined
notions of social exchange, then perhaps would-be students of book history
would do well to read Anthony Giddens' New Rules of Sociological Method.
Chapter 4, "The Form of Explanatory Accounts," which, among other matters,
treats "[t]he problem of adequacy," is particularly apposite.[36] Generally
speaking, Giddens proposes a model of sociological analysis that focuses on
"the reproduction of practices." Rejecting the simplistic "dualism of `the individual'
and `society'," he understands social structure as "both constituted
by human agency and yet . . . at the same time the very medium of this constitution"
(128-129). Giddens thus attempts to develop a sociological method
that accounts both for individual human beings as purposive agents and for
the larger forms of social life that their actions reproduce and transform.[37]
Giddens' Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) provides an especially
illuminating example of a thoughtfully developed sociological method.[38]

The sociology of texts should begin in the study of the practices and institutions
of textual production, transmission, and reception. Such a sociology
perforce involves the investigation of economic determinants, aesthetic conventions,
and ideological factors as it seeks to understand and interpret the
roles of print in the construction and maintenance of social practices and

institutions. Books are the products of social processes—sometimes represented
as "the communications circuit" or "the literary field"—and they
participate in social processes far beyond those associated with textual production
and transmission.[39] A sociology of texts should also seek a deeper
understanding of how the practices and institutions of textual production,
transmission, and reception are imbedded in and informed by larger social
and political structures. Moreover, such a sociology must always recognize
that print culture at once instantiates and is instantiated by the larger culture
of which it is a part. Hence, it is sometimes characterized as "an index of
civilisation."[40]

Book historians have already begun to cultivate a sociology of knowledge
and its allied discipline, the history of ideas—surely a hopeful development
indicative of greater things to come from recognizing the usefulness of the
social sciences for the investigation and analysis of the worlds of print.[41]
Some have found the foundational writings of Karl Mannheim enormously
valuable,[42] as are the works of more contemporary scholars, including Stark,
Berger and Luckman, and Merton.[43] Some important work has been done

too in the sociology of literature, though scholarship in this sub-field is
commonly more uneven in quality, which may help to account for its being
generally less well known.[44]

5. The Role of Bibliography in Book History

How can scholars effectively traverse the intellectual divide between bibliography
and book history? What cargoes might be traded between these
territories to the benefit of both? In CHBB5 we have wrestled with questions
about the use and display of bibliographical information of various kinds,
as well as with larger concerns about the relationship between particular
observations and more far-reaching analysis. In any history that gestures
toward comprehensiveness, there is an inevitable tension between the communication
of knowledge and the limited provision of the information from
which it is derived. A still more important matter, however, is the role that
bibliography should play in book-historical research. In a thought-provoking
paper, T. H. Howard-Hill has asked, "What is the contribution of bibliography
to the history of the book?" His answer, in part, is that bibliography
enables "already historically-sensitive book historians to attend to the physiscal
object in history."[45] This understanding accords well with the 1980
"Statement on the History of the Book" in which leading book historians
situated bibliographical scholarship at the center of book-historical research.
"The attempt to understand the influence of changes in book production and
dissemination is particularly demanding," they observed. "In the first place,
one needs to know the basic facts of what was printed, by whom and for
whom," but beyond such fundamental investigations there is also a great
deal of exacting bibliographical work to be done, because "[d]etailed bibliographic
studies, dictionaries of printers, and inventories of both public
and private libraries are among the time-consuming and exacting and fundamental
studies that are needed."[46]

Assessing the current state of book history in The Journal of American

History, Joan Shelley Rubin remarks, "Bibliography remains important."[47]
David Hall offers a more personal testimony, "My education at the hands of
the bibliographers is ongoing."[48] Nevertheless, the relationship between
bibliography and book history is sometimes characterized by vexing ambiguities
and competing demands. Hall has recorded that at a scholarly meeting
he attended, "The most explicit disagreement concerned texts and their
transmittal: to what extent should historians undertake bibliographical research
before they can proceed in confidence? Meanwhile, it was suggested
that bibliographers put their skills to work answering questions of importance
to historians. . . . This exchange of expectations might not have
satisfied either party. . . ."[49]

One problem facing book-historical studies is that many scholars have
an inadequate grounding in bibliography. It seems reasonable to propose
that bibliographical literacy ought to be requisite to book history in the
way that all physicians—whether surgeons, research immunologists, or epidemiologists—have
studied human anatomy. Yet, it remains a disturbing
truth that most of us engaged in book-historical scholarship received no
bibliographical training as part of our graduate studies. The results when
historians of the book are, apparently, ignorant of bibliographical rudiments
can be memorably infelicitous. One celebrated scholar recently made
much ado about the reprinting of a poetic miscellany many years after its
first appearance, adducing from the title page strong evidence of the original
edition's aesthetic and commercial success. Regrettably, however, the "new
edition" was merely a reissue of sheets that had long been in storage. Such
elementary oversights not only bring down individual arguments, they also
potentially compromise the integrity and reputation of book historical research
as a mode of inquiry.

G. Thomas Tanselle, delivering a lecture on "The History of Books as
a Field of Study," observed that "The kind of work now labeled `histoire
du livre' [which Tanselle characterizes as "the study of the role of printed
books in society"] and the kind called `analytical bibliography' [that is, the
scholarly investigation of "the printing history of individual books"] may
be for the most part associated with different groups of people, but both will
be less fruitful than they might be if they develop as independent disciplines."[50]
A dialogue between these two areas of inquiry would contribute

to book history because the "connection between physical detail [bibliographical
signs] and intellectual content, between analytical bibliography
and textual meaning, has a logical bearing on the role of books in society"
(54, 53).

Tanselle is right to acknowledge that "both will be less fruitful," and so
it is helpful to emphasize that book history might also enrich analytical (and
other varieties of) bibliography as well, since the observation and analysis
of bibliographic codes are always interpretative acts. Like book history,
bibliography—whether descriptive, analytical, enumerative, historical, or
physical—is invariably a critical and critically-laden exercise in historical
interpretation. It is critical in the root-sense of the word: bibliography requires
the repeated exercise of informed judgment. Concomitantly, knowledge
about the production and transmission of individual works (or, in
McKenzie's and McGann's terms, of the particular texts of a work),[51] often
the fundamental stuff of bibliography, can be essential to the conduct of
intellectually rigorous book history. One of the primary lessons at the intersection
of bibliography and book history is that "intellectual content" might
not be so easily equated with "textual meaning" apart from all other bibliographic
codes in the text, because the book is a complex system of signifiers,
all of which contribute to the ways in which meaning is made.[52] In this regard,
the idea of the book as a volume (volumen), a capacious container of
many and varied codes, is particularly appealing.

The rigorous and creative application of bibliographical knowledge to
book-historical research is, in my view, the single most important desideratum
for book history today. It is difficult to imagine how a sociology of texts that
does not integrate the contributions of bibliography could make an important
and lasting contribution to book history.

6. Understanding What the Gaps in Our Knowledge Might Mean

When in the late 1980s D. F. McKenzie first proposed the idea of undertaking
a multi-volume history of the book in Britain, a number of colleagues wondered
whether the state of our knowledge was as yet sufficiently advanced for
such a project.[53] Some fifteen years later, the question is still highly appropriate.
The lacunae in CHBB5 are far from trivial. They include: the sale of

Irish books in Northern England, especially post 1760; the market for Scottish
books in Ireland; the importation of books to the colonies from Scotland,
Northern England, and Ireland; and a range of issues concerning piracy
(discussed in section 7, below). Although some chapters in the volume reflect
outstanding scholarly achievement, others—often of no less merit—indicate
that many more specialist studies are needed. Nevertheless, it is the hope of
the General Editors and of the volume editors that book history will benefit
from the Cambridge History both as a source of knowledge and as a stimulus
to further investigation.

In The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Robert Darnton indicates
that "we need to know more about the world behind the books" and
offers an important series of questions that would help lead book historians
to that knowledge:

Commenting on Darnton's professed ignorance, John Sutherland is regrettably
imperceptive when he claims, "This questionnaire tacitly admits to
vast areas of academic incompetence."[55] Book historians—perhaps more than
researchers in traditional fields or even in longer-established interdisciplinary
approaches—should be mindful of avoiding the "Sutherland syndrome":
a false belief that the admission of ignorance ought automatically be equated
with incompetence. In the case of Darnton, the charge is absurd. The real
danger, however, is that book historians—either suffering from the syndrome,
or fearing the aspersions of those who are afflicted—will themselves be inclined
neither to admit publicly what they do not know, nor distinguish
among the several causes of their nescience.

As I see it, there are three principal classes to consider: 1) errors of perception,
synthesis or analysis, or the failure to adduce what is already known;
in such cases the investigator is ordinarily unaware of his or her ignorance;
2) a lack of knowledge that points toward future research which seems
tractable, but has yet to be undertaken;[56] and 3) ignorance arising from gaps
in the historical record—surviving documentation is so often incomplete and
much that we would be delighted to study is wholly absent. The destruction
of vital Stationers' Company records in "the Blitz" of 1940 is merely a

recent instance of such losses attributable to a variety of causes, including:
the Great Fire of London in 1666; the intentional destruction of correspondence
(as when James Dodsley burned the letters of his bookselling
brother, Robert); the use of old business documents as wastepaper for bookbinding;
and the sacrifice of old letters and ledgers as "Martyrs of Pies and
Reliques of the Bum."[57] It does us no good to mourn for all that is lost,
however, any more than it did for Thomasina Coverly to weep for the library
at Alexandria in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. [58] Instead, scholars do a service to
their colleagues, present and future, by indicating when their experience
teaches them that particular instances of scholarly ignorance fall into one of
these classes. In A Nation and its Books: A History of the Book in Wales, the
editors Jones and Rees are frank about areas in which "much of the basic
research has yet to be undertaken."[59] Such admissions manifest responsible
scholarship, rather than incompetence. The candid disclosure of what we
do not know, and the careful assessment of the reasons for our incomprehension,
can help direct future investigations and lead us to more adequate
understandings.

7. The De Facto Culture of Intellectual Property

Scrutinizing the contents of dictionaries, encyclopedias, poetic miscellanies,
magazines, and other works teaches us that, for all the careful tracing of legal
cases that scholars have done, we still know very little about the de facto
culture of "intellectual property" as it has operated in the book trade.[60]
Although this regrettable gap in our knowledge obtains not only for the
hand-press period in Britain, but also internationally and during later
periods as well, eighteenth-century England makes a good case in point.[61]
Biographical dictionaries and other eighteenth-century works of reference
typically recycled information and sometimes reprinted large passages from
earlier works with little or no alteration—viz., the Biographia Britannica
(1747-66) borrowed extensively from the General Dictionary (1734-41),
and Robert Shiells' Lives of the Poets (1753) used material from both of

these—without any known accusations of plagiarism being made.[62] As
Ephraim Chambers stated in the article on "Plagiary" in his Cyclopaedia
(1728):

Even Johnson's highly celebrated Prefaces Biographical and Critical to the
Works of the English Poets (1779-81) is very free in its use of sources—the
great biographer routinely fails to acknowledge evident debts to published
works, especially biographical dictionaries and other works of reference.[64]
Johnson's work was, in turn, plagiarized almost immediately.[65]

Just as with reference books, so too are many eighteenth-century verse
miscellanies closely related to one or more earlier publications, though the
degree to which `new' miscellanies are indebted to antecedent collections has
not been generally recognized. Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great
Britain and Ireland Re-Published from the Collection of G. Colman and B.
Thornton . . . with Considerable Alterations, Additions, and Improvements
(1785) provides an illustrative example. Chantel Lavoie has revealed that
the anonymous editors of the 1785 text "borrowed heavily [without acknowledgment]
from a four-volume collection compiled by James Harrison and
titled The Lady's Poetical Magazine, or Beauties of British Poetry," published
in 1781-82. Moreover, "Harrison had, in turn, borrowed [also without
acknowledgment] older material from the first edition of Poems by Eminent
Ladies (1755) to include in The Lady's Poetical Magazine."[66] Thus, the 178182
collection utilized the 1755 anthology, the 1785 version of which used
material from the 1781-82 volumes. It is plausible that the 1785 compilers
may have elected to remain anonymous because they owned neither the Colman

and Thornton text, nor the works they had arrogated from Harrison.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, such cases of unauthorized appropriation
appear to be more the rule than the exception.[67] The same is true
for song books and jest books; even many grammars and other school books,
as well as almanacs—all of which potentially constituted a highly lucrative
market—were regularly plagiarized.

Imaginative works too manifest an attitude toward intertextuality and
literary borrowing that suggests we need to think beyond the body of statutes
and legal cases regarding copyright if we are to develop a more realistic
understanding of how copyright and its attendant notions of intellectual
property actually functioned in the period. The famous diatribe against
plagiarism in Book 5, Chapter 1 of Tristram Shandy—which turns out to
have been plagiarized from Robert Burton, who himself stole passages of his
text from others—is merely one of the more memorable instances of such
borrrowing. Jonathan Swift, who may have inspired Sterne's clever joke, also
mockingly implicated himself as a plagiarist in his Verses on the Death of
Dr. Swift when the persona claims about the Dean, "But what he writ was
all his own" (Poems 493, line 318)—a line stolen almost verbatim from Sir
John Denham's 1667 poem, On Mr. Abraham Cowley (l. 30). More seriously,
Alexander Pope was routinely accused by his rivals and enemies of "plagiary,"[68]
often with good cause.[69]

Most importantly in this vein, there is a tremendous gap in our knowledge
about piracy—especially in northern England and Scotland, and so-called
"moral piracy" in Ireland.[70] So much basic research is yet to be done
concerning who the pirates were, the extent of their enterprise, the distribution
networks they employed (domestic, foreign, and colonial), and the nature
of their economic impact. The paucity of our knowledge on these fronts effectively
means that there is a significant flaw in our working models of the
ways in which the book trade operated in the British Isles, c. 1750-1830. The
work of other book historians and the nature of piracy itself suggests that the
de facto culture of intellectual property remains an inadequately understood
aspect of book history across most periods and in most places. Although I have
not investigated the matter in detail, it seems that, for eighteenth-century
Britain at least, the gaps in our knowledge come from all three classes of
ignorance: a failure to synthesize what is already known, a promising area of
research that has not been properly investigated, and, inevitably, lacunae in
the surviving historical record, especially with regard to clandestine activities.

8. Some Problems Involved in Reading as a Subject of Book History

The subject of reading presents a number of significant problems for book
historians, perhaps the most obvious among them being controversies over
assessing literacy—do signatures in marriage registers really signify functional
literacy?[71] —and the nature of the so-called "reading revolution."[72]
Yet, there is a more fundamental and not wholly insurmountable difficulty in
studying the history of reading. It may well be impossible to write a representative
history of reading based on the experiences of individuals because the
overwhelming majority of reading events are ephemeral and those that are
recorded are necessarily atypical. How can we develop historically sound approaches
to scrutinizing reading practices when most direct evidence of actual
reading is merely anecdotal?

Alastair Fowler approaches the same problem from a slightly different
angle, noting that scholars seeking to establish a history of reading will
"soon encounter an insuperable difficulty: the absence of data." Accordingly,
a line of historical inquiry that depends on the close examination of an individual's
reading practices—what Fowler styles a "minute phenomenology of
reading"—ultimately "depends on a nonexistent history of sensibility and
psychological events" and, hence, "is not very practical." "In the end," he
argues, "the only reader responses we can know in detail are our own." For
Fowler, there is no authentic way to "resolve the impasse of historical
discontinuity."[73]

Despite the great enthusiasm among book historians for the study of reading,
Andrew Hadfield, co-editor of A History of the Irish Book, Volume III,
The Irish Book in English 1550-1800 (OUP, 2006), pursues a similar line
of thought, writing of "the sort of problems that plague anyone working in
the now ubiquitous but rather amorphously defined interdisciplinary subject,

the `history of the book.' " Above all, he notes the simple truth that
"Evidence left behind by readers is generally scanty, and all too often scholars
are left trying to work out what the reader intended when he or she—if an
identity is known, let alone a date—underlined a particular passage."[74] As
such observations suggest, the value of collecting records of readers' experiences—often
isolated and invariably anomalous—may be rather suspect.[75]
It might well be desirable to know what a person read, especially if we can
learn the salient facts of that reader's life (age, gender, occupation, education,
income, social contacts, etc.), but to know how that person read is almost always
historically unrecoverable.

Leah Price also evinces concern about how historians think about reading
practices and the historical evidence they find. "Familiarity makes reading
appear deceptively knowable," she observes. On the one hand, "[t]he most
impassioned reading destroys its own traces" because it goes unrecorded,
while on the other, "studies drawing on autobiography or marginalia alike
are biased toward certain kinds of readers and styles of reading."[76] Even
potentially more comprehensive projects such as the Reading Experience
Database "are inevitably opportunistic in their cherry-picking of decontextualized
`reading experienes' from sources whose own structure and content
differ widely" with the result that historians of reading may be "like magpies"
(313).

These difficulties are of genuine consequence and too often have not been
sufficiently acknowledged. Thus, we may reasonably ask: given the frequently
suspect nature of the evidence and the troublesome ways that book historians
have sometimes used it, how might we conduct research in this important
area with a greater sense of intellectual responsibility? However formidable
the evidential problems we have been considering, the epistemological predicaments
presented by the surviving traces of individual readers' experiences

do not mean that we should abandon the history of reading as an area of inquiry.
No less an accompished historian and historiographer than Carlo
Ginzburg has argued for the admissibility of incomplete and even distorted
evidence, provided that the interpreters of such information have a thorough
understanding of its limitations. "Without a thorough analysis of its distortions
(the codes according to which it has been constructed and/or it must
be perceived)," he insists, "a sound historical reconstruction is impossible."[77]

In addition, it would seem profitable to develop a history of constructing
and construing meaning not merely from the isolated and evidentially problematic
recorded reactions of readers, but also from bibliography and publishing
history, from the ways in which material forms—bibliographical codes of
many kinds—both effect and affect meanings. The purposive actions of various
agents in the book trade are traceable in tens of thousands of books and
are typically calculated to influence their benign reception in as strong a
manner as possible. Accordingly, we ought to ground our reading and
reception studies more thoroughly in physical bibliography, as well as
in the analysis of book advertisements, reviews, promotional campaigns,
and the like. This is not to say that such studies could be altogether free from
problems of historical interpretation, but at least they would rest on sound
epistemological foundations. Understanding that the book, every book, is an
integrated system of signifiers and that the bibliographical codes embodied in
a particular book most often reflect interpretations and decisions about the
audience, meaning, and cultural significance of that book, some of the most
adept book historians have convincingly delineated the relationships between
forms and meanings. Striving to exhibit the complex relationships
between texts and readers in the production of meaning, Roger Chartier has
demonstrated that "the editorial history of Molièré's comedies has a significant
impact on the reconstruction of contemporary understandings of them,"
and D. F. McKenzie has done much the same for the plays of Congreve.[78]
Both scholars employ a synthetic method, embracing "textual criticism, the
history of the book, and cultural sociology" to show how the presentation of
the text is calculated to affect its reception.[79] If the history of reading and reception

were more nearly allied to the study of the material book, we might
well find that these areas of inquiry are mutually informing.[80]

Moreover, the study of how readers make meanings should not be primarily
confined to scrutinizing individual reader responses. Rather, in keeping
with the need to develop a richer and more complex sociology of texts
(see section 4 above), book historians might profitably focus their efforts on
reading as a social practice that is conditioned by other socially constituted
practices and institutions—just as it, in turn, exercises an influence on them.
Recognizing that even the most solitary reader is, inescapably, engaged in a
culturally situated pursuit, we may perceive that there is a tremendous scholarly
labor to be undertaken in locating reading within the complex forms of
social life that condition this activity at any given moment in history. Accordingly,
we ought to seek a better understanding of how the practices and institutions
of reading and reception are imbedded in and informed by larger
cultural and political structures. So situated in the sociology of texts, the
study of reading holds a scholarly potential commensurate with its difficulty
as an area of investigation.

9. Numbers

"Follow the money" is an excellent adage for book historians. The production,
distribution, and consumption of texts are almost always co-determined
by commercial and/or economic factors. Whether we are calculating the area
of pastureland needed by a medieval monastery operating a scriptorium in
order to maintain a sufficient number of animals for parchment production
(surplus to requirements for food to feed hungry scribes), or are factoring in
the cost of severance packages when Bertlesmann has acquired a publisher of
scientific journals in North America, we cannot think very far about the
transmission of texts before we bump into matters of money because, invariably,
money matters. Books are business. It seems strange, then, that so few
book historians possess economic knowledge, while the rest of us know almost
nothing about prices, income, capital, markets and consumer behavior, financing,
taxation, money and banking, and other rudiments of elementary
macro- and microeconomics.[81] And who among our number knows very much

about the history of accounting or the evolution of business practices in our
respective periods? If commercial motivations dominate the world of print
production and dissemination, then how is it that we so often give them such
scant attention?[82] Perhaps for a start we should all resolve to read G. R.
Hawke's Economics for Historians (1980).[83]

In studying a business in which capital outlay was so substantial, credit
was routinely extended to customers for six months or more, return on investment
was slow to accrue, and bankruptcy was common, it is particularly
important to recognize how changes in financing and credit arrangements
fostered or hindered growth. This is especially true if we are to understand
how adjustments in capitalization drove the shift from bookselling to publishing
in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In a similar
vein, we have yet to develop satisfactory accounts of the book trade's behavior
in—and varying responses to—the well-documented fluctuations of national
economics.[84] Although there is a dearth of surviving business and banking
records for the book trade in the long eighteenth century, most of what we
do have has not yet been subject to a thoroughgoing financial analysis. Nor
has much comparative or synthetic work been done either to document the
finances of agents in the trade,[85] or to develop more complete models of how
businesses actually worked.

Most scholars in the humanities, including many book historians, are
virtually innumerate, a liability that affects far more than our general inability
to deal adequately with economics and with business records. Much
book-historical work manifests a statistical innocence that impoverishes otherwise
valuable research. If we are to understand scholarly writings that presuppose
the reader knows the rudiments of statistics, then we need to progress beyond
the definitions of mode, median, and mean.[86] Most of us are not at home

with such basic concepts as frequency distributions, categorical independent
variables, or continuous independent variables, much less multiple regression
models. Who among us can interpret a chi-square test, something a first-year
undergraduate biologist or sociologist would be expected to do? Roderick
Floud's An Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians should be
required reading.[87] It would also be salutary for more book historians to be
familiar with SPSS, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, the most
commonly utilized computer program for basic statistical analysis.[88] More
advanced scholars examining large bodies of data, such as the ESTC, would
probably benefit from developments in sampling theory, though in such
cases close collaboration with a professional statistician is probably required.[89]

One of the chief methodological lacunae in Anglo-American bibliography
and book history also seems to stem, in part, from our discomfort with
numbers. This oversight in need of redress is our failure to interrogate the
bibliographical tools at our disposal—most especially the ESTC—so that we
know their strengths and limitations. Virtually all book historians routinely
employ enumerative bibliographies for their research, but many apparently
give little thought to the details of inclusion criteria, to problems raised by
varying survival rates, or to economic constraints and other important factors
among the circumstances that produced such research resources.[90]
A
common scientific adage is: "All measurements are wrong, but some are more
wrong than others. The key is to know how wrong your measurement is."

This notion has its corollary in the idea of "tolerance" in engineering.[91]
W. W. Greg has calculated that, of the 11,000 works entered in the Stationers'
Register for 1557-71 and 1576-1640, "6,100 are identified as extant, a percentage
of almost 55.5." Reasoning that "there does not appear any very
strong ground for supposing that entrance or non-entrance affected survival,"
he nevertheless concedes: "it is possible . . . that in the field of ephemeral
publications, where survival is least likely, the proportion of copies entered
may have been somewhat lower."[92] D. F. McKenzie's work indicates that what
the Wing Catalogue (1641-1700) includes "may not be as high as even 60 to
70 percent of the titles and editions actually published."[93] In his examination
of survival rates for ABCs, psalters, and primers from the Stationers' stock in
sample years from 1660-1700, John Barnard has documented enormous
losses: although some 14,000 psalters were printed annually, only four copies
are found in Wing. The loss rates for primers is also astonishingly high: for
the 1676-77 fiscal year, "84,000 passed through the Treasurer's hands," yet
they "are represented in Wing by a single 16mo black-letter copy in the
British Library, dated c. 1670."[94]

My own calculations for British books in the eighteenth century suggest
that, for approximately ten percent of the titles and editions published, not
a single copy exists.[95] Of course, by definition, none of these lost works or
editions is represented in the ESTC, a fact that surely should have a significant
effect on many of our searches.[96] Because loss rates vary widely according

to both format and genre, for certain classes of titles and editions the ESTC
is far off the mark. A great deal more work will need to be done before we
can calibrate the tools we use and, hence, employ them with greater fidelity
to the historical phenomena under investigation.

10. Producing a Printed History and Considering Its Use and Readership

Both the editors and the chapter authors of CHBB5 have felt enormously
constrained by the limitations imposed on us in trying to create a single-volume
history that satisfactorily chronicles the major developments concerning
the book in Britain and its colonies from 1695 to 1830. Chief among these
constraints has been space: the topic of virtually every chapter in the volume
is deserving of at least one substantial monograph. In a few felicitous intances
we already have genuinely impressive book-length studies to which
readers may be directed. Invariably, however, the question of comprehensiveness
versus depth presents itself. We have tried to address this tension in
part by including case studies and providing tables of data about publications
and book-trade personnel. Nevertheless, it is impossible to satisfy the competing
demands of depth and breadth in a wholly satisfactory fashion.

Closely allied to this issue is the question of what a weighty tome in a
multi-volume national history of the book is for: is it a work of ready reference
or a book to be read at some length? Is its chief purpose to provide information,
or to synthesize vast quantities of information into knowledge?
Working in concert with our contributors, Michael Turner and I have tried
to produce a book that would be both a serviceable work of reference and
an engaging text for more extensive reading. Thorough indexing and cross-referencing
have been paramount in making the volume easily navigable
for the reference-minded reader. Although CHBB5 tells the story of the
efflorescence of print culture in Britain during the end of the hand-press
period and chronicles the shift from bookselling to publishing (with its
attendant technological and financial developments), we have imposed no
orthodoxies, nor prescribed any investigative methods; instead, our hope has
always been that a variety of emphases and approaches would reflect the
diversity of book-historical studies as practiced in our day. Invariably, we
have insisted on scholarly rigor and transparency about what remains unknown,
believing that these best serve our readership and the enterprise of
book history.

It seems inevitable that a book historian should ask: what kind of print

product is this and for whom is it intended? Here I must admit to an admixture
of pride and shame: its pitch is authentically scholarly and its price is
genuinely prohibitive, costing c. £110. The first volume of A History of the
Book in America is 662 pages and costs $160 USD; volumes three and four
of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain run to 832 and 920 pages
respectively and are currently priced at the paltry sum of £95.[97] Paradoxically,
then, in Britain and America we have produced national histories of
the book that most book historians cannot afford to own. In contrast, consumers
pay just $50 AUS for the first volume to appear in A History of the
Book in Australia, making the 444-page book well within the reach of both
academics and a popular audience.[98] One way of addressing the problems of
inclusiveness, access, and price is to produce a web-based national history of
the book, which is free to all. Bibliopolis, the electronic national history of
the printed book in the Netherlands from 1460 to the present, offers free
access to a survey of the history of the printed book in the Netherlands (in
158 parts written by 40 book historians); an image database for the Dutch
history of the book ranging from portraits of printers and publishers to
examples of Dutch printing, typefaces, printer's devices, and watermarks;
digitized full texts of the most important book-historical studies; and links
to relevant databases, websites, and electronic catalogues.[99] Managed and
maintained by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, Bibliopolis solves
many of the most pressing problems associated with a printed national history
of the book with sufficient success to make one wonder if books are necessarily
the best medium for publishing national histories of the book.[100]

Volume 5 of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain has more
than forty contributors from eight nations writing on topics ranging from
printed ephemera to antiquarian books. If it is a success, then the whole
will be greater than the mere sum of its individual parts. When the fruit of so
much scholarly labor is presented in the aggregate, the reader may reasonably
expect that new patterns and new understandings will emerge. As one
of its co-editors, I hope that it will be a standard work of reference for many
years to come. As a scholar, however, I look forward to the day when book
history will have developed sufficiently to require an altogether new version.

If the contemporary, educated reader does not find vexing questions as well
as helpful answers in the pages of CHBB5, and if the discerning book historian
is not led to consider some of the historiographical issues mooted here—to
wonder how our historical inquiries might be conducted differently and
better—then the book will not have fulfilled its promise.

Reflecting on the state of Anglo-American book history and on the ways
in which our investigations might develop even greater rigor, creative vision,
and sophistication, we may feel with a growing sense of distress that there is
a great deal of homework each of us needs to do. It may seem daunting that
the demands of book history appear to require a basic knowledge of so many
disciplines and, ideally, fluency in several. Clearly, no scholar, however talented,
could master all the fields that make essential contributions to book-historical
studies. Perhaps, then, it is best that we perceive book history, not
as a discipline that any one of us can command, but rather as a multidisciplinary
practice that is necessarily collaborative. In his seminal essay of 1982,
"What Is the History of Books?," Robert Darnton called attention to the new
coordination of activities among an international group of "historians, literary
scholars, sociologists [and] librarians."[101] The promise of that statement
has yet to be fulfilled, but the need for such collaboration—for a catholic, capacious
approach to our undertaking, for promoting a more communitarian
scholarly sensibility and practice—is surely vital. Book history is an interdisciplinary
endeavor that scholars may creatively undertake together.

One vital aspect of such a collegial enterprise concerns our roles as educators
in the academy. Because the scholar-teacher is perforce always a student as
well, we must instruct and learn from each other, especially as book history
continues to develop apace. At the same time, we bear a delightful responsibility
for educating our students to surpass us. Accordingly, this medley of observations
and reflections from a student of book history with much to learn is
tendered, not as a counsel of despair, but in the hope that it might help to
invigorate the cluster of interdisciplinary practices we call the history of
the book.