University of Virginia Library

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.