University of Virginia Library

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.