University of Virginia Library

I

That artifacts are at the core of book history and that their study is an
expected activity may seem self-evident, but those contentions have also been
widely resisted. To set the stage for the discussion that follows, it is useful
first to consider some recent reactions to them. These examples are not intended
as a general criticism of the scholars involved, all of whom have
contributed significantly to our understanding. But they do suggest that a
respect for the centrality of artifacts and their study is not always the guiding
principle of work on the subject and that these statements from prominent
sources may have encouraged other researchers in less favorable directions.

Such rejections come from some of the most widely recognized voices in
the field of book history itself. Robert Darnton's put-down of those who
analyze original artifacts has become well known. In The Business of Enlightenment:
A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 (1979)
he writes, "Step into any rare book room and you will find aficionados
savoring bindings, epigones contemplating watermarks, érudits preparing
editions of Jane Austen; but you will not run across any ordinary, meat-and-potatoes
historian attempting to understand the book as a force in
history" (p. 2). Cathy N. Davidson illustrates the phenomenon in a different
way. In her book Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in
America (1986) she discusses the number of copies of Susanna Rowson's
1791 novel Charlotte [Temple] that were printed (p. 17), and she appends a
note that begins, "Few early American publishers kept press figures and
even fewer press records survive to the present" (p. 269, n. 9). For what she
calls an "excellent discussion" of "the problem" of this lack of extant publishers'
records she refers the reader to two essays by G. Thomas Tanselle.
But that reference reveals an incomplete understanding of artifacts in several
ways. First, neither article talks about publishers' records, not even to
lament their absence, as more direct familiarity with the Tansellean artifacts
presumably would have revealed. One of the items, Tanselle's essay
"Press Figures in America: Some Preliminary Observations" (from Studies
in Bibliography 19 [1966]) is interesting in another regard as well. Davidson

seems to interpret the "press figures" of its title as referring to the sales
figures of a publisher instead of to the arabic numerals or other symbols
inserted at the bottoms of pages to designate responsibility for printing
particular formes of the sheets. In so doing she not only suggests a lack of
understanding about the physical features of the books she is discussing but
also misses completely the point of the article she praises: that the physical
books themselves can reveal things about the people who produced them.

A couple of publications in 2002 designed specifically for classes in book
history also show the tendency to ignore the physicality of books. In The
Book History Reader, with its proprietary and pre-emptive definite article,
the Editors' Introduction by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery begins
by saying that "Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the
study of the nature of books in Anglo-American circles was dominated by a
preoccupation with the physical materiality of books." Without elaborating
what that might actually mean, it immediately reassures its readers that the
threat posed by such study has greatly diminished: "this tradition of scholarly
endeavour" is "still utilized today to a certain extent in courses on
bibliographic methods," but "Book history studies has since evolved . . ."
(p. 7). Also that year the University of Massachusetts Press, the American
Antiquarian Society, and The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress
co-published a "book history" anthology (edited by Scott E. Casper,
Joanne D. Chaison, and Jeffrey D. Groves) that included the word artifacts
in its title: Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary.
One approaches the book with curiosity about how it will manage
to incorporate physical objects, and in fact it does not. Artifacts here refers
not to the objects themselves, or even to the texts of the particular objects
under consideration, but rather to quotations from writings about those
objects and texts. This emphasis on something other than the actual books
is subtle but persistent: the Preface has things backwards, for instance,
when it says, "Engaging book history in the classroom demands close attention
to the products of print culture: books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements,
and so on" (p. vii). A culture characterized as "print" arises
from, can only arise from, the existence of printed materials; it is not that
some great cultural shift to print culture occurred and then printed objects
started to appear. The reluctance to consider printed objects as foundational
also pervades the opening essay by Robert A. Gross, entitled "Texts for the
Times: An Introduction to Book History," where in the first paragraph he
identifies the field under investigation not as books themselves but rather as
"the study of communication through writing and print" (p. 1). His account
of the pre-history of that field invokes caricatures of earlier workers, among
whom he includes "bibliographers, collectors, printers, and publishers":
"We hope," he says, quoting Febvre and Martin, "to establish how and why
the printed book was something more than the triumph of technical ingenuity"
(p. 2).

Scholars not consciously pursuing "book history," but whose interests
overlap with those who do, have likewise been reluctant to grant respect to

printed artifacts. The great collector James M. Osborn sought items of "evidential
value," a phrase that a biographer of his says "runs like a leit-motif
through . . . [his] conversations about books and manuscripts."[4] According
to Osborn, "only unique copies or books with annotations can be considered
to offer the kind of evidential value possessed by manuscripts," and he distinguished
the "kinds of printed books appropriate in a collection of evidence."[5]
Given the influence that a collector of his stature wielded, it is
especially regrettable that he did not recognize that all printed books can
supply the evidence he so valued, provided one knows how to read them. I
happen to have benefited personally from that shortcoming of his, for features
of a discarded copy of Pope's Dunciad that I obtained from a dealer
distributing Osborn's unwanted books proved the key to unraveling a mystery
about Pope's revisions in The Dunciad Variorum of 1729.[6] While
acknowledging a collector's prerogative to focus on an area of interest, one
can nonetheless think that the world's collective understanding would have
been greater had Osborn viewed books differently and recognized the value
of keeping this book and others in his own collection.

In a call for papers for a special number of PMLA entitled "The History
of the Book and the Idea of Literature" (to be published in January 2006)
the framers of the invitation encourage potential contributors to develop
articles that reflect our new understanding that "print" is above all "a
form of social behavior located in encounters with the published word that
define both a public life and a private subjectivity."[7] Whatever that might
mean, it is seen as superseding "an earlier study of books as mere repositories
of canonical texts, or as aesthetic objects, or as `evidence' for positivist bibliographic
scholarship." The genre of the call for papers exempts it from
some other MLA requirements—such as documentation, which might, for
instance, identify those past scholars who supposedly argued that books are
"mere repositories of canonical texts." The solicitation slips in what has
become a cliché in such discussions, that bibliographical scholarship is
"positivist"—a term never explained, but conveniently never needing to
be, for we all supposedly know that "positivist" means something negative.
If contributors heed the guidance of the call for papers, the special number
of the journal is unlikely to devote much attention to the physicality of
books.

In 2001 the Council on Library and Information Resources, or CLIR,
issued a report entitled The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force

on the Artifact in Library Collections. [8] The final version followed a draft
that was publicly circulated and the subject of hearings at half a dozen or
so major research institutions. According to the organizers, it was only at
the last stop, the University of Virginia, that questions arose about the core
concept of the report, the definition of the title word artifact. As a result
of that interchange, some of the most outlandish portions were cut—for instance
the contention that "the text [of a printed book] does not vary among
copies"; that there is only "one fixed text" of a work, which "Readers may
find . . . in hard cover or soft cover; Russian, Spanish, English, or many other
languages; edited or unabridged;" that "there is only one `true text' " of
War and Peace; and consequently—and this is the point that the statements
seemed created to support—that not all forms of the text need to be saved
(p. 13).[9] But the audience was unable to persuade this task force representing
more than two hundred academic libraries in the United States and Canada
that all printed items—or even the beverage can on the table in the meeting
room—are artifacts. As a result, the final report speaks of factors that promote
some printed materials to "artifact status" (as, for instance, on p. 23).
The practical implications are great. When libraries reproduce printed items
in another medium, originals that are of "rare and of artifactual value"
should be retained, but "Items that are common, such as journals, and
that have content value but little artifactual value" need not be. One suggestion
of the report is that everything printed before 1801 has artifactual
value and should be saved, but after that date only some printed objects
have such value and thus can be retained selectively. The problem with the
arbitrariness represented by that date (which seems based simply on the
distance of two centuries, a boundary that is always moving) is compounded
by an unwarranted confidence in the ability to identify (irrevocably, because
items discarded usually cannot be retrieved) the needs of future generations.
Among other criteria the report identifies as "best practice" (p. 10) for determining
what books are saved is their "evidential value" (perhaps the
legacy of Osborn's approach), including whether the object "demonstrate[s]
. . . the printing history of the item" (p. 94). As a physical object there is no
way that a book cannot bear witness to its own history, yet one of the most
influential bodies in the library community has lent its support to the view
that this is not necessarily the case.

A teacher of my acquaintance often begins a course by ripping apart a
book in front of his shocked students, aiming to challenge any sentimental
notions they might harbor about books. Unlike the authors of the CLIR

report, he doesn't deny that the object of his destruction is inherently an
artifact. But despite the effectiveness of this dramatic pedagogical demonstration
for the point he wishes to make, the gesture encourages an attitude
similar to that of the CLIR recommendations and preempts the chance to
instill an even more important lesson from the classroom prop: how much
it is that any book, even one not deemed worthy of retention, can reveal.