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Roger Chartier and Adrian Johns exchange remarks on Book Studies

Roger Chartier kept a capacity audience enchanted though out his three hour lecture and discussion Friday at the Newberry Library in Chicago (01.18.02). The presentation, “Textual Criticism and the History of the Book: Literature and the Printing Shop (16th - 17th Centuries)” described Miguel Cervantes awareness of printing occupations and their metaphorical as well as direct relevance to the production of literature. The roles of composition, casting off, working the press, correcting and editing, as undertaken in the print shop reflect, as well, the roles of the author.

With wonderful intonations, Roger Chartier described, from the book, the arrival of Don Quixote in a town where he notices a print shop. He and Sancho enter to find two books being printed. One is a book of piety, but the other is “The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part Two”. Don Quixote takes offense at this prescription of the future and decides not to fulfill the adventures described in Part Two. Specifically he will not win the tournament at Saragossa or be shut up in a mad house at Toledo.

This scene from the novel provides insight not only into Cervantes creative ability but also into the interplay possibilities in the fictional narrative which he developed. Chartier extends such discovery to the field of textual criticism and book studies. Book history “has too long been obsessed with the given text as a purified ideal.” Cervantes transactions with in his own picaresque narrative are negotiations of text specifically providing multiple pathways.

The field of book studies will only encounter further transactions of the given meaning as the text is observed, downstream, in its receptions by readers. Crossing this threshold to readers’ reception, Adrian Johns, University of Chicago, asked specifically how the early 17th century reader was aware of the influence of the activities with text and modifications of text in the print shop.

Roger Chartier responded that one good evidence was the readers’ response to punctuation which typographic conventions and print shop practice specifically imposed. “The exclamation mark and the question mark were initially prompts to inflection of the recited text". These eventually influenced meaning. Likewise commas, periods and other devices of typography were both imposed by the print shop and assimilated into the meanings conveyed to the readers. Punctuation served as a “musical notation for the composition” and is an evidence for conducting of the reader by devises of the press room; an invisible infrastructure imposed by typographic composing, correcting, editing and locking up the type.

Over 20 University of Iowa book studies students were in the audience for the Charier presentation. Some of us also participated in a tour of the Conservation Lab at the Newberry and a visit to the Joan Flasch book art collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Doro Boheme, curator of the Joan Flasch collection, discussed exchanges of vending machine exhibition arrays and Gary Frost presented a collection of letters of Ed Flood to the collection. The Newberry Conservation tour included a special display of a rebindings including the “Speculum; Mirror of Salvation”, an important Flemish illuminated manuscript of the later fifteenth century, as well as a collection of the tracts of Moses David. (One of the bowling pins has fallen off and a number of the six-shooters are missing.)