futureofthebook.com
preservation and persistence of the changing book

Introduction

Commentary

Reports

Workshops

Store

Links

Invisible Infrastructure of Book Studies

Rare Books School 2000

The second session of RBS 2000, class #23, took possession of "our" period, 1820 to 1940 in "America". The topic was industrial book production and the instructor was Michael Winship. That is my official report since I would now like to mention an effect of this class.

"Our" period from 1820 to 1940, with most of our focus on the 19th century, included absolute transformations of the industry and business of book production. It included transformations of influence of books on reading modes and transformations of knowledge. In other words, it produced changes of the kind that we observe today. The surprise is that the period produced THE changes that we observe today.

An interesting example of the precedent of 19th century change was in this morning's New York Times, July 1st, 2000. It described the construction of an on-line simulation of P.T. Barnum's American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street. The parallel is drawn that both the Barnum museum and the internet provide admission to a wide variety of curiosities of varying authenticity. Dr. Buckley of Cooper Union was quoted; "Maybe what's uniquely American about Barnum was this effort - he called it democratic, but it might be something else - to bring everybody together, regardless of class background. It was the whole period of the 1840's when I believe its possible to say that a distinct American popular culture was developed...". Other examples of THE changes in the 19th century would be photography and telegraph.

The current influence of digital technologies and communications on the manufacture, reading and meaning of books seems to be only a routine continuation of the revolutions of the 19th century. In the 19th century the Gutenberg revolution of interchangeable and movable type was ended by a counter revolution of text printing from plates. The industrial product of the book was redefined by case construction binding manufacture. The use of books was transformed by a different reading mode; silent, quick and by yourself, tracking off, reader by reader, into an infinity of texts. Also the transmission of knowledge was transformed by invented networks of transportation, information and credit. The only infrastructure left intact for transformation in our own time was the transmission of concepts by objects or physical books.

Because of all this churn and transformation of the 19th century book, it is not surprising that the study of books has also been disturbed. The history of reading evolved. New angles of approach include (1) study of reading as intellectual history, (2) study of the history of the common reader and the studies of literacy, (3) study of the text itself as a matrix for the presumed reader, (4) investigation of the role of gender and evaluation of reading as medium of cultural domination, (5) contrariwise, the role of reading as an act of domination by the reader who appropriates the text and (6) the study of ways in which reading works among other negotiations of society and how reading shifted from a family activity to a corporate activity.

The shape of the discipline of bibliographic studies morphed from an amateur , unstructured discipline devoted to an individual's passion for books to an academic discipline with systematic goals. The academic achievement of the discipline is exemplified by Fredson Bowers and his Principles of Bibliographical Description whose techniques could be applied in all sorts of cases all the way to Nixon tape transcription dating. Now bibliographical studies are entering an even wider domain. Moving beyond a focus on a book as an item in isolation to the study of the book as merchandise and as a component of society. This history of the book approach took hold of the field at the 1980 Rare Books and Manuscripts conference and is the current pausing in the evolution of the study of the book.

Michael Winship mentioned the arrow of time and how satisfactory it was that we never need to relive past experiences. To me that arrow also suggested a dart of bibliographical study which moves focus downstream from production of books to use of books to the meaning of books. For example, the dart prods the enclave of the book arts, artists making books, who need to know that the aesthetic product is not achieved at the exhibit opening, but downstream with the digestion of literacies. Book arts must pass through the body to acquire an ethereal state. Or, for example, the dart prods the practice of the preservation of books from the repair and restoration of books to the vortex of the dynamics of original and copy, surrogate and source and to any grip on the continuing role of the source original in the context of digital delivery.

But these are trivial examples as compared to moving all bibliographical studies, in a big boat, downstream. Down stream bibliographical studies will not necessarily be connected with books. The discipline will be more of an epistemology of the mechanisms of the book that enable the transmission of knowledge. These are mechanisms of extraction and formalization of works otherwise diffused across a synthetic neural web and mechanisms of packaging these works and miniature tools for sorting and reassembling units.

In the future, bibliographical students will be subversive cable repair types from "Brazil". Once culture is downstream in opened ocean, book study will be a subversive science of navigation.

It is not realized that librarians rule the world. They do this with a clever strategy of deflecting their political power from themselves to the systems that they create and it is those systems that control access to information and knowledge. Bibliographers are like librarians taken one step further. Bibliographers deflect political power from themselves and from the systems that they create. Instead they send their power to energize the phenomenon of the transmission of knowledge. Bibliographers are the only ones second guessing if the transmission of knowledge is real. This is an immense cultural responsibility for such a fringe enclave.

An Invisible Infrastructure Story

One day Michael was at work in the American Antiquarian Society Library. There he noticed Isaiah Thomas' number one press and undeneath it stereotype plates. It turns out that the press was used in the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in a printing technology exposition. The wooden press was set up to contrast with the steam presses of the day and a facsimilie of 18th century printing was run off. Presumably the printers were in appropriate costume but they printed from plates. These has been produced so naturally that it was evidentally not realized that the earlier printing was done from the movable, set type.