Robert Darnton, “First Steps Toward a History of Reading“

Both familiar and strange, [reading] is an activity that we share with our ancestors yet can never be the same as what they experienced. We may enjoy the illusion of stepping outside of time in order to make contact with authors who lived centuries ago. But even if their texts have come down to us unchanged – a virtual impossibility, considering the evolution of layout and of books as physical objects – our relation to those texts cannot be the same as that of readers in the past. Reading has a history. But how can we recover it?

Darnton suggests that scholars writing the history of reading pursue answers to these five questions: How was reading discussed or portrayed at different times and in different places? How was reading learned? What did readers write about their reading either in diaries or as marginalia? How was meaning construed by readers? How did the typographical features of print direct or at least influence the experience of reading? These are, of course, very basic questions, but they are ones we do not yet know the full answers to.

The history of reading is something I’ve been doing a bit of work in, myself.

Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?“

One can easily lose sight of the larger dimensions of the enterprise because book historians often stray into esoteric byways and unconnected specializations. Their work can be so fragmented, even within the limits of the literature on a single country, that it may seem hopeless to conceive of book history as a single subject, to be studied from a comparative perspective across the whole range of historical disciplines. But books themselves do not respect limits either linguisteic or national. They have often been written by authors who belonged to an international republic of letters, composed by printers who did not work in their native tongue, sold by booksellers who operated across national boundaries, and read in one language by readers who spoke another. Books also refuse to be contained within the confines of a single discipline when treated as objects of study. Neither history nor literature nor economics nor sociology nor bibliography can do justice to all the aspects of the life of a book. By its very nature, therefore, the history of books must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method. But it need not lack conceptual coherence, because books belong to circuits of communicaiton that operate in consistent patterns, however complex they may be. By unearthing those circuits, historians can show that books do not merely recount history; they make it.

John Feather, “The Book in History and the History of the Book“:

The history of the book is built up, like all social history, from bricks, each complete in itself, but each fulfilling its true role only when it is linked with others. If it is indeed true that the book, and the written or printed word it contains, is central to our history, then it follows that it is also central to the study and writing of history. Our understanding of the past, which is the ultimate objective of all history, will be severely impaired if we do not recognize this crucial fact … The perimiters of book history are defined by the perimeters of the printed word itself and if we accept, as surely we must, that we live in a culture whose development has been based on the transmission and understanding of words, then the history of the book is as fundamental to history as is the book itself to the culture whose history we seek to learn.

Those of you in the KC area might be interested in the following. Please forward as appropriate:

Continue reading →