

William Germano: What Are Books Good For?





[William Germano is dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A longer version of this essay was presented as a talk at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses this summer.]

I've been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what we mean exactly when we say "book." It's a slippery term for a format, a technology, a historical construct, and something else as well....

In the sense of having been around a long time, the book has a long story to tell, one that might be organized around four epochal events, at least in the West. In the beginning was the invention of writing and its appearance on various materials. The second was the development during the first years of the Christian era of the codex—the thing with pages and a cover—first as a supplement and eventually as a replacement for the older technology of the scroll. The third was what we think of as the Gutenberg moment, the European deployment of movable type, in the 15th century. And the fourth is, of course, the digital revolution in the middle of which we find ourselves today.

When we say "book," we hear the name of a physical object, even if we're thinking outside the codex. The codex bound text in a particular way, organizing words into pages, and as a result literally reframed ideas. The static text image on my desktop is the electronic cousin of late antiquity's reading invention. When my screen is still, or when I arrange text into two or four pages, like so much visual real estate, I am replicating a medieval codex, unbinding its beautifully illuminated pages. Yet reading digitally is also a scroll-like engagement—the fact that we "scroll down" connects us to a reading practice that dates back several millennia. One of the things that book historians study is the change in, and persistence of, reading technologies over time, and what those historians have demonstrated is that good technologies don't eradicate earlier good technologies. They overlap with them—or morph, so that the old and the new may persist alongside yet another development. Think Post-its, printed books, PC's, and iPads, all in the same office cubicle.

The book has a long history, but the concept of the "history of the book" is comparatively new. In the 1950s, two Frenchmen—Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin—brought out L'apparition du livre, or, in English, The Coming of the Book, a work of scholarship that became one of the signs marking the arrival of a new scholarly discipline. Book history's objective was analysis of the function of the book in European culture, and since the 1970s, it has continually expanded its scope, emerging as a trading zone among various disciplines, a rare scholarly arena where the work of librarians, archivists, and scholarly publishers can intersect with the work of traditional scholars and theorists, all members of what the economist Fritz Machlup termed the "knowledge industry."...



comments powered by Disqus

Subscribe to our mailing list
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/131819
historynewsnetwork.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-06
29579
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5WF7E5PQKOCHMCHUA7CLPF4YA4E64VRW
<urn:uuid:5f1b6e14-3b46-43ad-b12e-724fc010c6bb>
2015-01-30T22:12:52Z
192.254.214.97
sha1:7N5MY6NHNOBCHVMHB2QU4M7AZIFWIZ4X
<urn:uuid:7c360c0c-9cb9-4f1e-9ae2-9c59add26c7a>
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/131819
length
response
<urn:uuid:e25bb753-9d38-4f43-bfb1-bf22e9397902>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-212-252.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-06
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for January 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf