Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
heard (Chartier 1992, 50).
A text can therefore never be approached purely as only a semantic field (the view that had, Chartier notes caustically, hitherto dominated “not only structuralist criticism in all its variants but also literary theories concerned with reconstructing the modes of reception of works”); rather, “it is necessary to maintain that forms produce meaning, and that even a fixed text is invested with new meaning and being … when the physical form through which it is presented for interpretation changes” (Chartier 1992, 50–51). “The task of the historian”, he argues, ought accordingly to be “to reconstruct the variations that differentiate the ‘readable space’ (the texts in their material and discursive forms) and those which govern the circumstances of their ‘actualization’ (the readings seen as concrete practices and interpretive procedures)” (Chartier 1992, 50). “Authors do not write books”, Chartier (1992, 53) suggests usefully, “they write texts which become objects copied, handwritten, etched, printed, and today computerized.”
Robert Darnton, one of the earliest proponents of book history in North America (although himself primarily a scholar of ancien régime and Enlightenment French print and book histories), concurs with Chartier: “typography as well as style and syntax determine the ways in which texts convey meanings”; any “history of reading” should “take account of the ways that texts constrain readers as well as the ways that readers take liberties with texts” (Darnton 2002, 21; see also Darnton 1990). The suggestion is that historians—indeed, students of culture generally—ought to consider as their proper remit “the text itself, the object that conveys the text, and the act that grasps it” (Chartier 1989, 161). They—we—need to ascertain and describe the material form of any text that readers have encountered, to ask how readers encountered it and what they did with it, and to be alert to how this might have changed from one community (and text) to the next (and the next instantiation of a text) over time. It is in the “gap” between idealised text and materiality, Chartier (1992, 53) insists, that “meaning is constructed”.
Some Anglo-American literary critics who were also textual scholars had in fact been making similar suggestions in the late 1970s and the 1980s. With reference to his own work on Romantic and Victorian poets, for example, Jerome McGann argued that scholars ought to consider not only a literary work’s historical contexts, but also the history of what he called its “textualizations” (McGann 1985, 10; cf. McGann 1991, 9). How, scholars like McGann asked, does the text of a canonical nineteenth-century English poem or novel that is studied by university undergraduates in a scholarly edition differ from the text of the novel encountered by its first readers? To the bibliographer and scholarly editor’s question “how is this text different from this one?”, critics attuned to what was coming to be known as book history added such questions as “how has each instance of publication changed the text and affected the meaning?” Also: how has this text—with or without variation—been rendered a different work by virtue of textual variations, but also through changing format, typography, and different co- or paratexts: those “fringes” or margins of text, images, or other apparatus (cover, blurbs, dedications, glossaries and so on) that constitute, Gérard Genette (1997, 2) argues, “a zone not only of transition but also of transaction”?
Chartier and others in the early wave of influential book historians drew on the methodology of the French Annales school of socio-economic history. A seminal engagement of this school with the history of print came with Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s 1958 L’apparition du livre, translated as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (1976). The field gained its own scholarly journal, the Revue française d’histoire du livre (new series, 1971), and it is worth noting that English has tended to use the form of the direct translation of the French (“history” and “book” both in the singular).2 As Robert Darnton (2002, 10), who did so much to bring together Anglo-American and French bibliographic and historiographic traditions, explains, what these Annales-influenced scholars did was to attempt to “uncover the general pattern of book production and consumption over long stretches of time” rather than to offer detailed bibliographic analysis.
A key call to constitute a break from traditional analytical and descriptive bibliography that had long been a sub-field of literary and historical studies came from an Oxford professor of bibliography and textual criticism, New Zealand scholar Don (D. F.) McKenzie, whose 1985 Panizzi Lectures at the British Library came at a seminal moment in the evolution of book history and helped to constitute the field for a growing number of scholars in the later 1980s. McKenzie (1986, 10) argued that bibliography could not and should not “exclude from its own proper concerns the relation between form, function and symbolic meaning”. As hitherto undertaken in Britain and the United States in particular, bibliography had often merely described the effects of the “technical … processes of transmission”, he contended, but it should hitherto also consider the relationship between these and the “social” processes involved (McKenzie 1986, 13). McKenzie memorably showed the ramifications of this kind of analysis in a detailed account of misreadings of Congreve, including, ironically, in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s influential essay “The intentional fallacy”, which had argued (among other things) that the literary scholar should focus on the text itself (and only on the text). Congreve’s text had become corrupted, McKenzie showed, and changes in the literal appearance of text—of each word’s relative position in the typographical layout of words on the page in successive editions, excerpts and quotations—had a direct bearing on meaning, something that Wimsatt and Beardsley, for all their attention to the “text”, had missed. Variations bore on “the most obvious concerns of textual criticism—getting the right words in the right order”, McKenzie argued; variations suggested the importance of paying attention to “the semiotics of print” (including “the role of typography in forming meaning”) and, crucially, reflected significantly “on the critical theories of authorial intention and reader response” (McKenzie 1986, 21). The important point for McKenzie was to notice how an expanded set of skills, concerns and questions were pushing bibliography in new directions, to what he suggested was perhaps better termed “the sociology of texts”, a sociology that would allow scholars working with texts to do nothing less than uncover “record[s] of cultural change” (McKenzie 1986, 13). Others have made similar claims. David Hall, for example, a leading book-history scholar in the United States, suggested that the emerging field was “predicated on the assumption that the better we understand the production and consumption of books, the closer we come to a social history of culture” (Hall 1996, 1; emphasis added). Using books to tell these kinds of stories has involved considering print not only as produced in a particular society, but as itself “a mediating element in cultural life”, in Joan Rubin’s words (2003, 572).
Two questions follow: how might such an expansive and ambitious task unfold? and how do these formulations conceive of “the book” itself? If book history has never been “just about books”, in the words of Jonathan Rose, a leading historian of reading and popular print cultures in nineteenth-century England, but rather about “the social history of the creation, diffusion, and reception of the written” (Rose 1994, 462; emphasis added), where does one draw the boundaries that mark the field? Heidi Hackel (2005, 4) offers a note of caution, suggesting that while book history denotes a
general approach, which attends to the material details of the production and consumption of books, it is worth exercising more specificity about the points at which one enters the conversation. Even if the codex, rather than the scroll, is the defining object at the center of this discipline, the story of the book clearly begins before Gutenberg.
Darnton’s early answer to the question “What is the history of books?” had been “the social and cultural history of communication by print” (Darnton 2002, 9; emphasis added). Jonathan Rose and Ezra Greenspan, in their introduction to the first issue of Book History, the scholarly journal associated with the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (the foremost international scholarly and professional society for book history), suggested that the field encompassed “the creation, dissemination, and uses of script and print in any medium”, which was to say “the social, cultural, and economic history of authorship, publishing, printing, the book arts, copyright, censorship, bookselling and distribution,