The Nature of the Book

Technicians of print and the making of natural knowledge

“…Brock and Meadows suggest that the 'happy accident' that Jonas Davis became the printer of the Linnean Transactions and the Philosophical Magazine (f. 1798) led to Taylor being a scientific printer (20). This was not, however, mere happenstance.…”

“…19 Adrian Johns has recently shown that in the early modern period this was a process fraught with difficulty for scientific authors, and dependent on considerable craft skill. 20 Moreover, as Allan Dooley's study of the printing of literary works in the nineteenth century shows, texts continued to be very significantly shaped by the technologies of printing and the practices of those who used them in the machine-press era. 21 Yet scientific printing in the nineteenth century remains largely unconsidered.…”

Adaptive Reuse : Aspects of Creativity in South Asian Cultural History

“…Help in understanding this complexity might be found in studies concerned with similar historical moments in other geographical and cultural milieus, such as the otherwise controversial hypothesis of A. Johns (Johns 1998), according to which "neither the fixity, nor originality nor piracy could be taken as intrinsic to the body of a text but rather as attributed qualities attached to texts by their users." Comparable to this might be the colophons in the case of the ṚKD and its quotations, which may be taken not so much as factographic statements but rather as acts of aspiration or claims.…”

On synthetic technologies: the book, the university, the Internet

“…3 Second, its preservation is relatively simple, although Adrian Johns points out that the fixity and standardization that we associate with the book were not intrinsic to print but emerged rather as a result of a protracted and often tortuous historical process. 4 Third, as a reproducible product the printed book was accessible to a much larger reading public, though access was initially perceived to be a double-edged sword. It is worth remembering that the literate élite found printing to be a disruptive technology.…”