“What Is the History of Books?” Revisited

Abstract

Having accepted the invitation to revisit my essay of 1982, “What Is the History of Books?”, I find that I can do it only in the first person singular and therefore must ask to be excused for indulging in some autobiographical detail. I would also like to make a disclaimer: in proposing a model for studying the history of books twenty-four years ago, I did not mean to tell book historians how they ought to do their jobs. I hoped that the model might be useful in a heuristic way and never thought of it as comparable to the models favored by economists, the kind in which you insert data, work it over, and arrive at a bottom line. (I do not believe that bottom lines exist in history.) It seemed to me in 1982 that the history of books was suffering from fissiparousness: experts were pursuing such specialized studies that they were losing contact with one another. The esoteric elements of book history needed to be integrated into an overview that would show how the parts could connect to form a whole—or what I characterized as a communications circuit. The tendency toward fragmentation and specialization still exists.

Information Systems History: What is History? What is is History? What is History? … and Why Even Bother with History?

“…The information revolution of the late twentieth century has spawned a large number of studies of the manual technology revolution in organizations, commencing in the corporate sector, a century earlier (Beniger, 1986;Yates, 1989;Heide, 2009;Krajewski, 2011). The communications revolution of the mid-twentieth century onwards served as a backdrop, if not a stimulus, to efforts that pulled from relative obscurity, in terms of the priorities historians had been expressing, the print revolution that began in the fifteenth century (Eisenstein, 1979), and its subsequent effect on science (Shapin, 1998), as well as on distribution networks from publisher to bookshop, to what Irwin (1957) conceptualized as the 'golden chain' of library provision, and what Darnton (1982) called the 'life cycle' of the book.…”

Old v. New Journalism and the Public Sphere; or, Habermas Encounters Dallas and Stead

“…10 The articles appeared in the wake of Stead's most notorious foray into simplified form because the distribution of journals tends to be so much more streamlined than that of bound volumes, the print medium on which he largely focuses. 12 As noted by…”

(Im)politeness between copy-editors and translators: Working from different islands?

“…Authorship and the interaction between the author and other agents has been thoroughly discussed (see e.g. Darnton, 1982;Love, 2002;McGann, 1992;Stillinger, 1991). In translation studies, the term "multiple translatorship" (Jansen & Wegener, 2013) has been coined to account for the collaborative nature of many, if not most, translated works.…”