The Archeology
of Text:
A Rationale for
Preserving and Studying Collections of Old Books
Arnie Sanders,
English Department, Goucher College (1st Edition, 1/23/07; Current Rev.
04/30/2008 10:28:27 AM)
Now, as never
before since the invention of moveable type printing, literacy is changing. We
must study old books because “literacy technologies,” the ways we create and use
texts, are being revolutionized. Most scholars accept that revolution as an
accomplished fact, but it ultimately may lead to more dramatic psychological and
cultural changes in how readers and writers interact with new and old texts,
changes which are hotly debated (Birkerts, Stephenson). We can use old printed
and manuscript books to discover how earlier readers and writers differed from
us in their use and understanding of the tools and concepts of literacy. We also
can anticipate ways in which the new technologies of the word will alter
concepts writers and readers have taken for granted for millennia. The concepts
in play at this moment in history include virtually everything related to
“authority,” “reading,” “composition,” “the text,” and “meaning.” It doesn’t
get any more fundamental than that in the study of the Humanities.
The Triumph of New Criticism
and the Disappearance of the Text-as-Docment
The story of the
rediscovery of descriptive bibliographic analysis, or “codicology,” as a
scholarly tool begins with a battle over meaning that we might call “the theory
wars,” which changed the way literature was interpreted just at the end of the
print-literacy and manuscript era. A brief digression about that cultural event
may help to explain our need for renewed attention to books and manuscripts as
evidence of the “archeology of text.” During the last half of the twentieth
century, just as new technologies of creating and delivering print became
popular, literary criticism became deeply embroiled in struggles between
competing interpretive theories. At its height, a theory called the “New
Criticism” focused all attention on the importance of establishing the work’s
meaning by close reading of the text, and the necessity of excluding from that
process any information they deemed fallacious or even “heretical,” like
authors’ intentions, readers’ affective responses, biographical and historical
data not specifically referred to in the text, etc. Though this had the
salutary effect of making literary scholars much more careful readers, “close
reading analysis” also had the unintended effect of causing interpreters to make
anachronistic assumptions about early literature (i.e., before the “Modern
Period,” roughly pre-1700).
E. D. Hirsch’s
Validity in Interpretation (1967), and an influential essay upon which that
book was based (“Objective Interpretation,” PMLA 75 [1960]), rescued New
Criticism’s methodology by arguing that historical linguistic evidence and
certain kinds of biographical evidence must be admissible to interpret a work of
literature if it helps readers properly understand the English as spoken by
authors and contemporary readers, including legitimate connotative associations
the authors might expect readers to add to the meanings routinely recorded by
the Oxford English Dictionary for the era in which the word was published. The
first kind of historical information keeps us from getting the wrong idea from
Chaucer’s “Pilgrim Narrator” when he calls the Summoner “a gentle harlot and a
kind” (
4.
= ‘Fellow’; playfully ‘good fellow’. Obs.). The second kind of
historical information alerts us to the possibility of more subtle meanings like
political nuances, satire, comedy, irony, etc. (e.g., the Reeve’s horse is
called “Scot”—the English typically accuse Scots of stinginess, and horses which
are inexpensive to maintain would be like . . . [and perhaps the Reeve,
himself, is . . . ). Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theorists attacked
New Critics for self-satisfied aestheticism which, they alleged, privileged one
kind of reader and reading over all others (i.e., male, capitalist, aesthetic
readings vs. economic, anthropological, feminist, psychoanalytic,
deconstructionist, etc. readings). These “theory wars” have generally subsided
into a live-and-let-live truce, with differing theories commanding their own
journals and publishing houses, as well as faculty teaching positions, with the
general assumption that they simply will not read each other’s work as if they
practiced different disciplines, entirely. But while theory rose in prominence
in academic syllabi, something else was displaced in most institutions, and that
was the study of bibliography, codicology, and other long-standing disciplines
that studied the “vehicles” which delivered the New Critics’ “texts” to us.
Once New Critics (and their foes) had a properly edited copy of “the text” in a
modern print edition, they had no need for access or attention to the physical
artifact which first recorded “the text.” Any simulacrum of “the text,” if
accurate, was as good as any other when all you thought you were doing was
arguing about what the words meant. At first, this led to the
democratization of access to canonical literature. In the 1950s and '60s,
college English courses were designed around the availability of cheap paperback
editions of "classics" like The Modern Library, and compact anthologies of
canonical literature published by W.W. Norton, Oxford University Press, and
Longman's. These replaced expensive hard-bound editions that were designed
to be re-read by successive generations of scholars, readers who might leave
layers of annotations in the margins as evidence of their interaction with the
text. Paperback editions and anthologies were designed for single-reader
access (unless rebound), and in practice, a majority of those readers resold the
paperbound editions rather than using them to build personal libraries.
Used paperback copies rarely contained useful ownership information and their
annotations rarely were treated as evidence of "reader-response" that improved
the buyers' reading experience, leading buyers to attribute greater value to
pristine, disposable literary commodities (AKA "new books") that were intended
for disposal after one reading.
Rise of the Digital Surrogates
By the 1980s, digital images of “the text,” because they
were the cheapest to reproduce and store, gradually began to replace paper
copies in library collections and instructors’ reading lists.
Bibliographers call such simulated books "surrogates." Readers
of surrogate editions leave no trace on the text, which utterly resists
annotation. Purchases of paper editions are difficult for governmental
authorities to police, as attempts to censor Joyce's Ulysses and Miller's
Tropic of Cancer demonstrated, and even library borrowing records were,
until passage of the "U.S.A. Patriot Act," considered part of readers' private
mental space and immune to government surveillance. Paradoxically, readers
of surrogate online editions can be tracked instantaneously by the National
Security Agency's monitoring of Internet traffic, a process that is undetectable
by the readers (Lichtblau and Risen; Singel). The digital surrogates'
offer of apparently free, apparently authoritative access to the literary canon
contributes to readers' preference for online editions without concern for the
quality of the editions they have accessed. As a result, most modern
readers of Shakespeare routinely choose an online text based on the 1864 Globe
edition rather than any of the modern print editions that take advantage of the
intervening century and a half of scholarly editing (Johnson).
The displacement of paper texts by digital surrogates follows the
same process by which printed paper copies replaced parchment manuscript copies
in the C15-C18 period when moveable type printing and the hand press brought
mass production of texts to the first mass reading audience in human history.
Manuscripts used to set type for printed editions often were destroyed or
consigned to binders’ waste after their text was “harvested” for the new
technology, and scribes, formerly prized for their skillful creation of
beautifully unique documents, gradually lost business to the pressmen until they
became mere “clerks” who copied accounts and letters for businesses. Then, as
now, the artifacts of the older technology were increasingly discarded in favor
of the new, except for examples collected by bibliophiles, book collectors who
value the object as a rarity or curiosity, with less concern for its linguistic
contents. The parallel process of forgetting old analytical methods and discarding the
material evidence they analyzed coincided with massive changes in the technology
of literacy, itself, including reading habits, attitudes toward textual
authority, composition processes, and a host of other practices that the
“meaning” theorists all took for granted. As the printed book displaced the
manuscript, and mechanical reproduction displaced the specialist scribe who made
texts, so now a new technology displaces print as a tangible artifact, and the
human “printer” has become replaced by a small desktop device ordinary readers
occasionally operate to
produce their own texts. More commonly, though, the new literacy
technology results in reading on the screen, as well as composition on the
screen. These mechanical and cultural transformations already have begun to change the way readers and
writers think about the text, and the changes have only been under way for about
two decades as I write this. In the next few decades, we may find
ourselves inhabiting a society and a textual universe
vastly different from the five hundred years of culture founded upon information stored on printed paper
texts.
Coming into Literacy via
Handwriting, Reading Moveable-Type Printed Texts, and Typed "Manuscripts"
Under the previous regime of handwriting and print literacy, the following
general assumptions held sway. Children learned to write by handling styli
(pencils, pens, crayons) and sheets of paper, usually pre-lined, in unconscious
imitation of the Medieval scribes’ practice of pricking and ruling a manuscript
leaf before taking up their styli to inscribe upon it. Children learned to read
by studying printed pages bound in codex books, pages containing first pictures,
then alphabet letters, then words and illustrative pictures, and finally whole
sentences. Shortly after they learned to consume whole words and sentences,
they began to learn to produce their own texts in imitation of those their eyes
and brains were learning to decode.
Even in the late Twentieth Century, children’s progress into literacy production was measured by their
handwriting’s transition from block letters to script. They were taught by the
“Palmer," "D'Nealian," or "Zaner-Bloser" methods to form continuous, regular handwritten lines of connected
letters, and their progress was measured by their mastery of punctuation and spelling conventions
(especially in English!), grammar, and the rhetoric used by professional
adults (Koenke). In this, as well, they imitated the practices of Medieval scribes, even
to the extent of the relationship between the writing teachers’ authority over
the process and the scriptorium’s master-corrector who checked the quality of
individual scribes’ work. Writing skill tended to be measured by standards of
grammatical and spelling correctness, and by volume, whether measured in pages
or words per document, and by numbers of sources used for “research papers.”
All writing tended to be taught as genres of “writing-on-demand” in obedience to
outside authority, rather than writing whose purposes writers generated and
controlled themselves. Like the scribes who surreptitiously resisted the
monastery’s limitations on their use of the technology to copying pre-existing
religious texts, only children who first mastered, and then broke free of modern
print-classroom standards for “good writing,” could become professional writers,
but that is another story.
Children’s progress in literacy consumption was measured by their
transition from reading aloud to silent reading, again paralleling the
historical trend in the Anglo-European past, and their progress from reading of
simple narratives to increasingly complex narratives, then short essays (often
didactic, sometimes overtly moral), and finally fiction, in increasingly longer
works which culminated with the novel. The novel has become, as a test of
literary performance, the “glossed Bible” of the typical modern college English
Department. Reading skill tended to be measured by standards of correctness
(remembered summary meaning and “facts”) and quantity (numbers of texts consumed
and lengths of texts consumed).
Those assumptions were virtually identical in their general outlines with the
instruction in literacy technology available to children in the C17 (i.e., the
audience for which the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Milton were
created). Literacy (and numeracy) manuals began to be produced so that parents
could teach their children this new standard technology necessary to compete.
The printing press produced broadsides and pamphlets to sway popular opinion
even before the debate about Queen Elizabeth’s successor in 1603, and the war
with Spain (1625-30) and English Civil War also were fought in public print
while or even before troops entered the battlefield (see the library’s copies of
The Spyte of Spaine [1628], The lawlesse kneelesse schimsmaticall
Puritan [1631], and A Shrill Cry in the Eares of Cavaliers,
Apostates, and Presbyters . . . , [1648]). Reading printed books and
creating handwritten manuscripts remained the normal tests of educational
achievement from that period until the current day, though creating deluxe
documents like diplomas or large documents like codex books remained the
province of the specialist scribe or the printer. Charles Dickens’ “A
Christmas Carol” (1843) Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) record the
last (unhappy!) days of corporate scribes hired to copy documents by hand. By
then, the hand-press's master printer had been turned into a “machine minder” for the new mechanized
presses whose power turned out even greater floods of books and periodical
literature more quickly and in far larger formats than the old sheet-fed
hand-presses.
The scribe, as a
large-scale professional text-producer, was doomed
along with the pressman-as-craftsman, though scribes did not disappear
simultaneously with the introduction of moveable type printing, and the
profession of "calligrapher" survives as a craft to the present day (Bühler
24-39). The first patents for a mechanical “type-writer” date to the early C18,
and working typewriters were being promoted while Dickens and Melville were
writing. The first commercially successful typewriter was perfected and
brought to market by the Remington Arms Company, 1873. Just as manuscripts and
print technologies had previously been associated with the authority of the
Church and the Monarchy, now the authority of the typed text came to be linked
to capitalist businesses who could afford typed communications.
The
production of print-like alphabetic type-script actuated by a keyboard, though used only by specialist technicians for the
first decades of its existence, was the first invention since moveable type
printing that held the power to change the world of literacy so dramatically.
Typescripts put the power of producing printed texts into the hands of ordinary
people with limited technological and financial resources. In the former
Soviet Union, for example, where print publication was strictly government
controlled and private possession of copying machines was illegal, "Самиздат"
[samizdat--"self publishing"] circulated widely as hand-typed magazines among
the intelligencia and helped to preserve free political discourse, poetry and
fiction.
The
culmination of composition training under the former "modern" literacy regime gradually came to include
classes in
“typing,” the creation of documents resembling printed pages using first manual, and
then electric typewriters. Businesses and governments depended upon
"typing pools,” rooms staffed by dozens of
(mostly female) typists, who took over the scribes’ task of creating print-like
documents from manuscript or taped voice, and duplicating existing documents by
retyping them on multiple sheets of paper interleaved with “carbon paper” which
transmitted keystrokes to sheets beneath the first one. Increasingly,
however, writers were presumed also to know how to type, and typed "manuscripts"
became the standard submission format for publishers of books and journal
articles. By the 1950s, “typing
classes” began to become commonplace even for students who were not planning to
become professional typists, because knowing how to type enabled ordinary people
to imitate the print-like authority of corporate-typed texts. The typed letter
began to have more authority than handwritten letters, except in extremely
formal circumstances like love and thank-you notes, wedding and funeral
announcements.
Old manuscript-tradition habits die hard, though, especially for
the elites. As late as the 1970s, (mostly male) corporate executives ordinarily
never typed their own documents and secretaries effectively co-authored what
they wrote, assuming responsibility for correction of grammar and spelling. The
command, “Miss X, take a letter,” was a universal cliché in novels and films for
the executive’s authoritative utterance of his intentions. In academia, (mostly
male) scholars routinely used the prefaces of their books, which used to thank
Renaissance authors’ patrons for their largesse, to thank secretaries or their
wives for endlessly typing and retyping drafts of the book-in-progress. These
men were literacy-“dinosaurs” on the verge of extinction due to the invention of
“computers” as the new text production instrument.
The First Era of the New
Literacy Regime: Computers, Mainframe Text Processing Programs, and "WYSYWIG"
Stand-alone Word Processors:
Just as “printers” used to be human beings who operated the press to produce
multiple copies of documents, “computers” used to be human beings employed to
perform serial calculations. All that changed during the Cold War when the
United States and Soviet Union faced each other in a nuclear-armed stalemate
based on the doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction,” a doctrine which
paradoxically guaranteed peaceful behavior as long as both sides believed the
other could reliably target its cities for total annihilation so quickly that no
sneak-attack could destroy their nuclear weapons. With the invention of
intercontinental ballistic missiles, the time needed to compute targeting
trajectories had to beat the warheads’ thirty minute flight time from launch to
target, which was too brief an interval for human “computers” to calculate, and
in 1946 the first “mainframe” computers began operating to target opponents for
destruction were invented in 1946. The ENIAC was first turned on at the
University of Pennsylvania, demonstrating the close linkage between higher
education and the arms industry, and the machine calculated its last targets at
Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1955, when it was replaced by the Remington Rand
UNIVAC (a spin-off subdivision of Remington Arms, after its merger with the Rand
Kardex Corporation in 1927 [“Remington”]). IBM’s superior mainframe technology
dominated the late 1950s and 1960s, and large, room-filling mainframe computers
became standard engineering school technology for calculating solutions to all
sorts of problems, including the design of nuclear weapons and, incidentally,
ways for engineers to generate quick, professional looking documents, using
specially designed programs called “word processors.”
Printers had been using computerized type-setting since the 1970s, and
librarians (starting at Ohio State in 1967), had used them to catalogue books
and periodicals, but mass market adoption of the computer as text-producer took
longer (“History,” Falk, and Montagnes). In the early 1980s, mainframe digital
computers finally could produce truly print-quality documents using “word
processing programs” like Waterloo Script, but their use still was limited
because users had to memorize cumbersome codes for creating something as simple
as a new paragraph (“.pp;” in the left margin if the macro “.pp” had previously
been defined in the file as “.nl; .in 5” [new line, indent five characters]).
That code was an ancestor of HTML, the most common coding language for Internet
web pages, but it seemed nobody but graduate students were very interested in
producing text with print-shop quality. Mainframe computers gradually were
hijacked from their original purposes as engineering calculators and the huge
machines devoted increasing proportions of their computing power to serve liberal arts
majors who wanted to use them to store and print doctoral dissertations. Some insiders
also learned that you could also use programs like “FINGER” to find out if a
friend who happened to be logged on to another computer, and to send short,
typed messages to them (i.e., IM with really big “phones”). This was
possible because those mainframe computers were connected to ARPANET, the
military-collegiate-industrial telephone-line-linked “backbone” of what
developed into the commercial entity known as the Internet.
ARPANET was devised by the National Security Agency in 1968-9 to link together
the nation’s essential weapons designing and manufacturing infrastructure in a
system that enabled rapid sharing of information and that would be highly
resistant to destruction by enemy attack. Email emerged as early as 1972 as an
evanescent (but surprisingly permanent!) form of electronic text. ARPANET spun
off its military computers into a defensively isolated “MILNET” and new networks
sprung up on the same machinery (USFNET, USENET, and the true ancestor of the
Internet, BITNET). By 1988, the term “Internet” had caught Al Gore’s attention
and, in the next twenty years, nearly everyone else’s. Mainframe word
processing using huge, university and corporate computers, was the book
production (and library cataloging) standard for roughly ten years, but even as
it became the graduate student’s normal paper-production tool and the novelist’s
unseen digital assistant at the publisher’s, the competition emerged in the form
of small machines the size of a large folio manuscript book with a television
tube perched above it.
In
the late 1970s and early 1980s, first Apple Computer and then IBM launched
relatively simple, slow, “personal computers” that could perform word-processing
tasks in addition to running the games and computations for which Steven Jobs
and Steven Wozniak originally designed the Apple 1 (1977). The Apple II series
(1977-83) and the IBM-PC (1981), the first commercially successful personal
computers, enabled users to type text they saw only on cathode-ray-tube (CRT)
monitors until the file was “spooled” to a printer specially designed to read
their word processing code. The triumph of these "desktop publishing"
machines was assured by the way they represented text on screen, in a "what you
see is what you get" or WYSIWYG, rather than forcing users to see and type
formatting codes like ".pp:" to get a new paragraph. Because WYSIWYG word
processing was so easy to teach, and because it offered spelling-check programs
to assist children who were poor spellers or had significant learning
disabilities, elementary schools increasingly
began to shorten handwriting instruction in order to include “keyboarding”
instruction. The 1970s transition of the definition of "writing" from
hand-written manuscript to type-script had begun.
Businesses tended to adopt huge dedicated "word-processing programs" like those
produced by the Wang Corporation (1972-1983), but the introduction of the Apple
Macintosh and IBM-PC desktop computers eventually put Wang and other dedicated
word-processing manufacturers out of business. The revolution in online
literacy was essentially complete by the late 1980s, but we did not know how
far-reaching its effects on literacy would become.
The New Regime Triumphant: Online
Literacy Replaces Manuscript Literacy and the Text-as-Document Becomes "Old
Books"
Today, a significant percentage of new college freshmen arrive in classrooms
without pens and paper. This would have been an unthinkable phenomenon a decade
earlier when the pen and notebook were the sign of the student, but this
new trend also is evidence of the social transformation of text composition and
consumption from an act performed with graphite or ink on paper to something
produced by pressing keys and seeing images on a screen.
The
revolution in digital literacy began gradually at home as student hobbyists
began to play with texts on personal computers, but its most powerful and
methodical effects were felt in schools, starting with elementary instruction in
writing and reading. Because children’s teachers were increasingly evaluated by
their ability to teach children to read earlier and to read more texts (e.g.,
contests for reading the most titles in a year), and to produce more text
earlier in life (e.g., papers graded on page, word, and source counts), the
teachers were excited to learn that early research in classroom computer use
indicated that children produced greater volumes of text using computers, and
that they more eagerly sought texts to read when able to read online. Schools
seem to have ignored later research indicating that online writing tends to grow
longer but not better organized or more complex, and that text reading episodes
tend to be shorter and more discontinuous. Practical necessity seems to be
driving K-12 teachers to reduce time spent teaching actual handwriting skills
beyond printing, and a cogent argument has been made for abandoning instruction
in two different handwriting scripts, print and cursive, in favor of an easier
transition from printing to D'Nealian or italics (Wallace and Schomer). The revolution in
hard-copy textual media may already be over. Today’s college students do much of their reading, and nearly all
their writing, using digital media. Many of them find handwriting difficult, and
would prefer keyboarding to handwriting even in circumstances in which
handwriting would be more efficient and less disruptive of reading or
participation in class.
How
can the study of old books put these changes in perspective? They probably
do not mean what we first think they do, but we have to get some misconceptions
cleared up first, and old books can help do that, too. Think about typical
popular assumptions about modern digital readers. When the text is digital, its
ownership becomes ambiguous. Its authority or even existence is unstable.
Documents can vanish in an instant due to power failures or disk damage, but if
they are popular or valuable, they almost inevitably will become ubiquitous
on the web unless protected by extraordinarily good copy-protection software.
Once established on the web in multiple servers, the text becomes, like weapons
designs stored on ARPANET’s redundant interconnected mainframe computers, highly
resistant to destruction. Nevertheless, because no single authority controls
the text, it becomes a living embodiment of Deconstruction’s claims that the
text, once created, becomes an endless machine for “disseminating meaning.”
Variant versions can abound, all with the same title, and seemingly, to the
naïve eye, with the same content. Only close reading, our gift from the New
Critics, will reveal that one online version may not be the same as another.
When authors cannot protect their texts from copying, and readers cannot be sure
what they are reading is “authentic,” what will that do to the literary
marketplace?
On
the other hand, perhaps nothing has really changed. What happened when a scribe
made a copy of another manuscript? What were the chances that this copy would
be identical to the exemplar? The chances of such an event, for a large
manuscript, are vanishingly small, especially if we take into account the
appearance of the text on the page (location of words on a line, shape of the
scribe’s hand vs. the exemplar, etc.). Scribal errors like “dittography”
(accidental repetition of words or lines), "haplography" (omission of a correct
but repeated syllable or word [“had had” is legal but can easily become just
“had” if you listen to MS-Word]), and parablepsy (omission of a big chunk of
text between two identical words in the exemplar, sometimes called “eye skip”).
Scribes also felt free to alter intentionally their exemplar texts in many
common ways, including abbreviating common terms (“Ihro” for “Christ,” and “&”
for the Latin “et” or “and”), omitting familiar repeating passages in religious
texts or lyrics (the “Refrain” convention), and inventing transition where none
existed in the original (as in the scribal “epilogues” and “prologues” of
Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”). In effect, the scribal “copier” was not
producing a “true copy” of the original any more than the Internet pirate or
imitator who copies and posts a document. The scribe is more or less freely
translating the original, rather than merely “copying” it like a modern
photocopier. And even xerography (the process patented by the Xerox
corporation), does not exactly “reproduce” the original document. If the
original was written with pen, or printed with ink, a forensic scientist can
tell immediately which is the copy by examining the uniform texture of the
laser-fused carbon made by the photocopying process. Differences between paper
stocks also could reveal which was the “original” and which was the “copy,” even
if the copy was made from another photocopy. Thus, comparisons between new and
old books teach us to apply “close reading” techniques to our observation of
documents’ physical characteristics.
For
instance, when printers type-set their editions from a manuscript copy, they
also were “translating” the manuscript to print, and the copies of books from a
single edition look, to the untrained eye, like they are identical to each
other. Nevertheless, scholars have shown that each book is an unique artifact,
unlike all others in the press run. This can occur because of errors caught and
corrected while the press was still working, or because of type shifts or
drop-outs, variations in paper stock, and a thousand other differences that come
to our attention only when we ask ourselves what an “identical copy” would have
to be composed of. Studying old books can help us discover that.
What is “authority” and how does it come to be attached to a document?
Manuscript authors had various strategies for transferring their presence as
guarantors of meaning to the documents they produced, from wax seals and
signatures to various internal statements about the structure of the text which
would reveal, to readers, whether their copy was complete and its parts were in
the proper order. Manuscript copies usually translate such authority-confirming
machinery, like “incipits” and “explicits” to start and stop the text, from
exemplar to copy along with the text. Readers also could add their own
affirmations of the text’s authority, sometimes simply by writing in the margin
“auctor” to indicate the importance of a passage, often because of its citation
or quotation of another author. Marginalia and other forms of “epigraphy”
flourish in old books where they reveal readers’ direct interaction with the
text in a way that “Reader-Response” criticism can guess, at least as it usually
is practiced on modern print texts.
Readers’ ownership of texts also traditionally has been something they took
pride in and signaled by writing their names in the text, usually on a title
page or paste-down. In addition to making it easier to them to reclaim
ownership of a borrowed or stolen book, the practice suggests they emotionally
shared some of the works’ and authors’ authority by that act, and we can see the
same thing occurring in the modern era with owners’ signatures on acquisitions
as strange as dump trucks. Even non-owners have adopted painted signatures that
appear to affirm quasi-ownership in the form of “tags” on the sides of delivery
trucks, underpasses, and buildings. Subsequent early book owners, like the
graffiti artists of today, seem particularly determined to erase previous
owners’ inscriptions, inking over them before inscribing their own. This
practice seems to have led some owners to locate the inscriptions inside the
text, often signing books several times, and locating the signatures in places
likely to escape casual leaf perusal (e.g., in the “gutter” formed by the bound
pages). In this way, old books get us to rethink a “paratext” as simple as the
“signature” as a gesture of identity and authority.
After the invention of print publication, authors and printers found new ways to
increase their apparent authority, from reproducing their names in prominently
larger type on title pages, to affixing authors’ portraits as frontispieces
opposite the title page. Printers initially took much of the credit for the
text’s production, mentioning authors in their notes to readers but emphasizing
in the
colophon at the end of the book the date and place and person which gave the
text its existence. Later, authors came to greater prominence on title pages
and engravers began to produce the “author portrait,” now usually is relegated
to the back fly-leaf or back page of a hardcover book’s paper sleeve, or to the
back cover of a paperback. That image, and the accompanying adulatory
micro-biography, got its start in the “preliminaries” of early printed books.
The web site’s “About this site” page performs a similar task, unless the site’s
author has inflated the function until it takes over all the pages, in one form
or another saying to readers “The text is me, and all about me is my text.”
Studying old books enables us to see the full range of these negotiations of
authority between author and implied readers in the art of the dedicatory poem
relating the author to a patron, the poems by friends in praise of the author or
the book, the explanatory apparatus attached to antiquarian or scholarly
editions, etc. Even bindings tell us something about the book’s claims to
authority, much as manuscript illumination does for pre-print, manuscript-era
books. The visual arts interact with literacy technologies to produce that hazy
imagination of the author’s power even before the first word of text has been
read.
Operating the Text Under the
New Regime--What We Can Learn from the Old Regime and What May Happen Next?:
Internet-era texts usually come to us replete with devices to make reading
easier, like scroll bars, “Next” and “Previous” buttons, handy indexes of where
we are in the document by page or line or in whole page views of the document in
a frame on the side. Hyperlinks
usually are visually indicated by changes in text font or color, and take us to
(usually) relevant contextual material, like definitions, fuller explorations of
topics, and the old fashioned footnote. As most readers probably have already
guessed, all of these devices were invented, in one form or another, by
manuscript and print book makers, and they usually provided additional apparatus
that modern Internet-trained readers are slowly forgetting how to use.
Hyperlinked text is perhaps the most important example of an Internet-era text
feature that was anticipated by manuscript-era and printed books. Glossed
manuscripts arose from expert readers' interaction with important texts like the
works of theologians, famous secular authors, and writers on the law.
The Christians' "Glossa Ordinaria" on the Bible, the Jews' Midrashic Torah,
and other foundation texts,
like
Justianian's "Institutes" of Roman law, surrounded the primary source text
with commentary by previous scholars which put each primary source passage into
intertextual debate with its expert readers ("Glossa" and Justinian).
These "hypertextual" documents caused intense debate among late-Medieval readers
who suspected that readers following the glosses would neglect the sacred
primary text in the center, rather like Internet readers who lose the vertical
thread of a primary text because they follow too many hyperlinks too far
laterally. Though early printers carried on with the practice of printing
"authorities" as glosses beside the page, the practice also changed the meaning
of the word, "to gloss," especially in its colloquial pronunciation "to gloze,"
which became by the fourteenth-century a synonym for "to speciously adorn" or
"to flatter" ("to gloze" senses 2, 3, and 4).
Other profoundly useful codex book structures are not being
transferred to the new literacy technology. Pagination and foliation now
exist only on .PDF files of previously printed texts. Italics and
underscore, once a reliable indicator of a book title (vs. an article in
quotation marks), now are used for different purposes on popular sites and
freshman college students often do not notice or use them. The
printed book’s “Table of Contents” still seems familiar because complex web
sites often feature them, but indices are not, especially concept-based
indices (a political book with an index entry for all pages referring to
“injustice,” for instance, might also index words like “pogrom,” “lynching,” and
“Selma, Alabama”). The commonplace assumption by web-readers is that using a
“Search” or “Find” window, or a “Control+F” search of a page without such a
device, will produce the same results as an index, but it will not. Such
documents only can be scanned for “text strings,” characters that make up actual
words. Concepts must be searched for by entering every single word that might
plausibly be used to denote them on the page, and even then, circumstances in
which the concept is implied instead of expressed would be missed by the
machine-search, though a good human indexer would be sensitive to it.
The
index function of printed books is only one example of things we can discover
about the new technology that may expose a need to change it. For another
example, consider that the reduction or elimination of cursive handwriting
instruction in schools, to make time for keyboarding instruction, threatens to
make a generation of students into bad note-takers. Note-taking as a mnemonic
and creative act has been a component of reading since the earliest manuscript
books, and its sudden disappearance from schools poses unknown risks for
students unable or just unwilling and unlikely to do it. The study of old books
and manuscripts is not the study of something alien to our culture, but rather
it is the discovery and appreciation of literacy’s foundations and a way to
anticipate the future course our culture’s literacy will take.
Works Cited
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