Jaargang 20
bron
Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 20. Uitgeverij Vantilt, Nijmegen / Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging, Leiden 2013
Zie voor verantwoording: https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_jaa008201301_01/colofon.php
Let op: werken die korter dan 140 jaar geleden verschenen zijn, kunnen auteursrechtelijk beschermd zijn.
i.s.m.
[Nummer 20]
Voorwoord
Voor u ligt het jubileumnummer van het Jaarboek voor Nederlandse
Boekgeschiedenis, sinds 1993 de meest wezenlijke manifestatie van de Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging.
Twintig jaar! In een feestelijk voorwoord horen vanzelfsprekend enkele opmerkingen over heden, verleden en toekomst. Ik besef dat ik met die ‘enkele opmerkingen’ veel boekhistorici die zich de afgelopen jaren met hart en ziel voor de vereniging hebben ingespannen, tekort doe door ze niet te noemen. Ik hoop dat u mij dat vergeeft.
Ter zake.
Het Nederlandse boekhistorische landschap leek in het begin van de jaren 1990 aardig aangekleed; de Tiele-Stichting bevorderde ‘de wetenschap van het boek en de drukkunst en de daarmede samenhangende technieken’, het genootschap Petrus Scriverius behartigde de belangen van de wat traditioneler ingestelde liefhebbers van boek en bibliotheek en het gezelschap Convoluut bood boekhistorici een
uitwisselingsplatform voor lopend onderzoek. Toch werden niet alle doelgroepen bereikt. In een ongepubliceerde tekst uit 1993 wenste Paul Hoftijzer een landelijke vereniging ‘die allen, die een actieve of passieve interesse voor de Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis hebben, kan samenbinden en die tevens de cultuurhistorische waarde van het boek onder de aandacht van een breed publiek kan brengen en daarvoor, waar nodig, ook in de bres kan springen’. Niet veel later was Hoftijzer een van de oprichters van de Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging (NBV).
Bij de oprichting van deNBVwaren de volgende boekhistorici betrokken: Han Brouwer, Berry Dongelmans, Paul Hoftijzer, Marika Keblusek, Lisa Kuitert, Otto Lankhorst, Jeroen Salman en Garrelt Verhoeven. De vereniging bleek een schot in de roos. De leden kregen een Jaarboek en werden uitgenodigd voor excursies en symposia. Al gauw groeide hun aantal tot 300. En de inspanningen van de
daaropvolgende besturen en redacties hebben ervoor gezorgd dat het ledental meer dan verdubbelde.
DeNBVheeft ook de afgelopen jaren niet stil gezeten. Op 6 april 2010 organiseerde deNBVeen congres in Utrecht, getiteld, ‘Aanstormend en gevestigd’, over de stand van de boekgeschiedenis in Nederland. De presentaties waren interessant en de discussies
levendig. Waren de deelnemers onverdeeld positief? Neen. In september van dat jaar publiceerde De Boekenwereld (26, nr. 5) een kritische reactie op dat congres. Het artikel was geschreven door Vlaamse boekhistorici en droeg de fraaie, naar Xenophon verwijzende titel ‘Thalassa! Thalassa? De laaglandse boekgeschiedenis en haar zee van mogelijkheden’. De auteurs maakten bezwaar tegen de geest van zelfvoldaanheid die het congres volgens hen had gedomineerd. Ze constateerden een gebrek aan visie, en een ‘gemis aan theoretische reflectie en methodologische transparantie’. Naar hun mening dreigde het draagvlak van onze wetenschap te worden verpulverd. Hoewel sommigen de kritiek eloquent pareerden, werd duidelijk dat de Vlamingen een gevoelige snaar hadden geraakt.
DeNBVpakte de handschoen op en organiseerde samen met de Tiele-Stichting op 10 februari 2012 een expert meeting onder de titel ‘Een toekomst voor de
boekwetenschap’. De sprekers waren Kevin Absilis (Universiteit Antwerpen), Jeroen Salman (Universiteit Utrecht), August den Hollander (Vrije Universiteit) en Boudien de Vries (Universiteit van Amsterdam). De dag werd geleid door Lisa Kuitert (Universiteit van Amsterdam). Er was veel ruimte voor discussie en de aanwezige boekhistorici maakten daar goed gebruik van. Een verslag van de bijeenkomst werd gepubliceerd.
Concluderend werd gesteld dat er een intensievere gedachtenwisseling op vakinhoudelijk vlak noodzakelijk is en dat - om de organisatie van het vak te versterken - actieve samenwerking essentieel is: een platform voor de boekwetenschap kan helpen de Nederlandse én Vlaamse boekhistorische krachten te bundelen en daarmee de toenemende concurrentiestrijd op de subsidiemarkt versterkt aan te gaan.
En nu moeten we concrete stappen zetten. DeNBVen de Tiele-Stichting organiseren in samenwerking met de Vlaamse Werkgroep Boekgeschiedenis (VWB) dit jaar een vervolg op de expert meeting, waarin de theorie in de praktijk wordt omgezet.
Uit het bovenstaande zou kunnen blijken dat de aandacht van het zittende bestuur van deNBVvooral uitgaat naar de wetenschap. Maar zo is het niet. Voor het begrijpen van de geschiedenis van het boek is de wetenschap weliswaar essentieel, maar voor het overbrengen van de daaruit voortvloeiende kennis kunnen naast doorwrochte artikelen ook andere activiteiten worden ingezet, zoals leerzame excursies, interessante jaarvergaderingen (deze keer in het eveneens jubilerende Vredespaleis) en prikkelende lezingen. En daar laat deNBVhet dit jaar niet bij. In november wordt een congres georganiseerd waarin acht deskundigen vanuit hun boekhistorische expertise uitleggen wat de geschiedenis van het boek ons kan vertellen over de mediarevolutie waar wij middenin zitten, in het bijzonder als het gaat om de receptie van teksten. De
deelnemers aan het congres krijgen volop de ruimte om met de sprekers in debat te gaan.
Tot slot wil ik u iets vertellen over ons Jaarboek. In een geanimeerde discussie kwamen redactie en bestuur tot de conclusie dat het Jaarboek een nieuwe impuls nodig had. Deels werd de voorgestelde vernieuwing gedreven door wens om de aanlevering van hoogstaande artikelen te garanderen en een zo breed mogelijk publiek te bedienen, maar ook de veranderingen bij de andere Nederlandstalige
boekhistorische periodieken, Quaerendo, De Gulden Passer en De Boekenwereld noopten tot een herijking van de koers van ons Jaarboek. We hebben ons voorgenomen om vanaf 2014 ook Engelstalige artikelen op
te nemen met een uitvoerige Nederlandstalige samenvatting. De ruime meerderheid van de artikelen blijft overigens Nederlandstalig. Het onderscheid tussen
themanummers en ‘gewone’ nummers wordt losgelaten: ieder Jaarboek zal een thematisch gedeelte bevatten, aangevuld met ‘losse’ artikelen. Daarnaast krijgen de boekbesprekingen een prominentere plaats. De redactie zal er vanzelfsprekend scherp op letten dat de artikelen zo toegankelijk mogelijk blijven. Zo krijgt het Jaarboek een heldere positie tussen het volledig Engelstalige tijdschrift Quaerendo en het vernieuwde, laagdrempelige blad De Boekenwereld. Deze nieuwe opzet lijkt veel op het voorstel dat door Hoftijzer in de hierboven aangehaalde tekst uit 1993 werd geformuleerd: ‘Het recent opgerichte Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte met zijn kortere en langere artikelen, Forschungsberichte, documentaire bijdragen, mededelingen en recensies is wat mij betreft een uitstekend model’.
DeNBVheeft in de twintig jaar van haar bestaan enorm veel ondernomen om in het Nederlandse taalgebied iedereen te bereiken die geïnteresseerd is in de
geschiedenis van het boek. Daar mogen wij trots op zijn. Het is duidelijk dat het nooit was gelukt zonder al die boekliefhebbers die hun (vrije) tijd hebben opgeofferd om dit mogelijk te maken. Hoewel, ‘opoffering’... Ik weet zeker dat niemand dat zo voelde. Dit is leuk werk! Ik hoop, nee verwacht dat wij op de ingezette weg nog heel veel jaren zullen voortgaan en dat we deNBVvitaal, scherp, actueel en allemachtig interessant houden.
Hans Mulder
Voorzitter van de Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging
Preface
This is the jubilee issue of the Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, the Yearbook for Dutch Book History, since 1993 the prime organ of the Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging, the Dutch Book Historical Society.
A preface celebrating two decades of book-historical activities in the Netherlands should of course include a few remarks about past, present, and future. I am aware that by offering ‘a few remarks’ and not mentioning anyone by name, I seem to be forgetting all those many book historians who have been dedicating themselves with all their hearts to the society these past years. I hope you will forgive me on this score.
And now to the point.
In the early 1990s, the Dutch book historical landscape appeared to be neatly trimmed, with the Tiele Foundation promoting ‘the science of the book and the art of printing and related technologies’, the Petrus Scriverius society looking after the interests of the more traditionally inclined book and library lover, and Convoluut offering book historians a forum for communicating the results of current research. All the same, it seemed not all if the target audience was covered, and in an unpublished paper of 1993 Paul Hoftijzer accordingly hoped for a national society ‘capable of uniting all those with an active or passive interest in Dutch book history, as well as of informing the wider public about the cultural and historical importance of the book and if necessary championing its cause’. Not much later, Hoftijzer became one of the founding members of the Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging (NBV), the Dutch Book Historical Society.
The following book historians were involved in founding theNBV: Han Brouwer, Berry Dongelmans, Paul Hoftijzer, Marika Keblusek, Lisa Kuitert, Otto Lankhorst, Jeroen Salman and Garrelt Verhoeven. The society was an immediate hit, with more than 300 members joining the society in a relatively short time. Membership more than doubled in the following years thanks to the efforts of successive executive commitees and editorial boards. All members of theNBVreceive a free copy of the annual Jaarboek and are regularly invited to attend excursions and conferences.
TheNBVhas not rested on its laurels these past few years. On 6 April 2010 the socie-
ty organised a conference in Utrecht, entitled ‘Aanstormend en gevestigd’ (Fresh and established), on the current state of book history in the Netherlands. The presentations were interesting and the discussions were lively, which might suggest that the conference was unanimously regarded as a success. This was not the case, however, as a critical review appeared in the September issue of De Boekenwereld (26, no. 5) that same year. The article was written by Flemish book historians under the fetching title, reminiscent of Xenophon: ‘Thalassa! Thalassa? De laaglandse boekgeschiedenis en haar zee van mogelijkheden’ (Thalassa! Thalassa? Book history in the Low Countries and its sea of opportunities). In their article, the authors objected to a perceived air of self-satisfaction dominating the conference, which they also felt had suffered from shortage of vision and ‘a lack of theoretical reflection and
methodological transparency’. They believed the basis for the discipline of book history was in danger of crumbling. Although there have been some eloquent responses to foil that criticism, it was obvious that the Flemish colleagues had hit a nerve.
TheNBVrose to the challenge by organising, together with the Tiele Foundation, an expert meeting on 10 February 2012 called ‘Een toekomst voor de boekwetenschap’
(A Future for Book Science). The speakers were Kevin Absilis (University of Antwerp), Jeroen Salman (University of Utrecht), August den Hollander (VU
University) and Boudien de Vries (University of Amsterdam). The event was chaired by Lisa Kuitert (University of Amsterdam). The programme allowed plenty of room for discussion and the attending book historians eagerly availed themselves of this opportunity. An account of the meeting was published later.
The conclusion reached was that a more thorough professional exchange of views was needed in the field of book history and that active cooperation was vital to strengthen the structure of the discipline. A platform for book science may help harness Dutch and Flemish book-historical forces so together they can face the increasing competition in the world of funding. It is now time to take some concrete steps. In cooperation with the Vlaamse Werkgroep Boekgeschiedenis (VWB, Flanders Book Historical Society), theNBVand the Tiele Foundation are therefore organising a follow-up expert meeting, putting theory into practice.
Although it might appear from the above that the executive committee of theNBV
is mainly focussed on scholarship, this is not the case. Although we need scholarly research to fully understand all aspects of the history of the book, the accumulated scholarly expertise can be communicated in other ways than through academically sound articles only, for instance by offering instructive excursions, interesting annual meetings (this year in the famous Peace Palace in The Hague, which happens to be celebrating its first centenary) and stimulating papers. This is not all theNBVwill be offering its members this year. At a conference scheduled for November, eight experts on book history will be sharing their views on what the history of the book can tell us about the media revolution we are now witnessing, especially with regard to the reception of texts. There will also be plenty of opportunity for attendees to interact with the speakers.
Finally, I would like to turn to the Jaarboek itself. Following an animated meeting, the executive committee and the editorial board came to the conclusion that the Jaar-
boek needed a new impulse. The proposed innovations were partly driven by a desire to secure a steady flow of high-quality articles and reach as wide an audience as possible. However, a number of changes introduced in the other Dutch-language book-historical periodicals, Quaerendo, De Gulden Passer and De Boekenwereld, have also challenged us to review our existing policy with regard to the Jaarboek.
We have therefore decided to welcome English-language contributions (accompanied by an extensive Dutch summary) as of 2014, although the majority of the articles will continue to be published in Dutch. The distinction between special issues and
‘ordinary’ issues will be abolished: from now on, every Jaarboek will contain a thematic section in addition to separate articles. The book review section will also receive greater prominence. The editorial board will naturally see to it that the articles continue to be readable and accessible. These changes will ensure that the Jaarboek occupies a clear niche in between the completely English-language periodical Quaerendo and the renewed and easily accessible Dutch-language magazine De Boekenwereld. This new approach would appear to be very similar to what Hoftijzer already proposed in the 1993 paper referred to above: ‘In my opinion, the recently established Leipziger Jahrbuch zur Buchgeschichte, with its shorter and longer articles, Forschungsberichte, documentary contributions, notes and reviews, is a model worth emulating.’
In the twenty years of its existence, theNBVhas undertaken a great deal to reach all those interested in the history of the book in the Dutch-language areas, a feat that fills us with pride. It is at the same time very clear that we would never have been able to achieve any of this without all those bibliophiles out there who have sacrificed much of their time to make it all work. ‘Sacrifice’ is perhaps not a good word to use in this context, as I am sure nobody has ever experienced it as such. It's simply wonderful work to do! I hope and indeed expect that we will be able to continue along this new road for many more years and will succeed in keeping theNBVa lively, to-the-point, up-to-date and absolutely riveting place to be.
Hans Mulder
Chairman, Dutch Book Historical Society
Introduction
Founded in 1993, the Dutch Book Historical Society (Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging,NBV) is a society for those who enjoy books both old and new, and in every shape and form. TheNBVis a society with about 650 members, ranging from prominent academics to amateur researchers and from journalists to antiquarians. It publishes the Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis (Dutch book history yearbook), providing an overview of new research in the field of Dutch and Flemish book history.
At the tenth anniversary of theNBVthe yearbook was dedicated to developments in the publishing business, especially the book trade and publishing houses in the Netherlands in the second half of the twentieth century. In 2010 the yearbook was devoted to the state of book historical research in the Netherlands. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of theNBVin 2013 the editors wanted to look beyond the Low Countries, to see what happens in the field of book research and book history in the rest of the world. What are the international developments and evolutions in the field and what are the challenges for the future?
We imagined an attractive yearbook that expresses an internationally shared (academic) passion for books and puts the various national book historical societies on the world map. In an invitation letter we wrote that we were looking for
‘high-quality authors, local and renowned specialists, who would be able and willing to write a historiographical overview of book-historical activities’ in their countries.
We asked explicitly for a state of affairs in the field of book science, current insights and results in the field of book science and the future vision of the book-historical society.
We received as many as thirteen enthusiastic contributions from around the world.
In random order: China (Frederik Nesta); Japan (Peter Kornicki); Spain (Benito Rial Costas); South America (Cesar Manrique); Great Britain (David McKitterick);
Belgium (Stijn van Rossem); Germany (Christine Haug, Slávka Rude-Porubská and Wolfgang Schmitz); Austria (Peter Frank, Johannes Frimmel and Murray Hall);
South Africa (Archie Dick); Australia (Roger Osborne), Norway (Aina Nøding), Sweden (Rikard Wingård) and Denmark (Anders Toftgaard).
The articles appeared to be quite different, both in content and form. All authors have taken the request very seriously, but they have also answered it in their very own way. Browsing this yearbook, the reader will encounter no uniformity in the structure of the articles. The articles can of course be read independently from each other, but we also hope that comparing the approaches and views expressed in them will yield new insights.
A few things can be said about the content of the articles. In some contributions, the current state of affairs is explained from the general history of the book in a particular country. The study of the Chinese book, for example, has a long history, dating back to the ninth century when woodblock printing first appeared. Until fairly recently, Chinese book history was primarily the domain of scholars in China and the adjacent regions that used Chinese characters for their own literature. In Japan, studies of the history of the book concentrate on the Edo period (1603-1868), when commercial publishing came of age and when in a short period books became common goods to be bought or borrowed by almost everyone. In South America in the nineteenth century, the study of the book was all about the process of consolidation of national identities and therefore in the creation of national bibliographical repositories and national libraries.
The biggest surprise was that ‘book science’ and ‘book history’ have a different meaning in almost every country. In the Netherlands book science includes all cultural-historical, economic, social-cultural, sociological and professional research in the book, and archiving, preservation and distribution of relevant documents and data. Swedish book research spans even more areas connected to book history: author studies, history of graphic design, textual criticism etcetera. In Norway reception studies are also considered to be part of book science. Research areas range from core topics such as the history of reading, the book market and libraries, to areas such as censorship, editing or media history, where book history provides one of several perspectives. In Spain, on the other hand, book science is almost exclusively the domain of analytical bibliographers. The different views of what does and does not belong to ‘book science’ are related to research traditions in the different countries, the status of the discipline and its institutional infrastructure.
In the Netherlands, the study of the book has a long tradition and in the twentieth century the history of the book became an academic discipline. In a survey of the history of the book in the Low Countries,1Marieke van Delft described the
development of book science from the appointment of the first extraordinary professor of Book History and Bibliography at the University of Amsterdam in 1954 up to the state of affairs in the twenty-first century. This first chair was founded by the Dr.
P.A. Tielestichting, a key organisation promoting the study of the book. Since 2003, the Tielestichting has taken the form of a joint venture for book science in which almost all scientific and other organisations and institutions in this field are
represented. Currently there are three Tiele-chairs in Dutch universities: one at the University of Amsterdam (paleography and codicology), and two at the University of Leiden (Dutch history of the book in the early modern peri-
1 M. van Delft [et al.] (eds.), New perspectives in book history. Contributions from the Low Countries. Leiden 2006, 7-15.
od and Dutch history of the book in the modern period). The Universities of
Amsterdam and Leiden haveMAcourses in book science and codicology. And then there is of course the Dutch Book Historical Society (NBV), specific to the field of the book.
Although Belgian book historians have broadened their horizon internationally in terms of methodology, topic and the dissemination of their research, book science in Flanders has still not found an institutional port. There is only the Flemish Book Historical Society (VWB), founded in 1996. This society has increased its activities and membership over the years but according to Stijn Van Rossem, there is less and less place for research within the academic libraries. Also, there are no book history courses in the Flemish universities, and certainly no research group or book science programme.
Archie Dick writes that by comparison with many countries, book history in South Africa represents a growing but modest body of work and there is still no institutional home for research and tuition programmes of book and print culture. Plans for a research-driven Centre for the Book at the National Library of South Africa even evaporated when it became presentist and development-oriented in the 1990s.
In Germany, on the other hand, book science has become a significant academic discipline with various institutions and facilities both inside and outside universities, special and research libraries, scholarly societies and associations. In contrast to the situation in Germany, book science in Austria has not yet established itself as a field of study at universities, although, in order to create a common forum for book historians in Austria, the Gesellschaft für Buchforschung in Österreich was founded in 1998. The main goal of the association is to initiate and promote book historical research projects and to encourage links with international research.
Although the existence of the leading international scholary association for historians of print culture,SHARP(The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing), suggests otherwise, the developments in several countries in book research turn out to be especially nationally oriented. However, there are various signs of a growing awareness of the need to seek international connections rather than to construct national histories. Between the Scandinavian countries, there are long-standing traditions of cooperation in the field of book history. An example of an interscandinavian network is The Nordic forum for book history. On an
infrastructural level digitisation and database projects are flourishing. The Swedish ProBok, a database for information on bookbindings and provenance from the hand press period, is a case in point.
For the United Kingdom, David McKitterick signals a growing interest in the history of information that suggests a new stress on the relationship between print and other forms of communication. He believes that such research requires
international outlooks. Also in Australia en New-Zealand the first wave of national foundational studies laid the groundwork for a reassessment of the national in the context of international or transnational studies. In his contribution, Roger Osborne describes two case studies, which combined suggest future directions and possibilities for book history that examine much broader inter-cultural relations, transfers and exchanges in projects that will need to embrace collaboration and group authorship.
The answer to the question ‘what
are the challenges in the future?’ that emerges in most of the contributions, therefore, is that book research must get a trans- and international dimension.
This yearbook contributes to this by offering an initial overview of the state of affairs in the field of book research and book history worldwide and the international developments and evolutions in the field. We hope that it will be an incentive for a more global perspective on book science and that it will lead to new discussions, insights and results and, above all, more international cooperation. The authors of the various contributions have made a start. We are very grateful to them.
Sandra van Voorst
Editor-in-chief of the Dutch book history yearbook - Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis
David McKitterick
The United Kingdom: a national history of the book National histories
To dare to embark on a national history of the book demands a certain boldness.
Overall concepts may be clear, but the details of how topics will relate to each other can emerge only by experience. Some contributors will prove more willing than others to work in a team. Editors must try to ensure that there is some continuity.
More controversially, there is always the question of what exactly is the nation with which the project is concerned. Where are its linguistic, geographical or political boundaries? What has been the relationship between national ambitions and national imperialism? How have they affected, and how have they been affected by, the history of books in the broadest sense? How have all these questions changed over the centuries, and to what extent can they be accommodated? At a practical level, what bibliographical sources are available? Most of all, every national history of the book carries with it a question. How does it fit into the international world? So far, and perhaps understandably given the resources available, no history, in any country, has attempted an adequate answer to this question. Opinions differ even as to what we mean by the subject, the history of the book.
It is therefore not surprising that in recent years Britain has produced not only a national history of the book, but also two multi-authored general compilations both of which have sought to take a world view: one published by Blackwell and consisting of a series of short essays, and the other, with many more dictionary-like entries, by Oxford University Press.1In the world-wide application of book history, so much remains only partially explored, and so many connections have still to be made.
Over the last few years, secondary literature on domestic topics has been dominated in Britain by two projects published by Cambridge University Press: the seven-volume History of the book in Britain (1999-, six volumes published so far), and the
accompanying three-volume History of libraries in Britain and Ireland (2006).
1 S. Eliot, J. Rose (eds.), A companion to the history of the book. Oxford 2007; M.F. Suarez, H.R. Woudhuysen (eds.), The Oxford companion to the book. Oxford 2010.
Figure 1. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume 6. Cambridge 2009
Both acknowledge their considerable debt to the inspiration of L'histoire de l'édition française (1982-1986), and L'histoire des bibliothèques françaises (1988-1992), works whose own boundaries - thematic, political and geographical - themselves offered a challenge to anyone following in their footsteps. But these date from some years ago, and the intervening time has brought new perspectives. Other countries including the United States, Canada, and Australia have worked on their own national histories, while nearer home there have developed projects concerning Wales, Scotland and Ireland.2The existence of these other projects are reminders of how the British book trade has been international ever since early times. The further and related series for Ireland, Scotland and Wales provide not only for different perspectives, but also for fuller accounts of topics that had either to be set aside in the larger plan, or for which there was too little space.
From the beginning, the project was conceived as a history of the book in Britain.
In other words, the indefinite article was a reminder that such a history could never be conclusive; and secondly, that this was not a history of the British book, but of books as they were traded and used in Britain, the extent to which British printing, publishing and reading have always depended on imports and exports. Each volume contains sev-
2 P.H. Jones, E. Rees (eds.), A nation and its books. Aberystwyth 1998; B. Bell (ed.), The Edinburgh history of the book in Scotland. Edinburgh 2007- (three volumes of a planned four published so far); R. Welch, B. Walker (eds.), The Oxford history of the Irish book.
Oxford 2006 - (three volumes of a planned five published so far).
eral studies in more detail (not singled out in the present survey) beside chapters of more general application. This apart, the long time-span for the History of the book in Britain, from Roman times to the present, inevitably meant a considerable divergence of approach. Not only did most contributors prefer not to be led by theory.
More importantly, evidence for each period exists on very different scales. It was this, for example, that led to the decision to include a full account of the processes of printing and type-founding not in the volume that included Caxton, England's first printer, but that for the eighteenth century, where the evidence of printers' manuals, archives such as those of the Bowyers3or Cambridge University Press, and surviving equipment such as that at Oxford University Press, could be marshalled into a coherent and authoritative survey. The volume covering 1400 to 1557 was largely concerned with readership, that for 1557 to 1695 with the book trade, and that for 1830 to 1914 with the increasing ubiquity of print as well as with the many mechanical innovations.
The concluding volume for the period since 1914 is expected in the next two or three years.
In general, the History of the book in Britain has not been concerned with the world of print as a whole. The appearance in 2011 of the first volume, entitled Cheap print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, edited by Joad Raymond, of a planned
nine-volume Oxford history of popular print culture, was a timely reminder of some of the wider issues concerning what it meant to live in a world that was increasingly managed by, and dependent on, print. This examined not only popular literature of the cheapest kind, but also newspapers and the world of ephemera.
If the last few years have been dominated in Britain by the Cambridge project, it has also aired a host of further questions. In the following, I offer an account of some of the work that has been done in Britain concerning the history of the book.
Occasionally I have alluded to work by scholars based in other countries, where this seemed to be particularly helpful in setting a context. All of it, without exception, airs needs for further investigations and sometimes new kinds of questions, whether about different approaches, different kinds of evidence, different groups of people, or different genres of publication. Sometimes the questions are explicit. More often they are implied challenges. In general, the twentieth century has so far attracted less in-depth consideration than earlier ones.
Infrastructures: people
If we search for a date to which we may attach the beginning of institutional interest in the history of the book, then we can do no better than look to the foundation of the Bibliographical Society in 1892. This has been followed since by other
bibliographical societies, including those at Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge. With an eye to slightly different emphases, the Printing Historical Society was founded in 1964. The still predominantly Anglo-American Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and
3 K. Maslen, J. Lancaster (eds.), The Bowyer ledgers. London/New York 1991.
Publishing (SHARP) is a more recent arrival, founded in 1991. The principal annual specialist lecture series are the Sandars lectures, founded at Cambridge in 1895, the Lyell lectures (Oxford, founded 1952) and the Panizzi lectures (British Library, founded 1985). In university teaching, where the vagaries and changing demands of academic programmes and funding mean that there is no guarantee of longevity, the School of Advanced Study at the University of London offers anMAin the history of the book, as well as annual summer schools. At Oxford, the Bodleian Library has recently established a Centre for the Study of the Book, and at Oxford Brookes University there is an International Centre for Publishing Studies. The University of Edinburgh established a Centre for the History of the Book in 1995. At Cambridge, graduate seminars on the history of material texts draw their membership from departments including English, history, modern languages, the history of art and architecture, music and the history of science. At Reading, the Department of Typography has a strong historical element, reflected in its periodic series of Typography papers. The Open University offers a Book History Research Group.
This list is far from exhaustive, but it indicates the range of approaches taken in teaching, managing and encouraging the subject.
Infrastructures: bibliographical resources
For the two Cambridge histories, it was possible to tackle a subject stretching over so long a period thanks not only to sufficient contributors, but also to a bibliographical infrastructure. For the period from the mid-fifteenth century to the nineteenth century, there are reliable, if varyingly complete, retrospective bibliographies. The English Short-Title Catalogue, based partly on older works includingSTCand Wing and covering 1475 to 1800, is not quite comprehensive, but it provides a sufficiently detailed account of what has survived.4The Nineteenth-Century STC is less advanced,5 but again it offers a broader conspectus than is available in what is otherwise the most comprehensive record, in the British Library's catalogue. Neither of these, of course, is entirely complete; and neither lists what has not survived, not only of books but also of newspapers, pamphlets and all kinds of miscellaneous ephemeral material.
To that extent, it remains difficult to judge with complete accuracy what is meant by a society dependent on print.
As in some other countries, much effort has been given over the last few years to compiling essential retrospective databases. Apart from the now well-established
CERL,6efforts are being made in St Andrews and in Dublin to compile a Universal short-title catalogue, initially to 1600 but now to be extended into the seventeenth century.7Allied to them is the manuscript archival record. A sustained campaign to identify and preserve the archives of printers, publishers and other parts of the book trade has enabled new and fresh work. The archives of the eighteenth-century London printers
4 See estc.bl.uk.
5 See nstc.chadwyck.com.
6 See www.cerl.org/web.
7 See www.ustc.ac.uk.
William Bowyer father and son have been published in facsimile, with an
accompanying catalogue of the work recorded in the ledgers. Those of Cambridge University Press, published in part some years ago and now readily available in the University Library, have made possible a comprehensive re-evaluation of the history of the oldest press in the world (founded 1583).8The Longman archives, housed in Reading University Library with those of several other publishers, were the basis of a substantial history of the firm, with a history dating from 1724.9The papers of the firm of the publishers John Murray (founded at Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century) were bought by the National Library of Scotland, and are being steadily exploited.10Many of the Macmillan papers are now in the British Library, and have been used for work on authors including ‘Lewis Carroll’, Tennyson, and Yeats.11A major history of Oxford University Press, again based largely on archives that were only partly accessible until recently, will be published in the next few years. In London, the Faber archives are gradually becoming available online, and will cast a great deal of light on the publishing of twentieth-century poets including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes and others.12So far, most of these publishers' and printers' papers have been little analysed by economic historians.
The third crucial part is access. The existence ofEEBO(Early English Books online) and Ecco (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), with their full-length images of thousands of books published between 1475 and 1800 has in the last few years transformed the study of British history generally, not only the history of the book.
But they are only one aspect. Projects such as the digitisation of the Burney collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers in the British Library, of the state papers held at the National Archives and in some private collections, and of numerous nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers, have made progress in research possible with a speed and on a scale never before imaginable. Other extensive resources that have become available online, including the Old Bailey records (criminal trials), 1674-1913,13and various Parliamentary and other state papers,14 have so far been explored only a little.
Meanwhile there have been major on-line projects to record members of the book trade. The British Book Trade Index, based at Birmingham, takes matters to c.1850,15 and there is a separate one for Scotland.16The London Book Trades Database deals with the trade in printed books to c.1830.17Two recent local directories of the Suffolk trade, pub-
8 D. McKitterick, A history of Cambridge University Press. 3 vols., Cambridge 1992-2004.
9 A. Briggs, A history of Longmans and their books, 1724-1990. Longevity in publishing.
London 2008.
10 See digital.nls.uk/jma. For an example of work on the firm, see W. Zachs, The first John Murray and the late eighteenth-century London book trade. Oxford 1998.
11 E. James (ed.), Macmillan. A publishing tradition. Basingstoke 2002. For Yeats and others, see the contributions by Warwick Gould concerning the Macmillan archives in C. Hutton, P. Walsh (eds.), The Irish book in English, 1891-2000. Oxford 2011, 481-510, 650-56.
12 See www.faber.co.uk/archive.
13 See www.oldbaileyonline.org.
14 For example the state papers online, 1509-1714: gale.cengage.co.uk/state-papers-online.
15 See www.bbti.bham.ac.uk.
16 See www.nls.uk/catalogues/scottish-book-trade-index.
17 See www.oxbibsoc.org.uk/resources/london-book-trades-database.
lished in conventional format, may serve as examples of their kind.18So far, the twentieth century has been little explored, perhaps because so much appears to be readily available in contemporary directories.
Like their equivalents for books from continental Europe, projects such asEEBO
andECCObring immense benefits. They also all come at a price. As is being increasingly recognised, they focus attention on some survivals - which have been digitised and made easily available - at the expense of others which have not; and they distract from the further question that attends all kinds of evidence: what has not survived. The existence of a single digitised copy of a book is made to serve for many. I return to the importance of multiple pieces of evidence, and questions of provenance and copy-specific evidence, later on.
Secondly, digital copies are surrogates. Reproductions, and especially reproductions on film or digitised for screen presentation, cannot provide the physical immediacy of originals. Three dimensions are reduced to two, often distorted by the screen.
Colour is unreliable. Paper quality and weight cannot be judged. Even the size of originals cannot be adequately represented. Variety is reduced to uniformity. These are not new issues. When in 1985 D.F. McKenzie reminded his audience at the British Library that ‘forms effect meaning’,19he could not have predicted how rapidly electronic access to texts would develop in the coming years: in all manner of devices both small and large, and by all manner of software programmes. McKenzie's words, which have since been widely quoted, drew on long-standing bibliographical and critical observation. Forms of presentation not only affect meaning; they also help to create it, effect it. The maxim embodies a point that is central to the history of the book: the importance of artefactual evidence. Notwithstanding the lip service widely paid to McKenzie, one feature of recent work is an increasing divergence between historians who write about the history of the book from the evidence of primary materials - physical books whose format, weight, colour and materials are visible and tangible in all their glory, expense, cheapness, beauty or ugliness, pristine and barely touched or grubby from use - and those for whom secondary records or accounts are sufficient.
Varieties of book history
We may now turn to more particular aspects of book history. The fifteenth century has been exceptionally well served, with two major catalogues and one on-going project that has produced a number of unexpected results. The long-awaited publication ofBMC XI, the catalogue of fifteenth-century English printed books in the British Library, was based on work dating from the first years of the twentieth century and continued by successive members of the staff of the British Museum (from 1973 the British
18 T. Copsey, Ipswich book trades. A biographical dictionary of persons connected with the book & periodical trades in Ipswich. Ipswich 2011; T. Copsey, Suffolk book trades. A biographical dictionary. Ipswich 2012.
19 D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the sociology of texts. London 1986, 4.
Library).20But it was brought to completion by Lotte Hellinga, with crucial help (especially concerning paper evidence as a means of dating books) from Paul Needham. Much more than a catalogue, this volume also offered an introduction cast on a far greater scale than its predecessors, work that in itself provided an account of English fifteenth-century printing fuller than anything published, anywhere. It addressed not just issues of canon, dating, manufacture, authorship, the careers of printers and other topics that were to be expected, but also of survival and of the history of taste. It was pioneering not only in the detail of the contents of volumes, and the copy-specific information about provenance, type-setting, binding etc., but also in the substantial introduction including such matters as details of production and of survival, besides the traditional attention to type-faces. Dr Hellinga followed this with two further projects; an updated edition of Duff's standard bibliography of all English fifteenth-century printing,21and a study of William Caxton and early printing in England (2010). In the latter, and in an article in the Bulletin du bibliophile,22she put forward a powerful argument that Caxton's press in the Low Countries was not at Bruges, but at Ghent.
Figure 2. Lotte Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England. London 2010
20 Catalogue of books printed in the XVth century now in the British Library. BMC Part XI.
England. 't Goy-Houten 2007.
21 Printing in England in the fifteenth century. E. Gordon Duff's bibliography with supplementary descriptions, chronologies and a census of copies by Lotte Hellinga. London 2009.
22 L. Hellinga, ‘William Caxton, Colard Mansion and the printer in Type 1’, in: Bulletin du bibliophile (2011), 86-114.
Two other catalogues of incunables set new standards. The six-volume catalogue of those in the Bodleian Library at Oxford paid especial attention to the multiple authorial responsibilities for books that have, traditionally, generally been credited to single individuals.23In doing so, the catalogue made plain some of the ways in which ideas of authorship and attribution were to change quite dramatically during the following century as medieval traditions were gradually displaced. At Cambridge, where a printed catalogue of the incunabula in the University Library was published in 1954 and was then thought to be a model of its kind, a new computer-based catalogue was begun. Instead of simply transferring existing data, each book has been examined anew, resulting not only in the recording of more data, but also in the discovery of new features such as forgotten provenance details or evidence of use in annotations by (occasionally) well-known individuals. The project has been accompanied by an informative blog.24
With the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC), hosted in the British Library,25 the existence of this new generation of catalogues (supplemented by others abroad, especially in Germany) lends a fresh impetus to incunable studies. Meanwhile, subsequent periods have been approached from various viewpoints. My own Print, manuscript and the search for order (Cambridge, 2003) examined aspects of what was meant by a printing revolution, showing that this was much more protracted than is sometimes assumed: the period spanned 1450 to the 1830s, from the complicated transition from manuscript to print to the work of Charles Babbage.
While work such as Harold Love's Scribal publication in seventeenth-century England (Oxford, 1993)26had demonstrated the continuing importance of the written word not just for letters but also for publication, the interplay of print and manuscript is becoming ever clearer with respect to its complexity.
In the seventeenth century, the royal printers have attracted particular attention, notably in the work of Graham Rees and Maria Wakely on the century's early years.27 The anniversaries of the publication of the King James Bible in 1611, and of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, produced disappointingly little serious bibliographical analysis. Much more attention has been paid to questions of censorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example in a trio of works by Cyndia Susan Clegg.28
The business of bookselling and publishing was the subject of James Raven's The business of books, a study that, by taking a long period, showed how these changed not only in themselves but also in their relationship to each other.29As international activities, they were also reflected in the national histories of the book in Australia,
23 A. Coates [et al.], A catalogue of books printed in theXVth century and now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 6 vols., Oxford 2005.
24 See www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/incblog.
25 See www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc.
26 Republished as The culture and commerce of texts. Amherst,MA, 1998. See also the work of Brian Richardson on Italy (note 37 below).
27 G. Rees, M. Wakely, Publishing, politics and culture. The King's printers in the reign of James I and James VI. Oxford 2009.
28 C.S. Clegg, Press censorship in Elizabethan England. Cambridge 1997; Press censorship in Jacobean England. Cambridge 2001; Press censorship in Caroline England. Cambridge 2008.
29 J. Raven, The business of books. Booksellers and the English book trade, 1450-1850. New Haven 2007.
account of
the Charleston Literary Society,30and in my own study of a Barbados bookseller, importing from London for re-export to the eastern seaboard.31Such studies, complementing work done in the United States, serve as reminders of international trade, readership and personal and financial dependence, and of how much more needs to be done in exploring the mechanics and effects of the trade both
internationally and nationally. Some of this emerged in a collection of essays on the twentieth-century antiquarian trade, edited by Giles Mandelbrote.32This book reflected a gradual - and long overdue - growth in interest in the ordinary second-hand trade as well. For the seventeenth century, Matthew Yeo explored the use made of second-hand booksellers by the infant Chetham's library in Manchester.33For the new books trade, Sue Bradley edited a collection of interviews by mostly British booksellers and publishers.34Two series of annual conferences, one on the provincial trade and one designed more generally, have produced many useful and well-focussed studies of both individuals and themes.35
There is a pressing need for the international nature of the whole subject of production and trade to be more fully understood. It was explored in Andrew Pettegree's The book in the renaissance (YaleUP, 2010), and in several more particular studies. Ian Maclean's work is also notable for assuming an international viewpoint.36 More locally, Brian Richardson's several books on Italian renaissance books have frequently been concerned with the relationship between manuscript and print.37 Conor Fahy (d. 2009) left a body of work that helped to transform sixteenth-century bibliographical study both in Italy and concerning Italian books.38Taking a different palette, the publication of T.F. Earle's account of early modern Portuguese writers in some British libraries offered a welcome perspective on the ways in which interests developed, albeit within a strictly defined community.39For older books, Kristian Jensen's Revolution and the antiquarian book employed catalogues, surviving copies
30 J. Raven, London booksellers and American customers. Transatlantic literary community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748-1811. Columbia,SC, 2002.
31 D. McKitterick, ‘Books for Barbados and the British Atlantic colonies in the early eighteenth century’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 118 (2009), 407-65.
32 G. Mandelbrote (ed.), Out of print and into profit. A history of the rare and secondhand book trade in Britain in the twentieth century. London 2006.
33 M. Yeo, The acquisition of books by Chetham's Library, 1655-1700. Leiden 2011.
34 S. Bradley (ed.), The British book trade. An oral history. London 2008.
35 Papers from the series of Print Networks conferences have been edited by John Hinks and others. Those of the Publishing Pathways series have been edited by Robin Myers and others:
the volume Owners, annotators and the signs of reading (London 2005) includes a list of the contents of previous volumes.
36 I. Maclean, Learning and the market place. Essays in the history of the early modern book.
Leiden 2009; Scholarship, commerce, religion. The learned book in the age of confessions, 1560-1630. Cambridge,MA, 2012.
37 B. Richardson, Print culture in renaissance Italy. The editor and the vernacular text, 1470-1600. Cambridge 1994; Printing, writers and readers in renaissance Italy. Cambridge 1999; Manuscript culture in renaissance Italy. Cambridge 2009.
38 N. Harris, ‘Bibliografia delle publicazioni di Conor Fahy, 1999-2008’ (with references also to earlier work), in: La bibliofilia 111 (2009), 75-89.
39 T.F. Earle, Portuguese writers and English readers. Books by Portuguese writers printed before 1640 in the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford 2009.
cy that is still very much alive in the ways in which older western European books are viewed in Britain.40
Ownership and reading
Interest in mentalités, expounded years ago by Robert Mandrou and others,41has led to a burgeoning industry concerning copy-specific information about books of all kinds. This has taken various forms. Two detailed surveys of surviving copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare considerably expanded as well as updated the work of Sidney Lee at the beginning of the twentieth century,42and in their methods bear comparison with the work of Owen Gingerich on the earliest editions of Copernicus's De revolutionibus.43A similar approach was taken with surviving copies of Samuel Purchas's accounts of English voyages.44While these have focussed on particular books, questions of provenance have been much more widely pursued for individuals.
Accounts of National Trust libraries have brought much to light from shelves not easily available to ordinary country-house visitors.45Contents of other individual collections have been summarised in the two series Libri Pertinentes and Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE). David Pearson's Provenance research in book history. A handbook (1994, revised reprint 1998) has proved to be especially influential in an area of study that has attracted considerable interest internationally.
His account of a group of copies of a work by Francis Bacon, in his more general study Books as history,46offered a further example of the ranges of readership and taste, readily apparent in the kinds of bookbindings distributed amongst early owners.
Besides this, he has also made available an on-line index to English book owners in the seventeenth century.47For bookbinding studies, the completion of Mirjam Foot's magisterial three-volume catalogue of the Henry Davis gift in the British Library offers an exceptional, and international, range of examples, not just in the history of decoration but also frequently suggestive for the history of taste - and use.48The continuing work of Anthony Hobson, especially on bookbinding in the renaissance, has further demonstrated the extent to which the study of bindings can enable a better
40 K. Jensen, Revolution and the antiquarian book. Reshaping the past, 1780-1815. Cambridge 2011.
41 R. Mandrou, Introduction à la France moderne. Essai de psychologie historique, 1500-1640.
Paris 1961.
42 The more recent of these is E. Rasmussen, A.J. West (eds.), The Shakespeare first folio. A descriptive catalogue. Basingstoke 2012.
43 O. Gingerich, An annotated census of Copernicus' De revolutionibus (Nuremberg 1543 and Basel 1566). Leiden 2002.
44 P. Neville-Sington, ‘The primary Purchas bibliography’, in: L.E. Pennington (ed.), The Purchas handbook. Studies of the life, times and writings of Samuel Purchas, 1577-1626. 2 vols., London 1997.
45 For example M. Purcell, The big house library in Ireland. Books in Ulster country houses.
London 2011.
46 D. Pearson, Books as history. The importance of books beyond their texts. London 2008.
47 See www.bibsoc.org.uk/electronic-publications.htm.
48 M.M. Foot, The Henry Davis gift. A collection of bookbindings [now in the British Library].
London 1978-2007.
owners than with the book trade, and turned to newspaper advertisements to record sales of
49 See for example A.R.A. Hobson, Renaissance book collecting. Jean Grolier and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, their books and bindings. Cambridge 1999.
which no catalogue survives.50Unfortunately, his focus meant that he omitted hundreds of catalogues recording anonymous sales. While the nineteenth century remains under-explored, the bicentennial history of the Roxburghe Club by Nicolas Barker (2012) was as much a reminder of major collectors as a challenge to further work among those not at the centre of bibliographical fashion.
Figure 3. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge 2004
The history of reading, drawing on bibliographical and archival evidence, has attracted especial attention, exemplified in work on the early modern period, from different viewpoints, by Eamon Duffy, Kevin Sharpe and William Sherman.51The study of provenance can often be closely related to the study of reading as it is manifest in personal annotation. So far, this kind of evidence has been less discussed for later periods,
50 R. Alston, Inventory of sale catalogues of named and attributed owners of books sold by retail or auction, 1676-1800. An inventory of sales in the British Isles, America, the United States, Canada, India. 2 vols., Yeadon 2011.
51 E. Duffy, Marking the hours. English people and their prayers, 1240-1570. New Haven 2006; K. Sharpe, Reading revolution. The politics of reading in early modern England. New Haven 2000; W. Sherman, John Dee. The politics of reading and writing in the English renaissance. Amherst 1997; W. Sherman, Used books. Marking readers in renaissance England. Philadelphia 2007.
but meanwhile the history of reading is attracting very considerable interest among literary historians as well.
William St Clair's The reading nation in the romantic period (2004) was based on an examination of production statistics for different formats of books. It showed how the ending of perpetual copyright in the 1770s affected publication in sometimes unexpected ways, and it demonstrated amongst much else the practice followed by publishers of new titles exploiting each part of the market in turn, offering more expensive formats (quarto, large octavo) before the smaller and cheaper ones (small octavo, duodecimo etc.). While his study was widely welcomed, it remains that a great deal more remains to be explored about the reading nation at this time, as reflected in the growing periodical market and among the individual choices recorded in innumerable personal manuscript anthologies. In The Enlightenment and the Scots, Richard Sher tackled some of the same issues, not always agreeing with St Clair.52
Illustration has aroused detailed interest only in some areas. While in my Print, manuscript and the search for order I addressed the phenomenon of manuscript and printed illustration appearing side by side in some early books, Sachiko Kusukawa has addressed the rather wider question of sixteenth-century scientific book illustration in her Picturing the book of nature (2012).53In the seventeenth century, engraved illustration has recently attracted especial attention, particularly in the project led by Michael Hunter to compile a fully indexed digital library of British prints to 1700, including indexes to subject-matter.54Unfortunately there is no archive in Britain comparable to that of the Plantin press, on which Bowen and Imhof drew for their pioneering investigation of the relationship between letterpress and intaglio.55Among studies of later periods, the appearance of Nigel Tattersfield's immense bibliography of the wood engraver Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) set new standards in its attention to archival sources and questions of attribution.56In the twentieth century, interest in the design of dust-wrappers and other covers was reflected in Joseph Connolly on those of Faber (dominated for many years by Berthold Wolpe, as the firm's
typographer)57and in Phil Baines on those of Penguin.58The whole subject calls for extended analysis, but so far the only person to have written more generally and at length about the history of book-jackets is the American scholar G. Thomas Tanselle.59
52 R.B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Scots. Scottish authors and their publishers in eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland and America. Chicago 2006.
53 S. Kusukawa, Picturing the book of nature. Image, text and argument in sixteenth-century human anatomy and medical botany. Chicago 2012.
54 See www.bpi1700.org.uk. See also M. Hunter (ed.), Printed images in early modern Britain.
Essays in interpretation. Farnham 2010.
55 K.L. Bowen, D. Imhof Christopher Plantin and engraved book illustrations in sixteenth-century Europe. Cambridge 2008.
56 N. Tattersfield, Thomas Bewick. The complete illustrative work. 3 vols., London 2011.
57 J. Connolly, Eighty years of book cover design. London 2009.
58 Ph. Baines, Penguin by design. A cover story, 1935-2005. London 2005. See also Seven hundred Penguins. London 2007.
59 G.Th. Tanselle, Book-jackets. Their history, forms and use. Charlottesville 2011.
The dispersal of libraries
In the last few years, the management, and the dispersal, of some major libraries of early printed books has become a cause for concern. Partly, it reflects the crisis in library funding that is common through much of the western world. Partly it reflects various crises in institutional funding more generally, whether in universities, the churches, or in societies. Partly also it reflects an increasing belief in the sufficiency of scanned versions of books as being adequate both for immediate use and for long-term preservation. So-called rationalisation of book stocks may help library budgets, but it always obscures the history of books. These are all long-term issues, and the effect of decisions taken now will affect public understanding of books for all time. So, for example, Keele University sold a substantial collection of books on the history of science and mathematics, including books annotated by Sir Isaac Newton. Scandalously, in 2006 the diocese of Truro sold a major library of early printed books including not only a copy of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible but also a copy of Macklin's monumental edition of the Bible (1800) extra-illustrated on a unique scale, the inserted pictures bulking the original to no fewer than sixty-three volumes. The set was dismantled, and the illustrations dispersed in the print trade.
The rest of the library, mostly sent to a bookseller, was sold for very considerably less than its true value, and the sale seems to have been done by the diocese without taking any serious professional advice. More cheerfully, when in 2008 the city of Cardiff decided to sell its historic collection from the public library, a campaign successfully saw the books bought by the University of Cardiff helped substantially with a grant from the Welsh Assembly. The books, including a quantity of incunabula and a collection of seventeenth-century English drama of exceptional importance, had been collected in the late nineteenth century on a scale that was intended to form the core of a new National Library of Wales, and continued for a generation even after that Library was established on an entirely fresh site at Aberystwyth. Early reports suggest also that the provenances of many of the books, from early Welsh libraries, will substantially extend knowledge of the history of the use of books among Welsh families. The gradual attrition of historic libraries, and with them the evidence of book ownership and use, shows no sign of halting, and the tale is a mixed one.
Many of the books from the Benedictine abbey of Fort Augustus, for example, are now in the National Library of Scotland. The early books from Ushaw College, a Roman Catholic seminary with its roots in the sixteenth-century English College at Douai, are now under the umbrella of Durham University Library. But much of the library of Cheshunt College, Cambridge, originally a nonconformist training college, was sold in 2012. Easily the most spectacular sale of this kind was that of the seventh-century manuscript of the Gospel of St John, from Stonyhurst, sold by the Jesuit order in 2012 to the British Library for £9 million.
Private libraries are a separate matter, but many people lamented the dispersal of the library of the Earls of Macclesfield, one of the greatest of all private libraries formed mostly in the first half of the eighteenth century.60An exceptional record of how New-tonianism and other traditions of natural philosophy were sustained, developed and shared, it can now never be studied in its entirety.
60 Most of it was sold in twelve sales at Sotheby's, 2004-8, after part had been retained by the family. Further books have since been offered by the booksellers Maggs Bros.
A further look ahead
Looking ahead, what further work is needed, and where can we expect interests to develop? Computer-based projects such asCERL, theISTCand the Universal
Short-Title Catalogue being developed at St Andrew's University draw daily attention to the international nature of the subject. In the last few pages, some lines of enquiry - both international and insular - have already been suggested. Most importantly, the primacy of the printed artefact as evidence stands as a reminder to librarians and scholars alike of the importance of its maintenance, preservation and study. How much can we afford to throw away? As our world grows ever more dependent on the Web and other kinds of non-print environments, so it becomes ever more urgent to understand a medium that in the course of over five hundred years became dominant, but that was never a monopoly. How has print related to speech, the word to image, verbal language to the language of signs? First, we need to develop our knowledge of the extent to which print penetrated many aspects of society in ways of which we are so far largely ignorant. While great strides have been made in searching family, ecclesiastical, legal and business archives, the largest relevant question remains. What has been lost? What kinds of documents (not simply what books) have been lost? How many copies were printed, of books, and of more ephemeral publications such as notices, advertisements, licences, catalogues?
Quantification is taking a more central role, and it has the potential to inform present-day challenges concerning preservation as well as our understanding of the past, and what was meant by the power of print. Second, and related to the first: for some scholars, this is a question that is centered on books. William St Clair (a former civil servant in the Treasury) has suggested thatESTCrecords could be linked to archival records so as to produce the beginning of a census of production: such a project would require considerable care in its detail, if false trails and false links are to be avoided. These same archival records provide some of our best evidence of what has either completely, or almost, disappeared. Third, how do new books relate to old ones, and how does this relationship change? Fourth, how has the book trade worked - locally, nationally, internationally - and how has it changed over more than five centuries? Fifth, what is print for? Here, a growing interest in the history of information by Asa Briggs, Peter Burke and others suggests a new stress on the relationship between print and other forms of communication.61Most of these and other questions addressed above require international outlooks.
61 A. Briggs, P. Burke, A social history of the media from Gutenberg to the Internet. 3rd ed., Cambridge 2009; P. Burke, A social history of knowledge. 2 vols., Cambridge 2000-12. For work in a key part of the British Empire, see C. Bayly, Empire and information. Intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge 1996.
