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Book History at Penn State

by James L.W. West III

n the summer of 1992, without specific plan or strategy, I founded the Penn State Center for the History of the Book. The beginnings of the Center were not particularly auspicious: my dean, with admirable clearheadedness, simply told me that one could start such an enterprise by having some letterhead printed. She gave me a little seed money, I had the stationery prepared, and I was in business.

One of my first tasks was to explain, to colleagues and others in the university, just what was meant by the term “Book History.” I told them that History of the Book (or histoire du livre) had its beginnings in France with the publication of the seminal work L'Apparition du livre by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin in 1958. From France the discipline spread to England and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and began to make its appearance in this country, as a formally recognized field of study, in the late 1970s. Among its pioneers in the United States were Elizabeth L. Eisenstein at the University of Michigan, G. Thomas Tanselle of the Guggenheim Foundation, and Robert Darnton at Princeton University. The field is now well-established, with several scholarly organizations holding conferences and publishing newsletters, and with a good deal of activity among university presses and graduate schools.

Historians of the book engage in the scholarly study of scribal and print culture—the apparatus that exists in any advanced society for the production and dissemination of the written or printed word. In the broadest sense, book historians study the influence of manuscript or printed materials on the development and transmission of culture. Usually they concentrate on a group of related topics: authorship, bookselling, printing, publishing, distribution, and reading. A book historian places these activities into economic, technical, and cultural contexts for a particular time and place. The goal is to understand the role of the book in the history of a given society. The book can be examined as an art object, technological artifact, commercial product, or cultural signifier.

Book History is a messy discipline; perhaps for that reason it's an exciting place to work. The field is still in the process of defining itself and setting down its rules of procedure, though self-definition has not absorbed overly much energy, probably because most book historians are too busy playing the game to worry about the rules. Who is allowed to play? The answer, happily, is that virtually anyone can participate. Many book historians come from departments of English and history, but others are in departments of sociology, library science, economics, comparative literature, journalism, foreign languages, philosophy, art history, and design. Still others are librarians or museum curators or biographers, and there are able book historians who work in trade publishing and the rare-book world. That diversity of background gives the discipline strength and variety; it also ensures that professional conferences will be relatively tranquil, since there is no pecking order to squabble over.

From the beginning I had three goals in mind for the Center at Penn State. I wanted to see book history taught to graduate and advanced undergraduate students; I wanted to put in motion a program of publications at Penn State Press; and I wanted to sponsor lectures and exhibits. I also wanted to connect the Penn State Center with the larger community of the book, in this country and abroad, and to discover and reach that community in our own university and town.

The pedagogical effort has progressed steadily. Graduate seminars and undergraduate courses in book history have been available at Penn State since the mid-1990s. Faculty who have developed such offerings, other than myself, have included Michael Anesko, Robin Schulze, and Robert Edwards in English; Willa Silverman in French; Johathan Burgoyne and Lisa Surwillo in Spanish; and William L. Joyce, who heads the special collections division of the university library. The English department has recently hired Marcy North, a book historian who works in the Early Modern period; her first seminar in the discipline will be offered in 2004.

The publications program at Penn State Press has moved forward briskly. The central effort is the Penn State Series in the History of the Book, a line of original scholarly monographs in such areas as publishing history, author-publisher relationships, genetic histories of texts, studies of professional authorship, examinations of readership and distribution of books, and research on the history of copyright and concepts of literary property. Eleven books have been published, including James M. Hutchisson's The Rise of Sinclair Lewis; David Finkelstein's The House of Blackwood; James G. Nelson's Publisher to the Decadents; and Ezra Greenspan's George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher. A full listing of titles in the series is available elsewhere on this website.

Sanford Thatcher, who directs Penn State Press, along with Peter Potter, the senior editor there, have been indulgent and have allowed the series to include a journal as well—a clothbound annual called Book History. It is produced by SHARP, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, a visible and active book-history organization with nearly 1,200 members in thirty-eight countries around the world. In 1999 Book History won the prize for Best New Journal given by CELJ, the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals. Its co-editors are Jonathan Rose and Ezra Greenspan.

Lectures and exhibits are, locally, the most visible activity of the Penn State Center. When I founded the enterprise I wondered whether there would be, in central Pennsylvania, a constituency that would support such activities. I did find such a group, both on the university campus, among faculty and staff, and in the larger university family, among alumni and townspeople and retirees. The lectures (often coupled with exhibits) have been well-attended, and the lecturers have been a diverse group. John Sharpe spoke on “The Book as Cultural Emblem”; Robert Grudin on his academic satire Book: A Novel (which I recommend to anyone who cares about the printed word); Trevor Howard-Hill on “Getting a Grip on the Book in Britain”; Susan Albertine on the Chicago salonist-publisher-caterer-facilitator Harriet Moody; Janice Radway on the Book-of-the-Month Club; Linda Lapides on Struwwelpeter, the unkempt little fellow from German children's literature; Robert Patten on “When Is a Book Not a Book?”; and Roger Chartier on “Languages, Books, and Reading Practices.”

Activities of this kind (for anyone who might be thinking of founding a center like this one) help to connect the enterprise with the larger university and the local community. The Center at Penn State is tied to and supported by the College of the Liberal Arts, the University Libraries, the Department of English, Penn State Press, and the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, which is based in our library with Steven L. Herb as its director. However much by plan those interconnections might look to be, they in fact simply happened: everyone seemed willing to participate, and everyone has stayed interested.

One of the most pleasant aspects of establishing the Center at Penn State has been the discovery of a national and international confederation of organizations and societies in the field of book history. The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, directed by John Y. Cole, offered us an affiliation early on, and that association has been most valuable, since the Center at the LC is a clearing house and rallying point for people in the field. Another important organization for book historians in this country is the American Antiquarian Society, which hosts summer institutes and conferences, and which is sponsoring the multi-volume History of the Book in America project, published by Cambridge University Press. Small centers like the one at Penn State are also connected to other organizations: the Bibliographical Society of America, for example, or the American Printing History Association, the Book Trade History Group in England, the Institut Memoirs de l'Edition Contemporaine (IMEC) in France, the Centre National de l'Archeologie et de l'Histoire du Livre in Belgium, the Leipziger Arbeitskreis zur Geschichte des Buchwesens in Germany, the Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging in Holland, and similar groups in Russia, Australia, Canada, Scotland, India, Italy, and other countries.

That feeling of interconnectedness is reassuring for those of us who call ourselves book historians. In the years before the discipline came to be recognized in this country and elsewhere, the study of books seemed to be a fragmented enterprise, and many of us in the field felt isolated. Now, by contrast, scholarly editors, analytical bibliographers, printing historians, students of the publishing trade, sociologists interested in reading habits, economists who study book distribution, art historians who examine book illumination, historians who investigate the development of print technology—all of us rub shoulders comfortably beneath the wide umbrella of book history and feel at home in the organizations I've mentioned.

If one is thinking of founding a center for book history, it's reassuring to know that a great deal can be done with just a little money. Public lectures and exhibits are not especially costly; teaching and tutoring of graduate students can be carried out within existing educational frameworks. Publishing can be accomplished through one of the presses which are now issuing books in the field. In addition to the Penn State Series, there are lists in book history at Cambridge University Press, the University of Massachusetts Press, Scolar Press, Ashgate, and IMEC in Paris. Other university presses, such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, and Princeton, have ongoing interests in the field.

If anyone founds a center of this type, he or she should expect to be asked questions about the future of print culture. Will computer technology render obsolete the book as we know it? Will the codex disappear into cyber-space? The very phrase “History of the Book” has a retrospective sound to it: if the book is now a subject for historians, does that mean that it has already become part of the past, a subject fit only for retrospective analysis? Certainly one hopes not. Indeed, from my own observation I should say that the book will pass out of the culture at about the same time that the wheel does. Books are wonderful technological products. They are easily portable and relatively cheap, and they hold great amounts of information. They are simple to use and move around in, especially if they are outfitted with good indexes and tables of contents and documentation. They don't need sources of power; all the reader requires is the physical object in hand.

Books also speak to deep emotional and aesthetic needs in human beings. They are organic objects, subject to decay and instability but remarkably durable all the same. One of the patterns one finds in the study of book history is that books are often said to be endangered: it's a fear that one finds expressed from medieval times all the way through to the present. What is remarkable to observe in the long sweep of book history is how adaptable and resilient the book is, how it can absorb and transform those technologies that seem to threaten it and can emerge reinvented and newly vigorous. For this reason it's probably unwise, if you are a book historian, to dig in your heels and insist that the codex will ultimately defeat the computer. Let the book do its work and survive on its own, as it always has. This isn't really a contest, after all, since both print and electronic publishing aim to do the same thing—store and make accessible information which can be called up to serve the purposes of education and progress.

Indeed, electronic publishing might turn out to be no more than a new kind of technology, similar to the invention of mechanical typesetting machines or the shift from letterpress to offset printing. As important and transformative as those changes were, they did not alter the basic form of the book or the way it was used. Electronic publishing certainly has the potential to do so; conceivably it can change the way we do research, write, and even think. It can alter the way publishers conceive of their work; it can change the way librarians define their roles in society; it can reconfigure the way teachers operate and the manner in which scholars write. But can it replace the book?

Probably not. In any case it will take years for these matters to play themselves out, and in the meantime one can fall back on the emotional and visceral pull of the book. Garrison Keillor put it well recently: the book, he said, is “slow to hatch, as durable as a turtle, light and shapely as befits a descendant of the tree.... Closed, the objet d'book resembles a board. Open, its pale wings brush the fingertips, the spore of fresh ink and pulp excites the nose, the spine lies easily in the hand. A handsome useful object begotten by the passion for truth.”

The book is adaptable and durable. It contains the record of our culture and heritage; it survives fire, flood, warfare, censorship, carelessness, and malice. The book also knows how to wait. Neglected for decades, gathering dust on a shelf or in a box, it yet stands ready for immediate use the moment it is picked up and brushed off. It opens smoothly and begins its work immediately. No one needs to throw a switch or access a power source. The book is its own source of power, self-contained; for that reason it will be with us for quite some time to come.