Book review: Pass the tortoise shell: reading and writing across time and space
James Raven: WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK?
Reviewed by EVE HOUGHTON
The history of the book does not always involve the study of either history or books. As James Raven shows in this slim, engaging volume, the question of what sort of object might count as a book remains very much up for debate. The history of the book in the Western world has traditionally made “book” synonymous with “codex” – gatherings of leaves folded or stitched together – but in Professor Raven’s geographically and chronologically wide-ranging account, it takes a variety of material forms: Chinese tortoise shells inscribed 3,000 years ago; Sumerian clay tablets impressed with cuneiform scripts; knotted string records, or khipus, used for record-keeping by South American Incan officials. The boundaries of the book seem even less clearly defined in the era of the blog post and Kindle.
Reviewed by EVE HOUGHTON
The history of the book does not always involve the study of either history or books. As James Raven shows in this slim, engaging volume, the question of what sort of object might count as a book remains very much up for debate. The history of the book in the Western world has traditionally made “book” synonymous with “codex” – gatherings of leaves folded or stitched together – but in Professor Raven’s geographically and chronologically wide-ranging account, it takes a variety of material forms: Chinese tortoise shells inscribed 3,000 years ago; Sumerian clay tablets impressed with cuneiform scripts; knotted string records, or khipus, used for record-keeping by South American Incan officials. The boundaries of the book seem even less clearly defined in the era of the blog post and Kindle.
Furthermore, the
“history” of the book might not capture the full range and diversity of a
scholarly endeavour that now encompasses work in literary studies, sociology,
anthropology and computer science. Data-driven projects such as the Open
University’s Reading Experience Database consider histories of
book provenance and use on an aggregate scale. Advanced word and phrase search
functions in databases such as Google Books and the HathiTrust Digital Library
have allowed a computational approach to traditional literary-critical
investigations concerning questions of style, authorship and literary
influence. Online collections – among them Early English Books Online and Eighteenth
Century Collections Online – have replaced reels of microfilm with
digital images.
The field Robert Darnton described in the early 1980s as “the social and cultural history of communication by print” now involves objects of inquiry and methodological approaches that would have been hard to imagine even a few decades ago, such as work on “born-digital” archives (such as emails and Word documents) or computer models that can superimpose historical records of book ownership over geographic data.
The field Robert Darnton described in the early 1980s as “the social and cultural history of communication by print” now involves objects of inquiry and methodological approaches that would have been hard to imagine even a few decades ago, such as work on “born-digital” archives (such as emails and Word documents) or computer models that can superimpose historical records of book ownership over geographic data.
It is a credit
to What Is the History of the Book? that it emphasizes
enduring questions about the scope of book history while defining the
parameters of the field in enough detail to advance towards a “global,
accessible introduction to the field of book history from ancient to modern
times”. The book also gestures towards emerging areas of scholarship,
particularly in an illuminating chapter on the history of reading. Raven writes
that reading is “the most significant and challenging dimension of the history
of books”. Because it leaves few material records, reading remains one of the
most elusive practices to capture in historical terms. For example, it is not
always a silent, solitary activity. As Paul Saenger and other scholars have
shown, there is significant evidence that many people in pre-modern Europe
heard books more than they read them. But how can historians and literary critics
account for a form of engagement with books that, more often than not, left no
trace behind?
The upturn in
scholarly interest in readers’ marginalia in the past thirty years offers one
way of historicizing reading. But as Raven reminds us, “book usage . . . need
not correspond to what is generally regarded as reading”. Leah Price and Adam
Smyth, among others, have investigated a range of activities that might also be
considered under the rubric of reading – skimming books, recycling them,
venerating them. In one of Price’s memorable anecdotes from Victorian Britain,
a woman is accused of matching her book bindings to the colour of her dresses.
The earliest forms of Japanese woodblock printing, Raven points out, were
associated with various forms of ceremonial practice and prayer that allowed
the book to be displayed as a “preventative shaman”. Raven suggests
persuasively that not reading is as much a part of the history of the book as
reading, since “ritual attendance” to the book as a physical object may have
been, for certain people, “far more important” than actual reading.
