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.

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.

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.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/pass-the-tortoise-shell/