Darnton 1982

Robert Darnton. "What is the History of Books?" Daedalus 111.3: 65-83. Web.

• 65 It might even be called the social and cultural history of communication by print, if that were not such a mouthful, because its purpose is to understand how ideas were transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind during the last five hundred years.
• ...the history of books did not begin yesterday. It stretches back to the scholarship of the Renaissance, if not beyond; and it began in earnest during the C19, when the study of books as material objects led to the rise of analytical bibliography in England.
  • analytical bib = study of work in its material manifestation -- format, typography, binding -- which leads to descriptive bibliography. NOt good on print runs understood from editions, individual objects
• 67 communications circuit But printed books generally pass through roughly the same life cycle. It could be described as a communications circuit that runs from the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader. The reader completes the circuit, because he influences the author both before and after the act of composition. Authors are readers themselves. By reading and associating with other readers and writers, they form notions of genre and style and a general sense of the literary enterprise, which affects their texts, whether they are composing Shakespearean sonnets or directions for assembling radio kits. A writer may respond in his writing to criticisms of his previous work or anticipate reactions that his text will elicit. He addresses implicit readers and hears from explicit reviewers. So the circuit runs full cycle. It transmits messages, transforming them en route, as they pass from thought to writing to printed characters and back to thought again. Book history concerns each phase of this process and the process as a whole, in all its variations over space and time and in all its relations with other systems, economic, social, political, and cultural, in the surrounding environment.
  • in C19 and likely before, feedback loops between author and publisher that complicate "the author-function" (Buurma 2013) and with C19 novels for ex. between readers and authors
  • Suarez 2004 on the disciplinary and theoretical difficulties of actually doing this well
• 69 because "models have a way of freezing human beings out of history," he performs a case study of Voltaire's Questions sur l'Encyclopédie with the communications circuit.
• 74 But given the present state of documentation, one cannot know who Voltaire's readers were or how they responded to his text. Reading remains the most difficult stage to study in the circuit followed by books.
  • see Knight 2015, Chartier 1994
• 77 Although transport facilities probably had little effect on the trade in great publishing centers like London and Paris, they sometimes determined the ebb and flow of business in remote areas. Before the C19, books were usually sent in sheets, so that the customer could have them bound according to his taste and his ability to pay. They traveled in large bales wrapped in heavy paper, and were easily damaged by rain and the friction of ropes. Compared with commodities like textiles, their intrinsic value was slight, yet their shipping costs were high, owing to the size and weight of the sheets. So shipping often took up a large proportion of the book's total cost and a large place in the marketing strategy of publishers.
  • Commodities
• 79 If it is possible to capture the great rereadings of the past, the inner experience of ordinary readers may always elude us. But we should at least be able to reconstruct a good deal of the social context of reading.
  • Jardine & Grafton 1990, for example
• Following a notion of Rolf Engelsing, they often maintain that reading habits become transformed at the end of the C18. Before this "Leserevolution," readers tended to work laboriously through a small number of texts, especially the bible, over and over again. Afterwards, they raced through all kinds of material, seeking amusement rather than edifictaion. The shift from intensive to extensive reading coincided with a desacralization of the printed word. The world began to be cluttered with reading matter, and texts began to be treated as commodities that could be discarded as casually as yesterday's paper. This interpretation has recently been disputed [he mentions German scholars but Blair 2010 pushes back the timeline and criticisms of Eisenstein 1979 show the use of skepticism for "revolutionary" paradigms]
  • l/u his references in note 41 to German work in library history, incl Paul Raabe, ed., Öffentliche und Private Bibliotheken im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert: Raritätenkammern, Forschungsinstrumente oder Bildungsstätten (and one I found, "World Bibliographies: Libraries and the reorganization of knowledge in Late Renaissance Europe," also Paul Raabe, Tradition und Innovation: Studien und Anmerkungen zur Bibliotheksgeschichte)
• 80 Questions about who reads what, in what conditions, at what time, and with what effect, link reading studies with sociology. The book historian could learn how to pursue such questions from the work of Douglas Waples, Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Pierre Bourdieu. He could draw on the reading research that flourished in the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1950[.]
• 81 Books also refuse to be contained within the confines of a single discipline when treated as objects of study. Neither history nor literature nor economics nor sociology nor bibliography can do justice to all the aspects of the life of a book. By its very nature, therefore, the history of books must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method.