Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture

Books as Media

Simone Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000178296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Publicación

Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture examines the role of the book in the modern world. It considers the book's deeply intertwined relationships with other media through ownership structures, copyright and adaptation, the constantly shifting roles of authors, publishers and readers in the digital ecosystem and the merging of print and digital technologies in contemporary understandings of the book object.

Divided into three parts, the book first introduces students to various theories and methods for understanding print culture, demonstrating how the study of the book has grown out of longstanding academic disciplines. The second part surveys key sectors of the contemporary book world – from independent and alternative publishers to editors, booksellers, readers and libraries – focusing on topical debates. In the final part, digital technologies take centre stage as eBook regimes and mass-digitisation projects are examined for what they reveal about information power and access in the twenty-first century.

This book provides a fascinating and informative introduction for students of all levels in publishing studies, book history, literature and English, media, communication and cultural studies, cultural sociology, librarianship and archival studies and digital humanities.

Part I

Theories and methodologies for understanding print

1 Medium theory

As outlined in this book’s Introduction, Part I of the volume sets out four common theoretical approaches to understanding the contemporary book world: medium theory; book history; political economy; and cultural policy. In any field of study (at least in the humanities and social sciences, which print culture studies straddles) adopting a theoretical position is inevitable. Good academic work is self-conscious about its theoretical choices and justifies these explicitly, whereas inferior academic work proceeds as though there were only one, inevitable theoretical approach that is self-evident to all initiates. The problem with perpetuating such default research practices is that all theoretical perspectives come with inbuilt preoccupations and blind-spots, and the deeper one is socialised into a particular discipline, the harder these taken-for-granted assumptions are to see. The unfortunate upshot is that certain paths of enquiry become heavily trodden while alternative – potentially more revealing – paths are rarely explored. For this reason, Part I of this book juxtaposes several theoretical approaches without privileging any one. In fact, much of the best print culture research combines multiple theoretical approaches to give a 360-degree view of the phenomenon it examines, offsetting the weaknesses implicit in one approach with the insights of another or others. While ‘theory’ in this context means, roughly, a worldview or mental frame of reference, ‘method’ refers more specifically to a process for assessing what counts as evidence to support an academic argument, and a protocol for obtaining and presenting such evidence. In practice, however, theory and method are often deeply intertwined (certain theoretical approaches tend to favour particular quantitative or qualitative methodologies), so I have chosen to label this section ‘Theories and methodologies for understanding print’.

Defining ‘medium theory’

An enterprising (or simply desperate) student’s answer to an exam paper I once set defined medium theory as what lies between ‘big theory’ and ‘little theory’. While novel, their answer was, unfortunately, flat-out wrong. The ‘medium’ in medium theory does not denote size but, rather, the channel or means of communication being used (e.g. oral communication, print, radio, television, the internet or mobile phone). Whereas dominant strands of media theory have long been preoccupied with decoding media texts or analysing their effects on audiences, medium theory draws attention to how the format of communication deployed possesses inbuilt characteristics (whether affordances or limitations). US media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz defines the term thus: ‘Broadly speaking, medium theorists ask: What are the relatively fixed features of each means of communicating and how do these features make the medium physically, psychologically, and socially different from other media and from face-to-face interaction?’ (1995: 50). As Meyrowitz’s useful tripartite schema makes clear, media technologies not only influence the messages conveyed through them but also drive far-reaching changes in humans’ embodied, mental and cultural relationships. Medium theory as an intellectual preoccupation long predates Meyrowitz’s labelling of it as such (as this chapter will explore) but it has proven a useful umbrella term for grouping together multiple theorists (including Meyrowitz himself) who share a technological, materialist orientation, regardless of the specific medium or media they choose to examine.

What is the medium of ‘the book’?

With an understanding of medium theory under our belts we can proceed to examine the specific medium of the book, asking: how might the coming of print have changed humans’ physical, psychological and social behaviours? As it turns out, the book has initiated such changes on a scale so vast it can be difficult comprehend. In fact, the printed book has seeped so deeply into human culture in literate societies for over five centuries that the challenge is to see it as an information technology at all, rather than demoting it to simply the wallpaper of human existence. Experimental creative writer Shelley Jackson, best known as an author of hypertext literature, reminds us of the material reality of books and the comparative recentness of print’s emergence in the history of human communication: ‘The book is not the Natural Form it has become disguised as by its publicists. It is an odd machine for installing text in the reader’s mind and it too was once an object of wonder’ (2003: 251). To understand how changes so momentous came to seem commonplace, it is necessary briefly to trace the historical emergence and development of the book form.

At the outset of such a historical survey it is crucial to note that the ‘book’ is not synonymous with ‘print’. In fact, books were in existence in one form or another for roughly a millennium before Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century (and printed texts had been in existence outside of Europe for several centuries before that, as this chapter will explore). The first technology we might understand as a ‘book’ (broadly speaking, rather than as a clay tablet) is the scroll (volumen) of the classical world. Originally made from papyrus (derived from plants), scrolls were later made from less fragile parchment (treated animal skins). As anyone who has seen relics of ancient scrolls (such as the famous Dead Sea Scrolls) will readily appreciate, a scroll requires two hands to unroll it while reading and is therefore difficult to annotate or copy. It is also cumbersome to find a specific entry at random. Another technological limitation was that scrolls were too delicate and awkward to stack, causing problems of storage and preservation. This is not to say, however, that the scroll format has been entirely eclipsed, as bar mitzvah ceremonies, university graduations and even (metaphorically) the ‘scroll bar’ on Microsoft Word documents attest. But because of its inherent technological limitations, by around the third or fourth century CE, the scroll gave way to the codex – individual sheets of either vellum (treated calfskins) or later paper, preserved between hard covers and bound on one side. The hand-illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, recognisably books to modern eyes, are thus codices (the plural of codex) without having been printed. This book format persisted, with various modifications, such as the creation of bookmarks, finding aids and size changes, until what Western print culture scholars consider the ‘big bang’ moment: Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in Mainz (in modern-day Germany) around 1455 (White, 2017; Davis, 2019). As Mainz’s Gutenberg Museum takes pains to emphasise, Gutenberg’s innovation was not only to adapt a wine press for the quite distinct purpose of printing books but also to invent movable type (i.e. individual letters of the Latin alphabet cast in metal that were combinable to form words, sentences and paragraphs).¹ While many refinements of Gutenberg’s wooden hand press emerged throughout the early modern period, the fundamentals of printing remained largely unchanged until the full industrialisation of printing during the nineteenth century.

For a complex weave of geographic, economic and religious reasons, adoption of Gutenberg’s invention was swift throughout Europe. An intriguing interactive website, the Atlas of Early Printing, demonstrates how rapidly printing spread via networks of trade routes, university towns and book fairs by tracking existing incunabula (literally ‘from the cradle’): that is, the earliest-surviving printed books from approximately the first fifty years after the production of Gutenberg’s Bible.² This is not to say that printing’s adoption was immediate, uniform or uncontested; in fact, scribal and print culture continued to overlap for some centuries (Love, 1993). But its speed, standardisation and comparative cheapness were seized upon by an increasingly literate middle class hungry for access to new ideas. Over the course of subsequent centuries, Gutenberg’s ‘object of wonder’, the printed book, was refined and customised for specific markets. Aldus Manutius, a scholar and printer active in early sixteenth-century Venice, is credited with producing pocket-sized editions of around 1000 copies to create economies of scale and encourage portable reading – a recognisable precursor of the modern mass-market paperback. Increasingly sophisticated technologies for printing illustrations also proliferated, with wood-engraving and later half-tones, lithography and photogravure proliferating between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. These visual media were especially crucial for the efflorescence of educational, scientific and technical publishing; it is hard to conceive of the European Enlightenment, with its mapping and cataloguing of the natural world, without accurate means for communicating visual detail. Nor did printing’s other technological inputs remain static, with paper made by machines on continuous rolls from wood pulp eventually superseding hand-made rag-paper. In terms of human labour, the compositing of type (i.e. selecting the correct letter blocks in the correct order) developed from hand setting to typesetting with the aid of a machine, linotype (mechanical setting) and monotype (a process whereby lead is melted, cast and set as type simultaneously). Steam-powered mechanical presses had, by the nineteenth century, replaced hand presses for all but artisanal publishing, with concomitant increases in the speed and variety of book production.

This gallop through the history of the book’s development brings us to the two most significant developments of the twentieth century. The first of these – the paperback revolution – is typically dated to British publisher Allen Lane’s Penguin paperbacks of the mid-1930s, although Lane based his design for a more portable, semi-disposable book on earlier publications by German press Tauchnitz Editions (McCleery, 2007). The paperback culture of the mid- to late twentieth century indisputably led to a democratisation of reading and was crucial in such far-reaching social developments as near-universal Western literacy, wider access to higher education and the rise of popular genres such as romance, crime and science fiction/fantasy. The second landmark twentieth-century development – the digital revolution – occurred within the living memory of today’s middle-aged readers. It is impossible to specify a ‘big bang’ moment for this paradigmatic shift in the book world in the way we might neatly point to Gutenberg’s invention. Its more diffuse points of origin include the computer typesetting of books from the 1970s onwards, the 1980s personal computer revolution within publishing companies and the desktop publishing software innovations of the 1990s (Kirschenbaum, 2016). But, in retrospect, the early-1990s invention of user-friendly internet browsers was the tipping point in driving mass adoption of the World Wide Web, with all the implications this has carried for Adobe’s interoperable pdf format, eBook technologies and mass book-scanning projects (see Part III).

Effects of the book medium

Taking our cue from Meyrowitz’s itemisation of the physical, psychological and social implications of a given medium, we can explore the effects of printing across a number of interrelated domains.

On writing and reading

First, and most self-evidently, the adoption of Gutenberg’s printing press caused an explosion in the number of texts in circulation because of printing’s speed and economies of scale compared to hand copying (Eisenstein, 1979). Not only did more copies of the Bible (Gutenberg’s first publication) circulate but so too did a wider variety of textual genres: religious commentaries; official proclamations; political tracts; Protestant broadsides; reprints of classical texts; contemporary translations; almanacs; trade manuals; and, in time, romances and novels. Beyond diversifying the content of texts in circulation, print had important effects on the book format, ushering in the standardisation of fonts (and through this, handwriting), spelling and punctuation (for example, the normalisation of question marks). Indeed, the convention of inserting spaces between words to aid reading was popularised only in the wake of print. Bookish conventions above the level of the line also hardened: the title page; table of contents; chapter divisions; running headers; paragraph breaks; index; and page numbers (Duncan and Smyth, 201...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: what is ‘print culture’?
• PART I Theories and methodologies for understanding print
• PART II Socio-cultural dimensions of books
• PART III Book futures
• Index