Books as Cultural Artifacts

A Handbook for the Study of Book History

Ronald and Mary Zboray, 2000

The several disciplines that touch book history all seem to share an understanding: printed artifacts do not give direct insight into the past; rather, that insight is mediated. That is to say, meaning does not leap directly from writers’ to readers’ minds through printed pages, but rather is produced through interventions or mediations. This is a bit different from the idea I’m working with in my series on How to Read in my other blog, where like others such as Adler I assume that a writer wishes to be understood and a reader can achieve that, to a great extent, by a close reading of a book. In this portrayal of mediated understanding, which the Zborays expressed, for example, a writer writes not for a reader but for a “market”: editors and publishers that reconfigure the writer’s work into book form and decide upon its packaging and distribution; booksellers who display the book where potential buyers may be likely to see it; and finally, different readers who understand the book in a variety of different ways. By the time a book is read, they said, it has traveled through many such mediations. Some scholars consider these mediations as distortions—just as messages become mangled when whispered from person to person in a game of “telephone”—but book historians take these mediations as their principle object of study. Why? Because the mediations of producers, disseminators, and consumers of printed materials provide insight into how a society produces meaning.

So what about this? Is this a more expansive way of understanding books, or a reduction of their main point? On one hand, it makes me fairly sure I wouldn’t want to be primarily a book historian. On the other, the idea that the book is a cultural artifact and that it travels this path and meaning is added, subtracted, or changed along the way, makes some sense. I don’t think it replaces the direct connection between author and reader that I still think is the most important element of understanding books. But it could enhance or modify our understanding in interesting ways. What about the books that are known in a culture more widely than they are read? How do we understand the impact of something like On the Origin of Species, without thinking about the people who knew of it without having actually read it?

The mediations the Zborays listed seemed very modern. I could almost imagine them thinking about their own processes of writing, negotiating with their agent, working with content and then line editors, taking advice from packaging and marketing reps at the publishing house, going on author tours, etc. This is not the same experience that writers in previous generations would have had. An author like Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet like Common Sense for a “market” too, but not in the same way. Neither the production or distribution really had any of the modern bells and whistles. And what about a guy like Charles Knowlton, who self-published his books? He worked with the printer (whom he paid), bound some of the books himself, and then carried them from place to place in his saddle-bags, trying to find readers and booksellers to interest in his writing. The lack of mediation in these cases (or the authors’ and readers’ lack of awareness of mediation) might be as important as the presence of mediation in more contemporary cases.

The point that books are commodities is well taken (William Gilmore made it strongly in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, which Zboray reviewed, too). Books didn’t get from place to place by magic; somebody had to carry them and had to have a reason to carry them. But do the steps between the author’s act and the reader’s act necessarily alter the book’s meaning that much? The closer the author and the reader are in time and space, the less likely that seems to me. But on the other hand, what about Erasmus Darwin? How did his works get to places like Ashburnham and Ashfield and Brimfield, with enough energy behind them that people went ahead and named their children after the author? At the very least, the way decisions are made regarding what gets printed and distributed, and what doesn’t, seems to be very relevant to understanding books’ influence on cultures.