Gentlemen and Scholars

It was from this tradition that Fredson Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description emerged in 1949. Bowers's great book was a creative synthesis, consolidating what had gone before and adding to it. Every statement in the book presupposes the value of descriptive bibliography as a branch of historical scholarship and affirms the importance, for the study of the past, of placing on record the details that characterize the various objects called books. As Bowers says at the outset, a descriptive bibliography treats a series of books "so that the relations of their texts are clarified and the method of publication of all forms of each individual volume is determined" (p. 16, in italics); a bibliography aims "to present all the evidence about a book which can be determined by analytical bibliography applied to a material object" (p. 34). His book provides a model both for thinking about the subject at large and for handling the multitude of individual situations that can arise: it is the central document of its field, and not likely to be supplanted.

Its arrival on the scene was not greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm, however, and the misgivings it aroused in some people are profoundly significant for understanding the peculiarly divided history of the field. The key illustration is perhaps offered by the March 1953 meeting of the Bibliographical Society in London, where Geoffrey Keynes delivered an address, "Religio Bibliographici," summing up his "aims and beliefs as an amateur." One might have expected Keynes, as the author (at that time) of eight acclaimed bibliographies and the president of the society that had fostered the growth of scholarly bibliography, to welcome Bowers's book; instead, he held it responsible for a "shadow which seems in recent years to have descended over our amiable bibliographical discipline." The publication of the Principles, he said, "brought home to our consciousness the fact that what we had thought in our innocence was a pleasant, if sometimes exacting, pastime, was in fact a prime example of 'pure scholarship,' to be pursued with the mind of a detective, the spiritual temperature of an iceberg, and the precision of a machine" (p. 374). Although Keynes did wish to contribute to "the sum of knowledge" (p. 391), he did not, strangely enough, seem to understand that any bibliographer, amateur or professional, with such an aim must strive to work at the highest level of precision and rigorous thinking -- nor did he see that this approach does not exclude humanity from the work.
- G. Thomas Tanselle, "A Description of Descriptive Bibliography"

Over the past year I have become increasingly interested in the history of the book--a relatively young academic discipline which focuses on books and other printed (and manuscript!) materials from the point of view of their production, manufacturing, distribution, and so on, ignoring their content as much as possible. The work being done in this area is so remarkably fresh and interesting that it is almost enough to overcome my typical cynicism about my field. Where else can you talk to experts on Ottoman miscellanies and nineteenth-century academic databases and still have productive discussions about method and interpretation?  Even better, the field has increasingly positioned itself as, for lack of a better phrase, "after theory," and thus it has evaded much of the boring jibberjabber that has surrounded Big Theory and its demise. The genetic code of book history includes many more stuffy old bibliographers, librarians, and paleographers than German philosophers, and that makes it somehow comforting.

One of the things I like most about the field is the resolute way in which it avoids book fetishism. For book historians, the book is not a symbol of all that's good and literary in the world, it is a shifting and historically-contingent form whose development has always been accompanied by complaints and crises. As a result, they do not hesitate to ask serious questions about the potential of the Internet and electronic books--and they don't automatically assume that the book is headed for an apocalyptic Wall-E-esque demise. Like any other medium, the electronic book can be manipulated, played with, marked up, invested with emotional significance; what matters is how it does this.

The divide within bibliography Tanselle hints at above--between gentleman-amateurs and scientifically-minded professionals--is currently being replicated, it seems to me, within the culture of book readers as a whole. Primarily the debate is about electronic media and digitization. It's not that this is a question of seriousness per se: people who fetishize printed books are often very serious readers and scholars, and the objections that have been raised about the archival survivability of digital media cannot be ignored. The difference seems to be of another kind: book-fetishists and digital-media enthusiasts belong to two distinct intellectual traditions. The former are linked to the gentleman-bibliographers, to seventeenth-century virtuosi, and to Walter Benjamin's obsessive-compulsive book collector; the latter can trace their genealogies to John Milton, John Adams, and Marshall McLuhan.

If I had to summarize the distinction, I would put it this way. The first group treats the book as an icon, a sacred object whose function and meaning is its representational connection to some kind of abstract notion of "culture." The second treats it as a metonymy for an entire imagined network of circulation of ideas and information. When the second group starts talking about abandoning the book as a form or dissecting it with scientific detachment, the first responds with incredulity and incomprehension, because it cannot imagine another type of object substituting for their icon. The second group is equally unable to understand the first, because for them, the book has no meaning in itself--since it can only be conceptualized in the context of a network of exchange, any attempt to treat it as being valuable on its own terms would negate its fundamental essence. The two sides are unable to understand each other, and this seems to be why most Internet debates about this subject are unable to escape descending into senseless blabber.

Book history, at least in theory, has the potential to help us overcome this divide. Naturally a scientific or scientistic approach to the history of the book cannot be sufficient, because book culture (a fundamental focus of the field), even the microhistory of individual books and volumes, includes intellectual and affective dimensions that it will not capture. But because book history is already so familiar with the boundaries between media, and with the ways they can be challenged and blurred, it is particularly well-placed to demonstrate to us that the book as a form is not a coherent concept that can easily be encircled by wagons. Both sides are wrong, as often happens--and the future of the humanities will depend on who realizes it first.