A Companion to the History of the Book (76 page)

Consumption has become much easier to quantify in the post-1970 period in some countries with the introduction of EPOS (electronic point of sale) systems, which record sales as they occur through the shop till, thus generating instant and accurate sales data. These data can then be profitably used by retailers and publishers to inform their reordering, reprinting, and commissioning decisions, though an argument remains about how this market knowledge is used, and whether it leads to creative or copycat publishing (see Rickett 2000; Hutton 2002). However, this system currently operates in only a handful of countries and, despite its sophisticated delivery of sales information, it does not delve further into the psychology of book consumption. It is fair to say that publishers, particularly in the general trade market, really know very little about what motivates their consumers. Market research is only infrequently conducted on anything other than an anecdotal basis. The fanfare that greets the occasional forays into consumer research indicates this. One recent example is the several pages (including the front cover) taken out by Random House UK in
The Bookseller
to advertise the consumer research it had commissioned into “The Power of John Grisham.” The opening text of the advert reads:

The Power of John Grisham
All readers love the escapism of reading him
Women are hooked by the moral dilemmas
Men are fascinated by the issues
Everyone enjoys the pace
Everyone thinks he’s a star
How do we know?
Easy, we asked them … (Random House 2004)

Such self-congratulatory copy would suggest not just the power of John Grisham, but also the infrequency with which such consumer research is carried out, and hence the paucity of knowledge that even a multimedia conglomerate such as Random House has about its consumers and the reasons for their purchasing decisions.

General book consumer surveys exist in various publishing markets, but their coverage is patchy, and they often use non-comparable statistical bases. The variable levels of data provided via the International Publishers’ Association website (
www.ipa-uie.org
) clearly demonstrate this knowledge gap, and confirms Darnton’s statement about the difficulties inherent in the study of reading. Moreover, given the variable ways in which readers acquire books, patterns of consumption do not strictly mirror patterns of reading. Kovač notes how, despite a lack of exact figures, “a trend is apparent which disconnects high publishing revenue performance with a high number of per capita library loans” (2004: 31). He concludes that:

a bigger demand for books in a given society could be met through channels other than book sales. Even more, the case might be that a greater demand for books does not bring much financial benefit to the book publishing industry at all, as the link between the growth of library networks and the performance of the book publishing industry seems to be contradictory in that a too successful library network might mean less financial success for the publishing industry. (2004: 32)

In order to analyze patterns of global book readership, then, there is more to study than trends in consumption. Library borrowing is one important additional area of study, but there is also the aspect of actual book use: are bought books read, and in what ways? These are questions that have bedeviled historians of reading of all periods, but are also pertinent to an age in which it might be assumed that we know more about patterns of consumption, and can find out more – through ethnographic and observational research – about reader activity.

And yet, although it is arguably too early to establish patterns and trends in this near-contemporary period, it is a perfect moment at which to discuss the methods for collecting and analyzing data, and for beginning to carry out this research activity. Moreover, there is an urgent political impetus which extends beyond market information and the scholarly desire for knowledge. The recent fiftieth anniversary of the charity Book Aid International, an organization established with the specific aim of encouraging Westerners to assist developing countries by the donation of books, demonstrates all too clearly how book consumption is very unevenly spread across the globe, principally due to economic factors (Graham 2004). In the West, book production and consumption increased – in some cases remarkably – during the period 1970–2000. Yet in some other countries, book consumption and basic literacy is a privilege rather than a right, with the products of the publishing industry inaccessible to many citizens. Researching global patterns of book consumption, and their regional variations, should render these discrepancies apparent, and can potentially, therefore, make the study of very recent publishing history a potent political tool.

References and Further Reading

Amazon (1999)
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0330332767/customer-reviews/qid=1035649491/sr=l-4/ref=sr_l_3_4/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_l/026-5624646-4387602
(accessed March 5, 1999).

Anderson, Benedict (1983)
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso.

Bagdikian, Ben (1983)
The Media Monopoly.
Boston: Beacon.

B
BC
News (2002) “Fake Harry Potter Novel Hits China” (available at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/209266l.stm
; accessed January 14, 2005; article first appeared July 4, 2002).

Bookseller
(2005) “Rethink Publishing … and Expand the Market with Books People Want.”
The Bookseller,
March 11: 32.

Borah, Rebecca Sutherland (2002) “Apprentice Wizards Welcome: Fan Communities and the Culture of Harry Potter.” In Lana A. Whited (ed.),
The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon,
pp. 343–64. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Cavallo, Guglielmo and Chartier, Roger (eds.) (1999)
A History of Reading in the West,
trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity (originally published 1995).

Connor, Steven (1996)
The English Novel in History 1950–1995.
London: Routledge.

Darnton, Robert (1990a) “First Steps towards a History of Reading.” In
The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History,
pp. 154–87. London: Faber & Faber.

— (1990b) “What is the History of Books?” In
The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History,
pp. 107–35. London: Faber & Faber.

Graham, Gordon (2004) “The Editor’s Place.”
Logos,
15 (3): 116–17.

Gutjahr, Paul C. (2002) “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader-response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.”
Book History,
5: 209–36.

Hartley, Jenny (2001)
Reading Groups.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

— (2002)
The Reading Groups Book 2002–2003 Edition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hutton, Tatiana (2002) “Bookscan: A Marketing Tool or Literary Homogenizer?”
Publishing Research Quarterly,
18 (1): 48–51.

Jansen, Sue Curry (2001) “Market Censorship.” In Derek Jones (ed.),
Censorship: A World Encyclopedia,
pp. 1542–5. London: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Jentsch, Nancy K. (2002) “Harry Potter and the Tower of Babel.” In Lana A. Whited (ed.),
The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon,
pp. 285–301. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Kovač, Miha (2002) “The State of Affairs in Post-Communist Central and Eastern European Book Industries.”
Publishing Research Quarterly,
18 (3): 43–53.

— (2004) “Patterns and Trends in European Book Production and Consumption: Some Initial Observations.”
Javnost/The Public,
11 (4): 21–36.

Long, Elizabeth (2003)
Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nel, Philip (2002) “You Say “Jelly,” I Say “Jell-O”?: Harry Potter and the Transfiguration of Language.” In Lana A. Whited (ed.),
The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon,
pp. 261–84. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

News24.com
(2003) “Potter Fans Face Piracy Charges” (available at
http://www.news24.com/News24/Entertainment/Abroad/0,,2-1225-1243_1382962,00.xhtml
; accessed January 14, 2005; article first appeared July 7, 2003).

Pawley, Christine (2002) “Seeking ‘Significance’: Actual Readers, Specific Reading Communities.”
Book History,
5: 143–60.

Price, Leah (2004) “Reading: The State of the Discipline.”
Book History,
7: 303–20.

Radway, Janice A. (1984)
The Romance Reader: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Random House (2004) “The Power of John Grisham.”
The Bookseller,
September 17.

Rickett, Joel (2000) “Publishing by Numbers?”
The Bookseller,
September 1: 20–2.

Schiffrin, André (2000)
The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read.
London: Verso.

Sedo, DeNel Rehberg (2002) “Predictions of Life after Oprah: A Glimpse at the Power of Book Club Readers.”
Publishing Research Quarterly,
18 (3): 11–22.

Squires, Claire (2004) “Novelistic Production and the Publishing Industry in Britain and Ireland.” In Brian Shaffer (ed.),
A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000,
pp. 177–93. Oxford: Blackwell.

— (2007)
Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tomlinson, John (2000) “Cultural Imperialism.” In Frank J. Lechner and John Boli (eds.),
The Globalization Reader,
pp. 307–15. Oxford: Blackwell.

Venuti, Lawrence (1995)
The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation.
London: Routledge.

Willison, Ian R. (2001) “Mass Mediatisation: Export of the American Model?” In Jacques Michon and Jean-Yves Mollier (eds.),
Les Mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000,
pp. 574–82. Quebec: Les Presses de L’Université Laval.

Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs (1998)
Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts. The Case of Harlequin Enterprises and Sweden.
Uppsala: Department of Literature, Uppsala University.

— (2001) “Glocalities: Power and Agency Manifested in Contemporary Print Culture.” In

Jacques Michon and Jean-Yves Mollier (eds.),
Les Mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000,
pp. 565–73. Quebec: Les Presses de L’Université Laval.

Zipes, Jack (2002)
Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter.
London: Routledge.

PART III

Beyond the Book

31

Periodicals and Periodicity

James Wald

Accustomed to a diet of information in bite-sized morsels, readers increasingly lack the patience and even ability to digest serious books. The collective and ephemeral nature of the new media in turn encourages authors to dash off flimsy essays that would never stand scrutiny on their own. The result is a vicious circle. Although this lament could have been drawn from today’s debates about the web, it comes from eighteenth-century German critiques of the periodical (Raabe 1974). It even entered the literary canon. The Theatre Manager in
Faust
worries how to please a jaded public:

If one comes bored, exhausted quite,
Another, satiate, leaves the banquet’s tapers,
And worst of all, full many a wight,
Is fresh from reading of the daily papers.

Elsewhere, Goethe complained that ceaseless periodical reading fostered passivity, reducing culture to something “only supposed to distract” (Lowenthal 1961: 34, 21). The parallels command our attention. One ironic benefit of the digital revolution has been renewed interest in the history of “print culture,” though often marred by a tendency to view the latter monolithically and focus comparisons narrowly on “technology.” Many paradoxes are more easily resolved, and phenomena better understood, if we instead view them from the perspective of genre, with historically conditioned conventions of writing and reading.

The normative status of the codex, reflected in the name of our discipline and even the title of the present volume, leads many to view difference as hierarchy:

The periodical was arguably the first original genre to arise following Gutenberg’s invention. Like the latter, it was not
sui generis.
Rather, it combined and developed earlier practices, constituting something qualitatively new. The essence of the periodical is periodicity. The periodical is thus not a book
manqué,
but a nonlinear assemblage of parcels of text, the unity of which derives from a common program cumulatively implemented through repetition. Scorn is the price of success as well as novelty. Since the appearance of the first newspaper (1605) and journal (1665), roughly 1.5 million periodicals have conquered the globe: the vehicle of every major cultural and political movement, the preferred means of scientific communication, and the most popular reading matter.

The periodical was protean as well as prolific. It is relatively easy to see what links modern newspapers such as
Asahi Shimbun,
the
Guardian, Al Ahram,
and
El País
with one another and with the
Aviso Relation oder Zeitung
(1605),
Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt
c
(1618),
Moniteur Universel
(1789), and
Shenbao
(1872), but what could possibly unite modern journals such as
African Zoology, Paris-Match, Cigar Aficionado, Hispanic Entrepreneur,
and
Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts?
What can they, moreover, have in common with the
Rambler
(1750),
Revue des Deux Mondes
(1829),
Australian Gold Digger’s Monthly Magazine and Colonial Family Visitor
(1852), or
Efemérides barometrico-medicas matritenses
(1743)? Much ink and effort have been wasted in the quest for a definition that can expand to cover all possible variations without succumbing to analytical entropy.

The German school of periodical research pioneered by Joachim Kirchner associates the newspaper with (1) public accessibility; (2) periodicity; (3) timeliness; (4) universality – ascribing to the journal only the former two qualities (Kirchner 1928; Dovifat 1962). Periodicity is a trait shared by the periodical proper (journal/magazine) and newspaper, which are our focus, with several variants of the codex, including annuals (almanacs, gift books, yearbooks), proceedings, monographic series, and part-publication, which began as a rationalization measure in the seventeenth century and became a literary vogue in the nineteenth. Allowing for the inevitable historical exceptions, we will therefore employ “periodical” in the British sense, equivalent to American “serial”: “A publication in any medium in successive parts bearing numerical or chronological designations and intended to be continued indefinitely” (Woodward and Pilling 1993: 1).

Frédéric Barbier and Catherine Bertho Lavenir (2003) posit a tripartite history of media dominated, successively, by the principles of opinion, information, and communication :

(1) 1751 to 1870, the second revolution of the book: the democratic and industrial revolutions invest print with social and political significance.

(2) 1870 to 1950, the universalization of the media: heyday of the press, new media of picture and sound, in the mass age of national and global conflict.

(3) 1950 onward, the networked multimedia world: cultural and economic globalization.

The historian of the book, like the lawyer or evolutionary biologist, will look for the causal logic behind a phenomenon. Writing is some 6,000 years old, the codex over 2,000, and printing with movable type over 550, but the periodical only 400. Hunger for information may be “timeless,” but its diffusion implies a social need; its mechanical reproduction, the existence of a market; and the rise of a new genre, a change in reading practices as well as cultural production.

Barbier and Bertho Lavenir begin with the phenomenon that so worried Goethe, the shift from “intensive” to “extensive” reading: from repeated and extended rumination over a few traditional texts, to quicker consumption of a wider range of changing titles. Although debate has focused on the extent of new popular literacy, extensive reading was already the
modus operandi
for intellectuals: at first a necessity for the few, and only later a choice for the many. The periodical proved ideally suited to both audiences, publicizing information formerly and sometimes jealously confined to the private communication networks of princes, merchants, or scholars.

Amidst a variety of overlapping rather than successive genres, we can discern the evolution from ad hoc, single-topic print publication (Germany 1480) to varied content and serial appearance: weekly newspapers (Strasbourg 1605) and dailies (Leipzig 1650, London 1702, Paris 1777). Three influential variants were the Dutch
coranto
(1618–50), a weekly or bi-weekly “running relation” of multiple stories under a changing title, in which form the first French and English “newsbooks” appeared (Amsterdam 1620); and Théophraste Renaudot’s intelligencer and gazette (1633, 1631), official publications on commerce and foreign politics. Periodicity evolved in tandem with the rhythms and reach of the incipient postal services on which the inflow of information and distribution of publications depended. Early newspapers were international in content and orientation: local news required no new communication medium, and censors forbade coverage of internal affairs, along with other threats to state, religion, and morality.

Whereas the newspaper was a popular medium, the journal was an erudite one that displayed a dual tendency toward specialization and popularization as it evolved to address new topics and readership. Most learned journals contained diverse content but inclined toward what David Kronick (1976) calls the derivative (reviews, abstracts, excerpts) or the substantive, as exemplified by the first two titles (1665). Denis de Sallo’s
Journal des Sçavans
offered a weekly overview of the “Republic of Letters” “because things age too much if one defers speaking of them for a period of a year or a month” (Martin 1984: 2.199).
The Philosophical Transactions
(later:
of the Royal Society)
emphasized experimental scientific research. The value of the new genre as a supplement and alternative to soaring book production (250,000 titles in the seventeenth century) and cumbersome epistolary exchanges is easily imagined: the largest German Baroque scholars’ libraries numbered 20,000 volumes (typically 4,000–5,000). Leibniz, whose many periodical contributions included twenty-six on the calculus, had some 600 correspondents. The learned periodical henceforth became the principal forum of scholarly communication (1,858 scientific titles by 1790).

Its success inspired periodicals providing amusement or instruction for the growing non-academic market, although their precise genealogy and taxonomy are debated. The monthly
Mercure Galant
(1672, renamed
Mercure de France
in 1724) offered courtly news and culture for the social elite. Edward Cave’s
Gentleman’s Magazine
(1731) lent its name to a new type of periodical miscellany. The most original subgenre, however, was the essay journal represented by the
Tatler
(1709) and
Spectator
(1711) of Steele and Addison, which, as the latter put it, sought to bring philosophy out of the colleges and libraries to the coffee-houses and tea tables, so as to reach the “blanks of society,” particularly the “female world” (Lowenthal 1961: 67–8). Both journals were extensively reprinted and imitated, above all in Germany, where, as Wolfgang Martens (1968) has shown, some 450 “moral weeklies” (1720–60) in effect created middle-class literary culture. Because the newspaper represented a more basic need, it seems everywhere to have preceded the journal: Italy 1631/1668, Sweden 1624/1732, Russia 1703/1755, American colonies 1690/1741, Australia 1803/1821. Until about 1725–30, a nation’s first journal was likely to be a learned one; thereafter, general interest.

The periodical superseded the book as the dominant textual medium of intellectual exchange, social commentary, and entertainment in the age of Enlightenment and revolution, movements that emphasized popularization and debate. Continuing repression and stamp taxes notwithstanding, England between the Glorious and American revolutions established a “free” press based on metropolitan newspapers containing a mixture of political and business news, culture, and opinion, financed in part by advertising. In 1695, Kaspar von Stieler declared, “One reads newspapers not in order that one may become learned and skilled in judgment, but only in order to learn what is going on” (Kronick 1976: 17). Judgment was what journals promised: as Addison put it, not “what passes in Muscovy or Poland,” but “knowledge of one’s self” (Lowenthal 1961: 67). By combining the entertaining with the instructive, journals were to impart cohesion and aesthetic and moral skill to a growing reading public. Hence the importance of reviews: 433 contributors to Friedrich Nicolai’s
Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek
covered 80,000 titles from 1765 to 1806. The shift from a rule-based to a taste-based, subjective aesthetic demanded that even expert judgment legitimize itself before the tribunal of opinion. Contemporaries spoke of the century of the journal and criticism, both of which increasingly extended to the social.

Politically and culturally fragmented Germany produced the richest periodical culture, a veritable supraregional communication network: between 1609 and 1700, 162 newspapers (200 concurrently by 1800), reaching all but the lowest social strata; 3,494 journals by 1790. Because authorship and reading were inseparably associated with journals, the resultant debate assumed paradigmatic significance. Against those who praised journals for “diffusing useful knowledge to all estates,” critics (ironically, often writing in journals) charged careless authors and opportunistic “journal manufacturers” with feeding the new “plague” of “journal addiction,” which joined the diagnosis of graphomania and reading frenzy as causes of cultural decline and (the intemperate soon added) the French Revolution (Raabe 1974: 122, 113, 112). Even defenders of journals worried that their proliferation was overwhelming readers, while dissipating the efforts of writers. Friedrich Schiller’s
Horen
famously proposed, by bringing together the best authors and eschewing extreme erudition and populism alike, to eliminate competition and “reunite the politically divided world under the banner of truth and beauty” (Wald 1995: 118). It went from sensation in 1795 to silence in 1798, having failed to accommodate the demands of the genre and public taste. Like the web today, the periodical occupied a liminal realm between the elite and the popular, a site of continual contest between groups that valued reading for different reasons. As the first mass medium, the periodical summoned up deep anxieties arising from the breakdown of the putative unitary public and made visible a commodification of culture whose existence traditional interests preferred to ignore or deny.

In France, centralization and privilege relegated innovation to interstitial niches or sites beyond the legal and geographical boundaries of the kingdom. The 1789 Revolution liberated not just the nation, but the periodical, which in the form of the newspaper encompassed both information and criticism. The revolutionary press – 2,000 mostly short-lived newspapers and 12,000 pamphlets in the first decade – both covered and propelled events. Newspapers, in Jeremy Popkin’s words, “served as the Revolution’s real ‘public space’ ” (1990: 180), the manifestation of the popular will and public opinion that legitimized the new regime and paradoxically demonstrated its actual disunity. As in the English Revolution before and others later, the initial flood of print dried up under revolutionary dictatorship and restoration. Napoleon permitted only thirteen newspapers under the Consulate and four under the Empire, and his vanquishers likewise sought to restore unity by compulsion.