A Companion to the History of the Book (8 page)

And I believe that this Aristotelian condition in current textual scholarship ties in quite appropriately with the growth of the history of the book as a very successful discipline. As I have charted that growth (Greetham 1999) in its relation to the theory and practice of textual scholarship,
l’histoire du livre
is the textual working through of the
annaliste
view of history as
mentalité
or the cumulative effect of
histoire totale
rather than just of traditional “great-figure” historiography. I have noted that
l’histoire du livre
can thus be seen as a “postmodernist dispersal of the subject as an originary figure and its replacement by materiality, economics, and power, just as New Historicism treats of not the creator himself but what we may call the negotiations between the creator and the institutions of society” (1999: 101). It is, I believe, no accident that during the hegemony of modernist textual scholarship, there was a concentration on the canonical major-figure authors (especially of nineteenth-century American literature: Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, and so on). And it is similarly no accident that the most influential proponents of a more “socialized” view of textuality (like McGann or McKenzie) have insisted on placing the author and the production of texts into a shifting matrix of such material “negotiations.” In fact, even when “major-figure” editions are concerned, these social “negotiations” are made the
raison d’être
of an edition. As the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare insist, their texts represent the socially adjudicated “play as it appeared when performed” rather than what “Shakespeare originally wrote” (1986: xxxiii). In a major break from “textual” tradition, “the Oxford edition has admitted into the
Works
the theatrical interpolations that would have formerly been considered non-authorial playhouse documents” (De Grazia 1993:203).

And as one of the most culturally powerful of such “negotiations,” the book has emerged as an extremely productive site for showing how the means of production and consumption affect and inform our concepts of literature, of genre, of meaning, and of authoriality itself. For example, Alan Dooley’s study (1992) of such Victorian authors as Browning, Arnold, Tennyson, and Eliot shows very persuasively how the technology of book production (for example, from standing type to stereotypes) is inextricably linked to the market value and canonical status of an author’s work. Simply put, a book that is set in inexpensive stereotypes is a publisher’s recognition (or, at least, anticipation) that future reprints will be called for, and that the author is a “bankable” commodity. The physical form of the book is a direct representation of the book as a proprietary investment.

The impressive academic and intellectual success of the “history of the book” can thus be linked to a general shift away from formalism and from the “master narratives” (
grand reçits
) of modernism toward an emphasis on social context. The efforts of the “social” textual scholars like McGann and McKenzie to place all texts within these cultural “negotiations” should therefore be seen as part of this general shift and thus sharing many of the same objectives and methods as historians of the book. Housman’s “play of personality” is still with us, but its scope is now wider, moving beyond just the author to all of those other agents (scribes, printers, publishers, booksellers, readers) who participate in the single great enterprise of a reformulated textual scholarship.

References and Further Reading

Barthes, Roland (1977) “From Work to Text.” In
Image
,
Music
,
Text
, trans. Stephen Heath, pp. 155 – 64. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bowers, Fredson (1949)
The Principles of Bibliographical Description
. Princeton: Princeton University Press (reprinted New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2005).

— (1970) “Textual Criticism.” In James Thorpe (ed.),
The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures
, 2nd edn, pp. 29–54. New York: Modern Language Association of America (originally published 19 63) .

Chernaik, Warren, Deegan, Marilyn, and Gibson, Andrew (eds.) (1996)
Beyond the Book: Theory, Culture, and the Politics of Cyberspace
. Oxford: Office for Humanities Communications.

Dane, Joseph A. (2003)
The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method
. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

De Grazia, Margreta (1993) “What is a Work? What is a Document?” In W. Speed Hill (ed.),
New Ways of Looking at Old Texts
, pp. 199–207. Binghamton, NY: Renaissance English Text Society/Medieval and Renaissance Text s and Studies.

De Man, Paul (1986) “The Return to Philology.” In Paul De Man,
The Resistance to Theory
, pp. 21– 6 . Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Dearing, Vinton A. (1974)
Principles and Practice of Textual Analysis
. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dooley, Allan C. (1992)
Author and Printer in Victorian England
. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Dreiser, Theodore (1900)
Sister Carrie
. New York: Doubleday (1981 edn, ed. James L. W. West, III. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

Duguid, Paul (1996) “Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book.” In Geoffrey Nunberg (ed.),
The Future of the Book
, pp. 63– 101. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Eriugena (1968–95)
Iohannis Scotti Eriugenae, Periphyseon (De Diusione Naturae)
. Scriptores Latini Hiberniae, ed. I.P. Sheldon-Williams , Ludwig Bieler, and Édouard Jeaneau. Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies.

— (1996–2003)
Johannis Scotti seu Erivgenae, Periphyseon
, ed. Edvardvs A. Jeaneau, 5 vols. Corpus Christianorvm Continuatio Mediaeualis CLXI. Tvrnholti: Typographi Brepols Editores Pontifici.

Finneran, Richard (ed.) (1996)
The Literary Text in the Digital Age
. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Foucault, Michel (1979) “What is an Author?” In
Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-structuralist Criticism
, ed. and trans. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Graff, Gerald (1987)
Professing Literature : An Institutional History
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

— (1992) “The Scholar in Society.” In Joseph Gibaldi (ed.),
Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures
. New York: Modern Language Association of America.

Greetham, D. C. (1991) “Textual Scholarship.” In Joseph Gibaldi (ed.),
Introduction to Scholarship in
Modern Languages and Literatures
, pp. 101–37. New York: Modern Language Association of America.

— (1997) “The Resistance to Philology.” In D. C. Greetham (ed.),
The Margins of the Text
, pp. 9– 24. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

— (1999)
Theories of the Text
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

— (2005) “Édouard Jeaneau’s Edition of Eriugena’s
Periphyseon
in the Light of Contemporary Textual Theory.”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
, 79 (4): 527–48.

Greg, W. W. (1927)
A Calculus of Variants: An Essay on Textual Criticism
. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gurr, Andrew and Hardman, Philippa (eds.) (1999)
The Text as Evidence : Revising Editorial Principles (A Herm e ne utics of External Evidence).
Special Issue of
Yearbook of English Studies
29.

Heim, Michael (1993)
The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality
. New York: Oxford University Press.

— (1998)
Virtual Realism
. New York: Oxford Uni versity Press.

Housman, A. E. (1921) “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism.” In John Carter (ed.),
Selected Prose
, pp. 131–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

Hrubý, Antonín (1965) “A Quantitative Solution to the Ambiguity of Three Texts.”
Studies in Bibliography
, 18: 147–55.

Landow, George (1997)
Hype rtext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
, 2nd edn
.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Langland, William (1975)
Piers Plowman: The B Version
, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson. London: Athlone.

Lawrence, D. H. (1913)
Sons and Lovers
. London: Heinemann.

— (2002)
The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence
, 2 vols, rev. edn, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press.

Levinson, Paul (1997)
The Soft Edge: A Natural
History and Future of the Information Revolution
. New York: Routledge.

Levy, David M. (2001)
Scrolling Forward: Making
Sense of Documents in the Digital Age
. New York: Arcade.

Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann and Fraistat, Neil (eds.) (2002)
Reimagining Textuality: Textual
Studies in the Late Age of Print
. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Maas, Paul (1927)
Text kritik
. Leipzig: Teubner; vol. 1, pt. 7 of
Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft
, ed. A. Gercke and E. Norden, 3rd edn (rev. edn, Leipzig: Teubner, 1950; 3rd edn, 1956; trans. Barbara Flower, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).

McGann, Jerome J. (1983)
A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (revised edn, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).

— (ed.) (1985)
Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

— (1991)
The Textual Condition
. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

— (1997) “The Rationale of Hypertext.” In Kathryn Sutherland (ed.),
Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory
, pp. 19–46. Oxford: Claren don Press.

— (2001)
Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web
. New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s.

McKenzie, D. F. (1986 )
Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts
. The Panizzi Lectures. London: British Library.

Masten, Jeffrey, Stallybrass, Peter, and Vickers, Nancy J. (eds.) (1997)
Language Machines: Te chnologies of Literary and Cultural Production
. New York: Routle dge.

Modiano, Raimonda, Searle, Leroy, and Shillings-burg, Peter L. (eds.) (2004)
Voice , Text, and Hypertext at the Millennium
. Seattle: University of Wash ington Press.

Nunberg, Geoffrey (ed.) (1996)
The Future of the Book.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Patterson, Lee (1985) “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane–Donaldson
Piers Plowman
in Historical Perspective.” In Jerome J. McGann (ed.),
Textual Criticism and
Literary Interpretation
, pp. 55–91. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Quentin, Dom Henri (1926)
Essai de critique textuelle.
Paris: Picard.

Reiman, Donald H. (1984) “The Four Ages of Editing and the English Romantics.”
Text
, 1: 231–55.

— (2006) “A Great Society.”
Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation
, 1 (1): 75–87.

Shakespeare, William (1986)
The Complete Works
, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Shillingsburg, Peter L. (1997)
Resisting Texts : Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning
. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Sisson, C. H. (1979) “Pound among the Pedants.”
Times Literary Supplement
, May 20.

Sutherland, Kathryn (ed.) (1997)
Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory
. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Tanselle, G. Thomas (1974) “Bibliography and Science.”
Studies in Bibliography
, 27: 55–89 (reprinted in
Selected Studies in Bibliography
, pp. 1–35. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979).

— (1984) “Presidential Address: Society for Textual Scholarship.”
Text
, 1: 1–10.

Thorpe, James (ed.) (1970)
The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures
, 2nd edn. New York: Modern Language Association of America (originally published 1963).

— (1972)
Principles of Textual Criticism
. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library.

Trevisa, John (1975)
Trevisa’s Translation of Bar-tholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum
, ed. M. C. Seymour et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Turkle, Sherry (1995)
Life on the Screen: Identity in
the Age of the Internet
. New York: Simon and Schuster.

3

The Uses of Quantification

Alexis Weedon

Because text production – in the past and now – frequently aimed at multiplying and spreading its product as much as possible, and because those texts commonly became subject to markets and market forces, historical records of books and the book trade sometimes take the form of lists of quantities. Particularly since the invention of printing, we sometimes have information about the fee paid to an author, the cost of paper, the cost of composition, print runs, the cost and rate of binding, the costs of advertising and distribution, and sales figures. In addition, there are sources that go back beyond the 1450s, such as lists of library acquisitions and catalogues of royal, state, church, and private collections. This historical information is usually patchy, the way it was recorded varied a great deal, and much more has been lost than survives, but, even so, the data available are rich enough and important enough to be treated seriously. This is where the quantitative history of the book, or
bibliometrics
, comes in. It does not answer all the questions, and often its answers need careful interpretation, but it does give us access to parts of book history that would otherwise be wholly inaccessible.

The historical data come from three main sources: from members of the book and allied trades who needed to account for their income and expenditure; from scholars, librarians, and bibliophiles who have described and listed their books; and from those who governed and wanted to legislate for the book trade, whether through copyright laws or taxation. As the motives for the collection of information vary for each source, so does the way in which it was collected. For these reasons there is little consistency between different sets of data available from the historical record. Unsurprisingly, more statistics are available for the later periods – the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular – and the following discussion does have a bias toward these centuries. Even so, quantitative analysis of existing data has provided some insights on subjects as various as the origin of the codex, the decline of the English Stock, and the distribution of books in eighteenth-century North America, as we shall see.

Common Sources for the Quantitative Study of the Book Trade

Members of the book and allied trades kept various kinds of record. Perhaps the most accessible are the trade publications. In Britain,
The Publishers’ Circular
for the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, and
The Bookseller
(Whitaker Information Services) for the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries contain statistics on the number of series published, a count of titles, and reviews of different sectors of the industry. Eliot and Sutherland’s (1988) guide to the microfilm edition of
The Publishers’ Circular
has an appendix referencing some of the statistical information published in the journal. Eliot’s (1994) study of the trade journals, the British Library legal deposit ledgers, and Spicer’s paper figures draws on a number of sources to compare trends between paper manufacture, the periodical trade, and book production in Brita in from 1800 to 1919 . The book contains a large number of tables containing the original data. National bibliographies can also be useful as they record new titles, with author, publisher, price, and date of publication. For the nineteenth century, such lists as
The English Catalogue
and
The Reference Catalogue to Current Literature
can prove useful.

The records of guilds, associations, and societies can often tell us a lot about book production. The Stationers’ Company archive in Britain holds a wealth of information, some of which can be used for quantitative purposes, such as the list of works registered at Stationers’ Hall, sales of English Stock, Bibles and almanacs, the number of apprentices bound, and so on. Robin Myers’s (1990) guide is essential to understanding its contents and possibilities. Typographical societies published lists of members, recorded wages, and published their own descriptions of the working practices of the period. In Britain, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, trade associations (for example, the Publishers’ Association, the Booksellers’ Association, the Libraries’ Association, and the Society of Authors) were established and they recorded legal cases, data on membership, and gathered statistics on matters of interest to their members.

Some bookselling, publishing, and printing firms also preserved their own records which include details of publications, costs for plant and different types of work, correspondence, and names of employees and shareholders. Robert Darnton’s work in the archives of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel is a leading example (Darnton 1979). Thesociety holds information which can be used for quantitative projects: Dominique Varry has extracted lists of book-trade workers in the eighteenth century for the French
Gens du livre
project, for example (Varry 1997, 1998). Similarly, in Britain, William St. Clair has gathered data from fifty publishing and printing archives in the Romantic period on prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships, and his work contains tables relating to these data (St. Clair 2004). In my own work on Victorian publishing, I have extracted production costs from publishers’ and printers’ ledgers and used them to quantify the growth by value of the industry and to estimate the size of the reading public, and I have drawn on official sources to compare this with the export trade in printed matter (tables containing these data are in the appendix to the book: Weedon 2003). Secondary sources are useful and point to what the archive contains and are a guide to its limitations. More general reference works, such as Basil Mitchell’s (1988) collection of British historical statistics, also contain relevant data, such as wage indices for compositors, common economic indices for prices, production, and exports, and references to original sources which often offer more detailed data.

Moving from trade sources to the work of scholars, librarians, and bibliophiles, there is a range of possible resources. Bibliographers have examined books in terms of printing and techniques of illustration, binding, size, price, and number of sheets used. Book collectors tracing the provenance of a book have focused attention on ownership and the output of individual presses. Book historians have widened the view and used the firm’s investment in plant, presses, foundry, machinery, and the range and quantity of a particular fount as an indicator of the firm’s cultural capital and aesthetic contribution. Librarians and collectors have also compiled catalogues of book collections, listed and dated rare books – and estimated their value. All these have provided sources for bibliometrics. For example, Roberts and Skeat (1983) base their count of rolls and codices largely on Roger A. Pack’s
The Greek and Latin Literary Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt
(1965) supplemented by more recent studies. They counted the number of surviving Greek texts in roll and codex form from the first to the fifth century and found that “it was only in the course of the third century that the codex obtained a significant share of book-production and it was not until about ad 300 that it achieved parity with the roll.” However, by the fifth century, the codex had become the predominant form (Roberts and Skeat 1983: 37).

Particularly rich sources for bibliometrics are the union catalogues (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions [IFLA] have a directory of National Union Catalogues). Much work was done during the past century on compiling a series of Short Title Catalogues, such as Pollard and Redgrave’s
A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640
(known as STC) or the
Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue
(known as ESTC). There is also the
Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue
which, although valuable, is less reliable, having been compiled on different principles and having not been updated for some time. The earlier STCs (many of which have now been combined to form the
English Short Title Catalogue
[also confusingly called the ESTC]) have formed the backbone for the quantitative statistics presented in
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
, the third volume of which, covering the period 1400–1557, contains STC statistical breakdown for the years 1547–58, and an overall survey of book production for the same period. The fourth volume, which covers the period from 1557 to 1695, contains statistical tables on annual book production from 1475 to 1700, subject classification of entries 1668–1709, translations into English 1560–1603, and numerous other tables. Similar work has been carried out for other national histories of the book. For example, in volume 1 of
The History of the Book in Canada
, Sandra Alston and Jessica Bowslaugh (2004) have drawn on the work of cataloguers for their statistical analysis of seven thousand Canadian imprints from 1760 to 1840. They sort and count the list by province and by subject to illustrate the increasing importance of Upper Canada after 1821; they also, by means of simple graph, demonstrate the increase in the number of titles after 1821. However, as the authors admit, only limited analysis has been done.

The third source of book-trade statistics are official records. Governments at all levels record and count. Official papers hold copyright records, customs records, records of parliamentary debates, inquiries, and commission reports, and so on. In these papers are quantitative data on the book trade derived from legal cases, investigations into the printing and allied trades, accounts of the quantities of books and stationery exported, and the duties payable on printed material. One instance is the Indian customs records of import duty on books and stationery in the nineteenth century from which the government produced an annual statement of trade. In Britain, national surveys of industrial production were carried out in 1907, 1924, 1930, and 1935 which quantified output and employment in, among many others, the printing and paper trades. The “Blue books,” or parliamentary records, have statistics on the tax paid on advertising and paper, import and export duty paid at customs, and copyright dues. Many reports were hotly debated in parliament, recorded in
Hansard
, which then provoked public discussion in the press.

While many of these sources are well indexed and referenced, new discoveries are sometimes still made. In 1975, Michael Harris turned up a ledger in the Public Record Office among the State Papers Domestic. It was written by Charles Delafaye, then Secretary of State, and listed the names and quantities of newspapers he distributed in Queen Anne’s reign, 1702–14 (Harris 1975).

Wills and bank records can also be useful sources: Lotte Hellinga and Margaret Lane Ford found wills useful in identifying books imported into Britain before 1550 (Hellinga and Trapp 1999). J. D. Fleeman drew on Samuel Johnson’s diaries and the bank records of the account of the printer William Strahan in Gosling’s bank to estimate Johnson’s income. Fleeman calculated that over a twenty-one-year period Johnson’s pension and earnings “would have produced £6,800, perhaps even £7,000.” Yet Johnson, who was poor at accounting, died worth a little less than £3,000 (Fleeman 1975: 223).

Some sources have had more attention than others. Robert Darnton has commented:

When book history began to establish itself in Western Europe, it relied heavily on quantification. The sources were always imperfect: the papers of the Stationers’ Company and the library catalogues in the case of Britain; the registers for permission to publish and the depot legal in France; the catalogues of the Frankfurt and Leipzig book fairs in Germany. But however flawed or distorted, the statistics provided enough material for book historians to construct a general picture of literary culture . . . (Darnton 2002: 240)

Much of this work relies on simple counts of titles and quantities printed. There is still much more that can be done through the use of more sophisticated statistical methods.

Statistical Methods Used

Unlike social or economic history, book history does not have a long tradition of using quantitative methods. It must learn to borrow methods from economic and business historians, statisticians, and accountants to broaden the scope and definition of the subject. Each method, however, must be tailored to the peculiar needs of book-trade research.

The most common forms of quantitative analysis are those of the historian and the most common techniques of the historian are measures of central tendency and dispersion, trends, fluctuations, and correlation. Some projects require sampling of populations which can be difficult when the historical record is fragmentary. All these measurements must be balanced with measurements of error and statistical confidence which are essential in the interpretation of the data.

First, it is important to understand the form of the data before selecting a method of analysis. It may be nominal data giving numerical information on the number of surviving codices or rolls (Roberts and Skeat 1983). Or the data may be ordinal and therefore display a relationship between the categories; for example, readers of different occupations can be ordered by income and social status, as an extract from Richard Altick’s list of new borrowers to a branch of Manchester Public Library in 1857–8 shows (1963: 236) :

Or, finally, the data could be interval data which contain information on the numerical increments. For example, signatures relate to imposition schemes, and must be divisible by four. Eli MacLaren used interval data from the collation formulas of Canadian, American, and British editions of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical romance,
The Knights of the Cross
(1900) to prove that publishers affixed the title, imprint, copyright statement, and advertisements to the preprinted book blocks in order to produce and monopolize a bestseller in what was an intense international race to corner the market (MacLaren 2005).