SHARP President Professor Leslie Howsam recently encouraged SHARPists to comment on her blog on Book History's Best Books. Now, the Open University, UK's regular Book History and Bibliography seminar, held at the Institute of English Studies, is hosting a seminar entitled 'Landmarks in Book History: The Future of the Discipline'.
The organiser of the series, Dr Shafquat Towheed of the Open University, reports on the first in the series, asking what book history and media history might learn from one another:
In a fascinating and wide-ranging talk given on 11 January 2012, Dr Karin Littau from the University of Essex suggested some of the ways in which book history could draw upon media history and vice versa. A comparative literature scholar with an interest in book history, critical theory, translation and film studies, Littau engaged Robert Darnton’s landmark essay, ‘First Steps towards the History of Reading’ (1986), in particular noting that over the last 25 years, Darnton’s championing of the material text had forced both reception studies and reader response criticism to engage with the history of reading. But how, Littau asked, might book history be studied in relation to the histories of other cultural modes and forms, with their own partially excavated material traces? How might book history and film history, for example, be studied comparatively?
Uncovering the parallel technological developments in production and the cultural shifts in consumption in other media (such as film and radio), Littau argued, can flesh out changes in the use and impact of books in a cross-media world. For example, did the rise of new media such as film and radio increase or decrease the speed of reading, or have an effect on what people read, and how often? Littau’s talk encouraged us to consider once again whether in the face of recorded sound and vision, reading accelerated in the first decades of the twentieth century. Glancing at the automatic reading experiments of Gertrude Stein and Leon Mendez Solomons, and the technologically enabled fantasy of Octave Uzanne and Albert Robida’s ‘La Fin des Livres’ (‘The End of Books’, 1894), Littau’s approach asked us to examine again the hidden byways in media history to freshly interrogate the history of the book and of reading practices. How might Robert Carlton Brown’s futurist manifesto of automated labour saving reading machines, The Readies (1930), for example, be used to examine anxieties about reading practices at the time of the rise of talking cinema?
Media history and book history, Littau argued, are part of a wider cultural history of communications, and both can learn from one another, in terms of both content analysis and methodology. Ironically, it is the very attention of book historians to the material preservation, methodical cataloguing and careful interpretation of printed books that might offer valuable interpretative approaches to media historians. Cinema for example, has greater speed of distribution, penetration and impact, but the printed book has greater durability through time, wider potential access, and demands a higher level of individual qualitative engagement. This is evident in their material forms as well: celluloid is notoriously volatile and degrades easily, while the printed book is often remarkably physically durable, even while containing the traces of its use. Conversely, has the relative paucity of material archives deterred book historians from engaging with film history, even while the metrical data (cost of tickets, modes of distribution, sales figures etc) provides invaluable comparative information about how book sales and reading were affected by the rise of cinema attendance as a mass mode of cultural consumption.
Karin Littau’s paper clearly demonstrated that Darnton’s challenge, and indeed his paradigm shift – that literary studies recognise the importance of material objects and not just literary content in analysing texts – is one that is just as valid for describing any history of the media, or indeed, a media history of the book. There is still a great deal of work to be done in both book history and media history, but ultimately, no history of one form can be complete without a comprehensive recognition of the impact of other forms upon it. Books and printed matter have existed in a complex, increasingly interactive, cross-media and multi-media world for as long as book history has developed as a discipline, and it is perhaps appropriate that book historians now consider in their historical and methodological practice the extent of this interaction. Developing Darnton’s premise, Littau’s talk strongly argued that the book has a media history, as well as a textual history.
