The Future of Past Readers
In spring 2006 the National Library of Scotland launched its new magazine, Discover NLS. The photograph on its cover (Figure 36) caught my eye and the image of the young girl—I will call her Miranda—has stayed with me ever since. By now there is nothing particularly unusual about the image of someone (to quote the caption) “Browsing digital resources on an interactive kiosk,” and similar images have doubtless appeared in magazines, annual reports, and promotional brochures produced by any number of old libraries anxious to show that they remain sites of power and wonder in the brave new world of digital textuality.1 But Miranda’s pointing finger reminded me of the Renaissance students’ manicules discussed in Chapter 2—and of the long-standing links between pointing, reading, and learning—and prompted me to meditate on the future of the practices, terms, and traces described in this book. What kinds of marks will Miranda herself leave in or around the books that come (in one form or another) into her hands, and will they be more durable and interesting than the fingerprints that are wiped away each day from the screen on the interactive kiosk? And how will the digital medium help or hinder her potential interest in marking the readers who came before her?
Our new digital tools promise to bring more readers into closer contact with rare books and manuscripts than ever before. At libraries such as the NLS, visitors who would never dream of entering the reading rooms can be found marveling at high quality digital facsimiles of some of the nation’s textual treasures. At the British Library’s successful “Turning the Pages” displays, for instance, they can use the touch-sensitive screens to flip forward and backward through three-dimensional replicas of some of the rarest and most beautiful volumes—allowing them to examine the entire book, including the binding, and not just the single page or opening selected by a curator and presented on a cradle behind glass, while the original object can still be consulted by scholars (or, if it is particularly fragile, kept safe in climate-controlled stacks). An affordable CD-ROM version of the program makes it possible for visitors to take away a dozen of the most priceless manuscripts (including the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, and Jane Austen’s History of England) and turn their virtual pages with virtual fingers in the comfort of their own homes; and the entire interactive gallery has recently been made available for free to anyone with a networked computer.2
Figure 36. “Finger on the future,” from the debut issue of Discover NLS (2006). The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. Photographer: Peter Iain Campbell.
Researchers who do dream of visits to rare book reading rooms but have limited resources for travel to libraries can now, in many cases, summon up reliable images of most of the texts they want to study on their personal computers. And there is every indication that electronic catalogues will make bibliographical descriptions and archival finding guides both fuller and easier to access—where there is sufficient time, funding, and expertise to produce them. Indeed, these very tools made this book easier and cheaper to write: I used the National Archive’s “Documents Online” service to examine Sir Julius Caesar’s will without traveling to London, I used the ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue) to gather preliminary information about the location and condition of surviving copies of particular texts, and I used EEBO (Early English Books Online) to read countless rare books from collections all over the world—without moving from my office in York, I have been able to consult early printed texts held in New York and even to call them up alongside volumes from Oxford.3 I have also used Google to search for information on the Internet, Amazon to buy the occasional book, and e-mail to correspond with other scholars, with librarians, and with the various people responsible for producing and distributing this book.
And yet I cannot be alone in finding something sad about Miranda’s picture and in feeling more pessimistic than optimistic about her prospects. It is not (I hasten to add) the same pessimism that Sven Birkerts voiced more than a decade ago in his antidigital diatribe The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. I do not share his despair about the inherent evils of technology, nor do I share his sense of the kinds of reading we are in danger of leaving behind. Birkerts was primarily concerned with the post-Romantic reader of prose fiction, and his nostalgic argument “ultimately originates in . . . the dreamy fellow with an open book in his lap.”4 That form of reading shows surprisingly few signs of dying the death that dramatic pronouncements on the end of the book have either mourned or celebrated (depending upon who was doing the pronouncing).5 Almost everyone who still reads novels still prefers paper to screen for that kind of reading (though that may, of course, change as display technology, interface design, and Web-based fiction improve), and people are not yet being “electroencephalographically imprinted with the actual brain perception and erudition of Shakespeare or Erasmus, [allowing] the book [to] be bypassed” (as Marshall McLuhan predicted back in 1970).6 Furthermore, the “ecology of reading” privileged by Birkerts—in which our encounters with books are linear, slow, passive, and private—turns out to be far from universal: it has, in fact, very little in common with the scenes and modes of reading recovered in this book. And while Birkerts fears that contact with electronic texts will lead to both the erosion of language and the flattening of history, a long glance back at a premodern reader like Gabriel Harvey (with his “perpetual meditations, repetitions, recognitions, recapitulations, reiterations, and ostentations of most practicable points,” his “sounde and deepe imprinting as well in ye memory, as in the understanding . . . Every Rule of value, and euery poynt of vse”) makes Birkerts himself look terminologically impoverished and historically shortsighted.7
It is not, then, the screen itself that bothers me—though I do worry that Miranda is less and less likely to experience firsthand the difference between a “digital surrogate” and the kind of original artifact it can stand in for but never fully replace. My concern is rather with what the screen allows Miranda to see and do: simply put, the digital tools being developed for her have, as yet, paid very little attention to readers. Databases and facsimiles of the sort described above are primarily concerned with giving us access to accurate and attractive informational content and with helping us to make our way around it (a goal generally known, in the computer and information sciences, as “usability”). Their emphasis on “interactivity” notwithstanding, they have not yet imagined us doing much with or to books beyond turning their pages and have not yet found ways to preserve our marks—much less to improve them or to educate us about the markings of those who turned pages before us. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid suggested in The Social Life of Information, many of the “people driving us hard into the future on the back of new technologies” suffer from a sort of “tunnel vision” that leads them to ignore not just the “visual periphery of [the] physical objects” that transmit information but also their “social periphery, the communities, organizations, and institutions that frame human activities. . . . It is to help draw attention to these hard-to-see (and hard-to-describe) resources that we gave our book the title it has”8—and it is to help draw attention to similar signs of life in the margins of old books that has motivated me to write this book.
If the trends I have outlined continue, scholars of used books will be able to turn to different kinds of data: the customer reviews on Amazon alone will give future scholars of reader response much to work with. But historians of reading and readers themselves are in danger of losing sight of and interest in the kinds of materials and questions addressed in this book. These are large and thorny problems that we have only begun to take in hand. They worried the Council on Library and Information Resources enough to commission a far-reaching report (published in 2001) called The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections.9 That report was an exemplary collaboration between bibliographers, historians, librarians, and archivists, and I will end with a general call for conversations between scholars, curators, conservators, and digital designers that will produce the kinds of tools that serve the readers of the past as well the future.