Preface
1. Quoted in Gillian Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of its Sources, Ideals and Influence on Design Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 12.
2. Ibid., 26.
Chapter 1. Meditation on a Receipt
1. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, translated by David Gerard (London: NLB, 1979). See in particular the chapter titled “Manuscripts” by Marcel Thomas and chapter 1, “Preliminaries: The Introduction of Paper into Europe.”
2. Scott D. N. Cook, “Technological Revolutions and the Gutenberg Myth,” in Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors, edited by Mark Stefik (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 74.
3. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 36.
4. Berthold L. Ullman, Ancient Writing and its Influence (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1963), 64-65.
5. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
6. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 2.
7. Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to its Aesthetic and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 5-6.
8. M. T Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
Chapter 2. What Are Documents?
1. David Weinberger, “What’s a Document?” Wired, August 1996, 112.
2. George Steiner, “The End of Bookishness?” Times Literary Supplement, 8-14 July 1988, 754.
3. Quoted in David R. Olson, The World on Paper (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29-30.
4. Byron L. Sherwin, The Golem Legend: Origins and Implications (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), 7.
5. Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Technological Change, edited by Weibe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 225-58.
6. Otto Jespersen, Essentials of English Grammar (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 17. In the original, the phrase appears in boldface for emphasis.
7. Geoffrey Sampson, quoted in Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1985), 11.
8. Ibid.
9. Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1986), 29.
10. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).
11. First published by the British Library, the lectures have been reissued by Cambridge University Press: D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
12. Michael K. Buckland, “What is a ‘Document’?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48, no. 9 (1997): 804-9.
13. Both quotes are from Buckland’s article, above.
14. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 31.
Chapter 3. Leaves of Grass
1. Stephen Mitchell, preface to Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, edited by Stephen Mitchell (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), vii.
2. Paul Zweig, Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
3. Malcolm Cowley, introduction to Leaves of Grass, edited by Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), xii—xiii.
4. Cowley is here quoting from the first edition. My childhood copy reads:
Swiftly rose and spread around me the peace and joy and
knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers . . .
5. Ibid., xxxii.
6. William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, 2d ed. (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1989), 4.
7. Cowley, introduction to Leaves of Grass, xv.
8. Mitchell, preface to Song of Myself vii.
9. Charles Green, “‘I Sing the Body Electric’: Walt Whitman on the Web,” Kairos 2, no. 2 (1997). This is an online journal; its URL is english.ttu. edu/kairos/2.2.
10. Fortunately, scholarly online versions of Whitman’s authorized editions can now be found in the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive at jefferson. village. Virginia, edu/whitman/.
11. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, introduction to The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, by Marcel Mauss (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1967), ix.
12. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 151.
13. Ibid.
14. Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 113.
Chapter 4. The Dark Side of Documents
1. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, How Writing Came About (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
2. C. M. Kelly, “Later Roman Bureaucracy: Going Through the Files,” in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, edited by Alan K. Bowman and Greg Wolf (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 167.
3. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 219.
4. Ibid., 279.
5. Ibid., 14.
6. joAnne Yates, Control Through Communication (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1-2.
7. Quoted in ibid., 9.
8. Ibid., 12.
9. Quoted in ibid., 5.
10. Quoted in ibid., 41.
11. Quoted in ibid., 61-62.
12. Ibid., 96.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Quoted in Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 227.
15. Quoted in Rogers Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 22.
16. Dorothy E. Smith, “The Active Text: A Textual Analysis of the Social Relations of Public Textual Discourse,” in Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (London: Routledge, 1990), 120-58.
17. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976).
Chapter 5. Reach Out and Touch Someone
1. John L. Brown, “What Ever Happened to Mme. de Sévigné? Reflections on the Fate of the Epistolary Art in a Media Age,” World Literature Today 64, no. 2 (1990): 215.
2. Leslie B. Mittleman, “The Twentieth-Century English Letter: A Dying Art?” World Literature Today 64, no. 2 (1990): 222.
3. Ibid., 226.
4. Martin Arnold, “Making Books,” The New York Times, 21 January 1999.
5. Adam Gopnik, “The Return of the Word,” The New Yorker, 6 December 1999, 49.
6. Ibid., 50.
7. Bill Harby, “Learning Our Letters,” Island Scene Online, 2 April 1997. http://www.islandscene.com/internet/1997/970402/cybertalk_partl/ index.html
8. “The Life of the Mind Goes Digital,” U.S. News Online, 22 March 1999.
9. Howard Anderson and Irvin Ehrenpreis, “The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century: Some Generalizations,” in The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Howard Anderson, Philip B. Daghlian, and Irvin Ehrenpreis (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966), 274.
10. Ibid., 275.
11. Quoted in Stanley K. Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 29.
12. Andrew Carroll, ed., Letters of a Nation (New York: Broadway Books, 1997).
13. Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler, eds., Letters of the Century: America, 1900-1999 (New York: Dial Press, 1999).
14. Jennifer Williams, The Pleasures of Staying in Touch (New York: Hearst Books, 1998), ix.
15. Ibid., x.
16. See the Greeting Card Association’s Web site: www.greetingcard.org.
17. Anderson and Ehrenpreis, “The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century,” 270.
18. Richard Carline, Pictures in the Post: The Story of the Picture Postcard and its Place in the History of Popular Art (Philadelphia: Deltiologists of America, 1972), 57.
19. Ibid., 55.
20. Ibid., 57.
21. Ibid., 55.
22. Ibid., 57.
23. Ernest Dudley Chase, The Romance of the Greeting Card (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 5.
24. Ken Erickson, “Postal Modernism,” Anthropology Newsletter, March 1999, 17-18.
25. The PRC approved the increase to 33 cents, and in November 2000 approved another one-cent increase.
26. Alan R. Swendiman, “Initial Brief of Greeting Card Association” (Washington, DC: Greeting Card Association, 1998), 1.
27. Customers engage in another card-buying practice as well. According to Marc Lesser, the founder of the greeting card publisher Brushdance, people will sometimes buy a number of cards at one time, creating their own private store of them, and choosing from these when they need a card for a specific occasion.
28. Ken C. Erickson, “Direct Testimony of Ken C. Erickson on Behalf of Greeting Card Association,” 1997, 18.
29. Catherine C. Marshall, “Annotation: From Paper Books to the Digital Library,” in ACM Digital Libraries ‘97: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries (New York: Association of Computing Machinery, 1997), 131-140.
30. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
31. Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 29-30.
32. Mauss, The Gift, 10.
33. Quoted in Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), 153-54.
34. Erickson, “Direct Testimony,” 21.
35. Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 35-36, n. 24.
36. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2d ed. (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1993), 162.
37. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1986).
Chapter 6. Reading and Attention
1. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 403-4.
2. Beatrice Ward, The Crystal Goblet (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1956).
3. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 18.
4. Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” in The Kiss of Lam-ourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 107.
5. Robert Darnton, “How to Read a Book,” New York Review of Books, 6 June 1996, 52.
6. Quoted in Nicholas Howe, “The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England,” in The Ethnography of Reading, edited by Jonathan Boyarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 61.
7. Jean Leclercq, O.S.B., The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, translated by Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1977), 19.
8. Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 54.
9. Daniel Boyarin, “Placing Reading: Ancient Israel and Medieval Europe,” in Boyarin, The Ethnography of Reading, 13-14.
10. Quoted in Howe, “Cultural Construction,” 59-60.
11. Illich, In the Vineyard, 82.
12. The distinction between intensive and extensive reading is controversial. Certainly it would be a mistake to think that extensive reading simply replaced intensive reading at one point in time (i.e., the second half of the eighteenth century).
13. George Steiner, “The End of Bookishness?” Times Literary Supplement, 8-14 July 1988, 754.
14. George Steiner, “Ex Libris: A Love Letter Written to Reading,” The New Yorker, 17 March 1997, 27.
15. Illich, In the Vineyard, 3.
16. William Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).
17. Simon Jenkins, “Books Do Furnish a Mind,” The Times (of London), 22 April 1998, 18.
18. Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
19. Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue (New York: Random House, 1998).
20. Carla Hesse, “Humanities and the Library in the Digital Age,” in What’s Happened to the Humanities, edited by Alvin Kernan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 116.
21. Paul Duguid, “Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book,” in Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book, 74.
22. Ibid., 73.
23. For an alternative conception of information, grounded in people and social reality, see John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000).
24. Herbert Simon, “Rationality as Process and as Product of Thought,” American Economic Review 68, no. 2 (1978): 13.
25. Richard A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 227.
26. Warren Thorngate, “On Paying Attention,” in Recent Trends in Psychology, edited by William J. Baker, Leendert P. Mos, Hans V. Rappard, and Hen-derikus j. Stam (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1988), 247-63.
27. Geoffrey Nunberg, “Farewell to the Information Age,” in Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book, 125.
28. Michael Joyce, “The Lingering Errantness of Place”: A Talk Given at the ACRL/LITA Joint Presidents Program, American Library Association, 114 Annual Conference, Chicago, 26 June 1995.
29. Geoffrey Nunberg, “The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction,” Representations 42 (1993): 22.
Chapter 7. Libraries and the Anxiety of Order
1. Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
2. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 1-2.
3. Luciano Canfora, The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 20.
4. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 7.
5. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 85-86.
6. James Westfall Thompson, Ancient Libraries (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1962), 3-8.
7. Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 7.
8. Quoted in Patrick Williams, The American Public Library and the Problem of Purpose (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 4.
9. Francis L. Miksa, “Classification,” in The Encyclopedia of Library History, edited by Wayne A. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 145-46.
10. Dee Garrison, Apostles of Culture: The Public Librarian and American Society, 1876-1920 (New York: Free Press, 1979), 114.
11. Ibid., 112-13.
12. Wayne A. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (Chicago: American Library Association, 1996).
13. Francis L. Miksa, The DDC, the Universe of Knowledge, and the Post-Modern Library (Albany, N.Y.: Forest Press, 1998), 42.
14. Library Catalog (Boston: Library Bureau, 1909), 5.
15. Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer, 377.
16. Quoted in Garrison, Apostles of Culture, 106.
17. Garrison, Apostles of Culture, 107.
18. Both quotes in ibid., 112.
19. Ibid., 115.
20. Bohdan S. Wynar, Introduction to Cataloging and Classification, 8th ed. (Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1992), 332.
21. All quotes are from Francis Miksa, “The Cultural Legacy of the ‘Modern Library’ for the Future,” The Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 37, no. 2 (1996): 100-119.
22. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1994), vii.
Chapter 8. A Bit of Digital History
1. Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago: American Library Association, 1991), 143.
2. Ibid., 328.
3. Ibid., 29.
4. Ibid., 329.
5. Ibid., 331.
6. Ibid., 329-30.
7. You would also have a great deal of trouble assuring consistency among the letters. Even a very skilled punchcutter would have difficulty making all the lowercase e‘s look the same. This is more a consideration for us today than for the early printers. Because they were trying to replicate the look of handwritten manuscripts, they actually introduced variants in the letterforms to approximate the variability of handwritten text.
8. At roughly the same time, the designers of typesetting systems were beginning to use computers to further automate the work of setting type and printing documents. They were focused on the production of printed texts, and saw the computer as a tool in the service of this aim, not as a device in whose properties they were inherently interested. These two threads of development — from mathematics and computer science on the one hand, and from printing and typesetting on the other — would finally meet up in the 1970s.
9. Peter Deutsch and Butler Lampson, “An Online Editor,” Communications of the ACM 10, no. 12 (1967): 793.
10. Theodor H. Nelson, Dream Machines (self-published, 1974), 21.
11. Bush published his vision of the Memex in Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly July 1945, 101-8. Earlier in the twentieth century, Paul Otlet, the Belgian lawyer and documentalist, envisioned hypertext-like systems. See W. Boyd Rayward, “Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45, no. 4 (1994): 235-50.
Chapter 9. An Immense Effort
1. Mark Landler, “Now, Worse than Ever! Cynicism in Advertising,” The New York Times, 17 August 1997.
2. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
3. Susan Stellin, “Increasingly, E-Mail Users Find They Have Something to Hide,” The New York Times, 10 February 2000.
4. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 8.
5. Peter Lyman and Stanley Chodorow, “The Future of Scholarly Communication,” in The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century, edited by Brian L. Hawkins and Patricia Bat-tin (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources and Association of American Universities, 1998), 95.
6. “As Publishers Perish, Libraries Feel the Pain,” The New York Times, 3 November 2000.
7. Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 18.
8. Stanley Chodorow and Peter Lyman, “The Responsibilities of Universities in the New Information Environment,” in The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century, edited by Brian L. Hawkins and Patricia Battin (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources and Association of American Universities, 1998), 65.
9. Stevan Harnad, “The Post Gutenberg Galaxy: How to Get There from Here,” The Information Society 11, no. 4 (1995): 286.
10. Ibid., 289.
11. Stevan Harnad, “Sorting the Esoterica from the Exoterica: There’s Plenty of Room in Cyberspace,” The Information Society 11, no. 4 (1995): 320.
12. Ibid., 316.
13. Clifford Lynch, “The Scholarly Monograph’s Descendants,” in The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis or How Can I Get Tenure if You Won’t Publish My Book?, edited by Mary M. Case (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 1999), 142-43.
14. Tom Bissell and Webster Younce, “All is Vanity,” Harper’s, December 2000, 58.
Chapter 10. The Search for Stable Ground
1. George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4.
2. Ibid., 5.
3. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), 5.
4. David Loy, Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996), xiii—xiv.
5. Ibid., xiv.
6. Ibid., 14.
7. Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, translated by Janet Lloyd (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 142.
Chapter 11. Scrolling Forward
1. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
2. Although this is changing — see Dean E. Murphy, “Moving Beyond ‘Shh’ (and Books) at Libraries,” The New York Times, 7 March 2001.
3. David Loy, “Preparing for Something That Never Happens: The Means/End Problem in Modern Culture,” International Studies in Philosophy 26, no. 4: 52.
4. Douglas Wolk, “Webmaster Borges,” salon.com, 6 December 1999.
5. Douglas Davis, “Borges is God (or, God is Borgesian),” New York Press, vol. 11, issue 46, 18 November 1998.