Encouraged by the commercial and critical fortunes of The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), its General Editors were nonetheless chastened by the fact that its costliness prevented many from purchasing that two-volume work of 1.1 million words. Seeking a way to disseminate the essays from that compendium of book-historical and bibliographical scholarship, we have now edited The Book: A Global History, updating chapters from Part 1 of the Companion and adding new essays as well. It is our hope that the publication of this volume will make a valuable collection of bibliographical and book-historical scholarship—ambitious in its scope and innovative in its reach—accessible to a broad audience of general readers and advanced specialists alike. Throughout the planning and production of this vade mecum to the world of the book across myriad times and cultures, it has been our constant ambition to bring to life book-historical studies for students and scholars, librarians and collectors, antiquarian booksellers, and enthusiastic amateurs.
Building on The Oxford Companion to the Book, this volume seeks to delineate the history of the production, dissemination, and reception of texts from the earliest pictograms of the mid-4th millennium to recent developments in electronic books. Considering many aspects of ‘the book’—a convenient term for any recorded text—the 51 essays comprising The Book: A Global History traverse the Inca and the Aztec empires, the European medieval book and the early printing revolution, and the nationalization of the publishing industry and book trades after 1949 in Communist China. We have sought not only temporal comprehensiveness, but broad geographical range as well. In addition to book-historical studies of western European nations and the United States, readers will, for instance, find essays on the history of the book in Byzantium; in the Caribbean islands and Bermuda; in the Czech Republic and Slovakia; in the Baltic States and in the Balkans; in Africa, the antipodes, South America, and the islands of Southeast Asia.
We hope that the gathering of diverse perspectives from many nations in this history will lead readers to forge creative and serendipitous connections more powerful than the boundaries that have traditionally kept them separate. Propinquity may generate productive associations; typographical contiguity might in some felicitous instances help to transcend distances of geography, or even the demarcations of intellectual disciplines. Our hope, then, is not merely to supply information, but to promote new knowledge.
This volume also features topical essays on a wide array of subjects, including censorship, the book in the ancient world, missionary printing, intellectual property, children’s books, printed ephemera, Jewish books and manuscripts, the origin and development of writing systems, the book as symbolic object, and the economics of print. The bibliographically inclined may perhaps especially enjoy the chapters on paper, the technologies of printing, editorial theory and textual criticism, bookbinding, and the history of illustration and the processes devised for the reproduction of images in texts.
The use of ‘the book’ to designate the great diversity of textual forms considered in the ‘history of the book’, or indeed The Book: A Global History, is a kind of synecdoche, a single example to represent the many. Yet, because book history is, necessarily, about far more than the history of books, ‘the book’ as a category or abstraction encompassing everything from stelae inscriptions to laser-printed sheets is not a formation that comes naturally in English, as it does in French (Le Livre; histoire du livre) or in German (Buchwesen). Naturally, the use of the term ‘book’ in our title in no way excludes newspapers, prints, sheet music, maps, or manuscripts, but merely suggests a degree of emphasis. Mindful that in every major European language the word for ‘book’ is traceable to the word for ‘bark’, we might profitably think of ‘book’ as originally signifying the surface on which any text is written and, hence, as a fitting shorthand for all recorded texts.
Nevertheless, in several respects, ‘the book’ label is an unfortunate one. Even when perceived as an archetypal part of a larger whole, the Western codex, much less the printed book, is not really an adequate emblem of many material manifestations of text—say, ink-squeeze rubbings, or the Dead Sea Scrolls. More importantly still, the phrases ‘history of the book’ and ‘book history’ can carry with them the unfortunate idea that this area of study is restricted to texts as physical objects—the province of analytical (or physical) bibliography—whereas, as evidenced in the pages of this volume, it encompasses much more as well.
The Book: A Global History seeks to provide an accurate, balanced, comprehensive, and authoritative view of a large subject that is still evolving, based on the present state of our knowledge. All the essays have accompanying bibliographies; these are meant to direct the reader to the most relevant and useful sources for further study. In most cases, the bibliographies also represent the principal works consulted by the authors themselves. For this revised and augmented edition of the essays from the Companion, three new contributions have been provided to cover: Censorship; Intellectual Property and Copyright; and The History of the Book in the Caribbean and Bermuda. The essay on the Electronic Book has been extensively revised to reflect changes in this fast-growing field. Some new illustrations have been added. Many of the revised essays incorporate minor changes and corrections, including additions to their bibliographies, but the majority continue to reflect the essential state of knowledge concerning their subject-matter around the time that the Companion went into production.
We have not ordinarily translated the titles of works in major European languages other than English, but have provided translations where relevant for languages more likely to present significant difficulties for the majority of our readers. Throughout this volume, book titles follow the capitalization rules of the languages in which they are given. References to other essays are to their numbers and take the form of e.g. (see 17, 42). We have included URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, or Web addresses) whenever particularly important and reliable resources are to be found on the World Wide Web. Undoubtedly, some of these will migrate or expire over time, but we nevertheless believe that, when judiciously used, the Web is too valuable an asset for research and teaching to neglect merely because a small number of sites will present future difficulties, many of which can be remedied.
Inevitably, despite our best efforts, this volume will suffer from omissions—some because we were unable to discover a body of rigorous scholarly writing on a subject, others because of the constraints of time and page length in editing and producing a one-volume book of this kind, and still others because we have been too ignorant to know what was missing. Whatever merits The Book: A Global History does have are chiefly due to the expertise and generosity of our 58 contributors, hailing from 15 different countries. More and more, book history is a global enterprise. We present these essays in the hope that they will engender in diverse readerships from around the globe more capacious understandings of books and their fascinating histories.
MICHAEL F. SUAREZ, S.J.
H. R. WOUDHUYSEN
Charlottesville and Oxford
11 March 2013