Changing Agents

Abstract

It issomething of atruism in the field of book history that it's easy enough to produce detailed case-studies of books and their makers and readers, but very difficult indeed to synthesise these fragments into any sort of greater whole. This is especially true now that heroic bibliographical work has yielded such wonders as the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). Now attention increasingly turns to interpretative questions about how books occupy their place in cultures and societies and how they do the work they do. Consensus emerges slowly from a fog of detail. In recent decades work by historians such as D. F. McKenzie and theorists such as Jerome McGann has shown us how messy the work of making books is. Books are collaborative projects shaped by the actions of many people, amongst which those of authors can be of more or less importance. Meanwhile scholars including David McKitterick and Harold Love have successfully challenged the idea that print and manuscript have always been starkly separate modes of production. We now know that that the invention of printing in Europe wasn't a moment of rupture in which manuscript circulation was rendered obsolete, but the beginning of a complex process of coexistence for printed and hand-written texts. Turning to questions of use rather than production, pioneers in the history of reading like Roger Chartier have been followed by an industrious tribe toiling to piece together the history of how different people at different times have used books in different ways. Their aim is to show us that books depend on branching networks of people and practices and that meaning blossoms from those connections. The growing popularity of e-books makes these questions particularly pressing as all sorts of readers ask whether the end of the physical book is nigh. Those who must publish or perish wonder what publishing will look like in a world of open access.