The Center for the Book and the History of the Book

Abstract

In the three decades and more since its creation, the Center for the Book has benefited immensely from John Cole’s leadership in executing its broad public mandate. During these same decades the history of the book has become firmly established as a significant field of study, yielding an abundance of innovative scholarship. 1 The development of the Center not only coincided but also intertwined with the emergence of book history as a field, especially from 1977 to 1980, years that were foundational for both. What has not been sufficiently recognized is the important role Cole and the Center have played in nurturing book history in the United States and indeed internationally. In Anglo-American scholarship the history of printing and the history of books in the form of analytic and descriptive bibliography are venerable subjects. 2 Not until the late 1970s, however, did a subject identified as “the history of the book” (or “book history”) emerge in the Englishspeaking world. French scholars pioneered what they called l’histoire du livre, and the 1976 appearance of The Coming of the Book, the English translation of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s groundbreaking L’apparition du livre (1958), is usually considered the first major event in the development of the new field. In 1979 two American scholars who had trained as historians of France published major works now also seen as seminal—Elizabeth Eisenstein’s monumental The Printing Press as an Agent of Change and Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775–1800. These works, as bibliographic scholar and textual critic G. Thomas Tanselle has remarked, “reflect . . . widened interest [in book history] and at the same time have served to stimulate it.” 3 (Eisenstein’s work has been particularly instrumental in the formation of “print culture studies,” a rubric that some see as defining a field related to but nevertheless distinct from “book history.”) Within a few years the terms “history of the book” and “book history” had become widely current among English-speaking scholars.