Writing as Material Practice: Substance, Surface and Medium. Ed. by KATHRYN E. PIQUETTE and RUTH D. WOODHOUSE. * A Lakota War Book from the Little Big Horn: The Pictographic Autobiography of Half Moon. Ed. by CASTLE MCLAUGHLIN.

Abstract

Over the past few decades there has developed a synthesizing ‘history of the book’ based in traditional disciplines like bibliography and narrative social and technological history, with palaeography and diplomatics hovering in the background. I say background, because so far book history's primary focus has not been on manuscripts (Greg and McKerrow disagreed sharply on whether bibliography should even treat them) but on print culture, with a strong emphasis on material production, the book trade, textual criticism, reading, and latterly the digital turn. Looking to the book's origins, the tendency has been to locate them in the clay tablets of Mesopotamia. As Andrew Robinson wrote in The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010): ‘Some time in the late 4th millennium bc, in the cities of Sumer in Mesopotamia, the “cradle of civilization”, the complexity of trade and administration reached a point where it outstripped the power of memory among the governing elite. To record transactions in an indisputable, permanent form became essential.’ In this interpretation, two features are essential to the book as an artefact: its content, as represented by the infant technology of writing, and its permanence, as represented in Mesopotamia by the baked clay tablets remaining in the archaeological record.