Reviewed by: The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making * Daniel R. Headrick (bio) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. By Adrian Johns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xxi+753; illustrations, tables, notes/references, bibliography, index. $40. The citation above tells you who wrote this book, what it is called, and when, where, and by whom it was published. But how do you know that this information is actually true? This may seem an absurd question, for we live in a culture that trusts the publishing process (if not the content of printed matter). Explaining how this culture of trust came about is the purpose of this book. In so doing, it fits in with a new genre, the history of trust, exemplified by Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and Theodore M. Porter’s Trust in Numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). But it also belongs to another genre, the history of books and printing in the early modern age, pioneered by Henri-Jean Martin, Roger Chartier, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Robert Darnton. One of Johns’s goals is to challenge the notion of “fixity,” the idea that printing produced multiple copies of works as they were written by their authors. He does so by taking us back to seventeenth-century England, the age of the English Revolution and the Restoration. Back then, nothing printed was trustworthy; readers could not even be sure that two copies of the same work by the same author printed at the same time by the same printer contained identical texts. Instead, the world of printing was rife with piracy, plagiarism, unauthorized abridgements, false attributions, outright sedition, and errors galore. As the author explains, “the sources of [our] print culture are . . . to be found in civility as much as in technology” (p. 35). The most successful attempt to introduce civility into the world of printed matter was that of the Company of Stationers, with its complex protocols of registration. Another was the patent, a monopoly on the printing of legal texts, bibles, or almanacs. Yet another was the Royal Society’s efforts to bring credit to [End Page 872] the new “experimental philosophy” through elaborate rituals of perusal, registration, and printing of papers in the Philosophical Transactions. Hence, The Nature of the Book is also a history of early modern science, in which “the need to communicate successfully was . . . as important a part of the experimental philosophy as the experiment itself” (p. 472). It is a story of jealousy, suspicion, plagiarism, and manipulation, starring such luminaries as Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and John Flamsteed. Civility in science developed in symbiosis with civility in printing. To describe science, printing, and their social milieus, the author uses a postmodern vocabulary: representations, negotiations, contested, mediation of domains, and so on. Here the words fit, for the early modern period had just the attributes that postmodernists insist, less convincingly, on applying to the Enlightenment and its “modern” sequels. By applying concepts such as trust and credit to printing, however, Johns leaves himself open to a dangerous challenge. We may accept the veracity of the title and cataloging pages, but how do we know that the contents of this book can be trusted? To convince us, he brings out all the big guns known to historical scholarship. The result is a long and dense work of dazzling erudition, filled with minute details on many topics, from the invention of printing to the physiology of reading to tables of astronomical observations, with numerous quotations from original sources in their original spelling: “physitian,” “incompleat,” “allwayes,” and so on. All of this is supported by an awesome scholarly apparatus: 1,399 footnotes (most of them to multiple sources) and a bibliography of 633 primary and 1,014 secondary sources. This is scholarship so monumental that, indeed, it does seem trustworthy. But is it useful to readers of Technology and Culture? Although it was not aimed at historians of technology, there is nonetheless much to be learned here. There is an entire chapter on “The Cultural Construction of the Printing Revolution,” explaining why we believe in...