Thirty Years of Electronic Records (review)

Abstract

select are not quite the four I would have chosen, and I can think of plenty of other possibilities, so some editorial musings on the question of the key themes in book history would have been welcome. It was the devotion of a section to orality and literacy that made me ponder these organizational issues. I’m well aware that this is a topic that has caused much discussion (and if I were not, the length of the bibliography for this section makes it clear), yet the essays collected here all focus on the contrast between an oral culture and a literate culture. There is nothing about orality within a literate culture or about different sorts of literate cultures. There has, after all, also been a great deal written about the decline (or not) of the social activity of reading aloud and about the existence (or not) of a revolution from intensive to extensive reading. My own book history courses focus on the period from the eighteenth century onward, and I was disappointed to find so little my students could use in this section. Yet for me the most intriguing—and disappointing—aspect of this volume was its general tendency to think of books as texts rather than material objects. Although the editors claim in their introduction that “the significance of the book as a physical object” is one of the issues forming “part of the substance of this Reader” (1), they are also enamored by the concept of unstable, interacting texts (3), and most of their selected essays engage more with the production and consumption of texts than of books. This is certainly an increasing area of interest in these days of immaterial, electronic texts, but one of the most exciting aspects of book history for me is precisely the focus on books. Where were the essays discussing the material form of the book, investigating the significance of innovations in printing or paper-making technologies or the importance of edition bindings for creating a ready-to-read product? Equally, where was the attention to the practical side of reading, discussing questions of book availability whether from book clubs, libraries, or railway station bookstalls? Of course, editors of anthologies always have to be selective. This will no doubt be a most useful volume for instructors, but it will be more useful to those teaching very general book history courses than to those offering more specialized options.