Technology of the Book

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The Economist¹ recently featured an essay on The Future of the Book: From Papyrus to Pixels, with an interactive web version that can be scrolled through, read as a "book," listened to as an audiobook, and the last chapter can even be Spritzed through.

More than the future, the essay concerned itself with the current state of book affairs, speculating about the impending death of eBooks at the hands of multi-purpose tablets² and considering current self-publishing trends alongside the ambiguous pre-19th century, when it was "common for writers to publish themselves, [and it] carried no particular stigma."

However, what I appreciated, was that the essay took into account not only the history of the book, but also considered the book as the technology that it is. Today, we are enchanted with our own light-up and handheld technology, but we forget that a portable reading device with pages was not something that every historical human may recognize to be a container of text.

Since the essay did concern itself with papyrus, in the title and through an anecdote about Cicero in Chapter I, it is interesting that it did not treat the idea of the text itself — a papyrus scroll may not readily be identified as a book today. What is fascinating about the idea of scrolls in our contemporary context, is that we see them popping up again in webpages, as we more frequently begin to read top-down rather than flipping through pages.

As the essay suggests, the temporal space of emerging technology is nothing new, and may in fact be the norm. Sand and cave wall, stone markers and tablets, papyrus, parchment and loose sheets, printed books, pamphlets, websites, eBooks — sometimes the material vessels of text overlap and other times they eclipse each other. They are all just a means to an end after all.

Speaking of, Machiavelli, in a December 10, 1513 letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, speaks about having a book with him while he is out — "Ho un libro sotto, o Dante a Petrarca, o un di questi poeti minori, come Tibullo, Ovvidio, e simili..." (the section begins "Partitomi del bosco") — he is reading the love stories of the vernacular poets or the minor Roman poets. Then, later, he goes to his study to seriously read from a book that is not portable, and which has a ritual all its own (and he describes it with pomp).

Machiavelli writes just after the Aldine Petrarca volume was printed in a handy "pocket" octavo edition instead of something large and laborious to read (Petrarch, famously, also had a handheld manuscript copy of Augustine which he took with him up Mount Ventoux). Medieval scholars had to make their way to books that were chained to lecterns, and Machiavelli repeats the ancient ritual to do his serious reading. He lived at a time when there were distinct modes of reading, and small books were not earmarked just for travel. For example, in the Renaissance and Middle Ages, a handheld book may also serve as private prayer books and books of hours, often used in female solitary devotion.

Now, too, we approach different containers of text in different ways. We may read websites in a less serious manner than the printed page, or else we use eReaders to consume erotica (The Economist suggests that eReaders cemented the success of Fifty Shades of Grey), which maybe we will not do on a centrally-located PC. Voracious reader-travelers may wish to bring ten or more books on a Kindle or a Nook, but subway commuters may prefer the lovely technology that is the 21st-century-printed book, with its infinite battery life and a screen that does not cause too much eyestrain (and the essay does agree that a book is great technology). From Machiavelli and earlier until now, we must recognize that texts were accessed in a variety of material states often for different purposes.

Today's reader, who may find a handheld book to be ideal, may also have appreciated that during the period of Italian humanism, while the language shifted from the scholastic and inaccessible Latin to the more commonly-used vernacular, written text was reimagined from the tedious Blackletter (which persisted in many locales) to the elegant and readable Carolingian minuscule (which Petrarch extols in a 1366 letter to Boccaccio — "castigata et clara seque ultro oculis ingerens"). And this Carolingian minuscule hand was replicated in the typeset of early printed books, and later became the basis for computer fonts such as Times New Roman.

Still, the reader is only one interloper of the text, and the medium also influences the writer — as, The Economist notes, "serialisation further encouraged some novelists towards length, as well as setting up a distinctive rhythm of cliffhangers at the end of each instalment." Even before this, as the scattered rhymes of the poets of the 13th-century Sicilian Court were distributed to readers, poets intentionally rhymed their poetry at certain points in order to prevent their stanzas from being torn apart. And, surely, if there were no book format, Petrarch would never have created the narrative sonnet sequence that influenced European poetry for centuries.

And when we consider poetry we must also consider the oral tradition, for would we even have rhyme were it not for the need of mnemonic?

Books, and other textual containers, have been the technology to deliver us communication over time and space, which, as long as there are humans, is unlikely to ever truly be rendered obsolete even if various formats of text become (as some have already done) less prevalent. It is useful to realize that — even if we live in an age when technology seems to be advancing rapidly — it may be partially an illusion since we do not consider the technologies of the past to be technology any more. As the Economist article and its interactive compendium on the Future of the Book makes clear, text can be best explored through a number of technologies, as each serves the powerful ends of human exchange.


¹ October 11th-17th 2014 issue,
² "'In a few years' time,' a recent report by Enders Analysis, a research firm, predicts, 'we will look back at e-readers and remember them as one of the shortest-lived of all consumer media devices.'"

Further Reading

• Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” 
• D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts
• David Greetham, Textual Scholarship
• R. Clemens and T. Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies
• Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy
• Roger S. Wieck, Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art
• Anthony Grafton, “The Humanist as Reader”
• Brian Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy
• Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
• Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
• Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible”
• Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England