Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2010), "Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 7, pp. 564-566. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011065172

This attractively illustrated and competitively priced work takes two familiar themes out for a walk and presents them in an interesting, and revealing, ways. One of the themes is that of examining books, not just from what their texts say but in the wider context of books as cultural objects, in terms of their intellectual impact, and their para‐textual cultural production and distribution. There is an extensive literature here, typically Literary Cultures and the Material Book (Eliot et al., 2007) and Judging a Book by Its Cover(Matthews and Moody, 2007). The other theme is that of the destiny of the printed book – and the fate of libraries too – in an age of fast‐moving digitisation and e‐learning. Here, between stereotypes of factions merely for and against, lie cultural choices for heritage and preservation and lurk alliances (mergers and acquisitions?) between national/research libraries and Microsoft and Google and other global players.

David Pearson is the director of the University of London Research Library Services and author of earlier works on provenance research and English book‐binding styles. He draws on both themes – books not just as texts and the future of the book – in this generously illustrated work, predigesting some of the key issues for a reader who is likely to be, variously, either a teacher or a researcher wanting vivid examples for students and for talks, or a bibliophile (newbie or expert) fascinated by the field for its own sake. The price alone makes it a good addition to any library, however, hard‐up. Its British Library (BL) pedigree suggests that it could have derived from an exhibition, and the numerous reproductions of and from books are mainly from BL collections.

The essential theme of the book, Pearson says himself (p. 175, in a chapter called “Values for the Future”), is that “books may be interesting, historically significant objects, above and beyond their textual content” and that this is “a particularly important” thesis “at a time when the world of books is undergoing… major changes” like digitisation. This chapter provides the bare bones of that complex debate about preserving books as cultural heritage for posterity, about how much we can and should discard because we believe in electronic replacements, because of the pressures on space and finance, and because e‐learning seems the only way ahead. Baby and bath‐water time, crudely. So, Pearson suggests rather vaguely, not just the text but the “other things it has to offer researcher” (p. 183). The argument can be, and has been, made in fuller detail in everything from scholarly symposia to popular journalism and forms more of a back‐drop here, however, because Pearson's focus is to try to let the books speak for themselves.

He sets the scene in a chapter called “Books in History” – the cultural role of books across the ages (Western culture only), changes in technology which continue so why should we be surprised?, digitisation of out‐of‐copyright materials (he could have added in‐copyright ones as well), and books as gateways to texts and as cultural and historical artefacts in their own right. Pearson moves into other chapters – where books represent authority and wisdom, and where they are examples of varied and distinctive book design where individuality is achieved even within the framework of mass production. He sidesteps the Benjamin dimension of the argument (about aura and reproducibility) by emphasising and celebrating numerous examples of book design, from Kelmscott Press and Everyman editions to the livre d'artiste (for example Bonnard's Verlaine). We then move on to “Variety through Ownership” which describes how owners insert bookplates and annotations, how we get an idea of what well‐known owners thought (e.g. Coleridge's annotations, Blake's comments on Reynolds), and how books have associations (Lady Jane Grey's prayer book, a copy of Wilde's Salome presented to Beardsley, and births and deaths jotted down in bibles).

We also get variety through binding, where Pearson provides a snapshot of book‐bindings up to today, on evidence we get from fragments used in such bindings, on how decorative covers betoken ownership, and on how the same work can be bound in many different ways (a final case study of Bacon's account of the reign of Henry VII). Many items are private press works. The general approach throughout is based on an assumption that the cultural and intellectual values of the texts, and the production ingenuity and originality of the books as artefacts, are self‐evidently enough to prove the historical significance beyond the text. This argument is not fully worked through and anyone seeking to incorporate the book into a coherent argument will have to develop it for him/herself. Looking at this another way, perhaps it is an argument through stealth – through celebrating the uniqueness of these books, the ingenuity of their manufacture, the obvious affection in which previous owners held the books, an argument for books, and the values they represent, can be plausibly made.

The other theme, of the future of the book and so of libraries at a time of digitisation, is also only partially made. A late chapter in the book considers the collective value of libraries and, again, does it by celebration rather than analysis – in fact, celebration implies advocacy (even though advocacy is not explicit): the King's Library at the BL, the Bodleian Library, and others great and small (including a farmer's working library at Townend, the farm in the Lake District) are not just quarries of information but places with an aesthetic and history of their own. Collections like those of the National Trust cannot be left as hostage to fortune, even by benign neglect. Fine, but where do the aesthetic and historic lie here?: well‐captioned illustrations provide the reader with only an intuitive feel for them.

Link this to the final chapter on values for the future – books are historically significant beyond the text – the book asks what criteria should be used when discarding books and what cultural implications there are of doing so. Readers of the work will already – heart and head – be on Pearson's side about this, even though any dispassionate analyst of the arguments knows that the issues are, culturally and politically, a lot more complex than that. Even so, Books as History has set itself the task of presenting the materials where value lies: it offers only a patchy view of the para‐textual implications of this and only alerts readers to (rather than doggedly trying to convince them of) the preservation and cultural policy issues that arise from having such books, collections, and research into them.

All of which takes us back to what is probably the base‐line point here – that this book is essentially a celebration of lovely books. In art and music, as in bibliophilia, without this love, and without a belief in the intellectual merits of simply having and making such artefacts, not even policy can thrive. It seems like sentimentality to say so and that is one reason among many that the future of the book is so controversial. That said, access and preservation arguments take us another way, and the meta‐textual opportunities of developing digital media suggest that we will be able at least to see vellum texts and fine bindings even if we cannot feel them. But most of us cannot do that now and rely upon books like this to show us what some of them look like.