Treasury of Printing

Publishing and Reading

1. For too long Western historians have considered the relationship between printing, publishing and reading solely by the standards of Gutenberg's invention as if the latter was a necessary condition for the creation of a large readership and the development of a strong publishing activity. A better knowledge of books and publishing in China and Japan warns us against such europeocentrism. Wood engraving has, indeed, its own advantages. For one thing, it is better adapted than typography to languages which are made up of a large number of written characters or of several scripts. For another, wood engraving maintains a strong link between handwriting and publishing since the carved blocks derive from calligraphic models. Finally, due to the durability of the woodblocks, which allow several thousand copies of the same title to be printed, the number of copies of each edition can be easily adjusted to market demand. All these features require of us a more accurate appreciation of Gutenberg's invention. While certainly of fundamental importance, it is not the only technique capable of assuring the widescale dissemination of printed texts.

   As we know movable type was invented in Asian civilizations well before its discovery in the West. Movable type in terra cotta was used in China since the eleventh century. Beginning in the thirteenth century Korean texts were printed using metal characters, while in China wooden characters were used in the same century. However, this chronological priority is not the most important reason to challenge the spontaneous europeocentrism of Western historians. Indeed, In China as in Japan (where movable type was introduced in the last decade of the sixteenth century, simultaneously by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, after his military campaigns in Korea, and by the Jesuits), use of type remained limited, sporadic, and reserved for certain genres of works (classical and religious works, official texts, scholarly books).

   Having invented movable type, the East did not use it largely. But that does not imply the absence of a large-scale print culture. It depended on a technique used in the West only in the second half of the fourteenth century: the production of block-printed books. Such a technique assured in Tukogawa Japan and Ming and Qing China the broad circulation of printed texts, commercial publishing enterprises, a dense network of libraries, reading societies and bookstores, and broadly diffused popular genres. The civilization of printing and publishing cannot be reduced only to the ´Gutenberg Galaxyª.

2. We have also to think that even in the Western world before or after Gutenberg's invention, publishing a text does not imply necessarily printing it. On the one hand, if it is true that printing replaced manuscript, overwhelmingly, as a means for reproducing and disseminating texts after the mid-fifteenth century, copying by hand continued to play an important part in the circulation of numerous genres of texts. Their ´publicationª was closely linked to the diffusion among a limited number of readers of handwritten copies. It was the case for political pamphlets and newssheets ´publishedª by entrepreneurial shops, for the forbidden works circulated by clandestine manuscripts, for the poetic compositions of the ´gentlemen writersª, or for the erudite works of the members of the Republic of Letters. Gentlemen and scholars shared some common values. They were disdainful of the book-selling trade that corrupted at the same time the integrity of the texts, distorted by hands of ´rude mechanicalsª (as says Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream), the literary code of ethics by introducing into the commerce of letters cupidity and piracy, and the evidence of meaning by allowing an uncontrolled circulation and appropriation of the works. It is the reason why they preferred the manuscript circulation for their works because it was addressed to the chosen public of the peers and it embodied the ethos of personal obligations and communal politeness which characterized as well the aristocratic civility as the ethics of reciprocity of the Res Publica Literatorum.

   On the other hand, against the temptations of ´ethnocentrism of readingª, it is necessary to recall how numerous are the ancient genres and works which in no way implied as vehicle a printed object and as addressee a solitary and silent reader. Composed to be spoken or to be read aloud and shared before a listening audience, invested with a ritual function, thought of as machines designated to produce certain effects, they obey the laws proper to oral and communal transmission. From Antiquity on, reading out loud serves, basically, two purposes. On one side, a pedagogical function: demonstrating that one is a good reader by reading out loud constitutes an obligatory rite of passage for young men who thus display their mastery of rhetoric and public speaking. On the other, a literary purpose: to read aloud is, for an author, to put a work into circulation, to ´publishª it. This form of publication was not abandoned in the early modern period either as the only form for the circulation of a text or before its appearance in a printed edition.

   For example, the reluctance to print the theatrical plays was largely shared by the playwrights in early modern Europe. The rhetorical devices of the prologues and advices to the readers multiplied expressions of the ´stigma of printª. They referred back to two elements: one the one hand, the process of publication itself that put the work in the hands of the compositors who worked in the printing houses and introduced many misprints and mistakes in the text; on the other hand, the aesthetical irreducibility between the natural destination of the plays which are written for being acted, seen and heard, and the printed form which deprived them of their ´lifeª.

   But the necessity to print imposed itself. The prologues stated the diverse reasons able to justify such a decision: the impossibility to avoid the edition of stolen copies, the bad conditions of the performances on the stages, the requirements of the representations which obliged to shorten the plays for suiting the convenient length of the spectacle, etc. The emphasis put upon the written text and the importance of the reading of the plays counterbalanced the ´toposª of the reluctance to print. But it did not erase the fact that the primary form of their ´publicationª (like the publication of sermons and political discourses) was not printing but oral delivery.

   It is sure that Gutenberg's invention made it possible to reproduce texts in a large number of copies, thus transforming the very conditions for the transmission and reception of books. For one thing, printing drastically reduced the per copy cost of making a book by spreading that cost over the entire pressrun. For another, it shortened the time needed to produce a book, which was long for a manuscript, even after the invention in the XIVth century of the system that divided the work to be copied into several gatherings so that different copyists could reproduce the same book at the same time. With printing every individual reader could have access to a greater number of books, and every book could reach more readers. But it is not a sufficient reason for considering that the only possibility for ´publishingª a text was printing and that the Western technique was the only one able to establish a largely diffused print culture.

3. In the same manner we cannot consider in a too direct a manner the invention and spread of printing as responsible for bringing about a fundamental break in the history of reading. The ´reading revolutionsª are multiple and not immediately linked with the invention or transformations of printing. The first one consists in the long process which led an increasing number of readers from a necessarily oralized practice of reading, in which reading aloud was indispensable for the comprehension of meaning, to silent, purely visual reading. Although both ways of reading had coexisted in Greek and Roman antiquity, it was during the Middle Ages that the ability to read silently was reconquered by the Western readers. First restricted to the monastic scribes, such a capacity reached the universities during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and became common practice among courtiers and lay aristocrats since the fourteenth century on. This trend continued after Gutenberg until even the humblest readers had acquired a reading ability and style that no longer required oralization. We can see a proof, a contrario, of this evolution in Western societies today where people are considered illiterate not only if they cannot read at all, but also if they can understand a text only when they read it aloud.

   The first revolution in reading on the early modern age was thus by and large independent of the technological revolution in book production. It was rooted in changes which transformed the very function of the written word that took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when the monastic model, which assigned to writing a task of preservation and memory that was in great part dissociated from reading, was replaced by the scholastic model of reading, which made the book both the object and instrument of intellectual labor.

   The spread of possibly silent reading marks a rupture of capital importance. Silent reading allowed a relationship with writing that was potentially freer, more intimate and secretive. It permitted a rapid, skilled reading able to cope with the complexities of the relations set up on the page of the manuscript between the discourse and its glosses, references, commentaries, and indexes. Reading silently created the possibility of reading more quickly, and so reading more texts and more complex texts. This first revolution in reading thus preceded the revolution of printing since the possibility for silent reading arose (at least for learned readers, both ecclesiastic and lay) well before the mid-fifteenth century.

4. The second revolution in reading occurred during the age of printing but before the industrialization of the book production. Support for such a revolution experienced in Germany, England, France and Switzerland during the eighteenth century referred to different mutations: a growth in book production, which tripled or quadrupled between the beginning of the century and the 1780’s, the multiplication and transformation of newspapers, the triumph of small book formats, and the proliferation of institutions (reading societies, book clubs, lending libraries) that made it possible to read book and periodicals without having to buy them.

   This series of transformations occurred without great changes in the printing technology. They led to the development of new textual genres and new reading practices. The traditional readers had access to a limited and closed corpus of books, which were read and reread, memorized and recited, possessed and transmitted from one generation to another. This reading style was framed by the religious relationship with sacred texts and it was profoundly imbued with sacrality and authority. The new readers devoured a large number and a wide variety of ephemeral print materials. They read rapidly and avidly, subjecting what they read to an immediate critical judgment. A communal and respectful relation to written matter made of reverence and obedience gave way to a more detached and irreverent sort of reading.

   Nonetheless, such an opposition has not to be exaggerated. During the Renaissance, the humanist readers practiced a way of reading based on accumulated reading and the commonplace book in which the reader had to copy down quotations he has read and observations he had made or collected under a series of headings which allowed to reuse the informations and examples accumulated for the production of new texts.

   Conversely, the most intensive sort of reading, organized according the more traditional model, developed at the very moment of the revolution in reading. Novels by Richardson, Rousseau or Goethe took hold of its readers, absorbing them into a reading practice similar to the traditional reading of the religious texts. Older reading habits were shifted to a new literary form. The novel was read and reread, memorized, cited and recited. Readers were invaded by the text they read; they inhabited the text, identified with its characters and plot. Their entire sensitivity was engaged in this new sort of intensive reading. Readers (who were often women) were unable to control their emotions and their tears, and often they took up their pens to express their own sentiments or to write to the author as a director of conscience and guide for their live.

   Furthermore, the reading habits of the mot numerous and popular readers were guided during a long time by old ways. For them reading the chapbooks sold by peddlers in England, in France, in Castile, was a difficult task highly reliant on listening and memorization. The repertoire published for the chapmen's stock lent themselves to an appropriation based on recognition (of genres, themes and forms) more than of a discovery of novelty. Such a manner of reading characterized the popular readers at least until the mid-nineteenth century when the development of schools, the increase of literacy rates and a diversification of print production allowed new practices.

5. In the nineteenth century new categories of readers (women, children, workers) were introduced to written print culture and, at the same time, the industrialization of printing production brought new materials and models for reading. Educational disciplines, imposed everywhere, tended to define a sole, controlled and codified norm of legitimate reading, but this norm contrasted strongly with an extreme diversity of habits among various communities of readers, both those long familiar with written culture and newcomers to print. Behind the appearance of a common culture in the nearly universal reading literacy that acculturation to writing, both in and out of the schools, had brought to the more developed regions of Europe after the 1870’s or 1880’s, there lay an extreme diversity in both reading practices and market for print matter. The typology of the various dominant models of the relation to writing that succeeded one from the Middle Ages on (moving from the monastic model of writing to the scholastic model of reading; from the humanist technique of commonplaces to the spiritual and religious reading styles of Reformed Christianity; from traditional reading habits to the revolution in reading of the Enlightenment), gives way in contemporary societies to a large and scattered diversification of practices. With the nineteenth century, the history of reading enters the age of the sociology of differences.
6. In our own time, the electronic transmission of texts had brought another revolution in reading. First, it transforms our notion of context by replacing the physical contiguity among the texts present in the same object (a book, a review, a newspaper) with their distribution in the logical architectures that govern data bases, electronic files and the retrieval systems that make it possible to access information. It also redefines the ´materialª nature of works by suppressing the immediate and visible relation that exists between the print (or manuscript) object and the texts or texts it bears.

   The new relationship to the texts obliges to a profound reorganization of the ´economy of writingª. By making the production, transmission and reading of a given text simultaneous, and by uniting in one individual the tasks, until now distinct, of writing, publishing, and distributing, the electronic representation of texts annuls the old distinctions between intellectual roles and social functions. At the same time it makes imperative to redefine all the categories that organized readers’ expectations and perceptions. These include the juridical concepts (copyright, literary property), aesthetic categories (originality, integrity, stability), administrative notions (national library, legal deposit), and bibliographic instruments (classification, cataloguing, description) which have been used until now for characterizing the written word. All were invented for a completely different mode of production, preservation, and communication of writing.

   The world of electronic texts also removes the strict limitation imposed on reader's ability to intervene in the book. The print object imposed its form, structure and spaces on the reader, and no material physical participation on the reader's part was supposed. If the reader nonetheless wanted to inscribe his or her presence in the object, he could only do so surreptitiously by occupying with his or her handwriting the margins or the blank pages. All this changes with the electronic text. Not only can readers subject texts to a number of operations (they can index them, shift them from one place to another, dismantle or recompose them), they can become co-authors. The distinction between writing and reading, between the author of the text and the reader of the book, which is immediately discernible in the print culture, now gives way to a new reality: the reader becomes one of the possible authors of a multi-author text, or, at least, the creator of new texts composed by fragments displaced from other texts. Readers of the electronic age can construct original texts whose existence, organization and appearance depend only on themselves. Moreover, they have the power to intervene at any moment to modify a text and rewrite it. All this profoundly change the entire relationship with the written culture as does the possibility to receive on the same object - the computer - texts, images, and sounds.

   The result is thus an ambiguous status given to the self since, on the one hand, the individual acquired a power over texts unknown in all the previous forms of the representation and reproduction of the written word (the roll, the manuscript, the printed book) and, on the other hand, his or her sovereignty as ´authorª is erased by the mobility and malleability of electronic textuality which, according to the Foucaultian dream or desire, allows the engendering of discourses without the necessity to assign them to a fixed and stable identity.

   Such a change in the physical support for writing forces the reader to perform new gestures and learn new intellectual practices. The move of texts from the printed book to the screen of the computer is just as great a change as their move from the roll to the codex during the first centuries of the Christian era. It challenges the entire order of books familiar to the readers and dictates new ways of reading that overcome the traditional limitations imposed by the printed objects.

   Electronic textuality have abolished another constraint for the first time in history. Since Antiquity Western Europeans (and others) have been haunted by the contrast between the dream of a universal library that would bring together all the texts ever written and all the books ever published, on the one hand, and, on the other, real libraries, which, no matter how important were their collections, gave only a partial, incomplete and mutilated image of universal knowledge. The library of Alexandria has furnished the West with the mythical and emblematic example of this ardently desired exhaustiveness. Since the electronic techniques annuls the distinction, until now imperative, between the place of the text and the place of the reader, it make the ancient dream thinkable. The text in its electronic representation, detached from traditional materiality and localization, can (in theory) reach any reader anywhere. If we could suppose that all existing texts, manuscript or printed, were converted into electronic form, universal access to the entire patrimony of writing would become possible. ´When it was proclaimed the library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happinessª: the extravagant happiness of which Borges spoke is promised us by the libraries without walls that are undoubtedly in our future.

7. Extravagant happiness - but perhaps not without risk. The transfer of our common written heritage from print to screen would create immeasurable possibilities, but it would also do violence to the texts by separating them from the original medium in which they were published and appropriated. If, in a more or less distant future, the ancient works were communicated only in their new electronic form, there could be an enormous risk of losing the intelligibility of a textual culture which was for a very long time associated not only to printing but also to a particular form of the book: the codex constituted by folded sheets, leaves and pages. The universe of electronic texts necessarily signifies a distancing from the mental representations and intellectual operations that are specifically tied to this form of the book has taken in the West for seventeenth or eighteenth centuries and which was imposed to other cultures by the colonization and the industrialization of the world. In this sense no ´order of discourseª (according to Foucault's expression) is separable from the ´order of booksª with which it is linked.

   Thus it seems to me that we face today a twofold challenge. On the one hand, the profound transformation that is currently altering all modes of publication, communication and reception of the written word must be accompanied by historical, juridical, and philosophical reflection. The moment has come to reframe all the categories which governed until now the modes of assignation, circulation, and appropriation of texts.

   But we have to face a second requirement. The electronic representation of texts should not in any way imply the relegation, forgetting, or, worse yet, destruction of the objects in which the works of the past or the present were and are originally embodied. More than ever, perhaps, one of the fundamental tasks of the great libraries (whatever their form may be, material or immaterial) is to collect, to protect, to inventory, and, finally, to make accessible the inheritance of the written culture. But this task is not proper to the libraries. Publishers and readers must share it.

   Publishing strategies has always shaped reading practices. They invented new textual genres and new publishing formulas. For example by making inexpensive print products available to a ´popularª buyers (first, the chapbooks; later popular collections and newspapers), they offered the public an increasingly broad and diversified range of reading matter. In this sense, the readers’ freedom to choose could only be exercised within a range of choices that had already been made on the basis of interests or preferences that were not necessarily theirs. Even if such preferences were not all, nor at all times, purely commercial, they were the ones that governed publishing decisions and determined what repertoire of texts would be proposed. Control over reading matter at the source, by publishers’ decision, was a lasting trait of old regime societies. It was less constraining in the age of industrialization of print with the widening of the market. Nonetheless, it remains important in our contemporary times in which the responsibility of the publishers is to find a right balance between the different supports (printed or electronic) they can use for publishing texts. They must both invent new forms of organization and transmission of texts and to maintain (at least for some decades) a written culture that for five centuries has been identified with the circulation of printed matter.

   Within the textual territory made available to them, readers take command of works, give them meaning and invest them with their own expectations. Technical apparatus have never a univocal signification. They can be endowed with different usages and effects. Against any form of technological determinism, we have to recall that the techniques are what producers or users do with them. Such a remark opened the path for all the perspectives that consider cultural consumptions as a form of ´productionª which, to be sure, does not manufacture objects, but which creates uses and representations that are never identical to those that the producers of the cultural artifacts aimed at. Apparently passive and subjected, reading is, in its own way, inventive and creative. A comprehensive history of reading and readers must thus consider the variation, according to time and place, of the conditions of possibility, and of the operations and effects of such an invention and creation. In our world, the readers’ imagination can mobilize simultaneously the different and successive modes of inscription and transmission of the written word we have inherited from the past: manuscript, printing, and electronic communication. It is impossible to know how the readers will combine in the future this plurality of possibilities. We can guess that during a long time these three forms of the written culture will coexist and each one will be preferred according genres and uses. In this sense the new electronic world does not mean the death of printing. But we have also to recall that it is only by preserving the understanding of print culture that we may fully enjoy the ´extravagant happinessª promised by technological innovations.

   Roger Chartier
   Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris)