History of the Book

The "history of the book" is an odd-sounding phrase, seemingly too nebulous and sweeping to exert interpretive power. The essays brought together in Cultures of Print are, I hope, demonstrations to the contrary. Predicated on the assumption that the better we understand the production and consumption of books, the closer we come to a social history of culture, these essays employ a variety of strategies in giving weight to an otherwise enigmatic phrase. For the most part the setting is colonial America , but because the practices and representations described in these essays originated in early modern Europe , the frame of reference is recurrently transatlantic.

This frame is all the more appropriate because it was European scholarship that set in motion the history of the book. Taking this scholarship as my model, I have also depended on an overlapping body of work that investigates popular culture in the early modern period. The premise behind much of this work is an argument about authority and agency in matters of culture. Acknowledging the authority exerted by the learned, the clergy, a centralizing civil state, or an urban bourgeoisie, historians like Natalie Zemon Davis have nonetheless insisted that ordinary people retained a strong element of agency or independence.

I challenged this assumption in my initial foray into book history, "The World of Print and Collective Mentality in SeventeenthCentury New England", an essay written for a conference held in 1977 to assess the situation of intellectual history, which at that moment seemed irretrievably displaced by a numbers-driven social history. No longer satisfied with the ideas-in-themselves approach that Perry Miller had taken in his magisterial study of the Puritan mind, but wanting to keep ideas as part of the story, I found a temporary way station in the concept of mentalite and longer-lasting possibilities in the thenemerging study of popular religion and the history of the book.

These three realities - the long duration of vernacular Protestantism, the tension between the local and the metropolitan, and the existence of a middle ground where high and low converge - are made forcefully evident through the history of the book. Seeking out the details of printing and bookselling that would demonstrate these processes, I have found myself in the company of the scholars who edit literary texts, prepare bibliographies, and serve as curators of printed books in research libraries. Early on, like everyone who studies the colonial period of American history, I had depended on Charles Evans's indispensable American Bibliography. That there was more, much more, to the world of bibliography came home to me during a fellowship in 1981-82 at the American Antiquarian Society, the institution that has done the most to promote the systematic study of American imprints. For the first time, I went through the entire run of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America and similar journals. For the first time, mainly in the context of two conferences held at the Society, I sat down with bibliographers to discuss our common interests. Initially there was an edgy tone to those discussions, for the bibliographers, commanding an unrivaled knowledge of the book trades and of books as artifacts, questioned whether those of us acting as prophets of the history of the book were overly facile in generalizing about "print culture," a phrase no bibliographer cared to use.

It is fitting to enlarge upon a comment I made in a note to "Readers and Reading ," that these essays are a payment on the debt I owe to Chartier's wide-ranging scholarship. John Hench has overseen the publication of several of these essays; I thank him for his unstinting care for matters large and small pertaining to the history of the book.