From the invention of the codex in antiquity to the emergence of the international publishing industry, transformations of the book are intimately entangled with evolutions of modernity—its technologies and its politics. Following the argument of Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press yielded not only a Bible, but also created a “Gutenberg Galaxy”: a “global village” settled by a “typographic” human and connected by media—at first printed books, and then later radio, television, and the Internet. While technological innovations have since rendered certain media obsolete, the book—in its many forms—remains a prominent instrument of global society.
The historical lineage of the book follows a succession of technologies, economic systems, and social processes which coalesced to produce particular types of book. The illuminated manuscript in medieval Western Europe, for instance, was the book in the age of the hand: a precious artifact crafted by skilled artisans for use in a ritual context. Intelligible only to an elite few, and extraordinarily expensive to make, the illuminated manuscript corresponds to a historical world defined by scarcity: a scarcity of literacy, of political participation, of wealth.
Today, the book is a commonplace—an arsenal of modern production technologies has made books cheaper and more widely available than ever before. At the same time, the contemporary significance of the book is not well understood. Although pundits regularly proclaim the imminent “death” of print and the waning of literary culture, in fact, more books are printed and sold now than at any other point in history. Approximately 100 titles were published in 1450; today, more than 100 are published every hour in the U.S. alone. If the illuminated manuscript is a product of the medieval world, what new form of book might correspond to our era of hyper-productivity? Or, to put the question another way, what is the book in the age of globalization?
This seminar investigates historical transformations of the book against the backdrop of technological and social change. The seminar will produce a shared record of findings, and students will undertake experiments to better understand the technical construction and social functions of several book forms.
