Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture: Books as Media 0367338998, 9780367338992

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Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture

Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture examines the role of the book in the modern world. It considers the book’s deeply intertwined relationships with other media through ownership structures, copyright and adaptation, the constantly shifting roles of authors, publishers and readers in the digital ecosystem and the merging of print and digital technologies in contemporary understandings of the book object. Divided into three parts, the book first introduces students to various theories and methods for understanding print culture, demonstrating how the study of the book has grown out of longstanding academic disciplines. The second part surveys key sectors of the contemporary book world – from independent and alternative publishers to editors, booksellers, readers and libraries – focusing on topical debates. In the final part, digital technologies take centre stage as eBook regimes and mass-digitisation projects are examined for what they reveal about information power and access in the twenty-first century. This book provides a fascinating and informative introduction for students of all levels in publishing studies, book history, literature and English, media, communication and cultural studies, cultural sociology, librarianship and archival studies and digital humanities. Simone Murray is Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is the author of three previous books, including The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation (2012).

Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture Books as Media Simone Murray

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Simone Murray The right of Simone Murray to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-33901-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-33899-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32274-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For the many students who took my unit ‘Print Cultures: Books as Media’ over the course of a decade, and especially for the one who suggested that, if an appropriate textbook didn’t exist, I should write one.

Contents

List of figures

ix

Introduction: what is ‘print culture’?

1

PART I

Theories and methodologies for understanding print

15

1 Medium theory

17

2 Book history

34

3 Political economy

52

4 Cultural policy

70

PART II

Socio-cultural dimensions of books 5 Independent and alternative publishing

89

91

6 Editing

108

7 Adaptation: books beyond their covers

126

8 Book retailing

143

9 Cultures of reading

162

10 Libraries and archives

181

viii Contents PART III

Book futures

199

11 Digital books

201

12 The dream of a universal library: digitising knowledge

220

Index

238

Figures

I.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 7.3 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

‘Platform 9¾’, King’s Cross Station, London Gerard Dou, Old Woman Reading Modern Book Printing, ‘Germany: Land of Ideas’ installation The Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics: Paper, represented by the scroll A later part of the Opening Ceremony showcased China’s historical claim to have invented moveable-type printing Leslie Howsam’s triangular diagram of book history Digital Publishing ‘Communications Circuit’ Title from Oldcastle Books’ Pulp! the Classics series Karl Marx’s ‘base and superstructure’ model Mark McGurl’s ‘Institutional Environments of Contemporary US Fiction’ diagram Word factory cartoon The world’s ‘Top 10 most literate countries’ ‘Australia’s top 100 books’ UNESCO’s World Book and Copyright Day Haymarket Books Melbourne’s Sticky Institute Zine Fair Raymond Carver’s Beginners Colin Firth and Jude Law in Genius Spoof covers of H.G. Wells’s classic science fiction Sydney Writers’ Festival poster ‘Said I Read You but I Lied’ Audible ad Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail The online world meets bricks-and-mortar retailing at the Amazon Books store Bookstore browsers are encouraged to scan a title’s shelf-talker barcode It is then a mere step for shoppers to use their smartphone similarly in other retail outlets

7 23 25 29 29 39 42 45 54 57 60 74 79 81 95 102 110 113 127 129 135 147 153 154 155

x

List of figures

9.1 9.2 9.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4

Agostino Ramelli’s Book Wheel Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Book Club Analogue versus digital reading La Trobe Reading Room, State Library Victoria Nazi book burnings recreated in The Book Thief Aftermath of ISIS’s attack on the University of Mosul’s library Paper Passion Perfume by Steild and Wallpaper* eBook reader designs between 1990 and 2013 The LetterMPress™ iPad app Rachel Weisz in Agora The Authors Guild Bulletin’s take on Google Books The Great Library of Alexandria, Assassin’s Creed: Origins Scanner’s hand, ‘The Art of Google Books’

165 171 173 185 188 193 204 209 210 222 227 232 233

Introduction What is ‘print culture’?

At the outset of a book called Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture it seems logical to ask: what exactly is this entity called ‘print culture’? Certainly, it is not just the study of printing, which would be a far more limited and technical concern. A response to the question might be that it is the study of the book – immediately inviting the follow-up query: which book? The answer ‘all books’ hardly seems to clarify matters. After all, isn’t every academic discipline concerned with studying books sooner or later? Why otherwise would the coats of arms of universities worldwide so commonly feature books? Easing into a more Socratic rhythm, an interlocutor might insist that print culture studies is the study of books in their own right, beyond their textual content. But again, many disciplines already approach books with an eye to the nature of the communications medium itself, for example, literary studies, history, bibliography and librarianship. The answer, finally, is that print culture studies overlaps with all of these sectors, but with a unique spin: it is interested in the medium of the book (or print media broadly including newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and ephemera) and its impacts on society, economics, politics and culture. Books are never simply viewed as objects in and of themselves, but are positioned within dynamic networks. Books thus effect changes upon these broader social landscapes (through the ideas they contain, the uses they fa­ cilitate, the communities of readers they attract) but the external world re­ ciprocally leaves its marks upon the books themselves (the publisher’s logo stamped on the spine, the author’s signature inscribed on the title page, the library barcode and microchip embedded in the book copy, and the readers’ comments scribbled in the margins). Jonathan Rose, an important figure in the formulation of book history as an academic discipline, neatly encapsulates print culture studies’ view of the book as an irreducibly social object in the epi­ grammatic phrase ‘Books make history, and history makes books’ (2003: 11). Rose writes as an historian and his definition was in fact supplied for the discipline called ‘book history’. But this volume uses the alternative term ‘print culture’ in its title strategically to mark out differences between the study of this subject and ‘book history’ as the latter has consolidated institutionally over recent decades. The difference is partly one of chronology and partly one of technology. The distinction between the two terms becomes clearer in

2

Introduction

examining some well-known definitions of ‘book history’ for what they omit or indirectly occlude. Robert Darnton, a cultural historian of the French Revolution and book history’s founding figure (at least by citation count), defines the discipline as ‘the social and cultural history of communication by print’ (1990 [1982]: 107). But immediately the retrospective mindset in­ troduced by the word ‘history’ works to exclude contemporary developments. Indeed, until recent years, book history was averse to examining bookish phenomena from even the second half of the twentieth century, as though some decades’ distance were required to render them suitable for academic study. This, perversely, would leave the study of the book silent about the epochal developments of the 1990s, such as the mainstreaming of the internet and the digital information revolution that has since transpired. With books still evidently a vibrant part of the twenty-first-century information landscape, why should our academic models bracket off contemporary developments? We might then try on alternative definitions for size. Joan Shelley Rubin, also a cultural historian, defines print culture as ‘the nexus of practices creating and sustaining the ideological, psychological, political, and economic power of the printed word for a given social group’ (2003: 562). This is preferable for the way it locates print within an atemporal and highly dynamic web of re­ lationships, as well as its acknowledgement that the effects of print might well be variable across population groups. But the drawback of Rubin’s definition is less chronological than technological: by insisting on the specific affordances of print communication, it obscures the deep enmeshment of print with other media, whether film, radio, television or the internet. As this book emphasises throughout, but especially in its final part, it is impossible to understand the role of books in the contemporary world without attention to the deeply intertwined relationships between books and other media, and the legal, commercial and consumptive practices that sustain these. As that suggests, this book is specifically focused on the late twentieth century and early decades of the twenty-first century – the period book historians have tended to shy away from though they themselves are living through it. Therefore, in lieu of a hard-and-fast definition, a provisional definition of ‘print culture studies’ might be that it is the study of the book’s role in the contemporary world, in all its variety. Perhaps by the end of this book you will come up with your own working definition. Regardless, all definitions should keep sight of the fact that the nature and role of the book are constantly in flux, and any attempt at definition needs to counterbalance analytical precision with sufficient ca­ paciousness to respond to current (and future) developments.

Print culture studies’ relationship to literary studies and media/communication studies The two broad directions from which most students of print culture approach the discipline are literary studies, on one hand, and media, communication and cultural studies, on the other. It is worth taking a moment to reflect on how

What is ‘print culture’?

3

the unit for which this book has been set is structured into your degree, and the previous studies you have undertaken that have led to this point. But print culture studies, while a logical outgrowth of both these disciplines, also dis­ rupts some of their fundamental assumptions. It might more properly be positioned in the overlapping section of a Venn diagram encompassing both these disciplines. Literary studies has long been, par excellence, the academic discipline most concerned with books, in this case usually understood as creative writing in the genres of fiction, poetry and (to a lesser extent) drama. But literary studies has been almost exclusively concerned with the content of books – usually the older the better – because its founding premise was to evaluate writing’s aesthetic merit. Its chief methodology in doing so has been, since the discipline’s late nineteenth-century institutionalisation, detailed textual analysis (a.k.a. ‘close reading’). Print culture studies, with its focus on the economic, legal, political and institutional dimensions of book culture – such as publishers, retailers, copyright, censorship, diffusion of ideas and their codification as ‘truth’ – has involved a change of scale so radical as to induce whiplash in most literary scholars. As yet, such concerns appear either too grubbily commercial (if historical) or too messily contemporary to have been properly weighed for significance. By always pointing outwards from the text to an encompassing social and material reality, print culture studies has seemed to many literary scholars some foreign species of cultural sociology, threa­ tening to instrumentalise the study of literary works. The ‘taint’ of cultural sociology is of no concern to media, communications and cultural studies, as the discipline (at least in its UK origins) grew out of a sociological conception of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ that was explicitly anti-aesthetic in its aims and objects of analysis (Williams, 1966 [1958]: 16). But communications’ avid embrace of screen and later digital media has created its own problems as a potential institutional home for studies of print culture. Analyses of the book have been seen as too resiliently literary – precisely the former academic overloads from which cultural studies sought to escape. Supersessionist views of media formats such as those propounded by Marshall McLuhan, a founding figure of media studies, created an impression of print as an eclipsed medium, an antiquated curtain-raiser for the headline act of broadcasting and now digital media. As the chapters on political economy and adaptation in this volume explore, however, book publishers are in fact crucial in supplying global media conglomerates with franchise-sustaining content. Nevertheless, such misperceptions have sometimes made media and cultural studies programmes uncongenial environments for print culture scholarship.

The text/object distinction To drill down into precisely why various disciplines with an interest in books have focused selectively on only certain aspects of the book entity, it is useful to unpack a key distinction between ‘text’ and ‘object’. All books (whether in

4

Introduction

the familiar printed codex form, medieval manuscripts or eBooks) encompass the dual dimensions of text (i.e. the words that are perceptible by readers) and object (i.e. the three-dimensional thing that can be bought, sold, archived or burnt). Literary studies, as outlined, has been almost exclusively concerned with the former, typically deeming talk of a book’s publication history (be­ yond matters of authorial biography), cover designs or readerly reception intellectually out of bounds. By contrast, the adjacent discipline of biblio­ graphy and rare books studies has been almost exclusively concerned with the book as ‘object’: the number of copies printed in each edition; the value of a first edition; its historical provenance. The textual specifics of the work have often appeared, to many branches of bibliography studies, almost incidental. For students of print culture, by contrast, the fascination lies precisely in the interplay between the book’s textual and material dimensions, especially where these exist in tension. To illustrate how such an orientation might play out in practice, it is worth mentioning the path-breaking (proto-)book historian D.F. McKenzie, who was among the first to challenge the more empiricist and historicist branches of bibliography studies with his recasting of the discipline as ‘the sociology of texts’ (1986). This newly expanded discipline should, he asserted, be interested in all aspects of written communication – from stone inscriptions to digital discs. To illustrate his contention that ‘every book tells a story quite apart from that recounted by its text’, McKenzie writes that he used to start his Oxford University bibliography tutorials by asking students to interpret a blank book (1993: 8, 3–7). These predominantly literary-trained students were initially confounded by the impossibility of analysing a book devoid of legible marks. But McKenzie’s point was that the format, weight, paper type, construction and sheer endurance of such a sample book revealed much about particular societies’ attitudes to literacy, genre and readership. It was indeed possible to ‘read’ a blank book by looking beyond the textual level. If such a blank tome were interpretable, how much richer a site of analysis might be a book with actual text, if only its material, economic, political, legal, social and cultural dimensions were factored in.

Harry Potter case-study Let us bring McKenzie’s potentially arcane teaching experiment into the present day by performing a print culture analysis of the best-selling book series in history: J.K. Rowling’s seven Harry Potter books. To do so, we will examine firstly what literary studies approaches to these texts commonly focus upon, then the quite distinct elements that are grist to the mill of biblio­ graphers. Finally, we will examine these disciplines’ point of overlap and elucidate the many rich areas of analysis available to interdisciplinary print culture research. For the traditionally trained literary studies student, the elements of the Harry Potter books that most invite discussion are, as mentioned above,

What is ‘print culture’?

5

exclusively textual (assuming that the books are not so recently published, pop-cultural and juvenile in their appeal to have been declared intellectually beyond the pale). Scholars of children’s literature have written much about the narrative dimensions of Harry Potter: the works’ indebtedness to pioneering fantasy authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; the maturation of both the characters and plot complexity across the series; the recurrent symbolism in the story; and the books’ thematic preoccupation with the nature of evil, good­ ness, bravery, loyalty, grief and endurance. For feminist critics, the character of Hermione Granger has been analysed as a positive role-model of female intellectualism, while post-colonial critics have been interested in the racial debates raised by the books’ concepts of mixed-race Muggle/magical ‘mudbloods’. Literary critics trained in class-based approaches to literature have been less kind to the works, seeing in their Hogwarts setting a revival of the British boarding-school story, idealising institutions that remain, in reality, limited to those with great economic privilege. Despite the various points of conflict between these lines of analysis, note that they all draw their evidence for interpretation exclusively from the text itself. Even where they make arguments based on cultural politics (whether feminist, post-colonial or Marxist) they do so in relation to a politics of textual representation, rarely by associating the books with real-world political developments (such as attempts to ban the series in certain US school districts on the grounds of ‘satanic’ content). By contrast, a bibliographical analysis of Harry Potter would eschew textual specifics to focus on the books (or more properly individual copies of each title) in minute detail. For example, bibliographers would, and in fact have, produced guides to the market value of first editions of the first novel in the series, the extra value afforded by J.K. Rowling’s signature or handwritten dedication to a friend, and the comparative rarity of various print runs or spin-off publications (Errington, 2017 [2013]).1 For the bibliographer, the actual contents of the book – its plot, characterisation, thematic preoccupations and the like – are subordinate to the concrete object of a particular copy and its worth to individual collectors or institutions. Let us turn then to a print culture study of Harry Potter and examine the many rich seams of analysis afforded by the discipline’s conception of the book as both text and object – one that is always embedded in fluid social, cultural, political and economic networks. Such a print culture analysis might choose to focus on Rowling’s publishing history – the Cinderella myth that has grown up around the writing of her first book in various Edinburgh coffee shops (now featured in walking tours) while a struggling single mother, or the fabled lunch with agent Christopher Little at which he informed her of his modest sales expectations for the book. It might also take in the significance of her UK publisher Bloomsbury as one of a small and dwindling number of independent publishers, the sale of the US rights to the multinational, US-based children’s publisher Scholastic, and why this necessitated changing the first book’s title from Philosopher’s Stone to the less highfalutin, non-child-alienating Sorcerer’s Stone. For that matter, it would

6

Introduction

investigate the gender politics of children’s publishing that saw Bloomsbury advise Rowling to publish under her initials rather than her given name, Joanne, for fear of alienating male readers. Or it might examine both UK and US publishers’ later decision to rejacket the books in adult-friendly covers in order to capitalise on the books’ unanticipated crossover market success. Because print culture studies, like book history, has always been interested in the full life cycle of the book, scholars adopting such a perspective would be fascinated by the role that UK book prizes played in boosting the first book’s profile, especially amongst school librarians and teachers. However, these official gatekeepers were not the only forces responsible for turning the books into a global phenomenon: from early on, enthusiastic child readers connected on the internet to discuss the subject of their bookish passion and thereby stoked ever-larger mainstream markets for the titles. From that point, the typically solitary activity of book reading became increasingly social, with public signings by the now-celebrity Rowling, midnight launch parties in bookshops for the later titles in the series and even a Platform 9¾ photo op­ portunity (and now shop) sanctioned by civic authorities at London’s King’s Cross train station (see Figure I.1). As the unprecedented phenomenon of Harry Potter mania extended across the Atlantic and, later, the world through territorial and translation rights deals, the legal and economic dimensions of the book trade come sharply into focus. The first wave of the books’ success coincided with the early years of online retailer Amazon, but the bookseller’s jurisdiction-defying internet location created new problems of copyright policing, breach of publication embargoes and under­ cutting of bricks-and-mortar retailers. The successful film adaptations of the books by Warner Brothers from 2001 onwards put questions of intellectual property front and centre, as the new owner of the film rights deployed ceaseand-desist notices backed by trademark law in an attempt to corral fans into purely consumptive modes of behaviour. Such corporate manoeuvres in turn spurred a vocal fan backlash and public boycott that was damaging to the media company’s brand and public reception of its forthcoming film franchise. Likewise, fundamentalist Christians in southern US states denounced the books for promoting black magic and staged public book burnings, thus metaphorically igniting retaliatory ‘freedom to read’ campaigns by anti-censorship librarians and civil liberties groups. We might also add Rowling’s use of her new-found fame to support child literacy programmes, her prosecution of commercially offered works infringing her copyright and her simultaneous support for the flood of unofficial fanfiction that grew up around the series. Print culture scholars in­ terested in the Potter books as a lens through which to view technological and commercial developments since the late twentieth century would note how the exclusion of the eBook rights from Rowling’s original contract with Bloomsbury allowed her to retail them globally later via her own Pottermore web-portal. They might also note how Rowling’s subsequent public career has played out through self-named and pseudonymous cross-genre publications as well as a second sequence of spinoff films, not to mention Harry’s own afterlives, as in the blockbuster two-part stage-play sequel to the book series, studio tours

What is ‘print culture’?

7

Figure I.1 Life imitates art: London’s King’s Cross Station now features not only a ‘Platform 9¾’ installation of a baggage cart and owl cage disappearing into the wall (positively inviting fannish selfies) but also one of a chain of Harry Potter-themed stores, now set to expand transatlantically. (Nelo Hotsuma from Rockwall CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

8

Introduction

and a new flagship store in New York City (Frankel, 2019; Meikle, 2019; Smith, 2020). The range of material that is grist for print culture studies’ intellectual mill could be extended ad infinitum, but I trust the point has been made. Print culture scholars are interested in the whole production, dissemination and consumption history of a work, constantly interrelating the text of a given book, its object status and the encompassing social, economic, legal, intellectual and cultural channels through which it moves. Watching Rowling’s writerly cameo in the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, we might indeed conclude that Harry Potter has made history, and history has made Harry Potter.

Key issues in print culture studies Having established a working definition of print culture studies, outlined some of its inheritances and differences from adjacent disciplines, and explored an example of how print culture analysis might work in practice, we can summarise by distilling some fundamental principles of print culture research. Status of the book medium

Pre-eminently, print culture studies is concerned with rescuing the book medium from invisibility on the grounds of its very familiarity. Because the book has been the default medium of information exchange for hundreds of years, predating the development of modern political and economic institutions, we have a tendency to look through it rather than at it (exemplified by literary studies’ habitual reduction of books to pure ‘text’). Print culture scholars aim to bring the materiality of books back into discussion, pointing out that the sacred connotations books carry in the many religions based on scriptural authority have had a spillover effect on books generally. The discipline is interested in how the special reverence for the book form as talisman of truth and learning permeates books of all genres to a greater or lesser degree, and even pervades books that have been transformed into household or wearable objects (to the outraged consternation of some; see Rodger, 2018). The creative practice of artists’ books explores such associations by devising bookish objects that variously play with or disrupt our expectations of what a book should do (open, display information, remain pristine, singular and static). Materialisation/dematerialisation of book culture

Registering the material substrates of written culture is a necessary first step, but print culture researchers further ask what are the social, intellectual and even cognitive implications of the book medium as an information architecture? In short, what difference does it make to read information in printed form, rather than receive it via another medium (such as face-to-face

What is ‘print culture’?

9

communication, live performance, broadcast or online)? Print communication has been crucial in facilitating the development of human individuality because of the psychological interiority that reading permits each reader (see Chapter 1). Conversely, when these individualised readers consume the same printed product at roughly the same time, they come to consider themselves part of an ‘imagined community’ that is larger and more geographically dispersed than could be sustained by face-to-face contact alone (as the activities of the global Harry Potter fan community outlined above substantiate; see Anderson, 1991 [1983]). While such cognitive developments have been foundational for contemporary ideas of human selfhood, the very linearity of print communication – the remorseless visuality of running one’s eyes across sequential lines of text – has led us to conceptualise even such abstract phenomena as an individual lifespan, national history or human progress in similarly linear fashion. As digital book develop­ ments merge the traditional codex book with computer networks, how is this linearity challenged by increasingly decentralised information architectures, multimodal communication and pervasive interactivity? Changes to the book’s life cycle

Print culture studies is not concerned exclusively with such grandly abstract phenomena. In keeping with its wide-angle view of book culture, the discipline is just as interested in the commercial specifics of how the contemporary book industry actually functions on a day-to-day basis. It investigates how changes in technology and book industry structures affect the life cycle of books from author through agent, editor, publisher, retailer, librarian to reader. Do such earlier models of a linear communication circuit still reflect reality in pervasively digitised book industry settings (see Chapter 2)? How are traditional divisions between production, distribution and consumption eroding or collapsing as twenty-firstcentury technologies allow various agents to bypass former gatekeepers or act in multiple roles at the same time (see Chapter 11)? If these changes signal a democratisation of book culture by permitting access to more diverse content by greater numbers of people, why do the commercial underpinnings of con­ temporary book culture evince ever-greater concentration of power? Potential book futures

As the above tenets suggest, print culture studies is fundamentally concerned with understanding the contemporary world so that it can forecast and help shape the future of the book. In this, it demonstrates a fundamentally different chronological outlook from its cognate discipline book history, which has always been more comfortable with a backwards glance at book cultures of the distant past. While the ‘death of the book’ debates of the 1990s, with their dire predictions of imminent apocalypse, have since been disproven by the book’s resilience, the modern world’s ubiquitous digitisation forces us to ask in what ways will future generations encounter books? As importantly, though less

10 Introduction

often publicly acknowledged, is the issue of how what we know of the printed past depends upon contemporary book industry developments (such as mass book-digitisation projects that seek to scan and privately data-house the world’s printed record). Who ultimately owns the contents of books, and by extension controls access to the world’s collective past (see Chapter 12)? In this sense, the book’s long history and its future are intimately interrelated, requiring students of print culture to gain a thorough understanding of the book’s development as a medium, as well as its contemporary manifestations, before attempting to predict its potential futures.

Structure of this book Mindful of this need to survey the book’s past and present in the interests of forecasting its possible futures, the current volume adopts a three-part structure. Part I, ‘Theories and methodologies for understanding print’, introduces four key theoretical approaches frequently invoked in studies of the book industry, both now and in earlier periods: medium theory; book history; political economy; and cultural policy. The disciplines from which these theoretical frameworks derive are, respectively, media studies, cultural history, economics and politics. While there are significant areas of overlap among some of these approaches (such as between medium theory and book history), others exist in a complementary relationship (for example, cultural policy positions itself as a remedy for the excesses of the free market diagnosed by political economy critiques). You will notice that each of these chapters introduces, explores and applies its focus theory before closing with some criticism of that theory’s lim­ itations or blind-spots. The intention is not to pull the rug from under the reader’s feet and invalidate the earlier discussion. Rather, the aim is to emphasise that none of these theoretical perspectives should be viewed as orthodoxy. Each tends to privilege certain forms of evidence and discount others, often by as­ suming certain research methodologies are universal, which they never are. The various theories are juxtaposed to highlight that any theoretical approach is a lens through which we examine phenomena, with some aspects magnified and others minimised. Such selectivity is inevitable; the skill lies in choosing the optimal theoretical frame(s) and rationalising one’s choice. Evidently, Part I is the most abstract and theoretical section of this book, but don’t be daunted by this; rather, see it as a toolbox, laying out a selection of models and approaches from which you, as a neophyte print culture scholar, may pick and mix. In Part II, ‘Socio-cultural dimensions of books’, the discussion shifts from the theoretical and sometimes historical to the practical and avowedly contemporary. The chapters in this section are loosely structured after the life cycle of the book – from authorial creation through editing, publishing, retailing, reading and ar­ chiving to adaptation (though actual consumers come to books from many dif­ ferent directions). Contemporary and industry-focused as it is, this section still poses broader social, cultural, economic and political questions because, within a print culture mindset, these elements are inevitably interwoven.

What is ‘print culture’?

11

Each chapter in Part II necessarily touches upon the impact of digital technologies as digitisation has affected every sector of the book trade. But it is in Part III, ‘Book futures’, that digital technologies and the debates specific to the current era move front and centre. The two chapters in this section canvass both evolving eBook technologies as well as initiatives to scan and collate bookish content into massive online databases (such as Google Books). Together, they resist any simplistically successionist view of media transitions and instead explore how books are both challenged and boosted by digital media. Relationships between old and new media formats are often unexpectedly complementary. The final chapter, on the dream of a universal library, casts back into deep human history to explore the resilience of this desire to collect all of human memory in one place and consequently provides a useful summary of the book’s key themes. Regardless of the intellectual background from which you approach print culture studies, or the purposes to which you intend to put your newfound knowledge, critical study of the contemporary book world has much to offer. Rather than looking through the book object to access its contents, you will begin to see the book as a medium in its own right. While it might seem a self-sufficient entity, it is in fact alive with links to larger economic, legal, intellectual, social and cultural contexts. This holds true whether its format is reassuringly print-based or wildly hypertextual.

Learning exercise Perform your own print culture analysis of a chosen book, fiction or nonfiction, from any period and in any language. Remember, unlike standard literary studies analysis, you should focus not on the text of the book, but its context. Pay attention to the processes of production, circulation and consumption that formed the book: which agents produced it; how did it move (or fail to move) through its host society and further afield; what did readers do with it (perhaps against the author’s wishes)? Hint: controversial books often make especially rich case-studies. Try searching for industry background on your chosen title or author in digitised book-trade magazines such as Publishers Weekly (US), The Bookseller (UK), Quill & Quire (Canada) and Books+Publishing (Australia) or via the global newspaper database Factiva.

Note 1 In March 2019, a rare first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that formerly belonged to Rowling’s literary agent was sold at a London auction house for the equivalent of nearly US$100,000 (Ramirez, 2019). Later the same year, a first edition without such provenance sold for US$57,000 (Ahmed, 2019).

12 Introduction

Online resources • •

•

The State Library Victoria in Melbourne has produced a fascinating short video introduction to artists’ books held in its collection with History of the Book manager Des Cowley: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG0M5tldDvA. Social media networks Pinterest and Instagram are rife with pictures of books that have been creatively transformed into household objects, retail displays, jewellery and even clothes: www.pinterest.com; www.instagram.com. In 2009 the New Zealand Book Council produced a virtuosic animation of Maurice Gee’s novel Going West (1992) that revels in the materiality of the book form: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_jyXJTlrH0. It was such a viral success that it inspired a similarly styled video announcing the 2011 launch of J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore web-portal: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=r8UaAK3WkrY.

References and further reading Ahmed, Tufayel. (2019) ‘ “Harry Potter” First Edition Book Sells for $57,000.’ Newsweek 11 Oct. www.newsweek.com/harry-potter-philosophers-stone-first-edition-sells-570001464562. Anderson, Benedict. (1991 [1983]) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. edn. London: Verso. Boswell, Daniel. (2017) ‘What We Write about when We Write about Publishing.’ Interscript. www.interscriptjournal.com/online-magazine/what-we-write-about-whenwe-write-about-publishing. Darnton, Robert. (1990 [1982]) ‘What Is the History of Books?’ The Kiss of Lamourette. London: Faber. 107–35. Errington, Philip W. (2017 [2013]) J.K. Rowling: A Bibliography. Rev. edn. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Flanagan, Richard. (2007) ‘Colonies of the Mind; Republics of Dreams: Australian Publishing Past and Future.’ Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 132–48. Frankel, Valerie Estelle, ed. (2019) Fan Phenomena: Harry Potter. Bristol: Intellect. Henningsgaard, Per. (2008) ‘The Teaching of “Book History” in English and Cultural Studies Units.’ Preparing for the Graduate of 2015: Proceedings of the 17th Annual Teaching and Learning Forum, 30–31 January 2008. Perth: Curtin University of Technology. http://lsn.curtin.edu.au/tlf/tlf2008/refereed/henningsgaard.html. Kovač, Miha. (2008) ‘Reading the Texts on Book Publishing: A New Body of Knowledge about an Old Body of Knowledge.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 23.4: 241–53. Marsden, Stevie. (2017) ‘Positioning Publishing Studies in the Cultural Economy.’ Interscript. www.interscriptjournal.com/online-magazine/positioning-publishing-studiesin-the-cultural-economy. McKenzie, D.F. (1986) Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library. McKenzie, D.F. (1993) ‘What’s Past Is Prologue’: The Bibliographical Society and History of the Book. London: Hearthstone Publications.

What is ‘print culture’?

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Meikle, Kyle. (2019) Adaptations in the Franchise Era: 2001–16. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Miller, L.J. (2001) ‘Publishing as Medium.’ International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences. Ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes. Amsterdam: Pergamon. 12599–603. Murray, Simone. (2002) ‘Harry Potter, Inc.: Content Recycling for Corporate Synergy.’ M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture ‘Loop’ issue, 5.4. www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/ recycling.html. Murray, Simone. (2007) ‘Publishing Studies: Critically Mapping Research in Search of a Discipline.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 22.4: 3–25. Murray, Simone. (2016) ‘Literary Studies.’ International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy. Ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Robert T. Craig, Jeff Pooley and Eric Rothenbuhler. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect184. Noorda, Rachel and Stevie Marsden. (2019) ‘Twenty-first Century Book Studies: The State of the Discipline.’ Book History 22: 370–97. Ramirez, Hector. (2019) ‘Rare “Harry Potter” Book Sold for Nearly $100,000.’ WTNH.com 1 Apr. www.wtnh.com/news/international/rare-harry-potter-book-soldfor-nearly-100-000/1891749416. Reed, Marcia and Glenn Phillips. (2018) Artists and Their Books/Books and Their Artists. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Rodger, Nicola. (2018) ‘From Book to Bookish: Repurposing the Book in the Digital Era.’ Communication +1 7.1 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol7/iss1. Rose, Jonathan. (2003) ‘The Horizon of a New Discipline: Inventing Book Studies.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 19.1: 11–19. Rubin, Joan Shelley. (2003) ‘What Is the History of the History of Books?’ Journal of American History 90.2: 555–75. Smith, Sandy. (2020) ‘Harry Potter Flagship Store Set to Open this Summer in NYC.’ National Retail Federation 11 Feb. https://nrf.com/blog/harry-potter-flagship-store-setopen-summer-nyc. Stepanova, Marsha. (2007) ‘Disciplinary Duality: The Contested Terrain of Book Studies.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 23.2: 105–15. ‘The Harry Potter Franchise.’ (2010) In Media Res 15–19 Nov. http://mediacommons.org/ imr/theme-week/2010/33/harry-potter-franchise-november-15-19-2010. Williams, Raymond. (1966 [1958]) Culture and Society 1780–1950. London: Penguin.

Part I

Theories and methodologies for understanding print

1

Medium theory

As outlined in this book’s Introduction, Part I of the volume sets out four common theoretical approaches to understanding the contemporary book world: medium theory; book history; political economy; and cultural policy. In any field of study (at least in the humanities and social sciences, which print culture studies straddles) adopting a theoretical position is inevitable. Good academic work is self-conscious about its theoretical choices and justifies these explicitly, whereas inferior academic work proceeds as though there were only one, inevitable theoretical approach that is self-evident to all initiates. The problem with perpetuating such default research practices is that all theoretical perspectives come with inbuilt preoccupations and blind-spots, and the deeper one is socialised into a particular discipline, the harder these taken-for-granted assumptions are to see. The unfortunate upshot is that certain paths of enquiry become heavily trodden while alternative – potentially more revealing – paths are rarely explored. For this reason, Part I of this book juxtaposes several theoretical approaches without privileging any one. In fact, much of the best print culture research combines multiple theoretical approaches to give a 360-degree view of the phenomenon it examines, offsetting the weaknesses implicit in one approach with the insights of another or others. While ‘theory’ in this context means, roughly, a worldview or mental frame of reference, ‘method’ refers more specifically to a process for assessing what counts as evidence to support an academic argument, and a protocol for obtaining and presenting such evidence. In practice, however, theory and method are often deeply intertwined (certain theoretical approaches tend to favour particular quantitative or qualitative methodologies), so I have chosen to label this section ‘Theories and methodologies for understanding print’.

Defining ‘medium theory’ An enterprising (or simply desperate) student’s answer to an exam paper I once set defined medium theory as what lies between ‘big theory’ and ‘little theory’. While novel, their answer was, unfortunately, flat-out wrong. The ‘medium’ in medium theory does not denote size but, rather, the channel or means of communication being used (e.g. oral communication, print, radio, television,

18 Theories and methodologies

the internet or mobile phone). Whereas dominant strands of media theory have long been preoccupied with decoding media texts or analysing their effects on audiences, medium theory draws attention to how the format of commu­ nication deployed possesses inbuilt characteristics (whether affordances or limitations). US media theorist Joshua Meyrowitz defines the term thus: ‘Broadly speaking, medium theorists ask: What are the relatively fixed features of each means of communicating and how do these features make the medium physically, psychologically, and socially different from other media and from face-to-face interaction?’ (1995: 50). As Meyrowitz’s useful tripartite schema makes clear, media technologies not only influence the messages conveyed through them but also drive far-reaching changes in humans’ embodied, mental and cultural relationships. Medium theory as an intellectual preoccupation long predates Meyrowitz’s labelling of it as such (as this chapter will explore) but it has proven a useful umbrella term for grouping together multiple theorists (including Meyrowitz himself) who share a technological, materialist orientation, regardless of the specific medium or media they choose to examine.

What is the medium of ‘the book’? With an understanding of medium theory under our belts we can proceed to examine the specific medium of the book, asking: how might the coming of print have changed humans’ physical, psychological and social behaviours? As it turns out, the book has initiated such changes on a scale so vast it can be difficult comprehend. In fact, the printed book has seeped so deeply into human culture in literate societies for over five centuries that the challenge is to see it as an information technology at all, rather than demoting it to simply the wallpaper of human existence. Experimental creative writer Shelley Jackson, best known as an author of hypertext literature, reminds us of the material reality of books and the comparative recentness of print’s emergence in the history of human communication: ‘The book is not the Natural Form it has become disguised as by its publicists. It is an odd machine for installing text in the reader’s mind and it too was once an object of wonder’ (2003: 251). To understand how changes so momentous came to seem commonplace, it is necessary briefly to trace the historical emergence and development of the book form. At the outset of such a historical survey it is crucial to note that the ‘book’ is not synonymous with ‘print’. In fact, books were in existence in one form or another for roughly a millennium before Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century (and printed texts had been in existence outside of Europe for several centuries before that, as this chapter will explore). The first technology we might understand as a ‘book’ (broadly speaking, rather than as a clay tablet) is the scroll (volumen) of the classical world. Originally made from papyrus (derived from plants), scrolls were later made from less fragile parchment (treated animal skins). As anyone who has

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seen relics of ancient scrolls (such as the famous Dead Sea Scrolls) will readily appreciate, a scroll requires two hands to unroll it while reading and is therefore difficult to annotate or copy. It is also cumbersome to find a specific entry at random. Another technological limitation was that scrolls were too delicate and awkward to stack, causing problems of storage and preservation. This is not to say, however, that the scroll format has been entirely eclipsed, as bar mitzvah ceremonies, university graduations and even (metaphorically) the ‘scroll bar’ on Microsoft Word documents attest. But because of its inherent technological limitations, by around the third or fourth century CE, the scroll gave way to the codex – individual sheets of either vellum (treated calfskins) or later paper, preserved between hard covers and bound on one side. The hand-illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, recognisably books to modern eyes, are thus codices (the plural of codex) without having been printed. This book format persisted, with various modifications, such as the creation of bookmarks, finding aids and size changes, until what Western print culture scholars consider the ‘big bang’ moment: Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in Mainz (in modern-day Germany) around 1455 (White, 2017; Davis, 2019). As Mainz’s Gutenberg Museum takes pains to emphasise, Gutenberg’s innovation was not only to adapt a wine press for the quite distinct purpose of printing books but also to invent movable type (i.e. individual letters of the Latin alphabet cast in metal that were combinable to form words, sentences and paragraphs).1 While many refinements of Gutenberg’s wooden hand press emerged throughout the early modern period, the fundamentals of printing remained largely unchanged until the full industrialisation of printing during the nineteenth century. For a complex weave of geographic, economic and religious reasons, adoption of Gutenberg’s invention was swift throughout Europe. An intriguing interactive website, the Atlas of Early Printing, demonstrates how rapidly printing spread via networks of trade routes, university towns and book fairs by tracking existing incunabula (literally ‘from the cradle’): that is, the earliest-surviving printed books from approximately the first fifty years after the production of Gutenberg’s Bible.2 This is not to say that printing’s adoption was immediate, uniform or uncontested; in fact, scribal and print culture continued to overlap for some centuries (Love, 1993). But its speed, standardisation and comparative cheapness were seized upon by an increas­ ingly literate middle class hungry for access to new ideas. Over the course of subsequent centuries, Gutenberg’s ‘object of wonder’, the printed book, was refined and customised for specific markets. Aldus Manutius, a scholar and printer active in early sixteenth-century Venice, is credited with producing pocket-sized editions of around 1000 copies to create economies of scale and encourage portable reading – a recognisable precursor of the modern mass-market paperback. Increasingly sophisticated technologies for printing illustrations also proliferated, with wood-engraving and later half-tones, lithography and photogravure proliferating between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. These visual media were especially crucial for the

20 Theories and methodologies

efflorescence of educational, scientific and technical publishing; it is hard to conceive of the European Enlightenment, with its mapping and cataloguing of the natural world, without accurate means for communicating visual detail. Nor did printing’s other technological inputs remain static, with paper made by machines on continuous rolls from wood pulp eventually superseding hand-made rag-paper. In terms of human labour, the compositing of type (i.e. selecting the correct letter blocks in the correct order) developed from hand setting to typesetting with the aid of a machine, linotype (mechanical setting) and monotype (a process whereby lead is melted, cast and set as type simultaneously). Steam-powered mechanical presses had, by the nineteenth century, replaced hand presses for all but artisanal publishing, with concomitant increases in the speed and variety of book production. This gallop through the history of the book’s development brings us to the two most significant developments of the twentieth century. The first of these – the paperback revolution – is typically dated to British publisher Allen Lane’s Penguin paperbacks of the mid-1930s, although Lane based his design for a more portable, semi-disposable book on earlier publications by German press Tauchnitz Editions (McCleery, 2007). The paperback culture of the mid- to late twentieth century indisputably led to a democratisation of reading and was crucial in such far-reaching social developments as nearuniversal Western literacy, wider access to higher education and the rise of popular genres such as romance, crime and science fiction/fantasy. The second landmark twentieth-century development – the digital revolution – occurred within the living memory of today’s middle-aged readers. It is impossible to specify a ‘big bang’ moment for this paradigmatic shift in the book world in the way we might neatly point to Gutenberg’s invention. Its more diffuse points of origin include the computer typesetting of books from the 1970s onwards, the 1980s personal computer revolution within publishing companies and the desktop publishing software innovations of the 1990s (Kirschenbaum, 2016). But, in retrospect, the early-1990s invention of user-friendly internet browsers was the tipping point in driving mass adoption of the World Wide Web, with all the implications this has carried for Adobe’s interoperable pdf format, eBook technologies and mass book-scanning projects (see Part III).

Effects of the book medium Taking our cue from Meyrowitz’s itemisation of the physical, psychological and social implications of a given medium, we can explore the effects of printing across a number of interrelated domains. On writing and reading

First, and most self-evidently, the adoption of Gutenberg’s printing press caused an explosion in the number of texts in circulation because of printing’s

Medium theory

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speed and economies of scale compared to hand copying (Eisenstein, 1979). Not only did more copies of the Bible (Gutenberg’s first publication) circulate but so too did a wider variety of textual genres: religious commentaries; official proclamations; political tracts; Protestant broadsides; reprints of classical texts; contemporary translations; almanacs; trade manuals; and, in time, romances and novels. Beyond diversifying the content of texts in circulation, print had important effects on the book format, ushering in the standardisation of fonts (and through this, handwriting), spelling and punctuation (for example, the normalisation of question marks). Indeed, the convention of inserting spaces between words to aid reading was popularised only in the wake of print. Bookish conventions above the level of the line also hardened: the title page; table of contents; chapter divisions; running headers; paragraph breaks; index; and page numbers (Duncan and Smyth, 2019). Colophons (printers’ logos) began to appear on a book’s final pages to identify its originating printer and to advertise their business, with catalogues of other house titles often bound into a volume. From this we see for the first time the transmitter of a text making a corporate appearance in the text. Because the history of the book consistently demonstrates that changes in book production go hand in hand with changes in readerly consumption, it is unsurprising that the post-Gutenberg period also accelerated a shift from reading aloud to silent reading. For example, the original meaning of the university ‘lecture’ was, quite literally a ‘reading’, as limited copies of available books meant the lecturer would read aloud from a precious text while his student auditors made copies via dictation. But with the dramatic upswing in the number and range of texts in circulation, conventions of reading as a public, oratorical display gradually gave way to the normalisation of reading as both a private and solitary activity – to the extent that, by the nineteenth century, moving one’s lips while reading was considered a sign of idiocy. With the greater portability and affordability of books, reading in the home became normalised, with profound implications for the literacy and educational horizons of middle-class women. Reading became possible even in bed – to the consternation of many religious authorities (see Chapter 9). Finally, the increased speed and reduced cost of printed books encouraged within the literate strata of European populations a change in readerly disposition. Simply put, this favoured wider knowledge of more texts. In what is often termed a shift from intensive to extensive reading, the slow deciphering, interpreting and memorising of a single religious text (usually the Bible) many times over gave way to a more free-ranging, omnivorous approach to reading for knowledge-gathering and diversion. This voracious reading habit was the necessary cultural precondition for early modern humanist scholarship and the university culture that thrived with the proliferation of print. Indeed, education more generally shifts in the early modern era from a curatorial task of conserving texts of the classical world to analysing, critiquing and writing new texts.

22 Theories and methodologies On society and culture

The most diffuse of the printed book’s effects are found in the domain of society and culture. As indicated earlier, print culture and its associated mindset have so pervaded Western human history that it becomes difficult to discern the exact implications of the medium – it is simply assumed in any understanding of the modern self. Firstly, the power of print derives from the enabling skill of literacy. Thus literacy, in medieval times the domain of a clerical elite, became more widely socially distributed during the post-Gutenberg era. Literacy connotes social status as a form of communica­ tion not to be taken for granted in all normal adults (as with oral commu­ nication) but as a skill to be acquired over many years. While print drove innovations in modes and access to education by a burgeoning middle class, it remains true that social hierarchy in the early modern period can be calibrated by access to and familiarity with print. Also closely tied to class hierarchies, printed books became individual possessions rather than common property of a religious community such as a monastery or abbey. Royal and aristocratic figures created private libraries as signifiers of their wealth and cultural prestige. In fact, in this period, printed books were sold in unbound sheets on the expectation that the purchaser would have them bound in leather and gilded to match their existing library volumes. Cultural historians such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Robert Darnton have been especially fascinated with how print catalysed changes in people’s self-conception during the early modern and Enlightenment periods (approximately the fifteenth to the eighteenth century). The rise and spread of Protestant Christianity, particularly from Martin Luther onwards, was inextricably intertwined with the expansion of print culture (see Figure 1.1). Because Protestant theology emphasised the centrality of the believer’s direct relationship with God, unmediated by any priest, the Holy Word took new precedence over religious ritual. It stands to reason, then, that literacy was crucial if individuals were to interpret the Bible for themselves. (It helped that Christianity was from its earliest phases a religion premised upon the written text – ‘In the beginning was the Word …’) Eisenstein goes so far as to describe Protestant Christianity as characterised by ‘bibliolatry’ – the worship of books (1979: 67). Related to the rise of Protestant Christianity is the concept of individualism, so foundational to both modern democratic theory and capitalist economics. The idea that one could hold a subjective viewpoint and identity different from those of one’s surrounding social world owes much to the intellectual interiority fostered by print (and particularly to the practice of silent reading). While now a Western truism, this concept of the unique identity and importance of individuals in contradistinction to their place in the social collective has a discernible history. It followed logically that such selfperceiving individuals, empowered by print, should seek a greater say in public affairs. Print culture enabled the creation of a democratic ‘public sphere’

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Figure 1.1 Gerard Dou’s painting Old Woman Reading (c.1631–2; formerly attributed to Rembrandt) captures the extraordinary intensity of reading scripture in a Protestant society characterised by relative book scarcity. The book’s opening shows Chapter 19 of the Gospel of St Luke. (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

(Habermas, 1989 [1962]) in which free citizens could debate issues of common concern in an informed, rational manner (even if this was always an idealised, and in practice highly exclusionary, conception of the public). The public sphere extended beyond mere face-to-face networks via books, newspapers and broadsheets, allowing exchange of ideas with those who may be geographically (or historically) far distant. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular, the sense of an extended, print-enabled community had grown into the concept of the ‘nation’: that is, a sense of belonging to an ‘imagined community’ sharing a common mindset through the ability to read the same text(s) at roughly the same time (Anderson, 1991 [1983]). This was Samuel Johnson’s point when describing eighteenth-century Britain as ‘a nation of readers’; he didn’t mean

24 Theories and methodologies

just that people had started reading in greater numbers, but that the idea of ‘the nation’ itself was made possible through the act of engaging with mass-distributed books and periodicals. To facilitate this process, differences in regional languages and dialects were arbitrarily minimised. Tellingly, in Europe, it was typically the regional dialect of the area(s) that first adopted print technology that rationalised itself as the ‘national’ language (e.g. the form of English spoken in the south-east and university centres of Britain, Hochdeutsch in Germany, Parisian French and the Tuscan dialect in Italy). While this had immense (and still perceptible) negative repercussions for ‘minority’ languages, print had a countervailing positive regionalising effect – the normalisation of communication ‘below’ the trans-European level of scholarly Latin, but ‘above’ that of local vernacular dialects (see Figure 1.2). On human consciousness

Medium theorists’ most ambitious – and contentious – claims relate to the psychological effects of a new medium gaining widespread adoption. As one leading theorist of print, Walter J. Ong, stated, ‘Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness’ (1982: 81). The argument here is that once a new communication technology becomes mainstream, it exerts a gravitational pull on human cognition, causing us to think in new patterns. As will be examined later, such claims are often grand and sweeping in nature as well as, by definition, difficult to prove. The best-known proponent of the psychologically and cognitively transformative effect of print is Canadian literary scholar and media theorist Marshall McLuhan. In works such as The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan proposed the concept of ‘sensory ratio’ – namely, that the increasing dominance of writing and in particular print saw reading’s visuality gradually eclipse the aural sense. Ong, paraphrasing McLuhan, pithily summarised this change as ‘the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space’ (1982: 80). Whether or not we accept this claim (and prominent medium theorists such as Eisenstein have not), it seems indisputable that print changed textual transmission from oral cultures’ reliance on human memory to print culture’s externalised artefact. For Eisenstein, by this means ‘the nature of the collective memory was transformed’ (1979: 66). From Gutenberg’s time onwards, texts became far longer, infinitely more internally complex and relatively fixed in form. On this last point, Eisenstein herself coined the useful phrase ‘typographical fixity’ to denote the privileging of print’s permanence and ‘authority’ over that of evanescent oral communication. Print carried not only greater cultural prestige than the merely verbal report of oral culture but also more legal weight (as consolidating laws of evidence in the early modern period demonstrate). The newly fixed characteristics of printed texts (compared with the mutability of earlier oral and manuscript cultures) produced both winners and losers. Chief among the beneficiaries were writers, whose names were now

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Figure 1.2 Modern Book Printing, a sculpture unveiled as part of the ‘Germany: Land of Ideas’ installation for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, encapsulates the connection between printing, vernacular languages and nationalism. A tower of books by famous German authors rests upon the canonical work of Goethe, itself premised upon Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in Mainz in modern-day Germany. The sculpture’s erection in Berlin’s Babelplatz, the site of an infamous Nazi-era book burning, is additionally symbolic (see Chapter 10). Lienhard Schulz, Wikimedia Foundation

appended to the title pages of texts as authors. Rather than circulating anonymously, printed texts now typically carried the name of a putative source who could be alternatively acclaimed or admonished for the ideas contained therein. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, this sacralisation of the author had been codified in Britain’s first copyright legislation, the Statute of Anne (1710), marking a shift from conceptualising stories as common cultural property to considering the creative work as an individual’s asset from which they should benefit financially (and could prevent others from benefiting for an allotted period of time). By the late eighteenth century, the legal

26 Theories and methodologies

consecration of the author had intertwined with the philosophy of Romanticism to elevate the author to the position of unique, divinely inspired creative being (Rose, 1993; Murray, 2019). The losers in this new print culture equation were, arguably, readers. A ‘read-only’ culture emerged in which manuscript culture’s conception of the reader as a co-assembler of the text was downgraded to the notion of a passive recipient of works written and published by others. This created a two-tier society comprising those who read and wrote, on the one hand, and those who merely read, on the other. At the far reaches of medium theorists’ claims about the cognitive effects of print are that it has deeply inscribed linear and sequential reading patterns (e.g. left to right, top to bottom, page by page, volume by volume) in Western minds. So deeply have we been imbued with print’s linearity that we conceive of even abstract concepts, such as time, history and human development, in linear fashion (e.g. the trajectory of human ‘progress’). This has normalised cause-and-effect logic and renders strange non-literate cultures’ concepts of chronological simultaneity – the coexistence of past, present and future. Most invidiously, linearity has inflected even our conceptualisation of human communication itself, where print is seen as unproblematically ‘better’ and more ‘advanced’ than oral or scribal cultures. Implicit in the slow normalising of the print mindset, medium theorists suggest, has been a lack of attention to what print ‘costs’ a society, with all the focus on what it offers.

Emergence and characteristics of medium theory As an academic approach, medium theory traces its roots to a revolt against the exclusively textual and linguistic preoccupations of mid-twentieth-century literary studies. As outlined in this book’s Introduction, ‘Eng. Lit’ has long been inclined to read past the book – taking the codex format for granted and interpreting the words printed therein as though they had no material instantiation. A counter-movement known as the ‘Toronto School’, centred on scholars such as Harold Innis, emerged in Canada. Innis’s Empire and Communications (2007 [1950]) distinguishes between time-based and spacebased media: the former, such as stone or clay, offer durability; the latter, such as papyrus or paper, though more fragile, offer portability and are thus superior for transmission, diffusion and connections across space. Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilisation grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economics, social structures and the arts. The influence on the ideas of Innis’s younger colleague, McLuhan, is evident. While the work of both scholars is usually considered as foundational for the discipline of communication and media studies, two other medium theorists, Eisenstein and Ong, are still primarily identified as book historians, their work giving rise to a distinct academic lineage. This echoes the point made in the Introduction that print culture studies, which entails exploration of the contemporary book world, sits at the intersection of literary and media studies without being entirely at home in either.

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From the foregoing survey of medium theory, it should be clear that its practice is fundamentally macro-oriented: it analyses the impact of commu­ nication technologies over vast epochs because the effects of such technologies may be so subtly pervasive that they go largely unnoticed by contemporaries. Its society-wide analyses provide a corrective to historians’ tendency to analyse niche topics in isolation, and instead trace broad patterns in the adoption of communication technologies across continents. Because medium theorists’ primary research question is causation-focused – how does a particular communication technology change host societies? – it has been accused of technological determinism: namely, of privileging technologies as prime movers rather than the economic, religious, social and intellectual contexts in which they unfold. Equally, with the exception of rare hero figures such as Gutenberg, medium theorists have a tendency to downplay individual human agency in their quest to capture the grand sweep of history. A further legitimate criticism of the medium theory approach is that its sequential view of media development overstates the disruptive impact of technological changes and underestimates continuities between new and old mediums (O’Donnell, 1998: 39). Are older mediums simply displaced or subsumed by newer mediums or do they (so to speak) shuffle over to make room for the interlopers? The proponents of medium theory have certainly paid less attention to how older mediums reinvent themselves in the wake of the new. This is ironic, as even Gutenberg’s original 42-line Bible left spaces for hand illuminators to embellish individual copies so as to make them more closely resemble manuscripts. Rather than seeing the relationship between different media as one of supersession (the new eclipsing the old), we would do well to adopt media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of ‘remediation’, whereby media formats evolve complex and ever-shifting patterns of coexistence and interdependence (1999). Finally, the very scale of medium theorists’ temporal and geographic frame constitutes its Achilles’ heel, as national, regional, class- and gender-based variations in the rate of print’s adoption are either disregarded or minimised. It was this that the empirically trained historian Eisenstein found so problematic in the literary scholar McLuhan’s sweeping, metaphorically pitched generalisations. History, in its fine-grained detail, frequently complicates the ‘big picture’ narratives medium theorists seek to tell.

Eurocentrism of medium theory? The above criticisms of medium theory’s macro-orientation have been circulating since at least the publication of Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979). Since then, a newer critique of medium theory’s claims has emerged which, if anything, represents a more fundamental challenge to the approach’s tendency towards Gutenberg worship. While Gutenberg’s hand press was undeniably revolutionary in mid-fifteenth-century Europe, Chinese society had normalised carving whole pages of pictographs in

28 Theories and methodologies

wood, then inking and printing them on paper since the seventh century CE. The Buddhist Diamond Sutra was made by carving pictographs alongside illustrations, and it contains a colophon stating that it was produced in 868 CE, giving it claim to be the world’s earliest dated, printed book. These historical facts highlight the deep-seated Eurocentrism of AngloAmerican medium theory of the mid- to late twentieth century and raise the question of why medium theorists seemingly had little knowledge of Chinese and Korean print precedents. There are several explanations for the lack of crosscultural approaches to print history. Firstly, language differences and a paucity of translations meant that the work of East Asian scholars remained largely unknown in the West. The political context of the Cold War and China’s descent into the Cultural Revolution, with its highly politicised approach to pre-communist history, made academic exchange fraught. Also on the topic of language, the ideographic structures of written Chinese-based languages are very different from movable type using a 26-letter Roman alphabet (Man, 2002: 106). In a gallery commendably devoted to script and printing in East Asia, the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz dramatically demonstrates these practical problems in its dis­ play of an enormous circular compositing desk subdivided into myriad sections, each of which contains blocks for the printing of single pictographic characters.3 Looking beyond technology to encompassing social and economic frames, clas­ sical Chinese and Korean societies’ largely feudal and rural structures lacked the urban capitalist dynamics of Gutenberg’s Europe (Man, 2002: 115). Print’s alleged revolutionary impact on Reformation-era Europe does not appear to have any equivalent in earlier East Asia. In itself, this fact of print’s wildly different effect on geographically dispersed cultures refutes the technological determinist thesis. Yet, beyond these linguistic, economic and historical factors, it is impossible to discount a certain Western-centrism in medium theorists’ reticence about Chinese printing precedents. This seems to reflect an unspoken desire to posit the book as the supreme achievement of Christian (Protestant?) civilisation – as though a technology so revolutionary in its impact and so foundational to Western concepts of liberal individualism could only have arisen on European soil (Newman, 2019). Contemporary scholars of East Asian print histories such as Peter Kornicki (1998), Cynthia Brokaw (2007) and T.H. Barrett (2008) have challenged the lingering Eurocentrism of print culture research with pointedly anti-Gutenbergian book titles such as The Woman who Discovered Printing – a reference to the seventh-century Chinese Empress Wu (Barrett, 2008). China’s government has also been keen to promote the country’s claims to first-mover status in printing history: the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics included an extended sequence based on four great Chinese inventions: the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing (see Figures 1.3 and 1.4).

Conclusion: digital books’ challenge to medium theory If, as medium theorists claim, the codex has shaped Western minds and inculcated a conception of all phenomena as linear and sequential, how does a

Medium theory

29

Figure 1.3 The Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics (2008) contained a ‘Brilliant Civilization’ segment focused on four great ancient Chinese inventions: papermaking, printing, the compass and gunpowder. Paper, represented by the scroll, took the form of a massive, rollable LED sheet upon which images were displayed and calligraphy created by dancers with brushes in their hands.

Figure 1.4 A later part of the Opening Ceremony showcased China's historical claim to have invented moveable-type printing. Over 800 intricately choreographed letter blocks spelt out the Chinese characters for 'Harmony' and formed a stylised version of the Great Wall, before opening to reveal that each was operated by a human performer.

30 Theories and methodologies

reader’s relationship to the book change when facsimiles of book pages are presented on screen? Does a reader who ‘turns’ the ‘pages’ of a rare book in digital facsimile read in the same manner as a reader holding the precious volume in their own (white-gloved) hands? The British Library’s Turning the Pages software raises such questions, as do more commonplace reading applications for Apple’s iPad, with its page-turning swipe function, and the screen refresh/page-turn button on Amazon’s Kindle.4 More fundamentally, how do the copy-and-paste, collective authorship and DIY affordances of digital technology change the relationship of reader to text? Historian Thomas Pettitt has proposed the useful concept of the ‘Gutenberg parenthesis’ (2007) to high­ light how pre-print manuscript cultures and digital cultures have more in common with each other than either does with the comparatively brief (500year) reign of print that lies between them. With digital culture’s assumptions of textual mutability, free appropriation and group authorship, it may be that we are not so much entering a radical new era of human communication than reverting to a communal model from the pre-print past. This is perceptible if we look beyond digital communication’s technological devices to analyse how it impacts on society physically, psychologically and socially – as medium theorists have long stressed. If Pettitt’s ‘back to the future’ view is correct, it carries positive implications for power relationships based on the printed word, suggesting that we may again be moving from a ‘read-only’ culture for the majority to a ‘read, write and publish’ culture in which user-generated content is abundant, wildly diverse and globally accessible. It is an energising idea to which we will return repeatedly throughout this book, and especially in Part III.

Learning exercise Consider how different media affect your comprehension and retention of information. For example, cognitive scientists’ eye-tracking experiments have demonstrated that we tend to read in a ‘capital letter F’ pattern when reading online: that is, we read all of the first few lines, then decreasing amounts of subsequent paragraphs, before essentially skimming down the left-hand margin (assuming reading in a left-to-right language).5 Do you prefer course materials to be provided in print or screen versions? Why?

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

www.gutenberg-museum.de/index.php?id=29&L=1. http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/. www.gutenberg-museum.de/122.0.html?&L=1. www.bl.uk/turning-the-pages/. www.chronicle.com/article/Online-Literacy-Is-a-Lesser/28307.

Medium theory

31

Online resources •

•

•

Stephen Fry’s BBC TV documentary The Machine that Made Us (2008) accessibly examines how Gutenberg’s printing press created modern human societies. It includes engaging recreations of typecasting, compositing and printing on a reconstructed wooden hand press and is thus excellent forvisualising these technologies in action. Snippets are available via YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOs2G4VanMc. For an amusing take on the shift from scroll to codex, try the Norwegian comedy sketch ‘Introducing the Book’ (2007), which has a baffled monk calling the medieval equivalent of an IT help desk: http://atlas. lib.uiowa.edu/. The clip became an international viral sensation for Norway’s public broadcaster NRK. The history and significance of Gutenberg’s invention are given the Horrible Histories treatment in an undergraduate-friendly, three-minute encapsulation of his life and work, set to the tune of Blondie’s ‘Sunday Girl’. The animation of the onscreen printed text is itself an apt form of homage: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7e2bA3tTYow&feature=player_embedded.

References and further reading Allen, Susan M., Lin Zuzao, Cheng Xiaolan and Jan Bos, eds. (2010) The History and Cultural Heritage of Chinese Calligraphy, Printing and Library Work. Berlin: De Gruyter Saur. Anderson, Benedict. (1991 [1983]) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. edn. London: Verso. Barbier, Frédéric. (2016) Gutenberg’s Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity. Trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Polity. Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist and Eleanor F. Shevlin, eds. (2007) Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Barrett, T.H. (2008) The Woman who Discovered Printing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bolter, Jay David. (1991) Writing Spaces: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Borsuk, Amaranth. (2018) The Book. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke. (2009) A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Polity. Brokaw, Cynthia. (2007) ‘Book History in Premodern China: The State of the Discipline I.’ Book History 10: 253–90. Chia, Lucille and Hilde De Weerdt, eds. (2011) Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print: China, 900–1400. Leiden: Brill Academic. Dane, Joseph A. (2010) Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Davis, Margaret Leslie. (2019) The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book’s Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey. New York: Tarcher Perigee. Deibert, Ronald J. (1997) Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation. New York: Columbia University Press.

32 Theories and methodologies Duncan, Dennis and Adam Smyth, eds. (2019) Book Parts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1979) The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (2010) Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Eliot, Simon, Andrew Nash and Ian Willison, eds. (2007) Literary Cultures and the Material Book. London: The British Library. Eliot, Simon and Jonathan Rose, eds. (2007) A Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell. Füssel, Stephan. (2005) Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing. Trans. Douglas Martin. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Gitelman, Lisa. (2008) Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Graff, H.J. (1987) The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gutjahr, Paul C. and Megan L. Benton, eds. (2001) Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Habermas, Jürgen. (1989 [1962]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity. Henry, Anne, Joe Bray and Miriam Handley, eds. (2000) Mar(k)ing the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page. Abingdon: Ashgate. Higgins, Hannah B. (2009) The Grid Book. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Howard, Nicole. (2005) The Book: The Life Story of a Technology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Innis, Harold A. (2007 [1950]) Empire and Communications. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Jackson, Shelley. (2003) ‘Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl.’ Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 239–52. Johns, Adrian. (1998) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, William A. and Holt N. Parker. (2009) Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnston, Cynthia, ed. (2019) The Concept of the Book: The Production, Progression and Dissemination of Information. London: Institute of English Studies. Kapr, Albert. (1996) Johann Gutenberg: The Man and His Invention. Trans. Douglas Martin. Abingdon: Ashgate. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2016) Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kornicki, Peter. (1998) The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: Brill. Love, Harold. (1993) The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenthcentury England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Man, John. (2002) The Gutenberg Revolution. London: Review. McCleery, Alistair. (2002) ‘The Return of the Individual to Book History: The Case of Allen Lane.’ Book History 5: 85–114. McCleery, Alistair. (2007) ‘The Paperback Evolution: Tauchnitz, Albatross and Penguin.’ Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Ed. Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody. Aldershot: Ashgate. 3–18.

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McLuhan, Marshall. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. McLuhan, Marshall. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Meyrowitz, Joshua. (1995) ‘Medium Theory.’ Communication Theory Today. Ed. D. Crowley and D. Mitchell. Cambridge: Polity Press. 50–77. Murphy, Cullen. (2020) ‘Before Zuckerberg, Gutenberg.’ The Atlantic Jan./Feb. www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/before-zuckerberg-gutenberg/603034/. Murray, Simone. (2019) ‘Authorship.’ The Oxford Handbook of Publishing. Ed. Angus Phillips and Michael Bhaskar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 39–54. Newman, M. Sophia. (2019) ‘So, Gutenberg Didn’t Actually Invent the Printing Press.’ Literary Hub 19 Jun. https://lithub.com/so-gutenberg-didnt-actually-invent-the-printing-press/. O’Donnell, James J. (1998) Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Olson, David R. (1994) The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Reading and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ong, Walter J. (1982) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Ong, Walter J. (2002) An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Parkes, M.P. (1992) Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pettitt, Tom. (2007) ‘Before the Gutenberg Parenthesis: Elizabethan–American Compatibilities.’ Plenary presentation to Media in Translation 5, Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/legacy/mit5/papers/pettitt_plenary_gutenberg.pdf. Roberts, Colin H. and T.C. Skeat. (1987) The Birth of the Codex. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Rose, Mark. (1993) Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saenger, Paul. (1997) Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stevenson, Iain. (2010) Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century. London: British Library Publishing. Stewart, Garrett. (2006) The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stewart, Garrett. (2011) Bookwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van der Weel, Adriaan. (2011) Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. van Toorn, Penny. (2006) Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Watson, Rita and Menahem Blondheim, eds. (2007) The Toronto School of Communication Theory: Interpretations, Extensions, Applications. Toronto and Jerusalem: University of Toronto Press and Hebrew University Magnes Press. White, Eric. (2017) Editio Princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible. Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers. White, Glyn. (2005) Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Woodmansee, Martha and Peter Jaszi, eds. (1993) The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2

Book history

Imagine, for a moment, an utterly unremarkable exchange. The setting is an undergraduate tutorial on Modernist literature at some time in the early 1990s and this week the assigned text is Edith Wharton’s novel of Old New York high society and its repressions, The Age of Innocence (1920). A much-praised film adaptation by the (somewhat unlikely) director Martin Scorsese has re­ cently been released and the film tie-in edition of the novel that many students have in front of them has on its cover a still depicting Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer mid-clinch. A student makes a passing comment about the blurb on the back cover and the particular way it frames the text and is peremptorily, but not unkindly, cut off mid-sentence by the tutor. He states ‘in this tutorial we’re only talking about the text, not any specific copy of it’. Somewhat stung, the student – myself, as it turns out – continues to turn the question over in her mind for long afterwards: why? I have indulged in this brief autobiographical excursus to illustrate how early and deeply the literary studies orthodoxy of dematerialising the text begins. Through countless such everyday pedagogical encounters, students of litera­ ture internalise the academic protocol that it is solely the text that matters in the study of books, and that the physical format, covers, illustrations and other paratextual elements are so much chaff to be discarded in the hunt for the kernel of textual meaning. Yet it need not be so. For readers harbour detailed, often passionately sensory memories of the format in which they first en­ countered favourite texts (e.g. the illustrations, the position of key paragraphs on the page, marginal notations, the weight of a volume, cover art, even smell). These elements need not be intellectually discarded but should rather be factored into analysing texts because they mediate readers’ experiences of the text in crucial, though often subtle, ways (McDonald, 2006: 224–5). How different is the experience of a reader who holds a rare first edition of The Age of Innocence signed by Wharton, compared to that of a student with an Oxford World’s Classics paperback complete with scholarly introduction, or a Folio Society boxed gift edition, or even an audiobook version? Each of these bookish objects is richly revealing about its production context, how it has circulated socially, and its anticipated and actual readerships. Frequently these embodied bookish signs point in opposite directions from the text itself,

Book history

35

creating internally contradictory, fascinatingly rich objects for analysis. This is, in essence, the central tenet of the academic approach known as book history: that the materiality of texts invariably matters and deserves to be looked at, not merely looked through.

What is book history? The central tenet of book history may be simple to grasp but the discipline goes by a confusingly wide range of names. The first terminological thicket to clear is that ‘book history’ and ‘the history of the book’ mean the same thing and are used interchangeably. As mentioned in this book’s Introduction, the phrase ‘history of the book’ seems to provoke the follow-up question: which book? ‘Book’ here is used as a collective noun, like ‘cinema’ or ‘economics’, not with reference to any particular book. The term encompasses any written communication and has an eye to both the format of the book (including manuscripts, eBooks and audiobooks) and its communicative content. Less obviously, perhaps, book history also goes by the French term l’histoire du livre, the German equivalent Geschichte des Buchwesens and Anglo-American varia­ tions such as ‘print culture studies’, ‘publishing studies’ and ‘sociology of the text’. This plethora of terms for the same scholarly practice testifies to book history’s highly international and interdisciplinary scholarly lineage (explored in the following section). Regardless of the banner under which it presents itself, book history scholarship evinces a unifying concern: books are important not just for the texts they transmit, but as material artefacts. The dual nature of the book as both object and text (see the Introduction) means that books are always embodiments of their historical period as well as agents for change in that period and afterwards. Foundational book historian Robert Darnton neatly sums up this often-overlooked agential character of books: ‘books do not merely recount history; they make it’ (1990: 135). His point is that books both act upon societies through the ideas they transmit and are simultaneously acted upon by their host societies (and bear the marks of such treatment). The book/ society dynamic is thus symbiotic. In practice, book history research has three key foci: the production, circulation and consumption of print culture, typi­ cally viewed as complexly interrelated processes.1 Unlike mainstream literary studies, in which the literary text is often treated in comparative isolation, or related only to other works at the intertextual level, book history emphasises the communications system as a whole, not any one output of that system.

Book history’s disciplinary origins: revolt and synthesis From its origins, book history has been a strongly interdisciplinary undertaking, with scholars attempting to peek over the fences of their respective disciplines, as it were, to borrow theoretical concepts and methodological approaches from adjacent disciplines as seems opportune. At least in its foundational

36 Theories and methodologies

phases, book history’s three most influential contributor disciplines have been history, literary studies and bibliography. This section examines each in turn, analysing the intellectual habits each has bequeathed to book history and the sometimes conflicting legacies of these. History

Chronologically, the earliest and in many ways most significant ancestor discipline of book history has been historical studies, specifically the socalled Annales school of social history that flourished in France from roughly the 1930s to the 1950s. Annaliste historians rejected ‘great man’ schools of history that posited remarkable individuals as the prime actors in an his­ torical narrative often framed around the single lifespan. Instead, they pioneered so-called ‘trench’ studies of single locales, scrutinising the his­ torical record of a specific town or region over long historical periods (la longue durée) to reconstruct the material circumstances of daily life in that place. These historians were concerned with statistical evidence to build up the ‘big picture’ of life in a given place through time. Their interest was as much in continuities as disruptions, such as the wars and political factions typically recounted in history books, and this attention to the nature of incremental though paradigmatic changes links the Annalistes to medium theorists (see Chapter 1). The general Annales methodology was applied specifically to the history of printed books in the late phase of the school’s ascendency in works such as Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’Apparition du Livre (1958; first translated as The Coming of the Book in 1976; Febvre and Martin, 1990 [1958]) and Robert Escarpit’s Sociologie de la Littérature (1958; first translated as Sociology of Literature in 1965; Escarpit, 1971 [1958]). The belated translation of these works into English, especially the NLB edition of Febvre and Martin’s text, catalysed the emergence of book history as an academic discipline in the Anglophone world (Kirsop, 1979). Of particular interest to scholars of print cultures was the Annalistes’ concern with ‘mentalités’ (a difficult term to translate that equates roughly to ‘outlook’ or ‘worldview’). This gave a useful theoretical concept on which to hang studies of the large-scale impact of printing on Western societies’ thought processes and social psychology, and thus complemented medium theorists like Elizabeth Eisenstein’s more em­ pirical line of research. Prior historical models, with their often nationalistic frames, had also proven inadequate at tracking intellectual developments across and between societies to show how revolutionary ideas such as Protestantism, democracy and human rights campaigns filter through societies with often uneven effects. In this, comparativist Annaliste approaches fed into the broader development of cultural and intellectual history from the 1970s onwards. But book historians, as a specific subset of cultural and intellectual historians, added the insight that to understand the history of ideas scholars must also pay at­ tention to the material formats in which those ideas were packaged, circulated

Book history

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and consumed (be they vernacular Bibles, cheap pamphlets, circulating libraries or identity-based reading groups). Literary studies

If historical studies is responsible for the ‘history’ component of the term ‘book history’, the ‘book’ part comes more specifically from literary studies. The study of English and other national literatures had, after all, comprised the ground zero of studying books in the academy for the best part of the twentieth century. But, as outlined in the introductions to both this volume and specifically this chapter, the dominant mode of literary scholarship has long been textual analysis, pursued through the interpretive protocol of ‘close reading’. Especially after the ‘high theory’ trend of the early 1980s, successive self-proclaimed radical intellectual movements such as feminist theory, post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-colonialism produc­ tively questioned much else about literary studies’ self-conception, but tended to retain the primacy of the text as object of study. The tendency, buttressed by imported Continental linguistic-based theories such as semiotics, abstracted ‘books’ into free-floating ‘texts’ and commonly as­ sumed that all versions of a text were essentially identical and were read similarly (cf. McGann, 1991). Yet, despite its decades-long hegemony in literary studies, the ‘linguistic turn’ was never absolute nor uncontested, partially because of the still older disciplinary tradition of bibliography (see below) and because even literary scholars had some experience with outlier texts in the canon that had re­ markably distinct physical forms. For example, the highly anthologised English Romantic poet William Blake is known as much as a visual artist as a writer, and his most famous poems such as ‘The Tyger’(1794) appeared in self-printed books with the poetry engraved on copper plate surrounded (and often intertwined with) Blake’s illustrations. This clearly complicated any neat division of text and illustration. Or, to take a more modern example, Jack Kerouac allegedly typed his Beat classic On the Road (1957) in a three-week, Benzedrine-fuelled blast of creativity on a single scroll of paper, chosen so he did not have to interrupt his creative flow by inserting new sheets into the typewriter. Irrespective of whether the story of the book’s origin in a ‘savage and unmediated burst’ is true or part of Kerouac’s canny self-mythologising, the scroll has become such a famous talisman of the Beat movement that it tours the world as a literary artefact in its own right.2 Lewis Carroll’s handwritten and self-illustrated first version of Alice’s Adventures under Ground (1864) (viewable in its entirety via the British Library’s previously mentioned Turning the Pages software) pro­ vided yet another example for literary scholars of how a book’s materiality could never be simply bracketed off from its hermeneutic significance, and thus represented a natural entry point into literary studies for book historical approaches.

38 Theories and methodologies Bibliography

The third important contributor discipline to book history has been biblio­ graphy (literally: ‘writing about books’). Although bibliography has never been as institutionally powerful as either history or literary studies in the modern academy, and by the mid-twentieth century was often uneasily annexed to literary studies programmes in departments of English, it is the discipline most concerned with the object-status of the book. Bibliography emerged as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century from attempts to compile ‘authoritative’ and ‘definitive’ scholarly editions of key literary texts (especially the bibliographically complex Shakespearean canon). In contrast to the her­ meneutic preoccupations of literary studies, where the innately subjective pursuit of textual meaning holds sway (however much this subjectivism has been denied by literary formalists), bibliography has regarded itself as more of a science, preferring positivist forms of evidence (Bowers, 1949). It encompasses various sub-strands: enumerative bibliography (counting the number of books on a particular topic, in an edition, etc.); descriptive or physical bibliography (describing the physical constitution of books, paper, ink, binding, etc.); and analytical or textual bibliography (exploring questions of textual authority and reconciling variant versions of a text to achieve maximum fidelity to presumed authorial intention). Within classical bibliography, the author’s aims for a text were sacrosanct, and the various interventions of printers, publishers, proofreaders and so on were regarded as so much textual ‘corruption’ – errors to be expunged. Under the influence of bibliographically trained book history pioneers such as D.F. McKenzie (see the Introduction), the extra-authorial fingerprints left on texts by print culture intermediaries were re-evaluated as positive contributions to the text – valuable evidence of its transmission to print and its post-publication afterlife. Bibliographers were urged to reconceptualise text as less fixed outcome than ongoing process – an intellectual shift encapsulated in McKenzie’s idea of ‘the sociology of texts’ (1986). Moreover, traditional bibliography was taken to task for isolating books as objects from the eco­ nomic, social and cultural environments in which they were created, dis­ tributed and read. It was as though books themselves – rather than the people who produce, trade and consume them – had been conferred agency. In this dispute about appropriate scholarly frames of reference we can dis­ cern how different disciplinary approaches, although braided together to create book history, have left distinct traces upon the discipline, and sometimes pull in contrary directions – historians want to valorise the actions of specific bookish agents, while bibliographers posit the book object itself as the fun­ damental object of analysis. For their part, literary scholars may be happy to join bibliographers in focusing upon books, but by ‘books’ they mean not the material artefacts but the interpretive significance of the words on the page. Leading book historian Leslie Howsam (2006: 10) has created a useful trian­ gular diagram to sum up the varying foci book history retains as a result of its

Book history

39

Figure 2.1 Leslie Howsam’s triangular diagram encapsulates the attributes book history has inherited from its three ancestor disciplines. Though most book history work blends influences derived variously from history, literature and bibliography, individual scholars may hew closer to one of these disciplines. Book history practitioners also increasingly engage with work from further afield (e.g. cul­ tural sociology, media and communication studies and the digital humanities). (Figure 1 from ‘Disciplinary Boundaries and Interdisciplinary Opportunities’ in Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture by Leslie Howsam, page 10 ©University of Toronto Press 2006. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.)

mixed intellectual ancestry (see Figure 2.1). Always a magpie discipline, book history contains within its loose assemblage these various tensions and, as discussed below, also more recent encounters with other cognate disciplines. This self-proclaimed openness to intellectual hybridisation is precisely what makes it such a fecund, stimulating area of research.

Book history models Drawing its intellectual influences from so diverse a range of backgrounds, early book history threatened to degenerate into ‘interdisciplinarity run riot’ (Darnton, 1990: 110). For that reason, early book historians seized upon models that might unify and bring some cohesion to an intellectually diffuse undertaking, in particular Robert Darnton’s famous and much-cited ‘Communications Circuit’ (1990 [1982]). Based on diagrams of electrical

40 Theories and methodologies

circuits and communication studies models, the Communications Circuit at­ tempted to incorporate every aspect of the book world – from author to reader – in an interconnected ‘life-cycle’ (Darnton, 1990: 111). A nominal text (in Darnton’s case-study, Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopédie) moves around an outer circuit from Author via Publisher, Printers, Shippers and Booksellers to (finally) Readers, who, as represented by a tentative dotted line, might in exceptional circumstances have some subsequent communication with the Author. Inside this circuit, intellectual, economic, social, political and legal forces exert pressure on the book’s life cycle. Although Darnton, an historian of the French Revolution, claimed his model was applicable to all periods in the history of the book, its incorporation of elements such as Smuggler, Peddler and Binder, and its omission of many twentieth-century print culture intermediaries, such as literary agents and book designers, betray its historical specificity. Nevertheless, it has been hugely influential in supplying book history with a unifying theoretical schema. Though later significantly reworked by other scholars (and by Darnton himself), these critiques have kept the model very much at the forefront of book historians’ collective mind (Darnton, 2007). In fact, Darnton’s model has ossified into such an intellectual cliché that at SHARP conferences it has spawned its own (auto­ mated) spoof Twitter account: @RobotDarnton.3 Roughly a decade after Darnton’s model appeared, bibliographers Thomas R. Adams and Nicholas Barker proposed its first significant modification in their ‘A New Model for the Study of the Book’ (1993). This inverts Darnton’s relationship of the book world to the wider world: book-centric processes of publication, manufacture, distribution, reception and – in a significant addi­ tion – survival are shown as existing ‘within’ the ‘whole socio-economic conjuncture’ comprising intellectual, political, legal and religious influences, commerce, society and taste cultures. The revised schema embodies the au­ thors’ criticism that Darnton’s model wrongly favours human agents over phases in the book’s life cycle. Instead, it introduces a bio-bibliographical dimension addressing Darnton’s underemphasis on the cultural aura of the book as artefact. The book, the two bibliographers insist, cannot be reduced to a mere vector for communications; it is meaningful in its own right. By the mid-1990s, as the internet entered the mainstream academy and wider social life, it was the very linearity of Darnton’s model that came in for critique. An alternative, networked conception of print culture would depict every node in the print economy as potentially connected to every other point. Each ele­ ment in this bookish ‘ecosystem’ is constantly impacting upon every other element, making all elements interactive and interdependent. Invoking the communication architecture and terminology of earlier internet prophets such as Ted Nelson, book historians John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten described newer models as ‘publishing history, in other words, as hypertext’ (1995: 11). For feminist book historians, also active from the late 1980s, it was not Darnton’s relative prioritising of books or human agents, nor the linearity of his concep­ tion, so much as his model’s inattention to the gatekeeping effects of print culture intermediaries that was the issue (Tuchman and Fortin, 1989; Bell, 1989;

Book history

41

Travis, 2008). The mostly unidirectional arrows in Darnton’s model imply that entry to the Communication Circuit is unproblematic and that, once within the circuit, content easily flows from one node to the next. For feminist critics, sharply cognisant of women’s exclusion from or precariousness within the realm of print culture, this fundamentally misrepresents the power of the book world to obstruct, as much as facilitate, knowledge transfer. At every step in the model, gatekeeping agents block far more than they waive through: for example, au­ thors unable to secure literary agents, publishers rejecting manuscripts, book stores refusing to stock certain titles, and non-reviewing resulting in a book failing to find its audience. Gender politics and access to book-world mechan­ isms are crucial determinants of what we know of the print culture record; as Leslie Howsam wrote in 1998, it was long past time that book historians re­ cognise that ‘the book is also a gendered object’ (1). In fact, for women authors, publishers, critics and readers, the print world resembles ‘less [a] quasi-scientific model than [a] Snakes and Ladders boardgame’ (Murray, 2004: 17). Feminist book historians were not assuaged that in revising his model 25 years after its initial publication, Darnton (2007) confined any mention of women’s quite distinctive print culture experience to a mere two lines of text, focusing instead on how subsequent trends in intertextuality and paratextuality would cause him to construct his circuit differently now. The most recent attempts to redraw book history’s governing conceptual models position the disruptive effects of digital culture front and centre, noting how digital technologies pervade all aspects of the twenty-first-century book world (Ray Murray and Squires, 2013). One key aspect of the digital revolution has been the incursion into the book world of new actors from the ICT sector (Amazon, Google, Apple). Another, reflecting the networked structure of earlier hypertext models, has been the disintermediation of formerly linear relations, so that would-be authors may now bypass publishing gatekeepers by self-publishing or crowdfunding, including via online retailers themselves. What, for Darnton, seemed the self-evident (if temporary) endpoint in the circuit – reading – can now as easily be its starting point, as internet-sustained communities of fans lobby authors for specific developments in an ongoing book series, or take authorial matters into their own hands by writing fanfiction. Whether this resulting work is actually consumed in book history’s familiar codex format or on any number of eBook reading devices or mobile phone applications adds a further layer of complexity. In updating Darnton’s model to account for the reality of the twenty-first-century book world, the internet cannot simply be appended as a new node. The World Wide Web has so transformed all elements of book production, distribution and consumption – even calling into question the fa­ miliar sequence of these three phases – that an entirely new conception of book history is needed. In seeking this, book history must look beyond its ancestor disciplines to more recently established academic fields, such as media, com­ munication and cultural studies and the digital humanities (see Chapters 3, 4, 11 and 12), which have made the study of digital media central to their intellectual project (Kirschenbaum and Werner, 2014; Murray, 2018).

42 Theories and methodologies

Figure 2.2 Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires’s (2013) redrawing of Digital Publishing foundational ‘Communications Circuit’ (1982) to account for digital develop­ ments in the twenty-first-century book industry. (Ray Murray and Squires, 2012)

Key book history principles Drawing together key book history ideas from the foregoing disciplinary survey and outline of competing theoretical models, we can synthesise some key book history tenets: •

•

Format always matters when assessing books and their impact. In doing so, it is vital to keep in mind that the word ‘book’ always contains dual senses of both text and object. Adams and Barker, ever the bibliographers, make the interesting observation that ‘popularity as a factor tends to operate positively on the text and negatively on the book’ (1993: 33). They mean that the more popular a work is, the more editions and changes in format it will undergo, and the more individual copies of the book are likely to be worn, torn, dog-eared and annotated. There is a reason, after all, why a first-edition Superman comic book is now so much more valuable than it was upon publication in the late 1930s. What is meant by ‘book’ is malleable. The ‘book’ endures, but the format of the book changes radically across centuries (see Chapter 1). We cannot

Book history

•

•

•

•

•

43

assume that print culture exists ahistorically (i.e. what is called a ‘book’ in one era does not necessarily mean the same thing in another era). Therefore, historical and cultural context is everything for book historians. Access to print culture is almost always unequal and contested within societies (e.g. via censorship, obscenity trials, smuggling, pre-Civil War prohibitions on teaching African-American slaves to read, Nazi bookburning rallies, or the grossly inferior education afforded girls under the Taliban and ISIS). This inextricable interrelationship between books and power explains book history’s veritable obsession with ‘banned books’ (see numerous monographs by Darnton). There is no single, ideal reading of a text, only multiple possible readings. Reading is always contextually dependent. It alters, for example, according to the book format used, whether conducted in a public or private location, whether undertaken for education or leisure, and depending upon a given reader’s class, gender, race, age, politics and religion (see Chapter 9). In each of these settings ‘interpretive communities’ of readers are especially important in modelling desirable reading practices (e.g. schools, Bible societies, book clubs, university English departments). Dissemination of ideas in any society is tied to the infrastructure of print culture (and, since the late nineteenth century, to non-print-based media, too). Knowing and being influenced by a book need not necessarily involve reading it, as a work’s key ideas or reputation may circulate via published extracts, reviews and public discussion (Murphy, 2005; Bayard, 2007). Print culture might be thought of as possessing, in a positive sense, a ‘radioactive aura’ emanating from the book object itself. Nationalist narratives of print culture and literary history are always reductive because print culture has been innately international since its Gutenbergian inception via trade links and intellectual exchange (Casanova, 2004).4 That said, the obverse is equally true: print regimes have been essential in facilitating the politics of empire. Whether in the form of colonial book royalties, territorial rights agreements or multinational publishing conglomerates, print culture reflects and sustains real-world power imbalances (see Chapters 3 and 4). Knowledge is always based upon forms of power both ideological and material – with the two forms inextricably interconnected. Materiality is a mirage. Book history gained momentum during the 1980s and 1990s in protest against the dominance within literary studies of ultra-abstract ‘high theory’ (Winkler, 1993). Yet, ironically, both poststructuralists and book historians have come to ponder many of the same theoretical conundrums, albeit via radically divergent trajectories: for example, what is an author, what are the boundaries between texts and how much power do readers have to forge their own interpretations? The more book history seeks refuge from abstraction in ‘concrete’ objects of study, the more problematic theoretical issues these artefacts raise (see, in particular, Chapters 6 and 9).

44 Theories and methodologies

We might close this enumeration of book history’s central tenets with the words of D.F. McKenzie, the scholar who sketched out so much of the discipline’s future direction, and his appreciation of the open-endedness of all textual interpretation: ‘Meanings are not therefore inherent, but are constructed by successive interpretative acts by those who write, design, and print books, and by those who buy and read them’ (1992: 297).

Drawbacks of book history Just as the previous chapter closed with reflections on some of medium theory’s blind-spots as a research framework, this chapter will conclude by acknowledging some weaknesses of the book history model, at least as the discipline has evolved to date. Perhaps because of SHARP’s origins in a conference on the materiality of the nineteenth-century Anglo-American literary canon, book history has been dominated by Western European and North American book cultures, only comparatively recently expanding its analyses to the far different his­ tories of the book operative in East Asia, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (Gupta and Chakravorty, 2004; Zimbler, 2004; Jurilla, 2008; Fraser and Hammond, 2008).5 In this Western-centric bias, book history betrays many of the same assumptions as its cognate approach, medium theory. Book history also has deep-seated chronological limitations, prompting the ques­ tion: when does ‘history’ stop? Mainstream Anglophone book history has long prioritised the period spanning roughly the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War (Rose, 2001; Turner, 2003; Holman, 2008; Hench, 2010). The latter half of the twentieth century and thereafter was, until very recently, ceded to the apparently incompatible domain of ‘media studies’ (although book culture of the period was often also ignored by media scholars because of their preference for screen and digital media) (Kirschenbaum, 2020: 11). Book history, for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, seemed to wall itself off theoretically from fascinating developments in contemporary print cultures – coinciding, remarkably, with the advent of digital books, often hailed as the most significant communications devel­ opment since Gutenberg (Shillingsburg, 2006). Some might argue that this background of epochal change overwhelmed book historians, encouraging them to seek the comfort of the familiar codex (Winkler, 1993). But as a central tenet of both book history and medium theory is that mediums coexist and complement one another, such intellectual evasive action seems unjustified. In recent years SHARP conferences have played host to a critical mass of (often younger) scholars centrally interested in the twenty-firstcentury book world, although these researchers often congregate under the banner of ‘publishing studies’ rather than the less contemporary-sounding ‘book history’. Such scholars appreciate that the book industries are currently in a period of radical transition and research has a duty to analyse and elucidate contemporary developments.

Book history

45

Figure 2.3 The packaging of a book profoundly influences how readers interpret its content. UK publisher Oldcastle Books’ Pulp! the Classics series plays with this concept, bedecking esteemed literary classics with deliberately jarring downmarket cover designs, complete with faux aging and trashy taglines (www. pulptheclassics.com/index1.php?imprint=8).

Related to the false dichotomy that the book belongs to ‘history’ and other media are the province of ‘communication or cultural studies’ is book history’s long-standing tendency to analyse the book in isolation from other (nonprint-based) media formats. This reflects a deep-rooted belief in the book world that ‘books are different’ (the title of a famous 1960s UK report into the

46 Theories and methodologies

industry) – that is, incommensurate with other media or consumer products because of their intrinsic cultural value. While there might be policy justifi­ cations for such a claim in terms of books’ role as vectors of literacy and education, it has the unfortunate effect of obscuring the flow of content be­ tween books, radio, film and television throughout the twentieth century via common ownership structures and adaptation (see Chapters 3 and 7). Even passionate bibliophiles have never consumed books to the exclusion of other media, and audiences encountering content first in screen forms are frequently motivated to consume the same content in print format. In the twenty-first century, the internet brims with bookish content in the form of author blogs and Twitter accounts, online book retailing, videos of writers’ festival events, amateur and semi-professional readers’ reviews and digitally hosted book clubs. Arguably, this ‘digital literary sphere’ is where book culture is now principally located (Murray, 2018). That said, the previous sentence reveals a final blind-spot as regards book history: a tendency to assume that ‘book’ equates to ‘literature’. Book history has, since its inception, overwhelmingly focused upon the print history of literary fiction, although that has always comprised no more than a small proportion of publishers’ overall output. There is a continuing need to explore non-fiction forms of publishing (educational, governmental, religious, biographical and how-to books) as well as popular-culture fiction publishing (pulps, Westerns, romances, horror, ‘airport’ novels, comics, etc.) for what these reveal about their particular host societies (Gitelman, 2014). Perhaps the intellectual impress of literary studies as a key ancestor discipline to book history is evident in this squeamishness about works allegedly devoid of, or indifferent to, aesthetic merit. To appreciate how such proudly ‘non-literary’ works are produced, circulated and consumed, and with what effects, print culture researchers need to expand their theoretical and methodological toolkit. They should avail themselves of approaches drawn from other disciplines, specifically media studies and politics, as the following two chapters explore in turn.

Learning exercises Try assembling the same text in widely varying formats (e.g. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice exists in classic editions for academic study, as a massmarket tie-in paperback, in deluxe collectors’ editions, as a graphic novel and even packaged as chick lit or a counting primer for toddlers). You need not have read the text; indeed, the exercise works better if you know the work only by reputation. Consider how the physical properties, cover designs, illustra­ tions and other paratextual elements address different kinds of readers and encourage (or inhibit) various forms of interpretation. If you lack access to a range of copies, try the Literary Hub website’s (https://lithub.com/) fascinating

Book history

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compilations of cover designs for now-classic texts, such as the works of Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) or Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963). In 2020, US book retailer Barnes & Noble and publisher Penguin Random House withdrew plans to co-publish versions of classic books by white authors with black-themed cover designs for Black History Month. The plan was widely criticised as a clumsy and tokenistic form of ‘blackface’ (Harriot, 2020). What might the retailer have been trying to achieve with its ‘Diverse Edition’ covers and what alternative actions might have appeased its critics?

Notes 1 See, for example, the self-description of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), the leading international association of book his­ torians, founded in 1992: SHARP research ‘addresses the composition, mediation, re­ ception, survival, and transformation of written communication in material forms from marks on stone to new media’ (www.sharpweb.org/main/). 2 www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-slightly-embarrassing-love-for-jack-kerouac. 3 https://twitter.com/robotdarnton?lang=en. 4 This remains true despite the early 2000s vogue for national histories of the book in, for example, America, Britain, Scotland, France, Canada and Australia. Book historians involved in those projects frequently acknowledge the innate tension between dividing the vast history of the book into manageable national domains and doing justice to the international dimensions of the book trade. 5 www.sharpweb.org/main/purpose-history/.

Online resources •

•

•

The website of SHARP, the leading international scholarly organisation of book historians, is a goldmine of information about the discipline, its publications, conferences and events, as well as useful teaching resources such as syllabi: www.sharpweb.org/main/. The group Women in Book History has compiled a detailed bibliography of women’s involvement in the book trades, from early modern widow publishers via Civil Rights-era champions of library desegregation to women-run periodicals and publishing houses of second-wave feminism. The group’s mission is to recover women’s book world experience and assert its significance for a discipline too long oblivious to gender: www.womensbookhistory.org/sammelband/2019/ 3/28/teaching-women-bibliographers. Geraldine Brooks’ novel People of the Book (2008) engages with book history precepts in fictionalised form. Brooks reconstructs the bibliography of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a priceless, richly illuminated medieval Jewish prayer book, from its fifteenth-century arrival in Spain via its travels in Central

48 Theories and methodologies

and Eastern Europe over subsequent centuries to its pursuit by the Third Reich and remarkable rescue from the National and University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s. The book trailer distributed by its publishers (itself an interesting digital paratext) gives something of this historical novel’s flavour: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LaLRG4MM5H8.

References and further reading Adams, Thomas R. and Nicolas Barker. (1993) ‘A New Model for the Study of the Book.’ A Potencie of Life: Books in Society. Ed. Nicolas Barker. London: British Library. 5–43. Allen, Graham, Carrie Griffin and Mary O'Connell, eds. (2011) Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality. London: Pickering & Chatto. Barker, Nicolas. (2002) Form and Meaning in the History of the Book. London: British Library Publishing. Bayard, Pierre. (2007) How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. London: Granta Books. Bell, Maureen. (1989) ‘Hannah Allen and the Development of a Puritan Publishing Business, 1646–51.’ Publishing History 26.1: 5–66. Birn, Raymond. (1976) ‘Livre et societe after Ten Years: Formation of a Discipline.’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 151: 281–312. Bowers, Fredson. (1949) Principles of Bibliographic Description. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brooks, Geraldine. (2007) ‘The Book of Exodus.’ New Yorker 3 Dec. www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2007/12/03/the-book-of-exodus. Casanova, Pascale. (2004) The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chartier, Roger. (2004) ‘Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text.’ Critical Inquiry 31.1: 133–52. Childress, Clayton. (2017) Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Connolly, James J., Patrick Collier, Frank Felsenstein, Kenneth R. Hall and Robert G. Hall, eds. (2016) Print Culture Histories beyond the Metropolis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Connor, Steven. (1996) ‘Economics, Publishing and Readership.’ The English Novel in History 1950–1995. London: Routledge. 13–27. Danky, James P. and Wayne A. Wiegand, eds. (1998) Print Culture in a Diverse America. History of Communication series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Darnton, Robert. (1990 [1982]) ‘What Is the History of Books?’ The Kiss of Lamourette. London: Faber. 107–35. Darnton, Robert. (2007) ‘“What Is the History of Books?” Revisited.’ Modern Intellectual History 4.3: 495–508. Delft, Marieke van, Frank de Glas and Jeroen Salman, eds. (2006) New Perspectives in Book History: Contributions from the Low Countries. Zutphen: Walburg Pers. Eliot, Simon. (2007) ‘Wither Book History in the UK, and beyond?’ The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison. Ed. Wallace Kirsop and Meredith Sherlock. Melbourne: Centre for the Book, Monash University. 136–48.

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Eliot, Simon, Andrew Nash and Ian Willison, eds. (2007) Literary Cultures and the Material Book. London: British Library Publishing. Eliot, Simon and Jonathan Rose, eds. (2007) A Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell. Escarpit, Robert. (1966) The Book Revolution. London: George Harrap. Escarpit, Robert. (1971 [1958]) The Sociology of Literature. Trans. E. Pick. London: Cass. Feather, John. (2005 [1988]) A History of British Publishing. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin. (1990 [1958]) The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800. Trans. D. Gerard. London: Verso. Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery. (2005) An Introduction to Book History. London and New York: Routledge. Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery, eds. (2006) The Book History Reader. 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge. Fraser, Robert and Mary Hammond, eds. (2008) Books without Borders, Volume 2: Perspectives from South Asia. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gitelman, Lisa. (2014) Paper Knowledge: Towards a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Griffith, Penny, Peter Hughes and Alan Loney, eds. (2000) A Book in the Hand: Essays on the History of the Book in New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Gupta, A. and B. Chakravorty, eds. (2004) Print Areas: Book History in India. Delhi: Permanent Black. Hammond, Mary. (2006) Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914. Abingdon: Ashgate. Hammond, Mary and Shafquat Towheed, eds. (2007) Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Harriot, Michael. (2020) ‘Books in Blackface: Barnes & Noble Celebrates Black History Month by Showcasing White Books.’ The Root 6 Feb. www.theroot.com/books-inblackface-barnes-noble-celebrates-black-his-1841473226. Hawkins, A.R., ed. (2006) Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History. London: Pickering & Chatto. Hench, John B. (2010) Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hinks, John and Catherine Armstrong, eds. (2008) Book Trade Connections: From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries. London: British Library Publishing. Holman, Valerie. (2008) Print for Victory: Book Publishing in England 1939–1945. London: British Library Publishing. Howsam, Leslie. (1998) ‘In My View: Women and Book History.’ SHARP News 7.4: 1–2. Howsam, Leslie. (2006) Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Howsam, Leslie. (2014) ‘The Practice of Book and Print Culture: Sources, Methods, Readings.’ The Perils of Print Culture: Book, Print and Publishing History in Theory and Practice. Ed. Eve Patten and Jason McElligott. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 17–34. Hunter, Lynette, Maureen Bell, Shirley Chew, Simon Eliot and James L.W. West III, eds. (2001) Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in Transmission. Abingdon: Ashgate. Jordan, John O. and Robert L. Patten, eds. (1995) Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenthcentury British Publishing and Reading Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jurilla, Patricia May B. (2008) Tagalog Bestsellers of the Twentieth Century: A History of the Book in the Philippines. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

50 Theories and methodologies Kirschenbaum, Matthew and Sarah Werner. (2014) ‘Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline.’ Book History 17: 406–58. Kirschenbaum, Matthew, et al. (2020) Book.Files: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry. College Park, MD, and New York: University of Maryland and the Book Industry Study Group. Kirsop, Wallace. (1979) ‘Literary History and Book Trade History: The Lessons of L’Apparition du livre.’ Australian Journal of French Studies 16: 488–535. Kirsop, Wallace and Meredith Sherlock. (2007) The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison. Melbourne: Centre for the Book, Monash University. Levy, Michelle and Tom Mole. (2017) The Broadview Introduction to Book History. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Literature Compass. (2007) ‘Modern Book History’ special issue, 4.3. www.blackwell-synergy.com/ toc/lico/4/v3. Lyons, Martyn and John Arnold, eds. (2001) A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Mack, Edward. (2010) Manufacturing Modern Japanese Literature: Publishing, Prizes, and the Ascription of Literary Value. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McDonald, Peter. (2006) ‘Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory? PMLA 121.1: 214–28. McGann, Jerome J. (1991) The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McKenzie, D.F. (1986) Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library. McKenzie, D.F. (1992) ‘History of the Book.’ The Book Encompassed: Studies in Twentiethcentury Bibliography. Ed. P. Davison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 290–301. Modern Intellectual History. (2007) Special issue, 4.3. Murphy, Priscilla Coit. (2005) What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Murray, Simone. (2004) Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics. London: Pluto Press. Murray, Simone. (2018) The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pearson, David. (2008) Books as History: The Importance of Books beyond Their Texts. London: British Library. Raven, James. (2017) What is the History of the Book? Cambridge: Polity. Ray Murray, Padmini and Claire Squires. (2013) ‘The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit.’ Book 2.0 3.1: 3–23. Robinson, Solveig C. (2014) The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Rose, Jonathan, ed. (2001) The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Rubin, Joan Shelley. (2003) ‘What Is the History of the History of Books?’ Journal of American History 90.2: 555–75. Shillingsburg, Peter L. (2006) From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sutherland, John. (1988) ‘Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology.’ Critical Inquiry 14.3: 574–89. Travis, Trysh. (2008) ‘The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications.’ Book History 11: 275–300.

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Tuchman, Gaye with Nina E. Fortin. (1989) Edging Women out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change. London: Routledge. Turner, Catherine. (2003) Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. van der Weel, A.H. (2015) ‘Book Studies and the Sociology of Text Technologies.’ Material Moments: Essays in Honour of Gabriele Müller-Oberhäuser. Ed. S. Rosenberg and S. Simon. New York: Peter Lang. 269–82. Winkler, Karen J. (1993) ‘In Electronic Age, Scholars Are Drawn to Study of Print.’ Chronicle of Higher Education 14 Jul.: A6–A8. www.chronicle.com/article/In-ElectronicAge-Scholars/70595. Zimbler, Jarad. (2004) ‘Under Local Eyes: The South African Publishing Context of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe.’ English Studies in Africa 47.1: 47–59.

3

Political economy

Consider, for a moment, the last book you read. You will no doubt be able to recall its title, and very likely its author, but can you name the publishing company that produced it? To take a slightly different tack, you will probably be able to describe the cover design of the last book you read in some detail, but did you even notice the publisher’s colophon (the bibliographical term for the logo) that appeared on the spine and at the bottom of the title page? You are not alone in overlooking such telling details; the vast majority of readers pay no attention to the publishing house that produced the physical book they hold in their hands. Yet, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the title you read, if that particular publishing company did not exist, there is a fair chance that the book you read would not exist either. This is because book publishers, even in the digital era, remain a vital link between authors and readers, shepherding selected books into the public sphere, presenting them in ways that demarcate their target readerships, and significantly influencing the interpretations actual readers make of them. After reading this chapter, as a student of print culture, you should never again read a book without noticing who published it, asking yourself what difference that fact makes, and being able to explain why a book’s publisher matters. From the foregoing it will immediately be apparent that this chapter moves on from the primarily historical approach to the book that dominated the previous two chapters to arrive squarely at the present day. It is centrally concerned with the ‘big picture’ of contemporary international book pub­ lishing (understood chronologically as spanning the late decades of the twentieth century to the present). Its focus is also on how publishing fits into the contemporary media industries more broadly, which, evidently by this point in the twenty-first century, include not only traditional big media conglomerates but also newer digital entrants from the world of information technology and social media. Casting forward, there is a close relationship between this and the following two chapters. Just as medium theory and book history share many assumptions and theoretical orientations to the book, the approaches of political economy and cultural policy are intimately interrelated. As a critical approach to analysing contemporary media systems, political economy identifies problems caused by market structures that governments, in

Political economy

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turn, seek to ameliorate via cultural policy interventions. The former can be viewed as diagnosing shortcomings, and the latter as offering (partial) solutions. This chapter’s big-picture perspective on the handful of firms that over­ whelmingly dominate global English-language book publishing also con­ stitutes essential background to Chapter 5’s analysis of the quite different beliefs driving the independent publishing sector. ‘Indie’ publishing houses exist uneasily between the market realities identified by political economy and the practical assistance provided by governmental cultural policy schemes.

Characteristics of political economy The political economy approach is the oldest of the theoretical movements that gave rise to the modern academic discipline of media studies. As such, political economy traces its intellectual lineage not from history, literary studies or bibliography (as with book history) but from the combination of left-wing social theory, economics and aesthetic philosophy undertaken by the so-called Frankfurt School.1 This highly influential group of German writers and intellectuals, often also termed ‘mass society’ theorists, was concerned with how art and culture functioned in the context of industrial modernity. They were active during the 1930s and 1940s at the Institute for Social Research, a centre affiliated with Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Major figures associated with the group include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin. Given the time and place in which they were writing, coupled with their explicitly Marxist political commitment and the fact many of them were Jewish, after 1933 it became increasingly difficult for them to articulate critiques of the growing power of the Third Reich, and several of the group subsequently emigrated to the United States (although Benjamin committed suicide in Spain in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis). It has to be said though that the avowedly marketoriented and generally right-wing politics of the mid-century United States also proved far from intellectually congenial to the group’s émigrés and several later returned to West Germany. The key insight of the Frankfurt School theorists was that economic structures in industrial societies have cultural effects. To encapsulate the relationship, they proposed an influential ‘base and superstructure’ model to represent how the economic base of society (wealth-holding in the form of land, raw materials, factories and other means of production) produces cultural institutions such as the media, education, religion and the family (see Figure 3.1). This cultural superstructure functions in turn to legitimate and perpetuate the base of material inequality through reassuring the masses that this is how things always have been and necessarily should be. Groundbreaking at the time in terms of aesthetic theory was that the Frankfurt theorists eschewed analysis of any particular cultural artefact (e.g. individual books); instead, they were interested in the system that produced such books (and, by extension, radio programmes, films, recorded music and

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Figure 3.1 Karl Marx was attempting to push back against prevalent nineteenth-century ideas about the moral character of art or its aesthetic autonomy. His influential ‘base and superstructure’ model views culture as first and foremost economically determined. For political economy analysis, the first questions to ask of any cultural phenomenon are: who controls wealth? Who is responsible for creating it? And how does value circulate? (Alyxr CC BY-SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

other early twentieth-century cultural phenomena). Theirs, in short, was a macro-oriented, systemic approach to media analysis. A second key aspect of Frankfurt School philosophy was its explicitly critical orientation, in particular its focus on social inequality. Rather than valorising selected artistic movements or works, the theorists argued that access to cul­ tural products, employment in the cultural industries and thus representation of certain groups within the dominant culture are highly restricted according to class. Resultantly, working-class individuals are least likely to recognise their own lives in the products of a capitalist ‘culture industry’ bent upon anaesthetising them to their politico-economic subordination through the

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cultivation of ‘false consciousness’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993). While political economy began as an explicitly Marxist politico-cultural critique, in the wake of communism’s late twentieth-century collapse it would be hard to find card-carrying Marxists among the ranks of contemporary political economists. Such scholars now generally seek to improve democratic struc­ tures, not overturn them. Nevertheless, political economy in its current, more muted, social democratic forms maintains a keen interest in the ‘real-world’ effects of culture in terms of business behaviour, employment patterns and diversity of cultural output.

Book publishing stakeholders The contemporary publishing world is best understood as an ecosystem, in­ corporating many stakeholders whose interests are frequently complementary, although they may also pull in opposite directions. (This systemic under­ standing of the book world, with its echoes of Darnton’s Communications Circuit, represents a rare point of confluence between the book history and political economy approaches.) Authors have the most direct and obvious stake in the success of a published book: they seek public esteem, career ad­ vancement and (modest) financial returns. Publishers also have a clear in­ vestment in a book’s success: they require revenue sufficient to make a contribution to overheads, as well as enhancement of the firm’s market profile or cultural prestige. Similarly, editors and agents who work on manuscripts see books as vectors to job security (such as it is) and professional satisfaction. From here the ecosystem expands to encompass book retailers (who seek a profit on sales and possibly some contribution to local cultural scenes), cultural policy entities, such as arts funding bodies, writers’ festivals and authors’ as­ sociations (whose interest is often in books as markers of geographic and cultural identity), and even politicians (who regard books as contributing to local employment, exports sales, tax revenue and educational attainment, while also providing good photo opportunities when awarding prizes to ce­ lebrity authors). It is vital to include readers in this cursory sketch of the book ecosystem, as they are the ultimate destination of all writing and publishing efforts. Readers desire entertainment and possibly self-cultivation from books (especially literary fiction) as well as, increasingly, opportunities for socialisa­ tion, whether in the form of physical book clubs or their online equivalents, or via personal branding on social media. Finally, academics are deeply invested in book publishing, whether as authors of books that will contribute to their promotion prospects, as teachers hoping to devise curricula through ‘settable’ texts, or as reviewers seeking to keep abreast of developments in their dis­ cipline. Most striking in considering this diverse array of investments is how deeply intertwined commercial and cultural motivations are in all sectors of the book world. We are back at the dual sense of the book as both a physical object that may be bought or sold as well as a vector for communicating ideas, with all

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their complex implications for human identity and self-knowledge. In fact, this culture/commerce dyad, first explicitly identified by sociologists Lewis Coser, Charles Kadushin and Walter Powell in their study of US book publishing (1982), resembles Chinese philosophy’s yin and yang symbol: two opposing forces are locked into an irresolvable, mutually constitutive dialectic. There can be no conceptualising one element without the other, but reconciling the two in terms of an individual’s practice is commonly fraught with difficulty.

Structure of global book publishing A snapshot of current global book publishing shows it divided into roughly three sectors of vastly different scale. Collectively, a handful of multinational firms – commonly based in either New York City or London, but with branch offices in myriad national markets – overwhelmingly dominate global English-language book publishing. This ‘Big 5’ (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan) have achieved such size through an ongoing process of merger and acquisition of formerly independent houses. They are now commonly themselves subsidiaries of vast media conglomerates with holdings spanning many media platforms (such as Bertelsmann, News Corp, Holtzbrinck, etc.). Dwarfed by this first sector is a second group comprising independent publishers and university presses that seek to carve out a precarious existence in the cracks overlooked by the Big 5. These ‘independents’ are sometimes multinationals themselves (such as Oxford University Press) and often rely on the Big 5 for distribution of their books to retail outlets. Finally, there is the least prestigious but rapidly expanding selfpublishing sector, spanning everything from traditional vanity presses (where authors pay for hard copies of their books to be produced), through digitally enabled self-publishers (such as Xlibris, Scribd, Smashwords, etc.), to colla­ borative writing platforms for fanfiction or crowdfunded publishing (such as Wattpad and Unbound). This chapter’s focus is on the first of these sectors, the conglomerates, Chapter 5 examines the distinctive rationale and practices of the independents, while the disruptive effects of digital publishing initiatives are discussed in Chapter 11. Such schematic representations of the con­ temporary publishing field are always somewhat subjective. US literary scholar Mark McGurl, in his diagram mapping ‘Institutional Environments of Contemporary US Fiction, 2016; or, locating Amazon.com’ (2016: 450; see Figure 3.2), subordinates both the ‘Big 5 Publishers’ and ‘small presses’ to ‘AMAZON.COM’, such is the online firm’s stranglehold over book retailing, reviewing and now also publication via its Kindle Direct Publishing (451). How did this happen?

In economic terms, a market effectively controlled by a handful of firms is known as an oligopoly (a diluted form of monopoly, which is domination by a single firm; see Bagdikian, 2004). Yet, book publishing was not always

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Figure 3.2 Mark McGurl’s diagram attempts to contextualise contemporary fiction not only within literary traditions but against prevailing cultural, commercial, political and technological landscapes, asking, ‘What does the institutional ground of con­ temporary literary production actually look like?’ Amazon.com looms large here – as significant a force on contemporary fiction as university MFA programmes. (Mark McGurl, “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 77, no. 3, p. 451. Copyright, 2016, University of Washington. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyrightholder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu)

this way. During the first half of the twentieth century, Anglophone book publishing was dominated by so-called ‘gentlemen publishers’ working at cottage-industry scale. These typically family-run firms, based on the ‘& Sons’ model, existed on low capital often supplemented by private incomes, and regarded publishing as a cultural service. Less benevolently, they were also indisputably male-centric and suffused with an exclusionary class consciousness, as the term itself suggests (Athill, 2000: 56). However, from the 1960s onwards, and accelerating throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the book industry began its tran­ sition to highly concentrated ownership as large publishing companies acquired or merged with smaller houses. The upshot was that ever more publishing imprints came to be held in fewer hands. The new owners of publishing companies often had primary investments in quite different industries (e.g. electronics, computing or even armaments; see Long, 1985–6; Wirtén, 2007). As formerly independent

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houses were subsumed into multinationals, existing vestigially as imprints, midsized houses became increasingly rare (although exceptions such as Bloomsbury and Text indicate later resilience in the sector). The high-water mark of book industry consolidation to date was the Penguin/Random House merger, an­ nounced in October 2012. US-based Random House bought UK-based Penguin to form an uber-conglomerate with a commanding 30 per cent share of global English-language publishing, reducing the previous ‘Big 6’ of book publishing to the current Big 5 (at least at the time of writing). The merger was widely in­ terpreted as a defensive response to the eBook’s market incursion, as acquisition represents one of the few ways publishers can achieve growth in an otherwise static market (Steiner, 2018: 123). The implications of such concentrated ownership structures for a society’s marketplace of ideas are troubling: if an ever-smaller number of firms controls most access points to publication and competes to supply a mainstream market with imitative bestsellers, how will genuinely innovative writing break through to find its readership (Miller, 1997; Schiffrin, 1998, 2000, 2010; see also Chapter 5)? Louise Adler, head of Melbourne University Publishing at the time of the Penguin Random House merger, articulated this concern as both director of an independent publishing house and a publisher located outside the New York–London power axis: Sales are down and the gap between mass-market titles such as Fifty Shades of Grey or [popular fiction author] Bryce Courtenay and the rest is growing. The capacity to publish heartland Australian books is increas­ ingly difficult. The space in which authors, readers and bookshops can flourish is narrowing. Those of us committed to new Australian writing will find the space is narrowing. (Quoted in Steger, 2012: 15) This drawing of connections between the economic structures of the book industry and their cultural effects bears all the hallmarks of the political economy approach, although note that Adler does not use the term (for an­ other example, see Merrick, 2020). This highlights the importance of theo­ retical and methodological self-awareness for print culture analysis: discussions of the book industry rarely declare their theoretical orientation explicitly, especially if their platform is the general media. It is the aim of this part of the book to equip you with the intellectual tools you need to identify which orientation is being adopted even (or especially) when it is not stated upfront. Publishing’s problematic economics

In part, book publishing exhibits a highly concentrated market structure because of the industry’s intrinsically arcane economics, which frequently baffle outsiders and have caused journalist Ken Auletta to dub it ‘the im­ possible business’ (1997). On the supply side of the equation, the traditional

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book publishing model involves high outlay in the form of large print runs but slow returns as revenue dribbles in from books sold through at retail outlets. Compounding these cash-flow problems are the realities of high distribution costs to service often geographically large national markets, and the presence in the value chain of many middlemen (wholesalers, distributors, booksellers), each of whom eats into the publisher’s profits. Most staggering of all to business people from outside the book trade is the practice of ‘returns’, by which booksellers are credited for unsold stock that is returned to the publisher for warehousing, pulping (more outlay) or remaindering. The demand side of the equation is hardly any rosier. The chief unknown is what the public actually wants to buy at any time, given that reading fashions are so unpredictable and subject to politico-cultural serendipity. Even if these could be forecast with any precision, print book publishing requires a long production lead time, and even digital publishing requires the sunk-cost investment of often years of the writer’s life. To some extent, authors with established market profiles (known in the trade as a ‘platform’) offset risk by demonstrating existing market demand. It is for this reason that publishers’ acquisition and marketing decisions are frequently based on ‘comp title’ (i.e. comparable title) data: that is, sales figures for an author’s previous books or titles by other authors that targeted a similar readership (McGrath, 2019). Such attempts at rational quantification are, however, ultimately only fig leaves cloaking the randomness of publishing decisionmaking. The accountants who wield power in the global media conglom­ erates find such quixotism difficult to comprehend. The clash of the two cultures is brilliantly summed up in the strategic plan editor Diana Athill submitted to her new corporate masters when Time Inc. acquired the independent publisher André Deutsch in the 1970s: ‘What we will be publishing in five years’ time depends on what’s going on in the head of some unknown person probably sitting in a garret, and we don’t know the address of that garret’ (2000: 109). Multinationals versus independents

Because of political economy’s Marxist intellectual origins, critics employing this approach frequently have an extremely jaundiced view of corporate media’s cultural effects – a tendency dubbed ‘elitist pessimism’ (Curran, 1996b: 270). For that reason, it is important to give an even-handed account of the various pros and cons of publishing with – or working for – both the mul­ tinational and the independent sectors of the publishing industry (see also Chapter 5). Multinational-owned houses are, indisputably, always under pressure to attend to the bottom line, but their size and capitalisation mean they gen­ erally have better infrastructure and support systems and are able to invest significant resources in marketing and publicity for their lead titles.

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Figure 3.3 The book business reimagined as purely industrial process: words and wood pulp go in, printed books pop out, and puzzled publishers are left scratching their heads trying to sell them. The illustration’s teetering piles of warehoused books are not far off reality: around 30–40 per cent of copies shipped to retail outlets are returned to publishers within months to be sold off as ‘remaindered’ stock or pulped, then the process begins again. Illustration by David Follett (www.watermarkcreative.co)

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Commissioning editors in such firms frequently have passionately held views on literary worth, and champion these, but titles are signed up only after approval by an acquisitions committee for which sales forecasts will be a determining factor. From the author’s point of view, the Big 5 publishers often have better design, production and publicity resources, as well as the market profile to ‘push’ new titles, especially if they have already expended money on an advance. In terms of working at such firms, salaries and benefits across the whole publishing sector are shockingly low given the qualifica­ tions and experience required, but they are marginally better in corporate publishing than in the independent sector, where an ethos of self-sacrifice and volunteerism frequently prevails (Forge, 2018; Patch, 2019; Segal, 2020; see also Chapter 5). Finally, in terms of imprint identity, multinational houses often play a double game: when packaging and designing books they are keen to cultivate unique identities for their various imprints, the better to aid reader discoverability (Michael, 2019: 8). But in financial terms, most im­ prints exist as mere cost centres within a single, overarching corporate en­ terprise. It can be an illuminating exercise to scrutinise the reverse title-page details of your most recently read book. Who is the ultimate corporate owner behind a seemingly independent colophon?

Book publishing as a media industry As indicated earlier, consolidation of book publishing had been underway since the mid-twentieth century, but during the 1980s media conglomerates that already had holdings in film, television, newspapers and magazines started to purchased book companies. Their aim was to achieve the integration of corporate properties on multiple axes: vertically (i.e. owning different stages in the production chain for a media property), horizontally (i.e. owing multiple outlets in the same media format) and diagonally (i.e. owning media platforms across different industry sectors). As the internet became mainstream from the early 1990s and media formats of all kinds converted to digital technology (albeit at differing rates), the logic of diagonal integration assumed the new mantra of ‘synergy’ – the idea that a single media property or brand can be parlayed across multiple platforms simultaneously, all of which cross-promote one another (Wirtén, 2004; Murray, 2006, 2007). Yet book publishing has always fitted awkwardly into such forecasts of corporate nirvana, rarely achieving profit margins above 5 per cent, which begs the question why media conglomerates continue to acquire publishing houses or even create them. The answer is that publishers possess rich content assets: their backlists include classic and/or bestselling titles with proven brand recognition and often fierce consumer loyalty. I have elsewhere dubbed this strategy to parlay success in the book form into spinoff products in multiple other formats ‘content streaming’ (Murray, 2006, 2007). It illustrates how contemporary book publishing no longer constitutes a self-sufficient industry but rather can only be understood within the context of the media industries as a whole. Viewed in this

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light, books may serve as content generators (for film adaptations, television series and computer games) or as content packagers whereby screen-originated content is reformatted for print consumption (e.g. tie-in editions, novelisations, ‘makingof’ books, companion volumes and the like). Beyond this, intellectual property generated in book form can be licensed to third-party merchandisers to produce tie-in commodities, of which the Fifty Shades of Grey wine range represents either the zenith or nadir, depending on your political economic perspective (Reed, 2019).2

Implications of media convergence for books These industrial and technological shifts in the media landscape had trans­ formative implications for book publishers and their staff. Historically, pub­ lishers had run their publishing lists on the basis of cross-subsidisation: reliably commercial books of perhaps negligible cultural merit generated profit that could be spent on culturally worthwhile titles that might sell only in tiny amounts but garnered prestige for the house. By contrast, in the economic rationalist wake of conglomerate takeovers, each book was recast as its own profit centre, meaning every title must cover its costs and make a contribution to company overheads to justify its place on the list. In economic parlance, there were to be no more free riders. US publisher André Schiffrin was among the most prominent critics of this new dispensation, remarking astringently that publishing used to be ‘run by its editors rather than its accountants’ (2000: 81). He especially deplored how all rules of commercial restraint were suddenly waived when signing large ad­ vances for celebrity-authored titles, many of which subsequently failed to earn back their costs and had to be written off (2000: 80–1). Belt-tightening among the lower ranks meant that it became harder for new authors to break into print, as editors could not afford to allow them to hone their craft with early titles before hopefully hitting the critical/commercial jackpot with a later, more accomplished work (Knox, 2005). Authorial careers either had to start big or never got off the ground in an all-or-nothing gamble. Publisher Hilary McPhee highlighted the deleterious effects that this new model had on literary culture at large: What has changed is the way the money works and the fact that working with writers editorially is not considered smart business any more. It doesn’t fit current notions of efficient corporate structures. And most writers, upon whose copyrights the whole edifice rests, do not fit them either … Book publishing has become part of the media … What was once called the publishing house is no longer. Many publishing corpora­ tions suffer from a kind of giantism and are not much more than marketing and sales machines. The old maxim rules: the reader is a mug and the writer is a commodity – Sell 50,000 copies before anyone discovers they’re not much good. And individual creativity and relationships are

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devalued, marketing rules and the workplace could be trading in stocks or cosmetics rather than in those slippery things called words. (2001: 284–5) Industry responses to the corporate imperative have taken several forms, not all of them predictable or pointing in the same direction. Publishing’s new bottom-line fixation saw a surge of author poaching, whereby successful writers are lured to rival houses with offers of more money or better terms, as well as author stealing, whereby editors take their lists of authors with them when they move to new firms. The editing profession became less secure, with editors tending to work with authors on a project-by-project basis, rather than mentoring each author’s development throughout their career (see Chapter 6). Seizing their advantage, literary agents moved opportunistically into the roles editors had formerly fulfilled in authors’ lives – consistent point of contact, provider of moral support, creative sounding board and financial adviser – for a hefty 15–20 per cent commission (Murray, 2011). Such legal and financial advice was newly necessary as book contracts lengthened in the wake of synergistic strategies, with ballooning clauses for socalled ‘subsidiary’ rights (covering film, television, radio and stage adaptations, and newer audiobook, merchandising and digital rights; see Owen, 2014). Publishers began to reconceptualise their whole line of business with the realisation that book content matters more than the material book (Kirschenbaum, 2020: 7–8). Given this, it became vital to control intellectual property rights in order to construct cross-platform franchises. This led to the appearance in book contracts of ultra-expansive rights terms facetiously dubbed ‘Star Wars clauses’ because they committed authors to assign rights to all versions of their books in ‘any form known or hereafter invented’ (pre­ sumably even in galaxies far, far away). It did not help that, in the middle of such developments, publishers learnt that they did not in fact own the digital rights to books contracted before the advent of digital technologies, as these were deemed to reside with the author or their estate (see the Harry Potter eBook rights issue behind the Pottermore web-portal, as outlined in the Introduction).3 This left publishers fighting on two fronts: scrambling to shore up rights retrospectively with authors’ estates and wrangling with current authors’ increasingly assertive literary agents for transfer of rights under new book contracts. With the addition of millennial background noise about ‘the death of the book’, publishers found themselves facing a perfect storm.

Pros and cons of the political economy approach If you seek to understand the contours and dynamics of the contemporary book world, a political economy perspective is invaluable, providing a con­ temporary focus that book history and medium theory rarely attempt (Curran, 1996a: 126). Political economy’s default international frame of reference contextualises publishing activities undertaken within specific nation states,

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illuminating how book content is now generated, traded, marketed, retailed and repurposed on a global scale. Its origins in Marxist theory mean that political economy is always scrutinising the interrelationship between eco­ nomics and culture, highlighting the vast disparity in market power between the Big 5 and independent houses and pondering how that imbalance maps onto the range of available books. It is also strongly normative as it asks whether the current state of the contemporary book world is the way things should be. Are there viable alternatives, whether print-based or digital? If this much gatekeeping power is concentrated in so few hands, which books are we not seeing, which ideas are excluded from the international conversation, which great works are rejected and silenced simply because they are deemed too left-field? Equally, though, this attention to the barriers marketplace structures place in the way of human communication can err on the side of economic determinism and cultural pessimism (Curran, 1996a: 131–2). Critics of political economy, especially those from cultural studies, have counselled some optimism: innovation in publishing frequently occurs on the in­ dependent fringes and conglomerate publishers have been eager to co-opt such developments when they demonstrate success. This might be con­ strued as predatory behaviour, but change in multinational publishing practice is evidently possible. The rather conspiratorial tone of much po­ litical economy work (see the Outfoxed documentary, below) under­ estimates the sheer unpredictability of the book market. Could anyone have forecast that adult colouring books would comprise a major segment of non-fiction bestsellers in the second decade of the new millennium? Moreover, the Frankfurt School theorists were flatly dismissive of popular culture, refusing to countenance that a popular music form like jazz might give pleasure to its listeners, or that it emerged from and subsequently sustained a powerful African-American cultural consciousness (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993). Likewise, contemporary critics of multinational pub­ lishing bemoan its deleterious effects on literary works without considering that even high-brow readers frequently enjoy ‘trashy’ reads too (Miller, 1997). Cultural studies scholar and sociologist of reading Elizabeth Long (1985–6) has reminded her political economy counterparts that the vast majority of the book market has always comprised popular genres, not canonical literature, hence such critics’ alarm might be more a reflection of their own eroding cultural authority than any measurable drop in artistic standards. Finally, political economy’s emphasis on the scale and financial might of the Big 5 can induce a kind of fatalism. The problems of corporate culture are easy to adumbrate; the harder task is to propose viable solutions or at best devise constructive interventions (‘Smorgasbords Don’t Have Bottoms: Publishing in the 2010s’, 2020). For that, the cultural policy approach outlined in Chapter 4 has the edge, suggesting concrete publicsector policies that governments can implement to ensure diversity in the bookish marketplace of ideas.

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Learning exercises Imagine you are an executive at a multinational media conglomerate looking to franchise a particular piece of book-derived content across as many in-house media formats as possible. Consult websites such as Columbia Journalism Review’s Who Owns What database or the Media Reform Coalition’s ‘Who Owns the UK Media?’ chart for details of Big 5-owned publishing imprints and their ultimate conglomerate owners.4 Hint: highly commercial, synergistic works such as The Da Vinci Code (2003), Twilight (2005) and Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) respond especially well to such political economy analysis. In 2013 UK pop star and former Smiths front man Morrissey signed a book deal for his memoir – portentously titled Autobiography – with Penguin, but only on the condition that they publish it under their Penguin Classics imprint.5 What difference does the imprint make to the design, marketing and reception of a title? Try doing some research into how the resulting book (and its incongruous colophon) were received by UK reviewers.

Notes 1 The general term ‘political economy’ has even earlier origins in politics and economics. It emerged in the eighteenth century with attempts by economic-philosophical writers such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus to account for how goods were distributed within nation states. Importantly, such philosophers were strongly concerned with normative judgements (i.e. how economies should operate for social benefit), a dimension subsequently lost with the rise in the later twentieth century of so-called ‘neoclassical’ economics (Mosco, 2009). 2 ‘Wine plays an important role in Fifty Shades of Grey, reflecting the sensuality that per­ vades every encounter between Anastasia and Christian … so helping to create the blends Red Satin and White Silk felt like a natural extension of the Fifty Shades Trilogy’ writes E.L. James (http://www.fiftyshadeswine.co.uk/). 3 See also the New York District Court’s decision in the landmark Random House v. Rosetta Books case (2001). 4 www.cjr.org/resources; www.mediareform.org.uk/resources/media-activist-toolkit. Sociologist Laura J. Miller also compiled a detailed ‘Who Owns Whom Guide to the Book Publishing Industry’ (2008) that is useful for the recent history of publishing conglomeration (http://people.brandeis.edu/~lamiller/publishers.html). 5 www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/04/morrissey-smiths-memoir-published-penguinclassics. 6 www.imdb.com/title/tt0418038/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1.

Online resources •

The documentary Outfoxed (2004) critically examines the influence of media conglomerate News Corp on US democracy, specifically the role of the Fox News channel in the lead-up to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.6 It contains a useful snapshot of Rupert Murdoch’s trans-media holdings, including in book

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•

publishing. The film-makers adopt a quintessentially political economy approach, right down to the ominous music. The Books of the Century website contains bestseller lists for every year of the twentieth century, subdivided into fiction, non-fiction, critically acclaimed/historically significant and Book-of-the-Month Club categories (www.booksofthecentury.com/). Its data intriguingly highlight the discrepancy between contemporary bestseller lists and retrospectively created canons, demonstrating how the book industries have always been far broader than literary fiction alone.

References and further reading Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. (1993 [1945]) ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.’ Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge. 29–43. Athill, Diana. (2000) Stet: A Memoir. London: Granta Books. Auletta, Ken. (1997) ‘The Impossible Business.’ New Yorker 6 Oct.: 50–63. Baensch, Robert E. (1988–9) ‘Consolidation in Publishing and Allied Industries.’ Book Research Quarterly 4.4: 6–14. Bagdikian, Ben H. (2004) The New Media Monopoly. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bellaigue, Eric de. (2004) British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s. London: British Library Publishing. Brouillette, Sarah. (2007) Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, Stephen, ed. (2006) Consuming Books: The Marketing and Consumption of Literature. London: Routledge. Compaine, Benjamin M. (1979) Who Owns the Media: Concentration of Ownership in the Mass Communications Industry. White Plains, NY: Knowledge Industry Publications. Coser, Lewis A., Charles Kadushin and Walter W. Powell. (1982) Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crosthwaite, Paul. (2019) The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curran, James. (1996a) ‘Rethinking Mass Communications.’ Cultural Studies and Communications. Ed. James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine. London: Arnold. 119–65. Curran, James. (1996b) ‘The New Revisionism in Mass Communication Research: A Reappraisal.’ Cultural Studies and Communications. Ed. James Curran, David Morley and Valerie Walkerdine. London: Arnold. 256–78. Delany, Paul. (2002) Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Epstein, Jason. (1963) ‘A Criticism of Commercial Publishing.’ The American Reading Public: What It Reads, Why It Reads. New York: Bowker. xx–xx. Epstein, Jason. (2002) Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future. New York: Norton. Feather, John. (1993) ‘Book Publishing in Britain: An Overview.’ Media, Culture and Society 15.2: 167–81. Forge, Samantha. (2018) ‘Australian Publishing’s Pay Problem.’ Kill Your Darlings 13 Dec. www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/australian-publishings-pay-problem/. Gardiner, Juliet. (2000) ‘“What Is an Author?” Contemporary Publishing Discourse and the Author Figure.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 16.1: 63–76.

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Geiser, Elizabeth, ed. (1985) The Business of Book Publishing: Papers by Practitioners. Boulder, CO: Westview. Gomery, Douglas. (1996) ‘Towards a New Media Economics.’ Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Ed. D. Bordwell and N. Carroll. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 407–18. Graham, Gordon and Richard Abel, eds. (1996) The Book in the United States Today. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Greco, Albert. (1995) ‘Mergers and Acquisitions in the US Book Industry, 1960–1989.’ International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Philip G. Altbach and Edith S. Hoshino. New York: Garland. 229–42. Greco, Albert N. (2000) ‘Market Concentration Levels in the US Consumer Book Industry: 1995–1996.’ Journal of Cultural Economics 24.4: 321–36. Greco, Albert N. (2005) The Book Publishing Industry. 2nd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Greco, Albert N., Clara E. Rodriguez and Robert M. Wharton. (2006) The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books. Gunelius, Susan. (2008) Harry Potter: The Story of a Global Business Phenomenon. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hackett, Alice Payne and James Henry Burke. (1978) 80 Years of Best Sellers: 1895–1975. New York: Bowker. Haugland, Ann. (1994) ‘Books as Culture/Books as Commerce: An Analysis of the Text and Format of the New York Times Book Review.’ Journalism Quarterly 71.4: 787–99. Herman, Edward S. and Robert W. McChesney. (1997) The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London: Cassell. Huggan, Graham. (1997) ‘Prizing “Otherness”: A Short History of the Booker.’ Studies in the Novel 29.3: 412–33. Kirschenbaum, Matthew, et al. (2020) Book.Files: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry. College Park, MD, and New York: University of Maryland and the Book Industry Study Group. Knox, Malcolm. (2005) ‘The Ex Factor: BookScan and the Death of the Australian Novelist.’ The Monthly May: 51–55. Kobrak, Fred and Beth Luey, eds. (1992) The Structure of International Publishing in the 1990s. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Lacy, Dan. (1970) ‘The Economics of Publishing, or Adam Smith and Literature.’ The Sociology of Art and Literature: A Reader. Ed. M.C. Albrecht, J.H. Barnett and M. Griff. London: Duckworth. xx–xx. Lacy, Dan. (1992) ‘From Family Enterprise to Global Conglomerate.’ Media Studies Journal 6.3: 1–13. Lane, M. (1970) ‘Books and Their Publishers.’ Media Sociology: A Reader. Ed. J. Tunstall. London: Constable. xx–xx. Lathey, Gillian. (2005) ‘The Travels of Harry: International Marketing and the Translation of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Books.’ The Lion and the Unicorn 29.2: 141–151. Levin, Martin P. (1996) ‘The Positive Role of Large Corporations in US Book Publishing.’ Logos 7.1: 127–37. Long, Elizabeth. (1985–6) ‘The Cultural Meaning of Concentration in Publishing.’ Book Research Quarterly 1.4: 3–27. Martens, Marianne. (2016) Publishers, Readers, and Digital Engagement. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McDonald, Peter. (2006) ‘Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?’ PMLA 121.1: 214–28.

68 Theories and methodologies McGrath, Laura B. (2019) ‘Comping White.’ Los Angeles Review of Books 21 Jan. https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/comping-white/#!. McGurl, Mark. (2016) ‘Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon.’ Modern Language Quarterly 77.3: 447–71. McPhee, Hilary. (2001) Other People’s Words. Sydney: Picador. McQuivey, J. and M. McQuivey. (1998) ‘Is It a Small Publishing World after All? Media Monopolization of the Children’s Book Market, 1992–1995.’ Journal of Media Economics 11.4: 35–48. Meikle, Kyle. (2019) Adaptations in the Franchise Era: 2001–16. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Merrick, John. (2020) ‘Radical Publishing in a Pandemic.’ Tribune 14 May. https:// tribunemag.co.uk/2020/05/radical-publishing-in-a-pandemic. Michael, Rose. (2019) ‘Brand(ing) Independence: In Praise of Small Presses.’ Logos 29.4: 7–13. Miller, Mark Crispin. (1997) ‘The Crushing Power of Big Publishing.’ The Nation 17 Mar.: 11–18. Milner, Andrew. (2005) Literature, Culture and Society. 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge. Moran, Joe. (2000) Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. London: Pluto. Mosco, Vincent. (2009) The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal. 2nd edn. London: Sage. Murray, Simone. (2006) ‘Content Streaming.’ Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, Volume 3: 1946–2005. Ed. Craig Munro, Robyn Sheahan-Bright and John Curtain. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 126–31. Murray, Simone. (2007) ‘Generating Content: Book Publishing as a Component Media Industry.’ Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed.David Carter and Anne Galligan. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 51–67. Murray, Simone. (2011) The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Nel, Philip. (2005) ‘Is There a Text in This Advertising Campaign? Literature, Marketing and Harry Potter.’ The Lion and the Unicorn 29.2: 236–67. Norris, Sharon. (2006) ‘The Booker Prize: A Bourdieusian Perspective.’ Journal for Cultural Research 10.2: 139–58. Owen, Lynette. (2014) Selling Rights. 7th edn. London: Routledge. Patch, Bethany (2019) ‘The Book Industry Isn’t Dead: That’s Just an Excuse to Keep Salaries Low.’ Guardian 29 Mar. www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/thebook-industry-isnt-dead-thats-just-an-excuse-to-keep-salaries-low. Powell, Walter W. (1980) ‘Competition versus Concentration in the Book Trade.’ Journal of Communication 30.2: 89–97. Reed, Abigail. (2019) ‘Fifty Shades of Grey: Representations and Merchandising.’ Political Economy of Communication 7.2: 60–78. www.polecom.org/index.php/polecom/article/ view/112/329. Schiffrin, André. (1998) ‘The Corporatization of Publishing.’ Corporate Power in the United States. Ed. Joseph Sora. New York: Wilson. 145–52. Schiffrin, André. (2000) The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London and New York: Verso. Schiffrin, André. (2010) Words and Money. New York: Verso.

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Segal, Corinne. (2020) ‘Are We Seeing a New Movement to Organize Publishing?’ Literary Hub 5 May. https://lithub.com/are-we-seeing-a-new-movement-to-organize-publishing/. Smith, Anthony. (1991) The Age of Behemoths: The Globalization of Mass Media Firms. New York: Priority Press. ‘Smorgasbords Don’t Have Bottoms: Publishing in the 2010s.’ (2020) n+1 36. https:// nplusonemag.com/issue-36/the-intellectual-situation/smorgasbords-dont-have-bottoms/. Solotaroff, Ted. (1987) ‘The Literary–Industrial Complex.’ New Republic 8 Jun.: 28–45. Squires, Claire. (2007) Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Steger, Jason. (2012) ‘Surviving Publishing’s Perfect Storm.’ Saturday Age 1 Dec.: Insight, 15. Steiner, Ann. (2018) ‘The Global Book: Micropublishing, Conglomerate Production, and Digital Market Structures.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 34.1: 118–32. Sutherland, J.A. (1978) Fiction and the Fiction Industry. London: Athlone Press. Taxel, Joel. (2002) ‘Children’s Literature at the Turn of the Century: Toward a Political Economy of the Publishing Industry.’ Research in the Teaching of English 37.2: 145–97. ‘The Harry Potter Franchise.’ (2010) In Media Res special issue, 15–19 Nov. http:// mediacommons.org/imr/theme-week/2010/33/harry-potter-franchise-november-1519-2010. Thompson, John B. (2005) Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John B. (2010) Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Polity. Todd, Richard. (2006) ‘Literary Fiction and the Book Trade.’ A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. James F. English. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell. 23–50. Weber, Daniel. (2000) ‘Culture or Commerce? Symbolic Boundaries in French and American Book Publishing.’ Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States. Ed. Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 127–47. Whiteside, Thomas. (1981) The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. (2004) No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. (2007) ‘The Global Market 1970–2000: Producers.’ A Companion to the History of the Book. Ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Oxford: Blackwell. 395–405.

4

Cultural policy

One of the book format’s most beguiling and enduring qualities is its ability to foster the illusion that an author is speaking straight to you as reader in perfect, mind-to-mind communion. As Chapter 1 on medium theory explored, this creation of readerly interiority is one of the most significant effects of the written medium. But the seemingly untrammelled intimacy of this mental relationship is, book historians are quick to point out, always a confection; in truth, many intermediaries are responsible for editing, proofreading, designing, illustrating, binding, marketing, selling and reviewing a book long before it gets into the reader’s hands. Experientially we might know of these sequential interventions but our reading protocols, especially for fiction, tune them out the better to preserve print culture’s conversational, even confessional, tone. Among these many book-world intermediaries, one especially tends to be routinely elided by readers: the state. Scholars of literature focus on the state’s relationship to books mostly when it manifests in its most brutally proscriptive manner – namely, in acts of censorship, about which there exists a whole subfield of literary-historical research (Sutherland, 1982; Burt, 1994; Morrison and Watkins, 2006; McDonald, 2009; Malik, 2009; Moore, 2012, 2015; Barbian, 2013; Bradshaw and Potter, 2013; Darnton, 2014). However, state actors – whether at local, regional, national or even supranational levels – are also potent enablers of book culture. Conscious that excessively concentrated markets tend to reduce bookish diversity, governments of all stripes have intervened in the book world via cultural policy measures: that is, governmental decisions to subsidise, protect or otherwise promote local book production, distribution and consumption to achieve desired socio-political ends. Hence the state can – and manifestly does – positively impact the book ecosystem, funding writers and publishers to produce books, boosting those books’ chances of international circulation, and encouraging reader encounters with specific books.

How should the arts be funded? There is broad consensus across the political spectrum that books, reading and culture generally are desirable public goods. After all, it is difficult to imagine

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any contemporary government anywhere seeking to render their population illiterate, less educated or oblivious to their national past (however construed). The bone of contention, however, is how should the arts be funded and, specifically, what is the proper extent of government’s role in promoting cultural goods? Broadly speaking, there are two poles of the cultural policy debate. For ease of understanding, we may term these the ‘free-market’ model and the ‘state-intervention’ model. With the last chapter’s discussion of the political economy of global book publishing in mind, we might take the free-market model as the (increasingly) default position. This worldview, commonly associated with political parties on the right of the spectrum, asserts that an unfettered market is the best arbiter of value for all goods, cultural or otherwise. The economic laws of supply (i.e. product availability) and demand (i.e. consumer desire) should be balanced only by the price mechanism, and governments should not ‘intervene’ in the marketplace in attempts to ‘pick winners’. The touchstone of such political rhetoric is ‘consumer sovereignty’: that is, individual, rational, self-maximising consumers are the best arbiters of what they want, and should not be preached to by an infantilising ‘nanny state’ intent upon dictating what they ought to like. The free-market position is especially hostile to cultural nationalist arguments that seek to privilege locally made cultural products for reasons of national identity-formation, deeming such measures market-distorting ‘cultural protectionism’. If consumers’ box-office behaviours, for example, demonstrate that they prefer Hollywood blockbusters to locally made art films, so be it. The sovereign consumer has spoken with their wallet. The opposite end of this ideological spectrum is occupied by the stateinterventionist position common among left-leaning political parties, although in truth such positions range from moderate, centrist forms of intervention to far-left arguments that see the arts as a major plank of government business. Proponents of cultural policy measures mount essentially political-economic arguments that cultural commodities are produced in circumstances of ‘market failure’: that is, theoretically ‘free’ markets have in reality become so con­ centrated that an oligopoly of suppliers produces an undesirably narrow range of goods. For a stark visual encapsulation of such global information im­ balances, consult the Worldmapper website’s chart of ‘Books Published’ by nation.1 Distorting the familiar world map to enlarge the landmass of highexporting countries and shrink the area of low-exporting countries, the resulting map depicts a grossly bloated Western Europe, China and Japan, whereas sub-Saharan Africa is reduced to almost nothing (except for a dis­ proportionately sized South Africa). The so-called ‘level playing field’ of in­ ternational book culture is revealed as a fiction of economics textbooks. Particularly in countries not speaking the world’s dominant language of English, cultural nationalist measures are frequently enacted to preserve the national tongue and to nurture the broader culture’s uniqueness (e.g. the French gov­ ernment has long subsidised local film production as well as imposing import and exhibition quotas on foreign films; see Messerlin and Parc, 2017).

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Cultural nationalist arguments frequently laud the importance of books (a less thoroughly industrialised art form than cinema, perhaps) as talismans of national identity, arguing for embedding of local writing, publishing and reading initiatives in the school system as essential for educating new citizens (Carter and Ferres, 2001). Such cultural nationalist positions have achieved broad political consensus, especially in post-colonial nations (e.g. Canada, Australia, India, Ireland and New Zealand), in devolving or semi-autonomous regions of nation states (e.g. Quebec, Scotland and Wales) and among ethnic subgroups who feel their identity is insufficiently recognised by the dominant culture (e.g. First Nations populations). Among such groups, bookish consumption is not in itself viewed as sufficient to sustain community identity; unless the print culture is con­ trolled by the group concerned, and emerges from the group, it cannot adequately express the identity of that group. The early twentieth-century Australian author Stella Miles Franklin – who left a bequest in her will establishing the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most prestigious prize for fiction – made this point cogently as early as 1950: Without an indigenous literature people can remain alien in their own soil. An unsung country does not fully exist or enjoy adequate interna­ tional exchange in the inner life. Further, a country must be portrayed by those who hate it or love it as their dwelling place, familiarly, or remain dumb among its contemporaries. The fuller its libraries, the louder its radios, the more crowded its periodicals with imported stories and songs, the more clearly such dependence exposes innate poverty. (Quoted in McPhee, 2001: 293) The phrase in Franklin’s will stating that the winning novel must not only be of the highest literary merit but also ‘present Australian life in any of its phases’ betrays how the cultural nationalist position assumes the nation state as lit­ erature’s default unit of analysis – an increasingly untenable assumption in a globalising world.2 Indeed, over the years, Miles Franklin judging panels have, like the juries for other national literary prizes, had high-profile dust-ups about which books and authors are sufficiently ‘national’ to be eligible (see Allington, 2017). Authors in general may claim citizenship of a ‘world republic of letters’, in French scholar Pascale Casanova’s phrase (2004), but their cultural policy masters have difficulty thinking beyond ingrained national jurisdictions.

The fractured state of cultural policy about books The above debate regarding the virtues of free-market versus stateintervention models echoes across the arts generally, but what about cultural policy measures specifically affecting book-world stakeholders, whether au­ thors, publishers, retailers, librarians or readers? For most other media forms, national legislation sets out the relationship between government and the

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sector, specifying forms regulation and establishing mechanisms for ensuring a competitive market. For example, in most Western democracies, public ser­ vice broadcasters, the pay-television industry and the telecommunications sector are all governed by dedicated legislation. There is no equivalent ‘Books Act’; indeed, it is revealing that the phrase itself sounds ludicrous. The reasons for this legislative lacuna take us back to Chapter 1 on medium theory: the codex format predates parliamentary democracy, and even the emergence of nation states, by many centuries. By the time these political institutions had coalesced, the book had long since become simply an assumed part of everyday life and hence a dedicated statute was deemed superfluous. By contrast, sub­ sequently developed media forms such as radio, broadcast television and the internet were deemed worthy of specific legislative attention in part because they challenged the print-centric status quo. As medium theorist Marshall McLuhan aphoristically declared, ‘although we do not know who first dis­ covered water, it was almost certainly not a fish’: that is, there tends to be little or no critical examination of the dominant communications medium; its af­ fordances reveal themselves clearly only once it has been usurped and hence denaturalised (1966: 70). That said, many Acts of parliament dealing with copyright, import re­ strictions, taxation, primary, secondary and tertiary education, and even censorship do touch on the book business to a greater or lesser extent. Befitting its status as the oldest written medium, the book is implicated in all these fields of public policy, and book-world actors are (for better or worse) imbricated in each. As Stuart Glover observes of Australian cultural policy about books, it constitutes ‘a mess of policy’, but is nevertheless ‘a productive mess’ (2007: 83). Accordingly, getting a handle on cultural policy about books means examining a patchwork of sometimes overlapping regulation at local, state/provincial, national and even supranational level (as where copyright regimes are affected by free-trade agreements between countries). Among these strata, the levels of greatest cultural policy decision-making power have traditionally lain with national (federal) and state (provincial) policymakers. Yet one of the most interesting cultural policy developments of recent decades has been the devolution of power from the former to the latter as regions and individual cities have challenged the previously naturalised policymaking unit of the nation state.

Key levels of bookish cultural policymaking As we delve further into the specifics of cultural policy around books, it becomes clearer that the free-market versus state-interventionist model with which this chapter began is a simplification of a far more complex reality. Firstly, different countries occupy different points along the spectrum, with a country like the United States historically favouring minimal government intervention in markets for all goods, compared to a country such as Canada, where cultural nationalist measures have been strongly embraced as part of a

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Figure 4.1 An infographic of the world’s ‘Top 10 most literate countries’ based on a variety of ‘literate behaviour characteristics’ shows a high representation of developed nations, and the Nordic region in particular. However, an accompanying gra­ phic of ‘Which countries read the most?’ measured in terms of hours per week is topped by India and dominated by developing nations. (Reproduced courtesy of Digital Book World, 2017)

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long-term strategy of identity-building and national differentiation from its more populous, also English-speaking neighbour. (It is no coincidence that many influential cultural policy scholars are Canadian). Secondly, the posi­ tion of a country on this cultural policy spectrum is never static but fluctuates over time according to which political party holds power: a century-long view of any Western democracy would reveal ebbs and flows in govern­ mental support for the arts. It is for this reason that arts funding is often a lively issue (if never the dominant one) during election campaigns. Thirdly, the diffusion of cultural policymaking across local, state, national and su­ pranational governmental levels means that the position on the spectrum occupied by, say, a left-wing provincial government may differ significantly from, for example, a right-wing national government. Viewed as a whole, cultural policy resembles a clockwork of interlocking parts, with pro­ grammes operating simultaneously on many political levels. But it is also a clock with a sticky mechanism, with individual policy measures not always well coordinated or complementary. Local government initiatives

The adage that all politics is local certainly holds true in terms of cultural policy relating to books. For most Western populations, the chief interface with government-supported book culture is the local library system. These are commonly structured on the model of many local, usually suburban, branch libraries and a coordinating hub library housed in the metropole that contains a larger and more prestigious collection available to local patrons on request. During economic rationalism’s boom years of the 1980s and early 1990s, right-wing governments frequently targeted funding for local libraries on the basis that if ‘consumers’ wanted to read books, they should simply purchase them. But since that time, libraries in the UK and elsewhere have successfully fought back, reinventing themselves not just as storehouses of books and newspapers, but as community centres that offer social capitalgenerating activities such as preschool story times, homework clubs, retiree reading groups, and IT training for the unemployed or homeless (Klinenberg, 2018; Orlean, 2019: 65, 299; see also Chapter 10). As digiti­ sation promotes increasingly atomised and socially isolated consumers, local libraries have been reimagined as hubs of local, embodied communitybuilding activities for which books are often the means, but not the sole end.3 This self-conscious community-building has coincided with a boom in local council-sponsored literary festivals and writing competitions that began in the 1980s (Ommundsen, 2007, 2009; Murray, 2012, 2018; Weber, 2018). The main goals of these festivals, which are frequently named after a famous author who once resided in the area or a well-known book that evokes the locale, are to cultivate literary prestige, promote the area’s identity and generate modes of belonging among local citizens. If the locale happens to have a renowned

76 Theories and methodologies

writer’s house or book-themed museum, this is often built into proceedings (e.g. Massachusetts has marketed the house-museums of Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and other famous authors as a writers’ trail – the ‘Valley of the Literate’ – to boost local tourism).4 The most potent example of local pol­ icymaking around books is the mass-reading event along the lines of the much-imitated one-book–one-city model first trialled in Seattle by celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl (Fuller and Rehberg Sedo, 2013). Again, the chosen book is usually the work of a local author and/or set in the specific area, but the aim is not the potentially exclusionary one of literary critical judgement so much as community-building inclusiveness based on live, face-to-face events for avid readers, schoolchildren and recent migrants to the area (see Chapter 9). Finally, a city-branded arts festival or feted annual writers’ festival can form a key plank in a city’s branding as a cultural destination. In every country there is at least one city that regards itself as the ‘artistic capital’ (not always, interestingly, the political capital) and cultivates an image of cultural connoisseurship and enlightened consumption in its domestic and interna­ tional tourism advertising campaigns (see ‘Learning exercises’, below). State/provincial programmes

It is impossible to draw any hard and fast distinction between local and re­ gional cultural policy levels once general arts or book festivals grow to more than suburban size. These larger events are typically co-funded by the local city council and the relevant state or regional government (as a quick scan of the sponsors at the bottom of their web pages confirms). Convening an event of such scale and ambition requires the resources and organisational capacity of a state-level arts bureaucracy, frequently found in provincial departments of the arts, culture or, increasingly since the 1990s, creative industries. The evolving terminology reveals how public-policy conceptions of the arts have changed over recent decades – from the idea of state patronage as a cultural obligation, through a more cultural relativist focus on a broader crosssection of arts practices, to the current notion of the arts as a driver of innovation, employment and economic development (Caves, 2002 [2000]; Hesmondhalgh, 2018 [2002]; Cunningham, 2002, 2008; Garnham, 2005; Hartley, 2005; see also ‘Conclusion’, below). Sarah Brouillette, the scholar who has analysed the fraught creative industries/literature interface most fully, sees the creative industries discourse championed by Britain’s New Labour in the mid-1990s as promising that ‘culture would be central to negotiating the symbiosis between economic and social goals’ (2014: 3). Today’s major arts festivals make business cases for their ‘multiplier effect’ on the surrounding city and state, evidenced through boosting inbound tourism, domestic spending and associated sectors such as hospitality, restaurants and transport. Often strategically timed to coincide with book festivals is the announce­ ment of a suite of book prizes. This is not to say that all literary awards result

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from public patronage (e.g. the Nobel, Pulitzer and Booker prizes are all underwritten by either personal or corporate philanthropy). But politicians relish opportunities to burnish their public image and appear ‘cultivated and civilised’ by awarding state-funded literary awards to famous or up-andcoming writers (Lever, 1997: 105). Interestingly, the stated aims of such awards are commonly a revealing melange of appreciation for fine writing, educational and market development, promotion of local publishing and printing industries, and multicultural social cohesion. Literature is harnessed to specifically social, political and economic goals in return for money from the public purse. The terms of this trade-off can be uncomfortable for writers. While almost all authors appreciate the publicity boost of a prize win or even shortlisting in an era of diminishing formal review coverage, the process betrays an instrumentalising view of book culture as at the service of the state. Some state governments’ multicultural policy agendas have led to dark mut­ terings within the book world about the political palatability of certain texts outstripping their aesthetic worth. Writers are here caught in a bind of their own making. Unable to continue espousing Romanticist views of the supreme autonomy of ‘Art’ while requesting public subsidy for their writing practice, they cannot then bridle at the use of their taxpayer-supported works as glue for social cohesion (Brouillette, 2014). The national frame

Even in an era of cultural globalisation, national governments continue to exert dominance in terms of cultural policymaking. All developed countries have a government-supported entity for cultural self-promotion along the lines of the National Endowment for the Arts (United States), the Canada Council for the Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts, the Arts Council of Ireland and Creative New Zealand. The purpose of such organisations is twofold: in international terms, they coordinate cultural ambassadorial activities to promote the ‘soft power’ of the nation’s cultural identity. Domestically, they typically coordinate the allocation of government funding to arts practitioners and organisations on a competitive basis. Ideally, this is conducted via arm’s-length peer review of formal grant applications, but there are frequent scandals when government actors intervene more or less blatantly to favour or prohibit certain outcomes – a literal example of governments attempting to ‘pick winners’. Traditionally in the cultural policy subfield of literature, governmental subsidy has taken the form of grants to writers (and occasionally local publishers) to produce work in va­ lued (often commercially marginal) genres such as literary fiction, nonfiction, life writing, drama, poetry and, occasionally, electronic literature. Grant conditions may additionally delimit eligibility on the basis of authorial identity (e.g. for emerging or indigenous writers). Earmarking of govern­ ment subsidies for specific genres involves contentious decisions about cul­ tural value – distinctions that are harder to maintain as cultural relativism

78 Theories and methodologies

percolates throughout populations. Nevertheless, writers who are successful in this competitive and always imperfect process tend to be unanimous about its affirming effects: artistic validation; freedom from economic and time constraints to focus on their craft; and expanded opportunities for promotion of the resulting work (Galligan, 1999). This last point highlights how, over recent decades, the emphasis in cultural policy programming has moved from subsidising production inputs to funding audience development (writers’ festivals, literary journals, educational outreach) in the hope of cultivating wider readerships for taxpayer-supported works and thus deflecting accusa­ tions of elitist self-interest. A lower-profile, but practically no less significant, aspect of national cultural policymaking regarding books is copyright law. As touched upon earlier, there is increasingly an international dimension to this, as powerful cultural exporting countries seek through bilateral or multilateral free-trade agreements to reduce other countries’ cultural protectionist measures and thus maximise markets for their own products (see Sinnreich, 2019). However, in essence, copyright re­ mains a national sphere of policymaking, as is reflected in laws regarding books. Most foundational of these is authors’ copyright in their works (in most jur­ isdictions covering the life of the author plus 70 years), with copyright licensing agencies collecting and distributing monies to authors or their estates for legal use of their works. In addition, many countries have established legislatively sup­ ported rights schemes to compensate authors for lost royalty income when books are borrowed from public libraries (i.e. Public Lending Right) or school or university libraries (i.e. Educational Lending Right), or photocopied for edu­ cational purposes. These schemes resulted from long campaigning by author lobby groups – of which the UK’s Society of Authors (established in 1884) is the oldest – to raise authors’ standard of living. A subsector of copyright law in which national governments continue to exert power in spite of an increasingly global book market is so-called ‘parallel importing’ legislation. This attempts to balance the interests of publishers who have purchased territorial rights in a given title against consumers’ desire to access the widest possible range of published works promptly and at competitive prices. Governments generally grant a grace period of one to several months after international publication of a title for domestic publishers to bring out a national edition. In the absence of a local version, book retailers may import foreign-published editions (Carey, 2008). While varying in their specifics, parallel importing and the debates it provokes return us to political economy issues of marked imbalance in global publishing flows. Without the protection of parallel importing regulations, publishers in smaller markets fear a flood of imported foreign (and especially remaindered) publications from more populous and economically powerful nations. Loss of their national markets would jeopardise these domestic publishers’ financial viability and thus their ability to take risks on new local titles, further reducing diversity in an already concentrated marketplace of ideas (see Brooks et al., 2016; see also Chapter 5).5 Where, you might wonder, do readers fit in the national cultural policy imaginary? Without an avid readership for books, cultural policy support for

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authors, book publishers and retailers is ineffectual. Governments have attempted to stoke demand for books among national populations for the traditional reason that books (with their long associations with learning and status) are good in themselves, but also increasingly because of their role in improving literacy and thus ensuring a well-educated, intellectually flexible future workforce. For this reason, many national governments coordinate reading campaigns spanning preschool, school-age and adult populations.6 Incorporating the now-familiar cultural policy goal of national identity-formation, such campaigns frequently select a list of ‘top reads’ with local associations in terms of author or setting (see Figure 4.2). Consumers are encouraged to purchase such titles (which are often offered with a three-for-two discount or complimentary with another purchase), set themselves a recreational reading challenge, and participate in public discussions, debates and author interviews in live or mediated settings. Such campaigns tick multiple cultural policy boxes: boosting book sales for publishers and retailers; fostering educational aspiration among local popula­ tions; and generating the community and cultural cohesion of a writers’ festival or one-book–one-city mass-reading event. If books are to maintain their tenuous claim on public monies, they will increasingly be required to de­ monstrate such cultural policy bang for their buck. ‘International’ cultural policy

To the extent that a supranational level of cultural policymaking exists, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is

Figure 4.2 National governments seek to expand book readerships through selections of ‘Australia’s top 100 books’, as voted by the general public. Such lists typically include a curated mix of literary classics, popular fiction, children’s and young adult titles to gain the buy-in of educational, publishing and retail print-culture stakeholders.

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its legislature. This cultural arm of the United Nations, headquartered in Paris, saw its political stocks rise with the shift to the left of many Western democracies during the 1960s and 1970s. Like the UN itself, whose power tends to be more symbolic than actual, UNESCO has faced hostile headwinds with the subsequent rise of economic rationalism (given neoliberalism’s innate suspicion of govern­ mental intervention in theoretically free markets for cultural goods) (Brouillette, 2019). As part of its transnational and transcultural mission, UNESCO sponsors an annual World Book and Copyright Day on 23 April (the anniversary of Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ deaths) to celebrate ‘literature and reading while focusing particularly on the importance of enhancing and protecting Indigenous languages’.7 More palpably, since 2004, it has convened a high-profile Creative Cities Network under which cities bid for ‘City of Literature’ status on the basis of their literary history, bookish infrastructure and public engagement with reading.8 Edinburgh was the first city so garlanded, followed by Melbourne, Iowa City, Dublin, Reykjavik, Norwich, Krakow, Heidelberg and Dunedin among a growing cohort (Hamilton and Seale, 2014; Murray, 2018; Brouillette, 2019). This consecration tends to act as a catalyst in such cities, building upon an existing bookworld infrastructure of publishers, libraries and writers’ festivals and giving these new visibility in the eyes of state and national governments. The fact that UNESCO singles out specific cities demonstrates how the hyper-local and the most abstractly international levels of cultural policymaking have begun to fuse. For this reason, the stratified levels of local, provincial, national and supranational cultural policymaking itemised above should be seen as an analytical device rather than an accurate representation of cultural policy reality. In actuality, different levels of governmental policy frequently invoke and play off others, with the result that cultural policy in practice tends towards a messy tangle of interests, funders and programmes.

Conclusion: shortcomings of the creative industries approach Since the 1997 election of the Blair government in the United Kingdom, creative industries discourse has come to dominate cultural policy thinking. It has many advantages, not least the foundational one of shifting the relationship of government and the arts from one of begrudging patronage based on guilt to a more productive view of culture and economics as potentially complementary and capable of generating mutual benefits. This has been seen most dramatically in the so-called ‘Bilbao effect’, whereby a brownfield industrial site is regenerated through public investment as a major cultural institution, which then has the multiplier effect of rebranding its host city as a tourist destination (Landry, 1996, 2000).9 Yet, beneath the rhetoric of complementarity, creative industries policy has been accused of instrumentalising art for economic ends, and of celebrating the ‘bourgeois bohemianism’ of creative workers in exchange for a lived ex­ perience of economic precariousness. The insecurity of the ‘gig economy’, coupled with an ongoing lack of access to minimum-wage rates, leave

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Figure 4.3 Since 1995, UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has convened World Book and Copyright Day, an annual cele­ bration of books, reading and language diversity. The date – 23 April – was chosen for its cross-cultural resonance as the day on which both Shakespeare and Cervantes died. Each year a World Book Capital is selected for special focus, complementing UNESCO’s ongoing Cities of Literature network.

entitlements, pension schemes and other benefits of regular salaried work, has seen creative workers locked into a cycle of self-exploitative volunteerism well into mid-career – constantly networking and hustling to drum up freelance opportunities (McRobbie, 2002; Miller, 2004). While their residence in a ‘transitional’ locale might help rebadge it in the eyes of property investors, creative workers themselves are commonly priced out of gentrifying areas. Brutally put, they are too poor to afford the locations they helped make cool in the first place. At the most general level, the modish rhetoric of creativity’s essential role in all professional endeavours – encapsulated in the STEAM (sci­ ence, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) acronym – tends to devalue the specialist knowledge of those dedicated to professional arts practice. Really, aren’t we all creatives now? More specifically, there are concerns about where literature and books fit into creative industries models. Typically, such theories define creative industries so broadly that writing and books appear as mere afterthoughts, subordinated to the creative industries’ glamour sectors of galleries, performing arts and computer-game development (Cunningham, 2002, 2008; Hartley, 2005). There is a lingering suspicion that books, with their indelibly codex-based associations, may be simply too ‘old media’ to make the cut in a world of digital fetishism. Furthermore, can books be performative in the ways that, say, live music, theatre and stand-up comedy are? Granted, writers’ festivals, poetry slams and book-themed events have exploded in popularity in the last few decades, but the acts of writing and reading

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they showcase are almost always asynchronous (Murray, 2018). As medium theory has highlighted, this is the fundamental achievement of print communication: that one mind may ‘speak’ to another despite great distances of geography and time. There is a barely acknowledged sleight of hand at play when authors read from their work in book-themed events. All present know that the creative work is not being improvised on the spot. It is not the equivalent of a jazz solo or theatre-sports sketch in the manner of the Upright Citizens Brigade; rather, it is a carefully crafted piece of work presented under the guise of spontaneity. It is only in the subsequent question-and-answer session with the audience that the illusion breaks down and a genuinely live measure of unpredictability enters proceedings. For reasons such as these, the best work in print culture studies picks and mixes from medium theory, book history, political economy and cultural policy approaches, using the insights of one theoretical frame to shine light on the shortcomings of another. As Part I of this book aims to showcase, these various approaches are not mutually exclusive; in fact, one will frequently invite the complementary and contrary insights of another and thus prompt a more holistic understanding of the book object, its actants and broader socio-economic context. Furthermore, all three of these analytical dimensions are subject to a fourth: time. One of book history’s key insights is that what we know about the book is always historically contingent and, for all its survival as a communications architecture across half a millennium, the printed book is always undergoing some kind of change. Viewed in this light, the digital revolution that is the focus of Part III (and touched upon throughout Part II) is less a radical break than simply the latest in a long line of medium mutations.

Learning exercises How are cultural offerings invoked in tourism campaigns for a city you know well? Most countries have a city that brands itself as the nation’s cultural capital, or perhaps rival cultural destinations (e.g. New York City and Los Angeles; Edinburgh and Glasgow; Madrid and Barcelona). Do marketing campaigns targeted at international and domestic tourists differ in their emphases? Try, for a taster, the ‘Lose Yourself in Melbourne’ (2011) marketing campaign that presented the city in the mode of an arthouse film, prompting several parodies: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypCrz_2jivw. Cultural policy is frequently a lightning rod for political debates, especially as a proxy for broader ideological disputes about the proper extent of governmental involvement in public life. Examine a recent ‘culture wars’ scandal (e.g. cuts to public arts funding, controversy over the award of a particular book prize, protests over taxpayer-supported artworks) for what it reveals about participants’ cultural policy agendas (whether explicit or covert).

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Notes 1 http://archive.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=34. 2 www.perpetual.com.au/milesfranklin. 3 In 2018 the Times Literary Supplement convened a symposium in which they asked speakers at that year’s Hay Festival about libraries’ significance in their lives. The themes of libraries’ embrace of people as citizens, not consumers, their vital importance for the socially marginalised, and the transformative possibilities of library-based self-education were recurrent. Articulating the participants’ consensus, Philip Pullman wrote: ‘Above all, libraries should be open, and free, and properly subsidized by an intelligent state that values knowledge’ (www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/libraries-symposium/). In similar vein, in 2019 actress Sarah Jessica Parker headed an online campaign protesting budget cuts to New York City’s libraries with the statement that her local Greenwich Village branch was ‘a beacon, and one of the most beloved buildings in our community’ (https://pagesix.com/ 2019/05/20/sarah-jessica-parker-throws-shade-at-de-blasios-proposed-library-cut/?utm_source= editorial&utm_medium=LJTW&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=articles). Finally, Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy was prominent in the successful 2019 campaign to save 25 libraries threatened with closure in the UK county of Essex and wrote movingly of their importance as ‘palaces for people’ in her own working-class childhood (Kennedy, 2019). 4 See the video promoting the SHARP 2019 conference in Amherst, MA: www.youtube. com/watch?reload=9&v=7s-TeAeK_7A. 5 The #SaveOzStories collection of essays by Australian writers of all genres (Brooks et al., 2016) was published as part of a book-industry campaign to maintain that country’s parallel importing regulations. 6 See, for one example among many, the Australian government’s annual ‘Better Reading’ campaign (formerly ‘Books Alive’ and ‘Get Reading!’): www.betterreading.com.au/. 7 www.un.org/en/events/bookday/. 8 https://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/creative-cities-map. 9 The phrase alludes to the impact of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum (established 1997) in the formerly declining port city of Bilbao in Spain’s Basque Country (Throsby, 2010; Oakley and O’Connor, 2015). David Walsh’s privately subsidised Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has had the same effect in shifting touristic perceptions of Hobart in Tasmania.

Online resources •

•

Debates over cultural protectionism versus free markets are always vexed, especially when they revolve around books. Watch the ‘Keep Creators Creating’ (2016) campaign video, produced by Australia’s Copyright Agency, and examine the (emotive) arguments it makes for creative content’s crucial role in the modern economy: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=s5Mfu5Ypgiw. What similar campaigns exist around books in your country? Major state-sponsored international book awards: ◦ ◦ ◦

Governor General’s Literary Awards (Canada): https://ggbooks.ca/# winners National Book Awards (US): www.nationalbook.org/ New Zealand Book Awards: www.nzbookawards.nz/new-zealandbook-awards/

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◦ ◦ •

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (Australia): www.arts.gov.au/ books/pmliteraryawards Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award: www.saltiresociety.org. uk/awards/literature/literary-awards/

UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day (23 April): www.un.org/en/ events/bookday/.

References and further reading Allington, Patrick (2017) ‘ “No Award”: The Miles Franklin in 1973.’ Sydney Review of Books 1 Aug. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/no-award/. Auguscik, Anna. (2017) Prizing Debate: The Fourth Decade of the Booker Prize and the Contemporary Novel in the UK. Bielefeld: Transcript. Barbian, Jan-Pieter. (2013) The Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany: Books in the Media Dictatorship. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bradshaw, David, and Rachel Potter, eds. (2013) Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooks, Geraldine et al. (2016) #SaveOzStories. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Brouillette, Sarah. (2014) Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brouillette, Sarah. (2019) UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brouillette, Sarah and Christopher Doody. (2015) ‘The Literary as a Cultural Industry.’ The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries. Ed. Kate Oakley and Justin O’Connor. London: Routledge. 99–108. Burt, Richard. (1994) The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carey, Steve. (2008) ‘Between Two Worlds: Australian Publishing on the Horns of an Import Dilemma.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 24: 156–64. Carter, David. (2001) ‘Public Intellectuals, Book Culture and Civil Society.’ Australian Humanities Review 24. www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December2001/carter2a.html. Carter, David. (2016) ‘The Literary Field and Contemporary Trade-book Publishing in Australia: Literary and Genre Fiction.’ Media International Australia 158: 48–57. Carter, David and Kay Ferres. (2001) ‘The Public Life of Literature.’ Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 140–60. Casanova, Pascale. (2004) The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Caves, Richard. (2002 [2000]) Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce. Rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cunningham, Stuart. (2002) ‘From Cultural to Creative Industries: Theory, Industry and Policy Implications.’ Media International Australia (Incorporating Culture and Policy) 102: 54–65. Cunningham, Stuart, ed. (2008) The Cultural Economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dane, Alexandra and Millicent Weber, eds. (2020) Australian Humanities Review ‘Convention and Regulation in Book Culture’ special issue, May.

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Darnton, Robert. (2014) Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. New York: Norton. Driscoll, Beth and Claire Squires. (2018) ‘Serious Fun: Gaming the Book Festival.’ Mémoires du livre/Studies in Book Culture 9.2. www.erudit.org/en/journals/memoires/2018-v9-n2memoires03728/1046988ar/. English, James F. (2002) ‘Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art.’ New Literary History 33: 109–35. English, James F. (2004) ‘The Literary Prize Phenomenon in Context.’ A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000. Ed. Brian Shaffer. Oxford: Blackwell. 160–76. Fuller, Danielle and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. (2013) Reading beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. New York: Routledge. Galligan, Anne. (1999) ‘Government Grants and the Role of Supply.’ Southerly 59.1: 122–135. Garnham, Nicholas. (2005) ‘From Cultural to Creative Industries: An Analysis of the Implications of the “Creative Industries” Approach to Arts and Media Policy-making in the United Kingdom.’ International Journal of Cultural Policy 11.1: 15–29. Glover, Stuart. (2007) ‘Publishing and the State.’ Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 81–95. Guldberg, H.H. (1990) Books – Who Reads Them? A Study of Borrowing and Buying in Australia. Sydney: Australia Council. Hamilton, Caroline and Kirsten Seale. (2014) ‘Great Expectations – Making a City of Literature.’ Meanjin 73.1: 142–51. Hartley, John, ed. (2005) Creative Industries. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hesmondhalgh, David. (2018 [2002]) The Cultural Industries. 4th edn. London: Sage. Hickey, Amanda. (1997) ‘Are We Being Served?’ Australian Author 29.1: 18–22. Johanson, Katya and Ruth Rentschler. (2002) ‘The New Arts Leader: The Australia Council and Cultural Policy Change.’ International Journal of Cultural Policy 8.2: 167–80. Kennedy, A.L. (2019) ‘Palaces for People.’ The Author 130.4: 121–122. Klinenberg, Eric. (2018) Palaces for the People. New York: Broadway Books. Landry, Charles. (1996) The Art of Regeneration: Urban Renewal through Cultural Activity. London: Comedia. Landry, Charles. (2000) The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan. Lever, Susan. (1997) ‘Government Patronage and Literary Reputations.’ Southerly 57.3: 104–114. Macleod, Jock and Pat Buckridge, eds. (1992) Books and Reading in Australian Society. Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University. Malik, Kenan. (2009) From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy. London: Atlantic Books. Mason, Jody. (2017) ‘“Capital Intraconversion” and Canadian Literary Prize Culture.’ Book History 20: 424–446. McDonald, Peter D. (2009) The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGuigan, Jim. (1996) Culture and the Public Sphere. London: Routledge. McGuigan, Jim. (2004) Rethinking Cultural Policy. Maidenhead: Open University Press. McLean, Kath. (2005) ‘Books and Tariffs: An Australian Story.’ Journal of Publishing 1: 17–35. McLuhan, Marshall. (1966) ‘The All-at-Once World of Marshall McLuhan.’ Vogue Aug.: 70–73, 111.

86 Theories and methodologies McPhee, Hilary. (2001) Other People’s Words. Sydney: Picador. McRobbie, Angela. (2002) ‘From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at Work in the New Cultural Economy?’ Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. Ed. Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke. London: Sage. 97–114. Messerlin, Patrick and Jimmyn Parc (2017) ‘The Real Impact of Subsidies on the Film Industry (1970s–Present): Lessons from France and Korea.’ Pacific Affairs 90.1: 51–75. Miller, Toby. (2004) ‘A View from a Fossil: The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption – Two or Three Things I Don’t Believe in.’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.1: 55–65. Moore, Nicole. (2012) The Censor’s Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia’s Banned Books. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Moore, Nicole, ed. (2015) Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Morrison, Jago and Susan Watkins, eds. (2006) Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-century Novel in the Public Sphere. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mulcahy, Kevin. (2006) ‘Cultural Policy: Definitions and Theoretical Approaches.’ Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 35.4: 319–330. Murray, Simone. (2012) The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Murray, Simone. (2018) The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nile, Richard. (1990) ‘Cartels, Capitalism and the Australian Booktrade.’ Continuum: Australian Journal of Media and Culture 4:1 71–91. Nile, Richard. (2002) The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Nile, Richard and David Walker. (2001) ‘The “Paternoster Row Machine” and the Australian Book Trade, 1890–1945.’ A History of the Book in Australia 1891–1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market. Ed. Martyn Lyons and John Arnold. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 3–18. Oakley, Kate and Justin O’Connor, eds. (2015) The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries. London: Routledge. Ommundsen, Wenche. (2007) ‘From the Altar to the Market-place and back again: Understanding Literary Celebrity.’ Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader. Ed. Sean Redmond and Su Holmes. London: Sage. 244–255. Ommundsen, Wenche. (2009) ‘Literary Festivals and Cultural Consumption.’ Australian Literary Studies 24.1: 19–34. O’Regan, Tom. (1992) ‘(Mis)taking Policy: Notes on the Cultural Policy Debate.’ Cultural Studies 6.3: 409–423. Orlean, Susan. (2019) The Library Book. London: Atlantic Books. Sinnreich, Aram (2019) The Essential Guide to Intellectual Property. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Spahr, Juliana. (2018) Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Squires, Claire. (2007) ‘Book Marketing and the Booker Prize.’ Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Ed. Nicole Mathews and Nickianne Moody. London: Ashgate. 85–98. Ståhlberg, Per. (2019) ‘The Jaipur Literature Festival and Its Critics: World Literature as Social Practice.’ Anthropology and Humanism 44.1. https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12228.

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Starke, Ruth. (2006) ‘Festival Big Top.’ Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, Volume 3: 1946–2005. Ed. Craig Munro, Robyn Sheahan-Bright and John Curtain. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 156–159. Stevenson, Deborah. (2000) Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Street, John. (2005) ‘“Showbusiness of a Serious Kind”: A Cultural Politics of the Arts Prize.’ Media, Culture and Society 27: 819–840. Sutherland, John. (1982) Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain, 1960–1982. London: Junction Books. Throbsy, David. (2001) Economics and Culture. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Throbsy, David. (2010) The Economics of Cultural Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webby, Elizabeth. (2007) ‘Literary Prizes, Production Values and Cover Images.’ Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Ed. Nicole Mathews and Nickianne Moody. London: Ashgate. 77–84. Weber, Millicent. (2018) Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Part II

Socio-cultural dimensions of books

5

Independent and alternative publishing

Part I of this book introduced a range of theoretical frames and methodological approaches to studying print culture. It is appropriate now to attend to various sectors of the contemporary book world and to see how those theories can be productively applied to real-world circumstances. Accordingly, Part II – ‘Socio-cultural dimensions of books’ – introduces various spheres of the contemporary book industry (broadly understood): independent and alter­ native publishing; editing; adaptation; retailing; reading; and libraries and ar­ chives. These denote industry sectors for which education in print culture might well equip you, so the emphasis in this part is on applying theory to practice, particularly through examining case-studies that reveal interesting tensions or mark key moments of transition in the book world. The chapters in this part generally begin with some brief historical and theoretical contextualisation to set the scene intellectually, then proceed to explore contemporary manifestations of the issue in question before con­ sidering how digital technologies might shape the sector in the future. This paves the way for Part III of the book – ‘Book futures’ – which is dedicated to examining digital-book phenomena such as eBooks and mass-digitising initiatives. To contextualise this chapter’s focus on the independent and alternative publishing scenes, we need to revisit ideas encountered in Chapters 3 and 4. You will likely recall that the overview of international book publishing presented in Chapter 3 identified a cluster of multinational publishing and media conglomerates known as the Big 5 whose revenues dwarf those of all other book publishing sectors. While this oligopoly indisputably exists, undue political economic focus on market concentration tends to misrepresent the extent of activity in the independent book publishing sector. Cultural policy interventions work to mitigate the more extreme effects of the market and help carve out space for a fragile, but nevertheless vibrant, independent publishing scene. ‘Independent’, used in this sense, is a contentious term. It essentially denotes any book publishing operation unaffiliated with the Big 5. However, the ‘independent’ category encompasses everything from multi­ national businesses (such as Oxford University Press) and prominent mid-sized publishing houses (such as the UK’s Faber & Faber and Bloomsbury or

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Australia’s Allen & Unwin) to predominantly scholarly publishers (such as Harvard University Press or W.W. Norton), so-called ‘micro-presses’, which produce only a few titles each year, and even defiantly oppositional operations that eschew the capitalist economy completely. While all of these companies are technically ‘independents’, they exhibit vast differences in terms of scale, cash flow, staffing and ideological orientation. They may perceive little in the way of common cause. Hence, any examination of ‘independent publishing’ must start by acknowledging that the term is an extremely elastic, and sometimes contested, label. As is common among left-wing political groups, independent publishers are principally united by a strong sense of what they are not. Independent publishing is therefore defined negatively: it is an affiliation based primarily upon rejection of the Big-5 status quo.

Publishing and the ‘marketplace of ideas’ Most people form their opinions about the world and its workings from the ideas that are prevalent around them. Democracy itself is predicated upon the widest possible range of ideas being publicly debated and tested against in­ dividual experience. German sociologist Jürgen Habermas (a late exponent of the Frankfurt School’s mass-society critique) famously termed the conceptual space in which such democratic arguments take place ‘the public sphere’ (1989 [1962]). While this public sphere may be instantiated in specific locations (e.g. parliament house, town hall), it equally exists in media formats (e.g. news­ papers, broadcast news) or may even be entirely dematerialised (e.g. ‘public opinion’). The common denominator is that many parties and interest groups may present their ideas for public airing, and citizens will test those ideas for their worth and utility, adopting only those that they, as sovereign consumers, find compelling. Note that the very terminology of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ betrays a capitalist conception of public life wherein rational, self-maximising individuals set up their ideological market stall in the hope of attracting customers. Such inbuilt assumptions betray the limits of the ‘marketplace’ metaphor as an explanatory device for socio-political organisation in modern societies. Books remain important vectors for communicating ideas in the twentyfirst-century marketplace of ideas, notwithstanding the digital revolution, because they are still the preferred medium to convey lengthy and complex ideas about the world and humans’ behaviour within it. It follows, therefore, that a diverse book publishing sector is necessary to ensure that the widest possible range of ideas is offered to the public. Revisiting Darnton’s ‘Communications Circuit’ in this light foregrounds publishers as key ‘gate­ keepers’ of the marketplace of ideas: that is, publishers (as well as other media producers) can legitimate an argument by publishing it, or marginalise it by ignoring or refusing to publish it. Philosophically speaking, publishing thus serves an epistemological function, consecrating as authoritative that which passes its scrutiny, and implicitly stigmatising that which it rejects (libraries

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perform a similar function, as is explored below and in Chapter 10). Yet, the gatekeeping authority of publishers is never absolute, fixed for all time and operative in all places; if it were, the traffic in ideas would become so sclerotic as to seize up entirely. Consider how changing attitudes over time see once radical ideas, such as environmentalism, incorporated into mainstream belief (Murphy, 2005). Equally, book publishing’s formerly strong hold over the marketplace of ideas has been significantly loosened by the internet, where self-published books, blogs, Twitter and other social media platforms allow anyone to publish their ideas with no quality control whatsoever. Hence access to the global public sphere has been significantly disintermediated. Why, then, do social media-created celebrities (and even those consecrated by the film and television industries) so often seek to leverage their fame into book form when they already have large followings online? The answer returns us to medium theory’s understanding of the codex as in itself coded: authors crave the authoritative aura of the book format because it dignifies and elevates content so packaged. Here, in McLuhanite phrasing, the medium is itself the message. Free-market economists and philosophical libertarians tend to decry explicit acts of state or religious censorship because they consider them intrusions into the untrammelled play of demand-and-supply forces. However, political economists counter that theoretically ‘free’ markets are in reality merely smokescreens to perpetuate control by a handful of major players, to the detriment of genuine intellectual diversity. French-American publisher André Schiffrin popularised the useful term ‘market censorship’, encapsulating the counter-intuitive idea that the ‘free’ market itself silences ideas from outside the mainstream (2000: 106). He argued that publishing had been debased by the pursuit of sales beyond all else, resulting in the ongoing dissemination of tired ideas in imitative versions merely because they have proven profitable in the past (1998, 2000, 2010). Such corporate risk-aversion inevitably works against innovation, experimentation and aesthetic boundary-pushing. After all, true innovation will always represent a commercial risk because ‘a new idea, by definition, has no track record’ (Schiffrin, 2000: 106; see also Miller, 1997). Academic and independent publisher Michael Wilding concurs: ‘the West congratulates itself on its free press, on its lack of censorship structures. But it does not need them when the controls are already in place with current publishing practices’ (1999: 66). Deeply held convictions at both ends of the political-economic spectrum have led to fierce arguments about the extent to which conglomerate publishing is marketing-led, as opposed to independent houses’ self-espoused commitment to editorially led publishing.

Ensuring diversity in the publishing ecosystem Independent publishers would likely reject the capitalist assumptions built into the metaphor of the ‘marketplace of ideas’, instead preferring the model of an ecosystem. Deriving from environmental science, the concept of the eco­ system posits its various elements as complexly interdependent, so introducing

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a new species triggers myriad changes throughout the biosphere as other plants and animals adapt to the newcomer’s presence. Note how the ecosystem metaphor implicitly privileges the whole, rather than the individual actors. It is thus a more apt metaphor for independent publishers, who regard what they do as akin to maintaining biodiversity within a system otherwise tending to­ wards species loss at the hand of profit-maximising corporations. The analo­ gous concept of ‘bibliodiversity’ has even been proposed as a label for the independent and alternative publishing ethos (Hawthorne, 2014). All in­ dependent publishers, regardless of their internal differences, are united in the conviction that publishing books should be about more than profit alone. They are frequently motivated (to a greater or lesser extent) by social and cultural values rather than financial gain. Publishing scholar Louise Poland sums up this array of extra-commercial motivations as independent presses’ ‘cultural and creative imperative’ (1999: 116). Such motivations, which may be combined in the ethos of a single press, may take many forms, such as a commitment to: • • • • • •

develop national identity or preserve a national language (i.e. cultural nationalism); celebrate the identity of a specific region below the level of the nation state; champion gender politics (whether feminist or LGBTQI+); forge working-class identity and political consciousness; heighten the cultural and political profile of a racial or ethnic minority (e.g. indigenous writers); and/or further knowledge and academic research (e.g. university presses).

It should immediately be apparent from this list that independent publishers share many of the motivations of cultural policy entities that intervene in situations of market failure. This is no mere coincidence. Not only are the independent press sector and cultural policymaking ideologically aligned, but many small presses receive direct public subsidies for their publishing pro­ grammes from national, regional or local cultural-development bodies. Small presses also pride themselves on working differently from corporate publishers in their day-to-day operations. Independent houses frequently act as the ‘research and development’ arm of the publishing industry as a whole, seeking out talented, often unpublished, authors with compelling ideas (Galligan, 2007: 40). In fact, independent publishers are now almost alone in accepting unsolicited manuscripts (i.e. submissions unrepresented by a literary agent; see Stoner, 2019).1 Because they are not so beholden to the bottom line or as driven by ‘comp title’ data on previous sales figures, they are more open to experimenting with new topics, generally ‘pushing the envelope’ to in­ novate in terms of content, writing style and packaging. Their smaller size and consequently lower overheads enable them to contract books with smaller print runs than the typical 6000-copy minimum of the Big 5, creating more

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Figure 5.1 For many independent and alternative publishers, politics pervades not only the contents of their books but also the acts of publishing and reading. Chicagobased publisher Haymarket Books is representative in this regard, understanding publication of minority voices, engagement with race-based activist movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, and hosting community events connecting readers and writers as points on a political publishing continuum. (Reproduced courtesy of Efi Chalikopoulou, [email protected])

opportunities for authors to find niche markets rather than catering only to the mass market. Most importantly in a corporate publishing landscape characterised by editorial job insecurity and the omnipresent pressure to find ‘Big Books’, independent publishers still regard themselves as author nurturers, working with writers over the course of several titles or even a whole career rather than abandoning them if their first book fails to break out (Poland, 1999). Part of independent houses’ commitment to pushing the boundaries of publishing practice is their willingness to produce writing in a diversity of genres. Popular fiction and non-fiction are relatively easy to sell in the mainstream market, but poetry, short-story collections and literary fiction are

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often not taken on by the major publishers (or only in small numbers, and even then only from authors with existing profiles). Some small presses are even established specifically to champion ‘new’ genres, which they nurture until a market niche has been carved out and critical recognition has begun to flow. Mainstream houses then frequently move into the sector, keen to capitalise on burgeoning readerships. The rugged individualists who tend to run independent presses are justifiably cynical about such predatory com­ mercial behaviour: once they have done the cultural heavy lifting and weathered the financial risks, cashed-up corporate houses are keen to poach their most successful authors and encroach upon their hard-won market share (Gardiner, 2000b). A brief case-study serves to illustrate how a dynamic independent pub­ lisher can catalyse transformative change across the book industry and be­ yond. The London-based feminist publisher Virago Press was founded in 1972 at the height of second-wave women’s activism and established its signature Virago Modern Classics reprint series several years later. This landmark series aimed to republish women writers’ ‘lost’ works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to demonstrate a female literary tradition that had been largely obscured by longstanding critical neglect. As Virago’s founder Carmen Callil wrote in an early article for the (generally hostile) Times Literary Supplement, ‘An important aim for me in choosing the novelists I want to publish has been to reveal, and indeed celebrate, the range of female achievement in fiction … It is another aim of the Virago Modern Classic list to reveal [a female tradition in novel writing]’ (1980: 1001). Astutely, Virago understood the importance of an immediately identifiable uniform cover design, packaging all their Modern Classic titles in char­ acteristic dark-green livery, with paintings by lesser-known historical artists on their covers. Over the course of the 1970s and especially the 1980s, Virago’s championing of women’s writing had a transformative effect on literary culture, academic curricula and the publishing industry as competi­ tors (both independent and corporate) realised the potential of the publisher’s newly identified feminist readership. In fact, Virago was so successful in making feminist writing part of mainstream book culture that it may have eroded its own market base (Murray, 2004; Riley, 2018).2 After successive sales of the firm, it finally became an imprint of French-based media con­ glomerate Hachette, one of the Big 5, whose website now displays Virago’s bitten-apple colophon among several dozen corporate logos.3 This last observation about Virago’s current ownership is not intended to discredit the press’s record, only to highlight that even the most successful independent publishers exist in a state of constant volatility, with market success no guarantee of longevity. Perhaps this reflects the pattern of in­ novation across the cultural industries generally: an experimental fringe breaks new ground and a slower-moving corporate mainstream gradually co-opts its successes (e.g. the so-called ‘Indiewood’ film-making sector or the underground music scene).

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It is also important to complicate our understanding of independent pub­ lishing dynamics by recognising that strong commitment to adventurous, di­ verse publishing can also exist within the corporate fold. Chris Jackson, publisher at Penguin Random House US’s One World imprint, has argued passionately for innovative publishing programmes backed by the marketing resources of large corporations. Specifically, as an African-American in an overwhelmingly white industry, he articulates movingly how diverse hiring practices drive diversity in print culture as a whole and, through that, in the broader public sphere:4 When we expand the range of the industry’s gatekeepers, we expand the range of our storytelling, which expands our ability to see each other, to talk and listen to each other, and to understand each other. It allows more people to see themselves represented in literature; and it allows the rest of us to listen in, to understand our neighbors and fellow citizens, their lives and concerns, their grievances and their beauty, their stories and ideas, their language. The empathic bridges this creates between us is one of the essential functions of literature in a democracy. But it can only happen if we widen the gates of literature and diversify the gatekeepers. (2017: 229)

‘An ethos rather than a profit motive’5 – non-conglomerate publishing models How might the lofty ideological and cultural motivations of independent publishers play out in ground-level workplace operations? A common char­ acteristic of independent, and especially small-press, enterprises is that they are markedly less hierarchical than their corporate counterparts: the fact of a smaller number of employees tends to create work environments where roles blur, and the emphasis is on ‘mucking in’ to get the job done, whether it be editorial, production, marketing or sales. Because small presses have far more constrained operating budgets, prominence is given to editorial over sales and marketing, reducing the likelihood of substandard texts being rushed into print to meet the deadlines of a high-spend marketing campaign. The extreme manifestation of this blurring of workplace roles is the collective – a form of publishing organisation popular in the alternativeculture heyday of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The principle of collectivism is that workplaces should be (ostensibly) free of hierarchy, with members rotating through roles and equal weight given to everyone’s opinion. Decisions on manuscript acquisition, for instance, are taken only by unan­ imous vote, so a single objection can stymie publishing plans. As an operating principle, collectivism was always more attractive in theory than in reality, and many presses founded on such a basis have either shifted over time to more conventional models of job demarcation or, commonly, simply folded

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in the face of market pressures (Murray, 2004). However, while fully fledged collectivism is very rare in the contemporary book world, most small presses rely to some extent on an ethic of volunteerism. The staff at such presses tend to work not for the money (scant in all sectors of publishing though it is) but because of a commitment to shared political and cultural values. Small presses are often the seedbed for the next generation of publishers and editors, taking a chance on new talent with their staff as with their authors (who may be the same people). This commendable openness is vital for incubating print culture in any place. But its darker side is that it can create a culture where people self-exploit and young graduates already burdened with a mountain of debt, employment instability and the prospect of never reaching the first rung on the housing ladder are encouraged to act against their own eco­ nomic interests in the name of supporting creative endeavours (see also Chapter 4). A more optimistic take on independent working environments is pro­ vided by this chapter’s second case-study, McPhee Gribble. Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble founded the press in Melbourne in 1975 to publish in­ novative Australian writing. Through canny editorial selection and an eye for burgeoning cultural nationalism, McPhee Gribble discovered and/or nurtured the careers of several now-prominent authors such as Tim Winton, Helen Garner, Drusilla Modjeska, Rodney Hall, Kathy Lette and Murray Bail (Galligan, 2007). Penguin bought the press in 1989 just as world-wide recession loomed and, in a now-familiar pattern, subsequently housed it as a corporate sub-brand. But McPhee has written memorably of how, during its independent years, the press cultivated a relaxed and con­ sultative form of decision-making from its somewhat shabby, inner-city premises, with authors dropping by, children accompanying their parents to work, and meetings metamorphosing into parties that ran late into the night (2001). Publisher and author Sophie Cunningham, who cut her editorial teeth at McPhee Gribble, corroborates McPhee’s account of a nurturing, slightly ramshackle working environment, especially remembering a second-hand couch that was variously the scene of daily meetings, career-changing men­ toring and occasional authorial meltdowns: [T]he radical nature of my first and most formative work environment is clear to me. I often think now about how we worked as a group, the ideas and conversations that we shared, the confidence we were given, and the support we were offered … [W]hile I’ve worked in conven­ tional office environments since, I’ve never settled comfortably into them. (2011: 101) For independent and small-press publishers, the process by which the book is made can be just as significant as the finished product.

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Key challenges for small and micro publishers Virago, McPhee Gribble and other independent publishers mentioned to this point may not have been solely profit-oriented, but they were successful commercial concerns. Beneath that tranche of the independent publishing sector lies yet another stratum of self-declared ‘small’ or even ‘micro’ presses. These alternative publishers, often the creation of an individual or handful of enthusiasts, are even less interested in the standard commercial rationale and are proportionately more innovative in their structures. They typically exist on a combination of scant, irregular cash flow and subsidised or volunteer labour (Moore, 2019). Offsetting this, they tend to foster potent imprint identities, extremely close ties to local authors and deep roots within local community arts scenes – all of which cultivate fiercely loyal readerships. Such presses pride themselves on truly living out the indie motto that the politics isn’t just in the book but in the way the book is produced. Because of their nano scale, small and micro publishers frequently club to­ gether to achieve critical mass in terms of distribution arrangements and pub­ licity profile. For example, the Small Press Network (SPN), which was founded in Melbourne in 2006 as the Small Press Underground Networking Collective (slyly, SPUNC), runs an annual Independent Publishing Conference that pro­ vides survival tips and networking opportunities for small-press publishers (Freeth, 2007).6 Making common cause is necessary, as the challenges small presses face are legion. In addition to the ever-present threat of author poaching outlined earlier, small publishers must constantly contend with undercapitalisation: money and cash flow are always scarce and can prevent investment in important infrastructure, such as an e-commerce facility on the website or even the means to pay staff and freelancers. Secondly, marketing budgets are small to non-existent, so as much publicity as possible has to be generated by the authors themselves. This is increasingly true across the book industry generally, but small presses must tap every last drop of local goodwill to promote their titles via launch events and author readings, even at the risk of oversaturating local demand. In countries with large land masses such as Canada, the United States and Australia, book distribution is a major challenge as mailing hard-copy books across the country may not be financially viable, given a highly dispersed population and low sales (Michael, 2019). Furthermore, traditional retail channels may be un­ cooperative: chain booksellers may refuse to stock small-press titles altogether because it is more cost-effective to deal only with the major conglomerates. Independent bookstores – independent publishers’ kindred spirits – are thus crucial in getting small-press books into the orbit of potential customers (see Wilding, 1999; Michael, 2019; see also Chapter 8). Hence, the precarious health of the independent book retailing sector itself is another business variable of which small publishers must remain cognisant. Finally, chipping away at the mountain that is corporate publishing takes its toll on even the most highly motivated and culturally committed small-press enthusiasts. Succession thus be­ comes a key issue: what happens to a publishing house when its founders retire,

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fall ill or move on (Hollier, 2008)? For all of the above reasons, small-press publishing is not for the faint-hearted. Don Lee, former editor of Ploughshares, itemised the qualities required to found a literary journal but they might equally apply to small presses: money, he stated, is crucial, as are ‘zeal, stupidity, fervor, obsessive compulsion, indefatigability, out-and-out insanity, [and] idealism’ (quoted in Rudick, 2019). There is the final, bitter sting of seeing ideas and markets pioneered by small presses subsequently exploited by mainstream rivals who took none of the risks but opportunistically moved in to cream off the successes. As Zoe Dattner, co-founder of former Melbourne-based small press Sleepers Publishing, wrote in a piece appropriately titled ‘ “Sometimes It Sucks to Be a Pioneer”: On Watching Publishing Start-ups Finish’ (2014): I’ve developed a great enthusiasm for publishing start-ups and the lunatics who feel so driven to establish them. They are a wonderful expression of courage and risk-taking, something lacking in so many facets of con­ temporary business. But the very nature of the landscape they are compelled to innovate in, one that is turbulent and unstable and characterised by constant change, means that not many of them will flourish.

Zines: the independent’s independent publishing As Chapter 3 on political economy outlined, and as this chapter’s discussion of independent publishing reiterates, culture and commerce are in constant tension throughout the book world. To a greater or lesser extent, in­ dependent, small and especially micro publishers all reject the excesses of book publishing’s global oligopoly, but each in the end acknowledges that some concession to marketplace realities is necessary if an enterprise is to continue operating. There appears, by this point in the twenty-first-century West, to be no ‘outside’ to capitalism. Yet, at the most grassroots level of the publishing ecosystem, the mode of self-publication known as zines is attempting to evade the capitalist marketplace entirely in its pursuit of print communication untouched by commerce. The term ‘zine’ is a contraction of ‘fan-magazine’ and describes short, handmade, amateur publications, usually photocopied and stapled, that cover topics of niche interest (Triggs, 2010; Radway, 2012). Zines are invariably quirky, often highly autobiographical and range tonally from the humorous to the lugubrious; no topic is too obscure to sustain a zine. Most importantly, the zine scene cultivates a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos, proudly presenting its kitchen-table aesthetic as evidence of individuals refusing to be mere passive consumers and instead seizing the mantle of ‘publisher’ for themselves (Poletti, 2008). In this defiantly outsider attitude, the origins of zine culture in pre-Second World War science-fiction fandom, the alternative media movements of the 1960s and especially the punk music scene of the 1970s and 1980s are clear (Radway, 2012). Zine-making is about not waiting for a publisher, editor or literary agent to consecrate your work as ‘worthy’ of publication, but instead occupying all of these roles yourself.

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In keeping with zinesters’ rejection of the capitalist book industry, their products are more often traded than sold (Poletti, 2008). Distribution might occur through personal mailing lists or via alternative book and music stores, cafés and clothing outlets – anywhere that shares the same oppositional spirit (‘Interview’, 2019). Increasingly, in larger cities, zinesters have established centres such as the Toronto Zine Library or Massachusetts’ Papercut Zine Library, which offer zine production facilities, house collections and organise community events such as zine fairs (often with local cultural policy support).7 Even when zinesters charge a price to cover their production costs, it is usually a token amount in the region of a few dollars so that no potential reader is excluded. Unifying zine culture in all its diversity is the goal of bypassing publishing industry gatekeepers entirely and creating a parallel, alternative media scene. In the words of early zine scholar Stephen Duncombe, zines represent ‘a radically democratic and participatory ideal of what culture and society might be … The variegated voices of a subterranean world staking out its identity through the cracks of capitalism and in the shadows of the mass media’ (1997: 2). A baseline insistence on the human sustains zines even in an age of instant, global selfpublishing via the internet. In fact, as human communication becomes ever more captured by platform capitalism and data-harvesting, zines are thriving in inverse proportion (‘Interview’, 2019). These hybrid print/craft productions positively revel in their handmade, low-tech, obdurately retro materiality, fe­ tishising the authenticity this lends them. There is something almost heroic in zinesters’ defiant thumbing of their collective nose at global media conglom­ erates and the concentration of the contemporary book industry. It’s OK that no zine is ever likely to achieve mass-market appeal or global circulation, their makers seem to say, as they never wanted that kind of success anyway.

Learning exercises Independent publishing sectors often organise their own book awards, such as the US-based IPPYs (www.ippyawards.com/) and Firecracker Awards (www.clmp. org/readers/programs/firecracker/) or Australia’s Small Press Network Most Underrated Book Award (https://smallpressnetwork.com.au/the-most-underratedbook-award/). To what extent are such awards about celebrating literary excellence as opposed to canny marketing devices? Try researching similar awards in your own country for what they reveal about independent publishers’ self-conception, author relations and publicity strategies. Investigate your local zine scene. Is there an established place for zine production and exchange such as a zine library or zine fair? What networks of independent book, music and fashion retailers carry zines (and what might be their motivations for doing so)? To what extent does the zine scene in your city exist in parallel to (or defiance of) the capitalist marketplace and to what extent is it co-opted by it?

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Figure 5.2 The poster for Melbourne’s Sticky Institute Zine Fair celebrates the analogue tactility of handcrafted print culture: the joys of working with scissors, sticky tape, pen, photocopier and stapler. Such defiantly lo-fi aesthetics are key to zines’ DIY, al­ ternative take on cultural participation. (Tim Sta-Ana, https://timmy.dog)

Notes 1 Within the publishing industry, unsolicited manuscripts are known by the pejorative term ‘the slush pile’. 2 See also the BBC documentary Virago: Changing the World One Page at a Time (2016): www.imdb.com/title/tt6253812/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1. 3 www.littlebrown.co.uk/imprint/lbbg/page/little-brown-books/lbbg-imprints/. 4 The Diversity Baseline Survey (2015) conducted by children’s publisher Lee & Lowe found 82 per cent of editorial staff in North American book publishing are white, as are 79 per cent of staff overall (https://blog.leeandlow.com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-in-publishingthe-2015-diversity-baseline-survey-results/). The 2019 Publishers Weekly US industry survey

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notes ‘incremental improvements’ in subsequent years (www.publishersweekly.com/pw/bytopic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/81718-the-pw-publishing-industry-salary-survey2019.html). For Latinx perspectives on the ‘unbearable whiteness of Big Lit’ institutions and publishing practice in the United States, see Nava (2020) and Pineda (2020). 5 McPhee, 2001: 149. 6 https://smallpressnetwork.com.au/. The US equivalent, Small Press Distribution, which was founded in 1969, represents ‘hundreds of small literary publishers’ in the US market (www.spdbooks.org/pages/about/default.aspx). 7 www.torontozinelibrary.org/; www.facebook.com/papercutzinelibrary/. See also Melbourne’s Sticky Institute: www.stickyinstitute.com/about. In 2017 the State Library Victoria worked with the Sticky Institute to curate the exhibition ‘Self-made: Zines and Artists Books’, which showcased the library’s extensive zine collection (www.slv.vic.gov.au/self-made). It is a notable example of a library lending its con­ siderable epistemological power to legitimise an underground cultural practice (see Eichhorn, 2013; see also Chapter 10).

Online resources •

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Offset the characteristic gloom of political-economic publishing critiques by sampling some spoof book covers. Readers of the Canadian litblog Bookninja were challenged to repackage a classic text as a downmarket bestseller, with hilarious results: www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2008/oct/29/canada? picture=339081416. Covering the story, the UK’s Guardian newspaper ran its own competition, declaring Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities rebadged as a Lonely Planet guidebook the winner: www.guardian.co.uk/books/ gallery/2008/nov/05/design?lightbox=1. Chicago-based independent Haymarket Books is committed to progressive political publishing, particularly on class, racial and gender issues. In its oppositional self-conception, openness to unpublished writers without agents and emphasis on community engagement, Haymarket showcases many familiar independent publishing traits. Its founders are well aware of the culture/commerce conundrum, describing the press as ‘a socialist workplace in a capitalist world’, doing ‘everything we can do to decommercialize the project without completely going under’: https://m. chicagoreader.com/chicago/haymarket-books-publishes-reading-materialfor-radicals/Content?oid=68185743.

References and further reading Abel, Richard E., and Lyman W. Newlin, eds. (2002) Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishers and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. New York: Wiley. Arms, Jane. (2004) ‘Uneasy Truces and the Failure of Nerve in Scholarly Publishing.’ Readers, Writers, Publishers: Essays and Poems. Ed. Brian Matthews. Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities. 97–106. Bode, Katherine. (2010) ‘Publishing and Australian Literature: Crisis, Decline or Transformation?’ Cultural Studies Review 16.2: 24–48. Brown, Stephen. (2006) Consuming Books: The Marketing and Consumption of Literature. London: Routledge.

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Callil, Carmen. (1980) ‘Virago Reprints: Redressing the Balance.’ Times Literary Supplement 12 Sep.: 1001. Carter, David. (2016) ‘The Literary Field and Contemporary Trade-book Publishing in Australia: Literary and Genre Fiction.’ Media International Australia 158: 48–57. Cunningham, Sophie. (2011) Melbourne. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Curtain, John. (1993) ‘The Media Industries: Book Publishing.’ The Media in Australia: Industries, Texts, Audiences. Ed. Stuart Cunningham and Graeme Turner. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. 102–18. Dattner, Zoe. (2014) ‘“Sometimes It Sucks to Be a Pioneer”: On Watching Publishing Start-ups Finish.’ Wheeler Centre 4 Jun. www.wheelercentre.com/notes/3debe5f793db. Davies, Gill. (2004) Book Commissioning and Acquisition. New York: Routledge. Davis, Mark. (2008) ‘Literature, Small Publishers and the Market in Culture.’ Overland 190: 4–11. Davis, Mark. (2009) ‘Making Aboriginal History: The Cultural Mission in Australian Book Publishing and the Publication of Henry Reynolds’s The Other Side of the Frontier.’ Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture. Ed. Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon. Sydney: Sydney University Press. 176–93. Denholm, Michael. (1991) Small Press Publishing in Australia. Volume 2. Melbourne: Footprint. Derricourt, Robin. (1996) A Guide to Scholarly Publishing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Derricourt, Robin. (2002) ‘Scholarly Book Publishing in Australia: The Impact of the Last Decade.’ Journal of Scholarly Publishing 33.4: 189–201. Do Rozario, Rebecca-Anne. (2007) ‘Don’t Steal a Book by Its Cover: The Book Thief and who Reads It.’ Script and Print 31.2: 104–16. Duncombe, Stephen. (1997) Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. New York: Verso. Eichhorn, Kate. (2013) The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Eichhorn, Kate. (2016) Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fielder, Brigitte and Jonathan Senchyne, eds. (2019) Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print. The History of Print and Digital Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Flannery, Katheryn Thomas. (2004) Feminist Literacies, 1968–1975. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Freeth, Kate (2007) A Lovely Kind of Madness: Small and Independent Publishing in Australia. Small Press Underground Networking Collective. http://spunc.com.au/about-spn/ report-into-small-publishing-in-australia. Galligan, Anne. (2007) ‘The Culture of the Publishing House: Structure and Strategies in the Australian Publishing Industry.’ Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 34–50. Gardiner, Juliet. (2000a) ‘Recuperating the Author: Consuming Fictions in the 1990s.’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94.2: 255–74. Gardiner, Juliet. (2000b) ‘“What is an Author?” Contemporary Publishing Discourse and the Author Figure.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 16.1: 63–76. Gelder, Ken. (2004) Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. London: Routledge. Graham, Gordon and Richard Abel, eds. (1996) The Book in the United States Today. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

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Griswold, Wendy. (2000) Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. (1989 [1962]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity. Hawthorne, Susan. (2014) Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Heiss, Anita. (2003) Dhuuluu Yala: To Talk Straight. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Hollier, Nathan. (2008) ‘Australian Small and Independent Publishing: The Freeth Report.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 24: 165–74. Horowitz, Irving Louis. (1991) Communicating Ideas: The Politics of Scholarly Publishing. 2nd edn. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Hungerford, Amy. (2016) Making Literature Now. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ‘Interview with a Bookstore: Bluestockings.’ (2019) Literary Hub 27 Jun. https://lithub. com/interview-with-a-bookstore-bluestockings/. Jackson, Chris. (2017) ‘Widening the Gates: Why Publishing Needs Diversity.’ What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing. Ed. Peter Ginna. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 223–30. Korporaal, Glenda. (1990) Project Octopus: The Publishing and Distribution Ownership Structure in the Book Industry, in Australia and Internationally. Sydney: Australian Society of Authors. Kurowski, Travis, Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer, eds. (2016) Literary Publishing in the Twenty-first Century. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. Lee, Jenny. (2008) ‘The Trouble with Books.’ Overland 190: 17–21. Lewis, Glen. (1991) ‘“It’s Academic”: Imperialism and the Australian Tertiary Book Industry.’ Continuum: Australian Journal of Media and Culture 4:1: 92–108. Mannion, Aaron and Amy Espeseth. (2013) ‘Small Press Social Entrepreneurship: The Values of Definition.’ By the Book? Ed. Emmett Stinson and Nathan Hollier. Melbourne: Monash University Press. 74–88. Mathews, Nicole and Nickianne Moody, eds. (2007) Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Abingdon: Ashgate. McPhee, Hilary. (2001) Other People’s Words. Sydney: Picador. Michael, Rose. (2019) ‘Brand(ing) Independence: In Praise of Small Presses.’ Logos 29.4: 7–13. Miller, Mark Crispin. (1997) ‘The Crushing Power of Big Publishing.’ The Nation 17 Mar.: 11–18. Miller, Toby. (2007) ‘“Drowning in Information and Starving for Knowledge”: 21stcentury Scholarly Publishing.’ Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture ‘The Politics of Publishing’ special issue, 40.1: 25–40. Moore, Taylor. (2019) ‘The Life and Death of an American Indie Press.’ Literary Hub 1 Aug. https://lithub.com/the-life-and-death-of-an-american-indie-press/. Moran, Albert. (1991) ‘Inside Publishing: Environments of the Publishing House.’ Continuum: Australian Journal of Media and Culture 4:1: 118–44. Munro, Craig and Robyn Sheahan-Bright, eds. (2006) Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946–2005. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Murphy, Priscilla Coit. (2005) What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of Silent Spring. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Murray, Simone. (2004) Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics. London: Pluto Press.

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Nava, Michael. (2020) ‘Big Lit Meets the Mexican Americans: A Study in White Supremacy.’ Los Angeles Review of Books 2 Jan. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/biglit-meets-mexican-americans-study-white-supremacy/. Neave, Lucy, James Connor and Amanda Crawford, eds. (2007) Arts of Publication: Scholarly Publishing in Australia and Beyond. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Nile, Richard. (1991) ‘Cartels, Capitalism and the Australian Booktrade.’ Continuum: Australian Journal of Media and Culture. 4:1 71–91. Nile, Richard. (2002) The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Phelan, James. (2005) Literati: Australian Contemporary Literary Figures Discuss Fear, Frustrations and Fame. Brisbane: Wiley. Piepmier, Alison. (2009) Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: New York University Press. Pineda, Dorany. (2020) ‘“American Dirt” Publisher Vows to Increase Latinx Staff, Published Authors.’ Los Angeles Times 4 Feb. www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/ books/story/2020-02-04/american-dirt-publishers-dignidadliteraria-meet. Poland, Louise. (1999) ‘Independent Australian Publishers and the Acquisition of Books.’ Journal of Australian Studies 63: 110–18. Poland, Louise. (2001) ‘An Enduring Record: Aboriginal Publishing in Australia 1988–98.’ Australian Studies 16.2: 83–110. Poland, Louise. (2003) ‘The Devil and the Angel? Feminist Presses and the Multinational Agenda.’ Hecate 29.2: 123–39. Poland, Louise. (2005) ‘“Sisterhood is Powerful”: Sisters Publishing and Book Club in Australia 1978–85.’ Script and Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand 29.1–4: 276–89. Poletti, Anna. (2008) Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Radway, Janice. (2012) ‘Zines Then and Now: What Are They? What Do You Do with Them? How Do They Work?’ From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Anouk Lang. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 27–47. Randall, D’Arcy. (1998) UQP: The Writer’s Press – 1948–1998. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Riley, Catherine. (2018) The Virago Story: Assessing the Impact of a Feminist Publishing Phenomenon. New York: Berghahn Books. Rudick, Nicole. (2019) ‘Remembering Tin House, a Literary Haven for “Brilliant Weirdos.”’ New York Times 6 Jun. www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/books/tin-houselast-issue.html. Sabto, Michelle. (1998) ‘Lo-fi Tales.’ Meanjin 57.4: 809–15. Schiffrin, André. (1998) ‘The Corporatization of Publishing.’ Corporate Power in the United States. Ed. Joseph Sora. New York: Wilson. 145–52. Schiffrin, André. (2000) The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London and New York: Verso. Schiffrin, André. (2010) Words and Money. New York: Verso. Simons, Judy and Kate Fullbrook, eds. (1998) Writing: A Woman’s Business: Women, Writing and the Marketplace. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Squires, Claire. (2007a) Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Squires, Claire. (2007b) ‘The Global Market 1970–2000: Consumers.’ A Companion to the History of the Book. Ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Oxford: Blackwell. 406–418. Squires, Claire. (2019) ‘The Passion and Pragmatism of the Small Publisher.’ The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible. Ed. Georgina Colby, Kaja Marczewska and Leigh Wilson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stewart, Simon. (2018) ‘Making Evaluative Judgements and Sometimes Making Money: Independent Publishing in the 21st Century.’ Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change 3.2. www.lectitopublishing.nl/Article/Detail/making-evaluative-judgementsand-sometimes-making-money-independent-publishing-in-the-21st-century-3991. Stinson, Emmett. (2016) ‘Small Publishers and the Emerging Network of Australian Literary Prosumption.’ Australian Humanities Review 59. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2016/ 03/18/small-publishers-and-the-emerging-network-of-australian-literary-prosumption/. Stoner, Rebecca. (2019) ‘Haymarket Books Publishes Reading Material for Radicals.’ Chicago Reader 21 Feb. https://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/haymarket-books-publishesreading-material-for-radicals/Content?oid=68185743. Thompson, John B. (2005) Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity. Triggs, Teal. (2010) Fanzines. London: Thames and Hudson. Van der Vlies, Andrew. (2007) South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read all over. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Waters, Lindsay. (2004) Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Wilding, Michael. (1999) ‘Australian Literary and Scholarly Publishing in Its International Context.’ Australian Literary Studies 19.1: 57–69. Wilkins, Andrew. (2008) ‘Australian Book Market: An Overview.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 24: 149–55. York, Lorraine. (2000) ‘“He Should Do Well on the American Talk Shows”: Celebrity, Publishing, and the Future of Canadian Literature.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 71: 96–105.

6

Editing

Who creates a book? The standard answer is its author: the individual writer has been credited for some centuries in Western legal and aesthetic theory as the origin point of a book. Convention holds that it is the author’s unique creative insight that is showcased to the public via the printed codex. However, after reading about political economy, and especially the previous chapter about independent publishing, you might want to mount an argument for committed publishers as books’ true creators – whether through their gatekeeping power to acquire new manuscripts or via the more activist route of commissioning au­ thors to write books for which publishers perceive a ready market. If you have studied sufficient French post-structuralist theory, you might even make the argument that individual readers create a book through the unique constellation of personal experience, cultural perspective and interpretive decoding they bring to the author’s words (see Chapter 9). Regardless, it is vanishingly unlikely you thought to make a case for editors as creators of books. Editors are the invisible menders of the book industry; paradoxically, their role is performed best when their influence is least detectable (Greenberg, 2018: 5; Groenland, 2019a: 5). Good editors wipe their fingerprints off the text and erase all traces of their presence, ceding credit to the author alone, whereas incompetent editors leave so many mistakes in a text that readers become uncomfortably aware the editor has failed to perform their role conscientiously. It seems a no-win situation: noticed only for the wrong reasons. Mandy Brett, an editor at leading Australian independent publisher Text, encapsulates this idea of editing as self-effacement: the editor is ‘a servant whose principal task is to make someone else look good and not be observed doing it’ (2011). Still more perniciously, editing has long been couched in gendered terms, with editors the ‘handmaids’ or ‘midwives’ of authors – a symbolically sub­ servient status made ever more actual in a heavily feminised, increasingly free­ lance industry (Greenberg, 2018: 11; Shea, 2018: 112). Often the only explicit sign of an editor’s meticulous labour on a manuscript is a terse ‘thank you’ from the author on the Acknowledgements page. Consequently, most readers never think about book editors as mediators between authors and themselves. Such professional erasure is avidly encouraged by the author-centric nature of book marketing. Editors are rarely invited to speak at writers’ festivals (note the term)

Editing 109

unless the author over whose manuscripts they have laboured is dead, insistently anonymous or otherwise indisposed, and even then editors represent com­ pensatory programming choices. Try it yourself: how many book editors, past or present, can you name?

Was Raymond Carver actually ‘Carveresque’? Editors’ elbowing out of the book-industry limelight has been an open secret within publishing circles for centuries. Book editors may have looked askance at the practice, particularly as editors in other industries, such as newspapers, magazines and film-making, are often accorded celebrity status and credited with setting the tone of the finished product. Nevertheless, by and large, the diffident, self-abnegating nature of the editorial persona seemed to keep dis­ gruntlement largely under professional wraps. This changed radically early in the new millennium when a dispute between the estate of US short-story writer Raymond Craver and his publisher broke spectacularly into public consciousness, raising the intriguing question of whether certain literary edi­ tors themselves created the signature prose styles of acclaimed writers. Some necessary background: Raymond Carver (1938–88) was one of the most influential fiction writers of the late twentieth century. His signature pared-down, superficially minimalist but emotionally powerful evocations of white, working-class US life have been so institutionalised via Master of Fine Arts (MFA) writers’ workshops as to give rise to the adjective ‘Carveresque’ (Ley, 2010; Groenland, 2019a). His short stories have also frequently been adapted for screen, such as Robert Altman’s anthology film Short Cuts (1993), the Australian translocation of Carver’s short story ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ as Jindabyne (2006), and the Oscar-winning Birdman (2014), a film ostensibly about a stage adaptation of Carver’s work. Yet, in 2007, Carver’s widow, poet Tess Gallagher, verified long-circulating claims that the author’s New York-based editor Gordon Lish had made copious cuts to Carver’s drafts of his breakthrough short-story collection What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981). Side-by-side examination of the edited manuscript and the Knopf/Random House-published book revealed Lish had cut some 50 to 70 per cent of certain stories and had even devised the collection’s now-iconic, oft-riffed-upon title (‘Rough Crossings’, 2007; Groenland, 2019a).1 The lit­ erary community was thus faced with the disconcerting question of whether Lish had ‘created’ Carver’s distinctive style. The relevant editorial bluepencilling had occurred relatively early in Carver’s chaotic career, when he was still a struggling writer eager for recognition and mentoring, and Lish was already a fixture of US literary publishing. Gallagher claimed Carver had resented the extent of Lish’s expurgations at the time and had become increasingly assertive in his working relationship with the editor thereafter. As the power imbalance between the pair diminished, Carver eventually broke with Lish. Accordingly, Gallagher announced her intention to release the original version of the manuscript that became What We Talk about When We

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Talk about Love under Carver’s original title, Beginners (itself now subtextually laden), declaring it the ‘true’ representation of Carver’s authorial intention (Campbell, 2007). Random House alleged breach of copyright based on its original book contract with Carver, stating that Beginners clearly represented a competing work (‘Rough Crossings’, 2007). For a brief – perhaps overdue – moment, the author-sanctifying veil of the book industry was roughly pulled aside to reveal the extent of other parties’ hand in literary production. For any book historian familiar with Robert Darnton’s ‘Communications Circuit’ (see Chapter 2), the impact of cultural intermediaries on a book’s production and circulation is tantamount to a truism. However, for the broader book-buying public, it appeared a veritable revelation, calling uncomfortably into question the inviolable sanctity of the author–reader compact.2 As one reviewer wrote: Beginners forces important questions on the reader about the nature of authorship. If stories can be this significantly changed by an editor … perhaps we should wonder, more generally, about the purity of our connection with writers, and how literature is arrived at and delivered. (Ford, 2010: 22)

Figure 6.1 The cover of Beginners (2010), the unexpurgated edition of Raymond Carver’s signature short-story collection What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (1981). The controversy surrounding Gordon Lish’s drastic cuts to the manuscript version shone a light on editorial intervention in the literary world and pro­ blematised the concept of singular, Romantic authorial genius. (From Beginners by Raymond Carver published by Vintage. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. ©2010)

Editing 111

Varieties of editorial roles In contemporary publishing, the job title ‘editor’ obscures as much as it reveals about an individual’s professional responsibilities. There are several different kinds of editor, ordered in a distinctly hierarchical manner.3 The most senior editorial role is the commissioning or acquisitions editor, also known (somewhat confusingly) in some houses as the publisher. Employees in this managerial-level role are responsible for seeking out book projects for the publishing house, whether through acquiring completed manuscripts or book proposals or via the more activist route of directly commissioning an author to write a book for which they discern an untapped market. Commissioning or acquisitions editors may have little more to do with the development of a project after the contract is negotiated and signed. Typically, they work at a high level across multiple book projects simultaneously. Their role is an entrepreneurial, business-oriented one where profit and overall list profile are pre-eminent concerns. One rung down the editorial ladder are managing or structural editors, to whom commissioning editors often delegate the hands-on work for specific book projects. These second-level editors engage closely with ‘big picture’ issues for individual books: determining agreed goals for the title; liaising extensively with the author(s) over the structure of the manuscript; and identifying the preferences of its target audience. This is closest to the role most people have in mind when they say ‘editor’ and often represents the optimal blend of creative and commercial functions to which many graduates of publishing courses aspire. At the lowest notch on the editorial totem pole are line- or copy-editors. Their task is to address the nitty-gritty of manuscripts and especially to eradicate potentially embarrassing errors. They work through a manuscript line by line (hence the name), liaising with the author(s) over corrections such as typographical slips, spelling mistakes, grammatical infelicities or con­ fusing constructions, and resolve missing references, mislabelled figures, etc. (Ripatrazone, 2019). As the most junior and least prestigious editorial role, this function is now commonly outsourced to freelancers, who work on a casual basis. The corporate houses that have embraced outsourcing most enthusiastically have made substantial savings on wages and overheads by doing away with their in-house line-editors, and the risk of them being idle at any point. The historical ideal of the editor

Such a corporatised or casualised working life is a far cry from the famed editors who dominated book publishing in the early to mid-twentieth century. An editorial ideal hangs heavy over the contemporary book industry, as is evident in widespread nostalgia for the increasingly distant past, when editors were still mentors, nurturing the author’s creative development, advising on

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manuscripts, serving as a complex blend of business manager, artistic sounding-board, friend, counsellor, drinking buddy and amateur psychologist (Howard, 1989; Weisberg, 1991; Groenland, 2019b). This more heroic, even swashbuckling, editorial persona publicly championed often difficult new writing, waded into literary battle to declare the genius of favoured writers and searched out receptive audiences for as-yet-unacknowledged masterpieces. The editor-as-impresario might spend their entire career with a single pub­ lishing house as its resident talent-spotter, attracting other writers to the firm’s stable and occasionally becoming almost as famous as the authors they nur­ tured. The embodiment of such a figure in American letters is the legendary early twentieth-century Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins (1884–1947), dis­ coverer of such Modernist luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. A. Scott Berg’s deliberately ambiguously titled biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1997 [1978]) even had the unique distinction for a book about editing of being adapted for the screen. The film Genius (2016) centres upon Perkins’ long-running, frequently fraught ‘bromance’ with Wolfe during the writing of the latter’s breakthrough work Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and its follow-up, Of Time and the River (1935). Perkins is depicted trying to wrestle Wolfe’s ballooning 5000-page manuscript into publishable form over the course of two tumultuous years. In the context of Australian literature, Beatrice Davis (1909–92), doyenne of Angus & Robertson publishing from the late 1930s to the 1970s, performed a similar role, acting as literary taste-maker, career guide and prize judge. Her involvement in almost every aspect of Australian literary production during this period meant that, to some extent, the nascent national publishing in­ dustry and its academic adjunct, the discipline of Australian literature, re­ presented externalisations of Davis’s personal taste and editorial judgement (Kent, 2001). In the Canadian context, Jack McClelland (1922–2004) served an equivalent activist role in differentiating a national literature from the cultural dominance of Canada’s southern neighbour. His skill as a talentspotter, coupled with a flair for publicity and an astute sense of politicalcultural timing, made McClelland & Stewart synonymous with Canadian letters throughout the second half of the twentieth century.4 Editors’ contemporary reality

Editors working today in the corporatised, micro-managed world of multi­ national publishing must regard the editorial autonomy wielded by Perkins, Davis and McClelland with a sense of wonder tinged with jealousy. Since the conglomeration of publishing gathered pace during the 1980s, the editorial role has become much more business-oriented, with decreasing time spent on its traditionally creative, author-nurturing aspects. This holds true especially at senior levels of the editing profession, as most commissioning and acquisitions editors have deeply internalised the neoliberal mantra that ‘each book must pay its way’: that is, each title must make a profit to contribute to overheads,

Editing 113

Figure 6.2 Editor Maxwell Perkins (Colin Firth) burns the midnight oil attempting to wrestle author Thomas Wolfe’s (Jude Law) gargantuan manuscript into pub­ lishable form in director Michael Grandage’s filmic bromance Genius (2016).

with no more cross-subsidising of titles. Consequently, ‘slow-build’ authorial careers, where authors accrue modest sales until their ‘breakout’ book finally hits the bestseller lists, are rarer than ever (see Chapter 3). Commissioning editors must routinely run the gauntlet of sales and marketing directors at acquisition meetings, where BookScan and comp title data are tabled as ‘proof’ of a prospective title’s viability and hence merit. Industry-wide insecurity and personal dissatisfaction with the changing nature of the editor’s role have given rise to a ‘musical chairs syndrome’, whereby high-level editors change jobs frequently or decamp to establish literary agencies (Weisberg, 1991). Authors can thus become ‘orphaned’ when their former editorial champion leaves a publishing house and they are unceremoniously passed to a recently promoted staffer with little commitment to their ongoing or next project. At the lower editorial levels, the knock-on effects of economic rationalism register still more strongly. Tighter budgets overall mean the structural editing stage is often omitted altogether, with manuscripts going straight from au­ thorial submission to line-editing (Poland, 2007). This is especially prevalent in academic publishing, where authors are assumed, given their doctoral training, to have an adequate grasp of argumentative structure. But particularly with trade non-fiction and fiction titles, bypassing structural editing may result in an inferior work, with evident flaws in argument or plot (McPhee, 2001). Copy-editing also feels the pinch of reduced corporate investment. While few reputable publishers risk omitting line-editing entirely, books are often edited to a budget rather than a standard, with freelancers urged to rush an edit for the sake of meeting production deadlines (Weisberg, 1991; Miller, 1997;

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Poland, 2007). The transformation of copy-editing from a task performed in house with training and ongoing commitment to a publisher’s colophon to an insecure, freelance ‘gig-economy’ endeavour has obvious negative con­ sequences for practitioners’ career prospects and pay rates. More specifically, copy-editing’s declining prestige can be precisely calibrated against the fem­ inising of the editing profession since the 1970s (Reskin, 1990). While some female copy-editors with care responsibilities appreciate the flexible hours freelancing affords, this trend conforms to earlier patterns of status and salaries declining as women come to dominate a profession’s workforce. As Chapter 3 observed of publishing workers in general – and Chapter 8 explores in relation to book retailers – freelance editors are encouraged to trade decent salaries for the insubstantial benefit of high cultural esteem. The author–editor relationship

The historical ideal of the editor as literary champion may appear unsustainable in contemporary publishing’s heavily corporatised environment. Nevertheless, writers and editors verify that profoundly productive and collaborative author–editor relationships still exist, especially at independent houses. The dynamic is extremely delicate, demanding a high degree of trust, emotional intelligence, tact, compatible working styles and a shared vision for the finished work. After all, changing someone else’s words means altering their voice (‘Editorial Power Means Blowing up the Machine from the Inside’, 2018). For writers, the editing process thus represents an uncharacteristic, even threatening, relinquishing of control over their work. Yet such surrender is necessary as the author, being so close to the manuscript, often cannot see what is required to improve it. An editor’s most salient contribution might be simply to register where a passage does not make sense or some elaboration is required. This is the origin of the idea of the editor as the author’s ‘first, best reader’ – a creative dyad celebrated on the Acknowledgements page of many successful publications. The editor subordinates their critical acumen and ar­ tistic knowledge to the author’s goals for the work, diplomatically identifying which sections fail to communicate the author’s vision optimally. Novelist Charlotte Wood identifies four key qualities of good literary editors: in­ tellectual generosity; humility; imaginative courage; and the ability to en­ courage ‘the breath of life’ in a work (2014). At their best, the editor coaxes the author to express that which the writer intended, but perhaps could not consciously articulate: It is in the company of a skilled editor’s meticulous attention to the fine grain of a work … that writer and editor together might uncover and mark that precious resolving line, and with it bring the book, finally and fully into the light. (Wood, 2014)

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Literary agents Prior to the late nineteenth century, authors dealt directly with publishers. For this reason, Robert Darnton’s eighteenth-century-focused ‘Communications Circuit’ shows a direct and unbroken line connecting Author to Publisher (see Chapter 2). But by the 1870s, with the emergence of professional authors licensing their works for international book and periodical markets, authors became aware that editors within publishing houses experienced a sharp conflict of interest: an editor’s obligation to their employer is to secure the maximum rights in an author’s work for minimal outlay, whereas their role as author champion should see them reversing this ratio and granting as limited a range of rights in the work as possible for the highest fee. As individual au­ thors, and their nascent lobby groups, became increasingly dissatisfied with the state of play in the book industry, a new figure emerged to plead their case: the literary agent (Hepburn, 1968). Figures such as A.P. Watt, Albert Curtis Brown and J.B. Pinker set up in London as authorial business managers (an international agency still operates under Curtis Brown’s name; see West, 1988a, 1988b; Gillies, 1993, 2007; Bonn, 1992, 1994; McDonald, 1997). Since the 1970s in particular, the literary agent has become ever more central to the book world, undertaking many of the author-nurturing tasks that were formerly the province of editors, but with the clear-eyed, unconflicted goal of maximising the author/client’s income. By the twenty-first century, agents had become indisputable powerbrokers in the book industry, able to make or break not only individual book deals but entire authorial careers (Thompson, 2010; Murray, 2012). Modern literary agents are responsible for shepherding a book through preand post-publication phases and wear a range of creative and commercial hats. Prior to a manuscript’s submission to publishers, agents are often the author’s ‘first, best reader’, advising on the artistic qualities of a work in progress, suggesting refinements to plot, characterisation or narrative voice and clar­ ifying the author’s sense of the target readership. Once the manuscript is ready for submission, the agent will compile a list of preferred acquisitions editors at selected houses and create a pitch package consisting of an author dossier, writing sample and marketing materials. If the manuscript has generated suf­ ficient ‘buzz’, the agent may convene an auction, at which they will usually try to land a multi-book deal for their client plus a hefty advance. Once it comes to negotiating the resultant contract, the agent becomes the author’s legal and financial mouthpiece, deciding which rights to transfer to the publishing house and which to retain for potential later sale to third parties. This businessadvisory role frequently continues for years or even decades after the book contract is signed as the agent manages ongoing territorial, translation and socalled ‘subsidiary’ rights (e.g. book club, adaptation and merchandising rights). Indeed, they may continue to manage such rights even after the author’s death on behalf of their estate.

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Part of nineteenth-century publishers’ vociferous objection to ‘parasitic’ agents invading the ‘sanctity’ of the author–publisher compact was the un­ embarrassed way in which agents pursued the author’s financial interests, calling out publishers’ tendency to offer cultural blandishments rather than decent advances, competitive royalty rates and prompt account payments. Crucially, literary agents, like the Hollywood talent agencies from which many of them emerged, work on the basis of a standard 15 per cent com­ mission, which makes their income directly contingent upon the writer’s income. Moreover, agents continue to earn a fixed royalty on every contract they negotiated, even if the author subsequently moves to a new agent. Thus, even though it frequently has creative, nurturing overtones (as authors’ ‘thankyou’s on Acknowledgements pages attest),5 the author–agent relationship is primarily a business one in that it is usually more arm’s-length and professional than the mid-twentieth-century Maxwell Perkins editorial ideal. As publishing itself becomes ever more commercially driven, some disgruntled editors have jumped ship to set up their own literary agencies, preferring to work for themselves and retain the hands-on creative work that first attracted them to the book industry (Curtis, 1989). In recent decades a new breed of so-called ‘super-agents’ has emerged, first in mass-market fiction and increasingly in the literary sector as well. Often trained in law or business rather than literature, these super-agents have es­ tablished transnational rights agencies that purport to represent their clients’ interests across territories and media formats (Janklow, 1985). A simultaneous trend towards formerly independent literary agents joining cross-sectoral, multinational talent agencies such as William Morris and the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) has popularised the idea of ‘360-degree representation’: that is, showcasing a manuscript to film and television interests and compiling a ‘package’ of screenwriter, producer, director and acting talent even prior to a book’s publication (Murray, 2012). One of the foremost super-agents is Andrew Wylie, whose eponymous agency, with offices in New York and London, boasts a stellar list of authorial clients (or their estates) on its website.6 Such power-brokers hire booths at major international book fairs, like London and Frankfurt, to conduct busi­ ness, schmooze clients and broadcast influence, and a number of them have become celebrities in their own right. All credible agents cultivate an air of business acumen and see themselves as industry innovators, unhampered by the genteel ‘gentlemen’s publishing’ conventions of yore. Generally, they prefer to keep their authors in the spotlight and wield power behind the scenes, although this can sometimes fail, as in the 1995 UK tabloid scandal about Wylie luring novelist Martin Amis away from his long-time literary agent with the promise of a record-breaking advance (Murray, 2012). More recently, Sydney agent Selwa Anthony’s lawsuit against her star former client, UK-based mystery-romance novelist Kate Morton, shed unwelcome light on agents’ business practices, in particular the ostensibly business-savvy Anthony’s lack of written contracts with her client/authors (Cadzow, 2019).

Editing 117

Editing as a socio-political act Textual scholar Morris Eaves has provocatively declared that ‘editing is not only a service performed by underpaid bookworms but also, to some degree, a social act with political implications’ (1994: 91). This might appear to stretch the definition of politics to breaking point. Yet editors make choices about which of an author’s words appear and in what form. Because communication is inextricably related to structures of power, editors are often making im­ plicitly political choices. Editing can thus never be an entirely objective or neutral process (even if it claims to be). Rather, editorial power needs to be acknowledged and negotiated with authors if both parties are to achieve a creatively productive and professionally harmonious relationship. Contextual factors affecting editing

A significant power imbalance exists between most authors and their edi­ tors. This is especially pronounced with first-time authors, who are fre­ quently so overawed by book-industry gatekeepers that they acquiesce to most demands for textual changes. The editorial encounter can be emo­ tionally loaded, especially in relation to works of fiction that might be strongly autobiographical. At stake is the issue of whose vision of the book should prevail. Such an overview frames the author–editor encounter as essentially adversarial, but this default conception is itself problematic and can place relations between the two parties on a bad footing. The best editing does not seek to impose a voice on the text, but instead assists the author to find the right voice for the book. We return here to the image of the editor as enabler or creative midwife, putting their own skill at the service of the particular book project: You have to drop your own preferred style and look at what works for the text. At the beginning of any edit you ask yourself ‘who’s this book for, what is this book for, who will read it, and can I understand how they will read it?’ and that will affect whether you allow things that might not be your preferred way … I think a good editor is a good reader. (ABC National Radio, 2007) Language and expression

Particularly potent issues of editorial control arise around the use of ‘standard’ English versus ‘dialect’ in a literary work (Young, 2006). Even the terms ‘standard’ and ‘dialect’ are themselves loaded, implying one is a ‘natural’, universal language and the other a substandard deviation, intelligible primarily to those within a specific group. As the academic discipline of sociolinguistics investigates, the power to define language forms as ‘received pronunciation’ as opposed to ‘dialect’, ‘patois’ or ‘vernacular’ is, at its base, an expression of

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socio-cultural power. Politically self-conscious editors are alert to the re­ sponsibilities that come with control over another’s voice. In a forum on editorial power, Medaya Ocher, managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, stressed: [E]ditors … have power over how someone speaks. That is a massive privilege to hand to some other person. I wouldn’t even let someone else order for me at a restaurant. It involves trust and a measure of faith that is kind of shocking if you think about it. (‘Editorial Power Means Blowing up the Machine from the Inside’, 2018) The power imbalance between author and editor may be especially pro­ nounced where a writer from an ethnic minority seeks to write from ex­ perience of that position. The publishing industry across the Western world has long been, and stubbornly remains, overwhelmingly white-dominated (see Chapter 5). While book publishing as a whole has rapidly feminised at most levels since the 1970s, those female workers continue to be drawn dis­ proportionately from the white, upper-middle classes who can afford to live on the industry’s often meagre wages.7 Yet, during the same period, in part through the influence of post-colonial theory and Booker Prize selections, the publishing industry has avidly promoted literary works from non-AngloCeltic perspectives, and presses continue to pursue ways to attract broader readerships. Margaret McDonell, discussing the editing of Australian Aboriginal writers’ texts by non-indigenous editors (2004), examines how best to proceed in an industrial context where author and editor have markedly unequal status. She maintains that the key is to establish a protocol of ongoing dialogue and consultation: ‘The work of editing becomes an exercise in crosscultural communication and negotiation’ (83). There are, after all, myriad potential points of conflict: should the manuscript be rendered in Aboriginal English or ‘correct’ English; should the editor insist upon ‘standard’ spelling, grammar and punctuation or allow more idiosyncratic expression (taking into account the author’s level of formal education); if an illiterate author is relaying an oral narrative, does the transcriber/editor become effectively a co-author? Most complexly, what if the author seeks to record ‘secret business’ known only to initiates of an Aboriginal group? What might be the intellectual property implications – let alone the ethics – of a publisher seeking to copyright the cultural memory of that group? McDonnell’s case-study raises especially acute theoretical and practical is­ sues, but it is far from culturally unique. Recounting his positive experience with Chicago-based independent Haymarket Books (see Chapter 5), Latinx poet José Olivarez highlights the benefits of working with a racially diverse editorial team: ‘I didn’t have to translate any sections of my book, I didn’t have to explain things to my editor, I didn’t have to fight for [certain things] – for example, the words in my book that are in Spanish are not italicized. They just understood and went with that.’8

Editing 119 ‘Updating’ classic works

Debates over the socio-cultural politics of editing do not end when a manuscript passes to the publisher’s production department. Thorny editorial debates can continue over the posthumous editing of famous works to take account of changing cultural mores. For example, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) has long been celebrated for inaugurating in print a specifically Southern US English. However, during the 1990s, cultural battles raged over whether to excise Twain’s racist terminology to render the book more palatable in contemporary school and university settings (Morrison, 1992; Alberti, 1995). Children’s books, because of their assumed formative role, are frequent targets for such ex post facto bowdlerisation. Five on a Treasure Island (1942), the first instalment in Enid Blyton’s bestselling Famous Five series, originally featured a chapter titled ‘A queer story – and a new friend’, but in the 2001 edition this was editorially airbrushed to read ‘A peculiar story – and a new friend’. By 2010, for a new release, the text was again re-edited, with the word ‘peculiar’ changed to ‘strange’.9 Whether historical works should be altered after the author’s death to accord with modern sensibilities is at heart a debate over two differing conceptions of the text. For traditional bibliography, textual criticism is a process of compiling an authoritative version of a text that best reflects the author’s final intentions (Kelemen, 2009). Yet, for book history (see Chapter 2), textual ‘purity’ is always at best a mirage or at worst an editorial sleight of hand; the editor’s principal task is to reveal the innate mutability of all texts by exploring the shifting sociohistorical conditions that cause such variations (McGann, 1991; Eggert, 2009).

Conclusion One fascinating aspect of the theorisation of editing is its vertiginous shift from the micro level of an individual word on the page to the most macro-level concerns of power, voice and representation. As the technological substrate of literature increasingly shifts from print as default format to digital platforms, readers themselves will have ever-greater ability to edit texts, revising endings, creating further adventures for existing characters, and providing feedback to authors in the manner of fanfiction. Stabilising the text, which traditional bibliography was at pains to achieve by removing textual ‘corruption’, will stand revealed as a futile, even wrongheaded, task. For it may be precisely the instability of texts – their tendency to adapt to new environments – that proves their most compelling feature, as the following chapter explores.

Learning exercises Undertake some research into famous literary works that were substantially changed during the editing process (https://listverse.com/2013/01/14/deletedbook-chapters/). Notable examples include Ezra Pound’s cuts to T.S. Eliot’s

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The Waste Land (1922), the toning down of sexual content and race politics in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and the dropping of the final chapter from Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967). The status of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (2015) as a prior attempt at the material that became To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is a related, much-publicised recent instance. Does scholarly highlighting of editorial intervention justify the publication of ‘restored’ classics (akin to director’s-cut film reissues)? Or do proliferating versions unnecessarily muddy our perception of classic texts as ‘completed’ works? Take the first page of a book written in non-standard English and imagine it is a manuscript submitted to you as commissioning editor at a publishing house. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Sapphire’s Push (1996; filmed as Precious in 2009) work well for this task. To what extent is preserving the narrator’s voice essential to the artistic or ideological ambitions of the work? Should you advise the author to render their work in standard English to expand their potential readership? Could the use of dialect actually reinforce racial/ethnic stereotypes? How might you reconcile your commercial obligations to your employer with creative mentoring of the author?

Notes 1 See, for example, Price (2019). 2 The exception that proves the rule is the 2017 decision by Hachette imprint Dialogue to include film-style credits at the end of each book listing the dozens of publishing staff involved in its production (Barnett, 2019). 3 See also Susan L. Greenberg’s table of editorial roles (2018: 11). 4 After ongoing financial difficulties, McClelland eventually sold the firm. In 2000 the majority of shares were gifted to his alma mater, the University of Toronto. Since 2011, McClelland & Stewart has existed as an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada. 5 As but one example, in the Acknowledgements section of The Library Book (2018), Susan Orlean thanks ‘Richard Pine, my forever agent: You’re the greatest’ (312). 6 www.wylieagency.com/clients.html. 7 The 2015 Diversity Baseline Survey of North American book publishing found the industry workforce was 79 per cent white and 78 per cent female (https://blog.leeandlow. com/2016/01/26/where-is-the-diversity-in-publishing-the-2015-diversity-baseline-surveyresults/). Studies of UK publishing reveal a similarly white-dominated, Oxbridge-educated workforce (www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/27/has-publishing-really-becomemore-diverse) or, as David Barnett bitingly put it in a Guardian blog post, ‘trust-fund di­ lettantes with names like Jocasta’ (Barnett, 2019). 8 https://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/haymarket-books-publishes-reading-materialfor-radicals/Content?oid=68185743. 9 www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/23/enid-blyton-famous-five-makeover; https://worldofblyton.com/2013/12/20/five-on-a-treasure-island-how-has-blytonsoriginal-text-faired-in-a-modern-edition-part-two/.

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Online resources • • • • • • •

ABC Radio National. (2008) ‘An Intimate Relationship: Editors and Writers.’ The Book Show 11 Jan. www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/ 2008/2125552.htm. ABC Radio National. (2008) ‘The Rise and Rise of Literary Agents.’ The Book Show 18 Dec. www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2444944.htm. ACES: The Society for Editing (US): https://aceseditors.org/. Editors Canada: www.editors.ca. Institute of Professional Editors (Australia): http://iped-editors.org/ About_IPEd.aspx. Society for Editors and Proofreaders (UK): www.sfep.org.uk. Society for Textual Scholarship (STS): https://textualsociety.org.

References and further reading ABC Radio National. (2007) ‘What Is Structural Editing?’ The Book Show 8 Aug. www. abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2007/1995201.htm. Alberti, John. (1995) ‘The Nigger Huck: Race, Identity, and the Teaching of Huckleberry Finn.’ College English 57.8: 919–37. Athill, Diana. (2000) Stet: A Memoir. London: Granta Books. Barnett, David. (2019) ‘Should Books Include Credits Like Films?’ Guardian 19 Jul. www. theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2019/jul/19/should-books-include-credits-like-films. Berg, A. Scott. (1997 [1978]) Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. New York: Riverhead. Bonn, Thomas L. (1992) ‘Literary Power Brokers Come of Age.’ Media Studies Journal 6.3: 63–72. Bonn, Thomas L. (1994) ‘Henry Holt A-spinning in His Grave: Literary Agenting Yesterday and Today.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 10.1: 55–65. Bornstein, George. (2006) ‘W.E.B. Du Bois and the Jews: Ethics, Editing, and the Souls of Black Folk.’ Textual Cultures 1.1: 64–74. Bornstein, George and Ralph G. Williams, eds. (1993) Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Brett, Mandy. (2011) ‘Stet by Me: Thoughts on Editing Fiction.’ Meanjin 70.1. http:// meanjin.com.au/editions/volume-70-number-1-2011/article/stet-by-me-thoughts-onediting-fiction/. Bridges, L.E. (2017) ‘Flexible as Freedom? The Dynamics of Creative Industry Work and the Case Study of the Editor in Publishing.’ New Media and Society 1 Feb.: 1–17. http:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444816688920?journalCode=nmsa. Cadzow, Jane. (2019) ‘The Agent, Her Authors and the Legal Battles Worthy of a Bestseller.’ Sydney Morning Herald 23 Mar. www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/theagent-her-authors-and-the-legal-battles-worthy-of-a-bestseller-20190319-p515db.html. Campbell, James. (2007) ‘What a Carve-up.’ Guardian 1 Dec. www.guardian.co.uk/books/ 2007/dec/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview35. Childress, Clayton. (2017) Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clark, Alex. (2011) ‘The Lost Art of Editing.’ Guardian 11 Feb. www.guardian.co.uk/ books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing.

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Coser, Lewis A., Charles Kadushin and Walter W. Powell. (1982) Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cullen, Darcy, ed. (2012) Editors, Scholars and the Social Text. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Curtis, Richard. (1989) ‘Editors: The New Disenfranchised.’ Beyond the Bestseller: A Literary Agent Takes You Inside the Book Business. New York: New American Library. 326–331. De Glas, Frank. (2006) ‘The Role of the Editor in the Fiction Publishing Branch: Towards the Institutional Analysis of a Profession.’ FRAME 18.3: 7–25. Eaves, Morris. (1994) ‘Why Don’t They Leave It Alone? Speculations on the Authority of the Audience in Editorial Theory.’ Cultural Artefacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image and the Body. Ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. 85–99. ‘Editorial Power Means Blowing up the Machine from the Inside: Nine Women Editors on Sexual Discrimination in the Literary World, Part 1.’ (2018) Literary Hub 7 Feb. http:// lithub.com/editorial-power-means-blowing-up-the-machine-from-the-inside/. Eggert, Paul. (2009) Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eggert, Paul and Margaret Sankey, eds. (1998) The Editorial Gaze: Mediating Texts in Literature and the Arts. London: Taylor and Francis. Epstein, Jason. (2001) Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future. New York: Norton. Flanagan, Richard. (2007) ‘Colonies of the Mind; Republics of Dreams: Australian Publishing Past and Future.’ Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed.David Carter and Anne Galligan. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 132–48. Ford, Catherine. (2010) ‘When We Talk about Carver.’ [Review of Raymond Carver, Beginners.] Age 9 Jan.: A2, 22. Franklin, Dan. (1993) ‘The Role of the Editor.’ Publishing Now. Ed. Peter Owen. London: Peter Owen. 111–118. Franklin, Dan. (2002) ‘Commissioning and Editing Modern Fiction.’ On Modern British Fiction. Ed. Zachary Leader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 270–83. Gardiner, Juliet. (2000a) ‘Recuperating the Author: Consuming Fictions in the 1990s.’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94.2: 255–274. Gardiner, Juliet. (2000b) ‘“What is an Author?” Contemporary Publishing Discourse and the Author Figure.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 16.1: 63–76. Gillies, Mary Ann. (1993) ‘A.P. Watt, Literary Agent.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 9.1: 20–33. Gillies, Mary Ann. (1998) ‘The Literary Agent and the Sequel.’ Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel. Ed. Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 131–143. Gillies, Mary Ann. (2007) The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ginna, Peter, ed. (2017) What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glover, Stuart. (2011) ‘The Rise of Global Publishing and the Fall of the Dream of the Global Book: The Editing of Peter Carey.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 27.1: 54–61. Greco, Albert. (2005) The Book Publishing Industry. 2nd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Greenberg, Susan L. (2010) ‘When the Editor Disappears, Does Editing Disappear?’ Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies ‘Words on the Web’ special issue, 16.1: 7–21.

Editing 123 Greenberg, Susan L. (2015) Editors Talk about Editing: Insights for Readers, Writers and Publishers. New York: Peter Lang. Greenberg, Susan L. (2018) A Poetics of Editing. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Groenland, Tim. (2019a) The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Groenland, Tim. (2019b) ‘The Fantasy Editor.’ Los Angeles Review of Books 20 Apr. https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-fantasy-editor/#. Gross, Gerald, ed. (1993) Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know about What Editors Do. 3rd edn. New York: Grove Press. Hall, Frania. (2013) ‘The Changing Role of the Editor: Editors Past, Present, and Future.’ A Companion to Creative Writing. Ed. Graeme Harper. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. 179–194. Heiss, Anita. (2003) Dhuuluu Yala: To Talk Straight. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Henderson, Bill, ed. (1980) The Art of Literary Publishing: Editors on their Craft. Yonkers, NY: Pushcart. Hepburn, James. (1968) The Author’s Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent. London: Oxford University Press. Howard, Gerald. (1989) ‘Mistah Perkins – He Dead: Publishing Today.’ American Scholar 58.3: 355–369. Howard, Gerald. (1994) ‘Publishing Paul Auster.’ Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.1: 92. Hungerford, Amy. (2016) Making Literature Now. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Janklow, Morton L. (1985) ‘The Lawyer as Literary Agent.’ Columbia Journal of Art and the Law 9: 407–412. Jones, Jennifer. (2007) ‘Editing and the Politics of Race.’ Journal of Publishing 2: 46–67. Jones, Jennifer. (2009) Black Writers White Editors: Episodes of Collaboration and Compromise in Australian Publishing History. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Jordan, Deborah. (2009) ‘Emerging Black Writing and the University of Queensland Press.’ Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture. Ed.Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon. Sydney: Sydney University Press. 156–175. Kelemen, Erick. (2009) Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction. New York: Norton. Kent, Jacqueline. (2001) A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, A Literary Life. Melbourne: Viking Press. Korda, Michael. (1999) Another Life: A Memoir of Other People. New York: Random House. Ley, James. (2010) ‘Carved up, or Kindly Cut?’ Australian Literary Review 3 Mar.: 20–21. Mackenzie, Janet. (2004) The Editor’s Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mackenzie, Janet, ed. (2005) At the Typeface: Selections from the Newsletter of the Victorian Society of Editors. Melbourne: Society of Editors (Victoria). Marek, Jayne. (1995) Women Editing Modernism. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Maschler, Tom. (2005) Publisher. London: Picador. McDonald, Peter D. (1997) British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDonell, Margaret. (2004) ‘Protocols, Political Correctness and Discomfort Zones: Indigenous Life Writing and Non-indigenous Editing.’ Hecate 30.1: 83–95. McDonell, Margaret. (2005) ‘Locating the Text: Genre and Indigenous Australian Women’s Life Writing.’ Life Writing 1.2: 1–18. McGann, Jerome J. (1991) The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McPhee, Hilary. (2001) Other People’s Words. Sydney: Picador.

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Miller, Mark Crispin. (1997) ‘The Crushing Power of Big Publishing.’ The Nation 17 Mar.: 11–18. Moran, Joe. (2000) Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. London: Pluto. Morrison, Toni. (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Munro, Craig. (2015) Under Cover: Adventures in the Art of Editing. Melbourne: Scribe. Munro, Craig and Robyn Sheahan-Bright, eds. (2006) Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946–2005. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Murphy, J. Stephen. (2008) ‘The Death of the Editor.’ Essays in Criticism 58.4: 289–310. Murray, Simone. (2012) The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Orlean, Susan. (2018) The Library Book. New York: Simon & Schuster. Phelan, James. (2005) Literati: Australian Contemporary Literary Figures Discuss Fear, Frustrations and Fame. Brisbane: Wiley. Poland, Louise. (2007) ‘The Business, Craft and Profession of the Book Editor.’ Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 96–115. Price, Leah. (2019) What We Talk about When We Talk about Books: The History and Future of Reading. New York: Basic Books. Reskin, Barbara F. (1990) ‘Culture, Commerce and Gender: The Feminization of Book Editing.’ Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations. Ed. Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 93–110. Ripatrazone, Nick. (2019) ‘Is Line Editing a Lost Art?’ Literary Hub 6 Feb. https://lithub. com/is-line-editing-a-lost-art/. ‘Rough Crossings: The Cutting of Raymond Carver.’ (2007) New Yorker 24 Dec. www. newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/24/071224fa_fact. Shea, Nicholas. (2018) ‘Curators of Culture: Redefining the Role of Editors.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 34.1: 110–117. Somerville, Margaret. (1991) ‘Life (Hi)story Writing: The Relationship between Talk and Text.’ Hecate 17.1: 95–109. Squires, Claire. (2007) Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Squires, Claire. (2017) ‘Taste and/or Big Data? Post-digital Editorial Selection.’ Critical Quarterly 59.3: 24–38. Stillinger, Jack. (1991) Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, John B. (2005) Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John B. (2010) Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Polity. Vella, Collette. (2009) ‘The Changing Face of Publishing Relationships.’ Meanjin 68.2. http://meanjin.com.au/editions/volume-68-number-2-2009/article/the-changing-faceof-publishing-relationships/. Weisberg, Jacob. (1991) ‘Rough Trade: The Sad Decline of American Publishing.’ New Republic 17 Jun.: 16–21. West, James L.W., III. (1988a) American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Editing 125 West, James L.W., III. (1988b) ‘Henry Holt and the Literary Agents.’ Princeton University Library Chronicle 49.3: 256–272. Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. (1998) Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts: The Case of Harlequin Enterprises and Sweden. Uppsala: Department of Literature, Uppsala University. Wood, Charlotte. (2014) ‘“I Have Had My Vision.”’ Sydney Review of Books 16 May. http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/editing-writing-charlotte-wood/. Young, John K. (2006) Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-century African American Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

7

Adaptation Books beyond their covers

By this point in the twenty-first century, it is clear that adaptation – namely, the transfer of content from one media format to another – has become ubiquitous. The fluid reformatting of content from book to film to video game, via television show, stage musical and theme-park attraction, all ac­ companied by an array of licensed merchandise, is the hallmark of con­ temporary popular culture (Murray, 2005; Hutcheon, 2006; Leitch, 2017). Where books fit within this mix is, however, contested. As the oldest media format (see Chapter 1), books and their defenders have long held themselves aloof from more recently invented media, proclaiming or implying that there is something debasing about adapting codex-sanctified content to ‘inferior’ formats. In truth, however, such elitist disdain has been reserved mostly for adaptations of so-called ‘Literature’, as genre publishing has eagerly explored cross-format repackaging since its inception. This lingering note of fastidious literary distaste for adaptation is strongly reminiscent of Frankfurt School-style suspicion of the ‘culture industry’ and its alleged compromising of aesthetic aims. Chapter 3 cited several editors-turned-publishing-commentators, such as Diana Athill (2000) and Hilary McPhee (2001), who broadly subscribe to what has been termed the ‘lament for publishing’ school, regretting that the book industry has become subsumed into the general media (Rak, 2013: 58). A biting cartoon from around the same time made the point visually: featuring spoof book covers of H.G. Wells’s science-fiction classics The Invisible Man (1897), The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898), it jackets them with the respective straplines ‘Now a hollow movie adaptation. I think Kevin Bacon was in it’, ‘Now a weekly DVD rental with that Guy Pearce in it’ and ‘Now a dodgy prog-rock opera’ (see Figure 7.1).1 The subtext is clear: book culture is now valued only as incipient screen product, reduced to so much fodder for the voracious maw of the twenty-first century’s dominant media. Recognition of the book’s by now deeply intertwined relationship with other media is legitimate, but the negative connotations of this relationship are open to question. It might even be anachronistic to talk about a delimited ‘book industry’ when the subsidiary rights that underpin adaptation have become so important in negotiating many book contracts (see Chapter 6). Indeed, the appetite for adapting book content has been a huge boon for the

Adaptation: books beyond their covers 127

Figure 7.1 Adaptation as cultural debasement and intellectual slumming – a common critique of adaptation’s current omnipresence.

publishing industry. The codex format may not be an audience member’s first encounter with a particular content brand, but enjoyment of, say, a screen adaptation frequently drives consumers to seek out the content in book form. Conversely, books that generate highly dedicated fandoms have immense appeal to screen producers as ‘presold’ properties with established brand re­ cognition. Yet those readerships can be intensely proprietorial about their favourite books and may vilify adaptations that stray too far from the textual blueprint. In sum, this chapter investigates the economic, legal and audience dimen­ sions of book content’s widely dispersed existence across the twenty-firstcentury media landscape. Book content has long circulated outside of the codex’s covers. While this fact may have been lamented by literature’s selfappointed guardians, audiences have long demonstrated a more platformagnostic, culturally omnivorous mindset. Books are simply a part – albeit a crucial part – of the modern media mix.

Dissociation of book content from the codex format The seeming paradox that books are pervasively influential upon modern media in an era when the book industry feels perpetually under threat may be ex­ plained by the fact that book content is increasingly extracted from the codex format. This is a relative process. In the creation of eBooks, the reformatting of

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text from computer file for print publication to electronic publication is rela­ tively straightforward and largely automated; the only difference is the file’s output. For the creation of a feature-film adaptation, however, the process is clearly far more complicated, involving as it does the whole apparatus of screen production and post-production. However, in both cases, the story, characters and indicia of a print-born narrative continue to exist beyond the codex format. Moreover, the aura of the book rarely disappears from the target-text altogether, and the success of the content in other media forms has positive feedback effects for the source-text. Considering the commercial infrastructure underpinning adaptation’s con­ temporary ubiquity returns us to the political economy concerns of Chapter 3. Since the 1960s, publishers have largely ceased to exist as independent entities as they have been gradually absorbed into vast multinational media con­ glomerates with holdings spanning the full gamut of communications plat­ forms. For such a conglomerate, it makes sense to leverage content that one of its subsidiaries already owns across its other holdings. During the 1990s, the fashionable term for this whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts business logic was ‘synergy’. It helped that the same period saw the rapid digitisation of media platforms generally – a neat confluence of technological possibility and business strategy. Yet, as evidenced by the corporate reports of media multinationals, their book divisions remain minor contributors to their overall revenues and profits, and hence must justify their existence within the corporate fold in other ways. In consequence, books have been reconfigured as generators of content that may be spun off to affiliate media divisions and, conversely, as repackagers of film studios’, TV networks’ or music labels’ existing content (Murray, 2007). Sometimes the cross-fertilisation is even more complex, such as when a book is rejacketed with a still from a screen adaptation to create a so-called ‘tie-in’ edition. In these cases, the book exists as the ‘anchor product’ for a content franchise: a highly successful book title has brand-name recognition and inbuilt audience loyalty, valuable commodities when trying to raise produc­ tion finance for a screen adaptation (Murray, 2012). The adaptation process may unfold sequentially, but the ideal scenario is for all the related products within a content franchise to exist for the consumer simultaneously, so that the book and its incarnations in other media cross-promote each other synergis­ tically. Book historian and legal scholar Eva Hemmungs Wirtén sums up the interrelated industrial, legal and technological logics underpinning modern adaptation as the three Cs: ‘conglomeratization, content, and convergence’ (2004: 76). For its part, the book industry often tries to work both sides of the street. It is happy to play to the perceived high-cultural associations of books compared to (other) mass media, and to emphasise the superior cognitive engagement and editorial standards books offer in a world of digital distraction and fake news (see Figure 7.2). Yet, publishing staff are typically delighted when a screen adaptation of a work generates free publicity for a backlist title, and will

Adaptation: books beyond their covers 129

Figure 7.2 In their advertising, writers’ festivals frequently seek to distinguish books from the perceived banality of mass culture, particularly as represented by television. In reality, however, festival programming commonly features screenwriters, TV showrunners and books by screen celebrities. Panels on the book-to-screen adaptation process are a programming staple and demonstrate the increasingly medium-agnostic outlook of literary festivals. (Saatchi Design Sydney/Sydney Writers’ Festival Program 2006)

attempt to liaise closely with the screen producers to schedule the release of tie-in editions, timely bookshop placement and media profiles of the author. All the same, synergy can prove easier to coordinate in theory than in practice. Book production involves notoriously long lead times, even for new editions; book distribution involves a protracted and costly sequence of middlemen; and the analogue book cannot hope to achieve the same economies of scale as digital film, broadcasting and the internet. All of this has kept a

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significant sector of the book industry’s output resiliently analogue, with eBooks achieving substantial market penetration in self-publishing and genre fiction markets, but much less in trade non-fiction and literary fiction (see Chapter 11). The challenge for twenty-first-century media industries is how to transfer audiences’ respect for books and hunger for narratives to other media for­ mats without losing the aura of the book. There are echoes here of literary studies’ traditional dissociation of the aesthetic ‘text’ from the material book ‘object’ (as outlined in this volume’s Introduction). But here the dissociation is driven by commercial rather than critical imperatives. In a notably gloomy, late 1990s take on the book’s existence, Tom Engelhardt dolefully observed: In their hearts, publishing executives no longer feel that the book, as a freestanding entity, is sustainable. Everything in their experience tells them that a book not plugged into a product or performance nexus, that cannot offer a companion movie … or give a star performance that steps off the page and onto radio or television … will stumble into the world as if off a cliff steeply … Publishers now offer not books but seeds of synergy. (1997: 18–19, 21)

Adaptation studies: traditional and new approaches Adaptation, as a cultural phenomenon, has existed for as long as there has been more than one communications medium. As a sphere of academic research, however, adaptation studies is of much more recent vintage. The discipline’s ‘big bang’ moment is usually dated to the publication of George Bluestone’s monograph Novels into Film (2003 [1957]), which conceptualised fiction and movies as incommensurate aesthetic practices before, somewhat contra­ dictorily, attempting to detect equivalents between them via a number of detailed, compare-and-contrast case-studies. Bluestone’s theoretical pro­ nouncements and, especially, his comparative, text-based methodology cast long shadows over adaptation studies throughout subsequent decades. Two delimiting effects of his research parameters that became entrenched in later studies were the privileging of the novel and film as prime mediums of ana­ lysis, and his near-exclusive focus on the products of adaptation rather than its underpinning processes. Refreshingly, from the 1990s onwards, a number of scholars have broadened adaptation studies’ purview to include texts drawn from the performing arts (theatre, musicals, opera and dance), other longestablished media formats (artworks, popular song and radio) and even dis­ tinctly contemporary, avowedly commercial phenomena such as comic books, theme-park rides and computer games (Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999, 2007; Hutcheon, 2006; Leitch, 2007, 2017; Hutcheon and O’Flynn, 2012).

Adaptation: books beyond their covers 131

Nowadays, adaptation studies takes pains to encompass all media platforms and is chary of suggesting any implicit hierarchy among them. While welcome, widening the range of formats and texts considered as legitimate objects of scholarly analysis has not necessarily shifted adaptation studies’ predominant focus on texts as the end result of adaptation rather than the why, how and who of adaptation as an industrial process with crucial commercial and legal drivers. Spike Jonze’s film Adaptation (2002) – with a characteristically self-referential screenplay by Charlie Kaufman – has become a touchpoint in new-generation adaptation studies because of the way it foregrounds the dynamics of adaptation itself in its depiction of a creatively blocked screenwriter attempting to adapt Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief (1998).2 Less often remarked upon is the fact that the film is populated by various players in the adaptation economy: rival screenwriters; their agents; film producers; book authors; and screenwriting gurus. In playful fashion, the film highlights the adaptation industry that underpins the pro­ liferating adaptations that characterise contemporary culture. Each of these parties, as well as book editors and publishers, literary agents, reviewers and prize judges, operates in an intersecting economy that trades in legal rights to adapt cultural properties (Murray, 2012). While money certainly changes hands in this fast-growing sector of the global economy, so too does a more diffuse, intangible form of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1993). Critical and commercial success for one agent within the adaptation industry frequently has a positive spillover effect for others in the network (as when an Academy Award-winning film stokes demand for the originating book). But the various agents in the adaptation economy are also locked into rivalries, both with direct competitors in their specific subfield (e.g. other screen producers or book publishers) and with agents in adjacent fields (e.g. when fans believe an adaptation ‘betrays’ an originating book or threatens its cultural status). The rights-trading economy

The accelerated merger of media industries generally has had discernible knock-on effects within the book industry itself. ‘Subsidiary rights’ – those rights in a book contract other than publication, foreign territory and trans­ lation rights – were traditionally seen as contractual also-rans (hence their classification as subordinate to the main deal). Yet, in the contemporary publishing world, such technically ‘subsidiary’ rights can become dealbreakers. It is now not uncommon for a book’s screen rights to be sold prior to its publication or even its contracting (thus massively increasing its asking price) or for authors to work simultaneously on book and screenplay versions of a story to double their odds of being contracted, then parlaying success in one format into a second deal in the other (Murray, 2012: 42). For this reason, the types of rights specified in standard book contracts are proliferating and now include not only ‘prime’ rights (publication, digital, foreign and trans­ lation) but also rights to create film, television, theatrical, stage-musical and

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Socio-cultural dimensions of books

radio-play adaptations; animation, graphic-novel and computer-gaming rights; audiobook rights; serial rights to publish extracts in a newspaper or magazine; book-club rights; merchandising rights; sequel and prequel rights; and even naming rights for individual fictional characters or real people mentioned in a work, as Susan Orlean herself discovered when her book was adapted (see Owen, 2019). In what, for bibliophiles, might seem a jarring ontological inversion, the book is no longer necessarily the point of the publishing con­ tract; instead, it is merely one incarnation of the rights to the content property that is the prime issue in negotiations. With the value of a book in myriad, fissiparous formats so difficult to predict, it is no wonder that publishers’ standard contracts increasingly feature so-called ‘Star Wars’ clauses that attempt to secure rights to the work ‘in all mediums now in existence or hereafter invented’ (or similar all-encompassing, legally doubtful formulations).3

‘Reverse’ book/screen adaptation A particularly long-lived legacy of Bluestone’s founding adaptation studies methodology has been the constraining assumption that a print version of a story necessarily predates a screen version. According to this ‘book-first’ logic, the traditionally rarer screen-to-book trajectory constitutes ‘reverse’ adapta­ tion. Yet, it is no longer realistic to assume such a generally unidirectional flow of content. Traffic in the contemporary adaptation economy has myriad tra­ jectories, with adapters interested in any property in any medium that has proven traction with audiences (Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999; Hutcheon, 2006). Hence, rather than talking of ‘reverse’ adaptation when considering the book industry’s relationships with other media, the phrase ‘book of the film’ is preferable because it does not assume the book version’s prior existence. That said, even ‘the book of the film’ presupposes that the originating content’s first incarnation was as a movie, belying the number of screenoriginal works now emerging from television and computer gaming. Nevertheless, preserving the phrase ‘book of the film’ for the sake of utility, it is possible to discern a number of subcategories of the genre that combine book and screen content in different ways. Each of these boasts its own production channels, specialised markets and claims to authenticity. The most common material incarnation of book and screen industry codependence is the aforementioned tie-in edition, where a print work adapted for the screen is reissued with a cover design incorporating a film or television production still. These can significantly boost sales among viewers of the screen version (or even those who have merely heard of it) because of the recognition factor of a shared title and screen-industry artwork. Less common, at present, is the published screenplay, although demand for these is increasing as film studies becomes thoroughly institutionalised within university settings. In such works, film or television screenplays are packaged with stills from the production and behind-the-scenes reflections from those involved in the adaptation process. Almost invariably, the script that is codified for print publication is the

Adaptation: books beyond their covers 133

‘shooting script’ (i.e. the final outcome of a long script-development process) and even this can be retrospectively edited to accord with the final cut of the film (Murray, 2012: 151–5). Interestingly, the screenplays of both originally print-based works that have been adapted for the screen and screen-born works are published. The common denominator appears to be association with an auteur director, a cult television showrunner or, failing these, a celebrated author or playwright adapter. Closely related to the published screenplay is another book–screen hybrid known as the ‘making of’ or ‘companion’ volume. Such an edition may not include the screenplay or shooting script in its entirety (often because of rights restrictions), but it nevertheless allows the publisher to cash in on audience enthusiasm for a screen brand by providing director’s notes, behind-the-scenes information, star interviews, special-effects information, concept art, set blueprints and costume designs. Many of these volumes seem intent on prioritising the screenic nature of their content over the analogue format of the book product, as though they fear their audiovisually-oriented audience will quickly tire of anything unduly static or lacking opportunities for digital in­ teractivity. Publisher HarperCollins’ Harry Potter Film Wizardry (2010) is re­ presentative of the genre in that it was breathlessly advertised much like a film, irrespective of the fact that the Potter universe was first realised in book form.4 Lowest in the cultural hierarchy of ‘the book of the film’ is the novelisation – an awkward neologism denoting a prose reworking of a film or television screenplay. These are usually written as works for hire and have long been considered the lowest form of hack work for impecunious writers (such as Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan). However, their status has been reevaluated since cultural studies-style relativism began to infiltrate adaptation studies around the turn of the millennium. Novelisations have typically been relatively straight prose reworkings of a shooting script, but there are also ‘continuative’ novelisations that expand existing fictional worlds in the manner of fanfiction: sequels, prequels, mashups or ‘shippings’ of characters from long-running and broadly popular content franchises such as Doctor Who or Star Trek. This has been the major vector for adaptation of computer-gaming content to books, and the recent efflorescence of unofficial Minecraft con­ tinuative novelisations (some created by fans and then picked up by oppor­ tunistic publishers) mark it out as a growing space of cross-medial interaction. While novelisation is often considered a post-1970 phenomenon, recent research has demonstrated that it dates back to the earliest decades of film. Notably, in the 1910s and 1920s, Germany’s silent-film industry produced ciné-romans (literally ‘film-novels’ or, more commonly in English, ‘photoplays’) of successful films in which stills from a production were paired with linking text. In parallel with the contemporary mainstream commercial novelisations outlined above, there are rare ‘high-art’ examples. Usually issued by a main­ stream literary publisher, novelisations such as Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger’s jointly authored The Piano: A Novel (1994) are written in a literary

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prose style and usually resemble tie-in editions of classic nineteenth-century novels (Gelder, 1999). However, in this particular case, there is no print source-text because the screenplay is the original work. The leading critic in the book-of-the-film area, Jan Baetens, rightly identifies novelisation as re­ presentative of ‘a complex set of intermedial hybrid structures’ characterising contemporary film (2007: 227). Just as scholars of the book world can no longer identify a discrete book industry, only a bookish subsector of the media industries, film has had to come to terms with its increasingly permeable boundaries in an age of ubiquitous adaptation.

Audiobooks – a.k.a. ‘talking books’ The adaptation of book content to audio formats began with the advent of sound recording (Rubery, 2011). In the post-First World War era, with many returning servicemen blinded by gas or shrapnel, books were recorded on shellac and later vinyl discs so that loss of vision did not necessarily necessitate banishment from the world of books (Birkerts, 1994: 143; Philips, 2007: 294–5). Since then, audiobooks have rapidly adapted to sequential advances in recording technology – from magnetic-tape cassettes in the 1960s to compact discs in the 1980s to the current default MP3 format – that have enhanced storage capacity, portability and sound quality. There has even been a vogue for so-called ‘playaways’: disposable MP3 players designed for one-off use that contain a single audiobook. In the contemporary world, audiobooks cater not only to the visually impaired, elderly and illiterate but to sighted, literate audiences who wish to consume book content without having to read, for example on their daily commute, while driving, during exercise or while doing housework (Birkerts, 1994: 143; Shokoff, 2001: 171; Philips, 2007: 295, 297; Whitehouse, 2010: 176; see Figure 7.3). The commercial significance of audiobooks has risen rapidly since the turn of the millennium with the widespread adoption of Apple’s iPod (released in 2001) and similar MP3-enabled portable audio devices. By 2007, one bookindustry analyst observed that audiobooks accounted for 10–20 per cent of many US publishers’ revenues (Soames, 2007). Currently, most large pub­ lishers have an audiobooks division, and larger bookshops (both chain and independent) typically stock a wide range of audiobook titles (Shokoff, 2001: 171, 173; see also Chapter 8). From a political-economy perspective, it is notable that audiobook producers are often subsidiaries of either multinational book publishers (e.g. Penguin Random House Audio, HarperCollins Audiobooks) or market-dominating book retailers (e.g. Amazon, which owns the leading audiobooks producer, Audible). Such corporate acquisitions make synergistic sense given MP3 files represent a neat commodity fit for an ori­ ginally online-only retailer such as Amazon. Audible’s CEO has plausibly claimed that the company is now the biggest employer of actors in the New York City area, with successful voice artists able to carve out viable careers solely from this line of work (Kaufman, 2013; Dowling, 2019).5

Adaptation: books beyond their covers 135

Figure 7.3 Aging soft-rocker Michael Bolton extols the virtues of consuming audiobooks while exercising, driving and frolicking in the pool in Audible’s tongue-incheek ‘Said I Read You but I Lied’ ad campaign (2018).

Despite their evident popularity, until recently audiobooks were little analysed in print culture studies, literary studies or media studies – the three disciplinary domains the phenomenon demonstrably straddles (Shokoff, 2001: 171; Philips, 2007: 294; Rubery, 2011: 1–2). Moreover, they are rarely mentioned within adaptation studies, notwithstanding the discipline’s newfound conscientious openness to medial hybrids and disavowal of format hierarchies (cf. Rubery, 2016). It is as though the audiobook, with its com­ plicated media lineage, shifting formats and contested cultural status, is too much of an outlier even for this fringe-dwelling discipline. Such academic lacunae beg the question: is the audiobook actually an adaptation? Legally, the answer is clearly ‘yes’, as book contracts now routinely stipulate a division of audiobook revenues between author and publisher (typically on a 50/50 basis). Furthermore, Amazon’s bundling of an automated text-to-speech ‘read aloud’ function with its Kindle 2 (released in 2009) sparked a rights dispute with the Authors Guild, whose members clearly feared loss of revenue via the sale of audiobook rights (Whitehouse, 2010: 180). Approaching the question of audiobooks’ adaptation status from a theore­ tical, rather than a legal, perspective prompts reflection on how reading a text might differ from listening to that text. Most obviously, audiobooks return us to a pre-literate aural experience of literature, where performative dimensions such as the recorded reader’s timbre, accent, intonation and pacing, as well as the producers’ choice of accompanying music or sound effects, have an en­ ormous impact on the consumer’s experience of the text (Birkerts, 1994: 147; Shokoff, 2001: 175, 179; Philips, 2007: 300; Rubery, 2011: 13–14). To return

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to the example of Harry Potter invoked in this book’s Introduction, what difference does it make to a consumer of the Harry Potter audiobooks produced for the UK and Commonwealth markets that they are narrated by actor and author Stephen Fry, with all his associations of quintessential Britishness, love of language, wit and gay-rights activism? Compare this to the choice of UKborn but US-resident stage and film actor Jim Dale to narrate Audible’s Harry Potter audiobooks for the US market (Dowling, 2019). The audiobook needs to be appreciated and evaluated as a medium in its own right, not as a déclassé version of a print source-text. In terms of medium theory (see Chapter 1), the audiobook marks a shift in the ‘sensory ratio’ of book consumption that, since the invention of writing, has made the act of consuming stories an overwhelmingly visual experience. This excludes at a stroke the oral, aural and performative dimensions that characterise storytelling in non-literate cultures or settings. It prompts speculation as to what Walter Ong, influential theorist of the shift from orality to literacy, might have made of the audiobook. For example, does adaptation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey or the anonymous Beowulf to audiobook amount to a ‘re-oralisation’ of these originally verbal, later transcribed and now typically read texts (Birkerts, 1994: 143; Shokoff, 2001: 172, 176; Rubery, 2011: 12)? Can listening to an audiobook in a communal setting such as a long car journey return us to the pleasurable experience of receptive simultaneity and move us closer to the fellow feeling audiences experience in the performing arts (Philips, 2007: 299)? Most intriguingly, how might this communal affordance break down the in­ tense privatisation of the communicative experience that has been one of print culture’s most enduring legacies? There is an interesting link here with the revival of live, public reading that has occurred since the 1980s courtesy of the boom in writers’ festivals and similar ‘meet the author’ events (see Chapter 9). It is as though the twenty-first century’s profusion of communication channels and increasingly mediated interpersonal experiences have stimulated a thirst for authorial and readerly embodiment, even if this itself is mediated through digital proxies such as the author-narrated audiobook.

Conclusion: fan adaptations The lives of books beyond their covers are not determined solely by au­ thorised parties (e.g. agents, screenwriters, producers, directors and pro­ duction designers). After all, what readers make of a text has never been entirely foreseeable or controllable by the text’s producers (see Chapter 9). It follows that a book’s reception is even less predictable once myriad other parties have had a hand in adapting the work for another medium. But with the mainstreaming of Web 2.0 platforms, book readers themselves are, for the first time, equipped with sophisticated production technologies and a global distribution platform via the internet.6 This explains the explosion of unauthorised, fan-produced adaptations of book content since the turn of the millennium.

Adaptation: books beyond their covers 137

Fan productivity spans fanfiction (reuse of existing characters and settings for new stories), fanart, fan videos, fan film-trailer edits and amateur computer games (Hellekson and Busse, 2006; Wenz, 2010; Thomas, 2011; Grossman, 2011; Jamison, 2013; Guthrie, 2013; Clements, 2018; Aragon and Davis, 2019). Many websites host such content, but the fan-run Archive of Our Own (AO3) has emerged as the default clearing house for fanfiction (Fathallah, 2018).7 It hosts over five million fanfics in a staggering array of subgenres across over 33,000 content fandoms and has over two million users.8 Its bookindustry legitimacy has recently been boosted by a Hugo Award for ‘Best Related Work’ in the field of science fiction/fantasy, a prize never previously awarded to a website, let alone a fan endeavour (Romano, 2019). Despite their contemporary prevalence, fan-made adaptations occupy a legal grey area (Tushnet, 1996, 2007, 2017). The long history of clashes between media corporations and fandoms arises from two fundamentally incompatible concepts of ownership. Legally, as outlined in the foregoing discussion of subsidiary rights, intellectual property (IP) law stipulates that content may not be reproduced above a minimum ‘fair-use’ threshold without transfer of copyright or a licensing agreement. However, fan studies scholars have pro­ posed an alternative understanding of ‘ownership’ based on emotional in­ vestment, fan labour and social value-building. Henry Jenkins, a leading scholar in this area, dubs such affiliations ‘lovemarks’, as distinct from trade­ marks (2006: 69–70). Lest this defiantly non-legalistic conception of ‘ownership’ be dismissed as unduly romanticised or fanciful, Jenkins and his ilk have a point in that contemporary media conglomerates derive considerable value from the voluntary labour and popularising activities of online fan communities (Jenkins, 2006: 169–205). Moreover, many contemporary media texts are designed specifically to invite fannish investment by including de­ liberate plot holes or underdeveloped character back-stories in the hope that fans will fill in the blanks. Such vibrant audience engagement with content property serves as evidence for the commercial viability of an adaptation. Global media conglomerates have gradually modified their formerly heavy-handed policing of fans’ copyright infringement (which usually in­ volved issuing cease-and-desist notices) after realising that it is counter­ productive to alienate a property’s loyal fanbase (Murray, 2004). Instead, they have toyed with more collaborative, or at least grudgingly tolerant, modes of coexistence by turning a blind eye to non-commercial fannish creativity that is technically in breach of copyright and only prosecuting unauthorised adaptations that are clearly commercial in intent (Rimmer, 2008). Individual authors likewise have adopted widely varying positions on fanfiction: from Anne Rice’s well-known demonisation of it as creative theft, through J.K. Rowling’s wry acknowledgement of fannish speculation and drip-feeding of post-publication character titbits via Twitter, to Jasper Fforde’s experiments with incorporating fan-written content into his published books (Skains, 2010). Acknowledging such authorial perspectives demonstrates that there are frequently more than two sides in fanfiction disputes, as a complicated

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triangular relationship may exist between the author (usually the copyrightholder), the publisher (exclusive licensee of the book’s content for the term of copyright) and the fan community. Moreover, fandoms themselves display a broad spectrum of attitudes towards unauthorised reuse of content; it is not uncommon to see a work of fanfiction boasting its own copyright sign! The synergistic policies of global media conglomerates depend upon tight IP control of all manifestations of a content brand, and conglomerates are anxious about accusations of plagiarism from fanfiction writers who claim their ideas have been ‘stolen’ (Jenkins, 2003; Murray, 2004). For this reason, many authors insist they never read fanfiction based upon their works (Westcott, 2008). The first two decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a roiling battle over which view of ownership – strictly legal or social capital-based – will prevail. Additional complexity arises from the fact that all parties realis­ tically need one another, so the conflict may, ultimately, prove intractable. Debates over the boundaries between authorised and unauthorised adaptation go to the heart of whether there is a fundamental right to participate in one’s culture. Specifically, they probe the question of whether the traditional passive role ascribed to readers by the codex book can be reconciled with the pro­ fusely interactive affordances of digital technology.

Learning exercises Analyse a tie-in edition of a book (or published screenplay, companion volume or novelisation) for evidence of the interdependence of the book and screen industries. Consider who produced the book, with what layers of legal permission and why. How was its (re)appearance timed to coincide with other media properties? What kind of reader does it presuppose, and which other readers might actively oppose it? What does bookshops’ shelving of tie-ins alongside ‘original’ editions reveal about reader hierarchies? Why, for example, are there no Harry Potter film tie-in editions?Since the global blockbuster success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (originally Twilight fanfic), various book-industry players have attempted to monetise fanfiction. Amazon’s Kindle Worlds initiative (2013–18) licensed content from established book and screen creators, guaran­ teeing them a cut of royalties for all fanfictions based on their IP.9 How might such commercialisation of fanfiction be in tension with the amateur community’s generally collaborative ethos? Does such profiteering from fan creativity threaten media producers’ grudging toleration of non-commercial fanfiction?

Notes 1 Tom Jellett’s cartoon originally appeared in the Australian Literary Review. 2 For example, Leitch (2017) has a still from the film on its cover.

Adaptation: books beyond their covers 139 3 See also Chapter 3. 4 See the book trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw76LnI7PEw&feature=youtube_ gdata_player. 5 The company has also released a range of Audible Originals – audiobooks by often established writers that have never appeared in print form (Flood, 2019; Romei, 2019). 6 For an interesting take on pre-internet fanfiction, dating back to the early eighteenth century, see Chamberlain (2020). 7 https://archiveofourown.org/. 8 Statistics at time of writing (August 2019). 9 See www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2013/05/22/fan-fiction-is-finally-legitimizedwith-kindle-worlds/#44211c385e73.

Online resources •

•

Through aptly chosen film and music snippets, Kirby Ferguson’s four-part online documentary Everything is a Remix (remastered version 2015) demonstrates how adaptation has become fundamental to contemporary culture. Part 2, ‘Remix Inc.’, analyses the heavy traffic of content from print to screen, whether deriving from literary or genre fiction, and provides an especially succinct visual introduction to the topic: www. youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc. Audiobook producers take great pains in their advertising to normalise the idea of audiobook consumption by mainstream audiences, emphasising – often through humour – how consuming an audiobook fits into daily activities in a way that reading cannot. See, for example, Audible’s ‘Said I Read You but I Lied’ campaign (2018), featuring a self-mocking Michael Bolton: www.youtube.com/watch?v=X833Aa4gjkM.

References and further reading Aragon, Cecelia and Katie Davis. (2019) Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Athill, Diana. (2000) Stet: A Memoir. London: Granta Books. Baetens, Jan. (2007) ‘From Screen to Text: Novelization, the Hidden Continent.’ The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 226–38. Baetens, Jan and Marc Lits, eds. (2004) Novelization: From Film to Novel. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Barnet, Richard J. and John Cavanagh. (1994) Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. New York: Simon & Shuster. Birkerts, Sven. (1994) The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston, MA, and London: Faber & Faber. Bluestone, George. (2003 [1957]) Novels into Film. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bonner, Frances. (2009) ‘Early Multi-platforming: Television Food Programmes, Cook Books and Other Print Spin-offs.’ Media History 15.3: 345–58.

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Booth, Elizabeth and Deborah Hayes. (2005) ‘Authoring the Brand: Literary Licensing.’ Young Consumers 7.1: 43–53. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity. Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan, eds. (1999) Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. London: Routledge. Cartmell, Deborah and Imelda Whelehan, eds. (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chamberlain, Shannon. (2020) ‘Fan Fiction Was Just as Sexual in the 1700s as It Is Today.’ The Atlantic 14 Feb. www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/02/surprising-18thcentury-origins-fan-fiction/606532/. Clements, Mikaella. (2018) ‘From Star Trek to Fifty Shades: How Fanfiction Went Mainstream.’ Guardian 8 Aug. www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/08/fanfictionfifty-shades-star-trek-harry-potter. Dowling, Tim. (2019) ‘“Your Throat Hurts. Your Brain Hurts”: The Secret Life of the Audiobook Star.’ Guardian 16 Nov. www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/16/ throat-hurts-brain-hurts-secret-life-of-audiobook-stars-tim-dowling. Egbert, Marie-Luise. (2007) ‘“A Good Book Speaks for Itself”: Audiobooks and Reception Aesthetics.’ Intermedialities. Ed. Werner Huber, Evelyne Keitel and Gunter Süss. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Engelhardt, Tom. (1997) ‘Gutenberg Unbound.’ Nation 17 Mar.: 18–21, 29. Fathallah, Judith. (2018) ‘Digital Fanfic in Negotiation: LiveJournal, Archive of Our Own, and the Affordances of Read–Write Platforms.’ Convergence 30 Oct. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1354856518806674. Flood, Alison. (2019) ‘Sonic Boom.’ The Author 130.3: 83–4. Gelder, Ken. (1999) ‘Jane Campion and the Limits of Literary Cinema.’ Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. Ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. London: Routledge. 157–71. Grainge, Paul. (2007) Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis. Grossman, Lev. (2011) ‘The Boy Who Lived Forever.’ Time 7 Jul. http://content.time. com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2081784-1,00.html. Guthrie, Meredith. (2013) ‘Whatever You Do, Don’t Call It “Mommy Porn”: Fifty Shades of Grey, Fan Culture, and the Limits of Intellectual Property Rights.’ Infinite Earths Oct. http://79.170.40.240/infiniteearths.co.uk/?p=993. Hammond, Mary. (2004) ‘Hall Caine and the Melodrama on Page, Stage and Screen.’ Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 31.1: 39–57. Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse, eds. (2006) Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hutcheon, Linda. (2006) A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan O’Flynn. (2012) A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd edn. New York and London: Routledge. Jamison, Anne. (2013) Fic: Why Fan Fiction Is Taking over the World. Dallas, TX: Smart Pop. Jenkins, Henry. (2003) ‘When Folk Culture Meets Mass Culture.’ The New Gatekeepers: Emerging Challenges to Free Expression in the Arts. Ed. Christopher Hawthorne and András Szántó. New York: National Arts Journalism Program, Columbia University. 209–18. Jenkins, Henry. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press.

Adaptation: books beyond their covers 141 Kaufman, Leslie. (2013) ‘Actors Today Don’t Just Read for the Part: Reading Is the Part.’ New York Times 29 Jun. www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/business/media/actors-todaydont-just-read-for-the-part-reading-is-the-part.html. Klein, Naomi. (2001) No Logo. London: Flamingo. Lavery, David. (2007) ‘Read Any Good Television Lately? Television Companion Books and Quality Television.’ Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. Ed. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass. London and New York: IB Tauris. 228–36. Leitch, Thomas. (2007) Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leitch, Thomas, ed. (2017) The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McPhee, Hilary. (2001) Other People’s Words. Sydney: Picador. Meehan, Eileen R. (1991) ‘“Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!” The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext.’ The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media. Ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio. New York and London: Routledge and BFI Publishing. 47–65. Mitchell, Rebecca N. (2007) ‘“Now a Major Motion Picture”: The Delicate Business of Selling Literature through Contemporary Cinema.’ Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Ed. Nicole Mathews and Nickianne Moody. London: Ashgate. 107–16. Murray, Simone. (2004) ‘“Celebrating the Story the Way It Is”: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media and the Contested Utility of Fandom.’ Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 18.1: 7–25. Murray, Simone. (2005) ‘Brand Loyalties: Rethinking Content within Global Corporate Media.’ Media, Culture and Society 27.3: 415–35. Murray, Simone. (2007) ‘Generating Content: Book Publishing as a Component Media Industry.’ Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. David Carter and Anne Galligan. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 51–67. Murray, Simone. (2012) The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Owen, Lynette. (2019) Selling Rights. 8th edn. London: Routledge. Philips, Deborah. (2007) ‘Talking Books: The Encounter of Literature and Technology in the Audio Book.’ Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 13.3: 293–306. Rak, Julie. (2013) Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Rimmer, Matthew. (2008) ‘Harry Potter and the Lexicon of Doom.’ Australian Intellectual Property Law Bulletin 21.2: 26–30. Romano, Aja. (2019) ‘The Archive of Our Own Just Won a Hugo: That’s Huge for Fanfiction.’ Vox 19 Aug. www.vox.com/2019/4/11/18292419/archive-of-our-ownwins-hugo-award-best-related-work. Romano, Carlin. (1992) ‘Extra! Extra! The Sad Story of Books as News.’ Media Studies Journal 6: 123–32. Romei, Stephen. (2019) ‘The Ears Have It.’ Weekend Australian 26 Oct.: Review, 8–9. Rubery, Matthew. (2008) ‘Play It Again, Sam Weller: New Digital Audiobooks and Old Ways of Reading.’ Journal of Victorian Culture 13.1: 58–79. Rubery, Matthew, ed. (2011) Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies. New York: Routledge.

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Rubery, Matthew. (2016) The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shokoff, James. (2001) ‘What Is an Audiobook?’ Journal of Popular Culture 34.4: 171–81. Skains, R. Lyle. (2010) ‘The Shifting Author–Reader Dynamic.’ Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies ‘Words on the Web’ special issue, 16.1: 95–111. Soames, Nicolas. (2007) ‘I Hear What You Write.’ The Author 118.4: 147–48. Thomas, Bronwen. (2011) ‘What Is Fanfiction and Why Are People Saying Such Nice Things about It?’ StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 3: 1–24. Tushnet, Rebecca. (1996) ‘Legal Fictions: Copyright, Fan Fiction, and a New Common Law.’ Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review 17: 651. Tushnet, Rebecca. (2007) ‘Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity.’ Law and Contemporary Problems 70. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id= 1010395#. Tushnet, Rebecca. (2017) ‘Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author.’ Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. 2nd edn. Ed. Cornel Sandvoss, Jonathan Gray and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press. 60–71. Wasko, Janet. (2003) How Hollywood Works. London: Sage. Wasko, Janet and Govind Shanadi. (2006) ‘More Than Just Rings: Merchandise for Them All.’ The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context. Ed. Ernest Mathijs. London: Wallflower Press. 23–42. Weedon, Alexis. (1999) ‘From Three-deckers to Film Rights: A Turn in British Publishing Strategies, 1870–1930.’ Book History 2.1: 188–206. Weedon, Alexis. (2007a) ‘“Behind the Screen” and “The Scoop”: A Cross-media Experiment in Publishing and Broadcasting Crime Fiction in the Early 1930s.’ Media History 13.1: 43–60. Weedon, Alexis. (2007b) ‘Elinor Glyn’s System of Writing.’ Publishing History 60: 31–50. Wenz, Karin. (2010) ‘Storytelling Goes on after the Credits: Fanfiction as a Case Study of Cyberliterature.’ Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. Ed. Roberto Simanowski, Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla. Bielefeld: Transcript. 109–27. Westcott, Grace. (2008) ‘Friction over Fan Fiction: Is This Burgeoning Art Form Legal?’ Literary Review of Canada Jul./Aug. http://lrc.reviewcanada.ca/index.php?page= Friction-over-Fan-Fiction. Whitehouse, Guy. (2010) ‘Developments and Tensions in the UK and US Audiobooks Market.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 26.3: 176–82. Whiteside, Thomas. (1981) The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. (2004) No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

8

Book retailing

Consider for a moment where and how you purchased the last book you bought. It might even be this book, if you own the copy you are reading. Was it online, or from a high-street chain bookseller, an independent retailer, a university bookshop, or even one of the dwindling number of second-hand bookstores? Was it – perish the thought – from a remainder warehouse? There is a common perception that bookshops are cultured, refined, slightly tweedy places appealing to the nobler aspects of humanity and are hence cloistered from ruthless capitalism. This perception could not be more wrong. Book retailers are the crucial distribution link between publishers and readers (see Darnton’s ‘Communications Circuit’ in Chapter 2). Accordingly, booksellers have traditionally controlled public access to books and, by extension, to the marketplace of ideas (see Chapter 5). In contemporary times, book retailing has served as eCommerce’s testing ground since the founding of Amazon (originally solely a book retailer) in 1994. Even setting aside bruising com­ petition from online outlets, in recent decades bricks-and-mortar bookselling has seen bare-knuckle conflict between retailers and publishers. For example, in 2007 news leaked that the Australian firm REDgroup (owner of the local Borders and A&R Bookworld chains) had proposed new terms charging publishers and distributors up to A$46,000 to keep stocking their titles. Affected parties included the distributor of that year’s Miles Franklin Awardwinner (see Chapter 4), Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (Neill, 2007). Moreover, A&R proposed to charge publishers A$1.25 each time a title slated for pro­ motion was sold in one of their stores. An additional charge of A$8500 would apply when a publisher’s title featured on the book club of a high-rating daytime television show. These demands were regarded within the book trade as extortionate because the REDgroup controlled some 20 per cent of the Australian retail book trade. The ensuing ‘pay to display’ public controversy generated widespread ill-will towards the REDgroup and was cited as a factor in the company’s 2011 collapse. Yet, such demands for payment in exchange for retail placement (known in the United States as ‘cooperative advertising’ and in the United Kingdom more colloquially as ‘bungs’) are the rule in book retailing, not an exception. They represent a particularly potent instance of the culture/commerce dialectic that

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pervades the book as a communications medium (see Chapter 3). Tension arises from the fact that a bookstore is indisputably in the business of selling, but it is never just a business. Books, as outlined in preceding chapters, carry profound cultural connotations: they come freighted with the religious re­ verence accorded scripture; they are vectors for ideas and knowledge; and they facilitate identity-formation within the nation and among other political, social or cultural groups. As Laura J. Miller – author of a landmark study of US book retailing (2006) – summarises, bookselling practices foreground ‘longstanding ambivalence about the commercialization of the printed word’ (1999b: 388). This ambivalence underpinned the ‘book wars’ of the 1990s between super­ stores and independents, as well as the more recent mutation of this conflict into one between physical retailers and online behemoth Amazon and its ilk. The goal of this chapter is to explore the background to these conflicts so that you never again enter a bookshop (or load up your virtual shopping cart) without considering the retail environment, its cultural and commercial implications, and your role as purchaser within the book ecosystem.

Key phases in twentieth-century book retailing Whenever you purchase a book, the retailer takes a high percentage of the sale price – often in the region of 40 per cent. This cut is achieved through the bookseller’s imposition of a significant mark-up on the price they pay to the publisher, regardless of whether they are a bricks-and-mortar shop or an online retailer, such as Amazon. (Low prices are a cornerstone of Amazon’s customer appeal, but it preserves its margins by demanding high discounts from its suppliers.) It is worth exploring how this entrenched market power evolved. At the dawn of the twentieth century, book retailing was almost entirely conducted through independent bookshops. These one-off stores were akin to newsagents or tobacconists in that they typically stocked books alongside newspapers, magazines and stationery. The retail market was highly diverse in that the stock offered by any independent retailer reflected the owner’s per­ sonal interests. As this thumbnail sketch implies, such stores operated along old-fashioned business lines with razor-thin margins, often teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. The book-retailing market was thus ripe for the great shopping revolution of the early twentieth century – the department store. Such grandly decorated emporia principally targeted middle-class female shoppers, and department-store managers found books useful in setting a tone of cultural discernment that flattered their target market and made shopping appear decorous rather than mindlessly consumerist. While books were rarely a core sales category for such stores, the inclusion of a books department made the store seem ‘upmarket’ and ‘respectable’, thus indirectly facilitating the sale of core fashion, cosmetics and homeware lines. In the wake of the Second World War, with the drift of urban populations away from inner-city shopping precincts to sprawling suburbs, book retailing

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was again forced to adapt to changing tastes and lifestyles. Particularly from the 1960s onwards, books were increasingly sold via discount department stores (DDS) in suburban shopping centres, often in locations that had previously had no book retailers. The archetype of the DDS is Walmart – a largefootprint store offering a vast range of goods at cheap prices. This business model relies on quick stock turnover, and books were no exception: the stock comprised predominantly bestselling front-list (i.e. new-release) titles that were expected to sell-through rapidly or be replaced with even more recent titles. The decor of DDS book sections prioritised democratic access and a selfservice ethos: functional shelving, fluorescent lighting and a non-intimidating, uniform fit-out across outlets. Importantly, DDSs also pioneered the use of high-profile books as loss leaders: that is, a bestselling book is offered at an extremely high discount to attract customers to the store and tempt them to impulse-buy other products, generating a net profit on the transaction, even though the retailer loses money on every book sold. The later 1960s and 1970s saw a refinement of the DDS strategy with the emergence of chain bookstores (e.g. Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in the United States). Like their DDS competitors, these booksellers catered to the mass market, often setting up alongside their progenitors in suburban shopping centres. But unlike the DDSs, for whom books represented a minor product category, chain booksellers sold nothing but books. While their stock range may have differed in scope, they fully internalised the DDSs’ rationalised ap­ proach to book retailing in that they dealt in bulk titles with a focus on bestsellers, celebrity authors and media tie-ins, often including stock remaindered (i.e. returned to publishers) from other outlets. With stock turnover a priority in order to meet high shopping-centre rents, back-list holdings (i.e. classics and books published in previous seasons) were severely limited. Books were treated no differently from any other consumer item: if they failed to sell within a limited period, they were pulled from the shelves and shipped back to the publishers for credit under the industry-wide returns policy. The increasing market share of bookselling chains enabled them to demand hefty discounts from the publishers, which they passed on to consumers while preserving their own margins. They also represent the earliest instances of book retailers har­ nessing their market power to influence important publishing decisions: publishers started to seek approval in advance from the big chains’ central buyers for prospective book campaigns and even jacket copy because a large pre-order could make or break a mass-market title (Epstein, 2002: 93–109). By the 1990s, the success of the DDSs and chain bookstores set the scene for a new entrant to the retailing landscape: the book superstore (e.g. Borders and Barnes & Noble in the United States, Waterstones in the United Kingdom1 and Chapters in Canada). Such stores carried similar bulk inventory to the chain bookshops (though with more depth), but, in a crucial distinction, they consciously cultivated a more ‘bookish’ atmosphere through softer lighting, customer lounges, coffee shops, book clubs, portraits of famous writers and so on. While superstore atmospherics borrowed from both old-time independent

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bookshops and college libraries, behind the scenes the new arrivals invested heavily in the latest point-of-sale inventory management software, such as BookScan (Hutton, 2002; Koval, 2005; Childress, 2012; Magner, 2012). They hence merged the thoroughly rationalised management ethos of the chain bookstore with the cultivated atmosphere of the independents. This pitch to consumers as stimulatingly diverse, comfortable and welcoming places to browse without staff pressure to purchase became key to the superstores’ success, and saw them capture significant market share from the dwindling cohort of independent bookshops. During the same decade, in what appeared an existential pincer movement against independent booksellers, online book retailers started to emerge, most famously Amazon, originally a quirky outlier and now a market-monopolising juggernaut, which began trading in 1995. One of the most prominent and enduring of the first-generation dotcoms, Amazon was established in Seattle, far from the traditional US publishing hubs of New York City and Boston, and rapidly expanded into international markets and foreign-language books to ensure first-mover advantage. It continued to operate at a loss for many years before gradually converting its eCommerce dominance and customerworshipping ethos into vast profits. Amazon established its warehouses close to air-traffic hubs and courier services, which enabled it to fulfil customers’ orders in minimal time and thus largely neutralise the bricks-and-mortar retailers’ principal advantage over their online competitors. Moreover, as Amazon’s ambitions and website expanded, it devised myriad ways to mimic the handselling techniques of the trusted local independent bookseller: customer reviews, algorithmically generated ‘personalised’ book recommendations, a newsletter, book clubs, author Q&As and so on. Since the turn of the mil­ lennium, Amazon has continued to innovate by releasing successive Kindle eReaders, establishing self-publishing services, expanding into second-hand book sales, harvesting fanfiction for codex publication and even – coming full circle – setting up its own chain of bricks-and-mortar stores (Murray, 2018: 53–80). Book retailing, and the physical retailing sector in general, had been given a thorough shake-up and would never be the same.

Book Wars I: independent bookshops versus chain superstores The competition between independent booksellers and new-entrant super­ stores became a talismanic culture/commerce conflict of the 1990s – even receiving the Hollywood treatment in Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998), where Meg Ryan’s family-owned, Upper-West-Side independent children’s bookstore is muscled out of the neighbourhood by big-box retailer Fox Books, headed by Tom Hanks’s economic rationalist (see Figure 8.1). Despite its digital-friendly title (an early internet service provider’s email notification), the film’s sympathies lie strongly with the beleaguered independent sector. But it is worth taking a more even-handed look at the various pros and cons of the

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Figure 8.1 Things get heated between independent bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), owner of rival big-box retailer Fox Books, in director Nora Ephron’s romantic-comedy remake You’ve Got Mail (Warner Bros., 1998). The film’s sparring couple epitomised the ‘book wars’ of the 1990s.

independents and superstores before analysing how they have increasingly cannibalised each other’s business practices. Independent bookshops

Independent retailers are keenly aware that booksellers have played crucial roles in literary history, such as Sylvia Beach’s publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) from her Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s championing of the Beats during the 1950s from San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore (Emblidge, 2005, 2005–6; Osborne, 2015; O’Keefe, 2019; Pereira, 2019).2 As inheritors of this proud tradition, in­ dependent retailers pride themselves on having deep roots within local writing communities and fine-grained knowledge of the history, environment and culture of their specific locale. In their retail premises, this translates into stock selection customised to local interests, author events and ‘shelf-talker’ hand­ written staff picks, all of which underline to browsers that the store’s workers have expertise in the content of books, not simply in the scanning of barcodes. Customisation of stockholdings is particularly evident in specialist bookshops dedicated to, for example, children’s books, cookery, crime and feminist or gay interests. Independent retailers consider cultural value as well as potential profit when selecting titles, resulting in an openness to independent and micro publishers whose relatively low sales might render them an inconvenience for volume-focused chainstores (see Chapter 5). Typically, independent bookshops are found in inner-city or inner-ring suburban locations with upscale, middle-class populations. Well aware of their appeal as shopping destinations for culturally aspirational demographics, they have broadened their offerings to include giftware, music and stationery.

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Increasingly prevalent in-store cafés further encourage browsing, socialising and lingering. At their best, these stores cultivate a consciously civilised, clublike atmosphere, with classical music and book-themed decor. However, especially before competition escalated during the 1990s, it is equally true that independent booksellers were frequently tatty, dirty and chaotically dis­ organised, with a patchy record of fulfilling orders and paying their debts on time. It is also tempting for bibliophilic scholars of print culture to overlook how intimidating such retail environments could be for working-class cus­ tomers, who steered clear through fear of a supercilious proprietor snubbing their requests for information or deriding their purchases. Nevertheless, for habitual readers, the independent bookshop frequently equates to a cultural haven, a place for supporters of literary culture to con­ gregate, swap reading tips and feel part of an ‘imagined community’ of the book. In meet-the-author events at such stores, it is common for writers to state that they chose to launch their book in their favourite bookshop to recognise the work of its knowledgeable staff, the readerly advice they offer customers and their crucial role in sustaining the local literary ecosystem. Print culture may, from its Gutenbergian origins, be premised on the physical absence of the author – or even scribe – who communicates the tale (see Chapter 1), but bookish people have a seeming compulsion to meet and converse with others who share their passion (see Chapter 9). Chain superstores

The chain bookstore’s key selling point is its vast inventory, which is far greater than any independent bookstore could afford to accommodate. Unlike its even larger online rivals (see below), it can usually fulfil (and even gift-wrap) the customer’s request immediately. Yet, despite presenting itself as a literary cornucopia, the chain bookstore’s stock is ordered centrally and therefore tends towards standardisation and homogeneity (e.g. until its recent takeover, Barnes & Noble’s New York City headquarters controlled title ordering and number of copies for all of the chain’s US outlets). Centralised ordering creates economies of scale and means chains are able to pass deep discounts for bulk orders from publishers on to customers. But it also creates administrative disincentives to deal with independent presses. In terms of expanding the book-buying market, chain superstores innovated in stocking the culturally esteemed book alongside less class-stratified media, such as magazines, CDs, DVDs, audiobooks, stationery, reading gadgets and toys, which had the effect of presenting the book as simply one element in the communications landscape (reflecting, not coincidentally, conglomerates’ views of the media). In line with this democratising ethos, the chains encourage self-service by providing clear in-store signage to help customers find their own books and present them at the cash registers, where no judgement is passed on the quality of the chosen titles. As mentioned above, book superstores were enthusiastic adopters of the computerised inventory management and stock-ordering systems pioneered

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by the DDSs and earlier no-frills chain bookstores. These provide real-time data on stockholdings, faster, more efficient reordering and, crucially, an exact snapshot of the titles that are not selling. Hence the normalising of the ‘pull list’: that is, new titles are allowed only six to twelve weeks on the shelves before they are returned to the publisher for credit. The returned stock is then either remaindered or pulped. So-called ‘returns’ now comprise around 25 per cent of all books shipped to bookshops – an antiquated and astonishingly wasteful business practice that not only baffles outsiders but substantiates the common book-industry lament that ‘the shelf life of a book is now somewhere between milk and yoghurt’. This system clearly benefits ‘big books’ (front-list titles with powerful initial publicity campaigns) over ‘slow-build’ (or back-list) titles, and therefore puts extreme pressure on first-time authors to demonstrate breakout success if they hope to secure a contract for a second book (Knox, 2005; Thompson, 2010; Wilkins, 2019). Even when a title is stocked, its placement in the store does not necessarily reflect the manager’s opinion of its worthiness. The chain retail environment is determined by cooperative advertising: stores commonly rent publishers space in their window displays, tables near the entrance, the ends of individual shelving stacks, and even the right to have a book placed face-out rather than spine-out on the shelf. Publishers also pay high fees to be included in three-for-two-style promotions – in particular a key feature of UK high-street book retailing (Auletta, 1997; Miller, 2006; Thompson, 2010). These pay-for-display business practices saturate the retail environment in ways that are opaque to the general public, with retailers exploiting their role in the ‘Communications Circuit’ as con­ sumers’ main point of access when buying books. The layout and atmosphere of the chain bookstores proved to be their ‘killer app’ in the bricks-and-mortar book wars of the 1990s. They were universally clean, well lit and familiar in their standardised fit-outs, with long opening hours and an inclusive and welcoming ambience. In addition, they co-opted the independents’ claims to integration with local literary commu­ nities by hosting their own author readings, book signings, book clubs and community events. Such associations of sociability in the retailing environ­ ment were bolstered in almost every chain by the presence of a franchised café (e.g. Starbucks in Barnes & Noble and Gloria-Jean’s in Borders). One measure of how thoroughly standardised this retail innovation has now become is the children’s book Curious George Goes to a Bookstore (2014), with its illustrations of an in-store café and author-signing queue denoting taken-for-granted as­ pects of the bookshop experience for modern children. The bookstore café’s hip, cultural, sociable atmosphere (at least potentially, if not always in actuality) saw urban sociologists label it a classic ‘third place’: not work, not home, it represented a new kind of unthreatening ‘public’ space (Laing and Royle, 2005–6). Of course, the fact that all bookshops (and especially chains) are pri­ vately owned, consumption-maximising spaces undercuts such claims to com­ munity (Miller, 1999b). Disreputable, antisocial or non-solvent café patrons soon discovered that, while the chain bookstore may mimic the ‘piazza-like’

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central community hubs of European capitals, their lease agreements with pri­ vately owned shopping centres gave them legally enforceable rights to exclude undesirables.3 For reader/customers, the ‘destination’ chain bookshop, like its independent rivals, trades in a powerful, albeit intangible, commodity: a particularly potent brand of urban, cosmopolitan, cultivated lifestyle. As much as it is a place to purchase specific products, it is also a place to perform one’s identity as a member of a bookish tribe. While the chainstore’s democratic, non-intimidating buying experience is a selling point for occasional book purchasers, for the self-identified bookish this demotic appeal threatens to become too all-inviting, undercutting coterie claims to specialised knowledge and insider status. Staff at chain book­ sellers are selected as much for their familiarity with cash registers and inventory management software as for their knowledge of books and literature, resulting in countless anecdotes about their ignorance (to the delight of their independent rivals). These rumbling commercial tensions were particularly exacerbated by the chains’ often predatory store placement. By setting up adjacent to or directly opposite long-running independents, big-box chainstores attempted to force their competitors out of business and thus reduce an area’s book-retailing options (Rubbo, 2019). In a climactic scene of You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan’s character abhors Joe Fox’s dispassionate claim that their business dispute ‘wasn’t per­ sonal’ because, ‘whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal’.4 This cri de coeur became the rallying cry of a host of increasingly besieged independent retailers.

The independents fight back In the more than two decades since You’ve Got Mail was released, the film’s serviceable dichotomy between independents and chain retailers has become more complicated and the moral high ground harder to identify. Emerging from the first decade of the book wars around the turn of the millennium, the surviving independent retailers decided to distinguish themselves from their big-box competitors by emphasising personalised customer relationships. Their first step was to commodify their old-fashioned bookstore atmosphere by setting up cafés and/or licensed venues amid the shelves of books, which formed the ‘cultural wallpaper’ (Moss, 2019). Thus, a strategy that the chain superstores had previously mimicked was reappropriated by the independents. Secondly, the more agile independents emphasised their links to local com­ munities through stock selection, customer-focused events, loyalty-card schemes, newsletters, regular emails, social media updates and prominently displayed community noticeboards. Less tangibly, they alerted their customers to the shop’s economic contribution to the community by stressing that their profits remained in and benefited the local area (Miller, 1999b; Case, 2013). Thirdly, independent booksellers began to club together to secure better prices from publishers through bulk buying. This occasionally resulted in the somewhat perverse phenomenon of ‘chain independents’: that is, successful

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independent stores expanding to multiple outlets or purchasing other formerly independent bookstores. For example, Melbourne’s much-loved Readings bookshop – awarded Bookstore of the Year at the 2016 London Book Fair – now operates seven stores across Australia’s bookish capital, proudly an­ nouncing itself on its website as ‘Australia’s own since 1969’.5 Underpinning all these attempts to counter the market incursions and ag­ gressive business practices of the chain superstores was a new-found ethical consumerist ethos. Independent retailers sought to highlight the economic, political and social implications of book purchasing so that the act of shopping became infused with ideological commitment. Whether sponsoring local writing competitions or hosting midnight Harry Potter release parties, the in­ dependents strove to underscore their stores’ commitment to serving the needs of their host communities.

Book Wars II: physical versus online retailing While the conflict between independent bookshops and book superstores rumbled on throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, a third competitor was circling: the online bookseller. In fact, with formerly domi­ nant book chains now either defunct (e.g. Borders) or periodically struggling (Barnes & Noble, Waterstones), contemporary book retailing has mutated into competition between a surprisingly resilient – even resurgent – independent sector and the industry-dominating behemoth Amazon (Moss, 2019). In this, bookselling serves as a microcosm for the whole retail sector, in which cus­ tomers are increasingly deserting bricks-and-mortar chainstores and depart­ ment stores for the convenience, lower prices and infinitely greater range offered by online outlets. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos chose books as the key product category for his experiment in internet retailing not because of any particular bookish passion (however much he might have publicly espoused this) but because the industry-wide International Standard Book Number (ISBN) facilitated effi­ cient inventory management of a vast array of items (Striphas, 2009: 102). The company’s early self-description as ‘Earth’s Biggest Bookstore’ highlighted the fact that its inventory, because it was warehoused, was bigger than even the largest chain superstores could offer. To bolster claims to capaciousness, during its early phase, Amazon cultivated small and independent publishers, who at the time were often effectively locked out of the chain superstores, and was lionised as a result (Marcus, 2004). But this gesture towards diversity in the book ecosystem proved short-lived. As small publishers became increasingly reliant on Amazon for their sales, the online bookseller started to demand steeper discounts, notoriously referring to such publishers in a leaked strategy document as ‘sickly gazelles’ that the fast-moving cheetah Amazon would pick off from the back of the pack (Stone, 2013: 243–4; Murray, 2018: 74–5). Such aggressive corporate tactics became ever more prevalent as Amazon sought to capitalise on its first-mover advantage in online book retailing. Publishers in

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dispute with the company over its unsustainably low eBook pricing found the ‘buy’ buttons next to their books arbitrarily removed. Rival online retailers, such as Book Depository, and reader-review communities, such as Shelfari and Goodreads, were bought out and their functions merged with existing Amazon services. Throughout this time, Bezos continued to experiment with developing Amazon into ‘the everything store’ by expanding its product categories to encompass music, clothing, homewares and eventually general consumer items; developing the market-dominating Kindle eReader (released in 2007); and, most recently, remodelling the corporation as a data-services provider and screen-content commissioner. For Amazon, books now serve principally as the company’s legacy beachhead into online retailing. While this bigger picture of Amazon’s corporate operations provides con­ text, it is also worth examining the company’s innovations specifically within the book-retailing sector. In its mid-1990s infancy, the online bookseller was faced with the challenge of how to keep customers on its website without any of the comfortable chairs, mood lighting and enticing cafés of its bricks-andmortar rivals. The game-changing innovation of customer reviews began chiefly as a means to fill the sparsely populated pages of Amazon’s website with essentially free content (Spector, 2000: 141–2; Miller, 2009: 106; Packer, 2014). Bezos’s mania for quantification quickly found ways to rank readers’ 1–5-star reviews and for proprietary algorithms deploying collaborative fil­ tering to suggest items for possible purchase based on similar customers’ browsing history. Both were in effect digital imitations of the shelf-talker recommendations and hand-selling techniques of independent book retailers, and Bezos pitched them explicitly as such (Murray, 2018: 60). From this it was a logical step towards email newsletters, author interviews, ‘search inside’ digital browsing, online book clubs, an in-house blog and even prepublication galley proofs for especially ardent Amazon reviewers. For Bezos and his executives, customer service developed into a quasi-religion, with Amazon’s role extending far beyond merely satisfying consumers’ existing desires to effectively predicting and even stimulating those desires through algorithmically curated offerings. The potential of such corporate suggestions to become self-fulfilling – so that customers are offered new titles that are increasingly similar to those they have previously bought or viewed – has exacerbated the book business’s existing polarisation into a handful of megaselling front-list titles and an ever-lengthening tail of also-rans (Thompson, 2010; Murray, 2019). This leaves aside the privacy implications of Amazon’s hunger for data, especially as it has come to reconceive itself along social media lines as a data-hosting and artificial intelligence entity: through its Kindle eReaders, the company accumulates data not only on which titles are pur­ chased by which customers, but the rate at which they are read, the exact page on which a reader abandons a book, and any comments or highlights they leave on their digital copy (Rowberry, 2016). Reading, the epitome of sacrosanct interiority since the rise of the printed book (see Chapters 1 and 9), has been laid bare by pervasive digital surveillance. By the time a scandal broke

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Figure 8.2 The online world meets bricks-and-mortar retailing at the Amazon Books store. ‘Shelf-talker’ cards display a title’s cumulative review ranking and reader comments drawn from the website. (All images of Amazon Books, Portland OR courtesy of Rachel Noorda.)

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Figure 8.3 Bookstore browsers are encouraged to scan a title’s shelf-talker barcode and view the book’s page on the Amazon site.

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Figure 8.4 It is then a mere step for shoppers to use their smartphone similarly in other retail outlets, effectively turning physical stores into ‘showrooms’ facilitating online purchases (preferably on Amazon).

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in 2009 over Amazon’s unilateral deletion of George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour from Kindles because of a rights dispute, critics could only marvel at the symbolism (see Chapter 11). Given all this, what should we make of Amazon’s recent move into – of all things – physical book retailing? The company opened its first bricks-andmortar store – Amazon Books – in its hometown of Seattle in 2015, and has since expanded into cities across the United States. One might suspect that this was the product of a particularly febrile corporate brainstorming session during which executives competed to come up with the most outré manoeuvre for the cashed-up firm to make next. However, Amazon spokespeople have disputed this, claiming that the new stores combine the best of online and bricks-and-mortar retailing, with stock selected according to cumulative customer review rankings, and Amazon’s various consumer electronics, such as Kindles and Alexa home automation systems, available to trial (Murray, 2018: 53). Irrespective of whether this curious exercise in brand extension endures, independent booksellers have been reminded, as though they might forget, that the industry-dominating Amazon is omnipresent. The firm has released an app that encourages high-street and shopping-mall bookstore browsers to scan a barcode and reveal the usually far cheaper Amazon online price (so-called ‘showrooming’,). In addition it has now established a presence on the high street itself, luring customers inside with a combination of West Coast-style, exposed-timber decor and deep discounts. Ultimately, though, Amazon Books may be less noteworthy for what they sell than what they signal. Even if customers loyally support their local independent bookshop, the physical presence of an Amazon bookstore serves to keep online shopping alternatives front and centre of consumers’ minds.

Conclusion The recent history of book retailing shows it to be anything but a sedate, decorous industry. Whenever there has been a swing towards chainstores, the independents have fought back, prompting the chains to mimic the behaviour of the independents. With the mutation of this conflict into physical versus online retailing, independent bookshops have sought to cultivate a resonant online presence that mimics their shopfront and reinforces their community role in the digital book browser’s mind. Book retailing remains a volatile and highly competitive business, with booksellers forced to adapt to constant shifts in technology, major players, legislation and cultural trends. The only certainty is that the bookselling environment will remain one of constant change over the next few decades. Yet, even if digital pundits’ categorisation of the codex book as a superseded technology is correct, need that diagnosis prove terminal? Media theorists have long noted that, once a medium ceases to be socially dominant, users redis­ cover its physical and affective qualities, as has been seen with the efflorescence of record stores catering to vinyl purists. A new frontier in bookselling might

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well be book ‘cathedrals’ – beautiful, historic buildings originally constructed to be, or more often repurposed as, bookstores where the goal is as much to experience a unique atmosphere as it is to purchase a commodity. Thus the self-appointed ‘world’s most beautiful bookshop’ – Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, which is decorated with dazzling stained glass, polished woodwork and a grand curved staircase – has become a tourist destination in its own right, charging a five-euro admission fee and spawning a collection of YouTube video walkthroughs.6 As publishing commentator Jason Epstein forecast at the turn of the millennium: Tomorrow’s stores will have to be what the Web cannot be: tangible, intimate, and local; communal shrines, perhaps with coffee bars offering pleasure and wisdom in the company of others who can share one’s interests, where the book one wants can always be found and surprises and temptations spring from every shelf. (2001: 38)

Learning exercises In August 2018, London’s largest socialist bookshop, Bookmarks, was trashed by slogan-chanting members of the right-wing UK Independence Party.7 Can you think of other instances where bookshops have served as proxies for larger ideological disputes? Does the cultural significance of independent bookstores justify owners not paying staff their full entitlements (see https://popula.com/2019/05/01/vibranteconomies/)? If the viability of the business is at stake, should staff be compensated with less money given the cultural capital their job provides? Bricks-and-mortar bookshops face an increasing battle with the so-called ‘showrooming’ practices outlined above: that is, bookshop browsers identify titles of interest, look up the online price and buy the book from the online retailer, often while still in the physical bookstore (Case, 2013). The bookshop thus offers stock curation and staff expertise but is denied sales revenue. Some bookshops, like Livraria Lello, have fought back by charging an admission fee (Fishman, 2019). Given this pricing model works for nightclubs, might it also work for bookstores?

Notes 1 Since 2019, both Waterstones and Barnes & Noble have been owned by hedge fund Elliott Management (www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/elliott-management-to-acquirebarnes-noble-for-683-million.html). 2 Beach’s centrality to Parisian intellectual life between the world wars has been underlined by Princeton University’s recent digitising of loan and sales records from Shakespeare and

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Company. See https://lithub.com/this-new-database-shows-the-reading-habits-ofmajor-20th-century-authors/. Hanks’s character in You’ve Got Mail talks up Fox Books’ ‘piazza’-like function to a visiting TV crew: ‘a place in the city where people could mingle and mix and be’. At 1:36:45. See www.readings.com.au. This includes Readings’ specialist children’s and young-adult bookshop, set up next to its flagship premises in inner-city Carlton. See www.livrarialello.pt/en-us/. See www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/06/socialist-bookshop-support-afterrightwingers-attack-bookmarks.

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The tensions between independent and chain retailers are nowhere better encapsulated than in the ‘Manny Come Home’ episode from series three of the cult UK sitcom Black Books (2000–2004). Put-upon sales assistant Manny defects to the new Goliath Books superstore that opens next door to Bernard’s decaying second-hand bookshop. Simon Pegg puts in a scenestealing turn as the chain bookstore’s manager, whose touchy-feeling rhetoric is undercut by a ruthlessly Fordist approach to maximising staff productivity: www.imdb.com/title/tt0526552/. Love Your Bookshop Day (a Saturday in early August) began in Australia and has been successfully exported to the United States as the Love Your Bookstore Challenge (a week in early to mid-November). The Australian Booksellers Association has produced brief promotional videos for the day, while its US equivalent favours Facebook, Instagram and Twitter interactions with the general public: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbkkZtt5UCY; www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYkUfY8sXPg; www.loveyourbookstore. com/challenge.html. Both campaigns make resonant ethical consumerist appeals to book buyers, ironically on their chief competitor’s digital platform.

References and further reading Auletta, Ken. (1997) ‘The Impossible Business.’ New Yorker 6 Oct.: 50–63. Carrión. Jorge. (2017) ‘Against Amazon: Seven Arguments, One Manifesto.’ Literary Hub 15 Nov. http://lithub.com/against-amazon-seven-arguments-one-manifesto/. Case, Jo. (2013) ‘The Bookshops Fight Back: Strategies to Survive the Digital Age.’ Wheeler Centre 30 Sep. www.wheelercentre.com/notes/860b8645872c. Childress, C. Clayton. (2012) ‘Decision-making, Market Logic and the Rating Mindset: Negotiating BookScan in the Field of US Trade Publishing.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 15.5: 604–20. Coates, Tim. (1997) ‘British Bookselling Today: To Whom Does the Future Belong?’ Logos 8: 24–34. Collins, Jim. (2010) Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davis, Joshua Clark. (2018) ‘The FBI’s War on Black-owned Bookstores.’ The Atlantic 19 Feb. www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/fbi-black-bookstores/553598/.

Book retailing 159 Davison, P., R. Meyersohn and E. Shils, eds. (1978) Literary Taste, Culture and Mass Communication, Volume 12: Bookselling, Reviewing and Reading. Cambridge: ChadwyckHealey. Emblidge, David. (2005) ‘City Lights Bookstore: “A Finger in the Dike.”’ Publishing Research Quarterly 21.4: 30–9. Emblidge, David. (2005–6) ‘City Lights Bookstore.’ International Journal of the Book 3.4: 27–33. Epstein, Jason. (2001) Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future. New York: Norton. Felesky, Leigh. (2004) ‘Feminist Ink: Politics and Publishing in a Big Box World.’ Herizons 17.4: 21–23, 45–46. Fishman, Howard. (2019) ‘Should We Pay to Enter Bookstores?’ New Yorker 23 Oct. www. newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/should-we-pay-to-enter-bookstores. Fornäs, Johan, Karin Becker, Erling Bjurstrom and Hillevi Ganetz. (2007) ‘Print Media.’ Consuming Media: Communication, Shopping and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 66–81. Gardiner, Juliet. (2000a) ‘Recuperating the Author: Consuming Fictions in the 1990s.’ Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94.2: 255–74. Gardiner, Juliet. (2000b) ‘“What is an Author?” Contemporary Publishing Discourse and the Author Figure.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 16.1: 63–76. Gardiner, Juliet. (2002) ‘Reformulating the Reader: Internet Bookselling and Its Impact on the Construction of Reading Practices.’ Changing English 9.2: 161–68. Graham, Gordon and Richard Abel, eds. (1996) The Book in the United States Today. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Hogan, Kristen A. (2003) ‘Defining Our Own Context: The Past and Future of Feminist Bookstores.’ Thirdspace: The Journal for Emerging Feminist Scholars 2.2. www.thirdspace.ca/ articles/hogan.htm. Hogan, Kristen A. (2016) The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Horvath, Stephen. (1996) ‘The Rise of the Book Chain Superstore.’ The Book in the United States Today. Ed. Gordon Graham and Richard Abel. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. 63–75. Hutton, Tatiana. (2002) ‘Bookscan: A Marketing Tool or Literary Homogenizer?’ Publishing Research Quarterly 18.1: 48–51. Kipling, P. and T.D. Wilson. (2000) ‘Publishing, Bookselling and the World Wide Web.’ Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 32: 147. Knox, Malcolm. (2005) ‘The Ex Factor: BookScan and the Death of the Australian Novelist.’ The Monthly May: 51–5. Koval, Ramona. (2005) ‘BookScan and the Fading Mystique of Literary Australia.’ [Interview with Jane Palfreyman, Lyn Tranter and Henry Rosenbloom.] ABC Online 31 Jul. www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1425012. Laing, Audrey and Jo Royle. (2005–6) ‘Bookselling Culture and Consumer Behaviour: Marketing Strategies and Consumer Responses in UK Chain Bookshops.’ International Journal of the Book 3.2: 101–11. Liddle, Kathleen. (2005) ‘More than a Bookstore: The Continuing Relevance of Feminist Bookstores for the Lesbian Community.’ Journal of Lesbian Studies 9: 147–61. Littler, Jo. (2008) Radical Consumption: Shopping for Change in Contemporary Culture. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Loebbecke, C., P. Powell and C. Gallagher. (1999) ‘Buy the Book: Electronic Commerce in the Book Trade.’ Journal of Information Technology 14: 295–301.

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Magner, Brigid. (2012) ‘Behind the BookScan Bestseller Lists: Technology and Cultural Anxieties in Early Twenty-first-century Australia.’ Script and Print 36.4: 243–58. Marcus, James. (2004) Amazonia. New York: New Press. McGinley, William and Katanna Conley. (2001) ‘Literary Retailing and the (Re)making of Popular Reading.’ Journal of Popular Culture 35.2: 207–21. McMurtry, Larry. (2008) Books: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster. Miller, Laura J. (1999a) ‘Cultural Authority and the Use of New Technology in the Book Trade.’ Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society 28.4: 297–313. Miller, Laura J. (1999b) ‘Shopping for Community: The Transformation of the Bookstore into a Vital Community Institution.’ Media, Culture and Society 21: 385–407. Miller, Laura J. (2006) Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Laura J. (2009) ‘Selling the Product.’ A History of the Book in America, Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America. Ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin and Michael Schudson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 91–106. Miller, Laura J. (2011) ‘Perpetual Turmoil: Book Retailing in the Twenty-first Century United States.’ Logos 22.3: 16–25. Moody, Nickianne. (2007) ‘Empirical Studies of the Bookshop: Context and Participant Observation in the Study of the Selling of Science Fiction and Fantasy.’ Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Ed. Nicole Mathews and Nickianne Moody. London: Ashgate. 43–62. Moss, Stephen. (2019) ‘Unputdownable! The Bookshops Amazon Couldn’t Kill.’ Guardian 6 Jun. www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/06/amazon-booksellers-beating-odds-book-shops. Murray, Simone. (2018) The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Murray, Simone. (2019) ‘Secret Agents: Algorithmic Culture, Goodreads and Datafication of the Contemporary Book World.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 5 Dec. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1367549419886026. Neill, Rosemary. (2007) ‘Sold Out?’ Weekend Australian 1 Sep.: Review, 6. O’Brien, Gemma T.M. (2016) ‘Small and Slow Is Beautiful: Well-being, “Sociallyconnective Retail” and the Independent Bookshop.’ Social and Cultural Geography Jun. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14649365.2016.1199814. O’Keefe, Caitlin. (2019) ‘The Secret Feminist History of Shakespeare and Company.’ New York Review of Books 18 Nov. www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/18/the-secretfeminist-history-of-shakespeare-company/. Onosaka, Junko. (2006) Feminist Revolution in Literacy: Women’s Bookstores in the United States. New York: Routledge. Osborne, Huw, ed. (2015) The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop: Books and the Commerce of Culture in the Twentieth Century. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Packer, George. (2014) ‘Cheap Words.’ New Yorker 17 Feb. www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2014/02/17/140217fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all. Pereira, Alyssa. (2019) ‘The Incredible Story behind the Quietest Room in San Francisco.’ SFGate 21 Nov. www.sfgate.com/local/article/ode-to-City-Lights-Poetry-Room14847517.php. Phillips, Angus. (2007) ‘Cover Story: Cover Design in the Marketing of Fiction.’ Logos 18.1: 15–20. Powell, Walter W. (1983) ‘Wither the Local Bookstore?’ Daedalus 112.1: 51–64.

Book retailing 161 Raven, James. (2007) The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850. London: Yale University Press. Ross, Andy. (2002) ‘Store Wars: The Case for the Independents.’ Logos 13.2: 78–83. Rowberry, Simon Peter. (2016) ‘Commonplacing the Public Domain: Reading the Classics Socially on the Kindle.’ Language and Literature 25.3: 211–25. Rubbo, Mark. (2019) ‘Mark’s Say, 50 Years of Readings.’ Readings 5 Mar. www.readings.com. au/news/mark-s-say-50-years-of-readings?mc_cid=da7aa85834&mc_eid=d71330a623. Schiffrin, André. (2001) The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London and New York: Verso. Spector, Robert. (2000) Amazon.com: Get Big Fast. London: Random House. Squires, Claire. (2007) Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Stone, Brad. (2013) The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown. Striphas, Ted. (2009) The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press. Thompson, John B. (2005) Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John B. (2010) Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Polity. Todd, Richard. (1996) Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury. Todd, Richard. (2006) ‘Literary Fiction and the Book Trade.’ A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. James F. English. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell. 23–50. Weedon, Alexis. (2007) ‘In Real Life: Book Covers in the Internet Bookstore.’ Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Ed. Nicole Mathews and Nickianne Moody. London: Ashgate. 117–28. Wilkins, Kim. (2019) ‘Do the Hustle: Writing in a Post-digital Publishing World.’ Sydney Review of Books 27 Sep. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/do-the-hustlewriting-in-apost-digitalpublishing-world/. Young, Sherman. (2007) The Book Is Dead: Long Live the Book. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Zifcak, Michael. (2006) ‘The Retail Book Trade.’ Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, Volume 3: 1946–2005. Ed. Craig Munro, Robyn Sheahan-Bright and John Curtain. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 202–31.

9

Cultures of reading

Merely by reading the title of this chapter, each of you has employed physical, technological and cognitive skills of great complexity that have taken millennia to develop to this point. Yet probably not a single one of you gave a moment’s conscious thought to what you were (are) doing, even if you performed this in your second or perhaps third language. Few readers studying at university level would have found reading this paragraph so far requires more than a modicum of concentration and effort. The point of all this meta-reflection is to pose the question: how did a phenomenon as sophisticated as reading come to be taken for granted as the wallpaper of daily life? At what point did we as individuals and contemporary society as a whole assume literacy as the fundamental enabling skill for participation in modern life? It is not as though academic disciplines have been reluctant to analyse reading. On the contrary, any large research university hosts multiple faculties with a particular stake in understanding the skill. Education and the teaching of English as a second language are vitally concerned with how learners – and especially children – acquire literacy, and how best to foster increasing reader competence. Adopting a quite different perspective, cognitive disciplines such as neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology are keenly interested in reading pathologies, as where literacy is impaired by brain disorders or adverse psychiatric conditions. Equally, faculties of information technology and en­ gineering research how best to design screens to facilitate digital reading, re­ duce glare and eye strain, and generally service contemporary society’s demand for portable, constantly networked reading (Baron, 2015). Economic and rhetorical investment in reading is also found outside university and school settings. Cultural policy programmes, such as the Victorian state government in Australia’s recent ‘1000 Books Before School’ campaign, encourage care­ givers of preschool children to familiarise them with books through reading aloud and generally creating positive associations with print, the better to prepare them for formal literacy education at school (see Chapter 4).1 However, among all these stakeholders in what we might term the over­ arching reading project, only the discipline of book history (see Chapter 2) investigates reading as a cultural phenomenon with its own history and unique contemporary manifestations. In his landmark article ‘First Steps toward a

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History of Reading’, book historian Robert Darnton asserted, ‘Reading has a history. It was not always and everywhere the same’ (1990 [1986]: 187). In so doing, he invited fellow historians to stop looking through reading as a takenfor-granted means of accessing historical documents and instead recognise that, as a cultural technology, it has its own complex history. We might better say histories, given the diverse functions of reading in societies with different al­ phabets (or non-alphabetical writing systems) as well as its stratification by class, race, gender and religion within individual societies.

How to document the history of reading? It was all very well for Darnton to break the ground of a new academic subfield focused on the history of reading, but how to till that field was a more complicated undertaking. This is because reading is the hardest part of book history’s familiar ‘production–circulation–consumption’ triad to analyse his­ torically on account of a lack of extant evidence regarding how books were actually consumed (see Chapter 2). Darnton himself acknowledged this practical impediment, regretting that ‘the experience of the great mass of readers lies beyond the range of historical research’ (1990 [1986]: 177). The problem, from a methodological perspective, is that the act of reading is largely ephemeral and, as Darnton’s fellow book historian Roger Chartier noted, ‘only rarely leaves traces’ (1994 [1992]: 1). Indeed, the general public still regards reading as predominantly a silent, solitary, private and passive activity that leaves no record. There is some justification for this conclusion, but it should be noted that each of these characteristics is historically contingent and many exceptions to the rule are provided by contemporary digital reading practices. Take, for example, silent reading: this has been the norm in the West only since the Middle Ages; earlier (and indeed much later in certain contexts) reading was akin to a public performance, where one literate participant would read aloud to an audience whose experience of the text was primarily or exclusively aural (Saenger, 1997; Littau, 2006: 15). This dynamic lingers in the idea of a university ‘lecture’ (the term derives from the Latin for ‘reading’) and dates from an era when the scarcity of books meant the ‘lecturer’ would dictate a text for student auditors to transcribe copies or take notes. Nor has reading necessarily always been solitary, as the long history of book clubs, self-education groups and li­ braries substantiates (Rose, 2001; McHenry, 2002; Long, 2003). Weighing the question of reading’s privacy is especially complex. Certainly, as outlined in Chapter 1, literate societies create more favourable conditions for the culti­ vation of individualism than purely oral societies because of the interiority fostered by the reading act. But private, silent reading is also commonly performed on public transport; the UK-based book retailer W.H. Smith emerged in tandem with the nineteenth-century expansion of the nation’s railways and the demand for cheap reading material that commuting spurred among an increasingly literate public (Feather, 1988: 136). Finally, the

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question of reading’s passivity has been much debated in literary theory (see below), where scholars have identified considerable interpretive resistance among certain readers to what they read. Readers may be sufficiently moti­ vated to record their oppositional interpretations of texts, or even to generate their own texts as either ripostes to or reworkings of an original work (e.g. satires and fanfiction). With the internet dramatically lowering barriers to entry for public communication, scholars of reading have exponentially more evi­ dence of actual reader practices, whether in the form of Amazon customer reviews, online book-club contributions or reading-related social media posts (Participations, 2019). Sources for a history of reading

Even historical records can provide evidence of how readers distant in time and place understood what they read as long as scholars adopt a sufficiently capacious approach. Such a multi-perspectival corpus might encompass au­ tobiographies, diaries, letters, court transcripts, printed reviews, publishers’ archives, surveys, government reports and library and bookshop records. A particularly intriguing body of evidence for reader responses is marginalia (i.e. comments and marks left in books’ margins by readers), as collected by dedicated online projects (Jackson, 2001).2 The text of a book may itself provide clues to its expected mode of consumption, such as occasional re­ ferences to a listening audience in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or paratextual materials such as illustrations, prefaces or references that seek to engage certain kinds of readers. Bibliographers have been quick to point out that the material text itself speaks volumes about the anticipated readership, such as a cheap paperback versus a deluxe edition (see the Introduction). Even artworks de­ picting reading or technological apparatuses such as lecterns, hand-held pointers and book lights allow us to infer preferred reading protocols. Book historians’ evidentiary pool thus comprises both micro-level analysis of individual case-studies and macro-level data. What might lie between these two extremes? As recounted in Chapter 2, the Annales school of French social history that was a key tributary of book history bequeathed to the emerging discipline the concept of mentalités: the cultural ideas and as­ sumptions associated with reading within a given society at a particular point in time. In English, the term is roughly akin to Tony Bennett’s idea of a ‘reading formation’ (1987: 70). There are affinities here with the concept of the ‘implied reader’, which stems from the distinct intellectual tradition of 1970s German reader-response theory. By this term, the tradition’s leading theorist, Wolfgang Iser, meant the kind of ideal reader the text seems to presuppose: a figure who embodies ‘all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect’ (1978: 34). Importantly, this ideal reader constructed within the text may differ dramatically from the actual readers who consume the book, as you will have experienced when you read a textbook you do not understand, or a novel with which you fundamentally

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Figure 9.1 The proliferation of printed books in the early modern period necessitated in­ ventions for reading multiple volumes simultaneously, such as Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli’s Book Wheel (1588), forerunner of the modern practice of toggling between screen applications.

disagree. Book historians explore data on the use of books in everyday life to distinguish between these ideal and actual readers.3

Reading as a contextually specific practice By the late decades of the twentieth century, humanities academics broadly concurred that texts are innately polysemic: that is, there is no singular, ‘correct’ reading of a text, fixed and immutable. Instead, a text will be interpreted differently, at different times, in different places, by different people. Actual

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readings are thus more richly diverse than credited by literary studies’ earlier idealised conceptions of the ‘Reader’. This diversity is inevitable because, as literary sociologist Andrew Milner summarises, at its base reading is ‘an irre­ parably social process’ (2005: 186). By the time book history had begun to coalesce as an academic discipline in the Anglophone world, literary studies (one of its key ancestor disciplines) had long-since abandoned New Criticism’s postulated idealised Reader as an unsupportable, elitist generalisation. Instead, book history readily absorbed multiple intellectual currents that sought to challenge the conflation of idealised and actual readers, and to investigate the unequal social and political conditions under which readers interpret texts. Three intellectual strands of the 1960s to 1980s have been especially influential on contemporary conceptualisations of reading: post-structuralist literary theory; reader-response criticism; and feminist literary theory. The most famous salvo fired in the campaign to ‘liberate’ the reader from interpretive ‘tyranny’ is Roland Barthes’s paradigmatic French post-structuralist essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1986 [1968]). Barthes asserted that the author is not the final authority on a text’s meaning; rather, its readers are. His chief target was the ossified manner in which the then-dominant French literary academy interpreted texts, not the behaviour of leisure readers interpreting contemporary novels. Nevertheless, his essay launched a decades-long aca­ demic fascination with ‘resistant readers’ who evade – or actively defy – the implied author’s ‘intended’ meaning. This strain combined with emerging work in cultural studies such as Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984 [1980]), which celebrated readers as ‘poachers’ who steal across the landscape of the author’s text, appropriating what they need to construct their identities. Key reader-response figure Wolfgang Iser has already been mentioned with reference to his important theoretical concept of the implied reader (1974 [1972]). His original premise was the then-radical contention that meaning is not inherent in a text but created through the interaction between text and reader. He came to ponder the question of why readers behave in certain ways after reading certain texts at certain times after studying the eighteenth-century phenomenon of ‘Werther-fever’ (Littau, 2006: 68): a Europe-wide spate of copycat suicides among readers of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). That this book could generate such a drastic corporeal effect in readers in that particular time and place (and rarely since) seemed to indicate that meaning was conditional upon a shifting constellation of social, cultural and intellectual factors playing upon readers. It was not until the rise of second-wave feminism in the early 1970s that the specifically gendered nature of readerly protocols was foregrounded in aca­ demic research. There was an explosion of interest in how women might read canonical texts differently from their implied male reader – the act of reading against the patriarchal grain. An influential early proponent of such feminist critique was Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics (1972 [1970]) laid bare the inherent misogyny of much ‘great literature’, including canonical works by

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D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. A more cultural studies-inflected, socio­ logical approach was pioneered by Janice Radway in Reading the Romance (1984), a study of Midwestern female romance readers that showed women using intellectually disreputable novels to shield themselves from household labour and others’ emotional demands. All three of these late twentieth-century strands of reading research opened up the reading encounter to close analysis – investigating the motivations of individual or postulated groups of readers and giving credence to modes of resistant reading.

The significance of ‘interpretive communities’ Reading may be a predominantly private act, but it is never entirely auton­ omous because, unlike talking, the skill of reading is not natural. It has to be taught – a fact that immediately invokes a range of social actors with vested interests in the reading act. Throughout history, readers have been constantly encouraged – even coerced – to read in certain ways and to reach specific interpretations. For example, religious education such as Sunday school en­ courages children to distil any particular Bible story to its moral takeaways. High-school English classes and university literary studies tutorials are nothing if not laboratories for cultivating critical readers – alert to specific literary devices in a work, able to decode symbolism and theme, even ‘interrogating’ texts post-structurally to foreground the repressed ideas they contain. Outside of these formal educational settings, commercial speed-reading courses attempt to instil a mode of reading for the gist of a work. At the opposite end of the reading scale, a subgenre of cultural advice manuals with titles such as How to Read a Novel or 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die impart etiquette on the right kind of books to be seen reading and how to speak intelligently about them. In all such cases, a certain community attempts to guide the un­ predictable nature of readerly interpretation down preferred paths. While, in theory, what an individual reader makes of a particular text is almost infinitely variable depending upon their personal experience, political outlook and cultural competence, in practice certain interpretations are much more likely than others because of the social formation that intercedes between the text and the reader. Literary theorist Stanley Fish termed these influential forma­ tions ‘interpretive communities’ to highlight how they place a lens between text and reader in order to make certain ideologically inflected interpretations more likely (1980). The contemporary world is replete with such interpretive communities even if their motivations are less religious or political than psychological and commercial. When Oprah Winfrey encourages readers in her televised (and more recently online) book club to read a novel for its emotional truth and mine it for guidance on how to ‘live your best life’, she is normalising the protocols of psychotherapy and self-help for a mainstream audience (Striphas, 2003; Chabot Davis, 2004; Lamb, 2005; Farr, 2005; Farr and Harker, 2008). Individual reader/viewers are free to resist Oprah’s

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preferred reading paradigm (as some vociferously have done), but the tidal pull of her interpretive authority ensures such readers must swim hard against the current.

Resistant reading practices Taken together, this chapter’s previous two sections seem to present a paradox: readers may interpret a text in infinitely diverse ways yet, in practice, most of them are likely to draw similar conclusions from that text in line with the views of their respective interpretive communities. This apparent con­ tradiction – readers both enjoy individual agency and are subject to the control of powerful social, cultural, political and religious institutions – lies at the heart of the study of reading. Exploration of any particular reading act must pay due attention to both of these factors, and to the complex interplays and trade-offs between them. What are we to make of the most resistant, even ornery, class of readers – those who are well aware that they are meant to interpret a text in a certain way but wilfully refuse to bow to the dictates of interpretive authority? In 2011, London’s Islington Council staged an exhibition of books that the celebrated 1960s gay playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell had vandalised.4 Some years before Orton became famous for scabrous, establishment-defying satires of middle-class British mores such as Loot (1965) and What the Butler Saw (1969), he and Halliwell amused themselves by ‘redesigning’ with subversive collages the covers of dozens of books borrowed from their local library. For example, a biography of favourite Home Counties poet John Betjeman was redesigned with a near-naked, elderly, tattooed man; a gardener’s guide featured an image of a rose with a baboon’s face at its heart; and Phyllis Hambledon’s twee historical novel Queen’s Favourite was bedecked with softcore homo-erotica.5 Upon discovery in 1962, Orton and Halliwell were sentenced to six-month prison terms for wilful damage. But, with the passing of half a century, their doctored books have become prize exhibits for the local history museum, the dust jackets framed with archive-quality mats and hailed as guerrilla artworks. Orton here represents the most resistant subcategory of reader – an ar­ chetype that holds a particular fascination for book historians. Whether Protestant readers prosecuted by the Catholic Church for ‘heretical’ inter­ pretations of scripture, African-Americans combing the Bible for anti-slavery precedents, working-class socialists in search of a people’s history, lesbians reading pulp novels aimed at heterosexual males or even high-school children rifling through set texts in search of the ‘naughty bits’, resistant readers prove that interpretive communities may powerfully direct reading but they can never completely determine it. Through their agentic behaviours, resistant readers demonstrate the inherent fluidity and permeability of literacy’s power struc­ tures. The logical conclusion is that reading against the grain can itself ossify into an approved readerly practice. The first edition of J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2001), ostensibly a Hogwarts textbook, came

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complete with its own ‘marginalia’, such as the correction that the existence of a colony of Acromantula in Scotland has been ‘confirmed by Harry Potter and Ron Weasley’. The book’s reverse title page also features schoolboyish games of noughts and crosses and hangman for good measure.

Contemporary reading cultures The rise of the internet in the early 1990s triggered a spate of soul-searching among advocates of literary culture about the supposedly imminent ‘death of the book’ (see Chapter 11). Assuming an either/or relationship between screen and print culture, commentators feared (or celebrated) that the rise of digital media heralded the extinction of print traditions. Yet this same period coincided with an explosion of interest in reading among certain sectors of Western society, particularly in the reading of fiction for leisure and self-improvement. Book clubs (US)/reading groups (UK)

The concept of individuals choosing to read the same book privately and then meeting to discuss it has a history almost as old as print culture itself. Prerevolutionary, mixed-gender French salons hosted intellectual discussions of recently published works; nineteenth-century mechanics’ institutes and working men’s colleges frequently sponsored book clubs as part of their self-education programmes; and early twentieth-century female suffragists used book groups for intellectual stimulation, social networking and political skill-sharing. Today’s reading groups are strongly female-dominated, attracting principally thirtysomething or older professional women with a taste for middle- to high-brow literary fiction (Hartley, 2001; Long, 2003). However, there are many excep­ tions, such as all-male reading groups that have operated for decades, prison book clubs, and online platforms where participants’ gender may be chosen, or impossible to determine (Rehberg Sedo, 2003; Sweeney, 2010). What is con­ sistent across all embodied reading groups is that books constitute the glue of sociality, with the sharing of food, drink and gossip just as important as dis­ cussing the chosen title. Because members tend to be heavy readers and highvolume book purchasers, the book-club demographic has become an important market for publishers and booksellers. Guides on how to establish and run a book club proliferate, and paperback editions of likely book-club selections often come with discussion-starter questions printed at the back. Meanwhile, publishers can monitor online book clubbers with precision to determine which titles are becoming word-of-mouth hits with which readerships, in which areas and at what rate. Hence, publishers’ websites frequently incorporate special book-club content, such as cheat sheets for the time-poor and authorbackground information. In addition, dedicated online businesses such as BookMovement offer book clubs scheduling software and discussion-starter prompts as lures to persuade members to register on the site and thus agree to the combing and on-selling of their data to third parties.6

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Mediated book clubs

Between the physical book club and the purely online book club lies the mediated book club. Examples include radio-hosted book clubs, such as BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub and CBC’s Canada Reads, where a host facilitates discussion between invited participants, sometimes including the author. Notwithstanding its reputation as a rival for readers’ attention, television has also proven a highly successful medium for driving book sales through programmes such as the UK’s Richard and Judy’s Book Club, PBS’s The Great American Read, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s First Tuesday Book Club and, of course, the biggest mass-media book club of them all – that of Oprah Winfrey. US talk-show host Winfrey’s first foray into book-centric television programming – between 1996 and 2002 – had a seismic impact on sales of the selected titles, with relatively unknown authors becoming New York Times bestsellers virtually overnight following consecration as an ‘Oprah pick’. Scholars of reading have extensively explored the way in which Oprah’s Book Club foregrounded the gender, racial and class politics of reading and literary interpretation, principally in the United States but also internationally. As mentioned earlier, the mode of reading consistently modelled on the programme deployed books as vehicles for selftransformation – a casting of books as quasi-therapeutic aids that tended to downplay aesthetic devices and often led to a simplistic conflation of author with narrator or protagonist. In 2001, high-brow novelist Jonathan Franzen’s public reservations about Oprah’s choice of his novel The Corrections (2001) and the consequent rescinding of his invitation to appear on the show became emblematic of the sometimes fraught relationship between older forms of lit­ erary capital and the contemporary media sphere (Farr, 2005: 75–97). Nine years later, a subsequent invitation to Franzen to discuss his new novel Freedom (2010) set off another debate on whether artistic excellence was always tainted by contact with mass-media hustle – a classic instance of print culture’s un­ dergirding culture/commerce dialectic (see Chapter 3). Writers’ festivals

For many centuries, silent reading has been the cultural norm: from the earliest stages of education, children are discouraged from moving their lips while reading. Reading aloud lingered in settings such as church services, in some factories as a means to divert workers engaged in mundane tasks and in the domestic sphere as do-it-yourself entertainment in the pre-broadcast era, but, by and large, once a book was published, the author relinquished all contact with it, except in the legal sense of retaining copyright and receiving royalty payments. However, the exponential growth of writers’ festivals since the 1980s has fun­ damentally changed this dynamic, given that authors reading their work aloud in public is a staple of festival programming. Typically, invited authors will discuss their work with a chair (either singularly for star authors or as a panel member for the less famous), read an evocative passage, then take questions from the

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Figure 9.2 A pyjama-clad Reese Witherspoon promotes the analogue comforts of curling up with a good book for her Hello Sunshine Book Club, but note the prompts to interact via an array of social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Goodreads).

audience. Writers’ festivals thus add a communal, sociable dimension to the usually private, isolative activity of reading (Murray, 2012: 97–101; 2018: 81–110; Weber, 2018). They also prolong and reinforce the association of the author with their book in readers’ minds, as the authorial persona predisposes readers to certain interpretations. Authors may even outright reject particular readerly interpretations or speculations voiced from the floor. As many com­ mentators have noted, the author’s newly public profile as validator and promoter of their work in ‘meet the author’ culture seems to contradict poststructuralism’s claim that, with the ‘death of the author’, readers alone would be arbiters of textual meaning (Murray, 2018: 26). Less abstractly, the normalisation of performance as part of a writer’s skillset seems prejudicial to introvert or publicity-averse writers, and may result in good performers gaining the edge over their aesthetically superior, but less adeptly self-promoting, peers. The proof of how normative authorial performance has become is that those authors who refuse to participate in writers’ festivals become famous as much for their ‘reclusiveness’ as for their work. Mass reading events

Writers’ festivals, especially the largest ones, are important sales venues for publishers and book retailers, but they are also significant touristic and cultural-policy events given the number of visitors they attract to a particular locale and their utility for city branding (see Chapter 4). A variation on the

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theme of public reading is what Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo term ‘mass reading events’ (MREs), along the lines of the ‘one-book–one-city’ model (2013). In such events, a whole city’s or even region’s population is encouraged to read a chosen book over weeks or months and then participate in public and mediated discussions of its content. The phenomenon has its origins in US celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl’s ‘If All of Seattle Read the Same Book’ campaign (1998) and has since been much imitated around the globe. MREs tick several desirable policy boxes for their civic funders: encourage­ ment of literacy; catalysing of social cohesion and migrant integration; and showcasing of local history or cultural associations. Because so many divergent governmental, educational and commercial agendas are focused on a single title, choice of book is crucial. Successful MRE picks are frequently written by an author with local connections, or issued by a local publisher, and should be artistically ambitious without being intimidatingly experimental. A further spin on the MRE concept takes the idea of individuals’ coordinated reading of a single title to an extreme. Australia’s annual National Simultaneous Storytime encourages caregivers, librarians and teachers of young children to read the same picture book aloud at a prearranged date and time across the country in a collective celebration of books and their power.7 Reasons for the public resurgence of reading

Because reading is the foundational skill for participation in contemporary life, many groups have a stake in the overarching reading project. Within the subsector of the media industries, the resurgence of forms of public, sociable reading signals the book industry’s deeply intertwined but often disavowed relationship with screen formats (see Chapter 7). The championing of public reading of the kinds itemised above frequently occurs in response to the perceived banalities of much media content, such as reality television or ‘fake news’. Public affiliation with book culture can function conservatively as people seek out ‘quality’ and ‘classic’ books (highly debatable though these terms may be) against other forms of communication. Reading advocates are here availing themselves of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘cultural capital’: that is, forms of cultural knowledge, competences or dispositions that bring pres­ tige and social status to an individual or group (1993). Ironically, however, people who use their affiliation with book culture to distance themselves from mass media frequently do so via broadcast formats such as radio and television. In particular, any attempt to draw a clear distinction between codex reading and the internet fails utterly given the extent to which readerly identities are now constructed and performed on social media platforms.

Digital reading When first proposed as an academic subfield, the history of reading suffered from a paucity of evidence. In the twenty-first century, if anything, the opposite

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Figure 9.3 Codex-based and digital reading appear to pull in opposite directions: print en­ couraging solitary, deep immersion in linear narrative, and network-enabled devices inviting readers to skip from the text to consult online dictionaries, author profiles and the responses of other readers. While the distinction is not absolute, medium theorists recognise that the platform on which we read has inbuilt affordances that profoundly influence the reading encounter. (‘Nautilus’ reproduced courtesy of Irene Rinaldi)

problem prevails. Since Amazon began hosting amateur reviews on its website in the late 1990s, readers have relished the opportunity to comment publicly on what they are reading, whether through litblogs, online reading groups such as Goodreads, or the full array of social media platforms – bookTubing, litTwitter and Bookstagraming. Far from the internet signalling the eclipse of codex reading, literary culture has grafted itself onto each new communications de­ velopment. More specifically, earlier book historians who lamented that the reading experience of the vast majority of individuals would always elude his­ torical methods can now access fine-grained data on the names (or avatars), locations, genders and ages of readers who comment online, then use this to

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analyse how subgroups of readers differ in their interpretations of works. Old chestnuts about reading’s passivity have been indisputably dispelled by abundant evidence of readers ‘writing back’ to their reading material within the text itself through annotation functions such as Amazon’s Kindle Highlights, through vast fanfic platforms like Archive of Our Own, or through collaborative writing communities such as the Canada-based Wattpad (Rowberry, 2016; Ramdarshan Bold, 2018). Particularly in the worlds of fanfic and collaborative writing, tra­ ditional distinctions between author’s, reader’s and critic’s roles break down as readers workshop stories and offer suggestions on plot development, character fine-tuning and wished-for scenarios. Yet, while this mass of reading data represents a figurative goldmine for scholars, it constitutes a more literal type of goldmine for commercial en­ tities. Reading has often been postulated as the last bastion of liberal hu­ manism – a subjective domain that evades market forces. This idealised position is impossible to maintain when dominant online reading commu­ nities such as Amazon have been created primarily to keep potential bookbuyers lingering on websites. Even in less explicitly commercial online reading formations, readers’ comments and networks generate masses of data on readerly habits that can be categorised into niche demographics and monetised either by the platform itself for advertising purposes or via sale to third parties (Murray, 2019). Equally concerning are the privacy implications of pervasively digitised reading. Totalitarian governments have always sought to control citizens’ access to reading material via censorship (see Chapter 4), but any citizen in possession of a contraband text could withstand the badgering of interpretive communities and use their agency to read that text against the grain. By contrast, today’s digital reading devices can track not only what titles an individual purchases or browses and the comments they leave in eBooks, but the times of day when they read, their page-turn rate and the point at which they abandon a text (Paul, 2020). Such panoptical digital surveillance raises the question of whether readers are reading books so much as being read through them. The plenitude of digital reading in the early decades of the twenty-first century thus opens up fascinating new di­ rections for reading research, but it also requires a sharpening of politicaleconomy perspectives to understand the new stakes in the overarching reading project.

Learning exercises Scrutinise the online presence of a celebrity book club for how it functions as an interpretive community. Some popular recent examples are Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Book Club, Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf and Lena Dunham’s Lenny.8 What likely motivates such celebrities’ public affiliation with books? What do the selections or tone of online discussions indicate about the site’s preferred reading protocols? What degree of dissent is permissible on

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the website (or is it removed by moderators)? How significant is gender in the online book-club movement generally? Social media permits rapid, minimally mediated, global communication about books in a way many readers and writers find exhilarating. However, what might be the potential downsides of removing print culture’s multiple intermediaries? Should writers be subject to the preferences of their readership, and does constant interactivity erode an author’s precious writing time? Novelist Joanne Harris caused controversy at the Manchester Literature Festival in 2015 for stating that writers were not obliged to interact with readers on social media.9 Hyper-connected reading has even spawned its own backlash: the ‘slow reading’ movement, where committed readers meet regularly, unplug from all digital devices and read in uninterrupted silence.10

Notes 1 www.slv.vic.gov.au/live-learn/1000-books-school-state-library-registration. 2 For example, www.BookTraces.org and http://thepagesproject.com/. 3 The UK open-access Reading Experience Database (RED) collates accounts of how books were read over almost five centuries (1450–1945). See www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ RED/index.html. 4 See www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/11/library-books-playwright-joe-orton? newsfeed=true. 5 See www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/14/joe-orton-defaced-librarybooks. 6 See www.bookmovement.com/landing_2/. 7 See www.alia.org.au/events/17223/national-simultaneous-storytime-2019. 8 See: Jocelyn McClurg (2016) ‘Book-loving Stars on Instagram: They’re the New Oprah.’ USA Today 24 Apr. www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2016/04/24/ celebrities-book-clubs-social-media-reese-witherspoon-lena-dunham-kimberlywilliams--paisley/83040862/; Constance Grady (2019) ‘How Reese Witherspoon Became the New High Priestess of Book Clubs.’ Vox 20 Sep. www.vox.com/thehighlight/2019/9/13/20802579/reese-witherspoon-reeses-book-club-oprah; Ann Patchett (2020) ‘The Book of Reese.’ Vanity Fair Apr. www.vanityfair.com/ hollywood/2020/03/the-book-of-reese?utm_source=twitter&utm_brand=vf& mbid=social_twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned. 9 See www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/20/what-do-writers-owe-readers-in-thedigital-age-joanne-harris-colm-toibin-al-kennedy. 10 See www.wsj.com/articles/read-slowly-to-benefit-your-brain-and-cut-stress-1410823086. 11 See https://lib.bsu.edu/wmr/. 12 See https://cityreaders.nysoclib.org/. 13 See www.australiancommonreader.com/spotlight/australian-common-reader.

Online resources •

Researchers now have unprecedented access to information about historical reading practices due to the development of online databases of library

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borrowing records. In addition to the RED database (see note 3), try the free online projects What Middletown Read (1890s USA),11 the records of the New York Society Library (late eighteenth century)12 and the Australian Common Reader (1861–1928).13 The works of influential French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offer powerful theoretical models but are often heavy going, given his labyrinthine prose style. So, for a neat encapsulation of the relationship between economic, social, cultural and symbolic forms of capital, try Keith McDougall’s serial comic Bourdieu’s Capital™ (2016): www. theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2018/11/29/bourdieus-capital-by-keithmcdougall.

References and further reading Altick, Richard. (1998) The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900. 2nd edn. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Baron, Naomi S. (2013) ‘Redefining Reading: The Impact of Digital Communication Media.’ PMLA 128.1: 193–200. Baron, Naomi S. (2015) Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World. New York: Oxford University Press. Barthes, Roland. (1986 [1968]) ‘The Death of the Author.’ The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell. 49–55. Bennett, Tony. (1987) ‘Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts.’ Post-structuralism and the Question of History. Ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 63–81. Birke, Dorothee and Johannes Fehrle. (2018) ‘#booklove: How Reading Culture Is Adapted on the Internet.’ Komparatistik Online 24 Dec. www.komparatistik-online.de/ index.php/komparatistik_online/article/view/191. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity. Brodhead, Richard H. (1993) Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cavallo, Guglielmo and Roger Chartier, eds. (1999 [1995]) A History of Reading in the West. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Certeau, Michel de. (1984 [1980]) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chabot Davis, K. (2004). ‘Oprah’s Book Club and the Politics of Cross-racial Empathy.’ International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.4: 399–419. Chartier, Roger. (1994 [1992]) The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chartier, Roger. (1997) ‘The End of the Reign of the Book.’ SubStance 82: 9–11. Chelton, M. (2001) ‘When Oprah Meets Email: Virtual Book Clubs.’ American Library Association 41.1: 31–6. Colclough, Stephen. (2007) ‘Readers: Books and Biography.’ A Companion to The History of the Book. Ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Oxford: Blackwell. 50–62. Collins, Jim. (2013) ‘Reading, in a Digital Archive of One’s Own.’ PMLA 128.1: 207–12.

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Crone, Rosalind and Shafquat Towheed, eds. (2011) The History of Reading, Volume 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Darnton, Robert. (1990 [1986]) ‘First Steps toward a History of Reading.’ The Kiss of Lamourette. New York: Norton. 154–87. Davidson, Cathy N., ed. (1989) Reading in America: Literature and Social History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Devlin-Glass, F. (2001) ‘More than a Reader and Less than a Critic: Literary Authority and Women’s Book-Discussion Groups.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 24.5: 571–85. Dowling, David. (2014) ‘Escaping the Shallows: Deep Reading’s Revival in the Digital Age.’ Digital Humanities Quarterly 8.2. www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/2/ 000180/000180.html. Driscoll, Beth and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. (2019) ‘Faraway, So Close: Seeing the Intimacy in Goodreads Reviews.’ Qualitative Inquiry 25.3: 248–59. Farr, Cecilia Konchar. (2005) Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Way America Reads. Albany: State University of New York Press. Farr, Cecilia Konchar and Jaime Harker, eds. (2008) The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club. Albany: State University of New York Press. Feather, John. (1988) A History of British Publishing. London: Routledge. Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery. (2005) An Introduction to Book History. London and New York: Routledge. Fish, Stanley. (1980) Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flannery, Katheryn Thomas. (2004) Feminist Literacies, 1968–1975. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Fuller, Danielle and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. (2006) ‘A Reading Spectacle for the Nation: The CBC and “Canada Reads.”’ Journal of Canadian Studies 40.1: 5–36. Fuller, Danielle and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. (2013) Reading beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. New York: Routledge. Gonzalez, N.L. (1997) ‘Nancy Drew: Girls’ Literature, Women’s Reading Groups, and the Transmission of Literacy.’ Journal of Literacy Research 29.2: 221–51. Griswold, W., T. McDonnell and N. Wright. (2005) ‘Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-first Century.’ Annual Review of Sociology 31: 127–41. Hartley, Jenny. (2001) Reading Groups. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iser, Wolfgang. (1974 [1972]) The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Iser, Wolfgang. (1978) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jackson, Heather J. (2001) Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lamb, Mary R. (2005) ‘The “Talking Life” of Books: Women Readers in Oprah’s Book Club.’ Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present. Ed. Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 255–80. Lang, Anouk, ed. (2012) From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Language and Literature. (2009) ‘Literary Reading as Social Practice’ special issue, 18.3. Littau, Karen. (2006) Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Long, Elizabeth. (2003) Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyons, Martyn and Lucy Taksa. (1992) Australian Readers Remember: An Oral History of Reading 1890–1930. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Machor, James L., ed. (1993) Readers in History: Nineteenth-century American Literature and the Contexts of Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Macleod, Jock and Pat Buckridge, eds. (1992) Books and Reading in Australian Society. Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University. Manguel, Alberto. (1997) A History of Reading. London: Flamingo. McGinley, W., Katanna Conley and John Wesley White (2000) ‘Pedagogy for a Few: Book Club Discussion Guides and the Modern Book Industry as Literature Teacher.’ Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 44.3: 204–14. McHenry, Elizabeth. (2002) Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Millett, Kate. (1972 [1970]) Sexual Politics. London: Abacus. Milner, Andrew. (2005) Literature, Culture and Society. 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge. Murray, Simone. (2012) The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Murray, Simone. (2018) The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Murray, Simone. (2019) ‘Secret Agents: Algorithmic Culture, Goodreads and Datafication of the Contemporary Book World.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 5 Dec. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1367549419886026. Nakamura, Lisa. (2013) ‘“Words with Friends”: Socially Networked Reading on Goodreads.’ PMLA 128.1: 238–43. Olson, David R. (1996) ‘A History of Reading: From the Spirit of the Text to the Intentions of the Author.’ The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 143–59. Particip@tions. (2008) [Special issue on reader research], 5.2. www.participations.org/ Volume%205/Issue%202/5_02_contents.htm. Particip@tions. (2019) ‘Readers, Reading and Digital Media’ special issue, 16.1. www. participations.org/Volume%2016/Issue%201/contents.htm. Paul, Kari. (2020) ‘“They Know Us Better than We Know Ourselves”: How Amazon Tracked My Last Two Years of Reading.’ Guardian 4 Feb. www.theguardian.com/ technology/2020/feb/03/amazon-kindle-data-reading-tracking-privacy. Peck, J. (2002) ‘The Oprah Effect: Texts, Readers and the Dialectic of Signification.’ Communications Review 5: 143–78. Poole, M. (2003) ‘The Women’s Chapter: Women’s Reading Groups in Victoria.’ Feminist Media Studies 3.3: 263–81. Popular Narrative Media (2008) [Special issue on recreational reading], 1.2. https://access. portico.org/Portico/#!journalAUView/cs=ISSN_17543819?ct=E-Journal%20Content? label=v.%201,%20n.%202. Price, Leah. (2004) ‘Reading: The State of the Discipline.’ Book History 7: 303–20. Price, Leah. (2019) What We Talk about When We Talk about Books: The History and Future of Reading. New York: Basic Books. Procter, James and Bethan Benwell. (2014) Reading across Worlds: Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Radway, Janice A. (1984) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Radway, Janice A. (1997) A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ramdarshan Bold, Melanie. (2018) ‘The Return of the Social Author: Negotiating Authority and Influence on Wattpad.’ Convergence 24.2: 117–36. Ramone, Jenni and Helen Cousins, eds. (2011) The Richard and Judy Book Club Reader: Popular Texts and the Practices of Reading. Farnham: Ashgate. Rehberg Sedo, DeNel. (2002) ‘Predictions of Life after Oprah: A Glimpse at the Power of Book Club Readers.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 18.3: 11–22. Rehberg Sedo, DeNel. (2003) ‘Readers in Reading Groups: An Online Survey of Face-toFace and Virtual Book Clubs.’ Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 9.1: 66–90. Rose, Jonathan. (1992) ‘Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to a History of Audiences.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 53.1: 47–70. Rose, Jonathan. (2001) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ross, Catherine, Lynne McKechnie and Paulette Rothbauer. (2006) Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading, Libraries, and Community. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Rowberry, Simon. (2016) ‘Commonplacing the Public Domain: Reading the Classics Socially on the Kindle.’ Language and Literature 25.3: 211–25. Saenger, Paul. (1997) Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sharpe, Kevin. (2000) Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Socken, Paul, ed. (2014) The Edge of the Precipice: Why Read Literature in the Digital Age? Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Striphas, T. (2003) ‘A Dialectic with the Everyday: Communication and Cultural Politics on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 20.3: 295–316. Sweeney, Megan. (2010) Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Towheed, Shafquat, Rosalind Crone and Katie Halsey, eds. (2011) The History of Reading: A Reader. Abingdon: Routledge. Towheed, Shafquat and Edmund G.C. King, eds. (2015) Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Towsey, Mark. (2019) Reading History in Britain and America, c.1750–c.1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vlieghe, Joachim, Jaël Muls and Kris Rutten. (2016) ‘Everybody Reads: Reader Engagement with Literature in Social Media Environments.’ Poetics 54: 25–37. Walker, David, Julia Horne and Martyn Lyons, eds. (1992) Books, Readers, Reading. Geelong: Faculty of Humanities, Deakin University. Watling, Gabrielle and Sara E. Quay, eds. (2008) Cultural History of Reading. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Weber, Millicent. (2018) Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Wright, David. (2007) ‘Watching The Big Read with Pierre Bourdieu: Forms of Heteronomy in the Contemporary Literary Field.’ Centre for Research on Sociocultural Change Working Paper No. 45. www.cresc.ac.uk/publications/documents/ wp45.pdf. Wright, David. (2009) ‘Popular and Rare: Exploring the Field of Reading.’ Culture, Class, Distinction. Ed. Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright. Abingdon: Routledge. 102–20. Wright, David. (2015) Understanding Cultural Taste. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

10 Libraries and archives

For most students, a library is first and foremost a place in which to study, not a place to study. Indeed, it seems almost perverse to take the institution itself as an object for investigation. But just as the codex is not a neutral commu­ nications medium (as explored in Chapters 1 and 2), and publishers, editors and booksellers are not passive handmaidens in the production and circulation of books (see Chapters 3, 5, 6 and 8), libraries warrant analysis because they actively curate, classify and control access to knowledge in often subtle but farreaching ways. Therefore, one aim of this chapter is that when you next enter a library of any type you notice what its architecture, selection of holdings and internal organisation say about you, your area of study and the priorities of the host society. Given this chapter’s dual-focus title, it is appropriate to start with some clarifying definitions. The term ‘library’ typically denotes a collection of books and print periodicals, now supplemented with audiovisual holdings such as DVDs and audiobooks as well as access to digitised databases. An ‘archive’, by contrast, principally collects manuscripts, maps and ephemera either too brief or fragile to be classified as books (e.g. pamphlets, handbills, chap-books, posters and tickets). In practice, however, there is extensive overlap between the collections of these two kinds of institutions, and some countries combine them into a joint ‘national library and archive’. Whole graduate programmes in library science have been developed over the past 150 years to teach skills for optimising the operation and management of libraries, and key modern thinkers such as Melvil Dewey devised classifi­ cation systems for the organisation of human knowledge into various disciplinary taxonomies (see below). By contrast, a print culture perspective on libraries is concerned less with operational specifics than with the evolving idea of the library. The institution of the library has long been one of human history’s most visible gatekeepers of knowledge. Now, as twenty-first-century societies become pervasively digitised, it retains a crucial brokering role by de­ termining what counts as valid information, who has access to it and on what terms.

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Types of libraries A key tenet of the subdiscipline known as library history is that ‘the library’ is not a fixed concept; rather, it is dependent on shifting historical and cultural contexts. Any given library’s structure reveals much about the society in which it exists (or, just as tellingly, no longer exists). When attempting to trace the evolution of the concept of the library from its origins to the present day, some of the key considerations are ownership, holdings, organisation, language(s), architecture, sense of mission and user access. Private libraries

The oldest surviving institutions that we would recognise as libraries date from the Middle Ages. These began as private book collections of prominent persons, often royal or aristocratic, as in an era of widespread illiteracy the ability to read connoted power, wealth and a degree of leisure. In the preGutenberg era, manuscript books were valued not only for their (typically religious) contents but also for their bindings, which might comprise tooled leather, gilt and, in the most opulent examples, precious stones and pearls. As a format, the bound book created opportunities for display of material wealth that the more fragile and flexible scroll could not. Thus, the codex became a doubly venerated object as the richness of sacred scripture was clothed with earthly valuables. Because of such codices’ large format, rarity and physical treasures, medieval volumes were sometimes chained to desks. For example, the fifteenth-century Duke Humphrey’s Library, the core of what is now the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, still has large books chained to reading desks and all visiting researchers are required to swear an oath in their native language that they will not ‘kindle therein any fire or flame’ (Streeter, 2011).1 The conception of the private library as an opportunity for commodity display reached its apotheosis in the late nineteenth century as US ‘Gilded Age’ industrial magnates such as J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt dynasty established lavishly decorated, rare-book-bedecked libraries in their townhouses and country estates that betrayed a certain nouveaux-riche anxiety in their slavish accumulation of Old World cultural capital (see Chapter 9). More intellectually respectable, perhaps, are the surviving libraries of no­ table philosophers, writers and political figures that, especially when preserved whole, paint a vivid picture of the individual’s mental map – a kind of in­ tellectual biography. For example, US ‘founding father’ Thomas Jefferson’s book collection is preserved at Monticello, the house he designed and built in Virginia. As Robert Darnton wrote, ‘to scan the catalogue of the library in Monticello is to inspect the furnishings of Jefferson’s mind’ (1990 [1986]: 162). The collection reveals the developing ideas of a leading political and in­ tellectual figure of the late eighteenth century on subjects as diverse as political philosophy, natural history and agrarian management. So large and rare was Jefferson’s book collection in the early American Republic that it was sold to

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Congress after British troops burnt down the Capitol buildings in 1815, and thus became the kernel of the Library of Congress. The evolution of this particular library thus nicely parallels macro-level shifts from private to public libraries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see below). Even into the twentieth century, however, the private book collections of prominent individuals have continued to serve as ‘snapshots’ of their psychology and world-view. Since the turn of the millennium, there have been academic studies on the private libraries of such diverse figures as Oscar Wilde (Wright, 2009), Adolf Hitler (Ryback, 2009), Samuel Beckett (Van Hulle and Nixon, 2013) and David Bowie (O’Connell, 2019).2 Just as Duke Humphrey’s and Thomas Jefferson’s private collections have grown into larger public institutions, the history of the British Library, the world’s largest book collection, emblematises evolving conceptions of the li­ brary and its role, much as a tree trunk contains growth rings. The core of the UK’s national collection was once the personal library of King George III, and the architecture of the dedicated British Library building, which opened in the late 1990s, materialises the fact: on entering the complex, the visitor faces an inner, glassed-in, six-storey tower of book stacks known as the King’s Library, around which the rest of the building expands. Between the extremes of the wealthy individual’s library and the fully fledged democratic civic library movement of the nineteenth century (see below) lie subscription libraries, such as the still-operating Library Company of Philadelphia (est. 1731)3 and the London Library (est. 1841).4 These clublike institutions attest to rising literacy rates among upper-middle-class urban citizens and the consequent pressure to permit wider access to book collections. ‘Respectable’ individuals paid a fee to belong to the collective institution, effectively pooling their resources and thus creating a form of semi-public/semi-private space.5 By the nineteenth century, widening literacy, particularly among middle-class women and working-class men, extended the rather patrician early conception of the subscription library to the circulating library model, where, for a modest fee, readers could browse and borrow ‘useful’ reading material or, more popularly, multi-volume novels (Griest, 1970; Wiegand, 2007). Public libraries

By the mid- to late nineteenth century, the rise of civic discourse stimulated a municipal public library movement that saw libraries built in capital cities, regional centres and even large towns. Given that the funds for these in­ stitutions were raised via taxation, their orientation was broadly inclusive. They served as sources of municipal self-definition and pride, especially for colonial areas that felt themselves far removed from imperial centres of learning and culture. In such metropolitan institutions, the founders’ civic spirit and ambition for their respective locales were often reflected in grand public reading rooms, conceived as palaces of learning that would be

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accessible to the people. For example, the State Library Victoria in Melbourne (est. 1854 and now one of the world’s most visited public libraries) has as its centrepiece the domed La Trobe Reading Room (built 1913; see Figure 10.1).6 The roughly circular structure of this and similar public reading rooms is designed to signal architecturally principles of in­ clusiveness and democratic access. Such venues served as important vectors for self-education for those without access to school or university libraries. The founders of the State Library Victoria even codified a then-radical principle of free mass access for both genders in their declaration that ‘every person of respectable appearance is admitted, even though he be coatless … if only his hands are clean’ (Roberts, 2003: 21).7 The centrepiece reading rooms of grand nineteenth-century national or metropolitan libraries typically house the modern institution’s keynote col­ lection. After all, it is logical that the architecture of an aspirational building should give pride of place to its most precious and/or distinctive collection. For example, the vaulted Mitchell Library Reading Room, which lies at the core of the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, houses the in­ stitution’s collection of Australiana, bequeathed by its founder David Scott Mitchell. The foyer’s mosaic floor depicts an early European map of Australia emerging out of a seeming vacuum. Granted, this is an indisputably colonial view of Australian history, but it is also a resonant example of the fundamental link between libraries and nationalism. The nineteenth century saw the de­ velopment around the world of copyright deposit libraries that were legally charged with collecting (and thus defining) a complete record of a nation’s print culture. In consequence, some of the world’s greatest research libraries, such as the British Library and the Library of Congress, grew to unprecedented size at local publishers’ expense. Revealingly, though, it is possible to have a ‘national’ library in the absence of a nation state, such as the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales in the UK, whose names are testament to long and complicated histories of annexation, devolution and recent independence campaigns. National libraries can even be established outside of a nation state’s territory, as when Polish exiles founded the Bibliothèque Polonaise in nineteenth-century Paris in protest against foreign powers’ occupation of their homeland (Basbanes, 2004: 156–7). With the continued expansion of urban populations during the twentieth century, grand civic libraries gradually became hubs of broader suburban library networks that directly served the reading needs of the majority of the populace. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Scottish-American industrialist-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated a fortune to fund the building of over 3000 public libraries in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Fiji, among other countries. These locally accessible, mid-sized buildings became most people’s first encounter with a library and, with their children’s collections, homework resources and local newspaper archives, they became extremely popular civic centres.

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Figure 10.1 The State Library Victoria’s magnificent, domed La Trobe Reading Room. At the time of its construction in 1913 it was the largest dome in the world and a fitting embodiment of the library’s founding principle of free, universal access. (Photo by David Iliff. License: CC BY‐SA 3.0)

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By the late 1970s, however, the communitarian ethos that had long un­ derpinned the public library movement came under ideological attack with the rise of economic rationalist principles of user-pays (see Chapter 4). Rather than viewing taxation as the proverbial membership fee one pays to live in a decent society, the neoliberal movement recast public libraries as drains on the economy and questioned why ‘consumers’ should have access to ‘free’ books. Such policies ossified into political orthodoxy in Thatcherite Britain and Regan’s United States and resulted in the merger or closure of many public libraries, despite widespread community protests (Wilding, 2014). More re­ cently, though, rethinking the role of public libraries in policy terms has recast them as astute government investments on account of the social capital they generate by encouraging children’s literacy, facilitating community cohesion and aiding unemployed people’s access to digital resources that help them reenter the job market. Happily, such positive assessments of the role of public libraries appear to be in the ascendant in many jurisdictions, with regional and local governments restoring mothballed public library spaces and even ex­ panding their community programming.8 Books and digital media serve complementary functions in this twenty-first-century conception of the li­ brary, and the building itself constitutes a vital forum for community inter­ action in an increasingly socially atomised digital world (Orlean, 2019). Academic libraries

National and state-based public libraries are key components of their re­ spective countries’ research infrastructure, but they are flanked in this role by institutional libraries that are owned and operated by universities and other organisations of higher learning. A hallmark of a world-renowned university is its library collection, especially its holdings of rare books and manuscripts by influential individuals. Top-flight academic institutions often engage in semi-secret bidding wars for especially valuable books and manuscripts that become available on the open market, and certain in­ stitutions that started with relatively scant European cultural capital have attempted to boost their collections (and profile) through extravagant spending. For example, the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center has bought the estates of a many famous US and UK writers (and consequently has been criticised for expropriating British cultural patrimony), while Baylor University in Waco, Texas, built a special Victorian-themed library to house its collection of Robert Browning’s private papers (‘Collecting with a Vengeance’, 2011). Top-tier academic research libraries that have spent fortunes acquiring some of the world’s most prestigious books and manuscripts are understandably wary of lending them to other institutions and thus losing the patronage of visiting scholars who wish to consult rare items. As a result, these precious texts tend to be loaned only to institutions of comparable prestige for specially themed exhibitions, and even then usually on a quid pro quo basis.

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Given this background of prestige scarcity, such libraries’ decisions to di­ gitise some of the rarest items in their collections are laden with mixed mo­ tivations. On the one hand, creating digital facsimiles highlights the richness of a library’s holdings, enhancing its international reputation and demonstrating to university councils and local governments how the institution contributes to the public sphere. More practically, digitising certain high-demand items obviously reduces wear and tear on the originals and means that facsimiles of the texts – if not the physical objects– will be preserved in the event of cat­ astrophic damage to the collection (see below and Chapter 12). Nevertheless, it is impossible to dispel the suspicion that digitisation inevitably reduces the auratic power of a unique book and that providing a digital copy may be a boon for scholars unable to travel to see the original, but it still represents some dilution of the collecting library’s power as a curatorial stronghold. Certainly, there is a widespread belief that rare book librarians – long satirised as dragons fiercely guarding their treasure troves – seek foremost to preserve their hordes.9

Libraries and epistemology Whenever a library ‘accessions’ (that is, acquires) an individual book, the institution not only gives its new holding a protective cover, allocates it a call number and fits it with an electronic security device. More diffusely, library accessioning also confers cultural legitimacy – what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, borrowing from Catholicism, termed ‘consecration’ (1993). This process inevitably entangles libraries with the branch of philosophy known as epistemology – essentially, the theory of what counts as knowledge. As cul­ tural institutions of considerable prestige, libraries legitimate that which they choose to collect (and, conversely, delegitimate that which they refuse to house). To return to the example of the Australiana collection at the State Library of New South Wales, by acquiring a collection of books and maps about the Australian continent’s flora, fauna, peoples and history, the library made an implicit claim about the importance of such material not only for the newly federated nation but to human knowledge generally. It was a bold move, intellectually speaking, to put Australia on the map. Hence, when a library acquires collections outside of its traditional remit – including texts amassed by cultural subgroups such as gay and lesbian organisations, comicbook collectors and punk zinesters – it sends a powerful signal that such materials (and the social groups associated with them) are being accorded epistemological credibility and social legitimacy (Eichhorn, 2013).10 Equally, minority religious groups (paradigmatically Jews, the original ‘people of the book’) that have assiduously curated collections of sacred texts as markers of their collective identity have sometimes transferred these corpora to public institutions for safekeeping. On the other hand, some subgroups have refused to cede control over their precious cultural property due to fears that in­ corporation within a larger collection not controlled by the group itself will

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lead to identity diffusion or misrepresentation. For example, the collection of British women’s suffrage material that forms the core of the Fawcett Library was renamed the Women’s Library in the late 1990s and became affiliated with London Metropolitan University. In 2002, the library’s reopening in dedicated premises (a renovated nineteenth-century East London wash-house) was hailed as a boost to the profile of the nation’s pre-eminent repository of women’s history. However, around a decade later, following a period of significant institutional and funding uncertainty, the materials were in­ corporated into the London School of Economics and Political Science’s li­ brary, demonstrating the inherent challenges of maintaining a discrete, wholly independent specialist collection. For German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, libraries represented the ‘memory of mankind’ and were thus infinitely precious (quoted in Raven, 2004: 27). It is a powerful act of epistemological self-assertion, a proud declaration of identity and culture, when a group gathers together its cultural patrimony. ‘This culture’ – a dedicated library effectively announces – ‘matters.’ However, practically speaking, collecting the records of a cultural group in a single place can render the materials more vulnerable to ideological and physical attack. It is for this reason that libraries are frequently targeted in wartime, even though their destruction serves no obvious military purpose. If an enemy can manage to erase a library – and with it the cultural heritage, collective memory and social identity of a particular group – it moves one step closer to erasing the group itself. This form of ‘literary genocide’ (Raven, 2004: 5) is epitomised by the Nazis’ burning of millions of Jewish texts in the 1930s, before they turned their attention to the obliteration of Europe’s Jews themselves (Rose, 2001; Barbian, 2013; see Figure 10.2). The enormous public bonfires of Judaica and the bibliographic records of other ‘undesirables’

Figure 10.2 Markus Zusak’s bestselling novel The Book Thief (2005) is imbued with the politics of physical books: their destruction, appropriation and recreation. The film adaptation (2013) convincingly evokes the atmosphere of 1930s Nazi book burnings and explores the slippery power politics of biblioculture (see trailer at: www.imdb.com/title/tt0816442/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2).

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that took place across German cities are now commemorated in Berlin’s Bebelplatz. An underground art installation, viewable beneath the cobble­ stones of the square through a glass panel, features row upon row of empty bookshelves, testifying to the scale of the destruction.11 There are countless other, albeit less well-known, examples of book burning, from the German army’s targeting of Belgian libraries in the First World War, to the Soviet army’s torching of the German National Library in 1945, to Serbian attacks on the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s (Battles, 2003; Knuth, 2003; Polastron, 2007; Fishburn, 2008; Baez, 2008; Intrator, 2019; Orlean, 2019). Nor, by any means, is such ‘culturcide’ confined to European conflicts or to the twentieth century (Basbanes, 2004: 136). Nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine’s observation that ‘where they burn books, they will also burn people in the end’ is often read as prescient, but he had ample historical evidence on which to base his conjecture.12 As recently as 2017, Russian authorities ar­ rested and charged the director of the Library of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow with ‘inciting hatred towards Russians’ in a pointed warning that expressions of Ukrainian cultural nationalism would not be tolerated.13

Politics of library classification systems Even once a book is deemed worthy of inclusion in a library’s collection, the institution’s gatekeeping role is not over. For the precise position where that book is housed in the collection is equally a matter of epistemological value judgements, albeit often presented as quasi-objective principles. Virginia Woolf perceived this, along with so much else about the cultural consequences of material relations, in a passage of her famous essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) where she seeks information about women in the library of the British Museum.14 For ‘if truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum’, she asks mock-seriously, ‘where … is truth?’ (1998 [1929/1938]: 32–3). Consulting the catalogue – the library’s institutional brain, so to speak – Woolf is confronted with a litany of demoralising subject headings about women: ‘Weaker in moral sense than … Small size of brain of … Mental, moral and physical inferiority of …’ (36–7). She eventually abandons her search for information via such a prejudicial tool, having come to a deeper realisation: even the way in which the academic study of women has been organised is part of a patriarchal system that a feminist researcher must ques­ tion. There can be no ‘pure’ conception of information outside of the in­ stitutions and processes that police and classify it in ways all the more powerful because their effects are so subtly pervasive. During the late nineteenth century, when librarianship was in the process of reconceiving itself not as a hobby for leisured gentlemen but as an information ‘science’, various library classification systems were developed, the most widely adopted of which were the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) systems. Both systems are

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designed to facilitate library patrons’ efficient retrieval of relevant materials by systematising knowledge into strict hierarchies – DDC through the use of numbers in its shelf marks, and LCC through the use of letters.15 However, like all taxonomies, both carry an ideological undertow. Creators of taxo­ nomies must make often arbitrary decisions about where the boundaries between particular disciplines – such as theology and philosophy – lie. Their systems frequently also have the effect of ‘freezing’ knowledge at a certain point in time. Infamously, Harvard University’s Widener Library, the cen­ trepiece of its world-famous research collection, has a classification system designed in the early years of the twentieth century that fossilises divisions of knowledge prevalent at that time. Bafflingly, books on Turkey were, until the 1990s, still catalogued under the subject heading ‘Ottoman Empire’ – a geopolitical entity that had ceased to exist some 80 years earlier (Battles, 2003). While such historical hangovers might be dismissed as mere quirks, other classificatory headings reveal the ossification of outdated cultural and racial attitudes. For instance, ‘librarian-activist’ Sanford Berman has waged a decades-long campaign to abolish dated and culturally inappropriate LCC subject headings such as ‘Kaffir’, ‘Jewish Question’ and ‘Yellow Peril’ (1971). Australian library scholar Michelle Kelly concurs with Berman’s aims: ‘book numbers … are designations of philosophical, textual, and bibliographic consequence’ (2005). Specifically, they have a self-perpetuating inertia: once a library collection has been classified according to a particular system, there is an enormous incentive for librarians to maintain that system rather than re­ think classification from the ground up. Library patrons who have mastered a particular system may be especially resistant to change. Hardest to ascertain are the ways in which classification systems’ division of what is knowable structure the thinking of library users and researchers. As library historian Wayne Wiegand argues, classification systems are ‘culturally and chronologically dis­ tinctive patterns that reflect … the role of power in … the very definition of the word “information”’ (2007: 531). Virginia Woolf, confronting the im­ mense hostility to women codified in the British Museum’s library catalogue, and reduced to feeling like ‘a thought in [a] huge bald forehead’ by the scale of the Reading Room’s ‘vast dome’, posed the question ‘where is truth?’ This query begins ironically but develops increasing urgency as Woolf’s anger at the obliteration of women’s perspectives mounts. Her question remains equally pressing in an age of library digitisation: how do the systems we use to access knowledge facilitate or hinder particular constructions of reality?

Library digitisation debates Since the computing revolution of the 1980s, libraries have positioned themselves not just as storehouses of books but, more expansively, as gateways to information. They have become medium agnostic: their role is to facilitate connections between readers and quality content, regardless of the format in which that content appears. Even the evaluative role implicit in the word

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‘quality’ is understood much more loosely than it was in the days when public libraries imposed a quota on the number of ‘frivolous’ novels a borrower could check out (Wiegand, 2007). The twenty-first-century library is less interested in value judgements about what people should read than in fostering reader autonomy. There is now consensus across the library sector that digital technology is key to the contemporary library, both for practical reasons of cataloguing and searching and to reflect contemporary social practices. Yet, the issue of whether to replace print resources with digital-only copies is hotly contested. In 2000, US writer Nicholson Baker ignited furious debate within typically sedate library circles with a stinging New Yorker article, subsequently expanded into a book titled Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001). The target of Baker’s ire was modern libraries’ ‘deaccessioning’ (i.e. offloading) of print newspaper copies because of space constraints and their preference for microfilmed and digitised substitutes. Frequently, bulkily bound print-copy originals are scanned and then either sold to private dealers or destroyed. While Baker’s jeremiad focuses specifically on the loss of historical US newspapers, there are also periodic controversies involving libraries’ wholesale deaccessioning of books (Wilding, 2014). For example, in March 2001, the University of Western Sydney buried 10,000 books on campus because the university ‘could not afford storage costs’ (Raven, 2004: 26). The purged items included some first editions and works that were more than 100 years old. Baker’s title – Double Fold – derives from the brittleness test that librarians allegedly use for newspapers: that is, fold the corner of a page one way, then back; if the paper breaks, it is evidently too fragile to preserve, so it should be scanned, then discarded (2001: ix). But Baker is also punning on librarians’ cowardice: charged by their professional ethics to safeguard the nation’s print heritage, they are instead decimating it. While his argument is weakened by its impassioned tone and dismissal of contrary perspectives, Baker makes valid points about what has been lost in previous rushes to embrace space-saving duplicates: colour is not reproduced on monochrome microfilm, so we lose the material qualities of the newspaper text (e.g. its colour palette, the chemical content of the paper and ink, readers’ marginalia, etc.). Because of its standardisation, scanning also cannot reproduce physical characteristics of the text such as shifts in newspaper size and format; fold-out sections, inserts and the like are often poorly scanned or simply disregarded. If one of book history’s foundational principles is that the materiality of a text always matters because it affects readerly interpretation (see Chapter 2), casually doing away with originals drastically and irreversibly impoverishes the print culture record. Most libraries have now abandoned microfilm, with all its operational clunkiness and technological instability, in favour of digitisation. Yet, even this process can be problematic. Fragile books may be damaged by the camera flash or bending of their spines, especially during mechanical scanning (see Chapter 12). In addition, librarians were initially reluctant to sanction

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digital scanning of their collections after hearing accounts of early ham-fisted techniques, such as ripping the covers off books and guillotining the spines in order to scan single pages. Furthermore, just as microfilm degrades over time and may become unreadable (even with access to one of the dwindling number of dedicated reading machines), there are questions around the longevity of digital copies. The rapid technological obsolescence of computer software means digital copies may become inaccessible in as little as a decade, and if the print originals no longer exist, the result is a cata­ strophic, self-imposed loss of cultural memory. There is also the issue of default digital technology deskilling non-digitally literate library users. Medium theory argues that the introduction of a new communication technology inevitably changes the social landscape, empowering those who are competent in the new medium and sidelining those who are unable to deploy it (see Chapter 1). Readers who are unable to afford or use digital technology are increasingly marginalised in ‘digital by default’ library settings where computer terminals have replaced the previous, familiar card catalogues. Public libraries commonly host digital technology classes for the elderly, but these can go only so far in recasting print-based skills honed over decades. That said, the relationship between codex and digital technologies is a two-way street. Microfilmed and digital copies made by scholars have been used to reconstruct libraries destroyed in wars. As Nicholas Basbanes re­ counts, after the shelling of Sarajevo’s National and University Library in the early 1990s, the Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project called on the international scholarly community to provide images, photocopies, tran­ scripts or even notes about precious, but now lost, manuscript materials (2004: 138–9).

Conclusion: contemporary libraries Violent assaults on libraries are sadly not confined to the distant past. In April 2003, the Iraq National Library and Archive was looted and burnt after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. Baghdad blogger Salam Pax evocatively recounted the moment: ‘if Genghis Khan turned the Tigris blue from the ink of the manuscripts thrown in it, today the sky has been turned black by the smoke rising from the burning books’.16 Accusations and counter-accusations flew over who bore responsibility for this cultural atrocity. The US military claimed that rival local Sunni and Shiite factions had sacked the library, while many Iraqis believed that US and UK troops were complicit in the destruction because they failed to protect cultural institutions as the country descended into anarchy; instead, they prioritised the nearby oil infrastructure. Perhaps the one positive aspect of this lamentable situation was that burning a library remained such a byword for barbarism that neither side wanted to be tarred with that brush. However, even such willed optimism may have been premature. In

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December 2016, in a still-unstable Iraq, the ISIS regime trashed and burnt the library of the University of Mosul in a flagrant display of contempt for education and cosmopolitanism (Wright, 2017; see Figure 10.3). ISIS not only publicly claimed responsibility for this outrage but revelled in its book-burning ‘achievement’. A new low in culturcide seemed to have been reached. Yet, these dispiriting stories from the Middle East are counterbalanced by the resurgence of libraries across many Western democracies. While they continue to embrace digitalisation, these bricks-and-mortar institutions have one again become community hubs for education at all levels, social-cohesion generators through hosting face-to-face activities, and wellsprings of national and regional identity via their exhibitions and outreach programmes. There are also heartening links between those libraries in relatively stable countries and their counterparts in war-torn regions. For instance, in 2006–7, the British Library website hosted the blog of the Iraq National Library and Archive’s director, who recounted his team’s heroic efforts to keep the library func­ tioning at a time of civic chaos. Equally, in the wake of ISIS’s defeat, US, UK and French libraries have donated books to – and offered assistance in the rebuilding of – the University of Mosul’s library (Wright, 2017). One fact appears constant: whether in the best or worst of circumstances, libraries continue to matter.

Figure 10.3 In December 2016, Islamic extremist group ISIS ransacked and burnt the University of Mosul in Iraq, targeting in particular its library. An estimated one million printed volumes, manuscripts and maps covering the history, languages and culture of Mesopotamia were lost. UNESCO’s director-general Irina Bokova declared: ‘burning books is an attack on […] culture, knowledge and memory’ (Wright, 2017). International groups are attempting to restock the library with items donated from institutions worldwide, but intellectual life in the area has been irreparably disrupted. (Ahmed Jadallah/AAP Image)

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Learning exercises You are the custodian of a hypothetical gay and lesbian community archive and have been approached by the local metropolitan library, which wishes to acquire the collection. Assess the pros and cons of donating your grassroots archive, considering issues of preservation, public profile and accessibility as well as potential drawbacks, such as dispersal and misrepresentation. Might the materials stay safer in community members’ garages and attics? Most national and state libraries have standing exhibitions showcasing their most precious items. Browse your local collection in person or online to assess what it says about your community’s self-conception. Which elements of local identity seem core, and which artefacts signal attempts to contest or redefine the community’s self-image?

Notes 1 See https://medium.com/oxford-university/seven-things-you-probably-didnt-knowabout-oxford-s-libraries-38ed3748add. 2 In more coffee-table mode, interior designer Nina Freudenberger (2019) showcases the private libraries of notable contemporary book collectors, including US author Larry McMurtry. 3 See https://librarycompany.org/. 4 See www.londonlibrary.co.uk/. 5 Many of these institutions still operate along the same – rather exclusive – lines. See Kadet (2020). 6 See https://lithub.com/the-12-most-popular-libraries-in-the-world/. 7 http://ergo.slv.vic.gov.au/explore-history/rebels-outlaws/law-enforcement/sir-redmondbarrys-life. 8 See, for just one example, the State Library Victoria’s five-year, A$90 million Vision 2020 redevelopment, which increased publicly accessible spaces in the library by 40 per cent and created hubs dedicated to children’s activities, audio production, business start-ups and community facilities hire (www.slv.vic.gov.au/visit/our-magnificent-spaces). 9 For a fabulous satire on the world of the obsessive, completist collector of literary memorabilia, see A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), in particular the character of the deranged Mortimer Cropper. 10 For example, since the late 1990s, Ivy League Brown University’s library has amassed a collection of almost 5000 mid-twentieth-century gay pulp novels to preserve an important record of pre-gay-liberation homosexual life (www.wbur.org/artery/2019/ 07/01/brown-university-gay-pulp-fiction). 11 The Empty Library (1995) by Israeli artist Micha Ullmann also emits an eerie beam of light at night time. 12 The quote is from Almansor (1821). 13 See www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/arts/director-of-ukrainian-library-in-moscow-receivessuspended-term.html. 14 Woolf is referring to the library collection formerly housed at the British Museum building in London’s Bloomsbury. The building includes the famous Round Reading Room – a classic example of nineteenth-century metropolitan public library

Libraries and archives 195 architecture. The collection was formally renamed the British Library in 1973 and moved to dedicated premises on nearby Euston Road in 1997. 15 Library classification systems may not, however, always prioritise users’ access to in­ formation. Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1983 [1980]) has at its centre the library of a medieval abbey in which an allegedly heretical book is deliberately misclassified so that would-be readers cannot locate it. The idea contains strong echoes of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (2011 [1962/1941]), in which a fantastical library of all possible books lacks, maddeningly, a finding aid (see Chapter 12). 16 Posted 17 Apr. 2003. See Pax (2003).

Online resources •

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French director Alain Resnais’s documentary Toute la Mémoire du Monde (All the World’s Memory; 1956) is a loving portrait of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) that captures the institution’s role as the pre-eminent storehouse of French literary culture: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=i0RVSZ_yDjs&feature=youtu.be. The library is shown grappling with space issues even in the post-war period, foreshadowing the building of a new branch of the BnF on another Parisian site in 1996. For an innovative encapsulation of libraries’ evolution, see Ariel Aberg-Riger’s graphic narrative ‘A History of the American Public Library’ (2019), which traces the emergence of this critical piece of ‘social infrastructure’ from the colonisation of the North American continent to the present day without shying away from issues of exclusion, such as patriarchal control of the written word, race-based segregation and, latterly, the impact of neoliberalism: www.citylab. com/design/2019/02/american-public-library-history-cities-visualjournalism/582991/.

References and further reading Adkins, Denice and Lisa Hussey. (2006) ‘The Library in the Lives of Latino College Students.’ Library Quarterly 76.4: 456–80. Augst, Thomas and Kenneth Carpenter, eds. (2007) Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Augst, Thomas and Wayne A. Wiegand, eds. (2001) Libraries as Agencies of Culture. Special issue of American Studies 42.3. Baez, Fernando. (2008) A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. New York: Atlas & Co. Baker, Nicholson. (2000) ‘Deadline: The Author’s Desperate Bid to Save America’s Past.’ New Yorker 24 Jul.: 42–61. Baker, Nicholson. (2001) Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. New York: Random House. Barbian, Jan-Pieter. (2013) The Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany: Books in the Media Dictatorship. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Barker, Nicolas. (1993) ‘Libraries and the Mind of Man.’ A Potencie of Life: Books in Society. Ed. Nicolas Barker. London: British Library. 179–94. Basbanes, Nicholas A. (2004) A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World. New York: Harper Perennial. Battles, Matthew. (2003) Library: An Unquiet History. New York and London: Norton. Berman, Sanford. (1971) Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Berman, Sanford and James P. Danky. (2002) Alternative Library Literature: A Biennial Anthology, 2000/2001. Jefferson, NC: McFarlane & Co. Black, Alistair and Peter Hoare, eds. (2006) The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Volume 3: 1850–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blouin, Francis X. and William G. Rosenberg, eds. (2006) Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. (2011 [1962/1941]) ‘The Library of Babel.’ Labyrinths. Trans. James E. Irby. London: Penguin. 78–86. Bosser, J. and G. de Laubier. (2003) The Most Beautiful Libraries of the World. London: Thames & Hudson. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity. Byatt, A.S. (1990) Possession: A Romance. London: Chatto & Windus. Chartier, Roger. (1994 [1992]) The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press. ‘Collecting with a Vengeance.’ (2011) Economist 28 Jun. www.economist.com/prospero/ 2011/06/28/collecting-with-a-vengeance. Cox, Richard J. and David A. Wallace, eds. (2002) Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. Darnton, Robert. (1990 [1986]) ‘First Steps toward a History of Reading.’ The Kiss of Lamourette. New York: Norton. 154–87. Darnton, Robert. (2010) ‘The Library: Three Jeremiads.’ New York Review of Books 23 Dec. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/23/library-three-jeremiads/?page=1. Dever, Maryanne, Sally Newman and Ann Vickery. (2009) The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers. Canberra: National Library of Australia. Eco, Umberto. (1983 [1980]) The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Eichhorn, Kate. (2013) The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Fishburn, Matthew. (2008) Burning Books. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Freudenberger, Nina. (2019) Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home with Books. New York: Clarkson Potter. Graham, Gordon and Richard Abel, eds. (1996) The Book in the United States Today. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Griest, G. (1970) Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hall, Gary. (2008) Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harris, Michael H. (1995) History of Libraries in the Western World. 4th edn. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

Libraries and archives 197 Intrator, Miriam. (2019) Books across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945–1951. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Invisible Culture. (2008) ‘The Archive of the Future/The Future of the Archive’ special issue, 12. www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_12/index.html. Johnson, Alex. (2015) Improbable Libraries. London: Thames & Hudson. Kadet, Anne. (2020) ‘Psst, Check out New York City’s Under-the-Radar Libraries.’ Wall Street Journal 11 Feb. www.wsj.com/articles/psst-check-out-new-york-citys-under-theradar-libraries-11581433201. Kells, Stuart. (2017) The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders. Melbourne: Text. Kelly, Michelle. (2005) ‘Eminent Library Figures: A Reader.’ M/C Journal 8.4. http:// journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/07-kelly.php. Knuth, R. (2003) Libricide: The Regime-sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger. Lerner, Fred. (1998) The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age. New York: Continuum. Manguel, Alberto. (2008) The Library at Night. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Myers, Robin, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote, eds. (2007) Books on the Move: Tracking Copies through Collections and the Book Trade. London: British Library Publishing. O’Connell, John. (2019) Bowie’s Books. London: Bloomsbury. Orlean, Susan. (2019) The Library Book. London: Atlantic Books. Pawley, Christine. (2010) Reading Places: Literacy, Democracy, and the Public Library in Cold War America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Pax, Salam. (2003) Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi. New York: Grove Press. Polastron, Lucien X. (2007) Books on Fire: The Tumultuous Story of the World’s Great Libraries. Trans. Jon E. Graham. London: Thames & Hudson. Procter, Margaret, Michael G. Cook and Caroline Williams, eds. (2005) Political Pressure and the Archival Record. Chicago: Society of American Archivists. Raven, James, ed. (2004) Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Representations (1993) ‘Future Libraries’ special issue, 42. Roberts, Bev. (2003) Treasures of the State Library of Victoria. Sydney: Focus Publishing. Rose, Jonathan, ed. (2001) The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Ryback, Timothy W. (2009) Hitler’s Private Library. London: The Bodley Head. Ryle, Martin. (1989) The Vanished Library. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saper, Craig. (2018) ‘Microfilm Lasts Half a Millennium.’ The Atlantic 22 Jul. www. theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/microfilm-lasts-half-a-millennium/ 565643/. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. and Matthew Battles. (2014) The Library beyond the Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Springer, Anna-Sophie and Etienne Turpin, eds. (2016) Fantasies of the Library. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Streeter, Burnett Hillman. (2011) The Chained Library: A Survey of Four Centuries in the Evolution of the English Library. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tyacke, Sarah. (2007) ‘Archives in a Wider World: The Culture and Politics of Archives.’ The Commonwealth of Books: Essays and Studies in Honour of Ian Willison. Ed. Wallace

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Kirsop and Meredith Sherlock. Melbourne: Centre for the Book, Monash University. 209–26. Van Hulle, Dirk and Mark Nixon. (2013) Samuel Beckett’s Library. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weller, Toni. (2008) Information History – An Introduction: Exploring an Emergent Field. Oxford: Chandos Publishing. Wiegand, Wayne A. (2007) ‘Libraries and the Invention of Information.’ A Companion to The History of the Book. Ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Oxford: Blackwell. 531–43. Wilding, Michael. (2014) ‘Libraries under Threat.’ Sydney Review of Books 7 Mar. http:// sydneyreviewofbooks.com/libraries-under-threat/. Willes, Margaret. (2008) Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Woolf, Virginia. (1998 [1929/1938]) A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, Thomas. (2009) Oscar’s Books. London: Vintage. Wright, Robin. (2017) ‘Mosul’s Library without Books.’ New Yorker 12 Jun. www. newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mosuls-library-without-books.

Part III Book futures

11 Digital books

By the mid-1990s, the growth of internet service providers and the development of user-friendly World Wide Web browsers such as Netscape’s Navigator had driven exponential uptake of the internet across Western societies. For the book format, this development seemed ominous. In fact, the 1990s were replete with speculation about ‘the future of the book’ or, more pessimistically, ‘the death of the book’ and predictions that the codex would soon be eclipsed by the rise of digital technologies (Meadow, 1995; Nunberg, 1996; Douglas, 2000).1 Print publishers and bricks-and-mortar book retailers looked on with mounting dismay as the music industry was convulsed in the last years of the millennium by digital streaming services such as Napster, irrespective of the latter’s technical illegality. It appeared that the book industry, at that point the last of the major media industries to hold out against digital delivery platforms, was about to be similarly disrupted. The codex’s historical role as a receptacle for scared scripture and the cultural esteem in which the book had long been held made the prospect of its imminent erasure especially fraught, exacerbating the culture/commerce dialectic under­ pinning book culture as a whole (see Chapters 1 and 3). Yet the technology first trumpeted in the early 1990s as a replacement for the codex – the CD-ROM (Nunberg, 1993: 13) – has itself now been ren­ dered virtually obsolete. This fact should give current digital triumphalists pause. Technological change rarely happens in discrete phases, with the in­ stalled base of existing technologies replaced overnight by a newer technology. The actual process – as medium theorists have postulated and as book his­ torians have demonstrated empirically – is far messier, geographically uneven and prone to false starts than neat successionist models allow. With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that 1990s futurists made a fundamental error in con­ ceiving of print and digital culture as binary opposites, with commentators on the future of the book nailing their colours to the mast of a single techno­ logical paradigm. The reality, as it has played out, has been more nuanced. Media technologies form complex ecosystems of coexistence and mutual dependence in which the new can just as readily drive the fetishisation or repurposing of older formats.

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The ‘future of the book’ debate: four main positions By way of overview, this chapter distils the long-running – and ongoing – debate over the future of the book down to four main positions, though it should be noted that these often overlapped in time, and more than one stance is sometimes evident in the writings of a single individual. The labels I have chosen here have no established critical currency, but my hope is that they will provide a rudimentary framework for understanding an often messy and constantly mutating reality. Technophorics

The instigators of the 1990s death of the book debate and its most strident voices – the Technophorics – were euphoric about the possibilities of digital technology. In practice, they often articulated this view by disparaging print culture, as in hypertext evangelist Robert Coover’s infamous pronouncements that libraries would soon become ‘those dusty unattended museums’ and books were ‘dead as God’ (1992). The Technophorics’ mantra was that the book was a superseded technology, condemned to the scrapheap of history, and should therefore be jettisoned as soon as possible. By contrast, the book’s ‘inevitable’ successor – digital technology – was praised for offering multi­ modal sensory experiences, multilinear narrative pathways and greatly in­ creased reader agency as open-ended texts were altered and expanded by multiple co-authors (Bolter, 1991; Landow, 1992; Aarseth, 1997). With the mainstreaming of networked technology, print culture affordances that had been taken for granted for half a millennium came more sharply into focus: its fundamental linearity; its relative fixity; its elevation of authors at the cost of ‘disempowering’ readers (see Chapters 1 and 9). Moreover, poststructuralist feminist critics cast the uniformity and alleged monovocalism of print culture in gendered terms and insisted that digital technology’s multi­ linearity and ostensible lack of hierarchy were more innately female (Spender, 1995; Jackson, 1995, 2003; Hawthorne and Klein, 1999). Indeed, print cul­ ture’s very platform was deemed irredeemably outdated, with Technophorics sneering at so-called ‘woodware’ and sardonically describing the codex as ‘tree flakes encased in dead cow’ (Mitchell, 1995: 56). As far as they were con­ cerned, the book needed to be destroyed – if only figuratively this time – in order to liberate information that was apparently wanting to be ‘free’. Book defenders

In nature, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and in the future of the book debate this pushback manifested in the form of Book Defenders. As the term suggests, Book Defenders may be characterised as ambivalent or even outright hostile to digital media. In inverse proportion to the Technophorics, they expressed nostalgic longing for the ‘superiority’ of

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book culture over other media forms, praising its quality control, permanence and already optimal systems of information organising, hierarchy and crossreferencing (Birkerts, 1994; McPhee, 2001). Thus, for Mexican commentator Gabriel Zaid, books have characteristics that their newer digital rivals cannot improve upon: they can be skimmed to gain an overview of their contents; readers can determine the pace and order of their reading; they are extremely portable and cheap; and they permit a greater variety of content, given their comparatively low barriers to entry (2004 [2003]). In a sly dig at the hype and self-aggrandisement of their Silicon Valley antagonists, Book Defenders issued spoof new-product announcements for a suspiciously familiar-sounding technology named the ‘Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge’ device: The ‘BOOK’ is a revolutionary breakthrough in technology: no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on … Each BOOK is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. These pages are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence. Opaque Paper Technology (OPT) allows manufacturers to use both sides of the sheet, doubling the information density and cutting costs in half … Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into your brain. A flick of the finger takes you to the next sheet … The BOOK never crashes and never needs rebooting … The ‘browse’ feature allows you to move instantly to any sheet, and move forward or backward as you wish. Many come with an ‘index’ feature, which pinpoints the exact location of any selected information for instant retrieval.2 Biblio-optimists

As the future of the book debate continued to play out, the originally polarised positions developed more nuance and, perhaps inevitably, more moderate stances emerged. The group I have characterised as Biblio-optimists agree with Technophorics that digital media are irrevocably changing the book world but regard these changes as largely positive on the grounds that they re-energise writing, publishing and reading. According to this view (one the present volume broadly endorses), the internet signals a renaissance for reading and writing and therefore also for print culture. Exponents of this position include former Random House US publisher Jason Epstein, who views digital tech­ nologies such as print-on-demand (POD) as viable solutions for book pub­ lishing’s endemic distribution and returns problems (2001; see below). Argentine-Canadian bibliophile and critic Alberto Manguel, on the other hand, demonstrates strong sympathies for the Book Defender position, complaining that the internet strips books of their physicality and flattens all the printed past into a permanent present (2008 [2006]: 224–8). Yet, he also

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Figure 11.1 The release of eBook devices such as Kindles and iPads threw the particular affordances of the codex book into high relief. German publisher Steild and lifestyle magazine Wallpaper* collaborated on Paper Passion Perfume (2012), designed to evoke ‘the unique bouquet of freshly printed books’ (https://steidl. de/Books/Paper-Passion-Perfume-0008152458.html#). The perfume came in elaborate book-themed packaging, with the bottle nestled inside the cut-out pages – ideal for Book Defenders keen to broadcast their loyalty to a threatened medium. (Geza Schoen/Paper Passion Perfume/Steidl/Wallpaper*)

concedes that digital networking allows readers to find books and interact with others worldwide ‘at the speed of thought’ (225). Ambivalents

The final group – the Ambivalents – have hedged their bets by arguing that it is simply too early to determine digital technology’s full impact on the book world. Constant changes in digital platforms, unstable global markets and the

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vagaries of consumer demand make the publishing sector highly volatile and unpredictable, and public loyalty to the codex runs surprisingly deep. Nevertheless, the potential for digital technology to reshape book culture is undeniably exciting, and a return to pre-internet business as usual is both implausible and undesirable. The digital genie is out of the bottle and readers will not return to a world without digital fora for online book purchasing and reviewing, following authors’ social media posts and reading collectively. As UK publishing studies academic Angus Phillips states, ‘paradoxically, the world going digital is helping to keep the book alive’ (2007: 547). In practice, most legacy publishers, including the Big 5 multinationals (see Chapter 3), have already adopted the Ambivalent position. Some opened eBook divisions with great fanfare during the 1990s before quietly mothballing them in the wake of the 2001 tech-wreck. Since around 2006 there has been a modest revival of publisher eBook rhetoric, especially with the release of a series of popular digital eReaders (see below), but the tone is notably more muted than its messianic 1990s antecedents.

Are publishers redundant? The most unsettling implication of the internet for book publishers was the prospect, for the first time in half a millennium, of large-scale ‘disintermedia­ tion’ of the publishing process: that is, the potential for authors to self-publish and sell direct to their readers, bypassing the publisher, distributor and retailer intermediaries of Darnton’s ‘Communications Circuit’ (Epstein, 2001: 27–8; Thompson, 2010: 22; see Chapter 2). An author could thereby claim a much higher percentage of the cover price than the standard 5–10 per cent royalty on the publisher’s net revenue for a given title. In theory, at least, this seemed either an intoxicating opportunity or an existential threat, depending on the stakeholder’s position in the book world. Perhaps the world’s most successful brand-name author, horror writer Stephen King, was the first to test the self-publishing waters. In March 2000, King’s long-time publisher Simon & Schuster offered his first foray into ePublishing, the novella ‘Riding the Bullet’, as an eBook for download at a cost of just US$2.50. Public demand was huge and immediate, generating 400,000 downloads in the first 24 hours. Yet, hackers soon broke the eBook’s encryption and started distributing free copies, bringing the experiment to a premature end (Stevenson, 2008).3 Undeterred, months later, King published a new novel, The Plant, on his own website in instalments for serial download. He encouraged readers to post him a US$1 bill after reading each instalment, and vowed to continue publishing the story online if a minimum of 75 per cent of downloaders did so. The eBook’s price was capped at US$13 from the outset to reassure readers that they would pay less than the price of a standard paperback, regardless of the novel’s ultimate length. After a promising start – approximately 150,000 downloads of the first instalment within a week – the experiment was ‘temporarily’ suspended in November 2000 after only six

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chapters had been posted because not enough readers were paying. King has not attempted to relaunch or emulate the scheme since. On one level, it seems that King’s eBook experiments failed due to the familiar truism that consumers are reluctant to pay for online content. Regardless of his unrivalled genre identity and track record of extraordinary sales, King’s readers were still loath to pay what was almost a standard book price for a text of unknown quality in an unfamiliar format. This logic has generally held true for other established authors in the two decades since, despite a dramatic growth in eBook self-publishing in the fields of romance, science fiction, erotica and even King’s own genre – horror. Readers taking a punt on an unknown author require very clear genre markers in term of eBook paratexts (cover designs, marketing copy, author endorsements, etc.) and rely on proxy gatekeepers such as highly active online fan communities to sift through new releases, offer recommendations and even micro-classify titles into niche subgenres (Driscoll et al., 2016). The rise of algorithmic re­ commendation engines, such as those of Amazon and its subsidiary Goodreads, have automated this process of peer-provided reading advice. In turn, Amazon has used such data to make publishing decisions for its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) eBook originals platform. Although the traditionally dis­ crete roles of retailer and publisher have manifestly blurred in the digital era (see Chapter 2), there is still mediation between author and reader; it is just that the middlemen have changed. Also salient is that this model has translated very poorly to the literary fiction genre, where eBook originals have largely failed to bypass the book industry’s traditional gatekeepers – multinational and independent publishers (see Chapters 3 and 5) and literary agents (see Chapter 6). In fact, online publishing websites often boast that they have aided users to secure book deals with ‘mainstream’ (i.e. print) publishers – surely the exact opposite of disin­ termediation.4 To the book industry’s perceptible relief, readers still appear to view the traditional publisher’s colophon as a guarantee of quality.

Publishers as rights archives While limited uptake of eBooks may have granted publishers an existential reprieve, the digitisation of the book industry has nevertheless prompted a fundamental reconceptualisation of the publisher’s role. Over the past two decades, many publishers have come to the conclusion that they are no longer primarily book producers. This makes sense when viewed in longer historical perspective, as by the eighteenth century most publishers had relinquished the role of book printers, outsourcing this task to dedicated firms (Feather, 1988: 126). Rather, mainstream book publishers have long seen themselves as capitalist entrepreneurs: they shoulder the financial risk of launching a book project and manage an array of specialist tasks in the book publishing chain to add value to the author’s manuscript (Thompson, 2005). The rise of digital culture has merely prompted further dematerialisation of publishers’ self-conception

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as they (or at least their senior managers) now view the publishing house as a content archive of book-related intellectual property (IP) rights that they may exploit or license to others for use across a range of media (see Chapters 3 and 7). As the business mantra of 1990s convergence had it: ‘content is king’ (Wirtén, 2004: 76–99). Any publishing house that conceptualises itself as a rights archive must be certain of the rights it holds; otherwise, its business model is built on sand. What about electronic rights for books contracted in the pre-digital era? Such concerns triggered a spate of copyright skirmishes around the turn of the millennium as authors (or their estates) and publishers scrambled to ascertain who owned the suddenly valuable digital rights. Two landmark US legal rulings on the issue – Random House vs. RosettaBooks (2001) and New York Times Co. vs. Tasini (2001) – concerned the book industry and freelance journalism, respectively. The precedents laid down in both decisions all but guaranteed that superior courts would interpret media contracts narrowly: that is, all content rights not explicitly signed over to the publisher in a contract would remain vested with the author (Klebanoff, 2002: 1–29). This ruling had one particularly momentous consequence: namely, that authors (or their es­ tates) still owned and could sell the eRights for previously published books. For example, it was because J.K. Rowling’s original contract with Bloomsbury did not mention digital rights that she was able to set up the Pottermore portal, which eventually may well become readers’ prime point of access to the Potterverse (see the Introduction). Publishers’ in-house legal teams were thus put on notice that digital rights were a contractual deal-breaker, and would-be authors who tried to hold out against signing over such rights would need to find themselves a different publisher. One common publishing response was the inclusion in standard book contracts of ever-expanding rights terms (so-called ‘Star Wars’ clauses; see Chapter 7). Despite authors’ associations opposing this indiscriminate ‘rights driftnetting’, publishers sought to future-proof their businesses by controlling each and every potential use of a particular content package across all media. If they could not exploit certain rights themselves (e.g. film adap­ tation rights), they would at least get a cut of the revenue from the sale of these rights to third parties. Publishing in the digital era thus resembles a defensive form of rights warehousing, with publishers stockpiling content rights to maximise their manoeuvrability in an uncertain business climate.

Varieties of eBook innovation Moving closer to the contemporary period, this section surveys the digital book formats that have emerged since the 1990s. The first of these is now so familiar as no longer to seem even remotely innovative: Adobe Acrobat’s portable document format (pdf). Although lacking the material form of a dedicated reading device, such as is commonly associated with eBooks, pdfs are nevertheless a form of electronic publishing designed to work

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interoperably between the Microsoft PC and Apple Mac fiefdoms. The pdf file mimics the reader experience of the printed page as closely as possible, down to reproducing layout and numbering, and facilitates convenient email exchange of relatively brief documents, such as journal articles or book chapters. Yet, when most people think of eBooks, they picture hand-held, dedicated eReading devices of various designs and with variable levels of userfriendliness. There have been two distinct waves of eReaders, with the second generally learning salutary lessons from the fate of the first. This first gen­ eration appeared around the turn of the millennium and comprised devices such as the Rocket eBook (1998), Adobe’s Glassbook (1999), Microsoft’s Reader (2000) and Sony’s Librie (2004). Compared with analogue books, these offered large storage capacity, but they suffered from inferior screen resolution and cumbersome annotation functions. The resultantly onerous reading experience was not helped by a prohibitive price tag in the region of US$500. Most striking when looking at these first-wave eReaders now is that some have styluses, navigation buttons and keyboards in various configurations while others eschew buttons to maximise screen area (Rowberry, 2017: 293; see Figure 11.2). Their designers were clearly still ascertaining what func­ tionality digital consumers might require from their devices and, specifically, whether these were to be purely passive reading machines or should have annotative and even compositional capabilities. The nascent eBook market was hampered by incompatible hardware and software formats, creating an anarchic landscape that proved unappealing to the majority of potential consumers. This changed in 2006 when Japanese electronics manufacturer Sony expanded release of its Reader to the United States. Approximately the size of a paperback, this device could store hundreds of books, including heavily visual texts such as graphic novels and manga. Sony’s most significant breakthrough was its incorporation of electronic-ink technology: that is, a screen resolution close to that of printed paper with no backlighting, no flicker and no screen refresh, thus mitigating eye strain and reader fatigue. Physically, Sony’s Reader closely remediated the codex book with its closable ‘cover’ and default ‘portrait’ orientation (Bolter and Grusin, 1999). By contrast, in 2007, rival IT company Hewlett Packard’s eBook reader prototype opted for a double-page layout in ‘landscape’ or­ ientation. It did, however, introduce its own compelling form of remediation in that readers could ‘flip’ pages on the screen, mimicking the familiar manual page-turn. The twin game-changers for mainstream adoption of eReader technologies were Amazon’s first Kindle (2007) and Apple’s first iPad (2010). By 2007, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos had expanded the company well beyond its ori­ ginal base in books, but with the development and launch of the Kindle he signalled a return of books to the company’s core operations. The curiously named device was the size of a B-format paperback, could store around 200 eBooks and used electronic-ink technology, but its original price of US$399

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Figure 11.2 Simon Rowberry’s (2017) comparison of eBook reader designs between 1990 and 2013, demonstrating how eReaders have become increasingly sleek and stripped of keyboards, especially since the release of Apple’s game-changing iPad in 2010. (Simon Peter Rowberry, ‘Ebookness’, Convergence, 23.3, 289–305, (2017), Sage, DOI: 10.1177/1354856515592509)

brought it within the budgets of most Western consumers (Reinking, 2009; Wu, 2013). Further Kindle models were released in quick succession to max­ imise first-mover advantage and to capitalise on Amazon’s market-dominating eBook library.

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Not to be outdone, in 2010 Steve Jobs released the first iPad. Unlike all of its predecessors, this was a multi-function tablet computer, not solely an eBook reading device. To support its core web-browsing and mediaplaying functions, the iPad used a backlit screen – albeit an innovative touchscreen with a highly intuitive ‘swipe’ function for page-turning (complete with optional rustling-paper sound effect). Remediation ap­ peared to reach its apogee in 2011 with the release of the LetterMpress™ iPad app, which, in head-spinning back-to-the-future style, digitally re­ creates print-shop effects reminiscent of Gutenberg’s hand-press. Further eBook reading devices appeared around the same time, including book retailer Barnes & Noble’s Nook (2009) and the Kobo eReader (2010), but these lacked the backing of Amazon’s vast eBook catalogue and Apple’s design and marketing clout, so they have never seriously challenged the dominance of the two market leaders. In the decade since the iPad’s launch, the normalisation of eReaders as hand-held electronic devices that display eBook files has tended to obscure other manifestations of the relationship between print and digital publishing. Like the aforementioned pdf, another less-discussed eBook technology is print-on-demand, which involves downloading book content as an electronic file, then printing and binding it in hard-copy format, including the cover. POD machines, which resemble multiple interlinked photocopiers, were

Figure 11.3 The ultimate in remediation: the LetterMPress™ iPad app (2011) recreates in full traditional wood-block printing for a digital environment. Choose your font, letters, arrangement, paper stock, ink colour, number of impressions and then roll the press with a swipe of your finger (www.youtube.com/watch? reload=9&v=uzMRPW9fwSE). The effect is both profoundly retro and insistently virtual.

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installed in bookshops and university settings to create individually customi­ sable content, especially course readers for academic subjects. This digital–print hybrid has proven especially useful for highly specialised and outof-print titles, as a small potential sales volume is no disincentive to (re)publish. POD can be used to produce far smaller print runs than the industry standard of five to six thousand, all the way down to single copies, thereby catering to book publishing’s much-discussed ‘long-tail’ (Anderson, 2006). This tech­ nology offered Book Defenders the reassuring familiarity of a hard-copy codex as well as sufficient electronic behind-the-scenes distribution to appeal to Technophorics. Book-world commentator Nicholas Basbanes particularly notes its potential for servicing readers’ needs in the developing world, where computer infrastructure and electricity supply may be patchy (2004: 345–6).

Digital–analogue book hybrids Around the turn of the millennium, as eschatological predictions of the book’s demise began to give way to cautious biblio-optimism, a range of digital–analogue hybrids began to appear with successive waves of digital technology. In each case, content was created and circulated digitally, with online audiences invited to comment or contribute, and the works were then reformatted for print publication. The result has been a trade-off between digital-culture affordances of free distribution, peer-collaboration and viral publicity, and print-culture qualities of permanence, consecration and – significantly – profit. This last point represents either capitalist in­ novation adapting to market demand, as it has done since Gutenberg, or a travesty of the principles of internet communitarianism, depending on your point of view. Blooks

Chronologically, the first digital–analogue hybrid was the blook (i.e. books that started as blogs and were picked up for hard-copy publication by tradi­ tional publishers). The potential of blogging as an on-the-ground form of citizen journalism was demonstrated globally by the popularity of pseudon­ ymous blogger Salam Pax’s reports of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Ringrose, 2007; Whitlock, 2007). The Guardian’s republishing of Pax’s blog text in book form, albeit stripped of its hyperlinks and reset in chronological order, demonstrated that internet phenomena could access new audiences in more traditional formats, with no need for the traditional publicity campaign (Himmer, 2004). Self-publishing website Lulu.com gave the blook phenomenon a boost by establishing the cheekily named annual Blooker Prize for the best blog-cum-book published in the preceding year. Winners included Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia (2006), which was subsequently adapted into a suc­ cessful Hollywood film,5 and former GI Colby Buzzell’s My War: Killing Time

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in Iraq (2007). The codex medium implicitly accords greater literary value to such first-person writing, elevating it from online venting to content worth rescuing from digital evanescence and preserving for posterity (Poletti, 2020). Mobile-phone novels

The first decade of the new millennium, particularly in East Asia, also saw an efflorescence of so-called keitai (literally ‘hand-carry’ or mobile phone in Japanese) novels. These are narratives written in SMS text messaging, usually by women in their late teens or early twenties, and distributed via file-sharing websites for online consumption. Readers of the short instalments can respond to the author immediately, providing feedback or offering plot suggestions. After viral success, many of these narratives were published in book format, to the extent that five of the top ten hard-copy bestsellers in Japan in 2008 were originally composed as text messages (Goodyear, 2008; Goggin and Hamilton, 2014). The genre, which relies heavily on emoticons, slang-filled dialogue and plots that revolve around romance and parent–child conflict, has never gained literary respectability. Yet, its usually female authorship and relationship-based narratives are not the only as­ pects that are reminiscent of early, ‘classic’ novels, whether in Japan or Western Europe. Both keitai novels and blooks are examples of print culture’s use of digital media to revisit the novel’s origins as an epistolary, episodic art form with a high degree of responsiveness to audiences (Andersen, 2017). Wikinovels, literary mash-ups and fanfiction

The characteristic of the internet most praised by Technophorics in the early 1990s – its interactivity – has left its mark on a range of online literary practices that depend on dialogue between writers and readers as a story unfolds (Negroponte, 1995). The first of these were mass-written and multiply-edited wikinovels that were composed online (e.g. A Million Penguins, 2007); later, there were more controlled experiments, such as the Australia Councilsupported short-story projects Remix My Lit (2007) and Lost in Track Changes (2014). Remix My Lit involved established creative writers releasing short stories online and inviting readers to revise and edit them, with the best remixes subsequently published alongside the originals in a paperback-format, POD book. Lost in Track Changes drastically reduced the number of parti­ cipants as five previously published writers each contributed an auto­ biographical story that was then remixed by the next writer in the chain, with the whole protean text preserved in Microsoft Word’s track-changes format (and later published as a POD volume). However, the readerships for such projects have tended to remain confined to literary avant-gardists, never crossing over to the mainstream, perhaps because of the hold that the singular author has on conceptions of ‘Literature’ (Murray, 2019). The same cannot be said of the thriving online communities of fanfiction writers, who use characters, settings and plots from existing print or screenic

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texts as starting points for imagining further adventures in fictional story worlds (see Chapter 7). These communities most fully realise networked technologies’ potential for collaborative writing, with readers providing feedback to authors on works in progress in a blend of support group, creative writing workshop and critical community. Large-scale fanfiction fora such as Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Wattpad enable print publishers to outsource ‘slush-pile’ assessment to the community of amateur authors and then selectively cherry-pick those texts with demonstrable online popularity for print publication.6 Instapoets

A conception of print as the ultimate destination for online writerly endeavour is also apparent in the latest example of digital–print hybridity: Instapoetry. This term, which is somewhat contested by its practitioners, denotes poetry first posted on the social media platform Instagram. Given that social network’s bias towards visual content, the poems are often composed with an eye as much to the visual effects of font and illustration as to poetry’s more traditional verbal effects. Popular Instapoets such as Indian-Canadian Rupi Kaur have parlayed their online success into multi-book contracts with print publishers. Purchasers of Kaur’s bestselling poetry collection Milk and Honey (2014) are essentially paying for content they have already read online, foregrounding the printed book’s role as curator, populariser and consecrator of twenty-firstcentury digital writing (Berens, 2018).

Conclusion In an influential early contribution to the future of the book debate, ‘The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction’, Geoffrey Nunberg observed that the internet promised ‘libraries without walls’ (1993: 30). His remark was prescient, as one of the major ways in which digital technology has transformed the book world has been through the digitisation of book content for search and access by global readerships. A logical extension of the eighteenth-century, universalist idea of libraries as the ‘memory of mankind’ (see Chapter 10), online libraries date back to the internet’s infancy and ex­ emplify much of its early utopian spirit. The appositely named Project Gutenberg (founded 1971) is a database of out-of-copyright books that were manually keyed in by volunteers (in its early days) and later scanned and made available for download, especially for scholarly audiences. Other digital library projects sprang from more commercial foundations. Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ feature, which was designed to replicate the bookshop browser’s experience of leafing through a potential purchase, nevertheless serves a useful function for researchers. The best known of all the digital library projects, Google Book Search (GBS), triggered the most important copyright litigation between the book and digital worlds in the early twenty-first century and forms the crux of this book’s concluding chapter.

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While the future of the book debate began with polarised camps who understood inter-medial relationships in zero-sum terms, the intervening decades have revealed print and digital cultures to be more complementary and interdependent than originally envisaged. Even Google defended its scanning of millions of in-copyright books on the grounds that they were facilitating book discovery and stimulating sales for publishers and authors. Such potentially self-serving arguments aside, content incubated on digital platforms migrates readily to print formats and back again. Moreover, taking a broader perspective than just the book object itself, print culture now depends fundamentally on digital processes for book production, authorial publicity, book sales, review ratings and readerly interactions (Murray, 2018, Kirschenbaum et al., 2020). By this point in the twenty-first century, book culture is digital culture. Any attempt to isolate the two mediums amounts to a false distinction. Bibliophiles can now acknowledge and celebrate this fact without fearing that the internet’s ascendancy necessarily spells the demise of print culture. Books have learnt to live with and even benefit from over a century of rival communication technologies, and the digital era is no exception.

Learning exercise An eBook comprises a stratified bundle of rights: the author’s intellectual property, the executable programming code, the eBook file and the reading device.7 Whereas readers of codex books own their copy and can gift or resell it, eBook readers only license content from eBook retailers who can, and have, unilaterally deleted downloaded eBook files (along with all the annotations readers had made within them).8 How do such issues complicate print culture theorists’ traditional text/object distinction (see the Introduction) when conceptualising the book?

Notes 1 See also www.futureofthebook.org. 2 Versions of this meme have been circulating online since at least 1997, and with in­ creasing frequency in the first two decades of the new millennium (e.g. https://digital. usfsp.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=npml_newsletters). 3 The novella was subsequently republished in hardback format as part of King’s collection Everything’s Eventual (2002). 4 See www.youwriteon.com/. Similarly, ‘social storytelling platform’ Wattpad has its own books division that facilitates publication deals between amateur writers and print pub­ lishers including HarperCollins, Macmillan and Penguin Random House (www. wattpad.com). ‘Wattpad Books’, the website proclaims in oddly analogue mode, is bringing ‘Wattpad stories to bookshelves everywhere’ (www.wattpad.com/writers). 5 Kirby Ferguson’s online documentary Everything Is a Remix (2015) amusingly summarises the progeny of Julie’s Powell’s blog about attempting to cook all the recipes in Julia

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Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) thus: ‘a movie based on two books, one of which was based on a blog, which was inspired by the other book, that was adapted into the film’ (www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc). 6 See: https://archiveofourown.org/; www.wattpad.com. 7 On the layering of tools and interfaces involved in eBooks, see Galey (2012). 8 See: Stone (2009); Morris (2012); Wu (2013); Warner (2019).

Online resources •

•

Spoof product launches for BOOK devices continue to proliferate. See, for example, this (subtitled) Spanish sketch that perfectly parodies the smartcasual, primary-coloured aesthetics of a typical Google product launch (2010): www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=YhcPX1wVp38&feature= share. Or this one by Swedish homewares giant IKEA, which launched its radically futuristic printed product catalogue, the bookbook™, with tongue planted firmly in cheek (2014): www.youtube.com/watch?v= MOXQo7nURs0. Selling the concept of the eBook to a mainstream public involves Technophorics in a delicate balancing act between promoting the device’s innovative features and a professed reverence for bookish tradition (Wu, 2013). See Amazon’s launch video for the original Kindle (2007), in which CEO Jeff Bezos, accompanied by bestselling authors ranging in cultural stature from James Patterson to Toni Morrison, reassures consumers that the device ‘disappears’ in the reading process, guaranteeing full readerly immersion: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv9nvVTtm08.

References and further reading Aarseth, E. (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Andersen, Tore Rye. (2017) ‘Staggered Transmissions: Twitter and the Return of Serialized Literature.’ Convergence 23.1: 34–48. Anderson, Chris. (2006) The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. London: Hachette. Baker, Nicholson. (2009) ‘A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book?’ New Yorker 3 Aug. www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/03/090803fa_fact_baker. Ballatore, Andrea and Simone Natale. (2016) ‘E-readers and the Death of the Book: Or, New Media and the Myth of the Disappearing Medium.’ New Media and Society 18.10 http://nms.sagepub.com/content/18/10/2379?etoc. Basbanes, Nicholas A. (2004) A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World. New York: Harper Perennial. Berens, Kathi Inman. (2018) ‘Instapoetry Matters.’ English Faculty Publications and Presentations 33. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/eng_fac/33. Birkerts, Sven. (1994) The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston and London: Faber & Faber. Birkerts, Sven. (2009) ‘Resisting the Kindle.’ The Atlantic 2 Mar. www.theatlantic.com/ doc/200903u/amazon-kindle.

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Bolter, Jay David. (1991) Writing Spaces: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carr, Nicholas. (2008) ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ The Atlantic 1 Jul. www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/. Clee, Nicholas. (2007) ‘End of the Book Postponed.’ Prospect Jun.: 72–4. Coover, Robert. (1992) ‘The End of Books.’ New York Times Book Review 21 Jun. www. nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html. Cope, Bill and Angus Phillips, eds. (2006) The Future of the Book in the Digital Age. Oxford: Chandos. Darnton, Robert. (1999) ‘The New Age of the Book.’ New York Review of Books 18 Mar.: 5–7. De Bruyn, Ben and Jim Collins. (2013) ‘E-readers, Deconvergence Culture and McSweeney’s Circle.’ Image [&] Narrative 14.3. www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/ imagenarrative/article/view/373/292. Delaney, P. and G. Landlow. (1994) Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Douglas, J. Yellowlees. (2000) The End of Books – or Books without End? Reading Interactive Narratives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Driscoll, Beth, Lisa Fletcher and Kim Wilkins. (2016) ‘Women, Akubras, Ereaders: Romance Fiction and Australian Publishing.’ The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing. Ed. Aaron Mannion and Emmett Stinson. Melbourne: Monash University Press. 67–88. Epstein, Jason. (2001) Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future. New York: Norton. Erickson, Paul. (2003) ‘Help or Hindrance? The History of the Book and Electronic Media.’ Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 95–116. Feather, John. (1988) A History of British Publishing. London: Routledge. Galey, Alan. (2012) ‘The Enkindling Reciter: E-books in the Bibliographical Imagination.’ Book History 15: 210–47. Goggin, Gerard and Caroline Hamilton. (2014) ‘Narrative Fiction and Mobile Media after the Text-Message Novel.’ The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies. Ed. Jason Farman. New York: Routledge. 223–37. Gomez, Jeff. (2007) Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age. London: Macmillan. Goodyear, Dana. (2008) ‘I ♥ Novels.’ New Yorker 22 Dec. www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2008/12/22/081222fa_fact_goodyear. Gunder, Anna. (2004) Hyperworks: On Digital Literature and Computer Games. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Hall, Gary. (2008) Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hawthorne, Susan and Renate Klein, eds. (1999) CyberFeminism: Connectivity, Critique and Creativity. Melbourne: Spinifex. Hayles, N. Katherine. (2002) Writing Machines. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. (2008) Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Indianapolis, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Himmer, Steve. (2004) ‘The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature.’ Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs. Minneapolis: University of

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Minnesota. https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/172823/Himmer_ Labyrinth%20Unbound.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Jackson, Shelley. (1995) Patchwork Girl: Or, a Modern Monster. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. Jackson, Shelley. (2003) ‘Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl.’ Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 239–52. Kirschenbaum, Matthew, et al. (2020) Book.Files: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry. College Park, MD, and New York: University of Maryland and the Book Industry Study Group. Klebanoff, Arthur M. (2002) The Agent: Personalities, Publishing, and Politics. New York: Texere. Kovac, Miha. (2008) Never Mind the Web, Here Comes the Book. Oxford: Chandos. Landow, George P. (1992) Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lanham, R. (1994) The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levey, Nick. (2016) ‘Post-press Literature: Self-published Authors in the Literary Field.’ Post45 Feb. http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/02/post-press-literature-selfpublished-authors-in-the-literary-field-3/. Luna, Paul. (2007) ‘Books and Bits: Texts and Technology 1970–2000.’ A Companion to the History of the Book. Ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Oxford: Blackwell. 381–94. Lynch, Clifford. (2001) ‘The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World.’ First Monday 6.6. www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/. Manguel, Alberto. (2008 [2006]) The Library at Night. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. McPhee, Hilary. (2001) Other People’s Words. Sydney: Picador. Meadow, Charles T. (1995) ‘On the Future of the Book, or Does It Have a Future?’ Journal of Scholarly Publishing 26: 187–96. Meadow, Charles T. (1998) Ink into Bits: A Web of Converging Media. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Mitchell, William. (1995) City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Morris, Linda. (2012) ‘An eBook Enigma: Here One Day, Gone the Next.’ Saturday Age 3 Nov. www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/an-ebook-enigma-here-one-day-gonethe-next-20121102-28ppb.html. Murphy, Priscilla Coit. (2003) ‘Books Are Dead, Long Live Books.’ Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 81–93. Murray, Simone. (2008) ‘Feminist Print Cultures in the Digital Era.’ Feminist Interventions in International Communication: Minding the Gap. Ed. Katharine Sarikakis and Leslie Regan Shade. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 259–75. Murray, Simone. (2018) The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Murray, Simone. (2019) ‘Authorship.’ The Oxford Handbook of Publishing. Ed. Angus Phillips and Michael Bhaskar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 39–54. Negroponte, Nicholas. (1995) Being Digital. Sydney: Hodder & Stoughton.

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Nunberg, Geoffrey. (1993) ‘The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction.’ Representations 42: 13–37. Nunberg, Geoffrey, ed. (1996) The Future of the Book. Berkeley: University of California Press. Phillips, Angus. (2004) ‘Where Is the Value in Publishing? The Internet and the Publishing Value Chain.’ International Journal of the Book 2: 241–45. Phillips, Angus. (2007) ‘Does the Book Have a Future?’ A Companion to the History of the Book. Ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Oxford: Blackwell. 547–59. Poletti, Anna. (2020) Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book. New York: New York University Press. Pope, James. (2010) ‘Where Do We Go from Here? Readers’ Responses to Interactive Fiction.’ Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies ‘Words on the Web’ special issue, 16.1: 75–94. Reinking, David. (2009) ‘Valuing Reading, Writing, and Books in a Post-typographic World.’ A History of the Book in America, Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America. Ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin and Michael Schudson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 485–501. Ringrose, Priscilla. (2007) ‘“Salaam Baghdad”: Warblogs in the Textual and Social Economies of the Internet.’ Literatures in the Digital Era: Theory and Praxis. Ed. Amelia Sanz and Dolores Romero. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 305–17. Rowberry, Simon Peter. (2017) ‘Ebookness.’ Convergence 23.3: 289–305. Spender, Dale. (1995) Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Staley, David J. (2003) ‘The Future of the Book in a Digital Age.’ Futurist Sep.–Oct. Steiner, Ann. (2018) ‘The Global Book: Micropublishing, Conglomerate Production, and Digital Market Structures.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 34: 118–32. Stevenson, Iain. (2008) ‘Harry Potter, Riding the Bullet and the Future of Books: Key Issues in the Anglophone Book Business.’ Publishing Research Quarterly 24: 277–84. Stoicheff, Peter and Andrew Taylor, eds. (2004) The Future of the Page. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stone, Brad. (2009) ‘Amazon Erases Orwell Books from Kindle.’ New York Times 17 Jul. www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html. Striphas, Ted. (2009) The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press. Striphas, Ted. (2010) ‘The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read.’ Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7.3: 297–317. Thompson, John B. (2005) Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John B. (2010) Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Polity. Virilio, Paul. (2000) The Information Bomb. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. Warner, John. (2019) ‘Kindle and Nook Readers: You Know You Don’t Own Those Books, Right?’ Chicago Tribune 10 Jul. www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ ct-books-biblioracle-0714-20190710-2ykhjy4db5fangevs5ukax2dhm-story.html. Whitlock, Gillian. (2007) Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Wilson Quarterly (2009) ‘The Future of the Book’ special issue, Autumn. www. wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=WQ.toc&wq_volume_id=553665.

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Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs. (2004) No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wu, Yung-Hsing. (2013) ‘Kindling, Disappearing, Reading.’ Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1. www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000115/000115.html. Young, Sherman. (2007) The Book Is Dead: Long Live the Book. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Young, Sherman. (2008) ‘Beyond the Flickering Screen: Re-situating e-Books.’ M/C Journal ‘Publish’ special issue, 11.4. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/ mcjournal/article/viewArticle/61. Zaid, Gabriel. (2004 [2003]) So Many Books. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. London: Sort of Books.

12 The dream of a universal library Digitising knowledge

At the very dawn of the internet age, in an anthology appropriately titled Cyberspace: First Steps, writer Michael Benedikt (1991: 2) penned a visionary account of what the future World Wide Web might offer humankind: Cyberspace: A world in which the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alter-human agency takes on form … A place, one place, limitless; entered equally from a basement in Vancouver, a boat in Port-au-Prince, a cab in New York … From vast databases that constitute the culture’s deposited wealth, every document is available, every recording is playable, and every picture is viewable … The realm of pure information, filling like a lake, syphoning the jangle of messages transfiguring the physical world, decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes, redeeming them … from all the inefficiencies, pollutions (chemical and informational), and corruption attendant to the process of moving information attached to things. In its fascination with the novelty of digital placelessness, its emphasis on the dematerialisation of communication and its optimistic ecological predictions, Benedikt’s passage is typical of early cyberculture writings. Its raw internet utopianism even comes across as faintly comical in a twenty-first century thus far characterized by rampant platform capitalism, data-harvesting, fake news, trolling and scamming. Nevertheless, Benedikt’s vision of the internet as storehouse for ‘the culture’s deposited wealth’ in written, audio and visual media echoes a much older fantasy – that of a universal library. Faced with the reality of books’ loss through acts of war, human negligence and the in­ evitable decay of leather, paper and ink, historians, librarians and philosophers have long fantasised about a library encompassing all human knowledge committed to tangible forms (O’Donnell, 1998). Such a hypothetical in­ stitution would house knowledge from all eras, in all known languages and in all formats, and would serve as a bulwark against the loss of human memory. It would constitute the collective memory of not just a single nation, as with the copyright deposit libraries considered in Chapter 10, but of the entire world. With allowance for the gender-specificity of Goethe’s previously cited

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pronouncement about libraries, the universal library would truly embody ‘the memory of mankind’. This final chapter uses the recurrent theme of the universal library to draw together the threads of the present book, evoking the theoretical and meth­ odological approaches outlined in Part I, the survey of contemporary sociocultural book institutions in Part II and the focus on digitisation begun in the previous chapter. Specifically, it demonstrates how a twenty-first-century debate such as that which erupted over Google’s Book Search project needs to be understood within the frames of competing private and public conceptions of the book, the history of libraries and the relationship between print and digital communication paradigms. Such deep contextualisation is what a print culture perspective adds to journalistic or legal accounts of the latest dust-up between Google, authors and publishers. While never losing sight of the book as a material object, such a print culture approach pays equal attention to the economic, political and legal networks through which such volumes circulate and their wider social and cultural import. In this sense, the dematerialisation of the book forecast by writers such as Benedikt nevertheless throws up pro­ foundly material issues of who owns and controls access to information in the twenty-first century.

The Great Library at Alexandria The Ur-myth of the universal library, one invariably referenced by any initiative to construct an exhaustive collection of human knowledge, is the classical Library of Alexandria. Much about the Library is shrouded in myth although historians and, more recently, archaeologists have been able to ascertain some basic facts about its existence. Established in the port city of Alexandria, in modern Egypt, the Great Library was constructed under the Ptolemaic dynasty around 300 BCE. Its chief claim to fame was that it contained copies of every book (in papyrus scroll form) known in the classical world, predominantly in Greek but also encompassing Hebrew texts and others written in the various languages of Mesopotamia. Estimates of its holdings range between 40,000 and 400,000 scrolls. These un­ paralleled riches were amassed via a notably heavy-handed policy: every boat arriving in the port had any manuscripts on board impounded and copied, with the copies (not the original texts) subsequently returned. It was a form of state-ordered acquisition-building reminiscent of the copyright deposit legislation imposed upon publishers in the nineteenth century.1 Another facet of the Great Library that seems to foreshadow subsequent developments was that it adopted an eleven-part classification system to organise its holdings into navigable subdivisions of knowledge. In 2004, archaeologists discovered and examined a site thought to be that of the Library. Excavations substantiated much about the Great Library’s fame: clearly, it was a building constructed on grand scale and served as the hub of a larger, campus-like collection of buildings (Lyons, 2011). The site included 13

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large lecture halls that could accommodate up to 5000 students, making it one of the world’s first universities.2 The Library, somewhat like the great research libraries of leading modern universities, was clearly at the centre of a dynamic, polyglot institution for political administration, educational transmission and scholarly debate. However, somewhat paradoxically, it was the Great Library’s destruction that proved its greatest legacy in the collective cultural memory. At some point between the first century BCE and the third century CE (the date is highly uncertain), the building and its contents were destroyed in a great fire, or more likely a series of fires. Identifying the culprits has been a source of much politically motivated controversy from the classical era to the present day (El-Abbadi, 1996; MacLeod, 2000; Casson, 2001; El-Abbadi and Fathallah, 2008). One theory is that Julius Caesar’s troops accidentally burnt down the Library (MacLeod, 2000). Other scholars propose a much later date and hold Arabs, not Romans, responsible for a deliberate attack on the institution (Canfora, 1989; Orlean, 2019: 96). By contrast, director Alejandro Amenábar’s film Agora (2009) dramatically recreates the sacking and burning of the innately cosmopolitan, multicultural Library and concludes that early Christian fundamentalists were to blame – drawing uncomfortable parallels with the twenty-first-century’s ‘War on Terror’ (see ‘Online resources’, below, and Figure 12.1). Whoever was responsible for the Great Library’s destruction, it was an immense tragedy, as the only known copies of many classical texts were lost, leaving permanent, irreparable gaps in knowledge of our collective human past.

Figure 12.1 Panic sets in as classical philosopher Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) attempts to rescue important scrolls from a Christian mob intent on burning the Library of Alexandria in Alejandro Amenábar’s film Agora (2009).

The dream of a universal library 223

Yet, if the Great Library was a formidable educational and cultural in­ stitution during its existence, it has experienced an equally powerful, if eerie, afterlife (O’Donnell, 1998: 27). Its destruction has come to symbolise not only humankind’s yearning to collate an all-inclusive storehouse of knowledge but also the fragility – perhaps unattainability – of this goal. In its mystical existence and cataclysmic loss, it serves book culture as a quasi-parable of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden: once humans possessed a complete record of all that was known, but now we can only salvage scraps from the wreck of time, forever taunted by the immensity of that which has been lost. The Great Library is, as bibliophile and librarian Alberto Manguel writes, ‘one of history’s most distinguished ghosts’ (2015).

National copyright deposit libraries The myth of the universal library next comes to prominence in the nationalist heyday of the late eighteenth and, especially, nineteenth centuries. Granted, this assertion skips over one and a half millennia of human history, and the intervening centuries did see efforts to preserve and curate classical knowledge, such as the scriptoria of medieval monasteries, or the humanist impulse of the Renaissance to rediscover, translate and edit surviving texts of the classical past as well as to originate new works. Gutenberg’s ‘invention’ of the printing press (in the West, at least) in the mid-fifteenth century also played a crucial role in dramatically expanding the number and range of texts in circulation (see Chapter 1). But while all of these initiatives might, at some level, have been inspired by the ideal of the universal library, in practice books remained too scarce and expensive to realise such an aim in the Alexandrian sense. It was only with the rise of cheaper, steam-driven technologies for both printing and manufacturing paper from wood pulp in the nineteenth century that the price of individual books fell sufficiently for the goal of collating all knowledge in one place again to seem feasible. Such industrial developments coincided with a political and cultural upswing in nationalism among Western European and North American societies. For a newly mass-literate populace to recognise itself as a separate, distinct nation, it must have a complete record of its printed history and culture. Hence the rise of the copyright deposit movement, by which all book publishers were legally obligated to send a copy of each new title to the nominated copyright deposit library (or libraries) in the country of publication. For the United Kingdom, this now means the British Library (London), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), the University Library (Cambridge), the National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh), the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth) and – somewhat anachronistically – the library of Trinity College (Dublin). In the United States, the principal copyright deposit collection is housed at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC). In France, it is the Bibliothèque nationale (Paris), as lovingly recounted in director Alain Resnais’s documentary account of a single book’s arrival at and accession to the national collection in Toute la mémoire du monde (1956; see

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Chapter 10). In countries of the British Commonwealth, such as Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia, this process has been an epistemological task of conscious nation-building (again, see Chapter 10). For instance, the idea of the country as ongoing project is on display, in both senses of the word, in the Treasures Gallery of the National Library of Australia (Canberra), which seeks to convey a sense of evolving national identity through a selection of its prized holdings.3

Library card-cataloguing systems The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were also deeply marked by a uni­ versalising impulse to collect and classify knowledge, evidenced in phenomena such as dictionaries, encyclopedias and museums. In the book realm, this manifested in attempts to create library cataloguing schema to organise and hierarchise all human knowledge. Practically speaking, systems such as Dewey Decimal Classification and the Library of Congress Classification Subject Headings aimed to order rapidly growing collections to facilitate swift reader access to their contents. Nevertheless, as explored in Chapter 10, any attempt to organise knowledge into discrete units is inevitably ideologically loaded. Over time, all cataloguing conventions – with their inbuilt assumptions and quirks – ossify into law and may inhibit research and the growth of human knowledge. There is even the potential for cataloguing systems, ostensibly designed to facilitate reader access to relevant works, to frustrate discovery through deliberately misleading, accidentally unrepresentative or archaically non-intuitive subject classifications (Mohamed, 2020). For such reasons, poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida claimed that the best place to ‘lose’ an undesirable book or document may be in the archive allegedly designed to preserve it (1996 [1995]; Cornay, 2002).

Electronic catalogues The vast card catalogues that represented the ‘brain’ of national and academic libraries in the mid-twentieth century had, by the late decades of that cen­ tury, given way to the first computerised library catalogues. The shift to­ wards digitisation was met with some dismay in librarianship circles, as it represented a radical separation of the physical location of a book from in­ formation about it. In the words of book historian Roger Chartier, digitised catalogues offered the possibility of ‘libraries without walls’, with readers no longer needing to be physically present in the library to survey its holdings (1994 [1992]: 61). Once individual libraries’ catalogues were digitised, it was a logical step to scale these up to one massive library catalogue where everything is cross-referenced and searchable. Enter WorldCat – a combined database of world library catalogues established in 1971 that informs the searcher of the nearest library holding a copy of a requested title.4 By these means, the boundaries of individual libraries’ holdings began to blur. Yet, it

The dream of a universal library 225

is important to note that uber-catalogues such as WorldCat still contain only bibliographical information about books – what librarians term ‘metadata’ (e.g. title, author, publisher, publication date, etc.). A book’s content re­ mained hardwired into the object itself and required access to a material copy in order to be read.

The politics of book digitisation: Google Book Search The longstanding conflation of book content with the book object was fundamentally challenged by the Google Book Search initiative – the most ambitious, long-lived and controversial of a number of book digitisation programmes that emerged during the first decade of the new millennium.5 Google Book Search (GBS, subsequently also known as Google Books) was launched by the reigning internet search giant in October 2004.6 It com­ bined two Google programs for displaying digitised book content to in­ ternet searchers: Google Library (comprising agreements with libraries to scan printed books in their collections) and Google Print (involving deals with publishers to upload digital files of new books). With characteristic corporate ebullience, Google described GBS on its website as ‘Our Man on the Moon Initiative’, with one of the company’s executives observing, seemingly with some surprise, that ‘there’s all this great, really interesting information that’s available in books that currently isn’t searchable through Google today’.7 GBS’s game-changing goal to make the contents – as op­ posed to just the metadata – of printed books searchable represented the latest attempt to establish a universal library, albeit this time in digital form. The book-scanning project formed part of Google’s more general aim ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ (Sergey Brin and Larry Page quoted in Haigh, 2006). In a groundbreaking development, the contents of scanned books would be­ come available to all interested readers (not only credentialled scholars), wherever they may be, eliminating the requirement to travel to rare books and special collections libraries at major research institutions. In 2006, Google struck agreements with the ‘Google 5’ – that is, the leading re­ search libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Michigan as well as the New York Public Library and Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. These deals allowed Google to scan the li­ braries’ collections (or, in the case of the New York Public Library, only its out-of-copyright books), in return for which each library received an undisclosed payment and an electronic copy of each book. This last aspect is important considering the terrible history of both deliberate and acci­ dental library fires, and the spectre of annihilation that hangs over collec­ tions of rare books gathered together in a single location (see Chapter 10). The Google 5 were later joined by an expanding number of partner libraries internationally housing collections in other European and, increasingly, Asian languages.

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The legal niceties of this mass book-scanning project were a bone of contention from the outset. Coming out swinging, Google claimed the in­ itiative falls within US copyright law’s ‘fair use’ exemption because it displays search results in whole-page format only when a book is out of copyright or when the copyright owner has granted permission, whereas most in-copyright books are displayed in reduced ‘snippet view’ format. The Battle over Books

Unfortunately for Google, the two leading US publishing lobby groups – the Authors Guild (AG) and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) – did not share the company’s broad interpretation of ‘fair use’ exemptions. In 2005, they sued Google in separate class actions for massive copyright infringement. Crucially, both claimants asserted that breach of copyright occurs when a book is scanned and stored on Google’s servers, not when the results are displayed to an individual searcher. Thus, the simple fact that Google was scanning and storing on its servers authors’ and publishers’ works was itself a misappropriation of intellectual property, regardless of how these texts were subsequently displayed to the general public. Google countered that book publishers had been too slow off the mark to digitise their own backlists, and it was merely dragging a recalcitrant and borderline-Luddite print industry into the twenty-first century. Moreover, each GBS results page would provide links to the websites of the book’s publisher, booksellers and libraries currently holding the book, benefiting all parties. This so-called ‘Battle over Books’ raged for more than a decade and became an existential rallying point for book publishers and many traditionally pub­ lished authors, if not for Google. The litigation appeared to have been settled out of court in late 2008 with the creation of the Book Rights Registry to distribute payments to rights-holders whose works had been scanned. However, in March 2011, a US federal judge overturned the agreement as unfair to copyright-holders and the following year the AG and AAP re­ launched their suits against Google. In November 2013, the plaintiffs’ case was dealt a heavy blow when the US District Court essentially endorsed Google’s looser interpretation of how copyright law should function in the twenty-firstcentury digital sphere: The judge said the massive library makes it easier for students, teachers, researchers and the public to find books, while maintaining ‘respectful consideration’ for authors’ rights. He also said the digitisation was ‘transformative’, and could be expected to boost rather than reduce book sales.8 The AG lodged an appeal against this decision with a higher court, but in 2015 that forum also found in Google’s favour. Finally, in April 2016, the United States’ highest legal authority, the Supreme Court, announced that it would

The dream of a universal library 227

Figure 12.2 Controversy over Google Books convulsed the US book industry in a decade-long debate characterised by accusation, counterclaim and protracted litigation. This image from the cover of the Authors Guild Bulletin (2014) depicts Google’s behaviour as industrial-scale theft, as books are trucked in from libraries, their contents scanned by anonymous hazmat-suited workers and fed into a vast database. (‘Wordstrippers’ reproduced courtesy of Kevin Sanchez Walsh)

not hear a further appeal, and that the prior judicial decisions stood. Google thus emerged victorious from the bitter dispute, and authors retired to lick their wounds and devise survival strategies for the new landscape of digitised book content. It would be misleading, however, to characterise the Battle over Books as merely a dispute between an imperialising tech giant and reactionary print culture forces fighting a rearguard action for survival. A broader array of parties and commentators were drawn into the GBS dispute from the outset because of the pervasive social and cultural issues the conflict highlighted. The first of

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these issues was concern over US (and more broadly Anglophone) cultural imperialism. Commentators such as Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France at the time, pointed out that the Google 5 libraries were all based in either the United States or the United Kingdom and had overwhelmingly English-language collections so, inevitably, GBS would give users a fundamentally skewed perspective on world history (2007 [2005]: 6–8). Why, for example, should a historian seeking information on the French Revolution via GBS see texts chiefly (or solely) by English-language authors, or a literary scholar have access to works only in English translation? There is also the question of cultural patrimony. Why should collections built, in some cases, over centuries by institutions committed to the idea of the public good or the world republic of letters have their holdings ransacked by a private corporation concerned with profit maximisation above all else? As Brewster Kahle, founder of the public-interest group Internet Archive, stated in a documentary directed by Dutch film-maker IJsbrand van Veelen in the early days of the GBS controversy: Books – it’s who we are. It’s our literature. It’s what we’ve built up over millennia. And the idea of whether those books are going to be in the public sphere or privatised as we go through a digitisation route is very much in the air … We want to be able to not have to ask permission of a company to do research with these books.9 Such concerns over the relationship between books and identity also under­ pinned a second set of cultural objections to GBS. All searches performed on Google’s website can be traced back to individual computers, even if a searcher does not log in with a Gmail account (as they are everywhere en­ couraged to do). Thus, GBS has a power of surveillance over individual users’ searching and reading habits that outstrips even that fantasised by the most authoritarian and censorial political regimes of the twentieth century (Murray, 2007).10 The privacy at the heart of silent reading, which involves a communion between the minds of author and reader, appeared to be fun­ damentally breached by a new wave of digital intermediaries. These not only provided book objects (as had the publishing and retailing middlemen of Darnton’s ‘Communications Circuit’) but also took a commercial interest in their mode of consumption (see Chapters 2 and 9). Because Google’s business model is built on advertising revenue, it has every incentive to monitor users’ GBS searches and display thematically relevant advertisements alongside the results, as it does with what it formerly euphemistically termed ‘sponsored links’ in its general web-search business (Haigh, 2006). The fact that Google does not currently do this on GBS, and does not currently charge searchers to use the subplatform, does not mean that it cannot or will not introduce both in the future. Google likes to present GBS as a public-spirited realisation of the universal library ideal – offering access to the riches of the world’s great libraries to anyone, anywhere. Celebrating 15 years of GBS in October 2019,

The dream of a universal library 229

the company noted that it had so far scanned over 40 million books in over 400 languages and ‘shown … the importance of preserving and protecting these stories for the future’.11 But GBS can just as easily be understood as the latest manifestation of a far older print culture narrative – attempting to wield power through control of information.

Public-sector digital library initiatives In Amazon’s early years, founder Jeff Bezos apparently wanted to warehouse two copies of every book ever printed, in all languages. With characteristic hubris, he dubbed this (as-yet-unrealised) dream the ‘Alexandria Project’ (Marcus, 2004: 135; Packer, 2014). The co-optation of the public ideal of the universal library by private firms such as Amazon and Google spurred librarians and internet activists to devise public-sector digital alternatives during the first decade of the twenty-first century (Darnton, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2010). These tended to take one of two forms. The first comprised attempts to collate and better showcase existing book-digitising initiatives in order to increase public awareness of these non-profit alternatives to Google’s reassuringly familiar search page (which disguised its walled garden of content). The second involved new mass book-digitising initiatives funded either by state actors or by private philanthropists who supported public-interest groups. An example of the first response is the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), an open-access alternative to GBS supported by Robert Darnton, director of Harvard University Library at the time of the DPLA’s launch in 2013.12 This resource now contains a wealth of books, images, audio and video recordings drawn from US institutions in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector. One especially interesting dimension of the project is that it offers an application programming interface (API) that allows members of the public and other institutions to develop their own apps from the DPLA’s digitised materials. The logic behind the undertaking is that these materials constitute the collective cultural inheritance of all Americans and, by extension, world citizens, and it is the responsibility of the materials’ current guardians to make them fully discoverable and accessible in the digital environment. As the DPLA’s launch website put it, alluding to the proverbial elephant in the room, its mission is ‘to ensure that this critical, open in­ tellectual landscape remains vibrant and broad in the face of increasingly restrictive digital options’.13 Meanwhile, in France, another prominent GBS critic, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, contributed to the creation of Europeana – a digitised library of European print culture designed to counterbalance the Anglocentrism of GBS’s early corpus of scanned books.14 Further responses to Google’s cultural land grab came from the existing libertarian wing of digital culture, such as by dot.com multimillionaire Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive – a not-for-profit enterprise best known for its Wayback Machine web-archiving tool.15 The Open Content Alliance, of

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which Internet Archive was part, aimed to bring together and rapidly expand existing book-digitising operations on the grounds that ‘the public domain is small enough already’.16 Somewhat contradictorily, in its early phases, the Alliance worked with the avowedly corporate Microsoft on the latter’s book-scanning project, Live Search Books, although this was subsequently wound down in the face of indomitable competition from Google and eventually ceased in 2008. A slightly later attempt to allow scholars and other interested researchers to peruse the full texts of books is the HathiTrust Digital Library, which holds promise for the ‘distant reading’ of large textual corpora from the post-1923 era, a key date in US copyright law (Moretti, 2013; Jockers, 2013).17 These various digital library initiatives, with their differing foci, funding sources and sometimes internal rivalries, have struggled to compete with Google’s vast financial resources and proprietary book-scanning technologies. In the absence of these commercial advantages, public-sector projects’ rates of book scanning have lagged well behind that of Google. Nevertheless, their existence demonstrates that print culture stakeholders are not prepared to cede the longstanding ideal of the universal library or ‘world brain’ to private interests.18 Books, they insist, constitute the collective inheritance of all in­ dividuals alive today, and access to them should not – indeed must not – be restricted to those who can afford to pay or to those who are willing to relinquish their private data as the price of admission.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina The classical Library of Alexandria not only continues to haunt modern hu­ mankind as the prototype of the universal library; it now also has a concrete realisation. In 1974, planning began at Egypt’s Alexandria University to revive the legacy of the city’s most famous institution. The cultural arm of the United Nations, UNESCO, subsequently lent its support to the scheme, which seemed to embody the organisation’s twin missions of cultural protection and international outreach. After prolonged delays, construction began in 1995 and the complex was officially opened in 2002.19 The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) occupies a site near the port and close to the ancient Brucheion (Royal Quarter), where the original Library complex once stood – an important topographical proximity that bequeathed the project considerable cultural legitimacy.20 As a contemporary reimagining of the classical Library, the BA was designed to accommodate all extant books, with space for a projected eight million volumes, but at the time of its opening it housed only some 500,000 because of budget shortfalls. Additionally, the censorial government of President Hosni Mubarak decreed that the BA should house only Islamic texts, in direct contravention of the classical Library’s spirit of cosmopolitanism and multilingualism. The Library has broadened its collection since the overthrow of Mubarak’s regime in the Arab Spring of 2011, though its mission statement reveals that the institution is still

The dream of a universal library 231

torn between its role as Egypt’s national library and the pluralistic impulses of its renowned predecessor: The unique role of the Library of Alexandria, as … a great Egyptian Library with international dimensions, will focus on four main aspects, that seek to recapture the spirit of the original ancient Library of Alexandria. It aspires to be: • • • •

The world’s window on Egypt; Egypt’s window on the world; A leading institution of the digital age; A center for learning, tolerance, dialogue and understanding.21

Amusingly, or perhaps wisely, the new library also makes much of its cuttingedge fire-protection system. In partial fulfilment of the third of its aims – to rise to the challenges of the digital age – the BA joined Internet Archive’s digital book-scanning project to help build a public-sector alternative to GBS, and indeed hosted the Archive’s first mirror site. This helped to deflect mounting domestic criticism that vast sums of state money were being spent on housing an allegedly superseded technology. Yet, the vicissitudes of this vauntingly ambitious universal library project highlight some of the common pitfalls that invariably bedevil such schemes: financial constraints; capture by political and religious interests; and questions of whether information is best preserved by gathering it in a single place or dispersing copies in myriad locations.

Conclusion: the universal library as mirage As this chapter has explored, the ideal of the universal library has had many incarnations over the millennia, including attempts to realise the dream of total inclusivity through architectural, legal, analogue and now digital means. But running parallel to this history, the Alexandrian Library has also had a rich afterlife in the realm of fiction. The most famous fictional universal library appears in Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’s exceedingly strange short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (2011 [1962/1941]). Borges’s tale purports to be an aged librarian’s account of a fantastical library comprising a near-infinite number of hexagonal rooms linked by staircases. Each hexagon contains a uniform number of shelves containing a uniform number of volumes, with the whole collection comprising every book ever printed as well as every possible combination of letters, punctuation marks and spaces in every language. Somewhere in this limitless collection is the solution to all of humankind’s problems as well as the individual fates of every person who works in the Library. However, because there is no known catalogue, the librarians live in a state of perpetual suicidal despair. They are at once tantalised by the knowledge that they know lurks within the interlocking rooms and tormented by the fact that the odds of ever finding it are tantamount to zero: ‘The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed

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almost intolerable’ (83). Some of the librarians are driven to acts of bibliocide, condemning whole shelves with ‘the hygienic, ascetic furor caused by the sen­ seless perdition of millions of books’ (83).22 Later in life, Borges would become director of the Argentine National Library, and his curious vision is acute in many ways: the idea of the library as a hive mind, as suggested by the honeycomb structure of the myriad hexagonal rooms; the realisation that the accumulation of knowledge inevitably involves decisions about ordering and classifying collected items; and the paradox of a universal library scheme so grand that its ambition outstrips its utility. In the story’s mathematical preoccupations and tessellated imagery, there are strong echoes of the work of Dutch artist M.C. Escher, whose fascination with tricks of perspective and scale have earned him a cult following. In fact, one of Escher’s most famous works, Relativity (1953), which depicts figures traversing a series of staircases, inspired architect Betty Ayala’s design for the ArtDaily Library in Los Angeles (2004). In contrast to Escher’s print, where closer examination reveals the impossibility of figures walking on staircases that are in fact upside down, the ArtDaily Library does not defy gravity. But it powerfully symbolises the necessarily imperfect realisation of the universal library ideal. Similar to a mirage in the desert, the idea of accumulating and controlling all of print culture’s output appears to recede into the distance the closer we draw towards it. Ultimately, in the words of Roger Chartier, the universal library remains an ‘impossibility’ (1994 [1992]: 65).

Figure 12.3 The Great Library of Alexandria, as reimagined for open-world computer game Assassin’s Creed: Origins (2017). Canadian game-development company Ubisoft consulted extensively with classicists and historians, lending the interior of the library a high degree of architectural accuracy (www.vice.com/amp/en_us/ article/59kwea/a-harvard-egyptologist-explain-the-historical-accuracy-ofassassins-creed-origins).

The dream of a universal library 233

Figure 12.4 A Tumblr blog, ‘The Art of Google Books’ (https://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr. com/about), established by Krissy Wilson in 2011, crowd-sources scanning SNAFUs found on the controversial GBS database, including glimpses of workers’ hands, reader marginalia, library stamps, bookplates or image distortions produced by Google’s proprietary scanning software. These ‘digital anomalies’ represent moments when the labour relations and book materiality the platform generally seeks to render invisible suddenly become jarringly evident.

Learning exercise How much of a book can you read without actually holding a physical copy in your hands? Compare digitised book content available via GBS, Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ function, public-sector digital libraries, excerpts on the author’s website, sample chapters offered by the publisher and so on. Does the extent of online content differ between fiction and non-fiction, or by genre? Why is

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content from printed encyclopedias and recipe books particularly restricted? Is digitisation essential for online discoverability and publicity, or are authors and publishers essentially working for free?

Notes 1 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2005). ‘Revival of the Ancient Library of Alexandria.’ The Science Show 23 Jul. www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2005/ 1416565.htm. See also Chapter 10. 2 David Whitehouse. (2004) ‘Library of Alexandria Discovered.’ BBC News 12 May http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3707641.stm. 3 See www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/treasures-gallery/treasures-gallery-highlights. 4 See www.worldcat.org/. 5 Other book-digitising initiatives include the previously mentioned Project Gutenberg (1971–), Internet Archive’s Text Archive (2006–), the HathiTrust’s Digital Library (2008–) and Microsoft’s now-defunct Live Search Books (2006–8). See below for further details. 6 See https://books.google.com.au. 7 Google’s print product manager Adam Smith, interviewed for the documentary ‘Google: Behind the Screen’ (Special Broadcasting Service. (2006) ‘Google: Behind the Screen.’ The Cutting Edge 4 Jul.). 8 ‘Google Books Wins Case against Authors over Putting Works Online’ (2013) Guardian 15 Nov. www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/14/google-books-wins-case-authors-online. 9 Special Broadcasting Service. (2006) ‘Google: Behind the Screen.’ The Cutting Edge 4 Jul. 10 See also Special Broadcasting Service (2006) ‘Google: Behind the Screen.’ The Cutting Edge 4 Jul. 11 See www.blog.google/products/search/15-years-google-books/. 12 See https://dp.la/. 13 See https://dp.la/info/. 14 See www.europeana.eu/portal/en/TEL.html. 15 See https://archive.org/. 16 Comment made by Kahle in the closing session of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing annual conference, University of Victoria, Canada, 12 June 2017. 17 See www.hathitrust.org. 18 A term coined by English science-fiction writer H.G. Wells in 1936. 19 See www.bibalex.org/en/default. 20 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2005). ‘Revival of the Ancient Library of Alexandria.’ The Science Show 23 Jul. www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2005/ 1416565.htm. 21 See www.bibalex.org/en/Page/About. 22 Tellingly, Borges wrote ‘The Library of Babel’ at the height of the Second World War.

Online resources •

Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar’s film Agora (2009), which centres on the female mathematician and astronomer Hypatia, contains a memorable ten-minute sequence in which the Library of Alexandria is destroyed. The film has been criticised for anachronism in attributing the

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•

•

damage to early Christians, but the details of the Library’s lecture theatres and its triangular storage and classification system for scrolls accord with both historical sources and archaeological evidence: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=euR-6BS9FiQ. For a more recent example of the screenic afterlife of the Library of Alexandria, see its detailed recreation in the computer game Assassin’s Creed: Origins (2017; see Figure 12.3): https:// assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Screenshots. UK documentary Google and the World Brain (2013) provides a late-stage overview of the dispute between ‘the people of the book and the people of the screen’, including interviews with key participants and commentators such as Robert Darnton, Brewster Kahle and Jean-Noël Jeanneney. See the trailer at: www.worldbrainthefilm.com/. ‘Art of Google Books’ on Tumblr compiles crowd-sourced images of scanning glitches and distortions. Accidental glimpses of the hands of scanning staff hint at the low-wage and racialised labour conditions that underpin Google’s book-scanning ambitions (see Figure 12.4): http:// theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com/. See also: www.wired.com/story/ google-books-glitches-gallery.

References and further reading Battles, Matthew. (2003) Library: An Unquiet History. New York and London: Norton. Benedikt, Michael, ed. (1991) Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bennett, Linda. (2008) ‘Friend or Foe?’ The Author 119: 52–3. Black, Hilary May and Brent Salter. (2008) ‘When Copyright and Chutzpah Collide: The Google Library Project and Fair Use.’ Media and Arts Law Review 13.2: 186–217. Borges, Jorge Luis. (2011 [1962/1941]) ‘The Library of Babel.’ Labyrinths. Trans. James E. Irby. London: Penguin. 78–86. Brabazon, Tara. (2007) The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age. London: Ashgate. Canfora, Luciano. (1989) The Vanished Library. Trans. Martin Ryle. London: Hutchison. Cassin, Barbara. (2017) Google Me: One-Click Democracy. Trans. Michael Syrotinski. New York: Fordham University Press. Casson, Lionel. (2001) Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chalmers, Melissa K. and Paul N. Edwards. (2017) ‘Producing “One Vast Index”: Google Book Search as an Algorithmic System.’ Big Data and Society 17.2: 1–16. Chan, Leslie. (2004) ‘Supporting and Enhancing Scholarship in the Digital Age: The Role of Open-Access Institutional Repositories.’ Canadian Journal of Communication 29: 277–300. Chartier, Roger. (1994 [1992]) The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cornay, Rebecca, ed. (2002) Lost in the Archives. Toronto: Alphabet City Media. Darnton, Robert. (2009a) ‘Google and the Future of Books.’ New York Review of Books 12 Feb. www.nybooks.com/articles/22281. Darnton, Robert. (2009b) ‘Google and the New Digital Future.’ New York Review of Books 17 Dec. www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/12/17/google-and-the-new-digital-future/.

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The dream of a universal library 237 Murray, Simone. (2007) ‘Rights Culture: Authors, Publishers and the Digital Domain.’ Southern Review: Communication, Politics and Culture 40.1: 5–24. O’Donnell, James J. (1998) Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Orlean, Susan. (2019) The Library Book. London: Atlantic Books. Packer, George. (2014) ‘Cheap Words.’ New Yorker 17 Feb. www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2014/02/17/140217fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all. Rée, Jonathan. (2007) ‘The Library of Google.’ Prospect Feb. http://phillypersonability. blogspot.com/2007/01/library-of-google-by-jonathan-ree.html. Rimmer, Matthew. (2007) Digital Copyright and the Consumer Revolution: Hands off My iPod. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Shillingsburg, Peter L. (2006) From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spender, Lynne. (2009) ‘The Question of Literary Property.’ Meanjin 69.2. http://meanjin. com.au/editions/volume-68-number-2-2009/article/the-question-of-literary-property/ #A2. Townsend, Robert B. (2007) ‘Google Books: Is It Good for History?’ Perspectives on History 45.6. www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september2007/google-books-is-it-good-for-history. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. (2007) ‘The Googlization of Everything and the Future of Copyright.’ UC Davis Law Review 40.3: 1207–31. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. (2011) The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry). Berkeley: University of California Press. Weinberger, David. (2007) Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Holt.

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures

acquisitions 97, 111–13, 115 Adams, T.R. 40 adaptation 3, 6, 46, 62–63, 109, 112, 126–42, 207, 211; approaches to studying 130–32, 135; audiobooks as 134–36; by fans 136–38; definition of 126; ‘reverse’ adaptation 132–34; role of books in 126–30 Adler, L. 58 Adobe 20, 207–08 Adorno, T. 53–55 advances 62 agents; see literary agents Allen & Unwin 92 Allen, W. 133 Amazon 6, 30, 41, 56, 134, 143–44, 146, 151–56, 173–74, 229, 233; Amazon Books 146, 153–55; and ‘Big 5’ publishers 151–52; and eBooks 206, 208–10, 213, 215; and independent publishers 151; customer reviews 152, 156, 164, 173 Amenábar, A. 222, 234 Amis, M. 116 Angus & Robertson 112 Anthony, S. 116 Apple 30, 41, 134, 208–10 Archive of Our Own (AO3) 137, 174, 213 archives 181, 184, 224 artists’ books 8, 11 Athill, D. 59, 126 Atlas of Early Printing 19 Audible 134–36, 138 audiobooks 34–35, 63, 132, 134–36, 139, 148, 181 Auletta, K. 58

Austen, J. 46 Australia 58, 72–73, 77, 83, 98–99, 101, 108–09, 112, 118, 212; book retailing in 143, 158; libraries in 184–85, 191, 224; reading in 162, 170 authors 9, 38, 40–41, 43, 52, 55, 59, 62–63, 70, 72, 76–78, 108–10, 131; and editors 111–14, 117–18; and fanfiction 137–38; and independent presses 94–95, 98–99, 103; and literary agents 115–16; and publishers 115–16; and readers 166, 170, 175, 202, 228; author societies 78, 115, 135, 226; blogging 46, 205; celebrity 205; collaborative authorship 118, 174, 202, 211, 213; first-time 149; grants to 77; ‘meet the author’ culture 136, 147–50, 170–71, 175; origins of authorship 25–26; poaching of 96; rights 207, 226 back-list 145, 149 Baetens, J. 134 Baker, N. 191 Barker, N. 40 Barnes & Noble 47, 145, 148–49, 151, 210 Barrett, T.H. 28 Barthes, R. 166 Basbanes, N. 192, 211 ‘base and superstructure’ model 53–54 Beach, S. 147 Bebelplatz (Berlin) 25, 189 Benedikt, M. 220–21 Benjamin, W. 53 Bennett, T. 164 Berg, A.S. 112 Berman, S. 190 Bertelsmann 56

Index 239 Betjeman, J. 168 Bezos, J. 151–52, 208, 215, 229 bibliodiversity 94 bibliography 4–5, 37–39, 42, 119 Blake, W. 37 blogs 93, 152, 173, 192, 211; see also authors blooks; see digital books Bloomsbury Publishing 5–6, 58, 91, 207 Bluestone, G. 130, 132 Blyton, E. 119 Bolter, J.D. 27 Bolton, M. 139 book awards; see book prizes book burning 25, 43, 188–89, 193, 202 book clubs 46, 55, 132, 143, 163–64, 167–70; in-store 145–46, 149; online 152, 169–70, 173–75, 205 Book Depository 152 book fairs 116 book festivals; see writers’ festivals book history 1–2, 6, 9, 26, 34–51, 55, 70, 110, 119, 128, 201; definition of 35; disciplinary origins of 35–39; key principles of 42–44; library history 182–87; limitations of 44–46; models for 39–42; studies of reading 162–66, 168, 173 Bookmarks 157 BookMovement 169 Book-of-the-Month Club 65 book prizes 72, 76–77, 82, 101, 118, 131, 137, 143, 211 book retailing 6, 9, 40–41, 46–47, 55–56, 58–59, 99, 143–61, 181; and adaptation 129, 134, 138; and book clubs 169; and cafes 145, 148–50, 152, 157; and community 149–51, 156–57; and digitisation 201, 205, 211; and ethical consumerism 151, 158; and publishers 144–45, 148–49; and readers 150; author events and 147–50, 171–72; ‘chain independents’ 150–51; chainstores 143, 145–46, 148–51, 157; ‘co-operative advertising’ in 143, 149; destination bookshops 157; discounting in 145, 148, 151; employment in 157–58; history of 144–47, 163; independent bookshops 99, 101, 143–52, 157; independents versus chains 144, 146–51, 156; in discount department stores (DDS) 145, 149; loss leaders in 145; online 143, 146, 151–56; ‘pay to display’ controversies 143, 149; physical versus online 146, 151–57;

second-hand 143, 146, 158; ‘shelf-talkers’ in 147, 152–53; ‘showrooming’ in 156; see also Amazon book reviewing 41, 43, 46, 56, 131; by Amazon customers 146, 152, 156, 164, 205 BookScan 113, 146 book scanning 10–11, 20, 191, 213–14, 225–30, 234 bookselling; see book retailing books: format of 42; materiality of 35–36, 43–44, 191, 221; origins of 18–20 bookshops; see book retailing Borders 145, 149, 151 Borges, J.L. 195n15, 231–32 Bourdieu, P. 172, 175, 187 Brett, M. 108 Brokaw, C. 28 Brooks, G. 47 Brouillette, S. 76 ‘bungs’; see book retailing Buzzell, C. 211 Callil, C. 96 Campion, J. 133 Canada 72–75, 77, 83, 99, 101–02, 112, 145, 170, 174; libraries in 184, 224 Carnegie, A. 184 Carroll, L. 37 Carver, R. 109–110 censorship 6, 43, 70, 73, 93, 174, 228, 230 Chapters (Canada) 145 Chartier, R. 163, 224, 232 Chaucer, G. 164 ciné-romans 133 class 94, 103, 109, 144, 148; and reading 163, 168–70; and library access 183–84; see also literacy close reading 3, 37 codex 4, 9, 19, 26, 28, 31, 81, 93, 126–27, 138, 146, 156, 181, 192; and reading 172–73; as consecrator 212–13; as wealth display 182; fate of 201–02, 204–05; remediation of 208–10 colophons 21, 52, 96, 114 comic books 130, 132, 187, 208 commissioning 108, 111 communication studies; see media ‘companion’ volumes 133, 138 comparable title data 59, 94, 113 computer gaming 130, 132–33, 137 content 128, 207 convergence 128, 207; see also synergy Coover, R. 202

240

Index

copyright 25, 62, 73, 78, 80, 83, 110, 118, 137–38, 170; and eBooks 207, 213–14; and libraries 184, 223, 225–27, 230; see also Google Books Coser, L. 56 cover design 34, 45, 46, 52, 96, 128, 132, 145, 206 creative industries 76, 80–82 crowdfunding 41, 56 cultural capital (Bourdieu) 131, 157, 170, 172, 175, 182 cultural imperialism 228 cultural nationalism 71–75, 77–79, 94, 98, 112, 189 cultural policy 53, 55, 64, 70–87, 91, 94, 101; about books 72–73, 162, 171; and libraries 186–87; creative industries approach to 80–82; debates over 70–72; definition of 70; levels of 73–80 cultural studies; see media, communication and cultural studies culture/commerce dialectic 55–56, 100, 103, 111, 143–44, 146, 170, 201 Cunningham, S. 98 Dale, J. 136 Darnton, R. 2, 22, 35, 39–42, 43, 55, 92, 110, 115, 143, 163, 182, 205, 228–29, 234; ‘Communications Circuit’ 39–40, 42, 55, 92, 110, 115, 143, 205, 228 Dattner, Z. 100 Davis, B. 112 ‘death of the book’ debate 169, 201–02, 211, 214 de Certeau, M. 166 Derrida, J. 224 Deutsch, A. 59 Dewey, M. 181, 224 digital books 201–19; blooks as 211–12; digital–analogue book hybrids 211–14; ‘disintermediation’ of publishers by 205–06; electronic-ink technology 208; ‘future of the book’ debate regarding 201–05, 211, 213–14; Instapoetry as 213; mobile-phone novels as 212; rights for 206–07; varieties of 207–11; wikinovels as 212–13 digital humanities (DH) 39, 41 ‘digital literary sphere’ (Murray) 46, 226 Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) 229 digitisation 11, 20, 30, 41, 44, 59, 61, 75, 82, 119, 128, 138, 158, 221, 227–28; and eBooks 201–19; and libraries 190–93,

213, 221, 225–29, 229; see also Google Books; universal library ideal discoverability 234; see also digitisation distribution 56, 58–59, 99, 101, 129, 143; and eBooks 203, 205, 211–12 Duncombe, S. 101 Dunham, L. 174 Eaves, M. 117 eBooks 6, 9, 20, 35, 41, 58, 63, 127, 130, 204–10, 214; and reader surveillance 174; paratexts of 206; pricing of 152; see also digital books editing 108–25; by readers 119; posthumous 119 editors 9, 55, 59, 62–63, 126, 128, 131, 181; and authors 111–14, 117–18; and literary agents 115–16; and socio-political power 117–19; covert role of 108–10, 117; feminised profile of 108, 114, 118; freelance 108, 111, 113–14; job insecurity among 95; variety of roles 111–14 education 72–73, 77–79, 162, 167–68, 170, 172, 193 Egypt 221, 230 Eisenstein, E. 22, 24, 26–27, 36 electronic literature 77 Engelhardt, T. 130 Epstein, J. 157, 203 Escarpit, R. 36 Escher, M.C. 232 Europeana 229 Faber & Faber 91 Facebook 158 fandom 127, 131, 136–38, 206 fanfiction 41, 56, 119, 133, 137–38, 146, 164, 174, 212–13 Febvre, L. 36 feminism 5, 37, 40–41, 47, 94, 96, 103, 147; and libraries 183–84, 188–89, 194; and reading 163, 166, 168–70, 175, 202 Ferguson, K. 139, 215n5 Ferlinghetti, L. 147 Fforde, J. 137 Fiji 184 film 93, 96, 109, 128–34, 207, 211 Fish, S. 167 France 71, 193–94, 223, 229 Frankfurt School 53–54, 64, 92 Franklin, S.M. 72, 143 Franzen, J. 170

Index 241 front-list 145, 149 Fry, S. 30, 136 Fuller, D. 172 Gallagher, T. 109–10 genre 95–96, 126, 130, 139, 206, 212 Glover, S. 73 Goethe, J.W. 25, 166, 188, 220 Goodreads 152, 173, 206 Google 41, 214, 221, 225–30; and libraries 225; and publishers 225 Google Books 11, 213, 221, 225–29, 233; and user surveillance 228 Gribble, D. 98 Grusin, R. 27 Gutenberg, J. 18–22, 24, 25, 27–28, 30, 43–44, 148, 182, 210–11, 223 Gutenberg Museum 19, 28 ‘Gutenberg parenthesis’ (Pettitt) 30 Habermas, J. 92 Hachette 56, 96, 120n2 HarperCollins 56, 133–34 Harris, J. 175 Harry Potter 4–12, 63, 133, 136, 138, 151, 168–69 HathiTrust 230, 234n5 Haymarket Books 95, 103, 118 Heine, H. 189 Hewlett Packard 208 history 36–37, 39; Annales school of 36, 164 history of the book; see book history Holtzbrinck 56 Homer 136 Horkheimer, M. 53–55 Howsam, L. 38–39, 41 hypertext 18, 40–41, 202 ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson) 9, 23, 148 ‘implied reader’ (Iser) 164–66 imprints 58, 61, 65 incunabula 19 independent publishers 53–61, 64, 91–107; and Amazon 151; and authors 94–95, 98–99, 103, 114; and physical retailers 147–48; and ‘marketplace of ideas’ 92–93; as guarantors of diversity 93–97; challenges facing 99–100; definition of 91–92; ‘micro-presses’ as 92, 99, 147; models of 97–98; zines as 100–01 India 72 indigeneity; see race

Innis, H. 26 Instagram 12, 158, 173, 213 intellectual property (IP) 6, 62–63, 118, 137–38, 207, 214, 226 International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 151 internet 20, 40–41, 46, 61, 73, 93, 101, 129, 136, 146; and digital books 201–03, 205, 211–13; and libraries 220, 225; and reading 164, 169, 172; online shopping 151 Internet Archive 228–31, 234n5 ‘interpretive communities’ (Fish) 43 iPad 30, 204, 208–10 Ireland 72, 77, 223 Iser, W. 164–66 ISIS 193 Jackson, C. 97 Jackson, S. 18 James, E.L. 138 Japan 71 Jeanneney, J.-N. 228–29, 234 Jefferson, T. 182–83 Jenkins, H. 137 Jobs, S. 210 Johnson, S. 23 Jonze, S. 131 Jordan, J.O. 40 Joyce, J. 147 Judaism 47, 187–88, 190; see also book burning Kadushin, C. 56 Kahle, B. 228–29, 234 Kaufman, C. 131 Kaur, R. 213 Kelly, M. 190 Kerouac, J. 37 Kindle 30, 135, 138, 146, 152, 156, 204, 208–09, 215; Kindle Highlights 174 Kindle Direct Publishing 56, 206 King, S. 205–06 Kobo 210 Kornicki, P. 28 Lane, A. 20 language 24–25, 28, 71–72, 80, 81, 94, 117–20; non-standard English 117–18 Lawrence, D.H. 167 Lee, D. 100 LGBTQI+ identities: and libraries 187, 194; and publishing 94, 147; and reading 168 librarians 9, 172, 191, 224–25, 229

242

Index

libraries 92, 181–98, 163; and cultural memory 188–89, 191–93, 213, 220–22, 228–30; and nationalism 184, 186, 189, 193–94, 220, 231; and publishers 184, 221, 223; ArtDaily Library 232; as civic centres 184–86, 193; as gatekeepers 181, 189–90; Bibliothèque nationale de France 194, 223, 228; Bibliotheca Alexandrina 230–31; Bibliothèque Polonaise 184; Bodleian Library 182–83, 223, 225; British Library 30, 37, 183–84, 189–90, 193, 223; catalogues in 189, 224–25; circulating 183; classification systems of 181, 189–90, 221, 224; contemporary 192–93; copyright deposit 184, 220–21, 223–24; destruction of 188–89, 192–93, 220, 222, 225, 231–32, 234; digital 181, 186–87, 190–92, 213, 224, 229–31, 233; epistemological function of 103n7, 187–90; German National Library 189; ‘Google 5’ 225, 228; Harry Ransom Center (Texas) 186; history and types of 182–87, 221; Iraq National Library and Archive 192–93; Library Company of Philadelphia 183; Library of Alexandria 221–23, 229–32, 234; Library of Congress 183–84, 189, 223–24; Library of Ukrainian Literature 189; library records 175; local libraries 75–76, 80, 184; London Library 183; Monticello library 182; National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina 189, 192; National Library of Scotland 184, 223; National Library of Wales 184, 223; private 182–83; public 183–86, 191, 194; reading rooms in 183–85, 190; State Library of New South Wales 184, 187; State Library Victoria 11, 184–85; subscription libraries 183; University of Mosul library 193; University Library (Cambridge) 223; Widener Library (Harvard) 190, 225; Women’s Library 188; see also archives licensing 62, 78, 126, 137–38, 207, 214 Lish, G. 109–10 literacy 22, 27, 46, 162, 168, 172, 182, 186, 192, 223 literary agents 5, 9, 40–41, 55, 63, 94, 100, 113, 115–16, 131, 136; and authors 115–16; ‘super-agents’ 116 literary festivals; see writers’ festivals literary prizes see book prizes

literary studies 2–4, 26, 34–35, 37, 39, 43, 46, 135; and reading 165–67 Livraria Lello 157 Lonely Planet 102 Long, E. 64 Lulu.com 211 Luther, M. 22 Macmillan 56 Manguel, A. 203, 223 manuscripts 19, 27, 35, 181–82, 186, 192 Manutius, A. 19 Marcuse, H. 53 marginalia 164, 169, 191 marketing 59, 97, 99, 101, 108–09, 113, 115, 206, 210 marketplace of ideas 58, 64, 78, 92–93, 143 Martin, H.-J. 36 Marxism 53–55, 59, 64 mass society theorists see Frankfurt School McClelland & Stewart 112 McClelland, J. 112 McDonell, M. 118 McGurl, M. 56 McKenzie, D.F. 4, 38, 44 McLuhan, M. 3, 24, 26–27, 73, 93 McPhee Gribble 98–99 McPhee, H. 62–63, 98, 126 media, communication and cultural studies 2–3, 10, 26, 39, 41, 44–46, 53, 133, 135; and reading 166–67 media industries 52, 201–03 medium theory 17–33, 36, 70, 73, 82, 93, 136, 156, 192, 201; definition of 17–18; in relation to the book format 18–20; effects of book medium 20–26; as an academic discipline 26–27; limitations of 27–28; and digital books 28–30, 173 Meyrowitz, J. 18, 20 microfilm 191–92 Microsoft 19, 208, 212, 230, 234n5 Miller, H. 167 Miller, L.J. 144 Millett, K. 166 Milner, A. 166 Mitchell, D.S. 184 Morgan, J.P. 182 Morrison, T. 215 Morton, K. 116 Mubarak, H. 230 Murdoch, R. 65

Index 243 nationalism 23–25, 43, 48n4, 94, 144; and libraries 184, 186, 189, 193–94, 220, 223; see also cultural nationalism Nazism 47, 53, 183, 188–89 see also book burning Nelson, T. 40 neoliberalism 186, 194 News Corp 56, 65 newspapers 109, 132, 144, 184, 191 New Zealand 72, 77, 83, 184, 224 novelisation 62, 133–34, 138 Nunberg, G. 213 Ocher, M. 118 Oldcastle Books 45 Olivarez, J. 118 Ong, J.W. 24, 26, 136 Open Content Alliance 229 orality 24, 26, 135–36, 163 Orlean, S. 131–32 Orton, J. 168 Orwell, G. 156 paper 38, 223 papermaking 20 paperbacks 19–20 paratext 34, 41, 46–47 Patten, R.L. 40 Patterson, J. 215 Pax, S. 192, 211 Pearl, N. 76, 172 Penguin (Random House) Publishing 20, 47, 56, 58, 65, 97–98, 121, 134 periodicals 24, 47, 109, 115, 132, 144, 148, 181 Perkins, M. 112–13, 116 Pettitt, T. 30 Phillips, A. 205 Pinterest 12 ‘playaways’ 134 Poland, L. 94 political economy 3, 52–69, 78, 91–93, 102, 128, 134, 174; book publishing as media industry 61–62; book publishing stakeholders in 55–56; definition of 52–53; implications of convergence for books 62–63; origins and characteristics of 53–55; pros and cons of 63–64; structure of global book publishing 56–61 post-colonialism 5, 37, 118 Powell, J. 211

Powell, W. 56 print culture 1–13, 52, 70, 82, 91, 135–36, 148, 170, 175, 202, 214, 211, 221; and libraries 184; and screen media 169, 221; concern with materiality 8, 191, 221; definition 1–2; Harry Potter case-study 4–8, 9; origins 2–3; text/object distinction 3–4, 35, 42, 55–56, 130, 214; theoretical approaches to 17 printing 18, 20–21, 30, 40, 77, 206, 210, 223; in China 27–29, 44 print-on-demand (POD) 203, 210–12 Project Gutenberg 213, 234n5 Protestantism 21–22, 28, 36, 168 publicity 59, 99, 112, 128, 211, 234 public sphere (Habermas) 22, 92–93, 97, 149, 187 publishers 9, 40–41, 46, 52, 55–62, 77, 100, 181, 226; and adaptation 130, 133–34, 138; and authors 115–16; and book clubs 169; and book retailing 144–45, 149; and eBooks 201, 205–07, 214; and libraries 184, 221, 223; and reading 164; and writers’ festivals 171; as gatekeepers 92, 100–01, 108, 117; ‘Big 5’ multinational conglomerates 43, 56–61, 64–65, 91–92, 94, 96, 128, 134, 137–38, 148, 205; concentration of ownership among 9, 71, 91, 93, 101; epistemological function of 92; see also independent publishers publishing studies 35, 44 Pullinger, K. 133 race 47, 80, 94, 95, 97, 103, 118, 120; and Google Books 234; and libraries 190, 194; and reading 163, 168, 170; see also literacy radio 73, 130, 132; and reading 170, 172 Radway, J. 167 Ramelli, A. 165 Random House 109–10, 203, 207; see also Penguin (Random House) Ray Murray, P. 42 readers 9, 26, 30, 34, 40, 43, 46, 52, 55, 70, 72, 78–79, 99, 101, 108; agency of 202–03; and adaptation 127, 136–38; and authors 175, 202, 228; and book retailing 150; as editors 119; surveillance of 152 reading 6, 162–80; and audiobooks 134–35; and feminism 166–67; and materiality 164; and mentalités 164; and post-structuralism 166–67, 171, 202, 224;

244

Index

and privacy 174; as contextually specific 165–67; at live events 136; contemporary 169–72; contexts of 43; digital 152, 162–64, 169, 172–74; history and evidence of 162–65, 172; intensive and extensive 21, 23; ‘interpretive communities’ 167–68, 174; mass reading events (MREs) 76, 79, 171–72; readerresponse criticism 164–66; reading project 162, 167, 172, 174; resistant 164, 166, 168–69; silent reading 21–22, 163, 170, 228; ‘slow reading’ 175; see also book clubs Reading Experience Database (RED) 175 Readings (Melbourne) 151 Rehberg Sedo, D. 172 religion 163, 167–68, 170, 182, 187, 190, 201–02, 231 remaindering 59, 61, 78, 143, 145, 149 ‘republic of letters’ (Casanova) 72 Resnais, A. 194, 223 returns policy 59, 145, 149, 203 Rice, A. 137 rights 63, 78, 115–16, 126, 131–33, 135, 137, 214 Rose, J. 1 Rowberry, S. 209 Rowling, J.K. 4–8, 12, 137, 168–69, 207 Rubin, J.S. 2 Schiffrin, A. 62, 93 Scholastic 5 screenplays 132–33, 138 screenwriters 129, 131, 136 scroll 18–9, 31, 182, 221 self-publishing 41, 56, 93, 100–01, 130, 146, 205–06, 211 ‘sensory ratio’ (McLuhan) 24, 136 serial publishing 205, 212 Shelfari 152 Simon & Schuster 56, 205 Small Press Network 99 social media 12, 93, 150, 152, 205; and Instapoetry 213; and reading 164, 172–73, 175 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) 40, 44, 47n1, 235n16 ‘sociology of texts’ (McKenzie) 38 Sony 208 South Africa 71, 184, 224

Squires, C. 42 synergy 61, 128–30 technological determinism 27 television 73, 93, 128–33; and reading 170, 172 Text Publishing 58, 108 textual analysis 37 theatre 130–31 tie-in editions 62, 128–29, 132, 134, 138, 145 translation 131 Twain, M. 119 Twitter 46, 93, 137, 158, 173 typesetting 20 ‘typographical fixity’ (Eisenstein) 24, 202 Unbound 56 United Kingdom 136, 145, 149, 168, 170, 205; libraries in 183–84, 186, 192–93, 223 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 79–81, 193, 230 United States 73, 77, 97, 99, 101, 103, 109, 112, 119, 134, 170; book retailing in 144–45, 156, 158; copyright law in 207, 226–27, 230; libraries in 182–84, 186–88, 191–94, 223 universal library ideal 220–37: as mirage 231–32; Bibliotheca Alexandrina as 230–31; catalogues for 224–25; Google Books as 225–29, 221, 233; Library of Alexandria as origin of 221–23, 229–32, 234; national copyright-deposit libraries as 220–21, 223–24; public-sector digital libraries as 229–31, 233 universities 19, 21, 38, 43, 53, 55, 96, 113, 119, 211, 222; and reading 162–63; bookshops at 143; libraries at 184, 186–88, 193, 222, 224–25 university presses 56, 58, 91–92, 94 Virago Press 96, 99 Waterstones 145, 151 Watson, E. 174 Wattpad 56, 174 Wells, H.G. 126–27, 235n18 Wharton, E. 34 W.H. Smith 163 Wiegand, W. 190 Wilding, M. 93

Index 245 Winfrey, O. 167–68, 170 Wirtén, E.H. 128 Witherspoon, R. 174 women; see feminism Women in Book History 47 Wood, C. 114 Woolf, V. 189–90 WorldCat 224–25 World Wide Web see internet Wright, A. 143

writers’ festivals 46, 55, 75–76, 78–81, 83n3, 109, 129; authors reading at 170–71 Wylie, A. 116 YouTube 173 Zaid, G. 203 zines 100–02, 187 Zusak, M. 188