Vol. 24 No. 21 · 31 October 2002
pages 36-39 | 4705 words
The Tangible Page
Leah Price
- The Book History Reader edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery
Routledge, 390 pp, £17.99, November 2001, ISBN 0 415 22658 9
- Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays by D.F. McKenzie, edited by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez
Massachusetts, 296 pp, £20.95, June 2002, ISBN 1 55849 336 0
What exactly is book history? Literature students consulting their reference libraries would be hard put to find an answer: ‘history of the book’ appears nowhere in M.H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms or Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D.F. McKenzie, can be found on none of the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism’s several thousand pages.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 22 · 14 November 2002
From Peter McDonald
Contrary to what Leah Price says (LRB, 31 October), the new edition of Margaret Drabble's Oxford Companion to English Literature (2002) does contain an entry on book history. It falls between the Booker McConnell Prize for Fiction and the Book of Martyrs.
Peter McDonald
St Hugh’s College, Oxford
Vol. 24 No. 24 · 12 December 2002
From Rachel Malik
There are problems in Leah Price's characterisation of book history and the difficulties it currently faces (LRB, 31 October). It is true, as she says, that textual editors share certain questions with poststructuralists: the origins and instability of the text, the authority of the author and so on. But the difficulty, or impossibility, of recuperating meaning and intention is, for most of them, a matter of regret. Textual reconstruction remains the goal, even when the effort is understood as doomed, an attempt to recover what cannot be recovered. This Romantic inflection is entirely absent from, for example, Roland Barthes's critique of authorship.
The role that 'Readers' and kindred forms of academic publishing are playing in defining and reshaping disciplines demands careful scrutiny, and is arguably far more significant than Price supposes. Readers do indeed use 'voices' to sell themselves, packaging collections of original texts, abridged or not. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that there is 'no free indirect discourse here'. Quite apart from the unavoidable fact of selectivity, the whole apparatus of the Reader – the often extensive commentaries in general and sectional introductions, the titling and ordering of sections, the indexing strategy – strongly proposes ways of reading and valuing those voices.
Price sees a difficulty in thinking and working with the book as both commodity and artefact, but this has not been an intractable problem in the study of film, television or fine art. Are books so very different? One problem, which Price herself points to, is that book history tends to privilege empirical inquiry. Film studies, in contrast, don't deal only with particular texts and genres and periods, but work towards a theoretical understanding of the processes of production and dissemination of the cinematic institution as a whole. Why not a similar attempt to theorise the processes and practices of the book? Why not Publishing Studies?
Rachel Malik
Middlesex University
