Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation

Interacting with Print

Mark Algee-Hewitt

Angela Borchert

David Brewer

Thora Brylowe

Julia Carlson

Brian Cowan

Susan Dalton

Marie-Claude Felton

Michael Gamer

Paul Keen

Michelle Levy

Michael Macovski

Nicholas Mason

Tom Mole

Andrew Piper

Dahlia Porter

Jonathan Sachs

Diana Solomon

Andrew Stauffer

Richard Taws

Nikola von Merveldt

Chad Wellmon

Interacting with Print

Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation

The Multigraph Collective

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-46914-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-46928-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Le Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture (FRQSC) toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Multigraph Collective (Scholarly group), author.

Title: Interacting with print : elements of reading in the era of print saturation / The Multigraph Collective.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017035583 | ISBN 9780226469140 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226469287 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Printing—History—18th century. | Printing—History—19th century. | Intermediality—History.

Classification: LCC Z124.A2 M85 2017 | DDC 686.209/033—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035583

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface; or, What Is a Multigraph?

Introduction

1. Advertising

2. Anthologies

3. Binding

4. Catalogs

5. Conversations

6. Disruptions

7. Engraving

8. Ephemerality

9. Frontispieces

10. Index

11. Letters

12. Manuscript

13. Marking

14. Paper

15. Proliferation

16. Spacing

17. Stages

18. Thickening

Epilogue

Works Cited

About the Multigraph Collective

Index

Illustrations

Color Plates

1 Pieces of twig mounted inside the cover of Thomas Gray’s Poems (1768)

2 Contents page from Thomas W. Handford’s Illustrated Home Book of Poetry and Song (1884)

3 Binding of Friendship’s Token (1855)

4 François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour (1758)

5 Binding of J. Griffith’s Travels in Europe, Asia Minor and Arabia (1805)

6 Fifty-sol assignat (1793)

7 Admission form to the Foundling Hospital (1756)

8 Printer’s waste reused as a specimen-drying book (1768–1771)

9 Page from I. Thomasen’s Eikon Basilike (1713)

10 Tracing of hands from The Works of William Shakespeare (1853)

11 Reading in multiple directions, Hale family scrapbook (nineteenth century)

12 Mary Delaney, Asperula (1777)

13 Green’s characters in The Red Rover (1836)

14 J. R. Smith, The Dream (1791)

15 Charles Williams, Luxury (1801)

16 Authorized English version of the Holy Bible (1890)

Black-and-White Figures

0.1 Pieces of twig mounted inside the cover of Thomas Gray’s Poems (1768)

0.2 Trio of theoretical concerns

1.1 Handbill for Salmon’s Royal Wax-Work (1760s)

2.1 Contents page from Thomas W. Handford’s Illustrated Home Book of Poetry and Song (1884)

2.2 Frontispiece and title page from Friedrich Wilmans’s Taschenbuch der Liebe und Freundschaft gewidmet (1823)

2.3 Joseph von Eichendorff’s Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel from In zarter Frauenhand (1887)

2.4 Binding of Friendship’s Token (1855)

3.1 François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour (1758)

3.2 Binding of J. Griffith’s Travels in Europe, Asia Minor and Arabia (1805)

3.3 Binding of Anna Seward’s Letters (1811)

4.1 Page from James Petiver’s Hortus siccus Cappensis (date unknown)

6.1 Page titled Natural History, from the Fliegende Blätter (1845)

6.2 Page showing multiple typefaces, from the Fliegende Blätter (1845)

6.3 Charles Philipon in La Caricature (1832)

6.4 Pear speech in La Caricature (1835)

6.5 George Cruikshank, Bank Restriction Note (1819)

7.1 William Woollett, The Death of General Wolfe (1776)

8.1 Fifty-sol assignat (1793)

8.2 Admission form to the Foundling Hospital (1756)

8.3 Printer’s waste reused as a specimen-drying book (1768–1771)

9.1 Frontispiece and title page from Mary Robinson’s Poems (1791)

9.2 Frontispiece and title page from the illustrated edition of Don Quichotte de La Manche (1836)

9.3 Frontispiece to Otto Roquette’s Waldmeisters Brautfahrt (1897)

9.4 Frontispiece and title page to first edition of Dombey and Son (1848)

9.5 Frontispiece to Rousseau’s Collection d’auteurs français (1833)

10.1 Page from Johann Samuel Ersch’s Allgemeines Repertorium der Literatur für die Jahre (1785–1790)

12.1 Manuscript transcription from I. Thomasen’s Eikon Basilike (1713)

12.2 Two pages from I. Thomasen’s Eikon Basilike (1648)

12.3 Title page from Charles Churchill’s Gotham, A Poem, Book III (1764)

13.1 Tracing of hands from The Works of Shakespeare (1853)

13.2 Title page inscription from Caroline: or, The History of Miss Sedley (1787)

13.3 Manuscriptural emendations of The Foundling Hospital, for Wit (1746)

14.1 Anonymous, La confession coupée (1677)

14.2 Reading in multiple directions, Hale family scrapbook (nineteenth century)

14.3 Mary Delany, Asperula (1777)

14.4 Green’s Characters in The Red Rover (1836)

14.5 Pasted-in emendation of George Steevens’s Works of Shakespeare (1802)

15.1 J. R. Smith, The Dream (1791)

15.2 Charles Williams, Luxury (1801)

15.3 The Card Catalog, from the Library Bureau Catalog (1890)

16.1 George Herbert’s Easter Wings, from The Temple (1633)

16.2 Last page of To the Genius of Africa from Robert Southey’s Poems (1797)

16.3 William Wordsworth’s Lines left upon a seat in a Yew-Tree from Lyrical Ballads (1798)

18.1 Authorized English version of the Holy Bible (1890)

18.2 Francesco Bartolozzi’s engraving of John Henderson as Iago (late eighteenth century)

19.1 Network representation of renvois linking the chapters of this book

19.2 Network representation of topical similarity between chapters of this book

Preface; or, What Is a Multigraph?

A multigraph is a book written by numerous authors. In this, it represents a new kind of scholarly object. Unlike the monograph, written by a single author (or two or three coauthors), the multigraph represents multiple voices and multiple points of view. It exceeds the normal scale of scriptural collaboration. In this, it has a cacophonous underside. And yet, unlike the edited volume, in which a single individual (or two or three) organizes the disparate voices of multiple authors that never really cohere into a meaningful whole, in the multigraph those voices come together to tell a more unified story. There is a symphonic aspect to the text, but in this, the performers are also the conductors. It is organized from within.

This project began in 2011 during a planning session with the original members of the Interacting with Print research group: Susan Dalton, Tom Mole, Andrew Piper, and Nikola von Merveldt, later joined by Jonathan Sachs. Much had already been written about the crisis, death, and future of the monograph. The idea for the multigraph was a preliminary answer to these concerns and an effort to push the collaborative nature of our research group as far as possible in its published outputs. Interactivity was to be both our topic and our method: to study the interactions of the past, we would create new kinds of interactions in the present. Synthesizing the knowledge of our collaborators would afford a means of producing new kinds of knowledge. Our aim was not a manual or handbook, or a summa of existing knowledge, but a process in which emergent ideas could take shape, and new arguments for thinking about the history of print and media more generally. Integration and generation were related from the beginning.

To facilitate this development, we created the following process, which took place over the course of roughly two years. We share it with readers in the hope that it not only gives insights into what we have produced but also might be replicable for other researchers and other projects. We are deeply grateful to both the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et Culture, without which this project would not have been feasible. As we enter into the era of big humanities, which is nothing more than a reenactment of long-forgotten humanistic practices from the past (Wellmon 2014), projects like these will be important for thinking about how to use the public investment in humanities research toward the goal of integrating the many specialized veins of research that proliferate today.

The book’s composition fell into three stages, which we came to designate, in the spirit of its bibliographic origins, with a set of organic metaphors. First was seeding. At this stage we invited participants to offer brief contributions (typically a third to half the length of the published chapters) on a key concept from any area of their own research. The contributors were drawn mostly from among those who had participated in the research group’s activities over the previous three years, and so had already contributed to our developing theoretical framework. They were invited to choose from a seedbed of suggested keywords or to propose their own. Inherent in the idea of the seed is that it be generative, motivating further additions from other contributors. Some seeds became chapters, some were amalgamated, and some failed to germinate. Winnowing became a crucial aspect of the process.

During the second stage, grafting, contributors embellished and edited one another’s seeds. To do so, we used a wiki environment administered by Mark Algee-Hewitt, which allowed us to track versions and restore changes. The authors of all changes were recorded, and the wiki interface allowed for discussions in the comments section about the new directions a chapter was taking. As in any good garden, the point of the graft was that it must take—it required consideration of the ideas of someone else and an attempt to draw connections with thoughts not one’s own. For the graft to survive, and to promote subsequent grafts, it had to integrate with the original seed and allow the new, amalgamated form to develop in new directions.

At this point in the project, we found ourselves rethinking many of the chapters in significant ways, so that they developed far beyond the initial seeds. We also found that a face-to-face meeting was crucial to this development. We held the first of two annual workshops in which we created a rotating system of editorial sessions to work on the seeds. As each contributor moved from session to session, she or he would engage with new seeds and with continually shifting combinations of other contributors (using a very ungainly algorithm to generate the assignments, a bit like doing class scheduling by slide rule). By the end of the first two-day workshop, each contributor had edited at least half of the seeds and had interacted face-to-face with at least half of the other contributors. Plenary sessions helped shape a collective vision for the volume as a whole.

New visions and new directions were identified for each of the seeds, with individuals volunteering to add new material or to rework old. Each seed had a serial action plan assigned to it, a route that it would travel as it was edited and augmented by further participants. Everyone volunteered for as many seeds as they could reasonably participate in. Over the course of the next year, changes and additions were made in time for our second workshop, the aim of which was no longer more creation but completion.

The third and final stage, pressing, sought to fix the project into a stable form, to shift from the vitality of the web to the more permanent form of the hortus siccus, the specimen book of pressed flowers. At this stage, we held another workshop of rotating sessions and interactions, during which we appointed for each chapter an editor who was not the author of that chapter’s seed. The editor’s job was not to write the chapter, but to manage the process of collaboration to ensure that the finished chapter was produced to a high standard and in a timely fashion. At any time in the process, any contributor could edit any part of the book—including this preface. There was no hierarchy between authors and editors. There were twenty-two authors and twenty-two editors. Once the seeds were finalized, they were aggregated into a single manuscript, at which point it fell back to the project originators to tie up the loose ends and submit the manuscript for peer review.

It may be worthwhile to reflect on the variety of media we used to write this book and the place of mediation in the scholarly process. Alan Liu has suggested that social computing encourages literary scholars to remember and repurpose the long history of social writing, publishing, reading, and interpreting, and it is certainly the case that without the wiki interface, and the instant flow of communication enabled by email, this project would have been inconceivable. At the same time, it is equally true that the project could not have happened without the face-to-face interactions and the opportunities for interpersonal exchange that they afforded. In part, this is because no virtual environment (at least none that has yet been invented) can fully mimic the kind of spontaneity and engagement that can occur when individuals meet in person. But just as important, we doubt whether online social networking alone would have allowed for the sociability necessary to nurture and sustain commitment to this project. We can’t help but notice how many of the practices we engaged in, such as note-taking, annotation, revision, are—as Liu suggests—as old as the history of writing itself, and it is certainly the case that an online networked environment can foster these activities. But we also strongly believe that carrying forward the long history of social writing, publishing, reading, and interpreting will require that we continue to find opportunities to interact, personally, with one another and with the material artifacts we work with.

Why a book? Given that we undertook this project in a digital environment, and that the wiki was essential to its composition, the logical outcome might seem to be an online product—an interactive website, a hypertext repository, or a publicly accessible wiki. Such an outcome would have its own advantages: users could navigate through the chapters in nonlinear ways, an unlimited number of illustrations could be included, dynamic visualizations of the material could be produced, and the text could be updated without restriction, or even opened to editing by its readers in the manner of Wikipedia. We have chosen to forgo these possibilities in favor of a printed book because we believe that—at this moment in media history—print can still do things that digital media cannot.

We contend that print still has a valuable role to play as a central medium of humanistic communication. The relative stability of the printed book reflects values associated with the durability and referenceability of humanities research. Digital products offer different possibilities for interactive functionality, but at the time of writing, they remain difficult to integrate into the academic circuits of reception and assessment, and they are all too often hard to sustain online in the long term. If we choose the old technology of the printed book to be our product, however, we nonetheless chose the new technology of the wiki to shape our process. New technologies allow us to challenge established paradigms of print production in the contemporary academy, emphasizing values of process, community, and collaboration over scholarly hermeticism, hierarchy, and charismatic insight, as well as recovering and making visible practices of community and collaboration that, while they have long characterized humanistic inquiry, have often been obscured by our publication forms and practices.

At the same time, the collaboratively authored multigraph can be a useful tool for addressing one of the central problems of today’s scholarly landscape: the surplus of information. With so many new books and journal articles appearing continuously (not to mention conference papers, online resources, blog posts, and tweets), it is increasingly difficult to make an impact on any particular field of study. In bringing together a wide range of scholars, but in such a way that works toward synthesis rather than differentiation, the aim of the multigraph is to address these dual problems of coherence and scale. It combines the multiperspectival nature of the edited collection with the unified vision of the monograph. We think the fusion of print and digital media will prove in the end to offer a substantial contribution to how we as academics think and communicate.

We leave it our readers to judge whether we have succeeded in our aims. But for many of us who cowrote this book, the experience transformed our understanding of how we can undertake scholarly inquiry in the humanities. Writing together in this way, we experienced the remarkable generosity of our coauthors, and the refreshing reminder that contributing to the sum of our knowledge is a collaborative endeavor. All of us spend our professional lives in an environment that is pervasively competitive and often implicitly adversarial; we often have to compete for grants, for jobs, for recognition. We are asked to rank our graduate students and sometimes our colleagues against one another. Even as the rhetoric of interdisciplinary collaboration becomes common, the academy (particularly in the humanities) persists with a lone-scholar model. Writing this book allowed us to come together in a different way: not to present the fruits of research already largely complete (and individually carried out) and have them judged by others, but to work together to produce something new, which none of us would own but for which all of us would take responsibility.

If there is a polemical edge to this project, it is this: producing a print object with multiple authors, all of whom are equally responsible for all of its content, deliberately makes it more difficult to assign personal responsibility for any part of the whole to any one of the authors. Call it one small act of resistance to the academy’s increasing overreliance on measures of accountability. Unable to measure what we value most, we have come to value what we can measure. Effacing the measurability of academic work offers one way of moving past the overreliance on quantifying the assessment of learning and research today. Alongside all the effort to quantify, we think it is also time to develop new models of creativity and thought that are not easily subsumed within the accountant’s black arts. This project intends to affirm the argument that, when it comes to the making of ideas, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

Introduction

This book offers an innovative approach to the study of print culture based on the concept of interactivity. The approach was itself conceived, developed, and articulated in a novel and interactive way. The twenty-two collaborators of the Interacting with Print research group collectively wrote this book using both an online platform and old-fashioned annual symposia, and we are jointly responsible for all it contains. In this, we investigate how people interacted with printed matter, how they used print media to interact with other people, and how printed texts and images interacted within complex media ecologies. Interactive is a word most often associated with digital technologies, but we contend that a nuanced and historicized concept of interactivity is key to developing a deeper understanding of print, which emerged as the predominant communications technology in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The book’s eighteen short chapters offer an alphabetically arranged guide to key concepts in our approach to print culture in this period. Some chapters engage with cultural practices that were shaped by print, some with forms of printed matter that reflected or produced cultural practices. The chapters do not by any means cover all possible topics, and they are not intended to serve as an introductory guide to print culture in this period or a comprehensive overview of it. Rather, each chapter aims to articulate an aspect of our theoretical approach and to show it at work through examples chosen from across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (with some effort to look before and after this period), from Britain, France, and Germany (with some examples from North America, Austria, and Italy). The chapters are arranged alphabetically and can be read in any order. Keywords at the head of each chapter and cross-references between them allow readers to navigate through the volume in a variety of ways. The book’s epilogue tries to imagine nonbookish ways of representing these same relationships—interacting with print using new computational forms of navigation.

The Era of Print Saturation

Print was undoubtedly important before and after the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but European culture can most fully be described as a print culture in these two centuries. From the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 that freed English printers from government control to the technological innovations of 1897 that allowed photographs to be printed in newspapers, this period saw print in all its forms move to the center of cultural life without eliminating other communications media. Innovations included new technologies of printing (the iron press, the steam press, stereotypy), new methods for reproducing images (steel-plate engraving, halftone, chromolithography), new distribution infrastructures (macadamized roads, canals, railways), and new understandings of intellectual property, which crystallized into new copyright laws. In conflict, competition, or synergy with other communications media, print created new spaces for people to gather (in libraries, reading societies, printsellers’ exhibitions, and artists’ academies), newly diversified industries (as printing, publishing, and retailing became distinct operations), and new genres of writing (such as reviews, synopses, children’s literature, and gift books). Although there were significant differences between national contexts, the similarities are sufficient to sustain an account of print culture that is widely applicable.

This is the period of extensive reading, both in the sense that more people were reading and in the sense that there was more for them to read (Engelsing). The rise of popular education ensured a pan-European spread of literacy in our period: only 20–30 percent of adults in Catholic European countries and 35–45 percent of adults in Protestant European countries could read in 1700; by 1900 the figure for both was 90 percent. These members of the first true mass-reading public had much more reading matter to contend with, as the total amount of printed matter in circulation grew exponentially from the 1770s onward. They used print in conjunction with other media to disseminate and appropriate ideas, influence and form opinions, and define and redefine communities.

The total amount of printed matter in circulation and the literacy rate both continued to rise into the twentieth century. But with the invention of sound and screen media, print would gradually be displaced from its position of cultural centrality. The invention of the gramophone and the cinema—or print’s partial remediation through microfilm—did not kill print off any more than print killed off manuscript or oral culture, although both periods witnessed numerous laments to this effect. Indeed, print circulated information about these new media and helped to structure cultural consumers’ interactions with them. But over time sound and screen media would challenge print’s dominance over the circulation of information, the structure of education, the forms of public debate, and the pursuit of pleasure. We thus imagine our period to sit in the middle of a heuristically valuable three-part structure: emergence, saturation, and differentiation.

The question that remains is whether the current displacement of print has introduced a much-debated fourth era (a so-called late, decadent, or dying age of print) (Striphas), the result of the impact of digital media, or simply more differentiation (Piper 2012). Either way, it is clear that a history of mediation after 1900 could not reliably take print as its primary object of study. Our focus, by contrast, is on a moment in time when a single form of mediation—one composed of numerous different technical and institutional components—assumed cultural dominance through interactions with other channels of mediation. In this, we hope to provide a useful history to understand our present moment when the digital threatens to subsume all other forms of communication within itself.

Book History and Print History

The history of the book (histoire du livre, Geschichte des Buchwesens, Buchwissenschaft) has emerged as a rapidly expanding international field of interdisciplinary research in the past two decades. Pioneering studies by Darnton, Kernan, Wittmann, and Febvre and Martin have been followed by more recent groundbreaking synoptic accounts (Raven 2007; Siskin; Chartier 1994; St. Clair; McKitterick; Piper 2009b; Giesecke) as well as specialized studies on the role of gender (Keen 2012; Price 2000; Hesse; Dalton; Hoagwood and Ledbetter) and class (Warner 1990; Rose; Wadsworth; O’Malley) in the making of what is now commonly referred to as print culture. Uniting and revitalizing the existing scholarly endeavors of analytic bibliography, publishing history, textual editing, and literary study, the field is beginning to achieve a greater degree of theoretical sophistication and to reflect on its own practice.

Our aim with this book, however, is not simply to join the debate but also to transform some of its premises. Taking the new degree of theoretical self-consciousness within the field as our starting point, we aim to rethink the habitual narratives of book history—indeed, its identity as book history—in an effort to resituate print within a broader media ecology. We take aim at three persistent myths about print culture in this period:

1. Print displaced other media. Existing studies often represent the rise of print in the eighteenth century as a rapid and total displacement of other media (Kiesel; Eisenstein; Martin 1994; Kernan 1989). We focus instead on the continued importance of nonprint spaces (such as manuscript albums, epistolary correspondence, and salon conversations) and cultural practices linked to orality, performance, and sociability (such as reading aloud in domestic settings, public lectures, or tableaux vivants). These media thrived alongside print, not simply as anachronistic, defensive, or asocial practices (as asserted by Warner 1990; Thornton 2009; Gitelman; Newlyn). But they also did so by interacting with print: contesting or promoting it and engendering new forms of medial, cultural, and social interaction. These interactions force us to rethink the supposed asociability that surrounded the rise of silent reading and private viewing that have often been thought to characterize our period (Chartier 1994; Jajdelska; Schön).

2. Print equals letterpress (or engraving). Existing studies often align print exclusively with either writing (Williams; Kittler; Siskin; Koschorke) or the reproduction of visual art (Clayton; Bann 2001). We focus instead on graphic spaces in which text and image interacted, such as gift books, banknotes, caricatures, catalogs, or broadsides, and we explore the relationships between print and other areas of visual practice, such as drawing, painting, architecture, and sculpture. These interactions complicate received narratives of the antagonism between literary and visual culture (D’Arcy Wood; Wettlaufer; Neumann and Oesterle), instead showing how print’s meaning was refracted through its representation of other media.

3. Print culture is national culture. Existing studies often associate print culture with national culture, following Benedict Anderson’s influential approach. Work by Adrian Johns and William St. Clair reaffirms the national differences between European print cultures. Mindful of the extraordinary extent to which print culture was defined by the international circulation of texts, images, and people, we examine parallels as well as exchanges between national cultures. These interactions show that print culture did not emerge only in the crucible of national fervor but also within an international context of translation, imitation, reprinting, and cultural cross-fertilization.

Studies of print culture often rely on models of mutually exclusive spheres to understand the impact of print culture. Whether public-private, producer-consumer, male-female, parent-child, national-foreign, or even modern-premodern, such spherical thinking dates back to the work of Jürgen Habermas on the political ramifications of the public sphere and the voluminous critical literature that followed (Calhoun; Robbins; Meehan; Warner 2002). Such work underestimates, however, how interactive print formats such as conduct literature, gift books, translations, and children’s books pushed individuals to negotiate between spheres by calling on a variety of media to suit the varied nature of their relationships (Dalton; Heesen 2002). As we argue, the history of print media benefits from an understanding of the way print allows individuals to move between spheres or social domains, what we call the act of intermediation.

A History of Print Intermediality

These myths about print culture isolate print from other media and sever the connections it created among media and between individuals. By contrast, our approach traces international, interdisciplinary, and intermedial interactions. We apply and extend important new research in the field of intermediality (Gitelman and Pingree; Bolter and Grusin; Jenkins; Thomsen) to analyze cultural practices of intermediality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These cultural practices were widespread: children traced images printed in books [PAPER]; engravers reproduced the painted stage sets of the revolutionary spectacle [STAGES]; publishers engaged in multimedia advertising campaigns [ADVERTISING]; salons turned their conversation into publications and used the publications they read to stimulate conversation [CONVERSATIONS]; readers thickened their books with illustrations cut out from other books or with the autographs of loved ones [THICKENING]; viewers took printed catalogs into a growing number of public galleries or preserved them for later reverie [CATALOGS]; fans of Lord Byron turned from his poems to his image [FRONTISPIECES]; admirers of Goethe copied passages from his printed texts into commonplace books [MANUSCRIPT]; and archivists were busy arguing over what kinds of printed material had accrued enough value to be preserved among the growing mass of flying paper and loose leaves [EPHEMERALITY].

For the purposes of this volume, we identify three distinct kinds of interaction—people interacting with print, print interacting with nonprint media, and people interacting with each other through the medium of print—though we expect, indeed hope, that others will identify more and expand on our taxonomy.

People in the World of Print

At first glance, people might not seem to interact with print at all. Printed texts are open to the same complaint that Socrates made about writing more generally—no matter how vehemently you disagree with them or how persuasively you counter their arguments, they go on saying exactly the same thing. But in fact people interacted with print in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a wide variety of ways. They cut their way into the leaves of books with paper knives [PAPER]. They took pen and ink in hand and marked their books with ownership inscriptions, marginalia, and corrections [MARKING]. They wrote poems on flyleaves [MANUSCRIPT]. They bound their books in a style of their choosing, sometimes gathering texts together in unexpected ways [BINDING]. They unbound books to extra-illustrate them, tipped in manuscript leaves, and folded out large-format maps, facsimiles, or images. They collected, mounted, and displayed printed images [ENGRAVING]. They made their own books by folding and stab-stitching loose sheets; they cut text and images from magazines and pasted them into scrapbooks [PAPER]. In the age of movable type, authors and publishers also regularly tinkered with their writing in subsequent editions. Print was rarely fixed and uniform, but subject to constant intervention by authors and readers [PROLIFERATION].

We take the volume of Thomas Gray’s Poems, published in Glasgow in 1768 and held in the Morgan Library’s Gordon Ray Collection, as a prime example of the kind of interactivity we are talking about (fig. 0.1, plate 1). In it we see that a space has been cut out of the book’s boards to create a windowed placeholder for a twig. A caption beneath the window indicates "This twig is from the ‘yew tree’ mentioned in the fourth stanza of ‘Gray’s Elegy.’ The note continues to indicate that the twig was presented on October 1848 to Howard Edwards. Further paste-ins show a printed clip of the relevant stanza from Gray above an engraving of the country churchyard that forms the subject of Gray’s Elegy. The opposite endpaper has details of the auction catalog from which the book was purchased in 1804. Collectively, the various cutouts and paste-ins tell a story of both the appreciation of Gray’s Elegy" and the appreciation of the book Poems itself as an object made to tell its own story. We see how illustration, letterpress, manuscript, binding, and found object interact here to connect the book to specific times and places: the owner’s initial encounter with the churchyard of Gray’s poem, the subsequent gift exchange with the book’s later recipient in 1848, the institutional conditions of the book’s circulation thirty-six years after its initial publication, and of course its eventual inclusion in the Morgan Library’s special collections. The book records the individual, social, and medial interactions that give it meaning as an object in the world.

0.1. Pieces of a twig allegedly from the yew tree mentioned in Thomas Gray’s Elegy mounted under cheesecloth in a recess cut out of the board of the inside cover, from Poems (1768). The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (PML 145576). Bequest of Gordon N. Ray, 1987. Photograph: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

As this example suggests, books (and print more generally) were thus a part of the everyday lives of men, women, and children living throughout the period in question; books were taken outdoors and overseas, and thus subjected to the elements; they