The Nature of the Book: Print and

Knowledge in the Making

Adrian Johns

University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1998.

766p.

Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsA Note on Conventions 1: Introduction: The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book 2: Literatory Life: The Culture and Credibility of the Printed Book in Early Modern London 3: "The Advancement of Wholesome Knowledge": The Politics of Print and the Practices of Propriety 4: John Streater and the Knights of the Galaxy: Republicanism, Natural Knowledge, and the Politics of Printing 5: Faust and the Pirates: The Cultural Construction of the Printing Revolution 6: The Physiology of Reading: Print and the Passions 7: Piracy and Usurpation: Natural Philosophy in the Restoration 8: Histories of the Heavens: John Flamsteed, Isaac Newton, and the Historia Coelestis Britannica 9: Conclusion Bibliography (66 p; 1,600 items) Index (44p)

London

The Nature of the Book transports us back to early modern (seventeenth century) London.

“sordid and splendid, dank and magnificent,”

Its “domains,” the cultural setting for the new “print culture”

Print houses and bookshops, city square, courtrooms and coffeehouses dynamic localities defined by physical environment, work, and sociability. Here Johns focuses on the culture and credibility of the printed book, the politics of printing, the mechanics of book production, piracy, plagiarism, and authorship - conflicts of intellectual property.

The printing press stood at the center of this worldof deal-makers, stationers (a community, or guild,of printers and booksellers chartered by QueenMary in 1577),hawkers, re-printing, textual manipulation.

Printing shops of London, how they operated, by who, their number (fifty through the century, more than one hundred booksellers, coffeehouses,and taverns) where books were read, exchanged, bought, and stolen.

Later the Royal Society (chartered by Charles II in 1662) worked like a print licenser.

The Society watched experiments, recorded their observations, and accepted submissions of papers outlining inventions and questions. It became the institutional context of scientific investigation and the earliest scientific journal in Europe.

The Society did not authorize the truth of their content, rather vouched for their reliability, similar to a university press today.

In this dawn of scientific revolution “experimental natural philosophy relied on maintenance of credit through the process of correspondence and publication.

However, this was a world of plagiarism - even Isaac Newton himself suffered from unauthorized publication.

Libel in the next age will be history, warned Newton and his counterparts.

Reading

In The Physiology of Reading: Print and the Passions, Johns elaborates on “proper reading;” a new concept brought about by the mass distribution of books.

Reading was enmeshed with knowing.

Early modern people arrived at natural knowledge through the “skill” of reading.

Print represented a technology for knowing, and books were a place to record knowledge. How people read, how they distinguished between the creditable and the suspect washow they knew things.

This meant the proper disciplining of high-spirited “passions.”

Whether scientific materials read by intelligent English thinkers such as John Locke, or the interpretive readings of scripture by commoners or “non-conformists” like the Quakers, the volatile world of reading was a source of concern.

The Reformation, as example, had allowed the individual experience of reading. Protestantism rested on scripture. “In reading, says Johns, “lay its definition, practice, power, and propaganda.”

Johns relates how investigations into the origin of the printing press, ascertaining a place and individual for “credit,” was always in great debate.

Guttenberg, credited to have perfected the machine in 1455, was not their first or only choice.

The press was considered a providential gift, a blessing handed down from heaven. God was the ordainer and man the instrument (some even attributed knowledge of printing to Adam).

Others like Sir Francis Bacon called the press “a gross invention” and recommended “restricted publication of knowledge” which should be left to a select company of “interpreters of nature.”

Print would become a powerful instrument for enlightment and books “useful tools for creating and sustaining knowledge.”

Decended from Heaven

Minvera (science & trade) and Mercury (speed & commerce) passdown the printing press to Gutenberg.

Can we think of any other technological inventions that can be thought of as divine inspiration given to mankind?

Question

In other words, the “identity of print itself has to be made” and is not “intrinsically reliable.” The Nature of the Book attempts to uncover the “complex issues involved in the historical shaping of print.

One of the debates is Johns’s disagreement with the book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (1979). This critically acclaimed work argues that printing technology made experimental science possible because of the fixity and uniformity of print. Johns contention is that we are wrong to credit the machine (printing press) as a form of “fixity” to the written word.

The crucial issue is not fixity but credit and the degree to which a book might be granted credibility.

The destabilizing effects of book piracy, for example, had “epistemic as well as economic implications.” Readers could not automatically credit a book simply because it was printed. Early texts had to be established as trustworthy through historical and practical circumstances.

Theoretical Basis

Johns argues that the features of a book that we take for granted today; authenticity of author and text, publisher, uniformity; are “inherent characteristics” in a “technological order of reality.”

Seventeenth century London, this was not the

case.

Question

• Abridged editions• Vanity press• Publishers with hidden agendas• Ghostwriters• Government publications in restricted countries like China, Iran.• Countries that do not abide by present world-wide copyright laws. (Harry

Potter in Iran)

Today we think of the book as a reviewed, approved, and reliable piece of information. That was not the case in early modern England were the book could be used to manipulate information and its reader. Can we think of instances where the book might be “unreliable?”

On page one of his introduction Johns states “this book has not been produced with a specific, individual reader in mind.”

Although he admits, in part, his work is designed as a commercial product, he is aware that its size (766 pages) and price may limit its readership.

The credibility of the book in seventeenth century England rested with its choice of publisher. Today also, the character of a publisher is still an important issue.

Johns’s publisher, the University of Chicago Press, is a case in point. His choice of publisher enhances the “credit” of The Nature of the Book and will encourage scholars as well as other readers to read it.

Audience

This is a book about European intellectual history.

Before the printed book, scholars spent years worrying about accuracy of handwritten texts.

The printing press supposedly brought “fixity.”

Standardized material reproduced in quantity which could be disseminated in a free marketplace in a new “print culture.”

Progress and intellectual freedom brought people reading and interpreting, codifying laws and languages, formulating and circulating their own theories of creation and science -- the Protestant Reformation, the rise of the nation-state, and the scientific revolution.

Interpretation

The central premise of The Nature of the Book is the “relation between print and knowledge.”

The interplay of the scientific and print revolutions and their roles in production and dissemination of knowledge. The importance of locale in the making of knowledge – “local craft into global science” - that creates communities the practice that makes information infrastructures for the nature of scientific truth. Johns expounds the role of print in transcending place and rendering natural knowledge universal.

Knowledge Structures

• Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield• Civil Disobedience Henry Thoreau• The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx• Declaration to His Countrymen: 95Theses Martin Luther• Family Limitation Margaret Sanger • The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan• Mein Kamp Adolf Hitler• The Origin of the Species Charles Darwin• The Rights of Man Thomas Paine• Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie• Sexual Behavior in the Human Male Alfred Kinsey• The Works of Mao Tse-Tung

QuestionJohns quotes Roger Chartier (Chartier, Roger. Cultural Origins of the French

Revolution. Durham; Duke University Press, 1991, p85-7) “Do books make revolutions? and answers “books themselves do not, but the ways they are made, used, and read just might.” Can we think of some examples?

Reviews

Cyndia Susan Clegg Renaissance Quarterly: the conversation begun by Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, took another twenty years to see the emergence of other important work in this “new academic discipline called the history of the book.” Johns’s “ambitious” study “which pretends to address printing, writing, and reading in early modern England, really tells us more about the relationship between printing and scientific authorship.” Johns gets “detoured” with his “relationship natural philosophers saw between religious enthusiasm and bad reading practices” which adds “little to longstanding theories of learning or print’s distinctive character.” Clegg sees “serious errors” regarding the books generalizations regarding “print culture’s emergence in early modern England.” “The book’s clear bias that science is the only real knowledge.”

Graham Burnett The New Republc: this work of “meticulous scholarship” shows the author’s intelligence, painstaking research, and narrative gifts.”

Mark Rose, Criticism: Johns’s work was to “narrow, emphasizing the local and the particular. Very long stories, as long as some novels, take on a life of their own, distracting us from the main line of the book’s argument.”

Alice Tobbiner History: Review of New Books: into this “span of social history Johns has taken the book, a tool for the making of content and context which affects human comprehension, and created a “geometry of reader, author, and publisher” which produced a “singular event in human history – the birth and evolution of the book”