Home May 2000 Vol 61 No 3 Rota book review

College and Research Libraries
May 2000, Vol. 61, No. 3

Book Review

Rota, Anthony. Apart from the Text. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Pr., 1998. 234p. $35 (ISBN 1-884718-52-3). LC 99-177769.

An unexpected dividend from the discussion surrounding the electronic book has been a new appreciation for the extraordinary technological achievement represented by the traditional paper book. This recognition is forthcoming not just from the usual suspects in the humanities, but from computer engineers trying to replicate the paper book’s many desirable features in the electronic medium, among them portability, durability, intratextual connectedness, and mnemotechnical sophistication. An MIT e-book designer was quoted recently as conceding that on balance, if books had been invented after the computer rather than long before, they would have surely been considered a “big breakthrough.” These books, he marvels, “have several hundred simultaneous paper-thin, flexible displays. They boot instantly. They run on very low power at a very low cost.”

In the wake of Derridan deconstructionism and especially Gérard Genette’s discovery of “paratexts” (e.g. titles, dust-jacket blurbs, etc.), humanists, too, are seizing with new vigor upon the physicality of books, their various nontextual qualities that serve as coconstituents of meaning in “the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader.” In this discussion, the book emerges as a sensual, even sensuous, whole, in which the quality of the paper, the typography of the printed page, design, bindings, and even smell all contribute to meaning creation, and cannot be taken from it or removed from the reading equation without loss. Princeton historian Robert Darnton, for example, in principle an advocate of the new reading technologies, points to “the sensation of paper” as being “bound up in the experience of reading.” (“We have a long-term kinetic memory of paper.”) Those who “dematerialize” the book do so, it would appear, at their own risk.

All of this discourse, from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, amounts to a late vindication for the “materialists” of book culture, those book historians and artifactualists who have raised a mountain of scholarship to explain how and why books have become precisely what they are today, and to provide students of the book and of book history with the means to describe exactly what they encounter when a book is carefully, “analytically” examined. This is one of the original meanings of the word bibliography: the study of books as physical objects. Those of us in the library profession who enjoyed a traditional library education may remember an exposure to the giants of this science—Fredson Bowers, for example, and his Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949)—and to the pioneers of book history, such as Philip Gaskell’s New Introduction to Bibliography (1972) or the book that Gaskell bases his own study on, R. B. McKerrow’s Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1928).

This brings us to the present volume, a work copublished by the distinguished Oak Knoll publishing house and England’s Private Library Association and written by the lifelong antiquarian bookseller and bookman, Anthony Rota. His topic is everything that constitutes the book “apart from the text”—paper, binding, illustration, dust jacket, etc.—and how economic and other factors have contributed to the way these accoutrements of the modern book have developed. Rota’s recurring theme is in fact “the interplay between economic forces and the history of book production.” Although concentrating on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the era of the industrialization of the printing process, Rota dips back into earlier eras where necessary to make his arguments.

Those familiar with the existing body of literature on historical bibliography may ask what distinguishes Apart from the Text from earlier treatments such as those of the Englishmen Gaskell and McKerrow mentioned above, or A Short History of the Printed Word by the American Warren Chappell (1970). One difference beyond Rota’s greater attention to economic and social factors is the generally greater level of detail and deeper penetration into the historical background as he describes what militated on the side of change. This can be seen, for example, by reading his discussion of the adoption of cold metal composing machinery following William Church’s patent in 1822, comparing it to Gaskell’s far shorter and less organic description (cf. New Introduction). Rota also gives much more attention to the technical issues involved in automatic line justification than, say, Chappell does in A Short History. This could easily become tedious, of course, but Rota writes perspicaciously and at times elegantly, displaying a stylistic command of English on a par with his command of the material he presents. Describing the “more sensitive” spacing of the Monotype machine in comparison with the competing Linotype, for example, Rota comments that the Linotype machine would occasionally “leave virtual rivers of white snaking down the page,” a nearly poetic formulation that catches exactly the experience of reading a page of type too loosely set. This elegance makes Apart from the Text not only informative, but also pleasurably readable.

Another difference vis-à-vis his predecessors is that Rota develops his approach thematically rather than chronologically, looking, for example, at “design” and “book bindings” in dedicated chapters, rather than proceeding century by century. The result is a greater cohesiveness as we regard each constituent part of the book. For example, we follow “paper” from its ancient beginnings straight through to contemporary issues associated with acidity and conservation. The cost of this approach, of course, is an implicit deconstruction of the book as a contiguous whole; the reader must, in a manner of speaking, reassemble it in his mind at the end of the book or of each chapter.

For his last three chapters, Rota breaks with this approach and considers in turn several publication types that responded to public needs or even created them, namely, the famous Victorian “three-decker” novels, the practice of serializing publication of individual works over time; the “yellow-back” and the advent of series publishing; and the rise of the cheap paperback, such as Penguin in England and Bantam and others in the United States. This is a veritable crash course in modern publishing history and sociology.

Apart from the Text was the presentation volume for members of the Private Libraries Association several years ago and clearly was written with the needs and historical sensitivities of the educated book collector in mind. Although no one will turn to it for a theory-conscious analysis of the codex book as a triumph of reading technology à la Walter Ong, much less as a characterization of the book as a semiological, “grammatological” entirety à la Jacques Derrida, an extraordinary amount of traditional book learning (in both meanings of this phrase) is contained in, and can be gleaned from, its pages. Granted, it is a conservative work—an anomaly, perhaps, at the close of one millennium and the dawn of a new one—but Apart from the Text can certainly take a proud place next to other works on book history on library shelves, both private and academic.—Jeffrey Garrett, Northwestern University.