Jason McElligott and Eve Patten, eds. The Perils of Print Culture: Book, Print and Publishing History in Theory and Practice. New Directions in Book History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xii, 242p. ISBN 9781137415318. UK £55.00 / US $95.00 (hardback).
Print culture might be defined as the point at which print developed permanence and a pervasive presence — a point, equally, at which print reached unprecedented levels of ubiquity and commercialisation. But of the grand narratives regarding the uses and usefulness of print that have evolved to answer questions about British society and culture, many fall foul of ever-shifting cultural norms, while others inadequately and unequally establish the history of print in its production, dissemination and reception.
Such grand narratives have come to be questioned and treated with reservation.
Well timed, then, is this collection of essays on various “perils” of print culture, which is derived from a conference held at Trinity College, Dublin, in 2010. Its thirteen essays all use case studies which question in some way the authority of overarching methodologies and assumptions that have come to permeate studies in Western print culture. Such assumptions need interrogating as we become ever more entrenched in our own, digital, culture, in which our ideas about what a book is have become increasingly removed from the notions that once existed.
Leslie Howsham, then, asks how centralised the discipline of print culture is when the field lacks a distinct set of criteria and methodologies to assist in the assessment of the nature and ontology of “the book,” “book history” and “print culture.” Freyja Cox Jensen’s essay explores the problems surrounding paying too much attention to what is in print, and the impractical and sometimes unlikely paradigms that can be accepted by the scholarly community, as prompted by the acceptance of partial (“extant”) history standing in for complete history. Matthew Cheung Salisbury assesses the prevalence of electronic resources such as EEBO, and how they are commonly regarded as an acceptable medium for the study of book history and print culture, even though such studies must naturally, and alarmingly, be bereft of the physical properties of the book that they profess to have at its heart. Mark Williams evaluates the ways in which “ideas of textual authority were transmitted and negotiated” (65) from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and how such ways continue to impact our understanding.
Sarah Crider Arnat questions how large theories and methodologies are balanced by smaller local studies. She asks how, and why, the general should be privileged over the specific. This is because, she argues, large-scale projects “sweep away” (83) national and regional variation. Toby Barnard assesses the rising popularity of print in Ireland from 1680 to 1800 as it spread from Dublin to the provinces. The growing availability of print, Barnard argues, “deepened the integration of Ireland into the British cultural, linguistic and (arguably) political orbit” (96). However Barnard assesses material alongside the perils of what cannot be assessed: lost texts, (the difficulties of evaluating) reception and readership, and the handwritten and the oral in relation to print. Rebecca Bullard presents a case for signatures in printed texts as a point of interest for readers. Such interest, she argues, stems from the fact that early modern books were sold in bookshops unbound. She uses aberrant signatures to suggest ways in which mis-signaturing could have been interpreted by the first readers. Margery Masterson evaluates how access to a large number of periodicals via digitisation and key word searches has caused historians to “contemplate their research parameters” (146). David Finkelstein argues that there is a need for interest in the boundary between print culture, migration studies, cultural geography and economic, political and cultural history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies. He uses archival and primary records in Scottish, Irish and English print trade unions to examine the “tramping typographer,” or members of the printing diaspora who were wooed to work overseas.
Annette Walton seeks to assert how important print was in the propaganda and military wars of the Crown and Parliament in the 1640s and 1650s. She argues that seeming patterns in the collections and interest of the collectors of such print items can lead to assertions based on “foundations of sand” (178). Cristina Neagu assesses Albrecht Dürer’s lesser-known contribution in the arts in the form of language and writing, particularly relating to a small series of broadsheets. Anna Luker Guilding evaluates the peculiarities of periodicals and their relationship to Caroline Gilman’s Rose magazines, published between 1832 and 1839. Finally, James Raven reminds us that the term “print culture” is problematic in nature and considers three interlinked methodological perils of bibliometrics, national boundaries, and how the products of print cultures are evaluated.
In all, this volume is forward-facing in its assessment of various “perils” in print culture, whether in its discussion of how the inclusion of physical (and virtual) forms of material need to be widened, methodologies need to be rethought, or the danger of broad assumptions made about print culture based on limited, generalised studies. The volume is a good starting point for students of book history and print culture. Equally, it is useful for established scholars who wish to remind themselves of the sorts of topical questions being asked in this field of enquiry.
Natalie C.J. Aldred
Independent Researcher
