The centrality of the reader
October 4, 2010
I’m scheduling this to post automatically while I’m giving my first Historical Bibliography lecture of the year. Updating my notes, I realised how far the discipline has come in recent years, and how glad I am to be teaching and studying it at the start of this century rather than the last.
I always quote Greg’s 1932 statement:
What the bibliographer is concerned with is pieces of paper or parchment covered with certain written or printed signs. With these signs he is concerned merely as arbitrary marks: their meaning is no business of his.
And I always point out that his final statement no longer holds true for most of us today. But it’s only this weekend that it’s dawned on me how fundamentally I’m opposed to this idea. I much prefer Darnton’s view:
Printed books generally pass through the same life cycle, It could be described as a communications circuit that runs from the author to the publisher … the printer, the shipper, the bookseller and the reader. The reader completes the circuit because he influences the author both before and after the act of composition.
Where would poets be without the opportunity to read their work aloud to an audience and then redraft the places that were not working so well? And where would a book of any genre be without its readers? Left on the shelf, like so much expensive wallpaper.
So, much as I spend a lot of time advocating the importance of understanding the book as physical object, and the technical processes that produce it, maybe I am a social historian at heart after all … And with regard to my own studies, I realise I’m looking at Walter de la Mare the reader and how this influenced Walter de la Mare the writer. Reading first of all …
Image: final slide from ‘ What is Historical Bibliography?’ lecture, including pictures by Topsy Qur’et and goXuno Reviews
