Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times

by Andrew Piper

  Perhaps in response, more and more of our collecting is happening in the clouds. Like Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002), which reworked the popular video game so that viewers only saw the clouds floating in the background, clouds are where we dream of the collectivity of ideas.36 New websites like Public Collectors are helping make our digital collections available and shareable online. Unlike the bounded nature of our studies, homes, books, or even hard drives, cloud collections are more interchangeable. As Mimi Zeiger has written, today we no longer collect objects, we collect collections.37 We share presentations of our own and other people’s digital “shelves” without possessing anything tangible underneath, indeed without a strong sense of possession. The inherent tension of any collection—between having and halving, between owning and transmitting—is now decidedly tilted in the direction of commonality.

  But if I do not have my collection of digital files in the same way as my books, will I be able to give them away in the same manner? When I pass down my books to my children, I imagine I will be sharing with them a sense of time. Books are meaningful because as material objects they bear time within themselves. They convey a sense of time passing in a double sense—my having been there for some period of time and my no longer being there (“I was there,” a book says). Digital files, on the other hand, do not register time in quite this way. In order for them to remain legible to both machines and humans, they must be continually translated into new formats (“migrated” in technical terms). Files overwrite time. My physical copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, with its signature Vintage cover, its now slightly faded pages, its dog-ears, and its occasional uneven underlinings, will tell my children something that my digital copy of George Sand’s Indiana will not. We may look at a machine and feel a sense of time (my Apple IIe if I had kept it), but we cannot, currently at least, look at a file and feel time in the same way.

  And yet when I share my books with my children, I will only be sharing a part of me. There is only so much my children will ever learn about me. Even less so from my library. As they hold my books in their hands, they will be holding on to something that I once held. They will be able to look at my annotations, which are usually underlinings, but also occasionally notes in the margins summarizing what I’ve read or even less frequently ideas in the back pages for books or essays that I would like to write in the future. They will also be able to see where I gave up when I was reading, where the pages begin to look suspiciously unused.

  But through it all they will experience how little of me, how little of what I was doing during all those hours when I was reading, can be communicated to them. Unlike the digital file, which exists in a far more exacting web of measurability (when I read it, how long I read it, what I did with it), the used book is remarkably unmarked by comparison. In passing down my books I am passing down a sense of aloneness, of dwelling in myself. I am passing down a sense of difference. When I share my books with my children, I will be sharing the limits of sharing. Books are the original difference engines.

  SIX

  Among the Trees

  And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE [as you like it]

  On a moonlit evening in 1772 in a wooded grove outside of Göttingen, seven young men gathered together to pledge their allegiance to poetry and each other. They crowned their hats with leaves, placed them beneath a large oak tree, and began to dance in a circle around the tree while holding hands. As one member later wrote to a friend, they called upon the moon and the stars to be their witnesses to this new Bund or union. They read poems aloud and pledged to do so at regular weekly meetings. One week later they met again and began recording their poetry in a book. It was inscribed with the words “The Union is Eternal.” And so was born one of the most influential poetic movements of the eighteenth century that came to be known as the Union of the Göttingen Grove.1

  By the end of the eighteenth century reading outdoors was decidedly in vogue. As the last chains on books were being removed from libraries, men and women were going out into the woods to read books more than ever before. They were in search of peace and quiet, but also communion—with nature and with one another (fig. 6.1). Reading outdoors brought readers together through the naturalness of their feelings, not the artificial constraints of the salon or the schoolroom. Like the sinewy and subterranean connections of the trees’ roots, outdoor reading was a way to feel more intertwined with one another through the shared caverns of inner sentiment. Outdoor reading made readers feel more connected.

  [FIGURE 6.1] Heinrich Beck, Five Women Reading Werther (n.d.). Courtesy of the Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf, Germany.

  If the vogue for reading in the woods brought readers together in new ways, it also brought readers and their books together in new ways as well. Reading among the trees was a means of connecting with a sense of the book’s origins at a time when books were appearing in ever greater numbers. Both the English “book” and German Buch derive from the word for beech tree, while in India, it was the birch tree that served as one of the first writing surfaces. The Latin codex, which is the technical term used for books, derives from the word for the trunk of a tree. And the Greek biblion, from which we have both “Bible” and “bibliography,” comes from the name of the Phoenician town Byblus, which was a major exporter of papyrus, the plant that served as a key early writing surface for books in the Mediterranean region and beyond.

  Reading among the trees was thus a literal reminder of where books came from. As in the medieval tree of knowledge or Darwin’s tree of descent, reading among the trees—reading understood as a tree—was a quest for origins (fig. 6.2). It was a way of reading backward, a search for roots. But in those seemingly endless forking paths of the trees’ branches, readers also began to see a potent symbol for the branching of readerly thought, what the poet John Keats memorably called “the mazy world of silvery enchantment.”2 In turning outward toward the woods, the tree reminded readers of a turn inward into the expanse of human thought. Even at its most experientially poignant (being in nature), reading a book outdoors could serve as a means of accessing no place at all. It served as a space to lose one’s sense of place.

  [FIGURE 6.2] Ramon Llull, Arbor Scientiae (1505), SC.L9665.482ab. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

  Reading in the woods is just one example of the way reading is deeply shaped by where we read. Whether on trains, planes, buses, in bed, at a carrel, by a bookshelf, or under a tree, we will read just about anywhere. But as Gertrude Stein understood in those words, “book was there,” it matters deeply where one reads. Reading and place conjoin to form a powerful mix of meaning. “Oh what I would have given to be able to read my Homer on board,” wrote the young German pastor Johann Gottfried Herder in 1769 as he made his way at the beginning of his career from Europe’s outskirts in Riga to the continent’s intellectual center. Every book has its place.

  Today, the space of reading seems increasingly unsettled. Digital technologies are premised on a core conviction, almost religious in tone, about the power of mobility. Reading is once again on the move. At the same time, reading is in more places and more versions than ever before. We live in what is called a multiscreen reality.3 Where early cinemagoers were struck by the imposing size of the projected image, its monumental singularity, our interactions with screens are increasingly broken up into different spaces, formats, and versions. Diminution is followed by dissemination. This too has important bibliographic precedents. Where the large-format folio was the premier textual instrument of the Renaissance, the growing commercialization of reading in the nineteenth century led to more differentiated types of books to be read in more diverse settings (schools, bedrooms, trains, etc).

  But where the book was both somewhere and nowhere—the way its strongly place-bound nature allowed readers to lose a sense of place while reading—digital
texts by contrast are almost always somewhere and elsewhere. Woven ever more tightly into our daily lives, digital texts are more intensely place bound than books ever were. The ubiquity of cell phones, GPS devices, radio frequency ID tags, and new location services like Foursquare (“unlock your city”) mean that our texts are not only with us wherever we go, they are there to keep us from getting lost. And yet in their highly distributed nature, they are broken up across new, and increasingly transnational, geographies. What does it mean for a reader to be in so many places at once?

  The history of reading is indebted to the spaces where we read and the types of reading these spaces promote. But our reading tools have also played an important role in establishing a connection between individuals and a sense of place. Reading material isn’t just there. It helps structure our relationship to space and thus the space of thought.

  . . .

  Reading has for much of its history been associated with a sense of intimacy. We not only hold books before us in a sense of prayer, we also cradle them. Augustine’s conversion, we remember, took place in response to the child’s voice singing the refrain, “Take it and read.” Well before the invention of childhood reading, the book spoke to us in the familiar sounds of the lullaby.

  When we look at images of readers, we very often find them in corners (fig. 6.3).4 As Gaston Bachelard writes of the corner, “An imaginary room rises up around our bodies. The shadows are walls, a piece of furniture is a barrier, hangings are a roof.”5 The corner is both an inside and an outside. It folds back on us, a space within a space. The Gothic cathedrals of European monasteries abounded with corners, which were used by monks as reading spaces. As reading moved out of the study and into the home, people began to speak of the reading nook. This is where we “curl up” with a (or the) “good book.” The book’s goodness is a function of its power of enclosure. The Romantic bower, that dreamy space of enchantment and “curtain’d canopies” (again Keats), was another way of imagining this inside without.

  [FIGURE 6.3] Headpiece from Leigh Hunt, A Book for a Corner (1849). Courtesy of Victoria University Library, Toronto.

  In the corner we make ourselves smaller, curling, coiling, and contracting. It is where we dream of the miniature. The miniature book, defined as being less than three inches on a side and dating back to the fifteenth century, belongs to this space of the recess, to a time out.6 Thumb Bibles, finger calendars, or the Mignon Almanacs of publishers like Joseph Riedl in Vienna—these were all popular ways that reading shrank over the centuries, as in Jones & Company’s Traveling Library (1824–32), which contained fifty-three volumes of British classics in a single case that measured nine by seventeen inches. When opened, it resembled a classical Greek temple. Small books were the physical expressions of small characters, some of the most popular in the history of literature, like Tom Thumb, the Lilliputians, or Goethe’s Melusina, a nymph who lived in a traveling (book) case.

  The miniature contracts time and space, but it does so to expand them in a different register. “Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness,” says Bachelard.7 It is a foretaste of something to come, a reminder of the strong connection between intimacy and “intimation.” In this way, the miniature world of the nook, bower, or garden is a space of utopia (literally meaning no place). But it is also one of folly. Like so many characters from W. G. Sebald’s fictions who work on small, irrelevant things, the miniature can be useless, mundane, even self-destructive.8 As Toni Morrison writes in Paradise, “How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.”9 The miniature is how we live with the extraordinary, with overly grand ideas like “paradise.” The nook may open out into an imaginative expanse, like the windows that were above medieval reading desks for a lack of interior lighting or the streams that were compulsory for the bower’s architecture. But the nook also allows us to reenter the world—to go back to work.

  Reading in the corner or beneath a tree is a way of taking time. It takes time away from something, but it also has a duration. That is why debates about reading can be so contested today—it sits uncomfortably within the iron laws of productivity. The gods of efficiency look disapprovingly upon readers. The increasingly fragile state of the humanities has much to do with the fact that it is a field largely premised on reading a great deal.10

  In order to take the time to read, individuals need support, and not just the institutional kind. Reading can also be physically tiring. It seems to run counter to the body’s natural rhythms. As the book historian Erich Schön has pointed out, there is a rich tradition of reading imagery in which we see readers resting their heads on their hands while they read (fig. 6.4).11 The history of reading is as much about furniture as it is architecture and economics, the places where we rest our heads or our backs at the same time that we hold our books aloft.

  [FIGURE 6.4] Adolf Schroedter, Don Quixote Sitting in an Armchair While Reading the Chivalric Novel “Amadis of Gaul” (1834). Courtesy of bpk Berlin/Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Klaus Goeken/Art Resource, New York.

  With the spread of consumer culture at the end of the eighteenth century, new specialized reading chairs were invented for the home, places where individuals could forget about their bodies as they read (fig. 6.5). As Edgar Allen Poe would write in his “Philosophy of Furniture,” describing his ideal domestic décor, “Repose speaks in all.”12 The book, and the material support to which it corresponded, was understood as a form of rest—it allowed readers to rest from the rigors of daily life; to rest on it in the sense of depending on something; and finally it was a form of rest in the sense of waste, of something leftover (as in what are you going to do with the rest of that?). The book was there so that we wouldn’t have to be.

  [FIGURE 6.5] Reading chair from the Journal des Luxus und der Moden (February 1799). Courtesy of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, HAAB/ZA-2011.

  Reading among the trees was gradually complemented by another kind of outdoor reading, that of reading in the streets, which had much to do with the rise of metropolitan centers in Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like its pastoral counterpart, the urban landscape was imagined to abound with corners—the edge of a park bench, a seat in the subway, a bus stop, a stairwell, a stoop, a sculpture, an overhang, or an underpass. But unlike the domestic cranny or the idyllic bower, the meaning of the urban recess was darker, more menacing. It was a gateway to uncertainty, updating the threatening aspects of the fairy tale set in the woods (a space both open and closed, but always too large). Speaking of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, Baudelaire would write of the “sinuous folds of the old capital,” while Thomas de Quincey would muse on the “knotty problems of alleys” and the “enigmatical entries” of London’s streets during his opium-laden wanderings in the 1820s.13

  For the twentieth-century philosopher and journalist Siegfried Kracauer, who recorded his walks through the seedier pockets of Berlin between the world wars, the city was populated by an urban underclass for whom “nothing was any longer at-hand.”14 Unlike the naturalist in the woods or the comfortable home-dwellers who were losing themselves in their books, in the hollow city of modern life readers were increasingly getting lost. It was out of these urban recesses that emerged new experimental forms of writing, from the Dada headquarters of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 to CBGB in 1970s New York, which helped spawn the punk “zine.”15 The urban nook, social resistance, and the reimagined page went hand in hand.

  Books not only help us get lost—whether in ourselves or in the world—they also help us find our way. The travel guide dates back to the popular genre of the Ars apodemica, a dense compendium of information about foreign spaces that owed much to the encyclopedic urges of the Renaissance.16 It came into its own in the nineteenth century with the rise of tourism, supported through popular travel series from publishers like Karl Baedeker in Germany or John Murray in Britain. These books taught
us where to go and what to see. Goethe said that having a travel guide in Italy was like watching a book lying on embers—it gradually shriveled up in the face of the real thing.17 But he would also spend his evenings revisiting the books of buildings or plants he had seen during the day. The book has an oscillatory relationship to travel, opening and closing to reveal something deeper about where we are.

  Nowhere is this oscillation of reading more important than when we don’t go very far: when we browse. The term “browsing” comes from the now obsolete noun “browse,” for the young shoots of a tree. Although it was only used in relation to reading for the first time in the nineteenth century, the practice is far older. Take, for example, the famed scholar’s wheel, as imagined by the Renaissance engineer Agostino Ramelli (fig. 6.6). The serenity of the book’s single, turned page is transformed into the heavy, churning revolutions of the book wheel (recalling no doubt that proto-industrial processor, the mill wheel). Sometimes one book will simply not do. When we read we often triangulate multiple sources to arrive at the truth.18

  [FIGURE 6.6] Book wheel from Agostino Ramelli, Le diverse et artificiose machine (1588). Courtesy of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, New Haven, CT.

  By the twentieth century, churning had acquired the sense of churning out, to produce something of lesser quality. Surplus has become decidedly negative, but not so for earlier readers. We may dream in the nook, but we also need places where we can skip, skim, churn, graze, browse, or process. As Emerson remarked, “Often a chapter is enough. The glance reveals when the gaze obscures.”19 Discontinuous reading was and still is one of the most important types of reading. As Roland Barthes remarks, “We read a text (of pleasure) the way a fly buzzes around a room: with sudden, deceptively decisive turns, fervent and futile.”20