Book Was There- Reading in Electronic Times

by Andrew Piper

  30. This is what the German Enlightenment philosopher G. E. Lessing meant by the animal’s Bestandheit in his treatise on the fable—from the verb stehen, “to stand.” See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Von dem Gebrauch der Tiere in der Fabel,” in Fabeln, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1967), 110. For a recent general history of children’s literature, see Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  31. Paula Modersohn-Becker, Letters and Journals, ed. G. Busch and L. von Reinken (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 270.

  32. For a discussion of the role that the face plays in the ethical practice of “acknowledgment” (Anerkennung in German), see Axel Honneth, “Invisibility: On the Epistemology of Recognition,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary 75, no. 1 (2003): 111–26. See his foundational work in German, Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993); and in English, Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003).

  CHAPTER 3

  1. Pliny the Younger, Letters, vol. 2, trans. William Melmoth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 27.

  2. John Keats, Letters, 4th ed., ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 101.

  3. Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 10, trans. R. A. B Mynors and Alexander Dalzell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 74. Erasmus was echoing the well-known biblical trope of eating God’s word in Ezekiel 2:9–10.

  4. John Miedema, Slow Reading (Duluth, MN: Litwin Books, 2009).

  5. Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993).

  6. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Stella McNichol (London: Penguin, 2000), 129.

  7. Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief (New York: Ballantine, 2000), 109.

  8. Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

  9. Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, trans. Herbert J. Hunt (London: Penguin, 1977), 22.

  10. For the argument that the codex is fundamentally about a nonlinear access to reading, see Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42–79.

  11. Marjorie Garber, “ “ “ (Quotation Marks),” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (1999): 653–79.

  12. Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 131.

  13. J. W. Goethe, Begegnungen und Gespräche, ed. Renate Grumach (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 2414.

  14. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

  15. As Lev Manovich writes, “Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives, databases or something else, underneath, on the level of material organization, they are all databases.” Lev Manovich, Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 228. For this reason Alan Liu calls the digital interface a “data pour,” the result of a “query” of structured language that resides elsewhere. Alan Liu, “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004): 49–84. N. Katherine Hayles employed early on the productive notion of the “flickering signifier” to describe the impermanence of digital text. See How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 25–49.

  16. Craig Mod, “Books in the Age of the iPad,” March 2010, http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/. Every age needs its French philosophers, and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially their work on the “plateau,” seems to have become a new point of reference for our contemporary moment. For a primer, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

  17. For an introduction to satellite culture, see Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

  18. For John Cayley, this new three-dimensionality of writing owes much of its origins to the mobilization of writing in time through the medium of the film credit sequence. Cayley’s insight is interesting for how it draws attention to the way other media like film are important, and often overlooked, influences on the development of reading. John Cayley, “Writing on Complex Surfaces,” Dichtung Digital 35 (2005): http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2005/2-Cayley.htm.

  19. “The iPad in the Eyes of the Digerati,” New York Times, April 6, 2010, http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/the-ipad-in-the-eyes-of-the-digerati/.

  20. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Little Brown, 1961), 506.

  21. See in particular the work of Sara Cordes and Rochel Gelman, “The Young Numerical Mind: When Does It Count?,” in Handbook of Mathematical Cognition, ed. Jamie I. D. Campbell (New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 128–42, and Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 192.

  23. J. W. Goethe, The Man of Fifty, trans. Andrew Piper (London: Hesperus Press, 2004), 13.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Ernst Robert Curtius, “Goethe as Administrator,” in Essays on European Literature, trans. Michael Kowal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 58–72.

  2. For Goethe’s note, see Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv 25/W2002; for Melville, see http://www.boisestate.edu/melville/popup.asp?fn=17.

  3. For the argument about the importance of handwriting for print, see Peter Stallybrass, Printing for Manuscript (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). For a historical discussion of the relationship between handwriting and print, see Roger Chartier, “Le manuscrit à l’âge de l’imprimé (XVe–XVIIIe siècles),” La lettre clandestine 7 (1998): 175–93. For a discussion of the role of handwriting in generating sentimental networks of readers in the nineteenth century, see Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 121–52. And for a discussion of the way more printed books gave rise to more letter writing about books, see Catherine J. Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009).

  4. Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 17.

  5. Recorded on October 28, 1889. Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, vol. 2, ed. William White, Gay Wilson Allen, and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 539.

  6. See Box 123, Folder 8 and Box 124, Folder 10, Susan Sontag Archive, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

  7. Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, and David Weiss, eds., The Poet’s Notebook (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 190.

  8. Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, and David Weiss, The Poet’s Notebook, 224.

  9. Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, trans. John Sturrock (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), 311.

  10. James Joyce, The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo, ed. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), VI.B.47.016, VI.B.47.025, VI.B.47.043.

  11. William Hopkins’s The Flying Pen-Man, or The Art of Short Writing (London, 1674), n.p.

  12. Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, 37.

  13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge, 1957), §1554.

 
; 14. J. W. Goethe, Maxims and Reflections, trans. Elizabeth Stopp (London: Penguin, 1998), 21.

  15. As Ann Blair reminds us, many premodern note-taking devices were designed to be erasable, from wax tablets to sand trays to slate boards even to treated paper that could be easily erased. See Ann Blair, “Note-Taking as Information Management,” in Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

  16. E. A. Poe, “Marginalia,” Democratic Review 14 (November 1844): 484, emphasis in original. Or as Poe would later write in the same article, “Just as the goodness of your true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability, so is nonsense the essential sense of the Marginal Note” (485).

  17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 2.1, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), §2406.

  18. Georg Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, trans. and ed. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books), 100.

  19. Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, vol. 1, ed. Edward Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 230.

  20. Achim von Arnim, Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv 03/339 Bl. 13 Rs.

  21. Matthew J. Burccoli, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 18.

  22. See Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), and Ann Blair, “Note-Taking as Information Management.”

  23. Cited in Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 121.

  24. William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Anthony Grafton, “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise?,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91 (1997): 139–57.

  25. Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 157.

  26. Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2004): 313.

  27. Melville’s edition of Dante is discussed in Piero Boitani, “Moby-Dante,” Dante for a New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003) 435–50.

  28. Hermann Melville, Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities, in The Writings of Hermann Melville, vol. 7 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 251.

  29. For a few samples in the popular press, see Ann Wroe, “Handwriting: An Elegy,” More Intelligent Life (November/December 2011): http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/ann-wroe/handwriting-elegy?page=full; Graham T. Beck, “Tempest in an Inkpot,” Morning News, August 31, 2011: http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/ann-wroe/handwriting-elegy?page=full; and Kitty Florey, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting (New York: Melville House, 2009). On the scholarly side, see the work coming out of the field of “graphonomics” that studies the relationship between drawing and handwriting and its cognitive effects: http://www.graphonomics.org/.

  30. Anne Trubek, “Stop Teaching Handwriting,” Good, February 11, 2008, http://www.good.is/post/stop-teaching-handwriting/.

  31. As Steve Graham has argued, “Handwriting may require so much effort for some young writers that they develop an approach to composing that minimizes the use of other writing processes, such as planning and revising, because they exert considerable processing demands as well.” S. Graham, K. Harris, and B. Fink, “Is Handwriting Causally Related to Learning to Write?,” Journal of Educational Psychology 92, no. 4 (2000): 620. See Steve Graham, “Want to Improve Children’s Writing? Don’t Neglect Their Handwriting,” Education Digest 76, no. 1 (September 2010): 49–55; V. Berninger and S. Graham, “Language by Hand: A Synthesis of a Decade of Research in Handwriting,” Handwriting Review 12 (1998): 11–25; and S. Graham and N. Weintraub, “A Review of Handwriting Research,” Educational Psychology Review 8 (1996): 7–87.

  32. Ray Nash, American Penmanship, 1800–1850 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1969). See also Mary Carruthers, who reminds us of the physicality of writing with one’s hand in the Middle Ages when the dominant writing surface was animal’s skin. “One must break it, rough it up, ‘wound’ it in some way with a sharply pointed instrument. Erasure involved roughing up the physical surface even more . . . [including] pumice stones and other scrapers.” Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 102.

  33. Fotini Bonoti, “Writing and Drawing Performance of School Age Children: Is There Any Relationship?,” School Psychology International 26 (2005): 243–54.

  34. Steven Johnson, “The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book,” lecture delivered at Columbia University, April 23, 2010, http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2010/04/the-glass-box-and-the-common-place-book.html.

  35. Erasmus, Ciceronianus, in Collected Works, vol. 28, trans. Betty I. Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 402. On the history of the reader as a bee, see Matthew Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). On the importance of copying to human culture, see Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  36. Edith Norris et al., “Children’s Use of Drawing as a Pre-Writing Strategy,” Journal of Research in Reading 21, no. 1 (1998): 69–74.

  37. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, When Writing Met Art: From Symbol to Story (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).

  38. Linda Hermer-Vazquez, Elizabeth S. Spelke, and Alla S. Katsnelson, “Sources of Flexibility in Human Cognition: Dual-Task Studies of Space and Language,” Cognitive Psychology 39 (1999): 3–36. This is discussed in a wider developmental context in Charles Fernyhough, A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of His Daughter’s Developing Mind (New York: Avery, 2009).

  39. For examples of new digital authorial archives, see the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org/), the William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org/blake/), the Rosetti Archive (www.rossettiarchive.org/), and the Poetess Archive (www.poetessarchive.com/). For a discussion of the history of the “document,” see the work in progress by Lisa Gitelman.

  40. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” in The Collected Works, vol. 2, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 116.

  41. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 456.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Hyperion, 2009); David Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

  2. As Stephen Nissenbaum writes, “Books were on the cutting edge of a commercial Christmas, making up more than half of the earliest items advertised as Christmas gifts.” Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Vintage, 1997), 140.

  3. Gaben der Milde: Für die Bücher-Verloosung zum Vortheil hülfloser Krieger (Berlin, 1817–18), and The Queen’s Gift Book: In Aid of Queen Mary’s Convalescent Auxiliary Hospitals for Soldiers and Sailors Who Have Lost Their Limbs in the War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918).

  4. The literature on this subject is massive and growing. For the history of copyright, see Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), and Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). For critiques of contemporary copyright legislation, see Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press
, 2004); Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2010); and Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

  5. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5, no. 33 (1983): 69.

  6. Not surprisingly, with the recent overproliferation of reading material there has been a rise of theoretical reflections on the problem of commonality. See Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009); and Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

  7. The classic treatment on the history of gift-giving practices is Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 2000). Mauss was fascinated by the way gifts were very often part of larger circuits of exchange, that every gift implied an obligation to give something back. In my focus on sharing as one type of giving, I’m interested more in the problems of co-ownership and commonality that attend the circulation of objects, not in the form of something that needs to be returned at a later date, but that which might be held in common simultaneously. What are the practices and technologies that have allowed us in the past to overcome the temporality of giving to have something more spiritual or intellectual in common?

  8. Clara Gebert, ed., An Anthology of Elizabethan Dedications and Prefaces (New York: Russell and Russell, 1933), 107.

  9. Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).