Well before the Civil War book publishing and book selling in the United States had become a highly profitable, highly organized business, offering its wares through retail bookshops, subscription agents, peddlers, and auctioneers. One of the most famous of the early subscription salesmen was Parson Mason Weems. An author as well as a salesman, he wrote the best-selling life of George Washington in which appears the earliest version of the story of the cherry tree. By the time Weems died, in 1825, he had sold for Caleb P. Wayne, a Philadelphia publisher, nearly 4,000 sets of Marshall’s five-volume Life of Washington and had collected for him on that book alone the sum of $40,000.
Apart from improvements in paper making and printing, the industrialization of bookbinding was perhaps the most important step in the democratization of the book in America. The crucial change was the departure from the old hand-binding method, by which each book and its own binding were made together. By the new “casing-in” method, the printed sheets were sewn in one operation and then attached to a standard binding that had been made separately. This method came into the United States about 1832. Another important innovation was the introduction of cloth for binding (vellum, calf, or paper-covered cardboard had been the common materials before). Machines were then developed for pressing the pages together, for stamping design and lettering on bookbinding cloth, for folding paper, for sewing the pages; and, finally (an ingenious American invention of the 1890’s) for making the case of the book by machine, and for putting the sheets into the case. All this, of course, brought down the price of hardbound books. Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869) for some time after publication was being sold by subscription agents to about 4,000 purchasers a month.
When Shakespeare had been available only in expensive leather-bound folios for noble mansions, there was of course little pressure to abridge, bowdlerize, or popularize. But as rising literacy created a demand for cheaper books the industrialization of book making was an incentive to wider sales. A significant, but seldom-noticed, change has taken place in the United States in the subscription sale of books (by book agents who come to the door and sell sets on the installment plan) during the twentieth century. Subscription books of this kind have always had at least as much the character of home furnishings as of reading matter. Before about 1900 the staples of these salesmen were complete sets of authors like Shakespeare, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, and Thackeray. Since then the staples have come to be the multivolumed encyclopedias (The Britannica, Americana, Child-craft, World Book, Book of Knowledge, Collier’s, International, for example), which give you the gist of anything you want (including the writings of Shakespeare, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, and Thackeray). One large seller has been a twenty-volume encyclopedia of book digests. Copious photographs and illustrations, many in full color, are the most advertised, and perhaps the most used, features of these works.
Cheap “de luxe” editions (both of books and of magazines) also have had spectacular success. The Limited Editions Club, organized by subscription in 1929, limited its editions to 1,500 in order to give its members only books printed direct from type and from the original illustration plates. The success of the venture led its director, George Macy, to found The Heritage Press for a larger audience. This produced the novel phenomenon of books supposed to have most of the typographical virtues of “limited” editions, but now in almost unlimited numbers. Many imitators have produced books which purport to offer the hand-crafted beauties of small editions at bargain prices to a mass market.
The same newer and cheaper techniques of printing and book making which widened the audience also varied the forms in which literature reached the public. A comparable change took place in the graphic arts, and especially in the fine arts of painting and sculpture. Well before the middle of the twentieth century an American could buy for a few dollars a full-color copy of the “Mona Lisa” or of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” which, properly framed and viewed at a decent distance, was hardly distinguishable from its original. This was a new development. A few connoisseurs looked down their noses at these “vulgar misrepresentations” of a unique original. Was the old-fashioned traveler in the world of art now to be made into a mere tourist? Was he to be seduced into being satisfied with quick looks at handy copies which, at best, would be no more than a “bicycle ride through the Louvre”? The new techniques provided means for popularizing the original and transforming its general idea into a thousand forms: in cheap books, on lampshades, serving platters, and pencil boxes.
The first reproduction of a photograph in a newspaper appeared as recently as March 4, 1880, when a picture entitled “Shanty-Town” was printed in the New York Daily Graphic. This was made by a new process and was called a “halftone.” An object is photographed through a fine screen, and then the shadings are represented in print by the dots on the photographic plate. The technique, still in use, was developed by Stephen Horgan and Frederick Eugene Ives. Horgan had tried without success to persuade James Gordon Bennett to use it in the New York Herald. He finally managed to introduce it in the New York Tribune, where the first halftones were printed on power presses in 1897.
Improvements in color printing made possible the colored comic strip. Now the “yellow press” could appear in a full range of colors. In the fall of 1896 Hearst issued a comic supplement all in color, which he advertised, with characteristic reticence, as “eight pages of iridescent polychromous effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe.” The new collotype presses (first imported to this country from Germany in 1890) soon made possible nuances of color reproduction for fine medical and art books. Henry Watson Kent, who had lately been with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, joined Max Jaffé’s pioneer color printing establishment in Vienna in 1926. There high-grade art reproductions were made for the Museum, for other institutions, and for book publishers. Jaffé’s son Arthur established his own presses in New York in 1938. Since then the quality of cheap color reproductions has been much improved. This has been reflected in book and magazine illustration, and in the admirable color prints of great paintings now to be found in private homes, hotel rooms, and restaurants throughout the country.
Similar improvements have still more recently appeared in the processes of casting and in the making of metallic and plastic reproductions of sculpture. At the reception desks of museums, in gift shops, and in bookstores it is now possible to purchase cheap reproductions of classic pieces of Egyptian, Greek, or Roman sculpture which only an expert can distinguish from the originals.
The Graphic Revolution, in one area after another, has provided us with mass-produced “originals.” Inevitably, then, we come to think that the “original” is to be distinguished from its technically precise (and often more durable) copy only by its price. Respect for the original comes close to pure snobbery. What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art—especially of a painting—by how widely and how well it is reproduced? Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” which challenged the techniques of color reproduction and which could be tolerably and brightly reproduced at low cost, began to overshadow the drabber classics of the Italian Renaissance. As never before in art it has become easy for the great, the famous, and the cliché to be synonymous.
The original then somehow loses its originality. The copy is far more familiar. Indeed it is only the copy which is really popular. It often gives us more pleasure. At the Gauguin show at the Chicago Art Institute in 1959 visitors complained that the original paintings were less brilliant than the familiar reproductions.
The original itself acquires a technical, esoteric status. It becomes nothing more than a kind of prototype, like the type-castings for our books, or the dies from which other mass-produced items are made. We begin to wonder whether the primary purpose of a great work of art may not be to provide an original matrix from which copies can be produced. From our point of view it is more and more the copy, and not the original, which seems to fulfill the artist’s true
democratic-humanitarian-“life-enriching” purpose. It is the Van Gogh “Sunflowers” that hung in our college room, and not that which hangs in the Museum, that is full of meaning for us.
In the world of dramatic arts, the Graphic Revolution has produced a still subtler and more widespread confusion of forms. The English novel, we must remember, did not arrive as a popular literary form until the eighteenth century. English drama was, of course, much older, reaching back to the medieval mystery and morality plays, and coming to a climax with Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists. For a number of reasons, however, the two forms—the novel and the play—long remained quite distinct in English literature. It was not usual for a successful novel to be put into dramatic form, much less for a play to be cast into a novel. The obvious limitations of the stage had something to do with this.
The sweep of landscape and the panoramas of violent action seen in the pages of novels could not be convincingly transferred to the stage. How could you make sets for War and Peace? With the rise of motion pictures, however, these limits were almost destroyed. The new technique made it possible to change scenery in the flash of an eye, to bring vast landscapes and wild action into the theater—now on the screen. The new possibilities of the movie camera (especially in the early days before sound) tempted movie makers to exploit the peculiar capacity of the movie screen to depict what could not have been physically represented on the stage. The first great box-office success (still a record-holder) was D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which attracted millions by its expansive battle scenes, its torrential action, and its close-ups of the faces of leering villains and of dead soldiers. This was the first movie ever shown in the White House. After seeing it, President Wilson is said to have remarked, “It is like writing history with lightning.” The man-made lightning was important not only because it had created a new dramatic form. Equally significant, if less noted, was the simple fact that scenes which before could be vividly depicted only in the pages of a book (but not on the stage) now for the first time could appear in another form: on the movie screen. This new apparent interchangeableness of dramatic forms was seductive. Before long it helped produce a new amorphousness and elusiveness of all literary-dramatic form. From the point of view of the individual’s experience, too, this was epoch-making. It made the world of literary forms blurry as it had never been before.
Now, for the first time, you could dramatize almost any scene from any novel. The grander the expanses of scenery, the more violent and wide-sweeping the action, the more rapid the changes of scene—in other words, the more ill-suited any drama was to the narrowly confining stage, with its real men and women and its real stage sets physically present in the theater—the more appealing was the story for movie purposes. It was now only a rare novel (which depended on unique and intricate literary devices) that could not be made into a movie. Often the movie was more widely appealing, as it was of course more visually vivid, than its literary original. There were few plays and (after the addition of sound, signalized by Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer in 1927) few musicals which could not better attract the public from the screen.
One consequence of the movie form was to make it possible (or even common) for a spectator to arrive in the middle of one performance, and then to see the beginning afterwards. The fragmentation of experience was increased by the invention of television, when a viewer could turn the knob at will and enter programs one after another free of charge, seeing only a piece of each. The distracting possibilities of television reached a climax when, during the much-publicized quarrel between Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan, De Forest Television advertised in the Chicago Sun-Times on March 12, 1961 sets with two or three screens in the same cabinet:
The great networks are sharpening their weapons—competitive performances at the same hour—you simply can’t jump all round the dial and take a small bite—there’s too much to miss. But De Forest double or triple screen TV lets you see all—all the time—when you like what you see better on one, you touch your remote button and switch sound only, or flick the super magic infra-red remote for channel changing: head phones for the stubborn. It’s more fun than you dreamed about—try it tonight. Enjoy it up to 1 year if you like without paying anything.
The increasing technical possibilities of movies and television did have the effect of leaving the novel with an entirely new role. It was now a kind of residuary legatee: of radio, of movies, of television. Some of the ablest literary artists (like James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Henry Miller) more and more now explored the inner world—the world of eroticism, obscenity, blasphemy, symbolism, stream of consciousness, and introspection—which could not be acceptably displayed on the movie screen. The novelist, then, has been encouraged to explore the boundless non-visual world, as the movie maker has taken over much of his former jurisdiction over the fantasy world of sight, sound, and action.
A clue to the new interchangeability of dramatic forms appeared in America in the emergence of a new meaning for the phrase “legitimate theater.” In England the word “legitimate” had long been used in this phrase to distinguish the body of plays, Shakespearean and other, which had a recognized theatrical and literary merit, as contrasted, for example, with light musical entertainment, farce, and melodrama. In the United States after the rise of movies, “legitimate theater” expressed a distinction not of quality but of technology. “Legitimate theater” here came to mean any drama, including musicals, farces, and melodramas, performed by live actors on a stage, as opposed to performances in movies, on radio, or television.
Before I explore these subtler influences of the Graphic Revolution on our expectations and our experience, I will begin by recalling one of the most elementary and widespread symptoms of dissolving literary forms. This is the rise and popularization of the abridgment and the digest.
II
IN EARLIER times in Europe the “abridgment” or “digest” was a highly specialized literary form. It was used for technical (usually legal) materials. The most famous was the “Digests” (533 A.D.) of the Byzantine-Roman Emperor Justinian, who selected the writings of earlier Roman jurists and so preserved Roman Law for future ages. English lawyers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made comparable digests of the common law. The pioneer American work was Nathan Dane’s General Abridgment and Digest of American Law (eight volumes, 1823). It has been followed by still more elaborate abridgments and digests. Prosperous American law publishers (for example, the West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minnesota) have made big business out of reducing to accessible form our ever-multiplying statutes and judicial precedents.
In the past it was usually for the student of some special subject matter (needing, for professional reasons, to be informed about essential points in a vast literature) that publishers prepared abridgments or digests. The general reader, whether reading for pleasure or for instruction, selected his book for its total character and content. He chose a novel—his Cooper, Dickens, or Thackeray—because he liked what the author put in, what he left out, and how he told the story. In a work of nonfiction—in Jared Sparks, George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Hickling Prescott—he liked what the author told him and he was attracted by the author’s peculiar way of expanding, compressing, and discoursing. Since the later nineteenth century much of this has changed. The popular abridgment is the great symptom of the change.
With the spread of literacy and the cheapening of books since the Graphic Revolution, the printed matter available to the citizen has multiplied. The same technological advances which account for modern journalism and for the flood of political pseudo-events also account for the flood of magazines and books. The rising American standard of living has enabled more people to buy them at the same time that improvements in paper making and printing have made them cheaper to buy. The diffusion of secondary and higher education has made more people want to buy printed matter. Improvements in merchandising have made books and magazines handi
er. Advertising has supported more and more magazines. Democratic faith in an informed, participating citizenry has persuaded people they ought to read more and more.
The intimate impact of world events, the ever-present threats of depression and war, the spectacular pace of scientific advance—all these remind the citizen of more things he should know about. Magazines themselves, trading on the duty to be informed, prick the citizen’s conscience. He must be up on the latest book, conversational about the most recently notorious magazine article, “informed” about the world in which he lives. James Bryant Conant, former president of Harvard, said in October 1960 that the minimum goal in reading skill for almost all pupils at the end of Grade 9 is “that these future voters should be able to read with comprehension the front page of a newspaper at the rate of about 200 words a minute.” Everybody must know more and more about more and more. How to do it?
Today, therefore, everybody feels the need for “abridgment,” for digests and summaries of the world’s culture, the world’s opinions, and the world’s happenings. Not merely the specialist, the lawyer or the doctor, but the common citizen needs help. In twentieth-century America—a literate, prosperous, earnest democracy—the digest has become the citizen’s tool.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (Vintage) Page 14
