Some thoughts on the Printing Press and the Internet

Discussion of so vast a topic as "The Printing Press and the Internet" obviously calls for discussants not afraid to think Big Thoughts. Alas, the topic has provoked me to ruminate mere Small Thoughts. And then, after a while, thoughts even smaller still.

Both professionally and personally, I am interested in reading and literature specifically. More generally, I attend to the history of books and printing. Most generally, I am interested in many of the subjects subsumed under the rubric of "the historical humanities."

The sum of these interests afflicts me with a historical concern for the ways in which printing from movable type changed how people in the west experienced and expressed their similar interests as print culture came increasingly to dominate manuscript culture. Looking at my own time, how could I -- how could anyone else, for that matter -- doubt that "the Internet" is similarly changing the ways in which people like me (or even people who are me) experience these same interests? How many people write, read, and find new (or old) materials to read, reread, or, occasionally, write about is, obviously, something "the Internet" is changing. It is changing practice in the historical humanities, as well. But, of course, so are people's own actions and choices. As -- for one obvious instance -- by choosing to sit at a Dell Optiplex GX1 computer, as I am doing right now, rather than at a typewriter, working at a desktop instead of at a desk. Not typing -- and certainly not writing in longhand! -- they, I, we, "word process" (whatever that may mean, compositionally speaking) their, my, our simple thoughts in evanescent bits and bytes.

This kind of activity is A New Thing. I know it's new. Fifty-eight years old, I remember -- clearly and vividly -- doing this kind of thing differently.

Other people have different concerns, different memories. Some use digital and interactive media in work that involves mathematics, the physical or natural sciences, or the more quantitatively based of the social sciences, whether pure or applied. Others use them in the development of instructional or informational (reference) materials. Others still use them in advertising, marketing, and sales; in design; in movies. Perhaps such people will find that their very different concerns and interests lead them to very different attitudes about the many changes they are experiencing and creating than mine. Such differences would not surprise me. Anyway, as I get older, I note -- little genius is required for such an observation -- that fewer and fewer people have my memories and my consequent sense of just how new, just how strange, what is otherwise so easy to take for granted can seem.

I remember the arrival of my first 128 KB p.c. I can even remember, not six months later, watching a p.c. being installed in a neighbor's office. Showing off my new knowledge, I asked if this were also a 128 KB machine. And got a prompt comeuppance. A what? asked the installer. No, it's a 256. He didn't know that 128 KB machines had ever been made. No one had ever told him -- "not six months later" -- about what were already such old machines.

It's sometimes surprising how small a thing can make you feel suddenly quite old: older than your machine, which, of course, you are; and also more obsolete -- which you might be. It's also perhaps surprising how little the event need be that tells you that your world is changing.

On the other hand, I can also remember the arrival of my family's first television set. The 13" Dumont was a piece of furniture, not a tabletop. Its picture was black and white. It lacked a remote. Nor did it announce itself, as the p.c. did, as The Future when it walked, on its little furniture legs, through our front door. But it too was that, just like the p.c.

These remarks are background to a small prefatory opening observation. I can only speak for myself. I do so -- as booksellers sometimes say -- "with all faults." My perspective is not omniscient. It may even be downright peculiar. I hope, in what follows, to avoid as much as possible the word "we," a somewhat amorphous and ill-defined entity (or, I suspect, non-entity) for which I do not speak.

OBJECTS IN REAR-VIEW MIRROR ARE NOT CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

Some years ago, I published a very small paper disagreeing with one point in the very big book of another participant in this conference, Professor Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Time continues to pass. I continue to retain my admiration for The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Simply enough, this book changed the ways many of its readers, me among them, think. It did so by looking at something most had taken for granted, and thus not thought about: the impacts of a change in the way information, learning, and literature -- that is, letters generally -- were conveyed, delivered, and received. That change began, in the West, around the middle of the 1450s. Aided and abetted by the similarly seminal work of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (L'apparition du livre), Eisenstein's book has led to numerous other studies undertaken in its wake. It is an important work historically and historiographically.

Its importance granted, I still disagree with Eisenstein on one point about which I see matters very differently from she. Her view of the speed with which historical processes develop still troubles me. In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, historical processes act with a speed in which I simply cannot believe. Gutenberg puts out a printed Bible around 1455. A mere sixty-two years later, early in the sixteenth century, Luther nails ninety-five theses onto a church door in Wittemberg. Disseminated by print, the notions that led to and emerge from these theses tear Europe's religious unity into bits and shreds. More or less simultaneously, the scientific revolution is established fact by the seventeenth century. Word of new developments, immediately distributed widely, means that they can be tested, absorbed, and made the basis for further developments. The Eisensteinian characteristics of the new developments of print itself are, by now, part of the intellectual armory of every worker in the field: widespread rather than local dissemination; standardization; rationalization; new methods of data collection; fixity. Before her readers can say "Elizabeth L. Eisenstein," the author has moved them to a new world order where the cumulative augmentation of knowledge creates a perpetual renaissance. In other words, in very short order, the train has not merely left the gate. Barreling through the countryside, it has overwhelmed everything in its path.

Perhaps someone who had begun work as a historian in a period affected by the French Revolution would find this extension of the usefulness of a generalized notion of revolution merely self-evident. Eisenstein's initial historical work did in fact concentrate on the French Revolution and its aftermath. My own studies, however, began with literature, not history, and with the literature, moreover, of the later sixteenth century in England. This period was characterized by a great deal of change, to be sure. Some of it was even quite rapid. But "revolution" lay more than half a century ahead of the people I began my life studying. In the course of the "revolution" they did not foresee, to be sure, King Charles I -- like King Louis XVI during the course of the French Revolution -- would eventually be made a bit shorter than nature had at first created him. But despite this point of comparability between the events of England's 1640s and France's 1790s, their differences seem far more impressive than their similarities. Just how much of a "revolution" the people who shortened Charles effected in England's political system remains a question still debated by historians. Mine is, in short, in many ways a far more conservative period than Eisenstein's. The baggage its study has left me -- my intellectual background, if you will -- leaves me much more suspicious of the notion of "revolutions" than Eisenstein's leaves her.

In my small paper, I looked specifically at a number of writers. Writers! -- people whom moderns might have thought not only dependent on wide circulation of their works in printed book form but also delighted by the opportunities for broadened readership the existence of print opened up. Yet many of my writers were people who, unimpressed by modern expectations, were also unimpressed by print. In fact, they did not use it. I looked at quite a number of such writers in fields we think of as "literature." Their dates ran from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Of course, literary people are conventionally thought to be stodgily conservative, perhaps even outright reactionaries. The resistance to print of a few of them might be thought unsurprising. Perhaps more surprising, then, a few people from the same periods who thought of themselves as "scientists" at whom I also looked -- although conventionally scientists are not viewed as stodgily conservative or outright reactionaries -- felt just as coolly about print as the most troglodytic of sixteenth-century littérateurs.

The process of historical change, I tried to suggest, is often very much slower than we are inclined at first enthusiastic blush to think. After looking a bit further back in time than Alvin B. Kernan did, I argued that his views -- in Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), a book about print and authorship during the second half of the eighteenth century -- made more historical sense than the Eisensteinian views he modifies. Kernan sees changes that Eisenstein ascribes to the period in the immediate wake of Gutenberg -- fixity and multiplicity of copies of texts, their widespread dissemination, and so forth -- as coming into their own during the much later period he writes about. Later, not earlier, do concepts of authority and authorship develop out of circumstances made newly available by the absorption of printing technologies. Samuel Johnson is Kernan's major exemplar of this development. Years ago, Richard Newton had pointed to an earlier literary author who took advantage of print, the early seventeenth century poet and playwright Ben Jonson. That earlier Jonson seems exceptional, however. Kernan's Johnson -- at least as Kernan depicts him -- defines his era as one in which the implications of print have at last been naturalized.

Kernan agrees with Eisenstein: the printing press effected a "revolution." But that revolution, he argues, took a much longer time to make its revolutionary impact than she allows.

I wonder what significant reasons, as opposed to rhetorical ones, might lead anyone to suspect that things will be different -- faster -- this time. The pace of change, the ongoing exponential increase in "knowledge production," the rapidity of modern life, the interconnectedness fostered by global communications networks: no one concerned with the world we live in (a legitimate "we" there, I hope!) can have evaded such locutions, and a host of related ones. And yet, I continue to read one page at a time, just as I did before my first 13" Dumont television, to say nothing of my 128 KB p.c., arrived. And to write, and to rewrite, whatever the technology I happen to be using, in short bursts of words that I then reconsider and change. Johnson may have done it better. I am, in fact, quite certain that he did. I don't think he did it very differently, although his tools were not mine.

Henny Penny Continues to Fail Meteorology:
The Sky Is Not Falling

Scholars rightly draw attention to the material means by which writers and readers transform limited circulation writing and thought into publicly available property. The whole point of Eisenstein's work is vitiated if people cannot agree with her that it makes a big difference if books are produced one by one in manuscript formats or by the hundreds, and later thousands, in more or less identical printed formats. If that assumption is denied, than this conference lacks any point. I do not think it can be denied.

Yet not all changes in the material means of creating and transmitting texts have the same impact as this one. I am old enough to remember writing papers -- and to have known many other people who wrote papers in this way, too -- by sitting at a table with a pad of paper, white or yellow, ruled, with a red margin on its left side, and pencils or pens. Some people used pencils, some ballpoints. I favored fountain pens. I took my pen and wrote on the pad, filling in one page and then moving on to the next. If I remembered well enough, before starting this process, what was about to happen, I would write on every other line so as to leave plenty of room -- in fact, it was never enough -- for the changes I would introduce as I went back over my short bursts of words. I would go over them constantly (as I still do). I would go over each short burst. Then I would go over the sentences and the paragraphs their accumulations created. Then I would reread the entire paper up to whatever break point I had reached. Each rereading would involve rewriting: adding, correcting, removing or shifting sentences or words from here to there. Then I would go on from the point I had reached till another break point, or till I had reached the end. And then, I suppose because masochism is its own reward, I would type the thing up, doing more revisions -- I was God's gift to the makers of whiteout -- as I typed.

I remember being told to change these writing practices. I was in graduate school, still in my early twenties. One of the greatest scholars I have ever been fortunate enough to know said to me, "You haven't yet learned to compose on a typewriter? Silly boy!" And made me change.

Rosalie L. Colie did not live long enough to meet the desktop computer. But I suspect her reaction to it might have resembled mine. I found it far more difficult to learn to compose at a typewriter than I later found it to transfer my typewriter-honed compositional skills to a computer screen and word-processing program. Typing was the "new technology" for me as a writer. That peculiar aperçu makes it very hard for me to take seriously the nostalgic defense of typewriter-based compositional techniques essayed by Sven Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies), a writer who betrays no evidence that he has ever heard of handwriting in a book that seems to me to suffer from a severe overdose of Yeats. (More politely, Steven J. Zipperstein associates it with some other representative exemplars of what he calls "an intriguing, curious manifestation of fin-de-siècle unease" [Dissent, 47:3 (Summer 2000), 76]. All is not changed, changed utterly, word-processing to the contrary notwithstanding. I learned to write by hand. I learned to write on a typewriter. I learned to write on a computer screen. I learned all of these varied techniques, despite not being the fastest study in my peer group. But what changed my writing style more than any of these mechanical tricks was (unfortunately) a prolonged overexposure to sixteenth-century English prose at a much-too impressionable age. I'm a big fan of the Arcadia and Urne-Buriall and The Anatomy of Melancholy -- but not for people who want to write readable modern English prose, not, anyway, until after they've learned how to do that.

It takes time for the impact of a technology to be felt. Not enough people have lived with the computer long enough to know the directions in which it will take any of us -- or the directions in which any of us will take it. Just so it seems to me unlikely that any of Gutenberg's immediate followers could have made any reasonable guess even about so "simple" a matter as the "look," the "feel," of a printed book, as opposed to a manuscript. The sheer "presence" such books would attain in Renaissance Europe would also have been unknowable for quite some time. How it differs -- if it differs -- to read a manuscript rather than a printed book; how it differs to have, of a sudden, the immediate prospect to hand of extensive reading of many texts rather than intensive reading of a few texts: how does an early encounter with one printed book, or a few of them, prepare anyone to ask, let alone to answer, such a question? How long does it take to learn that there's a question to be asked? And does the culture, does the society, share a single learning curve?

This point, too, is one we know. We certainly know it about other technologies, though not yet about computers: television, for instance. How many people can recall how television functioned, for four days in late November of 1963, when masses of Americans, and perhaps people elsewhere, as well, sat in front of their television sets to "share" their grief at President Kennedy's assassination? But "masses" of people are not all people. Some people -- me, for example -- got the news by telephone and then turned on not the television but the radio. Not till at least two days had passed did it occur to me that there were pictures to be seen.

New technologies extend their reach at differential paces for different people. Change is not uniform. It may be pervasive but it need not also be insistent. It keeps on happening, but it does not happen to everyone, everywhere, all at once. These are obvious points, perhaps, but I wonder whether they have been often enough remembered in discussions either of the fifteenth-century printing "revolution" or of the twentieth- (and now twenty-first-) century digital one.

A Tiny Point

I warned at the outset that my thoughts would get smaller. Here is a very small one. It took a while for the printed book to begin to look like "a printed book." "Books" looked, at first, like manuscripts. That's the only model their makers had on which to base the appearance of their product. Not until roughly the 1520s -- some seventy or so years after Gutenberg printed his Bible -- did most printed books begin to look, by and large, like printed books. But not always and not uniformly. Some might be printed on vellum, just like manuscripts. Some might be printed in roman letterforms. Others might be printed in italic, black letter, or civilité letterforms. (Black letter, in fact, continued in use as a reasonable alternative to roman until the twentieth century, when -- except for pretentious newspapers -- it seems to have died off. Non-roman alphabets -- Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, as well as a host of non-western-language letterforms -- do continue in use; some read from right to left, some in vertical rather than horizontal array.) By the 1520s, however, a western reader could more or less confidently expect a title-page, some preliminaries, perhaps a table of contents or an index, and a main text divided into operable parts. By then, the printed book had become "operable." It took roughly those seventy years for writers, printers, and readers to accommodate themselves in their varied roles to the formats now taken for granted in print, and to make those formats part of the way in which the object was organized for manufacture and for use.

Or so it seems to those who, like me, work with such older books on a daily basis. I know what they are. By contrast, however, anyone who regularly teaches the young, as I also do, in classes where early printed books figure prominently, knows that even post-1520s printed books look very strange to them. And "post-1520" covers a stunning amount of territory.

Already in this still young semester, I have had occasion to show my freshpersons a First Folio Shakespeare (London 1623). Granted, it's a Big Book and the young rarely see Big Books. No wonder they thought this one a little odd. But I've also had occasion to show them a three-volume late eighteenth-century octavo novel (London 1796). They found that one odd, too. True, long "s" shocks them every time. But the look, the feel, of the paper (slightly tinted in this novel) also surprised them. They found disconcerting the small but heavily-leaded type (even without reference to long "s"). The leather bindings expectably added strangeness. So did the division of a basically pretty brief novel into three separate volumes. Need I mention that nineteenth-century books are now often also perceived as "old" and "different"? Even earlier twentieth-century books -- ordinary commercial products, say, Knopf imprints with stamped Dwiggins designs on their title-pages or cloth-covered boards -- are recognizably "difficult" for some of our students, in ways that must be more or less similar to my own response, when I was in my teens and twenties, to books my parents owned from the 1890s and 1900s.

It has taken a long time for printed books to come to look like printed books, whatever that means -- because, whatever it means, the concept continues to change even as it is enunciated. Generically, the specialist in older books may suppose that they're all alike. I find it a healthy corrective to this false supposition to watch students encountering such books for the first time. They don't see them as "all alike." They can (and do!) have trouble "operating" them, whether they were printed in the sixteenth or the nineteenth centuries. And this despite the fact that our culture now has over five hundred years of experience with printed books. What kind of comparable experience have we had with digital media?

The New York Times for August 24, 2000 prints a letter from someone identified as Edward Ripley-Duggan of Olivebridge, New York (p. G11). Mr. Ripley-Duggan writes:

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the problem of text legibility in printed books has been extensively investigated. Sadly, this research seems to have been largely ignored by the proponents of electronic research and the electronic book.

One may be forgiven for suspecting that Mr. Ripley-Duggan -- whom the Times does not identify as the rare book seller he is -- sheds crocodile tears in this letter. No matter: his point is small but interesting. It took at least seventy years for printed books to begin to look like printed books; and longer still for people to begin to worry systematically about what they might look like at their best, their most operable. A very small portion of the population has lived with computers even for the fifty-five (not yet seventy) years or so since ENIAC went live in the big basement on Penn's campus that it completely filled, not two blocks from my office. A somewhat larger number of people has lived with desktops for a bit more than two decades. A much larger number is still getting used to them after less than ten or even only five years of acquaintance.

These things are new. So is their look, their feel. And those people who work with them are not at the end but at the beginning of a long process of figuring out how to accommodate them to us as well as us to them, even in matters as basic as what the stuff on the screen looks like. As one result, I print out stuff in order to read it. I avoid on-screen reading as much as possible.

What is the speed of change? How fast is it?

An End

An end, not a conclusion, for I have none. Perhaps, if I am lucky, a point out of which some discussion can emerge? In any event, Mr. Ripley-Duggan's tiny point about typography takes me to my smallest thought of all. We don't know what is changing yet because we haven't lived long enough to experience it and the cause of change is itself in its infancy.

I tend to suspect that the book is dead. My opinion isn't worth much more than anyone else's, but -- for whatever it's worth -- there it is. I suspect that the book is dead even though I do not read books, or anything else, on a screen any more happily than Mr. Ripley-Duggan does. But I can already see that books are going to be a lot easier to get access to (or "to access," in Computer Newspeak) via digital impulses coming into my home or office than by schlepping myself to a bookstore or library. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Beats me. I probably won't read them that way -- but I will also probably be dead before I have consciously to eschew encountering my books in e-formats only. Will that form change the way my children or grandchildren encounter their "books"? Of course. How? I don't know. They aren't here to tell me -- and I won't be there to ask.

On the other hand, any of my contemporaries who views him- or herself surrounded by his or her books as a sort of Montaigne redidivus has severe mental problems. (I confess to feeling the same way about Sven Birkerts's self-presentation as Writer à la mode Typewriter. Is the man serious?) I don't read the same way Montaigne read. Not only was he a lot smarter than I am, but also books do not, cannot, mean the same kinds of things to us. I say this as someone who -- like Montaigne -- likes books, and even owns (and reads) a fair passel of them. But, just for starters, I own more books than he did, which by itself changes my relationship to them; and the vast majority of my books are in smaller formats than his are likely to have been, which is another factor that affects my relationship to them. Change comes whether one wishes it to or not. But it comes at its own pace. To experience change it helps to live through it (a point that Geoffrey Nunberg, among others, makes, Nunberg in The Future of the Book).

To worry about change, on the other hand, living through change is not necessary. All that is required is the expectation of change, along with an attitude that supposes first and foremost that change is automatically bad. We -- again, this is a real "we," I think -- live at a time when it is quite reasonable to expect change. Those of us who are also lovers of books, a form that expectable developments clearly threaten with many possible changes, may well assume that those changes will automatically be bad. Books will not be read. Something else -- what? -- will be "scanned" or "looked over" (or "overlooked") instead. More and more, the world of the visual and aural media will overtake and replace the world of the interiorly-experienced printed page.

A digression: I often find myself wondering what bases underlie recent discussions of the deteriorating civility, indeed, the deteriorating safety, of modern life, especially modern urban life. Discussants seem to make their standard of comparison, assumed to be a norm of some sort, what seems to me rather to have been the peculiarly safe city characteristic of a period of unusual prosperity following the end of the Second World War. But the nineteenth- or eighteenth-century city, or earlier cities: these were dangerous places. Their inhabitants were always threatened by illness and disease, of course. But thieves and scoundrels of many different sorts could also do in those inhabitants, or make their lives miserable, and they did: life was dangerous. So, too, the early twentieth-century city. Most moderns would run screaming from the prospect of having to live in quarters that our grandparents took for granted. Or, in my case, my parents, immigrant children moved from Europe to the slums of one of New York City's Jewish communities before World War I. If, instead of remembering these long pasts, we remember only the short past of that brief period of prosperity following World War II, we will do (and have done) a very good job of scaring ourselves about this strangely dangerous new world we seem to find ourselves in. It is dangerous; but danger isn't new.

But that paragraph is not entirely a digression. Discussion of the impact of "the Internet" on reading and the historical humanities seems to me to founder on precisely related difficulties. An ideal of a public reading culture that formed in a particular historical setting and proved able to persist for a century or more is assumed to be a sort of norm. That ideal, once stable, seems in the changed environment of the present to be threatened. "The media" have already succeeded in dethroning that kind of culture. "The Internet" seems poised to give it the coup de gras. Who, in this brave new world, will read? What future is left for the public reading culture, the intellectual culture, that discussants of this topic so highly value?

Indeed; but then again, who read? Reading was always a leisure-class activity. And even in that class, the stuff they read was more often Ouida, less often John Stuart Mill. People who hang around universities and weekly periodicals have odd ideas about the role of reading in other people's lives. Those of us who teach can stick a book on a syllabus and, lo and behold! it gets read. Surrounded by readers, we can talk about books all day long. We can walk into libraries with hundreds of thousands or millions of them, awaiting our eager touch. If we work on journals or periodicals or with publishers of one sort or another, we are surrounded by the same sort of person. But if we step outside this island where reading is privileged, or if we try imaginatively to move backward in time away from the island of the present -- how quickly the view changes! "My students can't read James," Birkerts complains; as if James were somehow a touchstone on which any literate reader could agree. James is long dead. Who read him when he was alive? Who read -- indeed, who saw -- Shakespeare when he was alive? Did bear-baiting or the Globe draw bigger crowds? Did reading improve the lot of Hardy's Jude, or Tess?

Who, looking at Gutenberg's Bible, would have predicted the expansion of literacy that seems to moderns, in retrospect, inevitable in its wake? But who, looking at the expansion of literacy, would have supposed that more readers would find their way to Danielle Steel than to Philip Roth? And that more still would find their way to The National Enquirer and astrology columns, and more even than these to nothing at all. Television, too, as I recall, was going to bring music, dance, theater, and the arts into the American home; and what it brought instead, in a steep downward spiral, were Ed Sullivan, MTV, and Wheel of Fortune.

I have a box on my desk at work, a box on my desk at home. I process words with these boxes. Now and again, I also look at articles, at newspapers, or at photographs. Where are these boxes taking me? To different places than books take me. I think. But I don't yet know where we're going. I can only hope that I will live long enough to get a glimmer.