ABSTRACT
So far in this book we have been concerned with resetting some essential bearings, and charting the chosen terrain. For the remainder I will be speaking about the dynamics of book history in the regions under discussion, dynamics that are best interpreted as a set of clashes between competing forces, some of them plainly revolutionary, others constructively conservative. Book history, I believe, cannot and should not be construed as a process of inevitable, irreversible evolution, or even as the product of intelligently ordered design. It is a battlefield in which technologies slog it out and voices strain to be heard, and where economics and commerce vie or conspire with the needs of self-expression. The chosen model is thus an open-ended one in which there are continuities as much as there are ruptures. What happens is a balance of attrition. It is with this contest between stasis and change that I shall begin.
