ABSTRACT
Book history is an interdisciplinary effort to study texts in their literary, cultural, and material contexts that begins to emerge as an institutional presence in the United States in the early 1990s with the founding of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) and the launch of Book History, the flagship journal for the field, later in the same decade.Book historian Michael Winship’s views are representative of the dominant perspective in the field: “authors do not make books.” Winship goes on to argue “the printed book in particular is the product of the collaborative efforts of many different people: laborers and craftsmen, publishers and editors, businessmen and patrons” [6]. His claims sketch the beginnings of a move from static to dynamic models of texts: Like McGann, Winship rejects the supremacy of the author. This move creates space for exploring some of the less recognized factors involved in literary production, but it stops short of taking a position on whether interactions among these factors produce one or many texts. McGann’s figure of the n-dimensional text, the one text that is many, can be read as an attempt to go a step further. The n-dimensional text harnesses but does not resolve the tension between a desire to connect texts and a desire to treat each as a discrete entity. However, the n-dimensional text has not yet reached the mainstream, even among book historians. Its presence is scarce, for example, in many of the important volumes recently compiled to survey the field.Readers of The Book History Reader, An Introduction to Book History, and A Companion to the History of the Book are likely to read of McGann’s push for the “socialization of texts,” but will find n-dimensional texts rarely mentioned. However, readers of these volumes will not fail to be introduced to the communications
circuit, one of the more established attempts among book historians to conceptualize the kind of multifaceted perspective championed by Winship. 5.2.1 The Communications CircuitThe communications circuit is an attempt to map the routes a text travels as it circulates among authors, publishers, printers, shippers, sellers, and readers. It was proposed by Robert Darnton in the early 1980s in an attempt to quell the rise of what he characterized as “interdisciplinarity run riot.” Book history, he worried, “looks less like a field than a tropical rainforest”[7]. Darnton’s occasionally playful diagnosis of the field’s ailments has become a classic article among book historians and the appeal of his model remains strong. Nearly 30 years after its proposal, the communications circuit has become a standard feature of course syllabi and other introductory materials for the field, while retaining a role in some of the more cutting edge book history scholarship.
