Material Texts in Early Modern England

摘要

Is the book broken-as an artefact, as an economic entity, as a metaphor, as an experience of common life? That question has been asked in various forms for nearly five decades, prompted by the replacement of hot metal by phototypesetting, the absorption of historic publishing houses into large conglomerates, the extreme scepticism of much current critical practice, and the physical disappearance of deeply loved books into the digisphere. The task of asking and responding to the question falls to the bibliographer, or as he or she has latterly become known, the book historian, a term that at the moment seems to cover anyone who tries to put together a picture of what the book is and where it might be going. Traditional bibliography in the century and a half since Bradshaw has focused intensely but controversially on the book as a material object, but there is much evidence that as Adam Smyth contends, this leads to an unprofitable argument about 'hard' practice and its superior relation to 'soft' theory. His new book attempts to steer between the two, or rather to bring them into a fruitful relationship, removing the seeming binary opposition. Smyth has certainly done the hard work; he begins by telling us how heavy an iron Model Number 4 printing press is, having bought one and with his friend Dennis manhandled it into his study, where they couldn't lift it onto the desk. The first thing the Smyth chapel did was to set and print four lines of a Keith Douglas poem, 'Stars'. Ruefully, Smyth concludes, 'Printing brings errors into being with an astonishing frequency: it is difficult to appreciate how hard it is to set even the most unremarkable line of blank verse with any kind of accuracy until one tries' (p.5).