Kevin
Kudic
10/22/15
Barbara
Gleason
ENGL
B6400 Theories and Models of Literacy
A peek into the history of books
A book as a
physical object has power attached to it. What a book represents to a society
and how the content of the book is communicated is heavily influenced and controlled
by larger forces at play; this question also relates to the issue of who has
access to a book.
We live in
an age where books are shared, exchanged and talked about in a variety of ways.
The communal power of owning a book can be sensed in a cultural titan like
Oprah Winfrey setting the barometer for taste for which book to read: an Oprah
seal of approval automatically grants a book status that was not there prior. Sometimes,
the sociocultural forces not only decided which books to include but rather
exclude as well. These forces run the gamut; from an adjudicated decision on
obscenity like in the case of Ulysses, or
in a classroom when a professor decides which books to include in the syllabus
are all different ways in which this power struggle manifests itself.
It was with
great pleasure that I was able to step into the vault at Butler Library and get
a tour of the some rare books and manuscripts at Columbia University. Walking
in and seeing the books sprawled out on the table almost as if they were
waiting to be autopsied gave me a curious feeling. What was more amazing was
seeing how well preserved the books managed to be after half a century in some
cases. Consuelo Dutschke was our guide and she is the curator at the Rare Books
and Manuscripts Division. She gingerly handled the books while talking about
their specific historical role or function. The handouts she distributed marked
all of the books and manuscripts we would be looking at during the demo.
One of the manuscripts that interested me was the
Encyclopedia. The large tome was located at the end of the table. What was
particularly striking about this book and many of the other books in general
was the fine, ornate style of the lettering. Wrapped in beautiful bound leather
with pages made from vellum, the book was gorgeous to look at. I’ve always been
fascinated with Encyclopedias, tomes and books with indexes and collections.
What particularly interested me in the encyclopedia were the drawings inside of
them. A different scribe would take over taking turns writing a couple of
entries. This process of scribes taking turns writing entry in this
encyclopedia made me draw parallels to some of the practices that are currently
done in digital spaces.
Now, when we
think of encyclopedias we imagine massive collections of databases like
Wikipedia where people can contribute to an entry. It is the community of
Wikipedia users that check each other and make sure that each entry is
accurate. The encyclopedia that we saw as a class, strangely, wasn’t very much
different. Each scribe wrote different sections of the book; normally we
associate encyclopedias with full color illustrations and pictures but the
encyclopedia that we saw didn’t have any illustrations until a scribe started
drawing something in one of the entries. Later scribes got hold of the same
book and started intentionally leaving a space to accommodate a picture
illustration for each entry. So from this one scribe we suddenly got pictures
in the encyclopedias; this is a standard feature of encyclopedias today that
wasn’t originally part of them. I found this connection to be very fascinating.
Lately, I
have been using a lot of e-books; I own a Kindle and find it immensely useful
for carrying large amounts of books in a single portable device. It is hard to
imagine the amount of effort and time it took to produce a single book. Current
technology has made printing accessible at your fingertips and there are even
services that offer custom digital book printing. The books that we saw on
display took a tremendous amount of work to make. Making the vellum that
scribes used instead of paper was made from goat or pigskin. Dr. Dutschke ran
through the grocery list of the livestock that was required to make one book.
The fact that it took all of these animal to make only one book added prestige
and value that must have been quite impactful for someone to own. Not everyone
could afford a book back in the Middle Ages and the person that had a book took
it as a special indicator of status. Knowing this information made me
appreciate how books were made and the work put into making them. It also gave
insight into the way books must have been perceived in the Middle Ages, not
just founts of information but also special tokens of status.
I take the
train every morning to work and what I notice that is very commonplace is
people reading. Take the subway in New York City and you can see people reading
on multiple devices. A large fold-able newspaper like the New York Times has
largely fallen out of fashion. What has cropped up instead is the digital version
of the print edition. If you peruse a full car during morning rush hour you’ll
see people reading on their smartphones flipping through pages digitally with a
quick flick of their thumbs. You’ll also see people with the new generation of
Kindle reading e-print. Sometimes, you may even see people with laptops typing
a last minute note to them, eyes glued intently on the screen. Society may
lament that people aren’t reading enough, but that isn’t necessarily true when
you ride the subway. In some way, especially digitally, people are interacting
with text.
If we
compare this mode of reading: silent and contemplative to the way people read in
the advent of the book then we can take the trajectory of the history of the
book as one that goes from outward to inward in many ways. Alberto Manguel
notes, “Written words from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant
to be pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit, as if it were
their soul, a particular sound (The Silent Reader 45).” As the technology
improved, the ability of the book to be personalized became more feasible. In its
earliest incarnation, before even a physical book was well established, we had
text. As Dr. Deutschke showed us during the tour, the script was written
without any breaks between words, no punctuation—scripta continua. Looking at
this, made me think about how reading must have taken place during those times.
I wasn’t aware that this form of writing was so prevalent. It made me think
about other kinds of writing systems in the world. I realized that the way we
leave a space between each word was not something that was taken for granted,
but rather it developed from a specific purpose: To read silently.
Silent readers are usually the norm when we think about the
act of reading. We tie the function of literacy to this ability. A literate
person should be able to read silently with confidence and with ease. However
the cultural norm of silent reading has been conditioned to us from a
particular framework that took centuries to develop. In many ways, I think
silent reading took hold from the development of people as readers.
Centuries
ago, when scribal literacy dominated the landscape, texts were read orally. The
communities that were literate were typically the elites of a society. This was
true during a time when the overwhelming majority of the populace could not
read or write. Yet texts were circulating freely especially in the nascent
Christian religion before it would dominate Europe. Scribes would work on a
text and sometimes they would pick up where another scribe left off. It was a
highly literate and closed feedback system. In the texts that were shown to us,
one of the manuscripts had the entire Book of Psalms written in two pages. This
was meant to be strictly memorized. The text sprawled across the pages and the
writing was so tiny that it was hard to imagine how ancient scholars could have
possibly read them. Seeing the kind of usage that books had really impressed
me. From the tour, you could really sense the impact that books had on a
culture that was still very much based on the oral tradition, yet here they had
texts that were primarily used as a performative piece. Books were meant to be
read out loud in public. Quite different from the silent reader image that we
have ingrained in our society.
Overall, it was a wonderful experience visiting the Rare
Books Divison. I learned that books are not simply neutral vessels of
information and knowledge, but rather a benchmark for the way we view what
society truly values.
Works
Cited
Manguel, Alberto. A history of reading. Penguin, 2014.
Print
McGrath, Alister. In the beginning: The story of the King
James Bible and how it changed a nation,
a language, and a culture. Anchor, 2008. Print
Saenger, Paul. Space between words: The origins of silent
reading. Stanford University Press,
2000. Print
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