The Exuvial Book

In his posthumously published study Art and Agency, the anthropologist Alfred Gell sets out the idea of distributed personhood, according to which we are present, not just in our bodies, but also in the remnants we leave in the wider environment, our “exuviae” or sloughed skins. This chapter explores the implications of this notion of identity for our understanding of the codex. Taking up Genette’s concept of the paratext, it shifts our attention away from the “peritext,” the layers of framing attached to the book, and towards the “epitext,” the frames that exist beyond the book’s bounds. It goes on to show how Gell’s analysis, in licensing the idea that a text might be more powerfully present at its most distant verge than it can be in itself, can illuminate figurations of agency in texts by Thomas Nashe, John Donne, and Andrew Marvell.

Notebooks

The eighteenth-century German polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg developed a utopian style of note-taking that anticipated the fantasy of democratically organized information promulgated by social media in the twenty-first century. In his “waste-books” (a term drawn from accounting) Lichtenberg made a virtue of the unfinished, promoting the use of the notebook as a tool directed to purposes other than publication: first, as an accumulation of informational wealth (“pennyworths); second, as an incubator for future possibilities over which he exercised no control (“seeds”); and, third, as a space where the micro trades places with the macro (“keyholes”). Lichtenberg elected to live in manuscript, relinquishing his witty retorts, aphoristic reflections, or ideas for whole books entirely to posterity. He kept marginal notations as a way of honing an individual style that was simultaneously divorced from social exchange with the living.

Derrida’s Unfinished Book

This chapter draws from the provocations of Derrida’s thought to undo heuristic assumptions (including some of Derrida’s own) about what constitutes a book. From the beginning of his career, Derrida resisted the idea of the book, which he regarded as a powerful metaphor of, and technology for, gathering things together. But in fact the book has never been a certain bulwark against the dissipative, fissiparous effects of writing. In the broadened sense Derrida gives the term, writing is that which happens. The book can then be said to be an adapted environment: not a shelter, however brief, from history but, on the contrary, a point of its uncontrolled accretion and acceleration. For Derrida’s most provocative thoughts on the nature of the book we will in the future need to look to his dispersed and extended work on questions of the archive.

Books in Videogames

This chapter argues that books and videogames, frequently presented as rival media, have much to teach us about one another. It does so by analyzing representations of books in videogames, focusing on a pair of games, Myst and Gone Home, that present competing allegories. Myst has been read as allegorizing the printed book’s obsolescence and impending replacement by videogames, while Gone Home diminished its differences from printed forms, presenting itself in allegorical alliance with photocopied zines. Working through these allegories, this chapter argues that books and videogames resist these games’ attempts to collapse the two media into one or to position them as alternatives. Indeed, simulations of physical codices in videogames can help us to understand the differences between these two media as neither absolute nor trivial. By bringing into relief their respective materialities, in particular, these simulations reveal books and videogames as distinct but mutually illuminating.

Transatlantic Traffic

This chapter examines the eighteenth-century transatlantic traffic in books by analyzing one extraordinary letter by Phillis Wheatley. Written in Boston on 18 October 1773, and addressed to David Wooster, in New Haven, the letter enlists Wooster’s help selling copies of Wheatley’s book, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” describes Wheatley’s manumission from slavery, and mentions a number of books Wheatley acquired during her recent trip to London, including Paradise Lost, Alexander Pope’s complete Works, and Don Quixote. Many of the books Wheatley mentions have survived with her signed inscriptions. An examination of those particular books and the letter that describes them provides a rich understanding of Wheatley’s relationship to books as a reader and published author, an enslaved and freed person, and a literary celebrity. In emphasizing the intimacy of transatlantic traffic, Wheatley’s letter suggests printed books remain “unfinished” until they change hands from one person to another.

Books on the Loose

While much of book history addresses itself to bound books or assumes that publishing a book is an author’s ultimate goal, an enormous amount of literature and para-literary writing circulated in ephemeral formats, in cheaply produced and loosely bound pamphlets that were addressed to particular audiences as well as to an anonymous print public sphere. The provisionality of pamphlets—broadcast in the cheapness of their production, the informality of their means of circulation, the looseness of their binding, and their capacity to be bound up by readers and collectors in varying groupings and orders—is crucial to understanding how print helped constitute and extend voluntary associations of all kinds. This essay addresses the difficulty pamphlets have posed for those who collect and preserve them and brings together two senses of the word gathering: the arrangement of folded sheets prior to binding, and a public assembly or meeting.

Ordinatio

Beginning especially in the twelfth century, developments in the presentation of texts in medieval manuscripts became increasingly bound up with understandings of textual forms, the structures inherent in texts. Scribes sought ways to express ideas of what was called a text’s ordinatio (or the forma tractatus) visually, in their approaches to copying and their organization of the page, and—especially insofar as scholastic literature increasingly favored ever greater subdivisions of texts—emphasis was placed on distinguishing and quickly locating these smaller textual pieces. After reviewing earlier scholarship on these intersecting issues of intellectual and material history, this essay extends this work in two ways: first, by exploring the overlapping contributions of scribes and authors to the visual presentation of their texts, and, second, by tracking “ordinational” impulses beyond single texts, to the organization of whole books, multiple volumes, and entire libraries.

Insides and Outsides

Because of the prominence of book covers, the history of bookbindings has long been synonymous with the history of bookbinding decoration. These “outsides” of books carry plentiful information, but so do their often-ignored “insides,” since bookbinding structures and materials changed with time and geography. Beautiful decorations catch the eyes of many, but binding structures can also be read as full of historical information. New technologies make old books available in an unprecedented manner, but in configurations that have mostly ignored their original forms: complete book digitization requires more than photographs and transcriptions. The digital now offers new possibilities: books can be presented in the manner of the cubist painter, offering their outsides and insides concurrently. Through digital means, books as objects can begin to be read more wholly, leading to a better understanding of the big picture of the history of the book.

The Things Books Make

This chapter examines objects shaped like books, from memorial stone tablets and love tokens to more utilitarian objects like spruce-gum containers and sewing kits, to twentieth-century mass-produced gag gifts. Focusing on those forms of non-literary value inhering in the book, this chapter analyzes the sentimental and ludic values assigned to the dazzling array of book-look objects (or “blooks”) fashioned across the centuries in Britain and America. What do these objects borrow from the book, on the one hand, and what do they tell us about the unique nature of the book, on the other? Focusing on the object-orientation of reading, I examine how book-look objects transform our understanding of the materiality of the book, and of the modes of perdurability and history the book, as opposed to the text, is asked to carry.

The Date-Stamped Book

Books as objects traverse numerous chronological horizons and fitfully bear evidence of that traversal. Most printed books are explicitly marked with their years of publication, but many accumulate other dates—inscribed, stamped, pasted, or printed—that attest to their complex temporalities, their multiple mooring points along a timeline. When we study a book from a previous era, when are we? The heterochronic, open-ended book surfaces the temporal instabilities of identity. Date-stamped books give us evidence of reading practices and bookish engagements of that era, even as the marks challenge us in their laconic numeracy. Surveying various examples in which books have been annotated, augmented, or otherwise marked with dates, this chapter meditates on personal memories intertwined with poems and the date-marking by which books became souvenirs and witnesses. Such copies help us see more clearly the rich, unfinished lives of books and of ourselves.