I had never known that an area of study surrounded bibliographical records. Bibliographical study analyzes all of the features of a book and text, including its watermarks and how it was printed to view a book as it’s own source of record to how it was made. The study prioritizes the book as an object, an object that has record, history, and material other than the main body of text. Bibliographical study considers how a book was manufactured and transmitted and uses the features of a book, not just it’s word, as a tool to learn about “cultural change, whether in mass civilization or minority culture.” (D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 1999).

Using the structure and construction of a book as a tool for learning about the exact culture and era that produced it, rather than just referring to it’s main text, is a sort of anthropological study, investigating changes in culture through the work it produces and what they add or take away from each new iteration of work. This is an intersection between multiple areas of study, requiring understanding of historical, anthropological, and literary perspectives. Bibliographical study reveals when and why certain aspects of the book began to matter to publishers and teaches how readers would read, share, keep, and interact with their books. Those two analyzed subjects, the publisher and the reader, are signifiers of how their society at large treated and thought of literature, reading, records, and books.

This has opened up a new perspective to me, the concept of Bibliographical study has made me realize that I have never close read the entirety of a book, doing so would have required considering each detail of it’s construction, covers, spine and pages. Knowing that body of a book should be studied and taken into consideration has made me reconsider one of the first ever notions I was taught as a reader, the idea to “not judge a book by it’s cover.” I will not only judge what may be the content of the book by it’s cover, but I will most certainly begging to question what that cover means about the book’s creation, about the readers it is trying to entice, and about what aspects of our culture has influenced how that cover, and the rest of the book is made.