They’re always talking about “what you know you know,” “what you don’t know you don’t know,” and “what you know you don’t know.” Right now, I am staring down the barrel of a football-length cannon loaded with what I know I don’t know. It is vast. More and more, I am coming to the central idea in all of the texts and objects we are looking at in this course, that the history of the book is the history of nearly everything.

And if “the ultimate resort the object of bibliographical study is, I believe, to reconstruct for each particular book the history of its life, to make it reveal in its most intimate detail the story of its birth and adventures as the material vehicle of the living word,” as WW Greg said in “Bibliography, A Retrospect,” then it is clear that I must be more intimately familiar with the many ways books came into the world, and to be more familiar with that I must better understand rudimentary production processes, how to make board, paper, ink, when and where and how all these ingredients were created, in what corners of the world were different types more common, what were the socioeconomic factors of the society in which a book was produced, what were the ongoing political struggles, what type of government did that society have?

To address the biography of a book without understanding much of that would be like trying to see your own house from space using a magnifying glass. Nothing but a generalized guess. To solve Greg’s “central problem of bibliography,” or to “ascertain the exact circumstances and conditions in which [a] particular book was produced,” I am going to have to choose a book produced in a society whose history I know well, or else I would be starting all of that research from scratch, and to track its adventures, as Greg said earlier, it seems like I would need some history of its provenance or of the hands that held it, so an English or Spanish reader would likely create marginalia that I could understand or come close to understanding.

So in some ways, conducting a bibliography of a book, is to do a deep dive on all the facets of the society that surrounds the book, because without that understanding, there is nothing to latch on to. A page is just a page, a material is just a material, and there is no story to be told from either.