Author Archives: Warren Stoddard

Understanding the Society Around the Book

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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.

The Changing Methods of Creating the Book

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Somehow, I feel that our obsession with the ideas within books restricts us from our understanding of them as commodity. As Borsuk illustrates in chapter 2 of The Book, the actual item of a book gradually morphed from something hand-done by scribes to production on an industrialized scale. Sandcasting has been done since ancient times, and in the renaissance it was utilized to form fonts, you had pressmen organizing and creating spreads of pages. This was a sector of the economies of the times that must have employed a large percentage of the working populace as literacy rates increased and the demand for books became something ravenous.

What really captured me was the realization that these early books were often created without covers. Borsuk writes that prior to “the nineteenth century, the cover [was] certainly part of the codex, but it [was] not, in fact, part of the book,” and the cover was only affixed to the pages as customers ordered books and publishers bound them once the purchase was made (74-76). I think many bibliophiles can conjure up the dream image of their own library, each book on the shelves bound in matching leather covers, as the aristocracy of prior centuries once did. As the book became a more widespread commodity, this fell largely by the wayside, though there are some contemporary bookbinders that will create wonderfully decorated bindings for the pages of your favorite book, like McCall. However, this practice has become a boutique niche well off the beaten path for most readers.

It’s hard to look at any of this and not think of the fears that must have arose from the workers in these sectors, as type became easier to create and set, as the pressing of pages became automated, as covers and bindings became cheaper to produce or changed in some way, these workers must have been terribly worried about the security of their jobs and the livelihoods of their families. I think in no small way that this mirrors many of the same fears we have today with the rise of digitization and the exponential expanse of AI in our world. What will become of us? What are we to do?

If we look to the book and its manufacture, I think there should be some answers that lay to rest the fears many in society now have in regard to this. As the creation of books changed with the values of consumers, so too did the industry. While at one time, bookbinders might have been employed in the thousands, it is now largely automated and a few have continued the practice. I think that the book, and knowledge, or humanity in general, will follow much the same path. The way we arrive to its end might be ever shifting, but there will always be a need for the human hand to mark the world in some way. It might be tempting to agonize over the looming iRobot or Wall-E end of civilization, but given the tenacity of mankind, this is terribly unlikely. As bookbinders faded from the forefront, artists took up the mantle, creating the wonderfully decorated covers we see today. As readers once relied on a few authors to create the vast majority of content, now there are an uncountable number of those laying words to paper. There is an ebb and a flow to all things. I think that no matter how our perceptions or stereotypes of it might shift, the book will always be.

The History of Everything

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What seems to be constantly simmering under the surface of every discussion of the history of books/the written word is that, although we generally view these things as sources of knowledge or history, they cannot be extricated from the history itself. And it seems to me that the history of the book is the history of everything. Borsuk writes in chapter one of The Book that we must “think about the way [the book’s] materiality is both a product and constituent of its historic moment” (34).

I think this is best exemplified when thinking about the early history of the book, where Borsuk details that the first earliest versions of paper–clay tablets and papyrus scrolls–were born of the rivers that the civilizations that birthed these things were centered around in Mesopotamia and Egypt. As human civilization evolved and animal husbandry went from smaller to larger operations, people were spread more into the countryside where they had the space to raise livestock. As a byproduct of that husbandry we saw the rise of vellum paper. With widespread farming came production of flax, and ultimately, linen which is still in use today as a paper product.

If we continue to chart the evolution of civilization in tandem with the book, we can often see the values of the society the book was produced in not only in its text, but in the actual arrangement of the physical book itself. So each book sends a message before it is ever opened. If a book must be easy to transport and withstand the elements it must be contained in a hard cover. If one wishes to project wealth and status today they may have a library of many leather-bound books. Bibles and Qurans are both printed on very thin paper, both to keep down the cost and the weight for their end users. Cheap, mass-market paperbacks exploded in popularity in the mid 20th century, coinciding with the massive fame authors of the time period enjoyed and in tandem with corporations having vested interest in cost efficiency and profit over quality of the product. If the work is the same but the book is printed cheaply, that drives up revenue for the publisher, but consumers are left with an objectively inferior product that was not built to stand the test of time.

Imagining the Single Book

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I think that most people in our day and age tend to think of books as a part of a larger whole. They’re things to be collected. They’re things to be placed upon shelves and organized in neat numerous rows either by author last name or spine color or the Dewey decimal system. To see a book all on its own seems so rare that my mind has difficulty even picturing it. I am sure that I have seen it, but there seems to be no good way to orient the display of a single codex on a shelf or on a desk, and it is equally difficult to imagine dedicating oneself to a single text.

But when we think about the history of reading (because to read them is the only rational reason to have any books at all) as something that has evolved over time, with various practices and methods, and we go back, perhaps, to the time of the first codified printing of Don Quixote, readers would have approached the text of the first modern, widely dispersed novel very differently.

As Levy and Mole explain in the introduction to The Broadview Introduction to Book History, “historians of reading sometimes distinguish between “intensive” and
“extensive” reading. Reading “intensively” means returning to a small number
of books again and again, whereas reading extensively involves reading
a much larger number of books (or other printed matter), and often reading
them only once” (xvii). They go on to explain that extensive reading is something of a novel phenomenon in the past hundred years and is a result of easily accessible printed material; “when books were very expensive and labour-intensive to produce (especially when they had to be copied by hand), most people had access to very few books. People often read these books intensively because they didn’t have access to any other reading matter. As a result, they came to know their books well and invested significant emotional energy in them” (Levy et al xvii-xviii). I like to imagine some simple, moderately well-off person in the mid seventeenth century going back to Alonso Quixano and the jousting of the windmills and the trot of Rocinante time and again by the glow of a lantern. There is no doubt that intensive reading of Don Quixote is nothing particularly unique, as it is probably the most studied novel of all novels, but to be that invested in that book because you have no other choice of reading material makes for a much different experience than that of the scholar who can understand why Steinbeck’s truck is named Rocinante in Travels With Charley, and who can tie Cervantes’ novel to numerous other works in the 400 years since its publication.

How does that type of reading alter the reader’s conception of the book itself? Are we still drawn to the same plot points? Do plot points then become of lesser importance? Are we more interested in language? Do we have time for more ornately written sentences? And are we more privy to social commentary, or are we less, with no (or few) other written works to compare to? Is the book something self-contained, as I believe we view it now, or does the book only become a launching pad for the more creative parts of our brain? Must we memorialize it and make it something more than a story?

The last two questions seem to have some answer. We can see it in the artworks of every part of the Spanish speaking world, and very much of the rest of it too. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza may be the most represented characters in sculpture and painting who are not religious figures. You can find them, if you look well, cast in bronze everywhere from remote regions of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain to bustling downtown squares in Brussels, Belgium.

I would argue that intensive reading of Don Quixote, (and of other books of the early era of widely-available novels) of prolonged, nearly undivided attention to the story and the characters within, allowed readers to elevate them to something of a mythic status. There were artworks created, false sequels written, conversations in the public square, and this came from an inability to access other books.

Readers must have had a sense of infatuation with early novels, allowed themselves to fully exist in their worlds, used these stories as inspiration (not unlike religion), and this is something we’ve seen peter off through the centuries as readers have had access to more and more stories, whether that be in the form of books, television, cinema, video games, or other kinds of entertainment. We read now in a series of flings, ever moving on to the next thing that catches our eye, which in some ways may have led to our viewing them as “a thing to fetishize rather than to use,” as Jessica Pressman says in “Old Media/New Media” (1). Books exist in collections. They are housed in vast libraries. And so, a deep relationship with a singular set of characters and pages and words in a singular world is largely a thing of the past. They are largely ornamental except in the brief periods of time we have them cracked open.

Hi, I’m Warren

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I think the title really says it all, don’t you? That’s my name. I’m originally from what used to be a very, very small town west of Austin called Dripping Springs, Texas. I lived in Birmingham, Alabama for about five years before coming to SDSU to start my MFA in 2023.

That’s me showing you what the bottom of Bridalveil Fall looks like. I go outside a lot.

I’ve done a number of things with my life. I used to build vintage Harley-Davidsons for a living. I still build them for fun. I ride them all over and sometimes fix them in motel rooms when they break down. I used to be homeless, living in a motorcycle shop called The Dojo. I used to clean septic tanks and grease traps. I used to work the door at a bar at the gnarliest intersection in Birmingham. I used to be an international terrorist of sorts. I used to, and still do, run an annual zine called Locating Troubles with my good photographer pal Liam. But I have always really been obsessed with the written word regardless of what I was doing with my life.

My mother read to me every night when I was a child. Maybe until I was twelve. I can still remember the first book I read and how proud I was: The Berenstein Bears on the Moon (Not Berenstain. I don’t care what they say). I wrote books for school projects and printed them out and illustrated them and bound them in elementary school. Something about the tangible book will always outweigh the worth of the digital book. Every time I publish in print there is a feeling of satisfaction that publishing online will never bring.

After I graduated from Texas State, I traveled to Rojava Kurdistan (Northeastern Syria), and I volunteered as an international member of a Kurdish militia called the YPG. I brought some physical books with me. I had a number to call when I landed in Iraq. I used a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, and I underlined the first time each digit of the phone number appeared in the book to record the name of a contact I was supposed to call who would smuggle me across the Iraqi-Syrian border of Kurdistan. That way, just in case I was detained and searched, it would be harder for them to find or notice any incriminating information on me or the people I was joining. Here I am reading that copy, with its page edges ~*tactically*~ blacked out, near a village called Qereçox.

I later volunteered in Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2022, and books, physical books, were precious treasure in both places. Kurmanji was a forbidden language in Syria from the rise of Arab nationalism until early this year (2025, yes, really), and in all my time there and to this date I have only ever seen three books printed in the Kurdish language. In Ukraine the thought of printed matter being in Ukrainian was an abomination until Taras Shevchenko rebelled against Russian nationalism by daring to write in Ukrainian and about Ukraine in the nineteenth century.

We used to gather at the internet cafe to pirate books from Library Genesis that we downloaded on our phones. I read War and Peace off my phone in the span of a week this way. There’s a lot of free time in a war. We had a very modest library of printed material in Syria: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, To Have and Have Not, The Man in the High Castle with the first 18 pages torn out, Marx’s Kapital, Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, Let it Come Down by Paul Bowles, to name the ones I can remember off the top of my head. We devoured those, and any time a new international would come to join us, one of the first questions we’d ask was, “Did you bring any books?”

I’m very excited to take this class and learn more about the history of the book as an object, what makes it so special, how they have been created, what it has meant to so many people, and what it will continue to mean.