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 How.

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When working on our biography of a book midterm projects, the biggest inquiry at hand is how. How are these books made, and how does that lead us to the bigger picture? For instance, “Bibliography examines the artifactual value of texts – including books, manuscripts, and digital texts – and how they reflect the people and cultures that created, acquired, and exchanged them.” This quote helps make the idea of a bibliography clearer, especially since the term isn’t as well-known as one might think. The biggest point that stands out to me is the “how”. That is the biggest question that lies before us when examining these artifacts. How are these books crafted? How were the pages bound? How were the pictures printed? How does the font reflect the culture of the time? These are how questions then lead to the bigger ideas, the so what, which is really what is important. We are close reading these books in a new way, which most of us have never done before. We are used to opening up a book and reading its contents, then reading closely from there. But here we are reading the spine, the cover, what the pages are made out of, how the pictures were printed, the marginalia, the signatures, the bookplate, and ext. This analysis then helps us see how people read the book during its heyday. Does it have a hook on it? What is the size? If it’s small, we can assume it’s a personal book, but if it’s large, then we can picture it being used in a public space such as a church.

There are so many questions at hand, especially so many how questions. I am very much looking forward to jumping into this project and close reading a book for myself to see into its past and glimpse into the culture that it reflects.

Week 6: Thinking on Critical Bibliography

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I was out sick and missed Tuesday’s practice in descriptive bibliography, as described by Terry Belanger (1977 qtd. in “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” 2025). (Thanks to Vide for keeping me in the loop.) Now I’m typing this week’s post informally because my mind is slow-simmering with sick. I note this because it’s offering me insight into how sickness influences energy and modes of functioning in a way that, like the language and probable typos in this post, can be read in comparison with other posts to signify my material circumstances as a creator. Considering the scope of bibliographic methods described in the Bibliographical Society of America’s “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” (2025), I’m thinking about how a disabled or sick bibliography would operate.

Following Lisa Maruca and Kate Ozment’s “critical bibliography”, I want to approach bibliography as culturally situated and potentially radical work. I’m thinking of a disabled or crip bibliography, which is a familiar practice in disability studies. There’s a quandary of identification in disability studies: How can we determine that a creator is disabled when there’s no hard evidence of this? Using bibliography, I think that we can elide this unnecessary (and at times medicalist) question and instead center how the materiality of a created object holds traces of disabled ways of being and production.

While it’s common to encounter a work and “just know” that you’re encountering crip kin, what you’re really experiencing is the recognition of familiar material behaviors in their media. The manically-typed scroll of Jack Kerouac, the multiple hands of blind Jorge Luis Borges and his assisting mother, the smudged and slanting correspondences of Frank’s Kafka during his late institutionalization, and the frenetic journal infodumps of Ada Lovelace can all be read for traces of disabled production practices. We might not know the affective experiences with which actors approached a book object, but we can read what G. Thomas Tanselle calls “physical clues [that] reveal details of the underlying production process” (2020 qtd. in “Bibliography Defined: Further Reading” 2025). There is some uphill work, I think, in defining and asserting ways of reading disabled production to a broader audience, but understanding the book as a technology means that we can understand how actors adapt it for disabled use.

This approach to bibliography is not limited to the processes of writing or printing a book object. The ways that people use books, as we’ve seen, are shaped by material circumstances; reading is, and has always been, transformed through disabled adaptations. Physical production processes are shaped by bodily limits on energy, time, and access. Charting these processes through crip bibliography can recenter the prevalence and importance of disabled life across history, resisting the dehistoricization and erasure of disabled life in dominant histories. This is critical when the erasure of our histories is used to justify the eradication of our futures.

I follow the bodily attunement of disability and affect theories in centering this way of experiencing the world as I practice bibliography from home. I’m looking over my journals and (in comparative readings with the aforementioned letters) observing how (re-)inking, formatting, and medium reflect how I was evidently using sketchbooks, notebooks, Post-It’s, and other ephemera both as existing books (mostly store-bought) and as creative adaptions. I will not be doing this project before a more foundations-based attempt at bibliography, but I do want to give it a try: I’ll write a bibliography of my written journals across my changes in health. Here I am trying out a disabled bibliography that can only be done in a disabled way. I’m thinking on this as my fever has exacerbated my memory issues, and approaching my journals does not come with memories of their creation. I would here undertake bibliography of objects that I know the context of (I modified them at some point) but not the actual processes of creating (those memories are gone). This would invite critical insight into doing disabled (auto?)bibliography, using immemory to investigate the fractured but continuous relationship between bibliographer, book object, and trace actors.

Bibliographical Book Study

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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.

What is Bibliography?

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When doing this weeks reading, I was interesting in how they defined a Bibliography as a study rather than a book. To me, bibliography meant a list of sources you site at the end of a paper- I had never thought about it in the context of being a study. “For in 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 an extension of this follows the investigation of the methods of production in general and of the conditions of survival.” (27) This struck my interest, and even this quote I had to re-read in order to fully understand its context. According to this source, a bibliography is a study of books as objects, rather than just the content. This changed my perspective in how I see bibliographies, and the importance of them. There are different types, which I did not know, and they all serve a distinct purpose in the context of work. Bibliographies bring more value to work- making it more reliable, historical, and accurate. This reading has made me see them more than just a hassle now, I understand the importance of them and the importance of studying them.

Analytical, Descriptive, Textual, Historical, Enumerative, are all types of Bibliography practices- I quite literally thought they were all the same. Not only do I now have a new understanding of this study, but also how the different practices bring different value to the work. They all have a specific purpose when looking at a creative piece, working to make it stronger. Bibliographies are so important when giving credit to an authors work, prevent plagiarism or stolen work, and verification: are all key to having a strong piece of work. Bibliographies established authors to get credit and creates credibility. “Offers liberation bibliography as a conscious and intentional practice of identifying and repairing the harms of systemic racism, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and other oppressive structures in and through bibliography and bibliographical study” (Bibliography defined). I had never thought of Bibliography as a form of liberation, but this new context makes it clear to me that Bibliographies played an important role in history, social justice, and the history of information and books overall.

You Are What You Read

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Within the grasp of our fingertips, an entire civilization unfolds, a lineage is traced back hundreds of years, and the power exists to alter our physical perception of anyone, including ourselves. This is the digital age, and to understand why this is feasible, or specifically why we’d desire such content so close, we may look at the Middle Ages and the concept of Girdle Books. Through that moment in history, among many others sharing the need for information at hand, it is revealed that codices and electronic devices are extensions of the human.

Our knowledge both expands and limits our freedom of expression. This concept seems simple enough, as a student undergoing med school may read a plethora of medical textbooks, allowing them to go on and on about whatever subject they wish, so long as it is medically related. Though in this performance, the student may be limited in their articulation of sheetrock repair or any other area they disregarded in place of studying medicine. In our day and age, with the excess of information, this isn’t as common an issue, though applying it to the Middle Ages is drastically different. 

With no internet and the time being before the Gutenberg press, Girdle Books largely determined one’s area of interest or expertise. An important choice of diction from Chapter 2 of The Book furthers this claim when looking at this sentence describing Girdle Books as “an oversized soft leather cover whose flaps could be looped under one’s belt for easy consultation on the go.” Notice how Borsuk chose the word consultation, rather than enjoyment, reading, or any other word for examining a book. This is because the owners were largely monks, professionals, and individuals who possessed relevant knowledge they could then apply to whatever circumstance. Of course, there were the select wealthy individuals who held knowledge with no “real” reason for it, but even then, the reason may be to gloat about their expanse of knowledge, useful or not.

With our accessible knowledge continuously expanding, there may be a point of collective knowing. This is speculative, of course, but I think all fun things are. As cellphones are the new girdle books, already multiplying our information at hand by an absurd amount, I am curious what technology will take the place of cellphones. Is imagining a society that collectively is tapped into an all-knowing AI that far off? Value could lie in the undigitized creations of mankind or the critical thought aspect. But honestly, is it unreasonable to imagine a doctor who’s programmed with all the knowledge necessary to achieve excellence in his division? Or is a human being just in the way at that point in the future? And lastly, off my main point, could all-knowing humans even be unique at that point? I pose this to the aether, and to any future person able to answer this question one day, until it’s finally true.

Bring Back Handcrafting Letter Stamps

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In the second chapter of The Book, Borsuk investigates the evolution of book content from the font to the binding and how that changed the way in which people approach books today. Borsuk begins with the origins of the modern codex, which lies with Gutenberg’s printing press in the 1440’s. But as Borsuk notes, “as much as we laud Gutenberg, he was not actually the first person to print with movable type,” instead,  it was “Chinese engineer, Bi Shen who developed a technique for printing from clay type he carved by hand” (73). I appreciated this acknowledgement because, not only does it highlight the reality of the movable type’s history, but it also shows how book practices developed relatively independently, as explored in the previous chapter.

Today, when typing, plenty of people don’t even have to consider their font choices so seriously. Though we might change it from Arial to Times New Roman, or if we’re feeling silly, Papyrus or Comic Sans, the labor, artistry, and history of creating fonts isn’t taken into account. In this chapter of The Book Borsuk, when discussing the printing press, goes into how Gutenberg and others had to literally create their own font. This task was more than just designing how letters would appear, but also how. The metal cast had to be strong enough to withstand the force of a printing press but not so hard that it destroyed the paper it was going on. In Gutenberg’s case, he “formulate[ed] his own alloy of tin and lead” (66) that was strong and had a low melting point. Borsuk then explains the complicated process of creating the stamps for the movable type, which was a lot to take in. With this page-long explanation, I realized the convenience of modern screens, keyboards, and printers. Gone are the days of arduous labor that required people to handcraft a single letter and put their full weight into pressing those handcrafted stamps onto handcrafted paper with an ink that was also made by hand. I think because of our disconnect with the labor that goes into the crafting of a book, in addition to its more automated route of creation, the path to fetishization of the book becomes easier.

Week 5: Books Becoming Content Based

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After reading Chapter 2 of Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, the curation of the book itself went from an intricate handmade artform to a mass production to fit the newfound purpose of the book, which is to use it for its content. Last Tuesday’s class in the Special Collections, we took the time to observe a variety of texts and the craftsmanship of the book itself. The covers, bindings, and format of the text revealed a history of the book without the reader even having to open it. For example, the intricate handmade cover of the Dominican Catholic Hymns book portrayed its importance with its ornate embellishments and high-quality leather. Being able to see the different handcrafted books in person highlighted the dramatic shift from books as art objects to books as content-based mediums.

I took a glance at my own personal book collection, and couldn’t help but notice that the majority of the books on my shelves are paperbacks with creased spines and flimsy covers that lacked any artistry. I flipped through the pages and noticed that most of the paper itself was so thin that I could see the words faintly through the other side. These observations display how “the printing press changed the book by facilitating its proliferation and separating the idea of the book from the object” (Borsuk, 76). Prior to the printing press, the book reflected more than the content inside. It was a portrayal of status and wealth not just a container of knowledge. The printing press made books more accessible and created the shift from sacred, one-of-a-kind artifacts to everyday commodities, valued primarily for the content they carried rather than the material form they took.

In my SOC730 course: Advanced Social Theory Class, we are discussing Marx theories that explain that with the increase in automation and capitalism we will see a decrease in work hours and more time for individuals to pursue arts and , to my understanding, more time to appreciate art. Will automation continue to decrease the artistry of books leaving them as disposable vessels of information? Or, perhaps, will it create space for a resurgence of book crafting as people search for meaning and beauty in tangible, handmade forms?

Are Books Alive?!!?

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After reading Borsuk’s chapter two in The Book, I was honestly super intrigued by the way they were discussing the book or codex as a body while describing each and every aspect of it like a body part. I also love how this part of the book transitions into the next sub-chapter which is how we as a society created some sort of intimate connection with this object that is not even alive. These two connect so well with each other since we see the book as a body and it is a clear representation of how we created such a close relationship with books.

Pretty wild to describe the book as body parts because I don’t believe a random bystander who doesn’t read occasionally would look at a book in that way besides it looking like, well, a book. The intimacy of not only looking at a book as a body, but as well writing down notes in the margins which then add another layer of relationship with the book is another telling sign of having a personal relationship with the book. The printing press creating these margins allowed for people to start spending more time with the book and having a personal relationship due to how important they viewed the content. This would then make every copy ever made more and more unique as time went on.

“The early years of printed codex thus mark both an important technological shift (the mechanical reproduction of text) and a philosophical one in terms of how we relate to books”(Borsuk 84).

This line fascinates me so much because it perfectly describes everything that I talked about earlier and of how we as humans have created such a close relationship with something that isn’t literally alive, but we do believe it is alive in one way or another due to how we react to the book since it feels as though we have a conversation with it as we continuously read it. So now it makes me wonder sometimes if our books are truly alive in one way shape or form because usually, we have intimate relationships with entities that are alive and not as much with things that aren’t alive. Our obsession with books is truly something that I never thought of especially when I look back to previous class discussion on how Professor Pressman discusses the fact that we as a society have really fetishized it to such a far degree and so far, that we have ended up tattooing it permanently on our body.

One more thing that I believe adds another layer on top of the intimacy with books is the fact that people back then would pirate books since they weren’t able to have many copies or that it may be too expensive. You have to be obsessed with a certain genre, author or story type to go out of your way to do illegal things to obtain such literature. My only question now is how far have we fetishized this inanimate object and second, how much further are we willing to push that line simply because we love books?

The Church, Power, and Gutenberg

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When reading chapter 2 of “The Book,” I questioned why Gutenberg was mentioned so prominently when it came to the printing press (yes he made many great achievements but he was not the first, see page 72’s mention of Bi Sheng). The answer that came to light is from page 72-73, “Evidence suggests that Gutenberg printed Latin schoolbooks and papal indulgences before completing his Bible as a means of supporting his press and currying favor with the Church” (Borsuk 72-73). One of the main reasons why I think Gutenberg has his place in history is because he curried favor with the Church—one of, if not, the most powerful entity of the time. The Church had overwhelming influence and a seemingly endless amount of funds. Gutenberg was first, and foremost, an entrepreneur, as seen in his earlier pursuits of gem-polishing, and “producing and selling mirrors to pilgrims” (Borsuk 65). And his print shop was one of his business ventures. Therefore, Gutenberg’s first motive is money—not necessarily the spread of knowledge. (It also helps that he was born into a rich family.)

In knowing this, it is not far-fetched to assume Gutenberg made a business decision to fall in line with what the Church wanted—it was a symbiotic relationship; the Church got to spread their message with ease, and Gutenberg was able to continue his business. On top of this, Gutenberg most likely knew that people were likely to buy religious books, because the Church was so powerful and most people subscribed to its faith. In printing the Bible and other religious texts, Gutenberg secured himself in the Church’s eyes, and thus in history.

Those with (and in) power are often able to either write history, or make us see it through their lens. Gutenberg’s story is an example of controlling the narrative. By making sure Gutenberg’s print shop stays alive through the Church’s funding, the Church is able to decide what is printed. If Gutenberg printed something the church was against, they could pull their funding and force Gutenberg out of business. They can decide to censor other perspectives and voices. It echoes the same problem today, of those in power trying to control and censor knowledge.