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From Last Week to This – A Book’s Body and Its Life

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While exploring the further reading section of What is Bibliography, I stumbled on one excerpt in particular, the one from W. W. Greg’s Bibliography – A Retrospect (1945). What he writes instantly reminded me of the thought process I had last week when I was reading Chapter 2 of Borsuk’s The Book. There Borsuk compares the codex to a human body, with a spine, a head, and even a tail (The Book, 77). I think while Greg technically makes a different comparison, they still connect very well.

Greg describes bibliography as “the study of books as material objects irrespective of their contents.” For him, the goal is “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.” I find it interesting that he talks about a book as if it had a biography. The words “birth” and “adventures” make it sound very much alive. They turn the book into something with its own story, separate from the words printed inside. Suddenly, the bent spine, the faded paper, or the scribbled notes in the margins all become traces of the book’s life.

Borsuk makes a similar point in a different way. Her comparison of the codex to a body also takes the book out of its role as a container. With a spine, a head, and a tail, the book looks like something with presence, something we hold and interact with like a living form. What makes this especially interesting to me is that it connects so directly to what I thought about last week. In my last blog, I reflected on how Borsuk’s metaphor made me realize that a book is not just information but something we meet, almost like a companion. The hinge of the cover, for example, pulling open the first page like an invitation, felt to me like the book was active, as if it greeted us. Reading Greg’s description, that thought immediately comes back to me. He gives the book not just a body but a life story. Putting the two together, the book becomes a being that has both a form and a past. It has a presence we can feel and a biography we can trace. This is why Greg’s passage stood out to me so much, as it reminded me of my own realization from last week.

In the end, both writers remind me that reading is more than just taking in words. Each book has its own presence, shaped by the people who produced it and the readers who left their marks on it. To open a book is not only to read its text. It is also to meet a life that has already been lived.

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.