66 The New York Review
font used is COMIC SANS!” is focusing
on the book as a material thing.
Those three perspectives share equal
billing in book history, the discipline
cobbled together in the past century
out of social and cultural history, tex-
tual editing, analytical bibliography,
and reception theory. That its methods
could transform our understanding
not just of peasants’ literacy rates and
pulp fiction, but also of where our own
scholarly practices come from, is one
of Anthony Grafton’s crucial insights.
Even in his biographies of scholars like
the fifteenth- century architect Leon
Battista Alberti, the sixteenth- century
astrologer Girolamo Cardano, and
the sixteenth- century classicist Jo-
seph Scaliger, Grafton, the Princeton
University historian who knows more
about Renaissance humanism than any
scholar alive and most dead, locates
the individual genius within networks,
workshops, and households.
Erasmus, Copernicus, and other
authors whom you’ll recognize in the
pages of Inky Fingers, his latest collec-
tion of essays, form the tip of an intel-
lectual pyramid whose base teems with
correspondents, protégés, servants,
and even children. The great Antwerp
printer Christophe Plantin, Grafton
shows, trained his five- year- old daugh-
ter to read Hebrew, Greek, and Latin
texts aloud to the proofreader, without
understanding the words. Notes scrib-
bled in the margins of the proofs of one
Bible printed by Plantin complain in
Hebrew of the girl’s tardiness, for the
sake of discretion.
Grafton’s 1997 monograph The
Footnote: A Curious History concret-
ized history from below, focusing not
on figures whose poverty excluded
them from the written record but,
more literally, on the lower parts of the
printed page. The essays that make up
Inky Fingers, too, repopulate the world
of high scholarship with participants of
all social ranks, dragging the most rar-
efied ideas down to earth.
Grafton chips away at early modern
scholars’ subordination of “mechani-
cal” workers (such as compositors and
pressmen) to “theoretical” workers
(such as the “correctors,” usually un-
derstood as proofreaders, whose role
Grafton shows to have encompassed
indexing, updating, and other functions
much like those of a modern editor or
literary agent). Although university
administrators now equate “scholarly
collaboration” with public- spiritedness,
the workspaces that Grafton recon-
structs in such evocative detail provide a
bracing reminder that teamwork doesn’t
preclude inequality. On the contrary,
his excavations of early modern hu-
manists’ working methods emphasize
a testily renegotiated division of labor
among more or less visible actors, with
the degree of acknowledgment rarely
proportional to the hours put in.
For all his own intellectual daring,
Grafton’s sympathies lie with grunt-
work. Originality is upstaged by trans-
mission, inspiration by logistics. Ideas,
in this vivid telling, emerge not just
from minds but from hands, not to
mention the biceps that crank a press or
heft a ream of paper. (The inky finger-
prints left on a manuscript by the great
printer Aldus Manutius, for example,
make it possible to identify which base
texts he worked from.) Reconstructing
artisanal processes from printed prod-
ucts, Grafton’s omnivorous erudition
lends drama to the dowdy subject that
high- school teachers call “study skills”:
how information is broken into man-
ageable chunks for future retrieval.
The most striking instance of the
“paper tools” analyzed in his book
is the collection of excerpts hand-
copied by Francis Daniel Pastorius,
a seventeenth- century German im-
migrant to Pennsylvania. Far from a
mere bucket in which derivative infor-
mation was stored, this commonplace
book emerges from Grafton’s analysis
as a powerful “artificial memory” that
shaped surprisingly radical arguments
about race and slavery. Other “epis-
temic machines” include seventeenth-
century precursors of tracing paper,
made from cow embryos coated with
pork fat and preserved by storage in
urine. The logic underlying such low-
tech duplication methods will feel un-
cannily familiar to any Internet user
who remixes—no matter how hygieni-
cally—the words and images compiled
by anonymous content providers.The questions formulated by Graf-
ton are recognizably bookish: Who
should be credited for the production
of knowledge? What traces do ideas
bear of the labor that transmits them?
In When Novels Were Books, the Ford-
ham University English professor Jor-
dan Stein uses bibliographical methods
to solve a puzzle that might look purely
textual: Where do genres come from?
The origins of the novel, in particular,
form one of the longest- running rid-
dles of literary criticism. In 1957 Ian
Watt’s Rise of the Novel sharply distin-
guished the realist novels that emerged
in eighteenth- century Britain—sec-
ular in their ethos, empiricist in their
epistemology, bourgeois in their alle-
giances—from the kinds of long prose
narratives that were distant in time
(Hellenistic and medieval romance) or
in space (the more shapely, less true- to -
life world of the French novel). Draw-
ing on the social sciences as much as on
literary criticism, Watt explained the
messy miscellaneity of the eighteenth-
century novel by the individualism of
the society that it expressed.
In the decades that followed, Watt’s
thesis inspired challenges from femi-
nist critics (Nancy Armstrong’s Desire
and Domestic Fiction and Margaret
Anne Doody’s True Story of the Novel),
Marxist critics (Michael McKeon’s Or-
igins of the English Novel), and debates
about the origins of the very idea of fic-
tionality (Lennard Davis’s Factual Fic-
tions, Catherine Gallagher’s Nobody’s
Story). Watt’s title ramified into “Rape
and the Rise of the Novel” by Frances
Ferguson (1987), The Colonial Rise
of the Novel by Firdous Azim (1993),
Women and the Rise of the Novel by
Josephine Donovan (1998), “Race and
the Rise of the Novel” (the subtitle of a
2007 study by Laura Doyle), and more.
For all their disagreement, these
arguments took “novel” to designate
a string of words. Stein’s revisionist
account of eighteenth- century print
culture starts instead from objects.
Granting publishers equal billing with
authors and paying as much attention
to buying habits as to reading practices,
he coordinates the history of the novel
with “the development of the book as a
media platform.” One effect is to reveal
an unfamiliar set of eighteenth- century
generic taxonomies, which defined
Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones not
as fictional prose narratives but asgatherings of printed paper in octavo
or duodecimo format—by comparison,
bigger than a smartphone, smaller than
a laptop. Publishers’ catalogs lumped
pocket- sized devotional works with
similarly scaled fictions rather than
with hefty, lectern- ready collections of
sermons. The textual features that we
usually associate with the novel—nar-
rative mode, fictional status, density of
detail—dwindle here to one element in
a bundle that also enfolds character-
istic material attributes, distribution
channels, and reading practices.
Dipping in and out of novels as
twitchily as they browsed and searched
books of piety, the readers described
by Stein sound more like the pen- in-
hand scholars described by Grafton
than the page- turning fantasists that
we think of when we picture novel-lovers. Looking at the ways in which
novels were used challenges the excep-
tionality of the genre. Watt placed the
novel within a longer history of nar-
rative, but When Novels Were Books
places it instead with contemporaneous
prose on both sides of the Anglophone
Atlantic. Stein pairs Richardson’s
pseudo- autobiographical fiction Pamela
(London, 1740), for example, with the
decidedly nonfictional Life of David
Brainerd, a now- forgotten missionary
document published a few years later
in Philadelphia.
The juxtaposition isn’t in itself sur-
prising: the New Historicists who came
to dominate English departments in
the 1980s invented the tactic of pairing
each literary text, sommelier- like, with
a more obscure nonfictional counter-
part in order to show the broader cul-
tural concerns that made both works
possible. Those critics might have
stopped, though, where Stein begins:
by noting the vulnerable first- person
speaker that narrates Pamela and
Brainerd. Stein, in contrast, zooms out
to the way eighteenth- century book-
sellers categorized the two texts. Ad-
vertised and shelved cheek- by- jowl and
priced alike, one narrative that would
later be relegated to the dusty catego-
ries of Religion or Biography originally
sent the same commercial cues as an-
other that would later be reprinted with
the retroactive subtitle “A Novel.”Like Grafton, Stein understands
publication as a process rather than
an event, and he shares Grafton’s fas-
cination with the afterlives of texts re-
purposed by successive generations. It
was only at the end of the eighteenth
century that booksellers began to re-brand books like Pamela as novels, a
category carved out by contradistinc-
tion to the equally new category of
“books of piety.” The next generation
of publishers went on to repackage Pil-
grim’s Progress—previously treated
as a religious text—as a secular novel.
Watt himself acknowledged that the
term “novel” emerged after the fact,
as a label for books published earlier
with subtitles like “history” or “life and
adventures.”
While Watt celebrated a genre burst-
ing free from the stale conventions
of epic and romance, Stein casts the
novel itself as the fixed point against
which modern devotional genres began
to emerge. He locates the latter’s in-
novation less in their ideas (conser-
vative if not reactionary) than in the
infrastructures that created them. The
same Christian publishers who recy-
cled worn- out content devoted all their
ingenuity to identifying cheaper sites
outside of London to produce books
and noncommercial channels through
which to distribute them: voluntary
associations, philanthropic giveaways,
religious factions. Novels triumphed,
in Stein’s nuts- and- bolts account, less
because they found exciting new con-
ventions in which to express secular
modernity than because the departure
of more enterprising competitors left
them the last ones standing in the sleepy
world of for- profit London publishing.
That literary works are shaped by
their social and economic circum-
stances may have startled Watt’s col-
leagues, but for the past few decades
a sometimes naive acceptance of the
findings of social historians has been
the default position in English de-
partments. The “go- it- alone literary
formalism” against which Stein polem-
icizes, therefore, feels like a straw man
standing in for historicist literary critics
who focus on textual content to the ex-
clusion of textual form. The New His-
toricists interpret the story in the text;
book historians like Stein tell the story
of how the text reached its readers.
Like Defoe describing Robinson
Crusoe’s adventures as “strange” and
“suprizing” in the title of that novel,
scholarly monographs have every in-
centive to overstate their shock value.
“Tilting my argument away from form
may seem like an unwonted move,” Stein
declares, “insofar as the long- standing
dominance of formalist interpretation
has not staunched the field- wide flow of
new attention to novelistic formalism.”
Yet book history is by now entrenched
enough that many of the scholars whom
Stein tags as “interdisciplinary” inhabit
English departments like his.
Stein does stand apart, however, in
practicing what he preaches. The prose
of this monograph might have been
less lively if its author hadn’t played
the full media field, from nonacademic
intellectual publications such as Com-
monplace and the Los Angeles Review
of Books to the food- and- wine mag-
azine Saveur. In the early 2000s, the
former two publications had the auda-
cious idea of bringing literary- critical
and even literary- theoretical ideas to a
(slightly) wider readership online than
the market for university press books
like Inky Fingers and When Novels
Were Books. Priced higher than most
books but lower than most university
press releases, measuring at around
six- by- nine inches, both dust- jacket-
encased hardbacks ground lofty ideas
in everyday things. QA French printing press; woodcut, 1508