[Special Feature: Encountering Books] Noriyuki Harada: How Books Came to Be Read—From the Perspective of the History of Publishing Culture

2023/08/07

For centuries, books have walked alongside humanity as the concrete embodiment of human intellect, culture, and the act of expression. Today, the nature of the book faces the possibility of a major transformation amidst the rapid spread of digital content and the qualitative shift in intellectual and cultural production activities brought about by generative AI. In this article, I would like to examine the various aspects of the history of the relationship between books and humans—specifically, how books came to be read—from the perspective of the history of publishing culture. In doing so, I will re-emphasize the importance of books in terms of guaranteeing the expression of each individual's personality and consider the future of books.

There is a novel called "Jane Eyre" (1847). It is an autobiographical masterpiece by Charlotte Brontë, a 19th-century British author known as one of the Brontë sisters, and is a work familiar through television and film. The heroine, Jane, loses her parents at a young age and is raised by her aunt-in-law, Mrs. Reed. Her only pleasure is hiding in a window seat in the corner of a room to read books. One of her favorite books is "Gulliver's Travels," and Jane often immerses herself in the extraordinary fantasies of Lilliput and Brobdingnag.

For a heroine who reads like this from the beginning of the work, the first important thing is that a book is simply there. Such a setting is possible because it is a mid-19th-century novel, but if we go back a century in the same country of Britain, things do not go so smoothly. Jane's act of reading also carries significant meaning. While trying to avoid facing Mrs. Reed and her cousins who treat her coldly, Jane seeks to release her imagination from the constraints of a harsh reality through reading. For her, books and the act of reading were a place where she could leave her stifling daily life and fully assert her individuality. Books are also a place where readers can safely construct their own worlds. For example, if the content of one's reading were instantaneously shared with those around them through a terminal, her rich imagination would not be nurtured.

What must be added here quickly is that there were not multiple copies of "Gulliver's Travels" in the mansion, and Jane did not have her own personal copy. On the contrary, what Jane was reading originally belonged to her cousin. While most people ignored it, for her, it was an irreplaceable object—that single book, "Gulliver's Travels." In a situation where publishing would not be economically viable unless half the members of the Reed household purchased a copy of "Gulliver's Travels," it is safe to say that Jane would likely never have encountered this book.

However, an environment where books are always available has not existed for very long. Even today, there are regions around the world that lack such an environment. Books containing religious doctrines or mysteries were often produced in very limited numbers, and even transcription was frequently forbidden. Nevertheless, in the case of Europe, by the latter half of the Middle Ages, various important documents began to spread to some extent in the form of manuscripts. Owning such manuscripts served as a symbol of authority, monopolizing knowledge and learning important to human society. The English word "Literature," which is generally translated as "bungaku" in Japan today, originally stems from the Latin "Litterātūra," meaning "things written down." In Europe, the material for paper transitioned from papyrus to parchment, but since the material itself was precious to begin with, the importance of "things written down" and the books that contained them was high. From the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, "Literature" was used as a term meaning "books," "learning," and "arts and sciences" in general, rather than so-called "literature."

Of course, changes gradually occurred as the method of making paper from plants was transmitted from China to Europe in the mid-12th century, and Johannes Gutenberg in Germany devised the letterpress printing technique in the mid-15th century (the following Keio University FutureLearn is useful regarding paper and papermaking technology). In Britain, large-scale publishing occurred in succession in the early 17th century. These included the so-called King James Version of the Bible (1611), led by King James I, and the First Folio of plays by playwright William Shakespeare (1623). However, it was generally around the beginning of the 18th century that the supply of paper stabilized, allowing letterpress printing to become economically independent, and the sharing of information through serious writing became an urgent social issue. This was also the period when general prose leading to the modern era—written language based on daily conversation—was established, leading to the development of information sharing and dissemination through writing, such as journalism. Samuel Johnson of Britain published "A Dictionary of the English Language," which played a major role in establishing English prose, in 1755 without relying on a patron, and the "Encyclopédie," edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, was published between 1751 and 1780. Religion, knowledge, scholarship, and literature finally began to be democratized during this period, at least in Europe. This movement accelerated in the 19th century. As suffrage gradually expanded, books were greatly needed to share and verify various information related to social movements, and also for purposes such as cultivating individual imagination and creativity. Thus, the environment where books were present began to take shape even for unfortunate heroines like Jane.

However, it is necessary to note that this movement toward the democratization of publishing culture eventually caused a fragmentation of the readership. Even regarding prose fiction—novels—which gained a large readership in the modern era, a significant divergence in the readership began to emerge in Britain, for example, around the time of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters in the mid-19th century. This is a phenomenon that literary historians describe as "the popularization of the reader and intellectual/literary success do not necessarily coexist" (refer to Ronald Carter and John McRae, The Penguin Guide to Literature in English (1996), p. 170). Jane's superior intellect and sensitivity in reading "Gulliver's Travels" were things shared socially through books, even if she was alone within the Reed family. However, the development of publishing culture weakened the integrity of such book culture and led to its diversification. In a sense, content intended to entertain Mrs. Reed and her cousins entered the world of books that Jane loved, creating a situation where the former pressured the latter. The birth of diversity and the process of it being lost again are, in fact, closely related.

In fact, this democratization of publishing culture, the diversification of books, and the danger of the dismantling of culture itself accompanying that diversification were phenomena already seen in the early modern stage when letterpress printing was getting on track. I previously noted that "if we go back a century from Jane's time in the same country of Britain, things do not go so smoothly." In the mid-18th century, as modern publishing formats were being established, it was Samuel Johnson himself—the man who completed the "Dictionary of the English Language"—who feared that "the number of authors continues to increase, and eventually there may be no readers left." The contemporary poet Alexander Pope also described the situation at the time, saying that "paper has become cheap, printers have increased, and as a result, authors are overflowing." The development of publishing culture always contained the danger of an overflow of authors and the dismantling of culture itself (refer to Noriyuki Harada, "Reading Enlightenment," The Rising Generation (Kenkyusha, May 2002 issue), pp. 10-13).

Looking back at the history of publishing culture in this way, it can be said that the current situation—where values regarding book content have diversified, resulting in the mass sharing and dissemination of information via electronic media—is inevitable. Even with conventional books, those that were scrolls in much of the ancient world changed into codex forms, and manuscripts transcribed by scribes changed significantly through printing technology. The fact that electronic media has replaced books does not mean that the basic role of sharing and disseminating information has changed. However, upon further examining how books came to be read, one realizes that the matter involves more important issues in a way that essentially relates to human thought content and thinking patterns. The key is to re-examine the book as an object (for example, David Pearson's "Books as History: The Importance of Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Western Tradition" is a useful reference).

To begin with, books as objects possess a high degree of freedom and rich diversity in the sense that they accompany the thoughts and actions of each individual. A book encapsulates a process where thoughts and emotions are not presented in their raw form but are polished by the author, editor, and in some cases, a few readers who read the work in advance, and then released again toward the reader. This process does not change much between the ancient world, where "things written down" were themselves precious, and the period after the modern era, when the presence of books became commonplace. The reason thoughts and emotions that stand a step or two above the everyday world reside in books is due to this process of polishing. Moreover, this polishing process does not necessarily end when a single book is completed. There are countless examples in the history of books as objects where not only the author but many readers have added marginalia to a single book preserved over centuries, and those notes in turn generated new thoughts and emotions. Readers' marginalia were also truly diverse and uninhibited, rather than being confined to a restrictive format like a "comment function." In those notes, we can find the status and origin of each reader, their unique ways of holding knowledge, and even their sharpened sensitivities.

Books were also a place for experiments related to human thought and information processing. This included not only punctuation for replacing oral expression with written language but also instances where people who were browsing information as if scrolling through a computer screen transitioned to the codex format due to inconvenience. There were cases where illustrations, which could be called unique works of art, were effectively placed between or beside text, and large-format books were produced so that large-scale maps could be understood experientially. There are also many books where great care was taken with paper, typeface, binding, or the proportion of margins, keeping in mind the reader's environment when the book is read.

To summarize these characteristics of books as objects, which are somewhat common across East and West, while they are based on a democratic character of sharing and disseminating information, they also played the role of a vessel that highlights the individuality of each person. What is important here is that for such individuality to stand out, humans must continue to devise ways for other humans to understand, by their own hands. To be sure, the world of books expressed in illustrated or large-format books might allow for a higher-precision experiential understanding through the use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology. However, that experiential understanding is not the same kind of experience as holding an illustrated or large-format book and reflecting on the intentions and ingenuity of the author or bookmaker while looking at the book from various angles or reading it repeatedly. Normally, we should probably think of the skill of the creator who made such VR possible, but we usually rarely do so. This is because VR technology aims to hide that distinct individuality and make one forget that it is virtual.

While books as objects aim for the sharing and dissemination of information, they are certainly inferior to electronic media in terms of high-capacity information processing, large-scale sharing, and speed of searching. Some point out that electronic media also needs the conscientious selection of information found in book publishing, and this may see some improvement if a place is provided for figures like the skilled editors of the past to be active in electronic media as well. However, the decisive difference between electronic media and books is that while both follow the trend of the democratization of publishing culture, the former predicts a thorough homogenization of information, including human individuality, whereas the latter continues to maintain a simplicity and rusticity sufficient for each individual's personality to survive. The problem, it can be said, depends on how we evaluate the brilliance emitted by such human individuality—which is sometimes capricious and highly inefficient—in the future.

Why is a thorough homogenization of information predicted for publishing via electronic media? The reason is actually inherent in the goal of wanting to deliver information to as many people as possible, or wanting to pick up information from as many people as possible. If many people share information, the content and format naturally become similar, and if one tries to include information sent by many people, the format again becomes similar due to certain physical constraints. In the history of publishing culture, there are scattered examples of publishers who succeeded through high-volume, low-margin sales, and the phenomenon of an overflow of authors already existed in the early modern period. Nevertheless, in the 19th-century Reed household, there was only one copy of "Gulliver's Travels." However, if even Mrs. Reed and the cousins come to access information in the same way, the information provided and the methods of providing it will naturally differ. The reason the movement from books to electronic media is predicted to bring about a homogenization of information itself—while being fundamentally a change in the method of information provision—is due to these circumstances. The fact that the shift to electronic media ironically tends to lean toward a quantitative scale of wanting to deliver information to as many people as possible, and that such a quantitative scale is easier to operate and manage than examining the quality of information, seems to accelerate these circumstances.

One might argue that we should simply strive to question the quality of information and secure a place for human individuality to be expressed even in electronic media by resisting such homogenization, but things do not proceed so easily. This is because mass production and mass consumption have already permeated every corner of society. Moreover, this trend did not just begin recently. Even if electronic media is accompanied by the homogenization of information, it overlaps with the path that books have walked—that is, the history of forming an environment where books are simply present. However, amidst these movements, what we must think about now is the disappearance of that single copy of "Gulliver's Travels" from before Jane in the name of the homogenization of provided information. This is because it could lead to the destruction of the life of a heroine who lived autonomously resisting various conventions and social discrimination, or the destruction of human society itself, which has been created through the endeavors of each such individual.

Ensuring that information is provided to the other members of the Reed household while a single copy of "Gulliver's Travels" remains before Jane—we seem to be standing at a major crossroads today in order to secure such a path of coexistence between books and electronic media.