Elizabeth Eisenstein wrote The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe in 1979, giving rise to the importance of the field of the history of the book in broader cultural and social histories. However, histories rarely stay static, and approximately 20 years after Eisenstein’s publishing, several challengers to her work rose. One of the boldest challengers was Adrian Johns and his 1998 The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making.
Soon reaching its own 25th year, The Nature of the Book is Adrian Johns’ massive undertaking detailing how the identity of print is a made thing, not an identity that came into being by being. In other words, for Johns, the context of the printed work and those that dealt with the printed work defined the printed work in the meaning its readers took from that work and the meaning those that surrounded the work bestowed upon the work. This social construction that was a book in early modern England, where most of John’s history takes place, produced contestable knowledge due to the events surrounding its printing. For those familiar with Eisenstein’s work, John’s book is a direct challenge to Eisenstein’s idea of “fixity,” the idea of the faithful replicability of any book in its entirety.
In order to challenge Eisenstein’s idea, Johns moves through nine chapters setting up several microhistories in a range of areas — commercial, intellectual, political, and personal. While the primary setting is always England, mainly London, the characters change as Johns’ ideas propel his main point — the made identity of print — forward. Each chapter focuses on a specific set of characters in the life of the book — those that made the book (chapter 2), those that put the book together (chapters 3), those that distributed the book (chapters 4 and 5 ), those that read the book (chapters 6 and 7), and those that used the book to make further knowledge (chapter 8).
Before getting into John’s work, one should know of the exchange between Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns in the February 2002 issue of The American Historical Review. As stated, in producing The Nature of the Book, Johns takes direct issue with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change from 1979. In a review and response exchange by Eisenstein and Johns, Eisenstein defends her work and argues that The Nature of the Book treats the macro shifts in history she identifies, primarily the shift from script to print, thus the creation of a print culture, as inconsequential. Johns, for his part, rebukes Eisenstein and takes issue with her usage of secondary sources and famous intellectuals. Eisenstein gets the last word in and claims that Johns refused to give her work a fair reading.
The merit of bringing this exchange into a review of The Nature of the Book illustrates several things, the essential being that Johns did not give Eisenstein’s work a fair reading; in fact, his tone with her and her work, to be blunt, borders on misogyny. No other male author Johns utilizes or has issue with takes on the fervent criticism that Johns gives to Eisenstein. Johns’s work suffers not from not acknowledging the work that came before him but from unfair criticism of that work and Eisenstein’s theory of the fixity of knowledge within printed work. This criticism is apparent from the beginning to the end of The Nature of the Book. To be clear, The Nature of the Book is not solely a critique of Eisenstein and her work, it questions others’ claims too, and is ultimately the result of asking a different set of questions. Furthermore, even with the critique of Eisenstein bearing the weight of Johns’ work, it is a fantastic example of integrating historiography into one’s work.
Bringing this exchange into a review set 24 years after the original printing of The Nature of the Book reminds us how the very works of these authors live in the resulting print culture, which influences the history the works tell. Their exchange serves as a good reminder of the fixity of 20th-century works that abide by the practices and cultures set forth by university printing presses. Additionally, the debate brings another strand of understanding of Johns’ view; Eisenstein repeatedly calls on Johns as a postmodernist. While Johns does not call himself a postmodernist, postmodernism [in this sense, the conditional nature of knowledge] certainly aids in underscoring Johns’ critique of Eisenstein and likewise appears to influence why Johns’ critique relies so heavily on examples of piracy throughout the work.
Nonetheless, this is not a review of Eisenstein and Johns’ argument. It is a review of Johns’ The Nature of the Book, 24 years after its original printing. Taking the work outside the debate with Eisenstein, Johns has done at a most basic level to write what amounts to a marriage of the history of print and the history of science. At a more appraising level, Johns’ work has and continues to aid in producing questions on cultural history in general, the human context of the sciences, and what it means for knowledge to be made, among many other roads of study. It is a work that asks the reader why they trust the knowledge they encounter in the modern book. The Nature of the Book gives a cast of characters from authors to printers and booksellers to readers themselves to explain why this trust took a long time to be earned by today’s readers. All those behind-the-scenes characters are essential for the early modern reader’s trust in the early modern book. In other words, Johns uses a small microcosm of scientific scholarship to ask his central question, what made print culture? Further, Johns asks, what made the print culture of the early modern English reader of printed scientific books, and how did this culture influence these books and their authors? Johns’ answer, the relationships and dealings between any of the parties involved make up the identity and cultures surrounding the book.
The author works through these various microhistories within his work by first introducing his two main ideas — 1) the impact of individual persons’ and organizations’ interactions at any point in the printing process and 2) the lack of authorial control — in the introduction. This is a work that could easily have been a series of articles instead, as each chapter could potentially stand alone. However, the two main ideas tie the microhistories together and allow Johns to advance his claims throughout the work.
To begin, Johns introduces the character of Joseph Moxon, the hydrographer to Charles II, and Moxon’s work which placed the press and printer in mathematical sciences. From there, Johns addresses how English printers and booksellers attempted to create trust in printed knowledge and, thus, the beginnings of a print culture of early modern readers in England. To tell the story of this emerging culture, Johns brings in the history of John Streater and his rivalries, namely Atkyns, in the print trade; it is through these rivalries that various print culture identities were embedded in the early modern print culture within England. The character of Streater is an especially useful example, as Streater was a figure who made books as a writer and a printer, demonstrating how the worlds of the makers, distributors, and readers, while linked, all contribute to different print cultures.
Johns steps into the historiography of the debate Streater and Atkyns produced on the origins and politics of the print trade to demonstrate how the notion of a printing revolution came about. From there, he works to understand the readers of early modern Europe and the experiments undergone by the makers of books to try and control the world of printing and undermine piracy. One of the final histories Johns utilizes to demonstrate his themes is that of John Flamsteed and Flamsteed’s Historia Coelestis. It is through Flamsteed’s history that Johns showcases how even the “hard” science of astronomy, which at the time mainly was empirical observation and quantitative calculation, could not escape how the printing process made and altered knowledge.
The Nature of the Book is an interesting example of the methodology of microhistory. One can see elements of the microhistorical approach in that the examples Johns uses are authors and astronomy books, the time frame is relatively small, and the field itself and its readers are a highly limited, intellectual set. However, one caveat on Johns’ methodology, his history starts quite in the middle of the history of the book as well as the history of printing, around 1640. It ignores a lot of the macro influences upon the book itself, which reflects in the miscommunication to the broader field itself and helps to explain the heated exchange between Eistinstien and Johns. Nonetheless, scholars of early modern Europe in general, early modern England, piracy, early modern London, the social aspects of printing, intellectual history, the transmission of texts, science publishing, and its history will do well to keep this book in mind when producing their works. Still, one has to know the historiography of the history of the book prior to reading Johns’ work. Johns’ book is massive and, as the argument with Eisenstein noted above implies, relies heavily upon the work that has come before The Nature of the Book; a novice scholar may find themselves lost. Overall, The Nature of the Book is a big book with a narrow focus and aim. It does an excellent job of accomplishing its aim of refuting Eisenstein’s claim of fixity and overall asking different questions of the history of the book. However, in its single determination to refute Eisenstein, it loses its connections to the macro history that surrounds the work.