Weighing in at 750-plus pages, Adrian Johns's sturdy tome is several books in one. At one level, it is a close study of print culture in early modern England, a time of civil war in which social and civic relations were being remade from the mores of feudal monarchy to a politics approximating modern democracy. In this transformation, the printing press was an essential vehicle for empowering the common people, and control over the publishing industry was contested among several parties--the government, authors, booksellers, the printers themselves. At another level, Johns's book is a study of the role of printing in the formation of scientific knowledge, a means whereby scientific discoveries could be widely circulated and codified. At another, it is a contribution to the sociology of communication, concentrating on changes in English society thanks to the press, through which a literate but remarkably isolated people who, an 18th-century writer observed, knew no more of the city and countryside outside their immediate neighbourhood than they did of France or Russia, could become aware of the larger world--often over the objections of power-makers like Sir Francis Bacon, who urged that the people not be given access to information that did not immediately concern them.

Johns's book is dense with facts and quotations from the contemporary literature, but his prose is lightened by keen observation and telling anecdotes. (In one, Benjamin Franklin tried to make his way across Europe as a journeyman printer but grew so disgusted at the copious drinking of his fellow tradesmen that he switched careers, an accident that would change the course of history.) The Nature of the Book will be especially useful to those now tracking the communications revolution of the late 20th century, in which new technologies are once again changing power relations and supplanting old media. © Amazon.com

Reviewed by Gene Evans

One's faith trust in the veracity of books is beyond question. There is a tacit appropriation made possible by virtue of the concerted efforts of writers and printers at the dawn of the print era. Adrian Johns wants this legacy to be questioned, not for nitpicking for nitpicking sake but for the need to understand why things are as they are. In his effort to trace the links between knowledge and print, Johns tracks the evolution of the book by focusing on the book trade as practised in one hugely influential locale, London. Johns's 750-pages+ book chronicles the complexity of the craft, politics, and economies of printing and publishing, with profiles of seminal individuals, discussion of the physiology of reading, and penetrating scrutiny of the rather shaky foundations of scientific, philosophical, and historical discourse.

Johns's seeks to demolish the last area of "whiggery" within this subject. Johns' contention is that if modern science has been able to rise as a social construction, much credit should also go to the press. The author is particularly trenchant in his criticism of Elizabeth Eisenstein's 'The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe'. Eisenstein had maintained that the print medium had provided a certain "fixity" to writing; and that a new culture evolved which enabled people to compare texts, correct errors thereby creating a standard for the criterion of truth, and thereby underwrote experimental science and modernity itself. Johns debunks this theory. He starts with the premise that the press was neither a stable nor a temporal category. "Truth" from the press derived from socially-constructed conventions that did not achieve general acceptance until the mid-18th century Enlightenment, and that would not become axiomatic and instinctive for yet another century. Johns asserts that nothing is intrinsic to print, and, that there no such thing as Eisenstein's "print culture."

Book description

Because we live in a print culture, we take a lot about a book for granted: that it was written by the person named as author and published with the author's consent, that both author and publisher vouch for the information or knowledge it imparts, that it was produced in an edition of many identical copies and is available to whoever wants to buy and read it. In The Nature of the Book, a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns transports his readers back to early modern England and the cauldron of creative and commercial forces in which print culture was formed. His uncanny eye for detail allows us to visit booksellers' shops and the Royal Society, paper manufactories and type foundries. We can eavesdrop on the often bitter disputes between authors and printers, printers and booksellers, clerics and intellectuals as they debate and resolve the meaning and rights attached to the creation of ideas, their appearance in written form and then in print, and the opportunity to sell, buy, and read printed work.

Johns focuses on the interplay between the scientific and print revolutions and on their roles, both complementary and antagonistic, in the production and dissemination of knowledge. For while the advancement of knowledge depended on the accuracy and legitimacy of printed findings, print also could be--and sometimes was--used to manipulate those findings for political, religious, or ideological reasons. Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture and its many arenas--commercial, intellectual, political, and individual. The Nature of the Book broadsides all of our assumptions about what books were at the beginning of that culture.

Synopsis

Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture and its many arenas--commercial, intellectual, political, and individual. "The Nature of the Book" is a tour de force of cultural history. In The Nature of the Book, Adrian Johns transports his readers back to early modern England and the cauldron of creative and commercial forces in which print culture was formed. His uncanny eye for detail allows us to visit booksellers' shops and the Royal Society, paper manufactories and type foundries. We can eavesdrop on the often-bitter disputes between authors and printers, printers and booksellers, clerics and intellectuals as they debate and resolve the meaning and rights attached to the creation of ideas, their appearance in written form and then in print, and the opportunity to sell, buy, and read printed work. Johns focuses on the interplay between the scientific and print revolutions and on their roles, both complementary and antagonistic, in the production and dissemination of knowledge.