Dreaming in Books - uncopy

Bibliographic Subjects / 5
dollars a year is spent housing and making books available to the public. 22
In the face of such numbers, to say that the book is dead seems absurd. At
the same time that books continue to enjoy an enormously broad public
appeal, they have also retained an important ritualistic private function.
Whether for birthdays, schooldays, holidays, or tenure, we still count time
with books. We are, in this sense, still very much a bibliographic “culture.” In
writing a history of the bibliographic imagination in the romantic age, I am
interested in understanding the communicative foundations upon which
our contemporary culture is based and to which my own book is integrally
related. In self- refl exive terms, it is the attempt to ask why we continue to
feel such urgency, whether personally or institutionally, to write books.
But this book is not just concerned with the emergence during the romantic
period of a set of values that continue to surround how we use and
think about books today. It also attempts to recover very different imaginaries
of how books worked and what books did in the past. It not only
engages narratives of the book’s end but also those of the book’s “rise” or
“coming” as well. Despite much of the triumphalism and universalism that
surrounds rise- of- the- book narratives—that all bibliographic cultures and
ages are the same—one of the aims of this book is to follow the work of
recent book historians such as Robert Darnton, Adrian Johns, Stephan Füssel,
Reinhart Wittmann, and Roger Chartier to help us see how the printed
book was a far more richly imagined and far more diversely used media
object than we have traditionally assumed. Our understanding of the book
has undergone a tremendous narrowing over time that this book hopes to
correct. As media historian Jonathan Sterne has written, “To study technologies
in any meaningful sense requires a rich sense of their connection
with human practice, habitat, and habit. It requires attention to the fi elds of
combined cultural, social, and physical activity—what other authors have
called networks or assemblages—from which technologies emerge and of
which they are part.” 23
While books had by the turn of the nineteenth century been a constant
of Western cultural life for over 1,500 years, 24 what was new around 1800
was the imminent sense of too- muchness that surrounded the printed book.
It was precisely this notion of the surplus of books that lent the book its
cosmological identity in the romantic age—that it was both everywhere and
could contain everything—and simultaneously made a unifi ed response to
such a problem increasingly diffi cult. 25 The book, like the society it helped
refl ect back to itself, was increasingly marked by a key element of heterogeneity,
as different book formats and literary genres were mobilized to
regulate the growing problem of bibliographic surplus. If we can indeed