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Rating: 
Summary: Different
Review: (I used this book in a graduate seminar on early modern printed books at the Newberry Library. It's worth delving into if you are seriously interested in the subject.)Overturning Elizabeth Eisenstein and Marshal McLuhan, Johns argues that the emergence of print technology did not stabilize and thus give authority to texts -- on the contrary, print culture could be even messier than manuscript culture. Authority and fixity were attributes and values that had to be constructed and ascribed to printed texts over a substantial period of time. The book reads like it is the product of a gang of Umberto Ecos--avoiding a grand narrative of 17th century English print culture, Johns describes famous and marginal characters as well as their physical milieu with incredible detail. If this doesn't fascinate you, it will at least inform you with a more concrete grasp of the subject than one normally receives from academics. On the other hand, the length of the book can become tedious and its argument elusive. Avoiding a grand, teleological narrative is one thing; losing sight of your thesis is another. But if you don't mind working with this book in interpreting a ton of data and fascinating events, you will find it a rewarding read.
Rating: 
Summary: mistitled
Review: Adrian Johns tells us much less about the nature of the book than about the origins of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, the physical conditions in which books were printed and distributed, and the architecture of the Royal Stationers Hall. These subjects are lovingly treated with, as another reviewer noted, Johns's prolix style -- not only could the book have shaved a third of its length were the language pared down even slightly, but there could easily have been 3 very interesting books made of this one, and none of them would have borne the title 'The Nature of the Book.' Johns's ostensible purpose in tying all these themes together is to attack Elizabeth Eisenstein's theory that fixity is an inherent effect of the advent of print culture; however his argument isn't supported by the evidence he so ponderously provides. He does not in fact compare print culture with manuscript culture, as an earlier reviewer stated; and without this comparison it's hard to say Eisenstein's theory suffers any damage as a result of Johns's book. His point is merely that fixity (of authorship, edition, form) was a problem for authors and printers in seventeenth century London, one that the Royal Society and the Company of Stationers both worked to solve; if anything, this rather supports Eisenstein's theory, since her point is that prior to the printing press the very notion of 'fixity' was impossible to imagine, nevermind realize. Despite the fact that the book is mistitled and its unifying argument is not especially choate, it does contain a wealth of interesting information about the gritty physicality of printing in seventeenth century London, and its later chapters are excellent intellectual/scientific history. I only wish the editors at the University of Chicago Press, whom Johns praises so highly in his acknowledgements, had been a bit tougher with the manuscript.
Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: I bought this in the expectation of something a bit like Haskell's 'History and its Images': an examination of the ways that people have come to terms with books and other printed materials in the past, and the ways that it differs from what we do today. And I believe that that is also what Johns wanted to write, and maybe even believes he has written. Unfortunately, he hasn't: early modern readers never really get a look in, and in spite of (or even because of?) more than 600 pages of main text, he fails ever to get to the point. In essence, this is not really a book, so much as large pile of stuff - it is as if, having done all his research, he could not bear to throw anything away. Thus, for instance, we get to learn a great deal about the finer social points of the printers/publishers guild in London, even about who should pay for dinner. But this information is on a scale, and left in a state, where it is more interesting to someone researching a novel set in a printing workshop in England in the middle of the seventeen century, than to someone wondering what, in 1650, was going through the head of someone settling down with a newly acquired book. Similarly, we learn a great about the publishing arrangements and politics of the Royal Society, and in particular about the 'Philosophical Transactions', as a lead up to a description of the bust-up between Christiaan Huygens and Robert Hooke over the invention of the spring escapement watch movement (David Landes' account, in 'Revolution in Time', which I would have thought definitive, and fairly well known - it is certainly more concise, and much clearer about the technical issues of who may or may not have been in the right, and to what extent - is not cited in the bibliography). But again this chapter leads nowhere, except to a conclusion about how the virtues of the Royal Society and the Philosophical Transactions, and the model of science they embodied, were not 'obvious' to contemporaries. This would be an interesting point to argue (it is certainly one with which I would be fascinated to engage). It might well be possible to build a case that a society that included Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and many similar others among its members, corresponded regularly with the most learned men in the rest of Europe, and published a journal where articles were admitted for publication only after review by members, had no obvious virtues as a clearing house for scientific information in comparision to, e.g., a journal that solicited materials to be dropped of at a specified coffee house, but I'm afraid Johns is going to have to work a bit harder if I am to accept such a claim seriously as an argument rather than as wishful thinking. (He even admits that all competitors to the Philosophical Transactions took it as a model, and also that most of them failed completely and almost immediately, though he does not discuss in satisfactory detail why). This book does, however, convince me that there is a fascinating book to be written on the relationship between readers and texts in early modern Europe, a book that follows up properly on a sentence that tantalized me in the introduction: 'It seems that nobody in 1660's Europe built an air-pump sucessfully by relying solely on Boyle's textual description of the engine. Some we know, tried; all, we think, failed.' There is also the book that is actually to be found at the core of this one: a monograph on the the issues an author in early modern Europe had to deal with in getting a book published, and securing credit for his ideas. Such a monograph would be the result of throwing away the stuff about, for instance, who paid for dinner at Stationers Hall, and tightening up the text and the supporting materials (Johns - who, in passing, accuses technical philosophers of 'canting speech' - has a pompously prolix style: rewritten, the text could easily, among other things, lose a quarter of its length).
Rating:
Summary: Why do we trust books?
Review: We uncritically accept that a book which says it has been written by so-and-so an author is, in fact, an accurate representation of that particular author's ideas. We believe that a book claiming to be published by such-and-such a publisher on this-or-that date has, in truth, come from that claimed publisher on that given date. Most historians of the printed word have considered our acceptance of these claims as a pre-destined result of the factory-like uniformity of print. A printed page can be exactly reproduced over and over again through printing, and this consistency lead the reading public to trust the claimed provenance of a printed materials in comparison to manuscripts. Adrian Johns' "Nature of the Book" disputes the inevitability of a trusted print culture. It did not arise as a mechanistic result of the printing process. Rather, Johns' argues that it was the individual and collective efforts of printers, booksellers, authors, and others who successes and failures prepared Western society to accept a print culture based on propriety and trust. Focusing on the Stationers' Guild of London in the mid-to-late 1600s and the British Royal Society of the early-to-mid 1700s, Johns highlights critical conflicts, collusions, competitions, cooperations, and crises which directly contributed to the trusted print culture we share today. Johns is an historian of science and he uses the development of experimental philosophy as championed by the Royal Society as a prime example of how diverse interest groups struggled with the dilemma of trusting books the printed word. In nine carefully focused chapters covering over 600 pages, the author builds his case that there was nothing inevitable about how our print culture evolved. The corollaries to our modern struggles over the veracity of electronic media are obvious. Western society has been in this position before and Johns does a wonderful job of telling the tale. If history is going to repeat itself, it will ultimately be the meatware rather than the hardware which defines the trustworthiness of our electronic information culture.
Rating:
Summary: Why do we trust books?
Review: We uncritically accept that a book which says it has been written by so-and-so an author is, in fact, an accurate representation of that particular author's ideas. We believe that a book claiming to be published by such-and-such a publisher on this-or-that date has, in truth, come from that claimed publisher on that given date. Most historians of the printed word have considered our acceptance of these claims as a pre-destined result of the factory-like uniformity of print. A printed page can be exactly reproduced over and over again through printing, and this consistency lead the reading public to trust the claimed provenance of a printed materials in comparison to manuscripts. Adrian Johns' "Nature of the Book" disputes the inevitability of a trusted print culture. It did not arise as a mechanistic result of the printing process. Rather, Johns' argues that it was the individual and collective efforts of printers, booksellers, authors, and others who successes and failures prepared Western society to accept a print culture based on propriety and trust. Focusing on the Stationers' Guild of London in the mid-to-late 1600s and the British Royal Society of the early-to-mid 1700s, Johns highlights critical conflicts, collusions, competitions, cooperations, and crises which directly contributed to the trusted print culture we share today. Johns is an historian of science and he uses the development of experimental philosophy as championed by the Royal Society as a prime example of how diverse interest groups struggled with the dilemma of trusting books the printed word. In nine carefully focused chapters covering over 600 pages, the author builds his case that there was nothing inevitable about how our print culture evolved. The corollaries to our modern struggles over the veracity of electronic media are obvious. Western society has been in this position before and Johns does a wonderful job of telling the tale. If history is going to repeat itself, it will ultimately be the meatware rather than the hardware which defines the trustworthiness of our electronic information culture.
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