On more than one occasion I have been asked why a society devoted to the study and appreciation of books in their material aspects should be called 'bibliographical'. The question has usually been prompted by the current use of the term 'bibliography' to denote the list of books consulted by scholars and students in support of a piece of academic writing. Originally, the classical Greek biblio + graphia denoted 'book-writing', which reveals some continuity between the ancient and the modern meanings of the term. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, a distinct if related use of it emerged to denote the history and systematic description of books - a task requiring specialist erudition. Today, the term is also used to cover the making, the manufacture, and even the buying and selling of books. Thus 'bibliography' now means, in effect, everything about books except their primary purpose, which is of course to be read.
However, over the last ten years or so, a new tendency has emerged which, in my view at least, has placed a new responsibility on bibliographical societies. While major book chains continue to distribute what could be called traditional new books, more and more as one haunts bookshops one begins to sense a general drift (from which antiquarian booksellers in York are almost wholly exempt) to divide books between extremely expensive specialist studies, middling- priced new fiction, and remainder issues. In attempting to understand this development we cannot ignore the growth of the computer industry over exactly the same period. In one of its functions as global encyclopaedia and archive, the internet is steadily converting itself into a transcendent library instantly available on-line. One does not have to be Jules Verne to foresee the creation of a universal electronic book-depot from which items can be summoned into private rooms by a few gestures on a keyboard. Cultural prophets have even warned that the book as a physical object is fast becoming 'obsolete', and that bibliographical societies, which exist by virtue of the fact that books are real objects in the real world, will soon be 'as extinct as Homer'.
This triumphalism, however, is premature. The world-wide web may already out-perform even the greatest portable encyclopaedias, but it has one limitation, which is that it fails to take into account that there is infinitely more to reading than the acquisition of information. For sure, to have not only the text but a total word-index of, say, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at one's instant disposal, together with much of the secondary literature it has generated, must be a good deal more than nothing. But it leaves unexplained one thing that is of crucial importance to bibliographical societies, and much else besides. Why is it that virtually no one except the occasional computer freak would ever consider reading Gibbon's masterpiece on screen? What is it that a physical book possesses that makes it not only user-friendly but able to become an integral part of its reader's life? The answer to that question, I believe, bears directly on why we can be grateful that York has possessed a bibliographical society for twenty years, and why we must hope that it will continue to do so for at least another twenty.
In my attempt to provide an answer, I am reminded of an enchanting though still untranslated piece by Marcel Proust written in 1904. It is entitled 'Journées de Lecture' (literally 'Days of Reading'), and it evokes the sunlit summers of childhood vacations spent with a favourite book on a river bank, or in a luminous attic when, passionately absorbed in what we read, we lived in the narrative, seemingly oblivious of what surrounded us far or near. Yet, says Proust, those days of reading possessed such unconscious intensity that everything we had excluded from them had been sealed in our memory; so that many years later, at some banal moment when, exhausted and depressed, we were crossing the Seine or alighting from a Parisian bus, that far-off summer, that sunlit river, those children's games, would suddenly rise before us with visionary intensity. Thus, writes Proust, 'if we happen today to turn pages read long ago, they become the only calendar we have kept of those vanished days'
For Proust reading is an experience, which is why he associates it with the unconscious absorption of its contemporary setting, and why it makes possible the future recovery of a vanished past. 'We should not expect books', he writes, 'to bring us documents', or ready-made lessons, but 'to teach us to learn our own truth.' For him, reading is not essentially utilitarian, but creative. Hence books have to be physical objects - that is, they must be able to be taken up, opened, carried, lent, collected, even sold - if they are to be truly ours. Like the substance of their readers, their substance is part of their essence.
In this perspective, the high-minded cavil that a bibliographical society's concern with the materiality of books is a betrayal of what a book is for loses its sting. How without its perishable substance, which is what makes it 'one of us', could a book go where we go, be lent to - or stolen by - our friends, or given to charity, or turned into a prized possession in a bookshelf, or even nourish what moments of creativity we may be lucky enough to have come our way?
York has an association with book selling and collecting that goes back to Alcuin, and this tradition was forcibly brought home to me some years ago. Preparing a talk on Christopher Marlowe's plays, I decided to investigate the geographical howlers about Africa perpetrated by the young playwright in the second part of his Tamburlaine (1590). I therefore called at the Minster Library to find out whether it possessed a copy of Abraham Ortelius' world-atlas - the very rare Teatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570 - if only to confirm Marlowe's cavalier attitude to fact. Three majestic copies were brought to me, one of them in dazzling colour. After I had recovered from the shock, and acquired some sense of the unimaginable vastness of the sixteenth-century world from Ortelius' depiction of the mysteries of Australia and Antarctica, I inspected the map of Africa. Within minutes it became clear that every one of Marlowe's alleged mistakes had been derived from the prime geographical authority of his age. What was I to make of these errors? I saw with my own eyes what Marlowe had seen: his exultant and ferocious play of four-hundred years ago was owed to the physical object open before me. Because of the survival of that atlas - that is to say, thanks to the great library that had respected those real objects called books - I suddenly felt that Marlow and I, despite my advantage over him in knowing what was where on the African continent, and his over me in the possession of a reckless talent utterly beyond my powers, belonged to the same world.
In an age of combative theorising, bibliographical societies have not occupied the centre of the intellectual stage, though York's has remained steadily focussed, well supported, and able to attract a succession of outstanding speakers, as well as organising visits to many great book collections both private and public. True to its ministry, it has given its attention to the material aspects of books, from their history and their illustration to their writing, printing, and survival.
But the cosiness of this relationship should not be exaggerated, for the fact remains that books that survive become the funeral monuments of their makers. Cervantes, for one, felt that irony so strongly that he devised a fiction in which a crazed reader, whose madness is to dissolve the distinction between real and represented life, is driven to become the hero of the novels he reads. One of the greatest statements of this paradox - that books endure because the paper they are written on outlasts the hand that wrote them - can be found in the fifth book of Wordsworth's Prelude, a poem which, in an entirely relevant irony, was published only after his death:
"....Oftentimes at least
Me hath such strong enchantment overcome,
When I have held a volume in my hand,
Poor earthly casket of immortal earth,
Shakespeare or Milton, labourers divine!"
This page was prepared by Peter M Lee, e-mail math16@york.ac.uk
Revised 24 November 2006