reviews Book Reviews 281 sources is mind-boggling. How is a per­ son to choose? Anne Woodsworth and Theresa M. Maylone do a good job of pulling together some of these diverse, contradictory ele­ ments in their foreword and afterword. But the collection remains no more than the sum of its parts. It never really fulfills the promise of its subtitle, “The Diffusion of Internet Expertise in the Academic Li­ brary.” I doubt that the fault lies with the authors, or even the editors. It may be that the topic itself is too amorphous or would be better addressed in a monograph. De­ spite some disappointments, this book is well worth adding to library collections for the practical ideas and tools that it makes available on a topic of importance to all librarians.—Jean M. Alexander, Carnegie Mellon University. Rhodes, Barbara, and William Wells Streeter. Before Photocopying: The Art & History of Mechanical Copying, 1780– 1938. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Pr., 1999. 494p. $95 (ISBN 1-884718-61-2). LC 98-8045. The ubiquity and speed of modern com­ munication—computers, photocopiers, e- mail, cellular phones, and scanners—tend to obscure the technological achievements of the preelectronic age when, for the ef­ fective conduct of business and govern­ ment, it also was necessary to make rapid copies of letters, contracts, inventories, shipping manifests, invoices, receipts—the entire galaxy of documents upon which contemporary, transaction-oriented civili­ zation rests. Today’s scholars and students take for granted the ready, cheap availabil­ ity of copies. But how did their predeces­ sors, long before electric power and pho­ tography became practical realities, make record copies of data except by laboriously, and sometimes inaccurately, hand-copying everything? How did they efficiently copy their letters and papers? The surprising answer lies in a forgot­ ten mechanical copying device that origi­ nated more than two centuries ago: the copying press, an apparatus that enabled almost anyone in the Western world to make, with considerable dispatch, iden­ tical multiple copies of vital documents. In fact, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison all used the copying press to generate file copies of their correspon­ dence. The copying press encouraged the rapid growth of scientific communication and publishing, accelerated the expansion of industry, and, ultimately, led to the early establishment of institutions such as the United States National Archives. It was not the Xerox process or the laser printer that first threatened to drown us in a sea of paper. Rather, it was the copy­ ing press, invented in 1780 by James Watt, the Scottish-born engineer who perfected the steam engine. Why Watt? Watt was a businessman as well as an inventor. In the course of England’s rapid industrializa­ tion, he traveled widely to promote his engines and needed to have with him copies of designs and specifications, con­ tracts, and correspondence. Thus, he was powerfully motivated to develop a copy­ ing apparatus. Watt’s device, which was to have many imitators, relied on the simple principle of offset, the same principle that led Alois Senefelder in 1796 to invent offset lithog­ raphy, the printing method that produces virtually all modern newspapers, books, and other mass ink-printed publications. But each exploited offset in a quite differ­ ent way. Senefelder’s use of offset relied on the natural repulsion of water and oil-based inks. But Watt’s process relied on inks capable of producing several ad­ ditional copies onto special paper from an original, handwritten document. In the Watt process, a recently written ink origi­ nal is squeezed against a fresh piece of unsized paper in a press whose force transfers some of the ink from the origi­ nal to the carefully dampened copy pa­ per. After the Watt process was perfected, it spread with incredible speed. “Inventors” brazenly infringed his patents; chemists formulated new inks; manufacturers im­ proved the device and developed me­ chanical variations; and salespeople flooded the market. The copying press 282 College & Research Libraries quickly became the hallmark of every pro­ gressive nineteenth-century business of­ fice, and portable models quickly emerged for traveling sales personnel. Despite the rapid emergence of the typewriter as the supreme early twentieth-century office instrument and the development of allied nonphotographic copying processes, espe­ cially carbon paper, the copying press con­ tinued to be used even past the middle of the twentieth century. Rhodes and Streeter report that Calvin Coolidge, as president from 1923 to 1929, used a copying press; and in industry, it was employed as late as the 1960s at the Smith & Wesson Com­ pany to copy export invoices. But unable to compete with the typewriter and car­ bon paper, around 1920, copying presses ceased to be manufactured. Today, as the authors point out, the copying press has become an unremembered instrument, most often seen in antique shops where uninformed salespersons erroneously call it a “bookbinder’s press” and claim that it was devised to flatten cockled pages or wrinkled manuscripts, or even to press leaves and flowers. The copying press was not the only early mechanical device available for pro­ ducing multiple copies of documents. Rhodes and Streeter describe a somewhat less successful and much less popular apparatus, the pantograph, a device whereby a “master” pen controls one or more slave pens to create several copies Index to advertisers ACRL 276 AIAA cover 3, 183, 187 Annual Reviews 184 CHOICE 262, 286 EBSCO cover 4 Elsevier Science 193, 195, 197 Greenwood Publishing 190 ISI 216 Intelex Corporation 215 Library Technologies 247 McKay Comm. Rowcom cover 2 OCLC 204 R.R. Bowker 233 Worldwide Books 275 May 2000 of the same document. They pay gener­ ous tribute to Silvio Bedini for his excel­ lent monograph, Thomas Jefferson and His Copying Machines (Virginia, 1984), which also describes Watt’s invention but pro­ vides significantly more detail on the pan­ tograph. Although their main focus is the copy­ ing press, the authors devote considerable attention to other systems besides the pantograph. In fact, it may be argued that their chosen title is slightly misleading in that an entire chapter is actually devoted to both nonphotographic duplicating pro­ cesses—the hectograph, mimeograph, and many others—and to photo-optical copiers, such as the Photostat, the Rectigraph, and early varieties of Xerox machines. All are described fairly mi­ nutely. This same chapter explains the terminal date of the authors’ research: It was on September 8, 1938, that Chester Carlson filed a patent application for his newly invented system of “electron pho­ tography,” now universally known as xerography. The authors divide their work and their book into two major sections. The first, by Rhodes, a conservator at the American Museum of Natural History, deals with hardware, materials (includ­ ing the special inks and paper), and meth­ ods of operating the copying press. In this first part, Rachel-Ray Cleveland, a paper conservator, contributes expert knowl­ edge to the chapter on inks. The second part, by Streeter, a hand bookbinder and former museum curator, thoroughly documents the technology, construction, and history of the device. Curiously, the intended readership of the book—re­ search librarians, museum curators, con­ servators, historians, bookbinders, print­ ers, and booksellers—is not explicitly re­ vealed until one reaches the preface to the second part. But next to the title page is a handsomely bordered dedication, replete with images of the copying press, to these very professionals. Not designed to encourage its readers to curl up in an armchair (the book is 12 inches high by 91/2 inches wide and just Book Reviews 283 six pages short of 500 pages), Before Pho­ tocopying is a hefty volume that requires a study table for comfortable reading. Not only does the work describe the copying press’s development in exquisite detail, but it also provides in-depth information on the technology of the process, with close focus on the characteristics of the required special inks and papers. The authors provide more than twelve hun­ dred illustrations of equipment and sche­ matic drawings, taken chiefly from manu­ facturers’ catalogs and patent illustra­ tions. They list every one of seventy known U.S. manufacturers and also illus­ trate products whose makers are un­ known. Illustrations include English and other European presses. More than 1,100 U.S. patents for copying presses and re­ lated equipment are cited and illustra­ tions reproduced from approximately five hundred of them. The book concludes with a valuable glossary of terms, an ex­ tensive bibliography, and a first-rate in­ dex. To help gauge the cost of copying presses and supplies in contemporary terms, the book features a table illustrat­ ing the equivalent value (in 1996 dollars) of one dollar for each year from 1780 to 1939. This will be of special value to ref­ erence librarians and also may help put into perspective current concerns about the cost of computers and software in li­ braries. Encyclopedic in scope, Before Photo­ copying is a remarkable and magnificent volume that stuns the reader. I could not be more enthusiastic. Seldom has a highly specialized, even abstruse, subject been given a treatment so informative, pro­ fusely illustrated, extensively docu­ mented, well written, and literate. This beautifully printed book is unquestion­ ably the most comprehensive, exhaustive study of prephotographic mechanical copying yet to be published. The work reaches far beyond its intended reader­ ship. It is a prime tool for the study of scholarly communication and a contribu­ tion to the history of science. And it is an indispensable guide for the would-be col­ lector haunting antique shops in search of a historical artifact.—Allen B. Veaner, University of Arizona. Rota, Anthony. Apart from the Text. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Pr., 1998. 234p. $35 (ISBN 1-884718-52-3). LC 99­ 177769. An unexpected dividend from the discus­ sion surrounding the electronic book has been a new appreciation for the extraor­ dinary technological achievement repre­ sented by the traditional paper book. This recognition is forthcoming not just from the usual suspects in the humanities, but from computer engineers trying to repli­ cate the paper book’s many desirable fea­ tures in the electronic medium, among them portability, durability, intratextual connectedness, and mnemotechnical so­ phistication. An MIT e-book designer was quoted recently as conceding that on bal­ ance, if books had been invented after the computer rather than long before, they would have surely been considered a “big breakthrough.” These books, he marvels, “have several hundred simultaneous paper-thin, flexible displays. They boot instantly. They run on very low power at a very low cost.” In the wake of Derridan deconstructionism and especially Gérard Genette’s discov­ ery of “paratexts” (e.g. titles, dust-jacket blurbs, etc.), humanists, too, are seizing with new vigor upon the physicality of books, their various nontextual qualities that serve as coconstituents of meaning in “the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader.” In this dis­ cussion, the book emerges as a sensual, even sensuous, whole, in which the qual­ ity of the paper, the typography of the printed page, design, bindings, and even smell all contribute to meaning creation, and cannot be taken from it or removed from the reading equation without loss. Princeton historian Robert Darnton, for example, in principle an advocate of the new reading technologies, points to “the sensation of paper” as being “bound up in the experience of reading.” (“We have a long-term kinetic memory of paper.”) Those who “dematerialize” the book do