reviews


 

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 



 

 

284 College & Research Libraries 

so, it would appear, at their own risk. 
All of this discourse, from opposite 

ends of the cultural spectrum, amounts 
to a late vindication for the “materialists” 
of book culture, those book historians and 
artifactualists who have raised a moun­
tain of scholarship to explain how and 
why books have become precisely what 
they are today, and to provide students 
of the book and of book history with the 
means to describe exactly what they en­
counter when a book is carefully, “ana­
lytically” examined. This is one of the 
original meanings of the word bibliogra­
phy: the study of books as physical ob­
jects. Those of us in the library profession 
who enjoyed a traditional library educa­
tion may remember an exposure to the 
giants of this science—Fredson Bowers, 
for example, and his Principles of Biblio­
graphical Description (1949)—and to the 
pioneers of book history, such as Philip 
Gaskell’s New Introduction to Bibliography 
(1972) or the book that Gaskell bases his 
own study on, R. B. McKerrow’s Introduc­
tion to Bibliography for Literary Students 
(1928). 

This brings us to the present volume, 
a work copublished by the distinguished 
Oak Knoll publishing house and 
England’s Private Library Association 
and written by the lifelong antiquarian 
bookseller and bookman, Anthony Rota. 
His topic is everything that constitutes the 
book “apart from the text”—paper, bind­
ing, illustration, dust jacket, etc.—and 
how economic and other factors have con­
tributed to the way these accoutrements 
of the modern book have developed. 
Rota’s recurring theme is in fact “the in­
terplay between economic forces and the 
history of book production.” Although 
concentrating on the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries, the era of the indus­
trialization of the printing process, Rota 
dips back into earlier eras where neces­
sary to make his arguments. 

Those familiar with the existing body 
of literature on historical bibliography 
may ask what distinguishes Apart from the 
Text from earlier treatments such as those 
of the Englishmen Gaskell and McKerrow 

May 2000 

mentioned above, or A Short History of the 
Printed Word by the American Warren 
Chappell (1970). One difference beyond 
Rota’s greater attention to economic and 
social factors is the generally greater level 
of detail and deeper penetration into the 
historical background as he describes 
what militated on the side of change. This 
can be seen, for example, by reading his 
discussion of the adoption of cold metal 
composing machinery following William 
Church’s patent in 1822, comparing it to 
Gaskell’s far shorter and less organic de­
scription (cf. New Introduction). Rota also 
gives much more attention to the techni­
cal issues involved in automatic line jus­
tification than, say, Chappell does in A 
Short History. This could easily become 
tedious, of course, but Rota writes per­
spicaciously and at times elegantly, dis­
playing a stylistic command of English 
on a par with his command of the mate­
rial he presents. Describing the “more 
sensitive” spacing of the Monotype ma­
chine in comparison with the competing 
Linotype, for example, Rota comments 
that the Linotype machine would occa­
sionally “leave virtual rivers of white 
snaking down the page,” a nearly poetic 
formulation that catches exactly the ex­
perience of reading a page of type too 
loosely set. This elegance makes Apart 
from the Text not only informative, but also 
pleasurably readable. 

Another difference vis-à-vis his pre­
decessors is that Rota develops his ap­
proach thematically rather than chrono­
logically, looking, for example, at “de­
sign” and “book bindings” in dedicated 
chapters, rather than proceeding century 
by century. The result is a greater cohe­
siveness as we regard each constituent 
part of the book. For example, we follow 
“paper ” from its ancient beginnings 
straight through to contemporary issues 
associated with acidity and conservation. 
The cost of this approach, of course, is 
an implicit deconstruction of the book as 
a contiguous whole; the reader must, in 
a manner of speaking, reassemble it in 
his mind at the end of the book or of each 
chapter. 



 

Book Reviews 285 

For his last three chapters, Rota breaks 
with this approach and considers in turn 
several publication types that responded 
to public needs or even created them, 
namely, the famous Victorian “three­
decker” novels, the practice of serializing 
publication of individual works over 
time; the “yellow-back” and the advent 
of series publishing; and the rise of the 
cheap paperback, such as Penguin in En­
gland and Bantam and others in the 
United States. This is a veritable crash 
course in modern publishing history and 
sociology. 

Apart from the Text was the presentation 
volume for members of the Private Librar­
ies Association several years ago and 
clearly was written with the needs and 
historical sensitivities of the educated book 
collector in mind. Although no one will 
turn to it for a theory-conscious analysis 
of the codex book as a triumph of reading 
technology à la Walter Ong, much less as 
a characterization of the book as a semio­
logical, “grammatological” entirety à la 
Jacques Derrida, an extraordinary amount 
of traditional book learning (in both mean­
ings of this phrase) is contained in, and 
can be gleaned from, its pages. Granted, it 
is a conservative work—an anomaly, per­
haps, at the close of one millennium and 
the dawn of a new one—but Apart from the 
Text can certainly take a proud place next 
to other works on book history on library 
shelves, both private and academic.—Jef­
frey Garrett, Northwestern University. 

Stover, Mark. Leading the Wired Organiza­
tion: The Information Professional’s Guide 
to Managing Technological Change. New 
York: Neal-Shuman, 1999. 362p. $49.95, 
paper (ISBN: 1-55570-357-7). LC 99­
28011. 

Those of you who may be wrestling with 
technology—how to manage and use it 
to improve whatever services you pro-
vide—will find this volume by Mark Sto­
ver just what you are looking for. Leading 
the Wired Organization offers the informa­
tion professional of whatever stripe or 
variety—managers, professionals, para­
professionals, and executives—a first-rate 

guide on how “to thrive in the new era of 
information and computing.” 

Stover recently served as director of 
information technology at Phillips Gradu­
ate Institute in Encion, California. Cur­
rently, he works as the psychology and 
behavioral sciences librarian at San Diego 
State University. His varied experience 
and penchant for seeing technical ques­
tions and difficulties from a human angle 
give his book an especially thorough and 
even-handed feel. In ten chapters, Stover 
treats a host of predictable, but key, issues 
associated with technology and informa­
tion. Topics discussed include: commu­
nicating online (the advantages of e-mail 
and its pitfalls), doing business on the 
Internet (your library should not rule it 
out), planning the ideal Web site (the po­
litical problems that Web design can en­
tail on many campuses), using emerging 
technology effectively (why pushing the 
envelope can be risky), and managing 
computer resources in a wired organiza­
tion (the inherent difficulties in any com­
puter center and library relationship). 

Stover begins each chapter with narra­
tive: a descriptive account or case study of 
a particular situation. He describes, for 
example, the scenario of disgruntled li­
brary workers irritated at the pace of tech­
nology in their department or the frustra­
tion of information overload that a group 
of reference librarians may be experienc­
ing. Narratives are followed by analysis 
and advice and a section of comments 
pooled from a select group of profession­
als whom the author polled. These latter 
data, though some might argue too selec­
tive (there were only forty respondents in 
his survey), add an extra dimension to the 
author’s analysis. They give him, notwith­
standing their somewhat limited number, 
a convincing, field-tested, empirical basis 
for many of the book’s conclusions. 

In attempting to provide the informa­
tion professional with perspectives on the 
plethora of issues facing technology and 
library services, the author naturally cov­
ers a lot of territory—ground that at times 
can be controversial. For instance, Stover 
insists on calling library users “custom­