Week 40: Are we there yet?
the end of the series
When I last discussed math, I mentioned off-hand that descriptive bibliography for the hand-press and machine-press books is different and that bibliographers kind of gave up a bit because it was just too much. Let’s return to that here:
I often describe the difference between the two (ish) eras (ish) of book production through the use of paper. A big, big caveat here: the hand-press era never ended. People still use hand-presses to print books, and they still make handmade paper for printing. The 1800 (ish) date for the shift from hand-press to machine-press is arbitrary, resting mostly on the shift to mechanizing paper-making. The paper resulting from this process lacked the chain line impressions from hand-made moulds, and, more importantly, wasn’t folded in the same way that hand-made sheets of paper were to create gatherings of leaves. Recall the exercise we did where you folded a sheet of paper in half again and again to produce different formats of books in Week 33. With the large, endless rolls of paper used in the machine-press period, such folding was no longer relevant, and so we abandon identifying format, for the most part, and begin measuring leaves in centimeters to provide dimensions of the book in bibliographic descriptions.
But other changes began as well: various typing machines emerged in the 1800s, including linotype, a Frankenstein’s monster of a machine that allowed typists to type a line of text that would knock the appropriate matrices into producing a fresh line of type (hence, line-o-type). No more setting individual characters by hand, now you could sit next to a boiling pot of alloy metal and have freshly-cut type ready to roll in minutes. Finished lines were recycled back into the vat to replenish the source metal.
Such machines removed a lot of human intervention from the printing process; moreover, with the metal recycling, it became much harder to identify reused type across different texts as one could (with lots of focus) in books from the handpress period. When compositors set type individually, then broke down finished text blocks and reset a new book, they reused the same sets of type. If a piece of type had a distinguishing error to it—perhaps the staff of the “d” was cracked, or the belly of the “a” wasn’t fully closed, a bibliographer could trace the use of that type across different print jobs at the same press (remember Charlton Hinman and the Hinman Collator from a million weeks ago? That’s what he was doing). No such luck with a machine that gobbles up your type as soon as you’re done with it, leaving no error paths to follow.
Sidenote, here’s a 30-minute documentary of the last night linotype machines were used at The New York Times:
The differences between hand-press and machine-press books abound. Gatherings were marked with numbers instead of letters, and often erratically. Printers began cloth-printing techniques,1 issuing bindings that were part of the overall printing process, rather than created separately at a bookseller’s shop or on a buyer’s commission. Bibliographers thus decided that bindings merited description, leading to argument over how to standardize different grain textures and cloth colors (which in turn led to viciously expensive reference materials).
How we made books changed, and so did the way we describe them. With hand-press books, we use alphabetic notation to describe a book’s innards. With machine-press books, we use numbers. With hand-press books, we consider the relationship between the sheet of the paper and the number of folds to create a single leaf. With machine-press books, we identify if the way the book is signed (grouped by number) is different than how it is gathered (sewn or glued together). With hand-press books, we rarely describe bindings, because they differ across time and buyer (though research now progresses that some booksellers did issue standard bindings). With machine-press books, descriptions of bindings and dustjackets can go on for pages.
Admittedly, the descriptive bibliography community is small. It takes literal lifetimes to create a bibliography of an author or a printer’s compendium of works because it takes so long to compare a sufficient number of examples and account for all of the differences and research the whys and hows and whos and whens. And admittedly, if you spend 40 years of your life on a project, and some snooty grad student with tortoise-shell glasses comes bounding up to you saying that you’ve suddenly gotta change everything, that might rankle you a bit, and you might dig in your heels. And still, it is possible, and still, we will change.
The way we build our descriptions of things—because representation and organization are describing things, both what they are and how they are in relation to other things—are constructed. Descriptive bibliography is the most extreme, most extrapolated, most ludicrous way of illustrating that point: all of these numbers and italics and brackets and superscripts and occasional Greek letters were cobbled together to try to communicate information to a very small group of people. It’s a notation system that indeed accomplishes a lot, provided you have the right teacher to guide you through it. My argument here is not that descriptive bibliography needs to suddenly be legible to everyone—remember, most people simply do not care about the arrangement of leaves in a book and when one may have been taken out and replaced at press-time, and that’s okay! Rather, I am elbowing you all in the side, banging on my drum, pointing and waving at how this is made up. There is nothing inherent about the way we organize this information.
I hope I didn’t hit you too hard on the head with the point: what we found in books changed, so the way we talked about them followed. We learned that there were more ways to make a book, and we are still learning that there are even more ways to make a book, then and now, and so we continue to adapt the way we describe them. I actually hid the point of this whole series in Issue 38:
Not only are attempts to organize all information fraught and insufficient because our knowledge evolves, they are insufficient because our means of finding knowledge evolves as well.
We have done this again and again, whether it’s the way we describe cause of death, or organize birds, or categorize bookmaking. We have reached no endpoint, no natural resting place for description. We will continue to tug the meaning of these categories back and forth, trying to squeeze a too-small fitted sheet over a too-large mattress. And by we, I mean you too: this work of categorization and organization is not isolated to librarians and information professionals. It appears in medicine, technology, law, education, health, arts, gardening, cooking, and so on. We are all negotiating categories as a way to understand the world; we must remember that while those categories are often dictated by power or the lethargy of time, they are mutable and we have the power to question them.
final notes
This series intended to walk you through the facets of control and description and how they operate at every level of book work, librarianship, and knowledge organization. Descriptive bibliography and digital libraries appear to be on opposite ends of librarianship: the former entirely interested in the physical production of tangible books, the latter conducted on screens. But they share codes and required learning of standards in the name of legibility. In these seven issues (33-40, excluding our book break), we covered hand-press and machine-press book description, subject headings and assignment, thesauri and controlled vocabularies, and metadata application. This was basically my entire semester, boiled down to about 10,000 words. Thanks for being patient with it all.
I wrote my first snarling newsletter of the term, “Issue 28: Is hell real?” three months ago to the day, concluding with a note about Texas’s then-recently-passed abortion restrictions (ban). I write this now, days after the Supreme Court heard Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, and early reports predict that SCOTUS will rule to overturn the right to safe abortion entirely. At the heart of this dastardly case are the questions: Who is a person? Who has a claim upon one’s own body?2
The material force of categories appears always and instantly.
housekeeping and birdseeking
house
Next week I’ll give us all a break and talk about something totally different.
This is a good time to share the newsletter, as I move on from this series and it can be read in full, rather than make new readers enter the internal boxing match of my brain halfway through. Pass it along to friends, near and far.
bird
‘Effin Birds: proceed with caution for profanity and self-reflection
More later.
This is such a big generalization. There were cloth-printing techniques before the machine-press period, they just weren’t part of the book-making process. The relationship between textual and textile printing remains understudied but we know there were and are links between the two.
A representative claimed yesterday that bodies with uteruses are “earthen vessels, sanctified by Almighty God.” If so, I am a vessel filled with bees and rage.
I find it hilarious how simple the etymology of Linotype is