Is there an archive of this discussion  to which I could direct
interested persons who are NOT members of the ESTS list?  Please let me
know.

Paul's question about the point of book history can be asked about
adjacent disciplines:
What is the point of bibliography; what is the point of textual
scholarship?
We each have sufficient answers or we would not be in these fields of
inquiry.
But the answer given by Paul about discourse and books I would put a
slightly different way--and then I wonder if that is just verbiage or
really says something:
1.  Without the book there is no access to discourse (at least not to
past discourse).
2.  Discourse is the history of ideas, the history of developing values
in concepts and notions of aesthetic appeal, and notions of justice, etc
(see Paul's note).
3.  If we whiz past or through book to discourse without attention to
how we are getting discourse, what its material, social, production,
economic forms and history are, won't we be likely to get discourse
wrong, or skewed, or de-historicised?
      It is this notion number 3 that sort of sounds good but I wonder
if it is really true?  Do the results of book history bear out the
notion that without book history we will get discourse wrong?

-----Original Message-----
From: The list of the European Society for Textual Scholarship and the
Society for Textual Scholarship
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Germaine
Warkentin
Sent: 23 March 2007 13:11
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What is the point of book history?

I don't know if I am a taker, but the suggestion that Paul Eggert puts 
forward is much along the lines of the argument of the book I'm trying 
to write. Nicolas Barker (and a lot of other people) have talked about 
the book as being the most important of all human artifacts. Well, I 
think I might put dwellings first, but that being said, books would be 
at the top of my list.  Though there again, one has to expand the 
definition of book beyond the usual one. (The art is in the expanding, 
of course.) How can we *not* regard the book in all its manifestations 
as central to human culture? Paul mentions Greg 1932; I go right back to

Greg's "What is Bibliography" of 1914, which seems to me central even to

as wide-ranging a discussion as today's. But it isn't easy to do; at the

plenary lecture  here in which I was beginning to evolve my ideas, I 
asked the audience who had read that article, and only 3 people raised 
their hands. I asked because it seems to me that bibliography and book 
history are intimately connected in every possible systematic way. As to

the "point" of this cumbersome but essential mating, a counterfactual 
experiment in which you try to imagine human life without "the book" 
makes the point.  These are big questions, I know, and they need to be 
addressed with great rigour. (Tanselle legacy) and imagination (McKenzie

legacy). It's worth doing.  Wish I'd been at that discussion at DMU, but

that's my two cents-worth from Toronto where spring (yes, Tony Edwards) 
has finally arrived. cheers, Germaine.

-- 
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Germaine Warkentin // English (Emeritus)
VC 205, Victoria College (University of Toronto),
73 Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, Ont. M5S 1K7, CANADA
[log in to unmask]	  (fax number on request)
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