Bibliomania

What all four of these books celebrate, and celebrate wonderfully, is the sheer thingness of reading. For each of the authors, each in his or her own way a kind of bibliophile, even a bibliomaniac, reading has mattered and matters yet because it involves encounters with real objects that have clout and heft, that you touch with your body and that touch your body, that thrill you through and through, your nerves and tissues and corpuscles, and put you in contact with the flesh-and-blood world of writers and printers and booksellers and with the things of the world, money, consumption, trade, travel, power and all that. Most exciting, indeed cheering, is that in none of these four books do books get abstracted into the mere “textualities” of the college seminar or lose particularity and substance.

Here, impressively, the stuff of reading is just that: stuff, written marks put onto paper that has smell and feel. Marks made by a substantive 20th century person like Anne Fadiman, with her favorite Parker 57 pen in her hand. Pages composed by some such 16th century London mechanic-printer as Adrian Johns urges us to focus on: a burly fellow hurrying huge containers of lead type and needing his six pints a day to keep going on. Pages folded and sewn and bound in a dark hole of a room down some 17th century London alley and pored over with laughs and curses amid the noise and beverage fumes of some 18th century coffeehouse around the corner and carried by the sort of 19th century trader Franco Moretti has in mind up the Congo River, say, in a biscuit tin, it might be, so the bugs won’t get at them.

Written and printed stuff, moreover, informs us about the real world, about the streets of Paris and London that preoccupy Moretti’s novelists or about the heavenly bodies of Johns’ heroic natural scientists: pages that transform our lives, grant us self-hood, mold our beings and our ideas, our cultures, our nation-states and the states of our nations.

Johns’ repeated theme is that there has been no knowledge, no knowledge of nature, no science, no history, no history of science, without the terrible messinesses of print culture as agent and intermediary. Everything comes stained, interfered with, by the ink-dirtied hands of artisanal men and women, of printers’ boy “devils” and girl “mercuries.” All we are and know, one way or another, are the products, in other words, of what Fadiman nicely labels the carnality of reading. She’s excited precisely by Charles Lamb, who said he liked reading secondhand books with traces of buttered muffins on them. The glory of reading for her is that it rather resembles eating. Her lovely, biddable essays, culled from her “Common Reader” column in Civilization magazine, are greatly drawn to the idea of bibliophagy, that is, the eating of books, a kind of cannibalism of the word. Why are there so few extant firsts of “Alice in Wonderland,” she reports a bibliographer as wondering. The suggested answer is that Victorian kiddies liked them so much they sucked them and nibbled them and chewed them right up.

Starting early with books is clearly a key to the adult enthusiasms for books both Fadiman and Anna Quindlen are seeking to pass on. Fadiman’s nursery building blocks were the volumes of her daddy’s collected Trollope. Daddy helped found America’s Book of the Month Club. His small daughter liked spelling out her own name found on the spines of his many books on the shelves of their greatly book-lined apartment. Daddy, a great reader-aloud, always the champ of the Fadiman family’s numerous word games, looms large. He was aided by an equally bookish mother.

The parents of novelist Quindlen were, for their part, not such great bookworms, so the push into early “book love” (that’s Trollope again, of course) came more from family friends and the teachers at her Catholic girls’ school. But early push there was, and soon she was nibbling away fit to catch up with all those bookish mites with their milk-teeth sunk into Lewis Carroll.

“Books, books, books! . . . I nibbled, here and there . . . . In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy.” That’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh,” the epigraph to Quindlen’s punchy contribution to the Library of Contemporary Thought. Such promiscuous avidity for books is not, Quindlen suggests, very American. America, she thinks, is uneasy about anyone who prefers reading to doing. Reading is too indoors a pursuit, too female, too wasteful of business time. The American Way is to read, if at all, for instruction rather than for pleasure. Quindlen is appalled by the continual American warfare against notable fictions waged by Christian parents and puritanical school boards. (“Moby-Dick” conflicts, they say in a town in Texas, “with the values of the community.”) What Quindlen finds compelling about books is the companionship they bring, especially with other women--with authors like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson and with contemporary women readers in neighborly book klatches and across the world (she warms to the fact that she and the Antiguan novelist Jamaica Kincaid were lost in the same books as girls though thousands of miles apart). Books are above all ways of being “not alone.”

Not alone, certainly, for Fadiman, who, like Quindlen, is happy to relish the formative whiffs and glimpses of grown-up ways to be found in the pages of what that Texas school board would call dirty books. Quindlen discovered the eye-opening “Tropic of Cancer” under her non-reading parents’ bed. Fadiman thinks Daddy must have deliberately made “Fanny Hill” conspicuous as the only book whose spine faced inward among the thousands on his shelves. What both women discovered early was contiguity between the pleasures of reading and the joys of illicit knowledge. To read is, of course, to fall. The book trade--it’s one of Johns’ most vivid subtexts--has always thrived on heresy, on subversion, on being counter and strange, on going against orthodoxy and being outside the law. It’s what the Christian book-banners can’t stomach; it’s why the authoritarians, whether Royalists or Roundheads, all the men with the old opinions and knowledges who people Johns’ narratives of the rise of modern science, have always sent the censors in.

The loss for readers, when the censors succeed, is just one of the many captivating things to be garnered from Moretti’s quite astounding new work of literary geography. Nineteenth century England, we learn, was a net exporter of novels. The British gatekeepers worked to keep it that way. What this meant in England, Moretti snarls, was a dire shortage of novels of ideas, of novels about adultery, of dirty realism and, so, the enduring triumph at home of the childish and the fairy tale, in short, of Dickens. Moretti has maps and graphs and charts to support his allegations. He exaggerates, of course. In particular, he ignores the great presence of George Eliot, especially “Middlemarch.” And all maps are, of their nature, abstractions and simplifications of phenomena.

But for all that, this “Atlas of the European Novel” is a real breakthrough in making us see the role of place as a subject of 19th century fiction (the creation of Jane Austen’s England, the presentation of African conquest, the fantasies of German invasion of England in the ‘90s, the foreign travels of heroes and heroines, the plot of desired success in capital cities, Dickens’ London, Balzac’s Paris, the locations of villains and of the Gothic, all that kind of thing) in making plain the place of fiction in the 19th century world (the import and export of novels, the spread of the two great French and English fictional powers’ novels across the world, which English libraries had which novels and so on). Every page, which is to say every one of Moretti’s lovely maps, every chart and flow plan and graph, brings home with singular and original vividness aspects of the materiality of the fictional condition and of the condition of fiction that one would not have thought of--and neither, as he admits, would Moretti--without the particular interrogations the business of mapping provokes.

As Moretti shows, the form of fiction, the nature of character are spatial matters, whatever else they might be. Differences of genre rely on differences of spacing. Everyday realism, for instance, tends to stay close to home. Short stories tend to be set in exotic places. Border zones are where treachery burgeons. The colonial romance is a linear journey into the foreign heartland. City fictions will be complex and plural as to personnel and highly dispersed as to location and event. Fictions of class are about oppositions between city sites. If novels are about making cities legible--and they are--then maps, as Moretti triumphantly demonstrates, can make that legibility more visible, make it readable, in fact, as never before. Vladimir Nabokov’s classic lectures on the novel insisted on the usefulness of maps to reading “Bleak House.” Moretti’s breakthrough is to make us see that mapping is a way of knowing about novels that isn’t just optional but from now on essential.

Maps are systems of knowledge that, applied to novels, closely respect the way books are nothing if not systems of knowing and, in effect, the way that knowledge has depended on books. Such a view of knowledge, at least, is Johns’ persuasive argument for the early modern period, the time of the rise of modern science. “The Nature of the Book” is vast, messy and overabundant with data. It shuffles case histories, theorizing together in altogether too kaleidoscopic a way. But its rich chaos is in its way entirely apt to its grand theme--that modern science, modern knowing, has been utterly subject to the vagaries of the printing and publishing practices that have been the vehicle of its spread.

As a theorist, Johns is, I’m afraid, far too prone to do what Moretti is forever resisting, namely dissolving specific London sites (printers’ shops, dives and streets, Stationers’ Hall where books were registered, coffee shops, observatories, booksellers’ buildings and so on) into the merely metaphorical “sites” beloved of theoretical-academic jargon. But this tendency is always happily countered by a sturdy faith in the specifics of the personal instance--of Robert Boyle, for example, fearful of “Raving” over books and forever raving about his notes being stolen, or the astronomer Edmund Halley lifting others’ ideas and interposing his own into other men’s scripts or Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed wrestling with Newton across the pages of his tardy proofs, or Professor Thomas Willis heroically dissecting hundreds of animal brains to get closer to the anatomy of reading.

These are, of course, all old stories. And hanging over all these books is a modern suspicion that the fine physicality of the book and of the reading act all books celebrate is already of the past. “Books are over,” an Internet journal editor tells Quindlen. And to be sure, there is nothing in her descriptions of reading’s joys (that womanly companionship, that contact with the past, that haven from the chores of life) that Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver would not recognize. And what Moretti so devotedly maps are, of course, the transactions of 19th century fictions. And Johns’ printed knowledges are old knowledge. Fadiman’s hero is, naturally enough, Prime Minister William Gladstone, voracious gobbler of books and publisher of crazy wheezes for squeezing 60,000 books into your average-sized Victorian room. And the logophiliac brother that Fadiman keeps going on about has no TV. Old times, old books, old reading matters all. And you can, if you wish, read your Quindlen on a Web site. But then, as she says, the laptop may be portable but it’s not half as companionable as a book. And her daughter likes the real book of “Arthur’s Teacher Trouble” that she can also read on CD-ROM. And so, still, I’m happy to agree, do lots of us.