Inthebeginningtheword

Untilthe11thcenturyeverywhereineurope- butthebritishislesanytextyoureadwouldhave- lookedsomethinglikethis. And that wouldn’t have been the half of it. No paragraphing, no spaces between words, no punctuation, no chapter divisions, inconsistent spelling, no table of contents, no title on front or spine, no bookshelves to hold the text and, in those centuries before Gutenberg, no typeset print either. Your book would have been hand-copied in Latin, Europe’s written language, in the difficult to decipher if evocatively named scriptio continua on parchment, treated sheepskin. A sizable flock of sheep would, it is estimated, have been needed to produce a good Bible. The pages would have been bound in wooden covers with a clasp and lock; then, if the work’s patron was important enough, encrusted in jewels and, being the valuable and uniquely produced object it was, buried in a royal treasury or chained to a lectern in a royal or monastic library. (Some Arab book collectors were even known to commission works that they allowed no one to copy to preserve their uniqueness.)

As those who deciphered the first sentence of this review must realize, reading was once an arduous experience. Without the indicators of spacing, pace or directionality that make silent reading natural to us, it would have generally been, as with the Greeks and Romans, a practiced oral performance, an event meant for the ears as much as the eyes. Our sharp distinction between reader and listener would have been less meaningful.

When it came to performing a text, the codex, a book with pages, which in the 3rd century began to replace the papyrus scroll, was not only cheaper than its predecessor--both sides of parchment be-

ing usable--but more suited to drama. With a book of modest weight, one hand would have been freed for greater expression. Even individual reading, which took place mainly in a monastic setting in medieval Europe, would generally not have been “silent.” As the scholars Roger Chartier and Guglielmo Cavallo comment in the introduction to “A History of Reading in the West,” the sound of monks reading in proximity would have been akin to “the buzzing of bees,” a beautiful, if alien, image of the Word enacted.

Then again, so much is alien and strangely wondrous in the history of the book. So John Larner makes clear in his learned history of the book of travels that Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant who became a minor official of a Mongol khan, co-authored in a 13th century Genoese prison. But the singular “book” may be the wrong word here; with Polo’s original manuscript long lost, what remain are sometimes shockingly disparate “versions” of the work, including a 16th century “Tuscan translation of a Latin translation of a Tuscan translation of the original French or perhaps Franco-Italian text.”

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But to grasp this, you must first imagine yourself as an author before the advent of print, writing what was to be an edition of one. Your editor, a scribe, wouldn’t even appear until your book had already been “published” and then, in recopying it, would have felt free to add to or amend it at will with an eye to making it more marketable, thrilling or proper for the small reading public he had in mind--leaving scholars like Larner to untangle the many “travels” of Marco Polo released into the world.

In addition, some versions of Polo’s travels were illustrated by miniaturists with images of the “marvels” then expected in such books: “dog-headed men, pygmies fighting with cranes, giants, sociopods, tailed-men, centaurs, cyclops or monocoli.” None of these is, in fact, to be found in Polo’s account, which was doubted, Larner argues brilliantly, exactly because the “marvels” offered were unexpectedly those of a distant workaday world of towns and cities of such diversity, wealth and civilized splendor as to be beyond the European imagination. Among the fascinating details Larner notes in passing is an example of early entertainment synergy: The Duke de Berry commissioned not only an illuminated manuscript but six tapestries based on the book.

Each volume under review is in a sense a book of everyday marvels about the written word in history. Each takes us ever further back in time until the world as we assume it disintegrates before our eyes and we find ourselves in the many textual kingdoms of the dog-headed men. As the scholar Joseph Svenbro tells us in “A History of Reading,” for instance, in ancient Greece, he who read a text aloud was believed like a slave to have been possessed by it, and so one early definition of reading went: “the writer of the inscription will ‘bugger’ the reader.”

There is something dreamlike and disorienting in stumbling upon moments in the past when the most self-evident aspects of our lives simply cease to exist. As a start, is there a material on Earth that hasn’t been written on? Leaving aside papyrus, parchment and paper (which in China was already in use in the 1st century), the Chinese at times used ox bone, tortoise shell, bamboo and stone; the Sumerians, clay; the Jews, leather; the Arabs, poplar bark; the Romans, ivory, wood and wax. And once written upon, the material would be stored in every imaginable way: in jars and satchels, chests and armoires or, in the case of Roman scrolls, as Henry Petroski tells us, in a capsa, “a container not unlike a modern hat box.”

In “The Book on the Bookshelf,” Petroski, a professor of civil engineering, charmingly explores the history of “the lowly bookshelf,” that never-considered appendage of the book. His purpose is to show how “technological factors . . . have shaped the book and the furniture upon which it rests,” well illustrated by the very fact that his book is almost one-third over before enough books have accumulated in the studies of scholars or in royal and monastic libraries for the shelf to come into its own. Even then, the--to us--only obvious form for shelving books is evident to no one. For years to come, Europeans would shelve their books spine-in (the spine then being, as he points out, no more than the book’s unwritten-upon “hinge”). In the process, Petroski immerses us in certain problems beyond the ken of a modern reader: What did one do, for instance, when all those chains holding ever more cluttered shelves of valuable books to lecterns became entangled?

Only Fred Lerner’s “The Story of Libraries” offers even a passing view of the splendors of the book and the library in other cultures. Imagine the glorious Syrian library of Banu Ammar with its 180 copyists, its fabulous pavilions and watercourses, of which it was said, “no ignorant person entered it but was enchanted, nor any learned person but his imagination was filled with the delights and perfumes of Paradise”; not to speak of the quite miraculous-sounding public libraries of 13th century Baghdad, open even to the poor.

More than the other books, his reminds us of the terrors that also lay in the textual past: the great imperial or monastic libraries destroyed time and again, the imperial book burnings of China and Spain, the peasant destruction of German church libraries, to name but a few. He reminds us of the fragility of the word and the often marginal status of those places in which it was stored. In 1258, when the Mongol armies entered Baghdad, he writes, “most of that city’s 36 public libraries were destroyed,” with the staggering result that of the books known to a Baghdad scholar of the time, “fewer than one in a thousand survives today.”

Unfortunately, his book, like Petroski’s, bogs down in the details of the modern library, as ultimately does Larner’s in the many versions of Polo’s story. “A History of Reading in the West” proves the most bracing of these books, the essays of its 13 European contributors taking us on a high-quality plunge into a new area of study: the text’s endlessly changing relationship to the reader. Each of these bold attempts to “retrace forgotten gestures and bygone habits” of the most historically ephemeral sort is based on the premise that, as Chartier puts it, “without a reader, the text is merely virtual; it has no true existence.”

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Attention is given to two great revolutions in reading: the first, which the editors claim preceded the invention of printing, involved the development of new signposts on the page that would ultimately make silently absorbing a text the dominant form of reading. The second took place in the late 18th century as printing became industrialized, while readers, who felt the novel penetrating their very beings, experienced the author and his or her characters ever more intensely in a new, ecstatic privacy. (Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” even led to a wave of sympathetic suicides.) With Europe’s ensuing “reading mania,” new “reading furniture” entered the bourgeois household, transforming its space in a manner comparable to what the TV would do to the American house of the 1950s.

There is no way to encapsulate here the richness of these explorations, but fair warning: This is not a book for the fainthearted. The writing is as intense and often as dense as the scholarship. Each page calls for an attentiveness that sometimes left me buzzing like one of those monkish “bees.” In addition, like the practitioners of any new field eager to establish itself, the authors exude a needless confidence in the authority of their conclusions, often based on the faintest traces of evidence left by readers in the vast expanses of historical silence. A greater modesty before the unknown wonders and terrors that silence undoubtedly holds might have been warranted.

The editors barely touch upon today’s electronic revolution--”as great a change as the shift from the [scroll] to the codex”--only briefly invoking it in a utopian language they would be far too sensible to apply to the past. Finally, they write, the “ancient dream” of “universal access to the entire patrimony of writing” becomes imaginable. Unfortunately, none of us can take the sort of trip into the future that all these writers have taken, however incompletely, into our textual past. In our short fragile lives, we are unlikely indeed to meet the dog-headed texts and cycloptic forms of the next age of the word, though these four books should remind us that among the marvels also lie terrors, the potential for electronic “fires” as fierce as any that burned the ancient libraries of Baghdad, kinds of destruction perhaps not yet imaginable.