Authors versus books

Abstract

The system of moving letters devised by Johan Gutenberg established, or rather, confirmed a chain of specialist relationships which runs: author, printer, bookseller/publisher, reader, librarian. For five centuries these have been the principal actors in the politics of the text; they have fought one another and depended upon one another; they have been held together (or apart) by a body of law and professional doctrine. Printer, bookseller/publisher and their ancillary crafts and trades were all once firmly held within the Stationers' Company but as the printing press technology spread beyond guild control in the late 17th century these functions diverged more and more. We inherit the rituals and procedures of these separate professional groups and their relative status. They have seemed to us as inevitable as the seasons and as essentially separate. Not even those revolutionary prophets of the early twentieth century who predicted the withering away of the state considered that a technology might arrive, as suddenly but as profoundly needed as the printing press, which would lead us to question the settled assumptions of the renaissance. For that is what the new technology of the text urges us to do; at least, to dig out some of the unargued assumptions about the nature of authorship, say, compared with librarianship, about the relationship also between publisher and bookseller, publisher and librarian, and so forth.

Citation

Smith, A. (1982), "Authors versus books", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 34 No. 5, pp. 221-226. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb050843