TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface; or, What Is a Multigraph?
Introduction - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0001
[print culture, European culture, technological innovations, print, communications media, reading]
This introductory chapter gives a brief overview of the print culture during the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, as European culture can most fully be described as a “print culture” in these two centuries. From the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 that freed English printers from government control to the technological innovations of 1897 that allowed photographs to be printed in newspapers, this period saw print in all its forms move to the center of cultural life without eliminating other communications media. Innovations included new technologies of printing, new methods for reproducing images, new distribution infrastructures, and new understandings of intellectual property, which crystallized into new copyright laws. In conflict, competition, or synergy with other communications media, print created new spaces for people to gather, newly diversified industries, and new genres of writing. This is also the period of extensive reading, both in the sense that more people were reading and that there was more for them to read. (pages 1 - 14)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. Advertising - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0002
[print advertising, retail economies, chapbooks, commercial advertising, newspapers, print advertising, multimedia advertising]
This chapter analyzes the expansion of print advertising. A wealth of evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, illustrates how, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advertising moved from the periphery to the center of retail economies. The period witnessed impressive multimedia advertising campaigns, waged in a variety of innovative formats, most of which became more widespread, diverse, and inventive over time. Stretching back to printed advertisements in seventeenth-century chapbooks and newspapers, the chapter shows how the links between commercial advertising and print provide their own history of intermediality. Alongside the late seventeenth-century explosion of trade notices in periodicals, pamphlets, and broadsides, the English word “advertising” shifted from denoting “warning” and “advising” to its modern commercialized meaning. Not surprisingly, as commercial life developed, so did the use of advertising as a means of promoting sales and public notoriety. Moreover, not only was print a preferred medium for advertising, but printed books vied with patent medicines as the mostly heavily advertised consumer products of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (pages 15 - 32)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. Anthologies - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0003
[anthologies, canons of literature, social practices, literary anthologies, writing, printed matter]
This chapter focuses on three kinds of work that anthologies could perform during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through their combined practice of gathering and recycling. First, anthologies helped create canons of literature by selecting and reprinting the “best” writing from the past, shaping its reception in the process. Second, anthologies offered readers up-to-date bulletins on the best new writing or the poems from the past that were currently fashionable. And third, the anthology became increasingly important as a material object that was both suitable for display and associated with novel social practices. Literary anthologies were an important print genre during the time because of the way mixture and reuse variously combined to produce different types of readerly and sociable communities, no doubt overlapping in complex ways: readers were united both by their dedication to canons and to fashions. But anthologies were also primary exhibits of the way printed matter was woven into heterogeneous medial and social contexts, contexts that could move between distinct social spaces from the classroom to the domestic living room. (pages 33 - 48)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. Binding - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0004
[binding, folded sheets, bindings, consumer choice, front covers, back covers, spine]
This chapter discusses binding—the act of folding printed sheets into folios or quartos or octavos or other formats, and then attaching those folded sheets to one another to create a book. Binding is thus a deliberate act that creates meaning through the presentation and collation of the leaves it encloses. For most of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, binding began with a stack of folded sheets. Many books could be purchased only stitched, or on the Continent still in sheets. A binding was usually completed when boards for the front and back covers were sewn to the bands, and then covered along with the spine with leather or paper. The covers and spine might then be decorated with a design comprising lettering and little tool marks, with gold leaf attached to some or all of that design. As this suggests, bindings available for any given edition were various and often came at multiple price points depending on decoration or type of leather. Binding was thus also a realm of consumer choice. (pages 49 - 65)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. Catalogs - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0005
[catalogs, goods inventories, collections, printed advertisements, museum catalogs, art catalog, consumer catalog, European print culture]
This chapter examines catalogs, which are a vital component of European print culture. Catalogs from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries primarily fall into these two categories: inventories of goods and inventories of collections. The former group includes printed advertisements that tell one what it is possible to buy in a particular place from a particular person or business. Omnipresent catalogs of this type included booksellers' catalogs, catalogs of art-historical prints, and consumer catalogs. Where the art catalog might very often have served as an important guidebook—orienting viewers' attention within a local collection—the consumer catalog was often bound up with the distant and the postal. But catalogs also attempt to control and contain the external world by sequentially ordering a given collection of objects, fitting them into a diachronic narrative. This approach is especially apparent in early museum catalogs, which often emphasize a narrative that is not only sequential but markedly historical as well. That is, catalogs are often arranged to tell an allegedly coherent, progressive, linear story—a history of, say, a culture or a nation. (pages 66 - 84)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Conversations - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0006
[conversation practices, salons, cultural institutions, nostalgia, sociable spaces, eighteenth-century Europe]
This chapter describes the sociable, often literary, conversation practices fashionable among elite society in eighteenth-century Europe. These discussions were known by many names and came to be referred to collectively as “salons” by the mid-nineteenth century, when they had become primarily objects of nostalgia. The term “salon” highlights the location in which the meetings took place, a particular type of public space within a private urban home. The salon's mixed-gender and mixed-rank sociability was a marked contrast with primarily masculine sociable spaces such as coffee houses or taverns. Although salons were hosted both by men and women, scholars have generally focused on those presided over by women, since these salons represent one of the few mixed-sex cultural institutions in which women could take a leading role. Within this literature, the semiprivate character of the meeting space has contributed to the debate about the broader place of women in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century intellectual life. (pages 85 - 96)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Disruptions - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0007
[print, ideas, errors, printed texts, satirical commentaries, materiality, authority, fallibility]
This chapter studies the disruption of the prevailing impression that print was a transparent vehicle for ideas. It shows how print sometimes presents an appearance of stability and reliability that makes it seem like a transparent medium for conveying ideas. On this appearance, print lends an inherent authority to the content it mediates. This aura of reliability may be more the result of long cultural work than it is a property inherent to the medium. Sophisticated readers have always understood print's fallibility both in the sense that it conveys false as well as true information and in the sense that printed texts are often strewn with errors. Nonetheless, the notion that print was a transparent, reliable vehicle for conveying ideas was sufficiently widespread during the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries that it inspired satirical or ironic commentaries, which themselves appeared in printed texts and images. Several writers, printers, and artists thus used print to draw attention to its own materiality and fallibility. (pages 97 - 112)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7. Engraving - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0008
[printed images, engraving, image transmission, nation building, interactivity, Vienna, London, patriotism, Paris, engravers]
This chapter is an examination of printed images. For much of the period between 1600 and 1900, intaglio engraving was a dominant mode of image transmission. Engraving, in fact, played a role in producing commercial identities, consolidating scientific discourse, and structuring debates about artistic hierarchies. It was also vital to creating and circulating national identities, whose uneven development illuminates the stakes of interactions with print in broader processes of social and historical change. This chapter investigates connections between engraving and nation building in three very different cosmopolitan cities, to show how crucial practices of interactivity were to both. First, state-sponsored engraving in Vienna provides a model for thinking about the mobilization of the reproduced image in the interests of a powerful state. Second, the example of John Boydell's gallery in London demonstrates that nation building could be developed in concert with commercial interests. However, linking patriotism with art and print exposed tensions among the competing interests of painters, engravers, letterpress printers, and their financial backers. Finally, with particular reference to Paris, this chapter considers how responses to engraving were inseparable from the technological transformations that shaped the media landscape of the period. In each case, the chapter shows that engravers were hardly passive participants in top-down ideological schema. (pages 113 - 125)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8. Ephemerality - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0009
[ephemerality, ephemeral print, durable print, ephemera, artifact, tickets, handbills, playing cards, periodicals]
This chapter considers ephemeral print: tickets, handbills, playing cards, periodicals unlikely to be reread, crude woodcuts, completed or blank forms. Unlike durable print, ephemeral print can be used and tossed away (or repurposed as wrapping paper or to line trunks). While durable print is manufactured with higher-quality materials, ephemeral print is made out of whatever is cheap and closest to hand. As a means of organizing the world, these distinctions have exerted tremendous power. But like most binaries, they are based on questionable assumptions. While not abandoning the distinction altogether, this chapter moves from the idea of ephemera to ephemerality, to foreground new kinds of historical insight. It argues that, far from being an inherent quality of certain genres or the inevitable consequence of particular manufacturing techniques or materials, ephemerality is a potential condition into which all mark-bearing paper can enter. By considering ephemerality as a condition that can be imputed to an artifact, this chapter shows how particular sorts of use could effectively protect it from becoming waste paper. (pages 126 - 140)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
9. Frontispieces - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0010
[frontispieces, frontispiece designs, title pages, architectural elements, graphic media, book production]
This chapter examines the frontispiece—a full-page image that occupies a privileged place at the beginning of a book, which is intended to structure readers' expectations and interactions with that book. Frontispiece designs fall into three general categories: architectural, portrait style, or illustrative. While some frontispieces come discretely from one category, they are often found blended or in combination. Frontispieces are closely related to title pages, which also regularly included architectural elements, often taking the form of an engraved portico. The printed doorway welcomes readers into the space of the text at the same time it references the material structure of the book. Like title pages, frontispieces are a key site of interaction between text and images; moreover, they use graphic media to gesture both out, to the reader's lifeworld, and in, to the book's own pages. Thus, this chapter argues that the frontispiece often complicated, rather than conferred, value. It also shows that changes in book production after non-intaglio printing became common further complicated the relationship between questions of value and the status of the frontispiece. (pages 141 - 154)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
10. Index - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0011
[index, indices, print navigation, organizing guide, books, newspapers, periodicals]
This chapter surveys developments in the form and function of the index as eighteenth-century readers were confronted with a world of books that seemed to be multiplying beyond measure and containment. Though indices existed as a form of print navigation well before the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, this chapter contends that the index became an exemplary navigational tool only in the eighteenth century. It considers the functions served by an index and how they came to be assumed by that familiar ordered list at the end of a work. But the chapter also discusses more generally the kind of organizational work done by an index and why such work was increasingly necessary for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers. In this sense, the chapter is not only about indices but also about “the index” in a different sense: an idealized vision of an organizing guide that one imagines can be installed, as it were, behind the world of print to organize readers' experiences with books, newspapers, periodicals, engravings, and other forms. (pages 155 - 168)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
11. Letters - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0012
[letter, letter writing, letters, epistolarity, epistolary imaginary, social networks, communication, correspondence, social networks]
This chapter studies the letter, the foremost material means of communication in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Letter writing was perhaps the most widespread form of writing in the eighteenth century, as what began as a largely administrative practice was gradually and then rather feverishly adopted by private individuals. Whenever distance or other circumstances made personal visits or oral relay through messengers impracticable, people put pen to paper (or asked others to do so for them) to bridge the gap and connect with each other. In fact, this act of bridging, of “making distance, presence,” not only undergirded the material machinery (such as pen, paper, ink, wax, and other epistolary paraphernalia; candles, spectacles, and writing surfaces; postal systems with their personnel, buildings, and vehicles; roads, canals, and rail) necessary for the systematic, large-scale production and dissemination of letters; it also generated a body of ideas regarding the efficacy of letters in the world, creating what might be called the period's “epistolary imaginary.” Under the aegis of such “epistolarity,” correspondence in letters helped to shape connections between people and traced the outlines of expansive social networks, anticipating later developments in communication in our highly “networked” world today. (pages 169 - 184)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
12. Manuscript - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0013
[manuscript, manuscript culture, print culture, manuscript writing, material artifacts, cultural practices]
This chapter focuses on works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscript culture. It begins with an assumption of coevolution rather than succession. Rather than rely on a replacement model—in which one media (print) overtakes and subsumes another (manuscript)—this chapter provides examples of how both media mutually develop. If manuscript writing far exceeded printed writing, then one might wonder about how a “print” culture fits into this narrative and how we might instead think about manuscript–print hybrids and about the mutual influences that they exert on each other. The chapter also considers methodological assumptions about how to research the material culture of the period. It is the quasi-public status of manuscript—its ambiguous hovering between public and private—that poses a problem of knowledge. One can only “imagine” what is circulated in manuscript because it is not as archivally or socially accessible. In light of these arguments, the chapter examines a set of material artifacts and cultural practices that illuminate moments of adaptation, resistance, and convergence between print and manuscript during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (pages 185 - 203)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
13. Marking - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0014
[bookmarking, marginalia, printed books, reading practices, marking, marking practices, inscribed codex]
This chapter considers bookmarking as involving a wider range of interactions, moving beyond reading to the social lives of books more generally and the marks left as a result of interactions by their everyday users. Many people see such traces and modifications as defacement, but recent scholarship considers the evidentiary value of marks in books, especially marginalia, and what they might tell us about the reading practices of the past. As such, the chapter first emphasizes marking as a materially determined phenomenon, one that has much to tell us about the domestic and social roles of book objects during this period. Second, it considers some examples of the ways that printed books in this period call forth certain kinds of conventional marking practices: not readers' personal reactions but a kind of “fill in the blanks” augmentation or completion of the printed text. Finally, the chapter examines some instances of nineteenth-century bookmarking that emphasize the social, domestic, and commemorative functions of the inscribed codex. (pages 204 - 222)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
14. Paper - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0015
[paper, reading, media, material paratext, reading communities, interactivity, paper folding, paper cutting, pasting]
This chapter captures the types of interactions that individuals have historically undertaken with paper. The question here is not what paper did to people, but the other way around: what did people do with paper? With this in mind, the chapter takes advantage of the recent turn that attends to questions of embodiedness when it comes to reading, the way our gestural interactions with media affect the meaning of what is mediated. If paper was an important material paratext that helped construct new kinds of coherent reading communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it also conditioned new kinds of interactions with printed and nonprint material. With its “openness to alliances and ability to insert itself into a multitude of routines,” paper supported, shaped, and inspired a wide range of routines and techniques of culture, ranging from the pedagogical and scientific to the sociable and artistic. Accordingly, the focus here is on three principal forms of interactivity—folding, cutting, and pasting—and the ways these interactions served different kinds of purposes across different social groups, including child readers, domestic collectors, scholarly editors, and devotional communities. (pages 223 - 242)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
15. Proliferation - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0016
[print proliferation, regulatory discourse, information management, promoting print, regulating print, style guides, reading primers, book reviews, conduct manuals]
This chapter chronicles the push and pull surrounding print's quantitative rise during the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, surveying the diverse responses to print's proliferation by common readers and famous tastemakers alike. In particular, this chapter considers what might be called the “third rail” of print proliferation—namely, an emergent regulatory discourse less intent on limiting or promoting print than on controlling and managing it. What made this discourse so powerful was that, unlike the polemic or the diatribe, it could take a variety of forms. In terms of genre, efforts to regulate print took the form of style guides, reading primers, book reviews, conduct manuals, handbooks on good taste, and philosophical, novelistic, and evangelical treatises on the often dangerous power of readerly imagination. Beyond the printed page, this impetus to control and systematize published materials became manifest in the era's enthusiasm for private lending libraries, rigid cataloging schemes, selective reading clubs, standardized indexing norms, and clearly demarcated academic disciplines. In short, proliferation not only begat more language about print; it also generated an entire material and cultural infrastructure designed to make its diffusion more controlled and manageable. Information management, assuming a host of material, institutional, and discursive forms, therefore emerged as one of the great new industries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was in this that the real impact of proliferation was felt most deeply. (pages 243 - 259)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
16. Spacing - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0017
[typographic elements, spacing, white space, print technologies, page layout, printed page]
This chapter focuses on the relationship between typographic elements and white space on the page, and the readerly ramifications of these various configurations. It traces a fine line between material practice and phenomenological effect. The ways that publishers, authors, and readers (when they mark margins or otherwise mark the space of a page) use and work with the spacing of a printed page raise an important question about printed matter: how does the physical layout of the page as a product of print technologies form and inflect readers' experience of and interaction with the printed page as an object of use and source of meaning? How does page layout lend the text an affective potential, a stimulating force? This chapter shows that the printed page is not simply an inert object of technical manipulation; it is rather a phenomenon with which humans interact. It is in this interaction, in the inextricable link of the technical and the human, that print exits. (pages 260 - 273)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
17. Stages - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0018
[theater, stage, performance, script, performers, interactivity, printed page]
This chapter explores the complex interactivity found in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century stages. Theaters in those days were well-lit, noisy, and boisterous spaces, illuminated by hundreds of candles so that performers and audience members were equally visible to one another. In this sense, they present a truly social form of media in which audience members came to cheer favorite performers and ogle each other, and where their contributions, for good or for ill, were frequently constitutive of an evening's performance. This interactivity, however, extended well beyond performers and audience members to the printed page itself. Plays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may often have entered the world first as performances, but that did not stop them from being accompanied by a host of printed texts, including newspaper advertisements, playbills, broadsides, and short pamphlets containing favorite speeches, songs, and choruses. Performances were advertised and reviewed, and actors' memoirs and behind-the-scenes accounts of various green rooms retain their popularity to the present day. In addition, once a play was well into its initial run, the playwright frequently published its script to achieve still greater profits. Herein lies yet another kind of interactivity—an intermedial one—in which the transitory nature of performance comes into dialogue, if not conflict, with the more permanent nature of print. (pages 274 - 287)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
18. Thickening - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0019
[thickening, interleaving, extra-illustration, thickened books, annotation, print paratext, footnotes]
This chapter considers the practice of “thickening” by pasting or “tipping in” prints, autograph letters, printed pages, maps, original art, or other materials into published books. The chapter argues that to describe these processes simply as “adding” misses the point. In contrast to the practice of binding a series of pamphlets or plays together, interleaving and extra-illustration reveal readers engaged in more radically altering and remaking printed books. The chapter argues that the practice is both dialogic and self-reflexive: formally, thickened books consciously reflect on augmentation as a form of interacting with the printed text. As a form of annotation, interleaving and extra-illustration function in ways akin to an individual reader's marginalia: inserted materials variously reiterate, elucidate, emend, recast, argue with, and critique the existing text. But thickened books also replicate the condition of the print paratext, particularly the armature of footnotes lining the pages of historical and literary books in the second half of the eighteenth century. (pages 288 - 304)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Epilogue - Multigraph Collective The
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226469287.003.0020
[renvoi, interactive texts, topic-modeling algorithm, linguistic patterns]
This concluding chapter offers two different representations of the contents of this volume. The first shows the connections between the chapters that are explicitly named using a system of renvoi in square brackets, in honor of the great eighteenth-century encyclopedia project of Diderot and D'Alembert, one of the more interactive texts of the era of print saturation. The second shows the relationships between chapters that have been generated using a topic-modeling algorithm, where latent linguistic patterns contained in the chapters are used to draw connections between them. In the same way that media (books, manuscripts, and volumes) mark hidden pathways and connections throughout the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century world, so, too, do these networks offer otherwise invisible routes through this book's text. Both point to a future in which our printed past will be mediated to us increasingly through digital media, one more way of interacting with print. The networks presented here are thus an experiment in reimagining the print convention of the table of contents or even the subject index. (pages 305 - 310)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Works Cited
About the Multigraph Collective
Index
