East”, a “lack of bookstores located outside wealthy urban areas”, poor distribution channels to encourage the production of indigenous-language publishing, and an under-resourced and under-utilised library system (DAC 2012, 22–23). It notes that “only 1% of the South African population are book buyers” (DAC 2012, 15). But the report also acknowledges the tremendous benefits of books and publishing to the nation and state—to culture, science, education, freedom of speech, and, not least, the economy—and seeks consultation on an ambitious plan to stimulate growth in the sector. Any coordinated strategy bodes well for the future of South African print cultures and should therefore be encouraged and scrutinised. Whatever its results, it will undoubtedly provide ample material for future book-historical research.
The essays included in this volume present themselves not as the history of the book in South Africa—that is to say, neither as a national history of the book, nor as a collection blind to the necessity of considering multiple other sign systems and modes of communication in a truly expansive history of communication in the region. The collection is certainly not exhaustive of all possible areas of study, forms of print artefact, or, indeed, language. Rather, these essays are chapters in a history of the book and of the history of its study in Southern Africa. Each of these contributions recognises, through a heterogeneity of subject and method, that an all-encompassing project would be too restrictive for a region as varied as this is—and with such a particularly cruel history. Rather, Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa presents itself as a gathering, a space of interdisciplinary conversation intended to make a significant intervention in a fledgling field and to suggest a number of models that future studies might follow.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For support during the writing of this introduction and the editing of this volume, I have incurred debts of gratitude to all of the contributors, but in particular to Peter D. McDonald for comments on a draft of the introduction (and, indeed, for getting me started), and Patrick Denman Flanery for ongoing support and conversation, and for telling me when it was done. Additionally: Rowan Roux retrieved a copy of J. M. Coetzee’s course outline from the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown; thanks also to NELM for permission to cite from it. I wish also to record my gratitude to all at Wits University Press, particularly Veronica Klipp, Julie Miller, Roshan Cader, Melanie Pequeux and Tshepo Neito, and also to the Press’s anonymous readers, and an efficient and accommodating copy-editor, Alex Potter.
NOTES
1See Coetzee (1992, 391–94; 2006, 214–15); Lenta (2003).
2Although the German Geschichte des Buchwesens, another strong influence on the Anglo-American tradition, uses the plural. Robert Darnton (2002) also favoured the plural.
3For South African readers new to the field, Hofmeyr and Kriel provided a compelling survey of the historiography of history of the book in their introduction to a special issue of the South African Historical Journal on “Book History in Southern Africa” (2006, see especially 5–10).
4Peter McDonald (1997, 105–9) offers a very useful summary of the confluence of these different strands of book-historical work, and places McKenzie and McGann in the context of twentieth-century scholarly editing and textual scholarship traditions.
5Bourdieu’s analysis of the field and operation of distinction in relation to cultural production generally has been enormously productive for book-historical studies, although its widespread application has attracted critique and revision in the last several years. For example, McDonald’s 1997 endorsement of Bourdieu’s conception of the field as a way of expanding on the usefulness of Darnton’s communication circuit had given way, by the mid-2000s, to a critique: Bourdieu’s “field” remained “limited insofar as it addresses only one side of literature’s double challenge”, McDonald (2006, 226) wrote; “it underestimates the unpredictability of writing, which is always capable of transforming the field by exceeding or subverting its determinations”. See also Jarad Zimbler’s nuanced critique (2009), which draws on South African literary examples in support of its arguments.
6Much of this and the preceding paragraph draws on formulations I offered in the introduction to a special issue of English Studies in Africa devoted to “Histories of the Book in Southern Africa” (see Van der Vlies 2004) and in the introductory chapter to my 2007 monograph, South African Textual Cultures.
7For example, the three-volume University of Queensland Press A History of the Book in Australia (including volumes edited by Wallace Kirsop on the period to 1890 [forthcoming], Martyn Lyons and John Arnold on the period 1891–1945 [2001], and Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright on the period 1946–2005 [2006]), and the three-volume History of the Book in Canada, published by the University of Toronto Press under the general editorship of Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Yvan Lamonde (2004–07). The US and British national history projects are the University of North Carolina Press’s A History of the Book in America (five volumes to 2009), and Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (six volumes published to date, with a seventh, on Britain in the twentieth century, forthcoming under the editorship of Andrew Nash, Claire Squires and Ian Willison).
8For important work on South Asian histories of the book (and of script and print), see Gupta and Chakravorty (2004; 2008). Ruvani Ranasinha (2007) and Sarah Brouillette (2007) have both written about the global fates of South Asian writers.
9These include introductory and survey essays on the history of the book and of script and print cultures in sub-Saharan Africa (Van der Vlies 2010), the Muslim world (Roper 2010), the Indian subcontinent (Gupta 2010), South-east Asia (Wieringa 2010; Igunma 2010), Australia (Morrison 2010), New Zealand (Rogers 2010), Canada (Fleming 2010) and Latin America (Roldán Vera 2010).
10I am indebted in part to Hofmeyr and Kriel, for their useful survey (2006, especially 10–14).
11Anna H. Smith’s account of the spread of printing in South Africa (1971) has not been bettered, although doubtless new material has been uncovered that might contribute to a revised edition.
12Poliva (1968, 52) writes engagingly about Nehemia Dov Hoffmann (1860–1928), pioneer Prussian-born printer and journalist who, having worked in Berlin and New York, arrived in Johannesburg in 1889, bringing with him the first “printer’s type in Yiddish characters”. Hoffman published Der Afrikaner Israelit for six months before returning to Cape Town and becoming a peddler. He later published a weekly called Haor, which ran for five years and, with a British Jewish immigrant, Der Yiddisher Herald, which lasted two years (Poliva 1968, 53–54). Mendelsohn and Shain’s The Jews in South Africa (2008) makes brief mention of Hoffmann, and of Yiddish publishing and intellectual life in District Six (see Mendelsohn & Shain 2008, 79, 82).
13See Van der Vlies and Flanery (2008) further on “South African Cultural Texts and the Global Mediascape”, the title of their special issue of Scrutiny2 on the topic.
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