and type-cutting, though without going into details, for none of us had had any practical experience. But with great sharpness of mind they immediately grasped the basic principles. While previously they had written only on vellum, bark and papyrus, they now undertook to make paper and print with type.”14 An early nineteenth-century translation sums it up this way: “Formerly they wrote only on parchment, reeds, or the bark of trees. Now they have established paper-manufactures and printing-presses.”15 After some trial and error with these new technologies, Hythloday says, they “mastered both arts … reprinting each [of the Aldine editions] in thousands of copies.”16 In Hythloday’s narrative, then, resourceful humans on one side of the world see the handiwork of resourceful humans from the other side of the world and, with a bit of practice, they reproduce it. No mention is made of the plants or plant-based fibers that must have supplied so much papermaking, nor would it make much difference in a fictional world. If Hythloday had said that the Utopians ultimately learned to make paper out of Japanese mulberry, it would be useless to question the claim. Mulberry trees may be written into existence on a fictional island. A Utopian ecosystem that is nowhere cannot lack natural resources.
Hythloday’s placeless history of the book in the fictional environment of Utopia is much like the book history narratives we have tended to tell, as is best demonstrated by Darnton’s influential schematic diagram “The Communications Circuit” (see Figure 1). In the diagram, only outputs—human labor and the texts generated by that labor—are mapped; the nonhuman inputs are assumed. Like a book in Utopia, books in Darnton’s circuit exist as if in a human vacuum rather than in an ecosystem of plants, animals, and minerals whose availability or scarcity dictates what a text can be at any given time and in any given place.17 Leslie Howsam praises Darnton’s model for its “emphasis on human agency in the making and use of books,” calling attention to a sociological shift in book history, one that brought human labor into focus.18 This important shift in book history was best and most famously sounded by D. F. McKenzie in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Redefining bibliography as “the study of the sociology of texts,” McKenzie insisted that humans must be a part of the stories that scholars tell about the history of books, and he employed the word “sociology” in order to further expand the field’s purview to include human agency.19 The brilliance of McKenzie’s approach was that even as it extended the scope of an already-overextended field or “tropical rain forest,” it offered a compelling framework for revisiting old books and for imagining new ways of examining them. McKenzie claimed that a sociological approach to texts could lead to new insights and discoveries because “it can, in short, show the human presence in any recorded text.”20 And yet, as Mark Vareschi has argued, the groundbreaking work of book historians such as McKenzie “inevitably [has] to locate action and intention in known human actors” such that we are left with “a delicate, and often unsatisfactory, balance being struck between the interpretive richness offered by their attention to the material text and the desire to justify such interpretations through recourse to the choices of authors, printers, publishers, apprentices, and others.”21
FIGURE 1. “The Communications Circuit,” in Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” (1982). Reprinted courtesy of the MIT Press.
What about nonhuman presence in texts, then? The Nature of the Page advocates an “ecology of texts” as a necessary and timely extension of McKenzie’s sociology of texts.22 Like a sociology of texts, an ecology of texts further extends the field, bringing more agents into play. It suggests, in a manner akin to that of McKenzie, that there is more to see and discover in the pages we have turned. An ecology of texts is an extension that has been latent in book history at least since Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s seminal study, The Coming of the Book.23 Febvre and Martin, like other scholars of the Annales school in 1960s France, are often credited with drawing attention to “the general pattern of book production and consumption” rather than “fine points of bibliography.”24 But in their discussion of papermaking as a collaboration of the “industrial” and the “natural,” one can also see the seed of a more ecologically attentive approach: “The story, in brief, of the papermaking industry is that its development was always conditional on the supply of its raw materials.”25 Even the language of Darnton’s communications circuit draws on ecological metaphors: “Books belong to circuits of communication that operate in consistent patterns…. By unearthing those circuits, historians can show that books do not merely recount history; they make it” (emphasis mine).26 “Unearthing,” though, requires one more step: the representation of the natural matter that makes the books that make history. One need not have any special investment in environmentalism to appreciate how much of the story we miss if we accept natural resources as givens rather than variables in the history of media.
On the other hand, one need not have any special investment in Renaissance poetry or book history to notice an important connection between the long, pollutive history of paper mills and Rob Nixon’s attention, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, to “paper trail identity” and the ways “writing has become fundamental to petro-modernity’s control of labor.”27 Indeed, in the section “Orality, Geology, and Writing: The Technologies of Encounter” Nixon puts that work in a direct conversation with “The Sociology of a Text: Oral Culture, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand,” the final chapter of McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts—and further highlights the “slow violence” that becomes visible when we attend to human presence in texts.28 Early handmade paper, which has played such an important role in codicological and bibliographical research of the past, is filled with other kinds of legible evidence about histories of weather and weaving, of ports and imports and exports, of environmental exploitation and toxic effluence. As Diane Kelsey McColley claims in a reading of Vaughan’s poetry, “Part of ecological thinking is knowing where our artifacts come from, with what cost to the earth, to habitats, to species, to individuals of those species, and in human labor.”29
Regardless of what we emphasize individually when we write about literature of the past, the great majority of humanities scholars access primary sources not only in editions, but also in archival libraries, where we hold and read and handle the slowly decaying remains of historical ecosystems that we call “Renaissance England” or “postcolonial Africa” or “nineteenth-century Latin American literature.” (Throughout this book, I use the term “archival libraries” when designating specific, material spaces that facilitate on-site access to published and unpublished historical records.)30 Bruce Holsinger suggests that “to be a medievalist is to be hopelessly implicated in and to constantly witness the mass deaths of countless sheep, lambs, calves, and goats for the means of literary transmission.”31 In doing so, Holsinger raises important concerns about the implications and the social and environmental ethics of archival research, topics to which I return in this book, especially in the final chapter. My starting point, though, is aesthetics as much as ethics, scholarly due diligence as much as environmental awareness. Seeing and emphasizing the organic nature of the texts we examine can give rhetorical weight to the matter from which texts are made and can begin to account for the crucial negotiations between humans and the world of things in the acts of creating (and preserving) material records of ideas.
We accept, as readers and as writers, that words on matter never perfectly replicate ideas in the mind. We accept and even enjoy these incongruities between mind and matter, but our fascination with the agency of humans, with human language, with human media, tends to blur our ability to see the ecological negotiations that undergird textual creation and circulation. Using biological metaphors like “medial ecologies,” we tend to overlook the actual ecologies that make media possible.32 And yet, as this book demonstrates, the affordances of a particular media form are determined by the affordances of the available plants, animals, and minerals used to create those forms. Natural resources can be imagined as boundless in
