reviews.indd


plative inquiries or the more competitive, 
heuristic games of science.” 

Shaw’s exposition is wide-ranging 
and thought provoking. Ultimately, he is 
not sanguine about the future of liberal 
education, which he believes has been 
almost totally consumed by a vocational 
education model that simply feeds a con-
sumer economy. He shares Alvin Kernan’s 
sense that they have reached the end of a 
line, when an older generation no longer 
passes the torch to new scholars who will 
take up the search for truth. As one might 
expect from such a source, the writing is 
replete with literary examples and allu-
sions. True to his belief in the power of 
presentational art, Shaw’s views are often 
expressed aphoristically or poetically, 
rather than in tight, logical arguments. 
Some readers will find this frustrating, 
but many others will rejoice in Shaw’s 
erudition. Either way, Shaw’s challenges 
to the current trends in higher education 
deserve careful attention.—W. Bede Mitch-
ell, Georgia Southern University. 

The Future of the Page. Ed. Peter Stoicheff
and Andrew Taylor. Toronto: Univ. of 
Toronto Pr. (Studies in Book and Print 
Culture), 2004. 272p. cloth $65 (ISBN 
0802088023); paper $29.95 (ISBN 
0802085849). LC: 2005-391277 

If the title of this volume reminds you of 
conferences you attended in the 1990s, 
early issues of Wired magazine, “the 
Gutenberg elegies,” and the Age of Ir-
rational Exuberance, you will not be 
disappointed. It collects papers from a 
conference in Saskatoon in 2000 and duly 
reflects agendas that have largely been 
eclipsed in the interim. The optimism and 
anxieties that underlie many of the papers 
here have receded as we slowly adjust to 
the addition of yet one more medium of 
communication. The irony of this, given 
the topic, will surely not have been lost 
on the editors nor on the University of 
Toronto Press. Print culture may be slow, 
but it is dependably relentless. The explo-
sion of interest in the history of written 
and printed word that occurred in the 

Book Reviews 477 

1990s as a response to the arrival of the 
Internet and the Web was a great good 
thing and continues to yield an important 
and impressive harvest of articles and 
monographs. Had the Saskatoon confer-
ence focused on a retrospective look at the 
page, its proceedings would have stood 
up better. The page, like the codex in 
which it nestles, has been around for mil-
lennia, its architectonics remarkable for 
their permanence. Bett er understanding 
the history of its formation and mutations 
must surely remain a priority for students 
of the history of the book. However, 
musings from the past about the future 
are likely to be of limited interest in the 
present. Much better, I think, to fly at dusk 
with Hegel’s owl of Minerva. 

To the extent that the contributors did 
address the topic of the conference, their 
prognostications sounded some familiar 
themes. The space of the new electronic 
page was greeted by many as a zone of 
liberation from the multiple tyrannies of 
print culture and its regime of fi xity, its 
many straightjackets, orthodoxies, and 
hegemonies. How this will be accom-
plished and who will be liberated from 
what, however, remains largely implicit 
in the various soundings. The mutability 
of all texts was proclaimed, while authors 
killed once by critical theory are sacrificed 
again at the altar of new technology, as 
empowered readers claim texts by oth-
ers as their own. At the same time, this 
destabilizing electronic space was seen by 
many as a new communal space that will 
create new ecologies of textual producers 
and consumers. The few medievalists at 
the table saw all these trends at work 
long ago in manuscript culture, where 
the idiosyncrasies of scribes had always 
made the page an unstable terrain. Be-
cause most of the participants hail from 
North American English departments, 
their preoccupation with authors, readers, 
and texts is understandable. Among the 
contributors are accomplished scholars, 
cultural materialists, and late twentieth-
century Marxists. Contributions span a 
broad range from canonical texts to Na-



478 College & Research Libraries 

tive American alternatives to the Western 
page. “Subversives” abound, including a 
Canadian artist, Edison del Canto, whose 
contribution is a mini-artist’s book that 
takes aim at the traditional page and its 
guardians: “Academic expert culture is a 
culture of command…. It achieves com-
mand and authority by subjecting you to 
institutionally legitimated intellectual and 
sociological power structures.” Whatever 
the future of the page, its past and present 
are anything but innocent to many of the 
contributors. 

However, the page itself is not really 
the focus of this volume. The concerns 
of most of the contributors are with the 
larger issues of print versus digital com-
munication. Whatever overall coherence 
“the page” may have given this volume 
was lost as contributors pursued their 
own agendas. The result is not a recon-
sideration of the durable page but, rather, 
a series of slimly connected speculations 
about the promises and perils of online 
formats. 

Although the volume feels at times 
ponderously PC and dated, it does con-
tain some useful pieces. Jerome McGann’s 
“Visible and Invisible Books” is a valuable 
chronicle of how the evolution of digital 
technologies has forced him to reconsider 
the very nature and meaning of editing 
text and image archives. For McGann, 
technology has a long way to go before it 
catches up with the needs of those who 
see texts as more than informational sites. 
A similar note is stuck by Michael Groden 
recounting his experiences in editing 
Joyce’s Ulysses online. Joseph Tabbi has 
a provocative piece on the potential of 
digital technology to facilitate the un-
derstanding of writing as a procedure (as 
opposed to a project) and in particular to 
capture the complicated self-referencing 
of what he terms “cognitive fictions.” 
Allison Muri provides an interesting 
diagnostic of those who fear for man’s 
very identity, his humanity, in an age of 
unembodied communication. 

Stoicheff and Taylor launch their vol-
ume with a smart and brisk introduction 

September 2005 

to the history of the page in the West. If 
they ever collaborate on that topic, I will 
be sure to make a return visit. Otherwise, 
the future is best left where it is—ahead of 
us, somewhere.—Michael Ryan, University 
of Pennsylvania. 

Against the Law: Crime, Sharp Prac-
tice and the Control of Print. Ed. 
Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and 
Giles Mandelbrote. New Castle, Del.: 
Oak Knoll; London: British Library 
(Publishing Pathways), 2004. 184p. 
$45 (ISBN: 158456153X, Oak Knoll); 
(0712348964, British Library). LC: 
2005-544193 

The eight essays in this handsomely 
printed volume constitute the published 
proceedings of the 26th annual book trade 
history conference held at the St. Bride 
Printing Library and Birkbeck College 
of the University of London. The list of 
approximately sixty att endees included 
scholars from England, Wales, France, 
Italy, and the United States. All these es-
says are concerned with historical aspects 
of the book trade and, specifically, its 
role as one of the gatekeepers to social 
status, reputation, money, and power. 
The editors state in their introduction 
that the contributors of essays “explore 
the underside of the book trade, revealing 
the ways in which laws and regulations 
relating to books have been exploited and 
manipulated, or evaded and broken, over 
many centuries.” 

Christopher de Hamel’s “Book Thefts 
in the Middle Ages” cites examples of me-
dieval book thefts and the measures taken 
by book owners and monastic librarians 
to protect their literary property, includ-
ing curses or anathemas on the person or 
persons who would steal their books. De 
Hamel shows that the very fact that book 
thefts were not uncommon is evidence of 
an active books market and furthermore 
that the book trade often was either con-
sciously or unwittingly an accomplice of 
the thieves, making it easier for thieves 
to ply their sharp practices, deceptions, 
and frauds.