Reading with a knife?

500 years before the first online wiki, when books first came out, you read them with a knife and they gave you plenty of room for notes.  Not so different from today's "share" or "comment."

Adam Smyth writes (LRB 5 July 2012): "The gusto with which readers intervened in texts, adding annotations (ticks and crosses; sketches of flowers; heckling commentaries) or even physically remaking them (knives and scissors were reading props alongside spectacles and candles) suggests that the book was thought of less as a finished, coherent object and more as an ongoing process: often sold unbound, and frequently including blank pages, the material book had the capacity for endless revision."

Renaissance printing prefigured digital age wikis.

We can also find antecedents to the "death of books" diatribes today.  And what we find is that the new technology renews interest in the old:  "Popular printed texts such as almanacs actively encouraged handwritten interventions: one from 1566 offers itself as a space for anyone 'that will make & keepe notes of any actes, deedes, or thinges that passeth from time to time, worthy of memory, to be registered.'  Far from killing off scribal activity, printing functioned, in Stallybrass's words, as 'a revolutionary incitement to writing by hand.'"

Similarly, digital book technology increases reading:  ebook readers go through 60% more books a year than traditionalists (Pew).

Usually today, we pride ourselves on how different our new things are.  Ads emphasize the different.  Reviewers comment on the novelty.  But just like our Renaissance forbears, our new book technology strives to be like the old:

• Amazon prides itself on a computer that looks just like a printed page:  "Kindle's E Ink screen reads like real paper, with no glare. Read as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room.
• "Early printed books – including the first of them, Gutenberg’s Latin Bible of 1455 – tried very hard to look like handwritten texts."

Some of the most fun books of the past decades obsess with text standards.  Think Pale Fire or If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.  Turns out these concerns come from the early publishers too, just like the "the deletion sign derived from the Greek δ":   "a broader stress on uniformity, accuracy, standardisation and ‘a new sense of responsibility towards the transmitted text.’  We see this in the overheated title-page boasts that use a rhetoric of accuracy to out-jostle rivals: the third edition of Lancelot Andrewes’s A Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine (1675) was ‘corrected and perfected … and thereby purged from many thousands of errours, defects, and corruptions, which were in a rude imperfect draught formerly published.’"

So much of the online culture comes from Renaissance publishing.  I wonder when I'll see the laptoppers at Starbucks web surfing with a knife?