CHAPTER 1

Take It and Read

What I must chiefly remember are the hands.

DELACROIX [diary, april 11, 1824]

... we were / hands, / we bailed the darkness out ...

PAUL CELAN ["flower"]

The meaning of the book could begin with St. Augustine. In theeighth book of his Confessions, Augustine describes the momentof his conversion to becoming a Christian:

In my misery I kept crying, "How long shall I go on saying, 'tomorrow,tomorrow?'" Why not now? Why not make an end of my uglysins at this very moment? I was asking myself these questions whenall at once I heard the singing voice of a child in a nearby house.Whether it was the voice of a boy or girl I cannot say, but again andagain it repeated the refrain, "Take it and read, take it and read."

Augustine is sitting beneath a fig tree in his garden, and uponhearing the voice he takes up the Bible lying near him and opensa passage at random and begins reading (Romans 13:13–14). Atthis moment, he tells us, "I had no wish to read more and no needto do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, itwas as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart andall the darkness of doubt was dispelled." Augustine closes thebook, marking his place with his finger, and goes to tell his friendAlypius about his experience. His conversion is complete.

No other passage has more profoundly captured the meaningof the book than this one. Not just reading but reading books wasaligned in Augustine with the act of personal conversion. Augustinewas writing at the end of the fourth century, when the codexhad largely superseded the scroll as the most prevalent form ofreading material. We know Augustine was reading a book fromthe way he randomly accesses a page and uses his finger to markhis place. The conversion at the heart of The Confessions was anaffirmation of the new technology of the book within the lives ofindividuals, indeed, as the technology that helped turn readersinto individuals. Turning the page, not turning the handle of thescroll, was the new technical prelude to undergoing a major turnin one's own life.

In aligning the practice of book reading with that of personalconversion, Augustine established a paradigm of reading thatwould far exceed its theological framework, one that would goon to become a foundation of Western humanistic learning forthe next fifteen hundred years. It was above all else the graspabilityof the book, its being "at hand," that allowed it to playsuch a pivotal role in shaping one's life. "Take it and read, takeit and read" (tolle lege, tolle lege), repeats the divine refrain. Thebook's graspability, in a material as well as a spiritual sense, iswhat endowed it with such immense power to radically alter ourlives. In taking hold of the book, according to Augustine, we aretaken hold of by books.

Nothing is more suspect today than the book's continued identityof being "at hand." The spines, gatherings, threads, boards,and folds that once gave a book its shapeliness, that fit it to ourhands, are being supplanted by the increasingly fine strata ofnew reading devices, integrated into vast woven systems of connection.If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to oursense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness,digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the lawsof horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration. They, likejellyfish or hydra polyps, always elude our grasp in some fundamentalsense. What this means for how we read—and how weare taken hold of by what we read—is still far from clear.

Aristotle regarded touch as the most elementary sense. It ishow we begin to make our way in the world, to map it, measureit, and make sense of it. Touch is the most self-reflexive of senses,an insight affirmed by the German researcher David Katz, whoestablished the field of touch studies in the early twentieth centurybased on his work with World War I amputees. Throughthe feeling of touch, we learn to feel ourselves. Touch is a form ofredundancy, enfolding more sensory information into what wesee and therefore what we read. It makes the words on the pagericher in meaning and more multidimensional. It gives words ageometry, but also a reflexive quality.

To think about the future of reading means, first and foremost,to think about the relationship between reading and hands, thelong history of how touch has shaped reading and, by extension,our sense of ourselves while we read. After completing hisearly masterpiece Dante and Virgil, the great French Romanticpainter Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal, "What I mustchiefly remember are the hands." As Delacroix said of painting,so too of reading.

* * *

Ever since its inception as a pair of wood boards bearing waxtablets bound together by a loose string, the book has served as atool of reflection. There is a doubleness to the book that is centralto its meaning as an object. With the pages facing each other asthey face us, the open book stands before us as a mirror. But evenwhen closed, the book is still informed by a basic duality. Thegrasped book is not only a sign of openness and accessibility, asit was for Augustine. It can also be an affront, closing something(or someone) off in the name of opening something up.

Consider Adolf von Menzel's Man Holding a Book (fig. 1.1),one of the most sensuous depictions of the relationship betweena hand and a book I have ever seen. In it we see the grasping handalmost entirely consume the image, excluding the man named inthe title from view, but also the book—so that we cannot even besure it is a book anymore. Grasping closes in the name of reopening.For Augustine to reopen himself to the world, anew, he mustfirst close himself off from the world by opening his book. Booksare objects that conjoin openness and closure together, like thehands to which they belong.

Nowhere is this more the case than when we read. When wehold books while we read, our hands are also open. Readingbooks, and this is no accident, mimics the gestures of greeting andprayer. In the Middle Ages, this marriage of reading and prayerwas combined in one of the most popular book formats fromthe period, the diminutive "book of hours," which individuals—thosewho could afford them—carried around with them as dailyreminders of religious song and wisdom. In Jean de France, Ducde Berry's Belles Heures (1405–8), one of the most lusciouslyillustrated examples of the genre (fig. 1.2), we see the patron'swife with her hands in prayer before the book. The mirroringthat transpires between her hands is then mirrored again in themedium of the open book before her, which is itself mirrored inthe figure of God, who is depicted as a trinity grasping a book,the book of the world (although with four, not six, hands, as twoare presumably reserved for holding the three of them together).Reading books, we are shown, is expansive, as well as inclusive.It is an act of calling out beyond ourselves, but it is also a symbolof reciprocity: in holding books, we are held together. Every timewe hold a book today we are reenacting this initial bond betweenreading and prayer.

The open hand was the preferred sign of divine calling inboth ancient and medieval art. Unable to be present, God spokethrough his hand. We do not just call out with books, in otherwords, but are also called to. The open hand is a reminder thatwhen we read books we hear voices, another sign of the book'sessential doubleness. The seventeenth-century physician JohnBulwer, who wrote one of the first studies of hand gestures, notedthat the hand "speaks all languages." It is in many ways a truerform of speech. As Bulwer writes,

The Tongue and Heart th' intention oft divide:The Hand and Meaning are ever ally'de.

The book's handiness is a sign of its reliability. Unlike tonguesand hearts, books are things that can be trusted, a fact that hasmuch to do with the nature of their tactility.

In the Codex Manesse (1304), one of the most comprehensiveillustrated books of medieval German love songs, we see how theopen hand speaks here too, but this time in the form of the scroll,a common medieval device (fig. 1.3). As a sign of speech, thescroll holds medieval readers (and listeners) together. The scroll(old media) communicates what the book (new media) cannot.Reliability is a function of redundancy, of saying something twice.The use of multiple channels—speech, scroll, book—is the bestguarantee that a message will be received, that individuals willarrive at a sense of shared meaning. Like the book's ability toconjoin the different faculties of touch, sight, and sound into asingle medium, according to the tradition of the Codex Manessethe book itself is imagined to reside within a more diverse ecologyof information. When we think about media death, about the ideaof the end of certain technologies, we do well to remember thismedieval insistence on the need for redundancy, the importanceof communicating the same thing through different channels.

Hands in books do not just speak, they also point in a moreliteral sense, like Augustine's finger that was used as a bookmark.Books, like hands, hold our attention. As early as the twelfthcentury, writers began drawing hands in the margins of theirbooks to point to important passages. Such a device graduallypassed into typescript and became a commonplace of printedbooks. It looked like this: [??]. The pointing hand in the bookstood for the way books themselves were like pointers, makingthe world graspable. If books open us out into the world, theyalso constrain. They bring the world down to size, inoculationsagainst the problem of patternlessness.

The child's first drawing is often of his or her own hand. Thefootprint may be the first mark we make in the world (for hospitalrecords), but the handprint is the original sign of self-reflection,of understanding ourselves as being in the world. The "handbook"or "manual"—the book that reduces the world into itsessential parts, into outline form—is an extension of this art ofmeasurement. It is one of the oldest types of books, dating backto Epictetus's Enchiridion (second century AD), a short repositoryof nuggets of wisdom. In the eighth century, the VenerableBede taught readers to count to a million on their hands in his Onthe Reckoning of Time (AD 725). By the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies, the measuring hand would become the ultimate signof our bibliographic relationship to the world, embodied in thenew genre of the atlas. In its first incarnation, Abraham Ortelius'sTheatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), the entire world could nowbe held in the reader's hand. The secular bravura on display inthese books, where the reader assumed the divine view, cannotbe overstated. The book was no longer simply a mirror, but acontainer and a lens at once. By the seventeenth century, the greatage of wars of religion, palmistry and chiromancy, knowledgeof and on the hand, would become major sciences. Handbooksseem to proliferate in periods of intellectual and technologicaluncertainty, much as they are proliferating today.

In the nineteenth century, readers witnessed the birth of readingas touch, in the form of Louis Braille's invention of a dot-matrixreading system for the blind in 1824. The method derivedfrom an earlier request by Napoleon for a code that could beread by his soldiers at night in the field without the use of light.Braille's innovation was to make the dot-matrix representationof letters small enough to correspond to a single touch of thefinger. It made reading digital in a very literal sense. By the endof the century, libraries such as the National Library for the Blindin Britain contained over eight thousand volumes in braille, oneof many subsequent technologies that aimed to bring reading tothe visually impaired.

The turn of the twentieth century was a period of numerousexperiments with the tactility of reading, both practical and impractical,culminating in the modernist revival of experimentalbooks between the world wars. Books made of sandpaper, cardboard,cheap notebook paper, wood, and even metal were some ofthe many ways that artists experimented with the touch of reading.In the Russian artist El Lissitzky's celebrated Architectureof VKhUTEMAS (1927) (fig. 1.4), we see how the disembodiedhand of the divine voice from the medieval book has returned,now in the form of the drafting hand of modern science. Withthe compass needle seemingly woven into the hand's grip, wecan see Lissitzky performing a subtle visual pun. The compassneedle is imagined to stand in for the sewing needle, one of theoriginal tools of bookmaking through the sewn binding of thebook's spine. For the Russian avant-garde, the rectilinearity ofmodernism—the cube, plane, column, grid—was as much bornfrom the book as it was the industrial Gargantua of the new machineage. The handbook was one of modernism's secret muses.

If the book's handiness has been fundamental to the way wehave taken stock of the world, its ability to serve as a containerhas been another way through which we have found order inour lives. Books are things that hold things. They are proxies forour hands, much like the popular device of the clasp, which wasinitially used to keep the pages of books from expanding in thehumidity. The book's meaning is tied to the way it relates, in anencapsulating way, to other objects in our lives. Scrapbooks—thebooks that record the sediments of our reading—are an integralpart of the history of the book. But so too are wallet bindings,introduced in the fifteenth century, which allow readers to placeobjects in a special front pocket, like pencils, eyeglasses, or notes,but also things like flowers and artificial flies (for fishing), asin The Companion to Alfred Ronald's Fly Fisher's Entomology(1836), which contains hundreds of flies hooked into its pages.Musical records, too, began to be tucked into the front pocketsof books, as in the popular series Bubble Books That Sing fromthe 1920s. The trajectory of the "pocket book" from somethingthat fit into your pocket to a book that had its own pockets tobecoming a fashionable handbag is marvelous and strange andone deserving of its own history.

Things in books not only draw us into a broader world ofeveryday objects. They also show us how things impress us, theway pressure is an integral component of human knowledge,one that is deeply tactile in its origins. Pressing flowers betweenthe pages of books, a popular activity through the ages for amateursand experts alike, was not only a means of preservingspecimens. It was a way of reflecting on how nature too couldleave impressions behind to be read, one more link in the sturdychain of the long-standing idea of "the book of nature." In thenineteenth century, the Austrian printer Alois Auer pioneereda technique of "self-printing nature," in which specimens wereimprinted directly onto soft metal plates and from there inkedand printed directly onto the page. It led to a beautiful series,Nature Printed, by the Englishman Henry Bradbury, in whichhe printed the ferns and other plants of Great Britain directlyfrom real specimens. Nature was thought to reveal herself moretransparently through the medium of print. Grasping, measuring,and pressing—these are the activities through which thingsbecome legible in a bookish world.

But not for everyone. For some readers, the book is anythingbut graspable. It embodies an act of letting go, losing control,handing over. "Without me, little book, you will go into the city,"runs Ovid's famous saying about his writing. Books cross timeand space; they transcend the individual's grasp. In this, we cannotknow what will happen to them when they leave our hands."Every poem is a betrayal," Goethe once said. Turning over thebook to another involves the possibility of losing control of one'smeaning, of potentially being betrayed by the reader. As an objectthat can fit easily into our hands, but also our pockets, the bookand its meaning are always potentially purloined. It lends awhole new meaning to the divine command "take it and read."