Judge a Book by Its Cover (and don’t use Kindle)

Last updated on: June 2, 2017 at 3:44 pm by D. G. Hart

Judge a Book by Its Cover (and don’t use Kindle) 2017-06-02T15:44:41-04:00 D. G. Hart

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Crawford Gribben’s careful and thoughtful biography of John Owen is also an important contribution to the history of the book. Early on he points out that the standard way that many modern evangelical and Reformed Protestant readers encounter Owen, such as through the Banner of Truth edition of Owen’s collected writings, distorts the author and his context:

. . . book historians insist that “forms” relating to a text’s status as a material object are also essential components of its proper interpretation. This ought to be a particular concern for the study of Owen as it has been developed over the last one hundred and fifty years. For the [Banner of Truth] edition’s starkly homogenous formatting of two dozen identical volumes was designed for a mid-Victorian print marketplace, and inevitably concealed the rich material variety of the seventeenth-century editions it purported to represent, as well as their occasional ideological diversity. In addition [Banner of Truth’s] arrangement of Owen’s texts can be misleading, as in volumes three and four, for example, which combine six different treatises published at different times under one general title, or as in Of Communion with God, which provides the text of the first edition with the preface to the second. . .(19)

Gribben adds that modern readers should not let the advances of on-line or digitized texts fool investigators and believers:

. . . modern scholars may be tempted to circumvent these text-critical difficulties by downloading facsimiles of early modern publications from the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database. But neither does the extensive use of online archives necessarily solve the problem. Electronic facsimiles provide an illusion of readerly immediacy, but they cannot escape their own standardizing formats in expanding or reducing texts of enormous material variety to the margins of the standard manuscript folio page (A4). (19)

Does this mean that all readers should collect books and only use historically authentic publications? It does not necessarily ban the amateur reading of historical texts in whatever format available. But for serious readers, like scholars and pastors, awareness of the page, binding, and cover do contribute to a text’s interpretation.

And even for ordinary Christians, Gribben’s attention to the materiality of books has consequences:

“Protestants used their books, dog-earing pages, underlining passages and writing in their margins,” Andrew Cambers has recently noted, in his magisterial account of Godly Reading (2014). The making of marginalia was a particular Puritan practice. (20)

Books have some advantages that machines don’t. So do historians.

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