Washington Irving Criticism

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Edward Tenner is an independent writer and speaker on the history of technology and the unintended consequences of innovation. He holds a Ph.D. in European history from the University of Chicago and was executive editor for physical science and history at Princeton University Press. A former member of the Harvard Society of Fellows and John Simon Guggenheim fellow, he has been a visiting lecturer at Princeton and has held visiting research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. He is now a visiting scholar in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information and an affiliate of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. He was a founding advisor of Smithsonian's Lemelson Center, where he remains a senior research associate. has a feature on an arcane but culturally vital institution, the summer Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. While the demise of printed books may be exaggerated--or so I argued here --the sense of crisis that began in the 1980s had a paradoxical effect on book studies. Once the printed object was no longer indispensable for the transmission of texts and images, it started to take on a new interest as a physically unique object, especially from the time before mass production when every copy of every book was different. Academics have spent decades comparing copies of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus , have become icons in their own right. Digitization projects make free access to high-resolution details of historic works possible and help increase interest in the originals.

Moral panic over the crisis of printed books, and linking it with economic woes, has a surprisingly long history. In America's first great international financial crisis, the Panic of 1819 (decisive in the lives of Edgar Allen Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, and John James Audubon), Washington Irving's hit, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon , saw publishing about to collapse through overproduction, a bubble like the troubled financial system. As the literary historian Edward Cahill writes:

Gorham Worth lamented the "contemptible catch-penny quackery" of the "glorious copartnership of Critics, Bards & Booksellers," singling out for criticism the dubious practices of producing unnecessary second editions and "puffing" or promoting low-quality writing.