The Content of the Form

In his Allgemeines Oeconomisches Lexicon, Georg Heinrich Zincke offered this definition of a “book”:

[E]ither numerous sheets of white paper that have been stitched together in such a way that they can be filled with writing; or, a highly useful and convenient instrument constructed of printed sheets variously bound in cardboard, paper, vellum, leather, etc. for presenting the truth to another in such a way that it can be conveniently read and recognized. Many people work on this ware before it is complete and becomes an actual book in this sense. The scholar and the writer, the papermaker, the type founder, the typesetter and the printer, the proofreader, the publisher, the bookbinder, sometimes even the gilder and the brass-worker, etc. Thus many mouths are fed by this branch of manufacture.{1}

It is worth pondering how such a definition would have to be modified in the face of the current trend toward electronic publication. This is no idle thought. “E-books” are increasingly common, and scholars are being encouraged—sometimes strongly encouraged—to publish electronically. Sarah Lowengard’s The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Gutenberg-e, 2006) is a case in point. Lowengard’s dissertation was one of a handful to receive a Gutenberg-e prize from the American Historical Association between 1999 and 2004, to support its conversion into “an electronic monograph.” The prize, underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was “not intended simply to reward excellence in scholarship with yet another prestigious prize but rather to use prestige—the bluest of ribbons awarded by the grandest of juries with the full authority of the AHA behind it—to set a high standard for electronic publishing. By legitimizing electronic publishing, the AHA hopes to change attitudes of academics toward e-books. By making the most of the new media, the program may also contribute to a new conception of the book itself as a vehicle of knowledge.”{2}

The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe is only available electronically (through http://www.gutenberg-e.org, the Gutenberg-e site set up by the AHA and its partner in the project, Columbia University Press), but other publishers are experimenting with other distribution models. For example, Edita, the in-house publisher for the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, distributes print versions of books in its History of Science series worldwide through the University of Chicago Press and places electronic versions (with “space” for added content not included in the book) on its website, where they may be downloaded for free.{3} I am no expert in the field of electronic publication, so I will leave it to others to consider what the larger impact of these developments might be. As an experienced reader, however, I have much to say about my encounter with this particular e-book.

It is interesting to note, first of all, that one cannot separate the question of form from content. I would submit that such is always the case, but here it results from the quite conscious design of the author. Though her project originated in a doctoral dissertation, Lowengard’s plan was not to begin the publication process with a traditional manuscript to which electronic features could be added. Rather, the book’s very composition was determined by her vision of what the experience of e-reading (if I might be allowed to coin this term) should entail. Lowengard writes that she “wished to produce a book that is not value-enhanced by the possibilities an electronic medium offers, but one that clearly loses value when it is removed from that medium.”

The book, consequently, is a surfer’s paradise. A core section charts the terrain of the study’s subject, and the remainder of the work is composed largely of a collection of semiautonomous vignettes connected to each other (and to the core section) by internal and external links. The text is frequently punctuated by the appearance of the word “reference” (which I found distracting, as it breaks the flow of the narrative). Clicking on the word transports the reader to another “location” that somehow relates to what one was reading, though the connection is not always obvious and the way back to one’s original place is sometimes treacherous.

As a former real-life surfer, I should appreciate this. Part of the charge of surfing is not knowing whether you will be able to ride the next wave. Will you make it back to shore in a state of physical exhilaration or be sent crashing down by the force of the wave? But there is a difference between reading a scholarly book and surfing, and I would hate to think that the one is going to be eclipsed by the other. The essence of a good scholarly book, it seems to me, is that it presents a well-argued and sustained analysis. It is composed so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in an analytical sense. The Creation of Color attempts to substitute for this an open-ended experience. One can’t speak of the relation of the parts to the whole in the same way, because it is not predetermined how many parts a reader will encounter or in what order, and so it is impossible to manage what the whole is or can be. As attractive as this might sound as a method of facilitating associative discovery, it comes at the expense of a well-crafted, unitary historical argument. Much is hinted at, but the reader is not presented with an analytically coherent whole.

There are two reasons for this. One is the form. The other has to do with content, to which I direct the rest of this review. Let me begin by saying that Lowengard has chosen a wonderful topic, one that opens up to an examination of the broader relationships between science and technology during an intellectually and materially productive period. The Creation of Color introduces us to historical actors ranging from some of the century’s most famous chemists to artisans so obscure that we can’t be sure of their true names. We are invited to (virtually) enter locations as different as the famous but previously understudied Gobelin tapestry works on one hand and nameless dye houses on the other, with many points between. And we are treated to excerpts from treatises running the gamut from the century’s epoch-making encyclopedias to obscure tracts whose purposes and meaning were only clear to their now-forgotten authors. The book presents a tantalizing buffet of activities and ideas, culled from sources including published pamphlets, unpublished correspondence, contemporary illustrations, still-extant artifacts, and the author’s own familiarity with the arts of making and applying color in various media.

The Creation of Color is beset, however, with a number of problems. First, Lowengard equates “science” (a highly problematic, anachronistic term for the eighteenth century in any event) with ideas and “theories” (I will return to this term in a moment) and identifies technology and art with practice. This threatens the success of her project from the start, as it creates a historically false matrix on which to chart actors’ identities and activities. Especially given her interest in relating elements of work within and associations among various institutions, workplaces, media, and social realms, it would have been more revealing to focus on the institutional, social, and market-oriented characteristics that delineated the actions and identities of what Lowengard calls science and scientists, on one hand, and art and artisans on the other. Instead, her historically artificial division of mental and manual labor stands in the way of understanding how colors were actually produced, analyzed, and used and of comprehending the interactions between the individuals and institutions engaged in these activities. The Academic chemists Pierre Joseph Macquer and Claude-Louis Bertholet’s connection with Gobelin, for example, surely involved more than contemplation, as Lowengard herself makes clear. These men, like so many others mentioned in this book, were hybrid characters whose careers encompassed research (in pursuit of both knowledge and more materially tangible ends), administration, tinkering, commercial negotiation, and writing. What does it mean to call them “scientists”? The reader would come away from this book with a richer understanding of the landscape of material and knowledge production in the eighteenth century had Lowengard not held on to such a priori categories.

Not so different is a problem regarding the complex implications of “physics” and “chemistry” in the production, use, and analysis of color. Lowengard repeatedly states that these categories cannot be mapped onto the disciplinary contours that define them today. But she does not explain what they did take in. Identifying the eighteenth-century “physics” of color with Newton, for example, doesn’t really help; too many studies have demonstrated that “Newton” and “Newtonian”—terms invested then as now with myriad meanings—were often rhetorical labels rather than specific references to something written by the great man. Dividing chemistry into “philosophical” and “practical” without comment is not particularly revealing either, as the boundary between the two is difficult to trace. An examination of eighteenth-century textbooks, as well as of the curricula of courses such as the enormously popular series given by Gillaume-François Rouelle at the Jardin du Roi in Paris for twenty-five years (1743–68), demonstrates just how artificial such a division is. While Rouelle, the most famous and influential French chemistry teacher of his day, certainly did not shy away from making statements about the fundamental composition of nature, much more of his course was taken up with discussions and demonstrations of how to develop sensible, analytical acuity when engaging in chemical work.

Had Lowengard attended more to the highly innovative character of chemical education in Germany, the hybrid nature of eighteenth-century chemistry would have become even clearer. One result of such an analysis would have been a more nuanced usage of the term “theory,” which historical actors used to cover at least two definitional spheres: explanatory claims regarding the composition and activities of nature, and generalized statements regarding a class of chemical operations. Here again we see the importance of tracing the complicated history that linked the work of the hand with the work of the mind, not only in eighteenth-century chemistry but across the field of contemporary natural inquiry and invention.

I fear that this review sounds harsher than I would have wanted, so let me reiterate that Lowengard discusses a number of highly interesting episodes and raises important questions regarding how we need to approach topics that so clearly extend beyond the easily drawn boundaries of a single discipline, set of practices, or institution. But this is perhaps also the source of her book’s difficulties. Such a demanding and ambitious project requires a choice between a carefully argued overview and an equally carefully crafted case study. I do not use the term “case study” here to mean a single episode, but rather a more delineated area of research. It might have been more rewarding to relate this book’s insightful questions to an in-depth analysis of what went on in and around the Gobelin factory, for example, or at least to narrow its geographical ambitions. The Creation of Color stretches too broadly in geographical terms, and the resulting unevenness is not clearly explained or justified. It also jumps among examples, leaving the reader with the sense that their inclusion sometimes reflects little more than the author’s serendipitous encounters in various archives. Unfortunately, to return to the issue of form, this problem is strengthened rather than mitigated by the book’s electronic structure. While surfing might be good for a “wiki” (quick) rush, scholarly reading yearns for the slower, contemplative joy drawn from savoring a well-constructed and detailed argument.

{1} Georg Heinrich Zincke, Allgemeines Oeconomisches Lexicon, 3rd ed. (Leipzig, 1753), trans. Martha Woodmansee. See http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/92wood.html#03 (accessed 11 July 2007).

{2} Emphasis added. See http://www.historians.org/prizes/gutenberg/index.cfm (accessed 11 July 2007), which also features a lively essay by Robert Darnton titled “A Historian of Books, Lost and Found in Cyberspace.”

{3} See http://www.knaw.nl/publicaties/gwn.html (accessed 11 July 2007).