A Companion to the History of the Book (78 page)

Even for prominent authors, the regularity of periodical work was sometimes both attraction and agony. Schiller, Hegel, Melville, and Robert Nicoll likened the routine of periodicity to the lot of the galley slave. Still, for writers willing to accept the constraints of serialization in mass-circulation magazines marketed as much to advertisers as readers, the rewards could be considerably more lucrative than book contracts: in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s case, $225,784 versus $66,588 from 1919 to 1936.

The combination of consistent title and changing content in effect made periodicals objects of both intensive and extensive reading. The
Encyclopédie
expressed a classic ambivalence when it described journals as devised “for the comfort of those who are too busy or too lazy to read entire books … a means of satisfying their curiosity and of becoming wise at little expense” (Kronick 1976: 20). Even the latter advantage was only relative. Because print-runs of early journals were 500–1,000 copies and even newspapers rarely sold in tens of thousands prior to the advent of cheap print, a single copy may have been shared by ten or twenty persons, in homes, coffee-houses, clubs, or popular joint-subscription organizations (430 in the German territories between 1760 and 1800; 463 in Paris between 1815 and 1830). Ironically, when periodicals were scarce, the experience of reading them was often collective and oral, but became more individualized and silent after they became a mass medium, reflecting the shift from vehicle of public discussion to object of private consumption. Mass-circulation periodicals were immensely profitable and influential, but whether they succeeded in manipulating their readers is a question that only a history of audiences can confirm. British workers, Victorian ladies on both sides of the Atlantic, and Soviet “new women” all turned to periodicals for entertainment and self-improvement in ways as likely to resist as absorb indoctrination.

As the means of physical production and distribution of periodicals evolved, periodicity settled into normative rhythms: daily for newspapers, weekly or monthly for magazines, and quarterly for “weightier” titles. The periodical that most exuberantly flaunts its periodicity is
La Bougie du Sapeur (The Sapper’s Candle,
1980). Named after a cartoon character born on February 29, this humorous “daily” appears only every four years, now accompanied (only every 28 years, of course) by a Sunday supplement. The joke makes sense only in an age so saturated with periodicity that we no longer notice it unless jolted out of our routines. Periodicity of publication was part of the evolution from fluctuating feast-and-fast rhythms to a modern world of factory discipline and time zones (derived from the needs of railroads), in which both work and recreation proceed according to schedule. In
Adam Bede
(1859), George Eliot lamented the replacement of the old, slow leisure by the new, which she described as “eager” and marked by “that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time.” In Arthur Schnitzler’s stream-of-consciousness novella “Leutnant Gustl” (published in the Viennese daily,
Neue Freie Presse,
1900), as the dishonored protagonist deliberates whether to kill himself at 7 a.m. local time or railroad time, his presumptive last act is to go to his café for coffee – and the morning paper.

Today, the periodical faces the challenges of rising costs, competition from other media, and changing habits of consumption. Television became the principal vehicle of both entertainment and news, depriving periodicals (especially magazines) of advertising as well as audience and, as a constant generator of narrative, even driving fiction from their pages. Major newspapers have compensated for the loss of immediacy through expanded analysis of the sort associated with the journal. The genre once reviled as a mendacious compilation of trivia now appears as the nostalgic voice of gravitas. Finally, the center of gravity of the newspaper is shifting. Between 1970 and 1997, the number of dailies, total circulation, and circulation per thousand inhabitants declined in the more developed countries but soared in the developing world (–25/+65, –13/+262, –23/+107 percent, respectively). In 2004, only thirty-five countries registered increases in newspaper circulation, notably China and India (35 and 23 percent). The decline of traditional mass-circulation magazines (particularly large-format illustrateds) has opened the market to larger numbers of consumer publications with lower circulations. Now, as earlier, quantity does not imply longevity. In the nineteenth century, US magazines typically lasted for two years. In 1989, only 20 percent survived more than four.

The challenge of the Internet soon eclipsed the “print versus video” debate. Web periodicals are still primarily pendants of paper versions, but increasingly online only
{Slate
dates from 1996). Their long-term economic and conceptual models remain unclear. One-fourth of adult Americans read news online daily, but the expectation of “free information” has militated against charging for “content.” Most electronic periodicals are typical transitional products that recapitulate the aesthetics and functions of the previous technology, resulting only in enhanced diffusion of static texts (disparagingly known as “brochureware” or “long-distance photocopying”).

A reconceptualization of both the periodical and its intellectual property regime is arising from the information explosion in the sciences (7,888 biomédical journals in 1959 versus 19,316 in 1977; 10,000 articles in
Physics Abstracts
in 1955 versus 146,500 in 1996). Soaring numbers and prices of scholarly periodicals issuing from monopolistic commercial presses devour library acquisition budgets at the expense of monograph purchases. The problem is compounded in developing countries, where the inability of scientists to keep up with current research prevents them from contributing to it. In 1991, the Third World accounted for only 1.5 percent of the journals and 5 percent of the papers in the Science Citation Index. Scholars and librarians associated with the “open-access” movement therefore urge a switch from paper to digital format and profit to reciprocity, on the principle that work produced without remuneration should be available online without restriction through peer-reviewed journals (over 2,000 so far) and repositories.

As David Kronick (1976), Joost Kircz (1998), and James O’Donnell (1998) have observed, the character of the learned journal as a means of disseminating, storing, and retrieving information highlights essential features of the periodical genre and the transformative possibilities of electronic publication, which expands the boundaries of the text and the reader’s capacity for interaction with it. Decoupling the text from an inalterable physical incarnation renders diffusion in principle universal and instantaneous, and underscores the primary function of the publisher as middleman. A single article can share several journal titles, whose assignment as credentialing and locator mechanisms could follow “publication.” The interactive capacity for continual updating allows the periodical to recapture the immediacy that it once ceded to audiovisual media, enabling users to respond to or even modify published texts, blurring the boundary between author and reader, and loosening the “fixity” that Elizabeth Eisenstein associated with print. Indeed, the new Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules replace “serial” and “monograph” with “continuing” and “finite” resources, both of them updatable.

Of course, ease of publication does not guarantee readership, not when “blogs” are being spawned at a rate of one per second. But research will become easier because we will search for information itself rather than the title of the journal or article that contains it. Pursuing this logic, some scientists envision a new form of scholarly communication in which “different types of information, at present intermingled in the linear article, can be separated and stored in well-defined, cognitive, textual modules” (Kircz 1998: 210), linked to one another both within and between publications. This possibility of boundless interconnection reminds us that, alongside the view of the periodical as inferior to the book existed others that claimed complementarity or even superiority. The early German Romantics, for example, developed a theory of the periodical as evolving encyclopedia or collectively authored book greater than the sum of its parts. By transcending the dilemma of selection versus expansiveness, the digital periodical may replace the book as the normative textual genre and become the portal through which we enter the coveted realm of the universal library. In the process, ironically, its hallmark – periodicity – may be radically transformed as we also enter a continually updatable hypertextual present.

References and Further Reading

Anderson, Benedict (1983)
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso.

Barbier, Frédéric and Bertho Lavenir, Catherine (2003)
Histoire des médias de Diderot à internet
[History of the Media from Diderot to the Internet], 3rd edn. Paris: Armand Colin.

Baron, Beth (1994)
The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

Baumert, Dieter Paul (1928)
Die Entstehung des deutschen Journalismu: Eine sozialgeschichtliche Studie
[The Development of German Journalism: A Social-historical Study]. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot.

Brooks, Jeffrey (1985)
When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy andPopularLiterature, 1861–1917.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cohn, Jan (1989)
Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Dharwadker, Vinay (1997) “Print Culture and Literary Markets in Colonial India.” In Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers (eds.),
Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production,
pp. 108–33- London: Routledge.

Dovifat, Emil (1962)
Zeitungslehre
[Theory of the Newspaper], 4th edn., 2 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Foucault, Michel (1984) “What is an Author?” In
The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow, pp. 101–20. New York: Pantheon.

Garvey, Ellen Gruber (1996)
The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880 to 1910s.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Habermas, Jürgen (1991)
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,
trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (originally published 1962).

Kirchner, Joachim (1928)
Die Grundlagen des deut-schen Zeitschriftenwesens. Mit einer Gesamtbibliogra-phie der deutschen Zeitschriften bis zumjahre 1790
[Foundations of the German Periodical. With a Complete Bibliography of German Periodicals up to 179O]. Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann.

Kircz, Joost G. (1998) “Modularity: The Next Form of Scientific Information Presentation?”
Journal of Documentation,
54 (2): 210–35 (available at
www.science.uva.nl/projects/commphys/papers/jkmodul.htm;
accessed August 12, 2004).

Kronick, David A. (1976)
A History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals: The Origins and Development of the Scientific and Technical Press 1665–1790,
2nd edn. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow.

Lindemann, Margot and Koszyk, Kurt (1969–86)
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Lovell, Stephen (2000)
The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet eras.
Houndsmills: Macmillan.

Lowenthal, Leo (1961)
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Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

Martens, Wolfgang (1968)
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[The Message of Virtue: The Enlightenment in the Mirror of the German Moral Weeklies]. Stuttgart: Metzler.

Martin, Henri-Jean, Chartier, Roger, and Vivet, Jean-Pierre (eds.) (1983–6)
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[History of French Publishing], 4 vols. Paris: Promodis.

O’Donnell, James J. (1998)
Avatars of the Word from Papyrus to Cyberspace.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Popkin, Jeremy (1990)
Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799-
Durham: University of North Carolina Press.

Raabe, Paul (1974) “Die Zeitschrift als Medium der Aufklärung” [The Periodical as a Medium of the Enlightenment].
Wolfenbüttler Studien zur Aufklärung,
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Reed, Christopher A. (2004)
Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937.
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Schroder, Thomas (1995)
Die ersten Zeitungen: Text-gestaltung und Nachrichtenauswahl
[The First Newspapers: Text Formation and Selection of News]. Tübingen: Günter Narr.

Shattock, Joanne and Wolff, Michael (eds.) (1982)
The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings.
Leicester: University of Leicester Press.

Smith, Anthony (1979)
The Newspaper: An International History.
London: Thames and Hudson.

Starr, Paul (2004)
The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications.
New York: Basic.

Sullivan, Alvin (ed.) (1983–6)
British Literary Magazines,
4 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Tebbel, John and Zuckerman, Mary Ellen (1991)
The Magazine in America 1741–1990.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Valdés, Mario J. and Kadir, Djelal (eds.) (2004)
Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History,
3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wald, James J. (1995) “The ‘Small Club of Connoisseurs’ and the ‘General Public’: Schiller’s
Horen
and Posselt’s
Europäische Annalen”
In Herbert Rowland and Karl J. Fink (eds.),
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Woodward, Hazel and Pilling, Stella (eds.) (1993)
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Aldershot: Gower.