The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume VI, 18301914
Edited by David McKitterick
Cambridge University Press £100, 826 pages

The British Book Trade: An Oral History
Edited by Sue Bradley
The British Library £25, 304 pages

The Business of Lunch: A Bookman’s Life and Travels
By Ian Norrie
Quartet £20, 286 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

Unlikely as it seems, when the Ultimate History of the Codex Book is written, “Schwarzenegger” may be in the index along with “Gutenberg”.

The decision in June by California’s governor to replace school textbooks with pupil-owned e-readers was dismissed by many as a drowning man’s response to the Golden state’s dire financial situation – in line with its issue of IOUs (“Arnie promises to pay”) to creditors. But, in fact, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial edict makes pedagogic sense. Children will stash their e-books, loaded with thousands of texts, in the satchel with their iPods, loaded with thousands of tracks, and use both as effortlessly as they chew gum.

Those of a reflective turn of mind will wonder if the rise of the digital book signals that the codex, in its hallowed, paper-and-print form, is on its death bed. Or is it, once again, merely adapting to the times? The codex existed in manuscript centuries before Gutenberg invented the mechanical printing press in the 15th century. Historically, the book has effortlessly absorbed radical innovation without alteration to its indestructibly durable bookishness. So is the rise of digital readers an indication of the continued strength of the book – or a sign of its ultimate demise?

Previous technical innovations are studiously chronicled in The ­Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, the sixth volume of which has just been published. They include paper in the 14th century (the country’s sheep flocks, which supplied vellum, must have baa-baa’d in relief); metal type in the 15th century; stereotyping (papier-mâché moulds rather than metal type) in the early 19th century; steam press and woodpulp paper (mid-19th century); and computer typesetting and offset printing (1980s).

The codex format effortlessly swallows such new technology. If we could transport William Caxton, who introduced the printing press to England, from the 15th to the 21st century, what he would see on the shelves of Waterstone’s bookshop would look comfortingly like what he was peddling on his stall, 500 years earlier, in St Paul’s Yard.

The same would be true of the latest big technological shift. The Californian kid’s e-book eerily resembles a book and, like the proverbial duck, goes out of its way to quack like one: it reassuringly simulates the turning page, for example, to remind you of what a “real” book is like. The digital book is, of course, less “haptic” – that’s to say it gives less satisfaction to the human hand and opposable thumb. It doesn’t smell like a book – though some calf-skin syntho-sniff could easily be added by the men in white coats. And, as the old-school readers like to say, you can’t drop it in the bath.

But, by way of compensation, the e-book opens the way to new applications and peripherals. For example, to let the imagination rip, there can be audio-visual enhancements and reader-customised annotation. The bottom line is the e-book is here to stay. Learn to love it. History can sort out if it’s a new lease of life for the traditional book or its death blow.

The most recent volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain covers the period 1830-1914, and includes gritty chapters on “Publishing for Trades and Professions” and “Science, Technology and Mathematics”.

In the chapter on the latter, James A Secord (a distinguished historian of science at Cambridge University) examines the gamut of print outlets for Victorian science, from learned articles to primers for infants. He argues that the giant progress made in this period cannot be abstracted from these vehicles of its propagation. What was On the Origin of Species? It was a theory but primarily a book, published by John Murray, on November 24 1859, at 15 shillings.

The still-raging row on evolution would have been different, then and now, had Darwin published a scholarly article in some dusty learned journal for dons, rather than something in hard covers for the intelligent masses. The physical forms in which ideas are formulated are not neutral conduits. Ideas do not pass through books, like light through glass. Books materially shape and direct those ideas.

When the Google Library Project, which aims to put the contents of five of the western world’s greatest libraries into e-print, is launched next year, will authors reshape their product to fit the medium? Of course they will.

This latest volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain is itself an impressive British book. But the sheer mass and generic variety of the material is beyond even a workforce of 40 formidably learned scholars prepared to spend years on the challenge. The mind boggles, sympathetically, at the task that awaits the next volume in the series, covering modern times – a period in which there has been more titles published than in all the preceding periods combined and, most challengingly, the arrival of the e-book.

There is another strategy: anecdotalism and personal witness. This is the approach adopted in Sue Bradley’s The British Book Trade: An Oral History. The edited volume draws on interviews gathered for the ­British Library Sound Archive – 1,600 hours of the recollections of “ordinary” book people from the shop floor to the board office, recorded from the 1920s to the present. The impression that most readers will take away from this engagingly disorganised book is of an organic “British Book World”, an interlocking complex of authors, agents, publishers, retailers and reviewers.

Like its writer-dominated sibling, the “London Literary World”, and Fleet Street, the British Book World has been blown away in the past 20 years under the remorseless pressures of bureaucratic and retail efficiency. The abolition in 1995 of the century-old Net Book Agreement, which set the retail price for books, opened the way to “discount selling” – “three for two” and “50 per cent off” offers. Books, it was previously believed, do not compete with books – that was why the UK disdained the barbarous American bestseller list until 1974. Now they compete. It was something that the post-1995 book retail trade both demonstrated and validated. Traditionalists and nostalgists lament the passing of the NBA, but the future – particularly with global e-selling – has no place for it.

The end of the British Book World as it once was has been clinched by supra-national agglomeration – a process symbolised by compounds such as HarperCollins (yoking venerable New York and Glasgow imprints) or Viking-Penguin – couplings as uncomfortable, to the old-fashioned ear, as “beef and custard”. At the retail end, high-street bookselling is dominated by supermarket-sized bookshops. The wares are cheaper, the choice wider, but has something been lost when one is intent on stacking up a basket rather than browsing?

Bradley’s volume is addictively readable. Hovering over the chorus of voices is a tantalising question: “Is the British Book World’s passing to be lamented?” Arguably no. First off, as Bradley’s survey stresses, it was arrantly imperialistic. The English language followed colonial conquest. It brought enlightenment and huge profit for the British book trade, but at the cost of cultural coercion for subject peoples. Who owns the book, owns power.

In its internal operations the British Book World was also feudalistic – dominated by a nucleus of dynastic imprints: Macmillan, Blackwells, Faber. It was held together at its top layer by old boy networks. There were, of course, no “old girl networks”, as Bradley shows. This was a profession for gentlemen, and, at best, work for women. Anne Walmsley, one of a group that was called the “Faber young ladies”, recalls that “it was rather ‘jersey and pearls’ and one went to the country for the weekend”. The most gifted female publisher of her time, Diana Athill, now best known as an autobiographer, never rose to a higher rank than André Deutsch’s “right-hand man”.

In short there was much that was objectionable in the British Book World. But much, also, that we could conceivably regret the loss of. Notably “idealism”. Bert Taylor, a humble warehouseman who started work with Simpkin and Marshall aged 15 in 1920, recalls: “When I first entered the trade, publishing was a gentleman’s business. A publisher published a book not to make a lot of money out of it, but because he thought it ought to be published.” Why, it may be asked, should a “gentleman’s” preferences dictate what “ought to be published”? The answer is in the extraordinarily high quality of books actually published during what one could call the “gentleman’s regime” of the 19th and 20th centuries. No country in the world published more, or better, books than Britain during that time.

There were, over these two centuries, booksellers who stocked books for the similarly idealistic reason that the things “ought to be bought”. One such was Ian Norrie, who until 1988 ran the High Hill bookshop in London’s Hampstead, home of Britain’s intellectual elite. The title of ­Norrie’s amiably rambling autobiography – The Business of Lunch – sums up the paradoxical nature of the “trade”. The greatest efficiency, book people such as him said, “was inefficiency”.

Norrie was also chairman of the Society of Bookmen, disdained, alas, nowadays as something of an old buffers’ talking shop. He wraps up his recollections with an angry ode against Amazon. A couple of clicks and Jeff Bezos out there in Seattle will have any one of 5m books whizzing to your letterbox. It’s devilish convenient. But is convenience all we want? My view is that it’s supermarkets and cornershops all over again. People wax nostalgic about the one, but – following the economic imperatives of life – shop at the other.

Where books are concerned, it’s not just nostalgia. The way books used to be sold had undeniable benefits. Norrie, for example, organised in-shop signing sessions with local writers, some of whom he played cricket with and whose publishers he drank with. He reviewed books – shrewdly – in the Ham and High local newspaper. He created what sociologists call a “local literacy”: a book community. The many reading groups that have sprung up in the past 10 years surely reflect an attempt to recreate such a community once more.

Good or bad, the British Book World has gone and it won’t come back. The web-libraries, web-bookshops and e-books of the future will serve us with an efficiency that, 50 years ago, only science fiction could imagine. None the less, I do rather miss books I could drop in the bath.

John Sutherland is author of ‘The Boy Who Loved Books’ (John Murray)