0.5 Non-consuming relevance: “the grub street project”  (Page 5/9)

The books describing all this information are completed, published in six volumes and two languages by the University of Toronto Press. But the mapping is advancing with GIS technologies, in particular, a recent email from Fiona Black tells me, capitalizing upon new geo-referencing technologies that enable using historical maps. Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 4:43 PM. MacDonald and Black argue in their article describing this undertaking that mapping information obtained from databases such as the British Book Trade Index ( (External Link) ) enables answering the following kinds of questions, beautifully tabulated for us:

(Black and Macdonald 514).

It is never the case that such questions canNOT be answered using books or databases—of course they can. However, one would have to extract the information from the media in which they appear. The mapping pre-extracts it, and lets you go on to think about what this information shows us, once mapped.

Every medium abstracts information. Here, pictorially, are some abstractions of book history information:

These particular views of the book history information—a closed book, a pile of microfilm, and a database search form—are lossy to say the least, obfuscating to say the most. Nothing can be known until you open the book, look at the microfilm, search the database.

These activities are trivial, you might say: the information is there. Is it? I want to trace one particular dataset that is “there” in many forms.

Ian Maxted published the book (inadequately pictured above) called The London Book Trades, 1775-1800: A Topographical Guide (Exeter: by the author, 1980). The book, clearly almost homemade, contains an introduction in typescript and a folder full of microfiche. The microfiche pictures a typed list of the names by street of those businesses involved in print culture, including the names of all who worked there. The typescript, we are told, was designed for Maxted’s own personal use to check the accuracy of information as he was proofing The London Book Trades, 1775-1800 , and subsequently given to the British Library so that they could derive cataloging information—identify printers and/or places from inadequate title pages. The microfiche images are almost undreadable:

This pdf of that microfiche image had to transform it from negative to positive. Maxted recognized the problem of communicating this information in book form, and to me he almost seems like a soldier in the effort to overcome information loss due to affordances of the book medium, as can be seen clearly in the copyright information to be found in his Topographical Guide :

© Ian Maxted, 1980

Subject to the provisions of the Copyright Acts any part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the permission of the author.

When I first read this sentence, I had to go back over it several times: surely I was missing the “not”—“Subject to the provisions of the Copyright Acts any part of this publication may NOT be reproduced . . . ,” but NOT is not there. A typo? The sentence following this one cleared up my confusion: “The author would however be interested to be informed of any major use made of the publication.” Maxted is saying, in effect, PLEASE reproduce this document in a more useful (“electronic”) form than I was able to do. He just wants his work to be effectively used. And aware of the terrible quality of the microfiche, Maxted went further, reproducing the work in its entirety with the rest of his works on a blog (http://bookhistory.blogspot.com/ ):