"The hand-shaped cursor abets what Walter Benjamin calls the 'dictatorial perpendicular' of modern reading. [...] as if the dictatorial perpendicular could every fully refute 'the frightening anesthetic power of company [academic] papers,' as Primo Levi once put it." — Gitelman (130)

People that are really very [academic] can get into sensitive positions and have [no] impact on history.

The academic position isn't a sinecure (rather the opposite), but it does have the tendency to produce, for the most part, circumscribed texts. Per Gitelman, "It is [due] to the internal workings of scholarship in particular that, notoriously, scholarly publication stands at odds with marketplace demands, as scholars publish for academic rewards such as promotion and tenure that ensue." (52) So we find ourselves reading the work of a [perhaps very] bright mind on the subject of the Blank, the Typescript, Xenography, and the PDF, which, though conforming to all apposite demands of scholarly/historical writing, has not revealed its subject. We are reading, then, simple history, populated with occasional juicy bits, which is required reading for no one.

On Questions the Text Doesn't Answer
(I'm thinking of the historical progression from hand-writing to PDF and OCR (optical character recognition) progressing even further into text-to-speech, with response from the 'Benjamin-ian' perspective of "mechanical reproduction" (Gitelman does this) though with response from Adorno's Aesthetics in which Benjamin's un-reflected conception of "Aura" is debated. Also I'm wondering about the Deleuzian response to digitized reading machines (such as the one which has read this book, Body Without Organs and all that), the solicitation of writing/reading/text/speech from a Derridean Grammatological perspective. Also was hoping to read about the question/problem of the Archive (touched on briefly) with reference to Spivak and work on teaching/instruction/Interventionalism.)

On the Blank
What does the writing of Edgar Allen Poe have in common with the Chequebook?

"The nominal blanks of fictions like Poe’s, seem like a careful attempt to hold open a tale’s potential field of address. Such openness may have helped get Poe’s tales and poems published, and republished, effectively providing Poe with a "mobile form of capital.” Seen in this light, the typography of [Poe's Blank] works something like the typography of a job-printed checkbook, since both facilitate monetary exchange. One difference is that Poe’s typography works in part because his blanks can’t be definitively filled in, while a checkbook works presumably because its blanks can be." (29)

On Xerography
Now that we are in the era of corporate underdog sports films (Air (2023), Flamin' Hot (2023), Blackberry(2023)), I am putting together a script for Xerox (2025), in which the initial turn of dramatic irony occurs when the main character (Mr. Haloid Xerox) recognizes the surreptitious use of the Xerox machine, which is that the Xerox itself could be Xerox'd:
"[Users] not infrequently making as many Xeroxes in a month as the machines had been designed to produce in a year." (84)

On the PDF
What does the the mouse cursor have in common with the Medieval text?

William Sherman notes that the small pointing hand, or “manicule,” is “a visually striking version of the most common marginal notation of all— nota or nota bene." (129)

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An interesting study of the near history of documents (last 150 years) examined through 4 'episodes', printing blanks (early 20th century), typography (1930s), xeroxing (1970s) and portable document format (1990s) plus an afterword on zines along with discussion of some socio-cultural environments such as the emergence of office bureaucracy, the place of the author and the amateur and the long-standing and ongoing debates around scholarly communication as well as revisiting the less self-evident than it seems documentalist question What is a Document?

This was an intriguing media history approach to the topic of documents. I would recommend it not just to those with an interest in media or history but to librarians and information scientists who are interested in seeing the history of documents from the perspective of another discipline. It is a short book but not necessarily a quick and easy read. It requires a clear head and close reading to fully appreciate but there are some thoughtful ideas in here. I really liked the ongoing discussion of fixity and fluidity and document as genre. I also liked how Gitelman critiqued ideas of print and print culture and pointed instead to the Raymond Williams framework of dominant, emergent and residual media and also processes of remediation as part of a diverse scriptural economy rather than one split into distinct eras. The faint suggestion of a metadata pre-history in blank pro forma was intriguing and the chapter on typescript was also a study of earlier contexts and debates on research methods and scholarly publishing that provide connections and counterpoints to current scholarly precoccupations.

At times, however, I found the tightly wrapped combination of history and theory a little too dense and intricate to follow the thread of the narrative or argument clearly. Sometimes it felt like too much effort was required to tease out an idea than the point was eventually worth. I also enjoyed the introduction and earlier chapters more than the later chapters. Perhaps this is because as Gitelman acknowledges it becomes harder to find outstanding exemplars, particular for the PDF chapter. The strength of the first chapters lies in the more detailed analysis of anecdotes, examples and evidence that anchors the theory. In later chapters, with less solid case studies, the theory tends towards generalisations, exemplified only briefly. It lost the macroscopic quality of the earlier episodes that skilfully wrapped big questions in small examples and so I felt the PDF chapter fell slightly short in its task of exploring what distinguishes a digital document. ( )