I have been a subscriber to Joel Miller’s excellent Substack, Miller’s Book Review for a couple of years. He never fails to pique my interest in whatever he’s reading, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s a hell of a good writer. So, I was very pleased when he announced that Prometheus Books had agreed to publish his book, The Idea Machine. It’s premise is very simple: How have books changed the world, and what is the history of them? As Miller writes on page 1:
The book, as I argue in the pages ahead, is one of the most important but overlooked factors in the making of the modern world. Why this lack of appreciation – or even awareness? Arguably, the book is a victim of its own success. Familiarity usually breeds more neglect than contempt. We fail to recognize the book for what it is: a remarkably potent information technology, an idea machine.
So begins Miller’s history and appreciation for the written word. He starts at the beginning with ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets, through ancient Greek and Roman ways of storing and retrieving information on scrolls, the development of codices in Christian medieval Europe, to the explosion of books made possible by the printing press. Along the way, I learned all kinds of fascinating facts.
I did not know that the books written on scrolls in ancient times did have the commonplace things we take for granted that make reading easy, namely spaces between words and punctuation. Because of this, reading and understanding a text took a lot of energy and intellectual effort. Roman elites had literate slaves read books to them, and it was unheard of to read a book silently. The ancient Romans were not interested in having as many literate people as possible, because the ability to read denoted higher class.
It wasn’t until the reign of Charlemagne that Christian monks and nuns took it upon themselves to create schools to teach reading to the masses. Christianity differed from paganism in that it was grounded in texts that were shared, copied, and disseminated as much as possible.
If there is a thread running through the entire book (besides the history and development of the book as an information technology), it’s the various ways cultures developed to catalog the information contained in large collections of books. Scrolls were very unwieldy when it came to quickly finding a desired passage; the codex, which consisted of pages that were bound together like our familiar books today, was much better at yielding up its information. Once the printing press made books easy to produce, the problem became one of organizing and cataloging the huge amount of information that was available. Until the advent of digital computers, the best people could do was analog card catalogs, encyclopedias, and indices. Miller makes the case that with AI, we are on the verge of another breakthrough on a par with the printing press. AI will allow users to quickly find and summarize relevant works.
If you’re wondering why Christendom quickly passed Islamic culture in terms of innovation and creativity, it’s because Muslim leaders banned the printed word, while Europe embraced it. As more and more ideas were written, printed, and spread, they led to even more ideas and insights. Thus, books were carriers of “viral” thoughts and theories that generated more creativity from their consumers. Areas under Muslim control missed out on this, because of their insistence on using hand-copied manuscripts.
The Idea Machine also has a chapter on how Thomas Jefferson’s buying books in Europe and sending them to James Madison back in the American colonies had a profound effect on the writing of the United States’ constitution. Another interesting chapter relates the struggles enslaved blacks underwent to learn how to read and write. The southern plantation owners it quickly realized that if slaves could read, their entire economic system was at risk of collapse.
Miller includes lots of illustrations throughout The Idea Machine (see the above depiction of Pliny the Elder for an example), as well as a “Marginalia” at the end of each chapter. These Marginalia focus on one or two specific examples that expand on the theme of the previous chapter, and are always entertaining.
I love books, and reading has given much pleasure. I still remember how excited I was to be able to read a simple story in first grade. All of a sudden, entire worlds were opened to me. As Miller remarks in his chapter on the novel,
Novels provide temporary leave of our specificity, an escape from the enclosed space of ourselves, the prison of our popular psychology. Literature brings us into the lives of others. If only for a few hours, we can appreciate their motivations and values; we can see what drives them, inspires them, and repels them. We can take the place of someone radically different from ourselves and engage the world as that self. (Page 254)
The Idea Machine is a wonderful history and analysis of books as a technology – without them, it’s doubtful human civilization would have ever gotten off the ground. Miller takes what could have been a dry and boring subject and turns it into an exciting tale of invention and discovery. Along the way, the reader gets to meet some of the most entertaining personalities in history. Any lover of books should add this one to their library.
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