How and Why Books Matter

 

What I have learned from 18 years of the Iconic Books Project—now collected together in one place:

How and Why Books Matter: Essays on the Social Functionof Iconic Books, from Equinox, 2019. 

Religious and secular communities ritualize some books in one, two, or three dimensions. They ritualize the dimension of semantic interpretation through teaching, preaching, and scholarly commentary. This dimension receives almost all the attention of academic scholars. Communities also ritualize a text’s expressive dimension through public reading, recitation, and song, and also by reproducing its contents in art, theatre and film. This dimension is receiving increasing scholarly attention, especially in religious studies and anthropology. A third textual dimension, the iconic dimension, gets ritualized by manipulating the physical text, decorating it, and displaying it. This dimension has received almost no academic attention, yet features prominently in the most common news stories about books, whether about e-books, academic libraries, rare manuscript discoveries, or scripture desecrations. By calling attention to the iconic dimension of books, James Watts argues that we can better understand how physical books mediate social value and power within and between religious communities, nations, academic disciplines, and societies both ancient and modern.

How and Why Books Matter will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in books, reading, literacy, scriptures, e-books, publishing, and the future of the book. It also addresses scholarship in religion, cultural studies, literacy studies, biblical studies, book history, anthropology, literary studies, and intellectual history.

Series: Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts

Table of Contents: 

Introduction: The Iconic Books Project  1-5

Chapter 1 How Books Matter: The Three Dimensions of Scriptures  7-29

Chapter 2 Iconic Books and Texts  31-54

Chapter 3 Relic Texts  55-69

Chapter 4 Iconic Digital Texts: How Rituals Materialize Virtual Texts  71-81

Chapter 5 Desecrated Scriptures and the News Media  83-98

Chapter 6 Ancient Iconic Texts  99-115

Chapter 7 Rival Iconic Texts: Ten Commandments Monuments and the U.S. Constitution  117-134

Chapter 8 Book Aniconism: The Codex, Translation and Beliefs about Immaterial Texts  135-159

Chapter 9 Mass Literacy and Scholarly Expertise  161-166

Chapter 10 Why Books Matter: Preservation and Disposal  167-188

Why Books Matter

(The news that a New England prep school has dismantled its entire library to replace it with computers and e-readers keeps the idea of "bookless libraries" in the news. Since the headmaster's rationale cites SU's Dean of Libraries, Suzanne Thorin, I'm posting here a piece I wrote last November when the controversy first hit Syracuse University.)

Worries about the future of books hit home recently on the campus where I work. The university library announced plans to dispose of some materials and move many more books to a commercial storage facility across the state in order to free space in the stacks for new acquisitions. These plans came soon after renovations transformed two of the library’s seven floors from book stacks into a coffee shop, a computer commons, “collaborative learning spaces” (i.e. tables with chairs), and classrooms. So the announcement of deacquisition and off-site storage plans prompted an uproar among humanities faculty members and students, producing 113 faculty signatures (including mine) on two letters of protest. Faculty in the sciences and social sciences soon circulated their own protest letters in solidarity with the humanists’ initiatives. A student petition against the plan garnered more than 1000 signatures. All demanded greater consultation and collaboration in developing library collections and policies. The library responded with its own letters and policy papers, claiming that it has always sought input, especially from faculty.

Beyond the argument over input on library practices, however, the dueling documents reveal a conceptual gap between the library’s administration and the protestors. Comparing the professors’ letters and the librarians’ policy papers shows that their subjects are completely different. The library’s policies focus on “information”—how and by whom it is accessed, distributed, analyzed and used. The faculty’s letters almost never mention that word; only the social scientists use it at all. The letters focus instead on the importance of reading physical books and documents, browsing stacks and viewing fold-out charts and maps. The library letters emphasize collaborative learning while the professors focus on the needs of solitary researchers. The library invokes utility while the faculty worry about recruitment and institutional prestige. The different subjects of the dueling documents show that this dispute involves very different ideas about books.

The whole affair could be dismissed as one more academic tempest in a teapot were it not for the much wider debates over the role of libraries on college campuses, over the state of book publishing and marketing, and, of course, over the future of books themselves. Like most long-standing social institutions, libraries are more than just mechanisms for providing particular services. They symbolize a cultural ideal. But libraries exemplify that ideal only by virtue of the books they house. Questions about the roles of libraries are, at bottom, questions about the significance of books.

Missing in this debate has been any exploration of the values that modern societies invest in books. As it happens, my university also hosts an interdisciplinary research program aimed at documenting and analyzing precisely this question across history and diverse cultures. I am co-founder of the Iconic Books Project, and so have followed the library debate with particular interest. It has prompted me to imagine how an iconic books perspective can help us understand the values attached to browsing stacks, material books, and library architecture.

The Importance of Browsing

Complaints against both digitized texts and off-site storage of library books frequently evoke the experience of browsing library shelves. Faculty members report the benefit of getting an overview of an entire subject contained in a collection. They repeat stories of finding just what they were looking for in the book next to the one they came into the stacks to collect. They celebrate how browsing stacks can produce random juxtapositions that neither cataloguing systems nor their own research plans anticipate, yet which provide the key to resolving their problem or to setting their research onto a new and more productive path. For them, this kind of browsing is not possible with either a catalog or an internet “browser” because its success depends on the physical juxtaposition of books on a shelf.

The open-stack library that makes browsing possible manifests an old idea. The notion that the contents of texts should be randomly accessible has slowly grown in strength over three thousand years. It decisively shapes the physical forms of books as well as libraries.

Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian libraries were owned by temples and royal courts who strictly limited access to their priests and officials. When new religions made knowledge of their sacred texts public instead of keeping them secret, public reading and interpretation became a standard element in Jewish, Christian and Muslim worship. At first, the books were scrolls whose pages were sewn together edge to edge. Scrolls must be read sequentially, either the whole text at once or sections over a series of sessions. In synagogue services, Torah scrolls are still read sequentially over a year. The scroll form makes it hard to compare different parts of the same book, and it cannot be opened randomly.

Ancient Christians adopted a different technology for their sacred books, one that binds together sheets of parchment or paper on a single edge. This is called a codex and is the form that almost all books take today. The codex allows you to skip from one part of the book to another easily, to compare different sections, to read in any order that you want, and even to read randomly by letting the book fall open. People of various religious traditions still use random access to divine in scriptures a message appropriate to their circumstances.

The public library movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made volumes of literature and information much more widely available, often in the form of open stacks libraries that allow the public to browse the shelves. Open stacks multiply the advantages of codex technology. You can access as many volumes as you can lay your hands on in any way you wish, including randomly. Open stacks represent the reader’s complete control over the physical process and sequence of reading. Refusing such access by storing volumes off-site or on-line feels like imposing the textual strait-jacket of a scroll on readers who have become used to the freedom of a codex.

Attention to the physical form of texts reminds us that reading is an embodied practice. You must hold a book physically, brace it with your hands or put in on a table, position your body in certain ways and, of course, focus your eyes in order to read. Working on computers or e-readers requires different physical activities that have provided much fodder to debates about e-books.

But here I want to point out that visiting a library is also an embodied practice. Walking into the building, navigating the stacks, sitting in carrels to study your finds, and checking out and carrying away the most promising books comprise physical routines that have long characterized the scholar’s lifestyle. The convenience of electronic texts and computerized catalog searches that deliver texts to you is offset by constricting the physical scope of your research activities to your own desk and computer. This loss may be felt especially keenly by faculty and students in the humanities whose research already tends to be the most individualistic of all the disciplines in the university and, therefore, the most isolating. For them, trips to the library have traditionally provided a physical research activity that many are sorry to see go.

Material Books and the Desire for Textual Permanence

Books represent more, however, than just the reader’s control over the reading process. They are powerful cultural symbols. Books matter because they are material manifestations of our culture’s ideals: educational ideals, political ideals, philosophical ideals, and religious ideals. They represent our best hopes for ourselves. But ideals can be hard to remember, much less live by. Books seem to preserve our values in physical objects. They are material manifestations of whatever we hold most dear. And when we struggle to know what that is, we can read books to remember what we’ve forgotten.

To a great degree, therefore, the cultural significance of books involves old knowledge. They represent our desire for old knowledge even while publishing new information. The publishing business, of course, wants new products to sell. Professors, especially those in the humanities, want to write and sell books. Research universities require them to do so. As a result, more books are published every year than the year before, and research libraries find themselves losing ground and floor-space in the effort to keep up. But unlike chain bookstores, libraries owe their cultural prestige to their role in preserving old books as much as in acquiring new ones.

Many fields of the humanities as well as qualitative fields in the social sciences promulgate old knowledge preserved in books. Of course, humanists also conduct creative research, use electronic resources and expect the most recent intellectual trends to appear on their library’s shelves. But their teaching tends to be book-centered and many of those books are old. In courses in literature, philosophy, history, and religion, students’ work consists mostly of reading books, often primary texts. Distinguishing primary from secondary sources is a hallmark of humanistic research that emphasizes the importance of reading authors from diverse times and cultures. Many professors in such classes teach book in hand, modeling by their own performance a text-centered way of thinking. Explicit in such performances is the assertion that these old texts still have important things to say to contemporary students. Implicit is the hope that, in this or another book, we may find forgotten wisdom that could benefit us and our society.

Such pedagogies reflect wider cultural commitments. Human cultures tend to vest some material objects with important, even transcendent, meanings. Objects like national flags, religious art, and grave markers evoke powerful emotions and motivate the behavior of very many people, no less today than in the past.

Books also evoke powerful emotions and symbolic connotations. That is most obviously the case for religious scriptures. The Torah, Bible and Qur’an, to name only three, function as icons not only for Jews, Christians and Muslims, but also serve as powerful symbols of those religions within the wider culture. But many other books also exhibit iconic qualities, if not to the same degree. The image of the book (codex) appears in art and other visual media to represent knowledge and learning. It is a conventional prop in the portraits of scholars and writers. Many universities put images of books on their institutional seals.

Material books evoke a semi-sacred sense in many people. They will therefore go to great lengths to avoid destroying them. Librarians, who must dispose of redundant or out-of-date volumes, have told me stories of loading the dumpster at night so as not to be seen. The cultural roots of this antipathy run deep. Memories of cultural loss because of mass book destructions lie at the roots of both Chinese and Western cultures: the first Quin emperor ordered the destruction of most forms of literature in 213 B.C.E, while Roman troops accidentally burned the library of Alexandria in 48 B.C.E. Historians debate the accuracy of both stories, but that has not lessened their cultural significance. Conflict between and within religious traditions has frequently included destroying books and attacking their owners. These were also prominent practices of totalitarian governments and political movements in the twentieth century. As a result, book burning remains one of the most outrageous activities in contemporary culture, closely followed by attempts to ban books from libraries or bookstores.

From a practical point of view, all of this is inexplicable. Books are very common and widely distributed commodities. The destruction of one copy or even many copies will not seriously threaten the availability of mass marketed books. But such practical observations do nothing to lessen the iconicity of books. Most religious scriptures are even more widely distributed, often in very inexpensive form, and so common that the destruction of tens of thousands of copies would not seriously affect access to their texts. Yet news of scripture desecrations arouses very strong fury and catches the attention of the world’s news media. The iconic status of books in contemporary culture is unaffected by their ubiquity or commercial value.

So research libraries in the early twenty-first century find themselves in a difficult predicament. On the one hand, the ever-rising number of academic publications and ever-expanding scope of scholarly interests puts enormous pressure on their acquisitions budgets and their shelf space. It is understandable that the advent of electronic texts might look like a timely technological fix to these woes. On the other hand, the broader society privileges research libraries—and the universities that support them—as conservators of intellectual culture. The prestige of a university is often crudely calculated by the sheer number of volumes in its collections. (Even more extreme examples of the social priority on book conservation can be found in national depository libraries like the U.S. Library of Congress and the British Library, which try to collect most if not all books published in their countries.)

E-books do not serve this desire to preserve culture in books very well. Electronic texts are an ephemeral textual medium, like chalk boards. And like chalk boards, preserving electronic texts depends on frequent copying, though they are much easier to reproduce. They show absolutely no promise for permanence, however, either physically (on various kinds of computer hardware all of which suffers rather rapid physical decline and even more rapid technological obsolescence) or culturally (due to ever-changing software that overwhelms the human expertise needed to operate old systems). The widespread hope that constant copying and upgrades will preserve e-texts long term shows remarkable ignorance of human history. When physical, economic, and political systems can all be disrupted on a catastrophic scale—as they were several times in the twentieth century alone—systems that depend on power and communication networks cannot be trusted as reliable long-term repositories of cultural memories.

The research university library has served the function of cultural repository for centuries. Though its collections can also be destroyed by war and other catastrophes, books at least do not require dedicated electrical technologies in order to work. They need only a human eye and a mind that understands the language and script they contain, and even that knowledge can often be reconstructed after being lost.

Books preserved in libraries of various kinds have proven to be the most reliable, flexible, and portable technology for long-term cultural preservation for the last two thousand years. That is why books symbolize the preservation of cultural ideals, and that gives them a lot of cultural prestige. Libraries that appear to abandon the role of book preservation lose the prestige that goes with it.

Architectural Values

On university and college campuses, library buildings share the culture’s symbolic investments in the books they contain. It is a very old religious idea that books of scripture convey some of their importance to the buildings that house them. A synagogue is holy because of the sacred Torah scrolls it contains, a Sikh gurdwara is a shrine for the Guru Granth Sahib, and a mosque is holy to many Muslims because of its Qur’ans. Buddhists as well as Christians have frequently treated books of scripture just like the relics of saints, and the boxes and buildings that contain them as reliquaries.

Library architecture often reflects this tradition by imitating Greek temples or Gothic churches. University professors and administrators frequently claim that the library is the heart and soul of the university, but university crests show that the real referents are the books inside those libraries.

This architecture and rhetoric do not make casual claims. They tie the university’s identity to material artifacts—books—that exemplify learning and wisdom, in contrast to other campus architecture—such as the football stadium—that emphasizes very different cultural values. Library policies therefore evoke heated debates because the cultural identity of universities in general, and the humanities in particular, are at stake. Books matter because they are the icons for such values. A university without a book-stuffed library is a university without a soul.

I hope that will not be the case at my university. Greater collaboration between faculty and librarians should result in more books on open stacks, and that will represent a tangible recommitment to the university’s role as a cultural conservator.

Besides, that investment will benefit the university’s research programs in another way: those books contain lots of interesting information too!

© 2009 James W. Watts

The UnIconic Book

Paul Collins in Slate Magazine asks “Why won’t phone books die?” The question was prompted by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ claim that “Yellow Page usage among people, say, below 50, will drop to zero—or near zero—over the next five years” (Bill Gates: Reading to go "completely online"). Collins counters with industry figures:

Printed phone books are a maturing industry, with only about six in 10 businesses and individuals still regularly relying on them. Yet even as directories hemorrhage content to the Web and to unlisted cell numbers, enough oldsters—those, say, who still recall physically dialing numbers in a rotary motion—continue using them enough to keep profits rolling in.

The phone book’s physical and economic ubiquity over the past century is undeniable:

The humble phone book spent the 20th century as the prince of print jobs. When AT&T gave all 2,400 local editions the same bicentennial-commemorative cover, the resulting run of 187 million copies probably became the most-reproduced book cover of all time. ... The phone book is the one book guaranteed to be present in every household, no matter how little else the occupants read. Even in a vacant apartment, you'll still find old phone books in the kitchen cabinet. ... Last year, according to the industry group the Yellow Pages Association, approximately 615 million directories were printed in the United States alone, generating revenues of $13.9 billion. Some quick math tells me that's more than $22 in revenue per copy. And, what's more, those revenue figures are growing.

By one meaning of the word “iconic,” people’s instant recognition of phone books by their size, shape and color as well as their ubiquity should make them a paradigmatic “iconic book.” But Collins points out:

Yet the phone book's ubiquity has given it an invisibility. ... despite being the most popular printed work ever, there's never been a single scholarly monograph on the phone book.

Those observations go to the heart of what makes a book iconic. It is ritual. By “ritual,” I mean practices that draw attention to books and makes people conscious of how they are using and reading them (applying the ritual theory of Jonathan Z. Smith). Religious processions with scriptures, political oath ceremonies, and sales of textual amulets all ritualize the physical form and image of books or other texts. But people also ritualize books—that is, they draw sustained and conscious attention to them—by interpreting their meaning (in scholarly monographs, among many other media) and also by performing the text through recitations, songs, art, theater, and film. People in different cultures, times and place ritualize different books to different degrees along each of these three dimensions.

Phone books, however, are ritualized in none of their dimensions. Not only has their semantic form and cultural significance remain uninterpreted, but the idea of “performing” their text or contents is ludicrous. As to their physical form, no one protests if they are burned, mutilated, or otherwise destroyed (unless it is out of concern for environmental impact, which as Collins notes must be considerable). By the analysis we’re employing here, phone books are the most uniconic of books.

Thinking about such uniconic books lets us nuance our theories. For one thing, I need to ditch my simple definition of an iconic book as “a book you can recognize from fifty feet away.” Phone books, especially Yellow Pages, can easily be recognized at a distance just as bibles can, but that characteristic has not endowed them with cultural worth and significance.

Uniconic books may also help us grasp the likely effects of transforming texts into digital media. To the degree that a book simply serves as an information source, like the phone book does, it can be replaced by computer searches without readers feeling any loss. That does not mean, however, that “reading will go completely online,” as Bill Gates maintains. To the degree that people ritualize books and other texts along the iconic dimension, that is, to the degree that they pay conscious attention to how they look and feel, how they carry them and their own posture as they read them, such iconic books will remain major features of human cultures.

That is not to say that iconic texts won’t be adapted to new media. I think biblical texts were digitized and marketed in electronically searchable forms sooner than phone books, and elicited no complaints from the devout (at least that I’ve heard). The difference lies rather in the fact that the disappearance of physical bibles is unimaginable, while the eventual disappearance of physical phones books seems very likely. As this blog is documenting, the iconic status of various kinds of books preserves and even enhances their appeal in the age of digital information.

Elvis's Bible auctioned for $120 million

 

A bible that belonged to Elvis Presley sold at auction for $120 million, according to CBN. It contains "a large number of marked pages and passages" that the rock star highlighted personally. 

Elvis's bible is an excellent example of a "relic text," a material book valued for its unique history and form. Its printed text is the same as countless other bibles, but its association with Elvis makes it very valuable. Why? Because, as I wrote in How and Why Books Matter (2019), "relic texts legitimize a story .... People use them to identify with and place themselves in that story. ... Since ritualizing a text's iconic dimension bestows legitimacy, people will go to great lengths and spend large sums of money to own and display a relic text."

Relic Texts

Presented to the Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT) meeting concurrently with the Eastern International Region of the American Academy of Religion in Waterloo, Ontario, May 4, 2012. Pdf file (without links) available for download from the Syracuse University repository.

Revised and published in How and Why Books Matter (Sheffield: Equinox, 2019), pp. 55-69.

I have previously argued that religious traditions typically ritualize their scriptures in three dimensions (Watts 2006). They ritualize the interpretation of sacred texts (their semantic dimension) with preaching, teaching, commentary, and private study. They ritualize the performance of their sacred texts (their performative dimension) with liturgical readings, dramatic performances, artistic illustrations and private meditation. They ritualize the physical form of their sacred texts (their iconic dimension) by their elaborate manufacture, stereotypical appearance, public display and ritual manipulation. Other kinds of texts may be ritualized in one or two dimensions, but the regular ritualization of a text in all three dimensions usually distinguishes it as a sacred text, a scripture.

However, there are some texts, or more accurately some specific copies of texts, that tend to be ritualized only in the iconic dimension. Though highly venerated, people do not often read them and even more rarely interpret their meaning, nor do they perform most of them verbally or dramatically. That is, they are not ritualized in either the semantic or the performative dimensions very much. Examples of such texts include most books on prominent display in museums, such as the earliest known manuscripts of the Bible and the Qur’an, Gutenberg Bibles, Shakespeare’s first folio and any valuable first edition, the autographs of the Declaration of the Independence and U.S. Constitution, and so on. Old or unusual copies of scriptures feature prominently among them, but so do political documents and works of literature.

I call such books “relic texts.” Relic texts are valued for being the specific objects that they are. They are rare, if not one-of-a-kind, and are in theory not reproducible. Relics, as known from Christian and Buddhist traditions and many other religions, are more appropriate models for how such books function than are icons. Both icons and relics are believed to mediate the sacred. But the value of icons is that they are reproducible, whereas the value of relics lies precisely in the fact that they are unique. Of course, because the demand for relics always outstrips the supply, the (re-)production of relics has long been the subject of scandal.

Relic texts can be distinguished from other books by how they are ritualized in the three dimensions. The iconic dimension of relic texts dominates and eclipses the other two dimensions. They are not read or interpreted very much because they share their semantic and performative dimensions with other, non-relic copies of the same texts. Their social function therefore differs from other ritualized texts. Their authority is not invoked to settle disputes over doctrine nor do people usually look to them for help in achieving performative inspiration. Because relic texts are ritualized in the iconic dimension alone, their chief function is legitimation. Owning them legitimizes individuals and communities and conveys a sense of empowerment. Losing them threatens group identity.

These effects have appeared prominently in many recent news stories about how individuals, private institutions, and government agencies have gone to great efforts to gain and to keep particular relic texts for themselves. These stories show the similar ways that owners use their relic texts to legitimize themselves, their institutions, their nations, and their religions.

Legitimizing Owners

Relic books convey the prestige of being the owner of a famous object. For individual and institutional collectors, that prestige can be valuable, as Nate Pederson observed:

A tip to any public libraries struggling with declining patronage: go digging around in your vault!  The public library in Windsor, Ontario discovered a Bible from 1585 languishing away in its vault earlier this year.  Librarians promptly put the book on display and saw a 40 percent increase in visitors last month (Fine Books and Collections, October 4, 2011).

The same motive drives many text digitization projects. Libraries and museums put high definition images online of their most iconic books in hopes of drawing more people through their doors to see the real thing. They also offer for sale physical mementos of the relic text, ranging from cheap postcards of individual pages to expensive facsimile reproductions of the entire book.

Jonathan Z. Smith noted the effects of reproduction on the status of iconic books when he distinguished “the sacred book as a sacred object, one that is always manufactured and all but infinitely reproducible, and, therefore, one to which there is almost never attached a claim of being ‘original’” from reproductions that “become themselves the subjects of narratives, as is the case, for example, of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Stonyhurst Gospel and the cult of St. Cuthbert” (Smith 1998, 298). Reproductions therefore seem to blur  the distinctiveness of relic texts, producing what Zeev Elitsur termed “pseudo-relic books” (Iconic BooksBlog, September 29, 2009). However, the tension between asserting the uniqueness of objects and producing many similar things for widespread distribution has been a characteristic feature of relic economies throughout history. In his study of the circulation of medieval bodily relics, Patrick Geary described their use to extend the influence of Popes:

The most important donor of relics was, of course, the Pope, who had at his disposal the vast treasury of the Roman catacombs, containing the remains of the early Roman martyrs. Prior to the mid-eighth century popes steadfastly refused to distribute these relics, preferring rather to distribute secondary relics or brandia, objects that had come into contact with the martyrs’ tombs …. From the mid-eighth century on, however, the Roman pontiffs began to exploit their inexhaustible supply of relics in order to build closer relationships with the increasingly powerful Frankish church to the north. (Geary 1986, 182-83)

Thus belief in the uniqueness of relics led to producing secondary relics and eventually finding ways to increase the number of apparently genuine relics available for distribution. Relic texts participate in the same kind of relic economy. It is characteristic of the use of relic texts that owners try to combine ritualized display of these unique objects with attempts to profit from sales of their reproductions. People also try to create new relic texts by making a reproduction somehow unique: hence the continual efforts to make the world’s largest Qur’an or Bible, or to cast a scripture in gold plates, and so on (see e.g. Iconic Books Blog, June 25, 2007; September 21, 2007; August 11, 2009; April 9,2012).

Private owners, by contrast, often want to hide relic texts and hoard their effects for themselves. Some people regard relic texts, like other kinds of relics, as having supernatural power. Scholars frequently ridicule such beliefs. They find the public’s veneration of a text’s iconic dimension problematic and complain that people should focus on the text’s semantic contents instead. That normative judgment stems from the scholars’ success in controlling textual authority through their own meritocratic system of semantic interpretation (see Watts 2010). But in order to gain access to relic texts owned by private persons, scholars often must seek allies in institutions and governments that want the legitimacy that comes from owning certain relic texts themselves. The different interests of individual owners, scholars and public institutions contributes to conflicts over relic texts.

For example, an international effort to preserve centuries-old Indonesian manuscripts had difficulty getting access to privately owned texts.

The surviving manuscripts were written in various languages and scripts, including Arabic, Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Sasak, Balinese and the Wolio language of Buton Island. ... “The problem is that there are many more important ancient manuscripts in private hands,” [the coordinator for digitization] said. “The owners usually refuse us access to them because they consider them sacred relics that have been handed down for generations.” (JakartaGlobe June 26, 2009)

The Indonesian scholars only want access in order to make photographs and publish them digitally. The owners, however, seem to think this would desecrate the relic texts and weaken their potency.

Such conflicts do not just occur over religious texts. The same kind of issues swirl around secular relic books. A vivid example was provided by the publication of Carl Jung’s Red Book for the first time in 2009. The famous psychoanalyst wrote and illustrated the book by hand over a sixteen-year period starting in 1914. In it, he recorded his dreams, active imaginations and self-induced hallucinations. These experiences became the basis for much of his later theorizing about myths, dreams, and the unconscious. Jung never published the book and his family refused to do so or even let very many people see it, until recently.

The Red Book’s relic status derives from its impressive physical appearance and one-of-a-kind nature. Sara Corbett described the book and its publication under the headline, “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious” for which she wrote a characteristic description of a relic book: “The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse, its writing almost to crawl” (New York Times Magazine, September 16, 2009). The reputation of the Red Book also depends on the story of its origins, what Dori Parmenter (2009, 299) calls the “legends of veracity” that surround relics and relic texts alike. Part of this story is the fact that Jung himself recognized the iconic power of textuality. One of his clients recorded his advice on how to process her inner life:

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.” (quotation in Shamdasani’s footnotes tothe Red Book)

In the Red Book, therefore, Jung intentionally created a ritualized relic text, if only for his own use. For later Jungians, its ritualization in the iconic dimension as a relic text precedes and lays the basis for its inspirational reading (performance) and semantic significance: “[Jungian analyst Stephen Martin] added ‘It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it’.”

Corbett documents how the claims of the Red Book’s private owners and public scholarship came into conflict, as they do with other relic books the world over. “To talk to Jung’s heirs is to understand that … [they are] caught between the opposing forces of his admirers and critics and between their own filial loyalties and history’s pressing tendency to judge and rejudge its own playmakers.” The tension leads to conflicting claims of ownership that run deeper than legal title or historical claim. The article quotes Martin about the quandary faced by Jung’s family and by Jung’s followers, among whom he counts himself: “They own it, but they haven’t lived it,” he said, describing Jung’s legacy. “It’s very consternating for them because we all feel like we own it.”

Other recent news about conflicts over secular relic texts include the report that a lost poem by P. B. Shelley was rediscovered in 2010, then immediately bought and sequestered by a private collector. Michael Rosen, speaking for the interests of literary scholars, argued in The Guardian (July 23, 2010) that this should not be allowed. “We can easily envisage an owner owning a manuscript while we collectively own and know the piece of literature it contains.” He was also reacting to the ongoing legal battles over Franz Kafka’s papers between the heirs of the publisher’s secretary who possess them and the state of Israel’s claims on them. An Israeli judge’s order that the papers should be publicly inventoried was hailed as “a victory for the National Library of Israel and by Kafka scholars around the world” (The Guardian, July 21,2010).

The tendency of relic texts to bring individuals, institutions and nations into conflict with each other exemplifies a typical feature of relic economies, as Geary observed:

High-prestige objects such as relics can play an important role in deeply divided communities. Disagreements and conflicts within society may be expressed and even conducted through disputes over the identity and value of such objects (Geary 1986, 188, citing Brown 1982, 222-50).

Circulating the pieces

Dealers often treat relic books like the relics of saints. Just as the bodies of dead saints were separated into small pieces to produce the maximum number of relics which were then displayed in elaborate and often framed reliquaries, so book sellers often tear apart relic books to sell individual pages to collectors, who frame them like artwork for public display.

This practice can lead to new conflicts over ownership, identity and proper display. For example, the Getty Museum is fighting a legal battle to retain ownership of eight illuminated pieces of parchment from the 13th-century Zeyt’um Gospels. The Armenian Church claims the pages were stolen during the genocide of 1916 and the Getty does not hold legal title to them. This controversy involved debates not only over the ownership of the pages but also about the ethics of separating a manuscript into multiple parts. In its defense, the Getty cited common practice:

Elizabeth Morrison, the Getty's acting senior curator of manuscripts, said that “well-regarded … collections around the world” contain individual manuscript sheets. “The Getty in no way condones the practice of taking apart manuscripts, but we continue to collect individual leaves after careful examination proves that they have not recently been removed … with motives of financial gain.” (Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2011)

Her argument, then, is that there are legitimate motives for taking books apart, but the pursuit of profit is not one of them. She did not mention another common motive. Libraries and museums have often disassembled valuable codices in order to display more than two pages at one time, because display, not reading, is the typical way in which relic texts get used. Once disassembled, though, they are more easily sold in pieces, and perhaps more valuable that way. Both for display and for profit, then, codices frequently get treated like bodily relics by secular institutions.

The Armenian Church claimed that the pages belong with the rest of the manuscript. It received scholarly support for its position from Columba Stewart, the executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. He argued that the manuscript should be reunited for reasons of art, scholarship and religious devotion. The LA Times quoted Stewart as saying

“It’s better from an artistic perspective … it can [then] be studied by scholars as a whole object.” [Museums must avoid] “contributing to an improper fragmentation of a work.” … Beyond that, Stewart said, the Getty, … should consider that these works are still venerated: “Here's a living, breathing religious community, as opposed to classical antiquities.”

This tendency to parcel out relic texts produces other conflicts between private owners and institutionalized scholars who are trying to unify the pieces. For example, an Israeli museum has been trying to collect all the fragments of the oldest complete Hebrew Bible, the Aleppo Codex. But some owners have resisted parting from their pieces. One man always carried his small fragment with him for sixty years.

He was convinced that thanks to the parchment, which he kept with him always in a transparent plastic container, he had been saved from riots in his hometown of Aleppo during Israel’s War of Independence, and he had managed to immigrate from Syria to the United States in 1968 and start a new life in Brooklyn and make a living. The charm was with him when he underwent complicated surgery. (Haaretz, November 6, 2007)

Only when he died did the fragment become available to the scholars at the Yad Ben-Zvi research institute in Jerusalem. They, however, had their own iconic interest in asking for the fragments to be turned over to Israel. The head of Yad Ben-Zvi said “This is the No. 1 asset of the Jewish people, and I believe the Jewish people would do a great deal to have it back” (Haaretz, December 3, 2007). This situation illustrates a typical conflict over relic texts that pits the interests of scholars speaking for a reified collective (in this case, “the Jewish people”) against the interests of individuals (the Jews from Aleppo). The relic text serves to legitimize the collective (“the No. 1 asset of the Jewish people”), but provides individual owners a sense of empowerment (a “good luck charm”). The Armenian Church was able, however, to mobilize at least some scholars to speak for a communal claim against that of a scholarly institution. Both cases invoke scholarship that is grounded in the authority of semantic interpretation to buttress attempts to control relic texts that legitimize institutional and communal identity.

These cases illustrate clearly the contested values that swirl around relic texts, especially those that have been partitioned and parceled out, as people are prone to do with relics. Claims of historical title mix with communal identity claims, aesthetic arguments and the interests of scholarship to contest the ownership, location, and display of relic texts.

Nationalistic relic texts

The case of the Aleppo Codex also highlights the nationalistic interests in controlling the legitimacy conveyed by relic texts. Many countries make such efforts because sales of ancient texts frequently raise nationalistic concerns. Relic books are regarded as one-of-a-kind, so they often carry significant associations with particular places or countries. In 2007, the British government imposed an export ban on the Wardington Hours, a fifteenth-century illuminated Book of Hours. It acted in order to give the British Library time to raise the money to match a German buyer’s offer (BBC June 27, 2007). Similarly, when the St Cuthbert’s Gospel was put up for sale by the Jesuits in 2012, the British Library raised £9 million to acquire what it called the world’s “oldest intact book,” since the original binding of this seventh-century manuscript of the Gospel of John has survived (see Brown 2010, 60). The British Library intends to digitize the book so that it is available to people “everywhere” online. But its campaign to raise the money emphasizes the urgency of keeping the Gospel “for the nation” because it is “a precious part of our heritage.”

The political symbolism carried by relic texts can bring governments in conflict with each other. In 2009, Jordan asked Canada to seize and hold some Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts that were being displayed in Toronto (Globe and Mail, December 31,2009). Israel took control of the scrolls after the 1967 war when it conquered east Jerusalem. Canada refused to seize the scrolls, deferring the issue until settlement of territorial conflicts in the Middle East. Very clear from all the news coverage were the identity issues at stake for the Middle Eastern governments involved (Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority). Every side tried to employ the scrolls as relic texts to legitimize their own group and contested the others’ claims to them:

On Sunday, Israeli officials released a statement saying the Jordanian claims are “completely ridiculous” and that the scrolls have little or no connection to Jordan’s history. ... Palestinians have argued the scrolls, dating as far back as 250 BC, are an integral part of their heritage also. (CBC News, January 3, 2010).

The same kinds of issues swirl around an Iraqi Jewish archive consisting of 3,000 documents and 1,700 antiquities. They were found in the flooded basement of the Iraqi intelligence building in Baghdad after the American invasion in 2003 and transferred to the United States for preservation. Iraq has now asked for them back because, according to the Iraqi ambassador, “They represent part of our history and part of our identity. There was a Jewish community in Iraq for 2,500 years” (Washington Post, April 30, 2010). But the head of an Israeli museum dedicated to Iraqi Jews argued that the materials should be sent there: “The books belong to the majority of the Iraqi Jews, and they are not in Iraq. The books should be given to us, as the representatives of the Jews of Iraq” (Associated Press, January 16, 2010). Such efforts led to headlines in the Arab press proclaiming, “Israel suspected of seeking to ‘steal’ ancient Iraqi manuscripts” (Al-Arabiya, June 4, 2012). Here an archive of historical interest became a relic when it was used to represent conflicting communal and national ownership claims.

Historic political documents can be even more central to nationalistic concerns. The legitimizing effect of ritual display plays a major role in the treatment of nationalistic relic texts, such as the manuscripts of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Since 1952, they have been enshrined in the Rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. All copies of the Constitution and Declaration are iconic in American political culture, but the manuscripts in the Rotunda are relics: they are not displayed so that visitors can analyze their meaning in depth or read them aloud in their entirety (the Declaration, at least, is much too faded to do either very well) but for their material, visual effect alone. Asked “Why is it important for people to come here to see the declaration firsthand?”, Archives senior curator Stacey Bredhoff described the effect of viewing the Declaration of Independence this way:

I think there is some kind of magic in standing in front of the original document. You’re standing in front of the original Declaration of Independence, faded as it is, but still you can make out some of the signatures and you think, “Whoa, these people were real. This really happened.” (Gannett News Service, July 17, 2007).

Walt Disney Studios capitalized on this mystique by making the Declaration of Independence the key to finding another treasure in its 2004 film, “National Treasure,” that grossed $347.5 million worldwide.

The mystique of relic texts moves historians too. The Philadelphia Inquirer (February 2, 2010) reported the re-discovery of a draft of the U.S. Constitution in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The researcher, Lorianne Updike Toler, reports the thrill of discovery in vivid language: “This was national scripture, a piece of our Constitution's history,” she said of her find in November. “It was difficult to keep my hands from trembling.” As other researchers “realized what was happening, there was a sort of hushed awe that settled over the reading room,” Toler said. “One of them said the hair on her arms stood on end.”

When texts become so iconic, the degree of authenticity required for relic status can be negotiable. The original Declaration of Independence was printed overnight after its adoption and distributed by the hundreds in Philadelphia and throughout the colonies. Only then was the well-known manuscript now displayed in the Rotunda written and signed by the delegates when they reassembled two months later (NARA). Elitsur would therefore call the displayed document of the Declaration of Independence a “pseudo-relic”.

Nevertheless, relic texts linked to national history or ideals prompt political and financial efforts to preserve national ownership even if they cannot plausibly claim to be “the original.” The winning bidder for the 1297 Magna Carta auctioned by Sotheby's in 2007 was motivated by the desire to keep it in the USA.

David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group private equity firm, paid $21.3m (£10.6m) for the document ... [He said] “I was concerned that the only copy that was in America would escape. I was convinced that it needed to stay here. This document stands the test of time. There is nothing more important than what it represents. … This is a gift to the American people. It is important to me that it stays in the United States.” (The Guardian, December 19, 2007)

However, lest the former colonies congratulate themselves too much, Oxford’s Bodleian library then indulged in what the Guardian characterizes as “scholarly one-upmanship” by displaying all four of its copies of the Magna Carta. Three date from 1217 and one from 1225, all older than the copy auctioned in New York. (The first charter was forced on King John in 1215. It is the 1297 version, however, that remains legally influential in England.) Attempts to keep a thirteenth-century copy of the Magna Carta in the United States date back to at least the 1930s, when the outbreak of World War II stranded Lincoln Cathedral’s copy across the Atlantic. Rubenstein returned his copy to the National Archives in Washington, DC, which displays it near the U.S. founding documents in the Rotunda.

Efforts to control the Aleppo Codex, the Wardington Hours, and St. Cuthbert’s Gospel show that governments do not limit their interest in relic texts to legal documents. Nations ritually index their identity and obligations through various kinds of relic texts just like individuals do.

Authenticity, Identity and Scholarship

As the above examples show, relic texts legitimize the person, institution or nation that owns and claims them, rather than providing the textualized authority and performative inspiration that humanistic scholarship usually addresses. They can also, however, be used to legitimize the textual tradition itself. Their antiquity and/or rarity can confirm the legitimacy of mass-produced copies of the same texts. Therefore relic texts can serve both scholarly and community or institutional stakes in particular textual traditions. Scholars consult relic books to authenticate details of the text, while public viewings of them serve to legitimate the prestige that the reproducible iconic text enjoys.

Owners involve scholars in ritualizing iconic texts and in disputes over ownership because the legitimizing effect of relic texts depends on belief in their authenticity. They must be as old and important as people say they are. The problem with relics has always been verifying their authenticity. Geary (1986, 186) described this process for any relic: “The account of the relics’ translation had to itself become part of the myth of production - the story of how they had come to their new community was itself part of the explanation of who they were and what their power was.” This is no less true of relic texts, which “become themselves the subject of narratives” as J. Z. Smith noted (see also Dorina Miller Parmenter 2009). For example, the New York Times (April 13, 2010) reported that when questions were raised about the whether a particular Torah scroll survived the Holocaust or not, the donor provided another scroll with a better attested Holocaust lineage. In this case, his goal was performative as well as iconic ritualization. The donor explained that he had donated the Torah to the synagogue “so its congregants could have the sacred experience of reading Scripture from a scroll that had survived the Holocaust. … As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”

The Dead Sea Scrolls illustrate the distinctive scholarly treatment accorded relic books. These manuscripts dating from the third to the first centuries B.C.E. were discovered in the mid-twentieth century C.E. One quarter of them contain texts of the Hebrew Bible, the earliest biblical texts now in existence. They have been the object of intense scholarly comparison with younger biblical manuscripts in order to legitimize and correct the biblical text. The other three-quarters of the scrolls contain non-biblical and previously unknown compositions. They also have received intense scrutiny as important sources for the history and religion of Judaism in the last centuries B.C.E.

Thus interest has focused on interpretation of the semantic dimension of the non-biblical scrolls, while the biblical scrolls are ritualized more in the iconic dimension as relic books to legitimize the biblical text. Modern culture treats some of these ancient texts as relics (iconic dimension) while using others primarily for interpretive purposes (semantic dimension). The distinction is confirmed by the display of the scrolls in the aptly named “Shrine of the Book” at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem: a biblical scroll (Isaiah) receives pride of place in the central display. The dominance of its iconic dimension for both scholars and the public confirms its status as a relic text.

The scriptures of most religious traditions presuppose an original relic text that persists only in its iconic copies. The original has long sense disappeared and in most cases never existed at all, at least in a textual form resembling its current manifestations (see for example on the Bible, Beal 2011). The desire to nevertheless legitimize the tradition by means of a relic original generates beliefs in its existence in heaven (Parmenter 2009). Thus the Torah written by God before the creation of the world, or the Qur’an that stays with Allah, or the Golden Tablets of Mormon reclaimed by angels ground religious traditions in heavenly relic texts that legitimize all their earthly copies. These relic texts cannot be viewed in a museum or place of worship, but belief in their existence can still serve to legitimize these scriptural traditions.

Relic texts legitimize a story about a community. People use them to identify with and place themselves in that story. This is one of the most important social functions of ritual: to demonstrate publicly one’s acceptance of a tradition and one’s place in a community (Rappaport 1999, 118-124). Relic texts frequently serve as important components of such rituals.

Relic texts are therefore an exception that proves the rule about ritualizing texts in three dimensions (Watts 2006). Though they are themselves not usually subject to semantic and performative ritualization, they owe their exceptional iconicity to the fact that other, non-relic, reproductions of the same text are ritualized in all three dimensions. When particular books are readily available for semantic, performative, and iconic ritualization, a few special exemplars can be set aside to serve purely iconic purposes as relic texts. The different effects of ritualizing books in each of the dimensions helps explain the popular appeal and social function of relic texts. Since ritualizing a text’s iconic dimension bestows legitimacy, people will go to great lengths and spend large sums of money to own and display a relic text. They do so in hopes of legitimizing a nation, a religion, a public institution like a museum, library or university, or just themselves.

References from books and journal articles:

Beal, Timothy. 2011. The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Brown, Michelle P. 2010. “Images to be Read and Words to be Seen: The Iconic Role of the Early Medieval Book.” Postscripts 6: 43-66.

Brown, Peter. 1982. “Relics and Social Status in the Age of Gregory of Tours.” In Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, 222-50. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geary, Patrick. 1986. “Sacred commodities: the circulation of medieval relics.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. A. Appadurai, 169-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jung, Carl. 2009. The Red Book: Liber Novus. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton.

Parmenter, Dorina Miller. 2006. “The Iconic Book: The Image of the Bible in Early Christian Rituals.” Postscripts 2: 160-89.

Parmenter, Dorina Miller. 2009. “The Bible as Icon: Myths of the Divine Origins of Scripture,” In Jewish and Christian Scripture as Artifact and Canon, ed. Craig A. Evans and H. Daniel Zacharias, 298-310. London: T. & T. Clark.

Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Jonathan Z. 1998. “Canons, Catalogues and Classics.” In Canonization and Decanonization, ed. A. van der Kooij and K. van der Toorn, 295-311. Leiden: Brill.

Watts, James W. 2006. “The Three Dimensions of Scriptures.” Postscripts 2: 135-59.

Watts, James W. 2010. “Ancient Iconic Texts and Scholarly Expertise.” Postscripts 6: 329-38.

References from news media:

Al-Arabiya, June 4, 2012: Israel suspected of seeking to ‘steal’ ancient Iraqi manuscripts transferred to U.S.

Associated Press, January 16, 2010: Iraq urges U.S. to give back Iraqi Jewish Archive.

BBC, June 27, 2007. British Library saves manuscript.

CBC News, January 3, 2010. Canada refuses to seize Dead Sea scrolls.

Gannett News Service, July 17, 2007. Viewing Declaration of Independence can be almost magical, by William Risser.

Globe and Mail, December 31, 2009. Jordanasks Canada to seize Dead Sea scrolls.

Guardian, December 19, 2007. Magna Carta fetches £10m in New York auction.

Guardian, July 21, 2010. Franz Kafka papers should be made public, Israeli judge rules, by Kate Connolly.

Guardian, July 23, 2010. Owning manuscripts is one thing: owning the contents is quite another, by Michael Rosen.

Haaretz, November 6, 2007. Fragment of ancient parchment from Bible given to Jerusalemscholars.

Haaretz, December 3, 2007. Ben-Zvi institute calls for return of centuries-old AleppoCodex fragments.

Jakarta Globe, June 26, 2009. Digital Age Provides Hope For Ancient Manuscripts.

Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2011. The Getty Museum is in a legal fight over ArmenianBible pages, by Mike Boehm.

New York Times, April 13, 2010. Two Torahs, Two Holocaust Stories and One Big Question, by James Barron.

New York Times Magazine, September 16, 2009. The Holy Grail of the Unconscious, by Sara Corbett.

Philadelphia Inquirer, February 2, 2010. Early draft of the Constitution found in Phila., by Edward Colimore.

 Washington Post, April 30, 2010. Iraq demands return of its Jewish archive, by Glenn Kessler.

References from other online resources:

British Library, April 16, 2012. British Library acquires the St Cuthbert Gospel – the earliest intact European book.  

Fine Books and Collections, October 4, 2011. Bishop's Bible Brings in the Visitors, by Nate Pederson.

Iconic Books Blog, June 25, 2007: Golden Qur’an at Pushkin Museum

Iconic Books Blog, September 21, 2007: Devil’s BibleExhibited in Prague

Iconic Books Blog, August 11, 2009: Giant WoodenQur’an

Iconic Books Blog. September 29, 2009. Scholem’s Mechanically Reproduced Relic Zohar, by Zeev Elitsur.

Iconic Books Blog, April 9, 2012: Giant Afghan Qur’an

NARA. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The Declaration of Independence:A History.

© James W. Watts 2012.