Chapter 10 - What We Talk about When We Talk about Talking Books

Summary

In seeking to frame reading as a multimedia event, this chapter looks back to a period in the late nineteenth century when book-makers sought in various ways to refashion their products as audiobooks, and so to undo some of the principles that characterise silent reading. In this way, the chapter elaborates on the familiar history of gramophonic storage media by uncovering a pre-history that stretches right back to the technology of Thomas Edison in the 1870s. This, then, is an experiment in media archaeology, which is alive both to forgotten and aborted attempts to make books talk, and to books that like to imagine in more vicarious ways a reading culture unencumbered by the false principles of an ‘audiovisual litany’, as Jonathan Sterne once put it. The chapter touches on a variety of material – by Edward Bellamy and Bram Stoker, and by the French science fiction writers Albert Robida and Jules Verne – and it does so with a view to showing how imaginative writers anticipated the future of sound media.