4 - Diffusion Channels

Summary

In the previous two chapters, I examined Arab printers and publishers and their products. Later chapters will look into the consuming public of these works, the readership, which likewise grew dramatically within the same historic period. The proliferation of written works and the growth of their consumer market were two sides of a coin, that of enhanced Arab literary activity during the final Ottoman half-century. As with all coins, in between the two visible sides laid an interlocking layer that joined them together – a vital layer that permitted the flow of products from printers to readers. Its constituents were many: middlemen of all stripes, technological mechanisms, working procedures, and several functional institutions. This intermediary tier has been the focus of inquiry by students of book history in Europe and the West in recent years. But it has been largely overlooked in the Middle East, where it has received still less attention than either the publishers or the readers. An indispensable link with a significant imprint on the quality and rhythm of change, it warrants a closer consideration. In the present chapter and in the next, I will look at some of its main constituents.

A mediating layer of this kind has been part of every system in which written texts were meant to reach an audience. It had existed, on a small scale, during the manuscript era as well, comprising a range of book traders and sellers. But printing, with its massive scope and hurried tempo, vastly increased the need for it as well as its complexity. As Robert Darnton has shown in one of his most quoted studies in book-history, the route from the author's desk to his readers was long and lined up with many stations. Darnton's famous “communication circuit,” largely based on his research of eighteenth-century France, has proven most valuable as an organizing model for the study of diffusion in other times and places. Beyond the writer's door, Darnton has reminded us, were printers, proofreaders, binders, shippers, warehouse keepers, wholesale book dealers and small bookshop owners, distribution agents, post-office personnel, mailmen and local deliverymen, street newspaper vendors, and more.