The Sony Lib­rie, the first e‑reader to use a mod­ern elec­tron­ic-paper screen, came out in 2004. Old as that is in tech years, the basic idea of a hand­held device that can store large amounts of text stretch­es at least eight decades far­ther back in his­to­ry. Wit­ness the Fiske Read­ing Machine, an inven­tion first pro­filed in a 1922 issue of Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can. “The instru­ment, con­sist­ing of a tiny lens and a small roller for oper­at­ing this eye­piece up and down a ver­ti­cal col­umn of read­ing-mat­ter, is a means by which ordi­nary type­writ­ten copy, when pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly reduced to one-hun­dredth of the space orig­i­nal­ly occu­pied, can be read with quite the facil­i­ty that the impres­sion of con­ven­tion­al print­ing type is now revealed to the unaid­ed eye,” writes author S. R. Win­ters.

Mak­ing books com­pat­i­ble with the Fiske Read­ing Machine involved not dig­i­ti­za­tion, of course, but minia­tur­iza­tion. Accord­ing to the patents filed by inven­tor Bradley Allen Fiske (eleven in all, between 1920 and 1935), the text of any book could be pho­to-engraved onto a cop­per block, reduced ten times in the process, and then print­ed onto strips of paper for use in the machine, which would make them read­able again through a mag­ni­fy­ing lens. A sin­gle mag­ni­fy­ing lens, that is: “A blind­er, attached to the machine, can be oper­at­ed in obstruct­ing the view of the unused eye.” (Win­ters adds that “the use of both eyes will doubt­less involve the con­struc­tion of a unit of the read­ing machine more elab­o­rate than the present design.”)

“Fiske believed he had sin­gle-hand­ed­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ized the pub­lish­ing indus­try,” writes Engad­get’s J. Rigg. “Thanks to his inge­nu­ity, books and mag­a­zines could be pro­duced for a frac­tion of their cur­rent price. The cost of mate­ri­als, press­es, ship­ping and the bur­den of stor­age could also be slashed. He imag­ined mag­a­zines could be dis­trib­uted by post for next to noth­ing, and most pow­er­ful­ly, that pub­lish­ing in his for­mat would allow every­one access to edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al and enter­tain­ment no mat­ter their lev­el of income.” Con­sid­er­ing how the rela­tion­ship between read­ers and read­ing mate­r­i­al ulti­mate­ly evolved, thanks not to cop­per blocks and mag­ni­fiers and tiny strips of paper but to com­put­ers and the inter­net, it seems that Fiske was a man ahead of his time.

Alas, the Fiske Read­ing Machine itself was just on the wrong side of tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry. Even as Fiske was refin­ing its design, “micro­film was begin­ning to catch on,” and “while it ini­tial­ly found its feet in the busi­ness world — for keep­ing record of can­celled checks, for exam­ple — by 1935 Kodak had begun pub­lish­ing The New York Times on 35mm micro­film.” Despite the absolute preva­lence that for­mat soon attained in the world of archiv­ing, “the appetite for minia­tur­ized nov­els and hand­held read­ers nev­er mate­ri­al­ized in the way Fiske had imag­ined.” Nor, sure­ly, could he have imag­ined the form the dig­i­tal, elec­tron­ic-paper-screened, and slim yet huge­ly capa­cious form that the e‑reader would have to take before find­ing suc­cess in the mar­ket­place — yet some­how with­out quite dis­plac­ing the paper book as even he knew it.

via Engad­get

Relat­ed con­tent:

The e‑Book Imag­ined in 1935

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study Sev­er­al Books at Once (1588)

The Page Turn­er: A Fab­u­lous Rube Gold­berg Machine for Read­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“Old paint on a can­vas, as it ages, some­times becomes trans­par­ent,” play­wright Lil­lian Hell­man observed in Pen­ti­men­to, the sec­ond vol­ume of her mem­oirs. “When that hap­pens it is pos­si­ble, in some pic­tures, to see the orig­i­nal lines: a tree will show through a wom­an’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.”

Sev­en years ago, some­thing sim­i­lar start­ed hap­pen­ing with thou­sands of old books, dat­ing from the 15th to 19th cen­tu­ry.

Age, how­ev­er, did­n’t force these vol­umes to spill their secrets…at least not direct­ly.

That hon­or goes to macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­try (MA-XRF) and Erik Kwakkel, a book his­to­ri­an who the­o­rized that this tech­nol­o­gy might reveal medieval man­u­script frag­ments hid­den in the bind­ings of new­er texts, much as it had ear­li­er revealed hid­den lay­ers of paint on Old Mas­ter can­vas­es.

How did this strange “hid­den library” come to be?

Books were high­ly prized objects when man­u­scripts were copied by hand, but as Kwakkel notes on his medieval­books blog, “thou­sands and thou­sands of medieval man­u­scripts were torn apart, ripped to pieces, boiled, burned, and stripped for parts” upon the advent of the print­ing press.

Their pages were pressed into ser­vice as toi­let paper, bukram-like cloth­ing stiff­en­ers, book­marks, and, most tan­ta­liz­ing to a medieval book spe­cial­ist, bind­ing sup­port for print­ed books.

This prac­tice was so com­mon that the bind­ings of near­ly 150 ear­ly print­ed books in the Yale Law Library are known to con­tain pieces of medieval man­u­scripts.

These mate­ri­als may have been down­grad­ed in the lit­er­ary sense, but to Kwakkel they are “trav­el­ers in time, stow­aways in leather cas­es with great and impor­tant sto­ries to tell:”

Indeed, sto­ries that may oth­er­wise not have sur­vived, giv­en that clas­si­cal and medieval texts fre­quent­ly only come down to us in frag­men­tary form. The ear­ly his­to­ry of the Bible as a book could not be writ­ten if we were to throw out frag­ment evi­dence. More­over, while ancient and medieval texts sur­vive in many hand­some books from before the age of print, quite often the old­est wit­ness­es are frag­ments. At the very least a frag­ment tells you that a cer­tain text was avail­able at a cer­tain loca­tion at a cer­tain time. Step­ping out of their leather time cap­sules after cen­turies of dark­ness, frag­ments are “blips” on the map of Europe, express­ing “I exist­ed, I was used by a read­er in tenth-cen­tu­ry Italy!”

A few lines of a muti­lat­ed text can often be suf­fi­cient to iden­ti­fy it, as well as the loca­tion and gen­er­al tim­ing of its cre­ation:

That said, it is not easy to make sense of the remains. Binders seem to have par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed slic­ing text columns in half, as if they knew how to frus­trate future researchers best. Iden­ti­fy­ing what works these unful­fill­ing quotes come from can be a night­mare. Dat­ing and local­iz­ing the remains can cause insom­nia.

Pri­or to Kwakkel’s high tech exper­i­ments at Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty, mod­ern researchers had to con­fine them­selves to acci­dents, as when, say, an old book’s spine cracks, reveal­ing the con­tents with­in.

Macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­try turns out to be well equipped to detect the iron, cop­per and zinc of medieval inks beneath a lay­er of paper or parch­ment.

But it does so at a pace that might not knock a medieval scribe’s socks off.

Pro­duc­ing a leg­i­ble scan of what lurks beneath a sin­gle vol­ume’s spine can require as much as 24 hours, and expen­sive and time con­sum­ing propo­si­tion.

With thou­sands of these bind­ings hid­ing so close to the sur­face in col­lec­tions as mas­sive as the British Library and Oxford’s Bodleian, be pre­pared to remain on your ten­ter­hooks for the fore­see­able future.

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via Messy Nessy 

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Join her in New York City on Novem­ber 11 to cre­ate a col­lab­o­ra­tive Kurt Von­negut Cen­ten­ni­al fanzine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.