Abstract
Never less than intriguing, a new book by Lisa Gitelman is a prospect to savour. Paper Knowledge lives up to this expectation. It explores the various media that documents have inhabited over the last 150 years. Documentation is an expansive, rag-bag genre, and right at the start, Gitelman helpfully deals with this by characterizing it as ‘the kind of knowing that is all wrapped up with showing, and showing wrapped up with knowing’ (p. 1). She goes on to examine documentary manifestation in four episodes of media history, using these to demonstrate the rapid and radical diversification of writing and what counted as writing from the late 19th century onward. She begins with commercial or ‘job’ printing, a neglected area but one that covers a huge diversity of material, from restaurant menus to stock certificates and official letterhead stationery; the jobbing press was central to the ascendancy of documentation. The second episode is the 1930s, when new media such as the photo-offset and microfilm arose for the reproduction of documents. Here, Gitelman explores the lowly typescript document which, along with prolific secretarial work, eroded the monopoly which printers had enjoyed for four centuries or so, as for instance in its reproduction and distribution of scholarly work alongside typecasting production. A later episode takes us to the photocopy and a chapter where Gitelman looks at such figures as Daniel Ellsberg, who Xeroxed and leaked the Pentagon Papers – a wonderful act of airing dirty laundry. The final episode, not unexpectedly, brings us onto digital documents, with Gitelman focusing on the pdf file (portable document format). Over the course of the book, she shows how the newness of new media is only ever relative, only ever partially new. She shines a light on areas of neglect and omission in media studies and remains alert throughout to vernacular uses of media. The book is, in its own right, a delightful analytical document.