So, I'm beginning to think about teaching my modern political thought course in the fall, and about ways--O idealistic me--to persuade students to take the material seriously and spend some time struggling with it, instead of dipping into and out of it after their whim or curiosity or emotional reaction, as if it were so many piles of blog commentary.

I hit upon the idea of spending some time discussing with students what the very act of writing, then publishing, material in the past was like. Most everyone today composes on the computer, in air-conditioned rooms, on more or less comfortable chairs, with plenty of artificial light. Typesetting and printing, for those manuscripts that find their way into print, is done by people working in similar circumstances, most often without the need--unless the method is deliberately chosen--for physical typesetting and the pressing of letters into paper.

But--to pick the example of the first author the students will be reading next term--Thomas Hobbes would have had to write his manuscript out by hand, with pens that had to be dipped, on expensive paper, in rooms without the benefit of temperature controls, on wooden furniture, under bad light . . . you get the idea. Things obviously would be even more unlike today's writers' lairs the farther back in history you go.

Under those circumstances, it seems like you would take writing--and books and printing--very seriously, because you invest so much in the act, certainly more than the Ann Coulters and Michael Moores of today do in what appears in print under their names.

So, the combination of something really important to say and conditions that require a lot of investment in saying it would mean we could assume that even in very long manuscripts everything on paper is there for a reason. Authors would spend a long time thinking and talking about what they had to say in advance, they would gather their evidence and craft their arguments carefully, and they would make every word tell. Printers, for their part, would not take on jobs lightly.

This in turn demands (the punchline would go) that we read what they wrote differently than we would read the Coulters and Moores of today. Differently, even, than we might read the Strausses, the Arendts, the Rawlses, the Nozicks, the Blooms, and the Habermases of today. Not because the older authors are "better" or "got it right," and not because many later authors are not also worth struggling with, but because the acts and circumstances of writing and publishing in the past produced prose meant to be read in different ways.

Setting my windmills and tilting aside, of course I have only my general sense of social and technological history upon which to draw to make this case. The above may be no better than a caricature of how things really were, and I don't want to do my students the disservice of blustering through some harebrained tale that reads like the five feet of snow our grandparents walked through every day to get to school (even in summer, and uphill both ways!).

Here's where I hoped Typophiliacs might help me out. Are there good books on the history of the physical act and circumstances of writing and publishing relevant to the story I want to tell that I could consult to extend and/or correct it? Anything to suggest I'm on the right track or completely full of it? Thanks for whatever you can recommend.