The Myth of the Unmediated Glance: A Defense of the Intermediary Folio

There is a persistent and, I would argue, misguided romance surrounding the act of reading old books. It is the allure of the unmediated glance: the idea that by holding a first edition of, say, Walton’s The Compleat Angler, we can somehow bypass the centuries and commune directly with the author’s intent. We imagine the ink as freshly poured, the thoughts as newly minted. This belief seduces us with the promise of purity, of a direct line to genius or craft. But in this veneration of the immediate, we have unjustly maligned the very thing that often makes such communion possible, and richly layered: the intermediary folio.

I speak of those in-between copies, the secondary texts that served not the author, but the reader and the community of readers that followed. The heavily annotated schoolmaster’s edition of Virgil, its margins a palimpsest of pedagogical notes from three generations of instructors. The family bible, its flyleaves filled with the shaky script of births, marriages, and deaths, creating a parallel text of lineage. These are not the pristine originals we showcase in glass cases; they are the working copies, the vehicles of transmission. The modern prejudice is to see them as defaced, their value diminished by the ‘clutter’ of human use. We want the blank margin, the sacred silence on the page, as if a book’s highest purpose is to be a museum piece.

This is a profound error. The intermediary folio does not obstruct our view of the past; it clarifies and deepens it. It adds a vital dimension of time. When I trace the notes in that Virgil, I am not just reading about Aeneas’s journey. I am witnessing the journey of the text itself—how a particular phrase confounded students in 1820, how a different translation was preferred by 1850, how a witty teacher in 1892 drew a comparison to a contemporary political event. The primary text is the score, but the marginalia is the performance history, a record of how the music was played and heard across the years.

The cult of the unmediated glance is, in essence, a form of historical narcissism. It pretends we can experience the past on our own terms, without the interference of other interpreters. But we are always interpreters. The intermediary folio is a humbling and generous artifact. It forces us to acknowledge that we are not the first to puzzle over a difficult stanza or find solace in a quiet passage. We are participants in a long, slow conversation.

To prefer the sterile originality of an untouched page over the lived-in, annotated life of a working copy is to misunderstand the nature of books as social objects. They are not monoliths delivered from on high; they are tools, companions, and heirlooms. Their value accrues not in isolation, but through use. The true ‘mediation’ is not the penciled note in the margin; it is the unavoidable filter of our own modern perspective. The intermediary folio, with its chorus of previous readers, offers us a corrective. It shows us that reading is never a solitary glance, but a shared gaze across time, and that the most interesting texts are those that have been truly lived with.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: