The Gutenberg Revolution, by John Man <br></br>Radiant Textuality, by Jerome McGann

After half a millennium, books are far from dead. Brian Dillon praises new ways of discovering old texts

In the white night of technological innovation, every epoch dreams its future in the colours of the past. In their different ways (one ploddingly populist, one entertainingly academic) these two books explore the history of our efforts to imagine the future of the book.

John Man's The Gutenberg Revolution inhabits the familiar post-Longitude genre of the technological adventure story: a slim but epic tale of intrigue and invention. The conventions are tiresomely recognisable. Vaguely defined historical conditions creak into place: "It was an invention waiting to happen." Our hero marshals resources both modest (financial) and lavish (intellectual, moral). He is beset by malign forces: church, state, corrupt competitors. The inventor dies in obscurity; his invention "lives on". Along the way: obligatory reference to Leonardo's helicopter; deployment of the dreaded "internet start-up" analogy; history reduced to entrepreneurial kitsch. Man offers all of this and, fortunately, a little more.

For a book about a technology dedicated to replicating significant detail, The Gutenberg Revolution squeezes too much material through the clunky mechanisms of cliché and overstatement. The whole genre depends on a certain pop-eyed attitude to history. Historical coincidences are invariably "astonishing". Gutenberg's foray into the Christian-relic industry leaves him stranded on "the wilder shores of religious eccentricity" (not merely part of the texture of pre-Reformation worship).

Oddest of all, Man skirts the technology itself: a mould for making lead type is apparently impossible to describe. The real drama unfolding here is the struggle of historical knowledge and imagination to keep up with the author's freewheeling narrative velocity.

It is perhaps unfair to chide a work of popular history for its storytelling drive, and the book is most fascinating when attending to specific products of Gutenberg's invention. Man's description of the ravishing first edition of a late-15th-century Italian dream narrative, Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, is exemplary. Such is the sublime oddity of this text (an erotic tale of nymphs and classical architecture, rendered in a linguistic mélange to rival Finnegans Wake) that it raises Man's writing into another realm: that of the complex fascinations of the book as both medium and message. It is a line of investigation by which he is clearly intrigued, having had his book set in the same gorgeous typeface as Colonna's.

Reactions to the latest evolution of Gutenberg's technology have tended toward hyperbole. The internet, Man claims, "seems to be turning us into cells in a planet-sized brain." Yet literary scholars baulk at talk of "the end of the book". As Jerome McGann's lively, intriguing book points out, this argument works only if you start with a paltry notion of the book in the first place.

Conservatives and radicals alike can't see past a restricted idea of the book as mere container of information. McGann explores the ways in which information technology (too puny a phrase to capture the possibilities he has in mind) can preserve and extend the inheritance of the printed word.

Taking inspiration from the visionary texts of Blake and Rossetti, he goes gleefully to work on the most apparently traditional of scholarly resources: the critical edition. A critical cliché has it that a scholarly edition stands in relation to the original as a death mask to a corpse. The edition, swathed in introduction, footnotes and variants, is a kind of scholarly mummy: the deceased work eviscerated and encased in the sarcophagus of commentary. As Wordsworth put it, "we murder to dissect".

But, McGann reminds us, a book is not a tomb. If scholars build ruins, it is because the book has no architectural boundaries. It is instead an archipelago of fragments dispersed across space and time. New technologies allow us to see the wonder of the book as if for the first time: drifting nebulae of meaning; eerie constellations of significance.

McGann knows that this insight is nothing new. It is the guiding principle, for such writers as Mallarmé, Calvino and Perec, of modern literature's rediscovery of rhetorical and graphic trickery as integral to the book, not decorative frippery. But it alters McGann's approach to criticism in astonishing ways. He imagines the job of the critic as the systematic deformation of the work. He chops books into fragments, reads Wallace Stevens backward, removes all the verbs from poems, stages his scholarly dilemmas as Brechtian dramas, and plays elaborate online interpretative games with his colleagues. (Yes, he gets funding for this.)

The closest analogies for this marvellous book are not literary but musical: Brian Eno's playful subversion of the recording process, or a reggae producer's explosion of musical fragments – Gutenberg's "bookspace" remade as 21st-century dubspace. With a technician as smart as McGann at the controls, scholars and readers can be assured that, once again, all sorts of inventions are waiting to happen.

Brian Dillon teaches English at the University of Kent