A Companion to the History of the Book E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1381

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A COMPANION TO THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK A COMPANION TO THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK Edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose "As a stimulating overview of the multidimensional present state of the field, the Companion has no peer." Choice "If you want to understand how cultures come into being, endure, and change, then you need to come to terms with the rich and often surprising history Of the book ... Eliot and Rose have done a fine job. Their volume can be heartily recommended. " Adrian Johns, Technology and Culture From the early Sumerian clay tablet through to the emergence of the electronic text, this Companion provides a continuous and coherent account of the history of the book. A team of expert contributors draws on the latest research in order to offer a cogent, transcontinental narrative. Many of them use illustrative examples and case studies of well-known texts, conveying the excitement surrounding this rapidly developing field. The Companion is organized around four distinct approaches to the history of the book. First, it introduces the variety of methods used by book historians and allied specialists, from the long-established discipline of bibliography to newer IT-based approaches. Next, it provides a broad chronological survey of the forms and content of texts. The third section situates the book in the context of text culture as a whole, while the final section addresses broader issues, such as literacy, copyright, and the future of the book. Contributors to this volume: Michael Albin, Martin Andrews, Rob Banham, Megan L Benton, Michelle P. Brown, Marie-Frangoise Cachin, Hortensia Calvo, Charles Chadwyck-Healey, M. T. Clanchy, Stephen Colclough, Patricia Crain, J. S. Edgren, Simon Eliot, John Feather, David Finkelstein, David Greetham, Robert A. Gross, Deana Heath, Lotte Hellinga, T. H. Howard-Hill, Peter Kornicki, Beth Luey, Paul Luna, Russell L. Martin Ill, Jean-Yves Mollier, Angus Phillips, Eleanor Robson, Cornelia Roemer, Jonathan Rose, Emile G. L Schrijver, David J. Shaw, Graham Shaw, Claire Squires, Rietje van Vliet, James Wald, Rowan Watson, Alexis Weedon, Adriaan van der Weel, Wayne A. Wiegand, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

References

PART I Methods and Approaches

1 Why Bibliography Matters

Enumerative Bibliography

Analytical Bibliography

Descriptive Bibliography

Textual Bibliography

Historical Bibliography

Bibliography and Modern Book History

References and Further Reading

2 What is Textual Scholarship?

References and Further Reading

3 The Uses of Quantification

Common Sources for the Quantitative Study of the Book Trade

Statistical Methods Used

Common Limitations to Quantitative Analysis

Understanding Trends with Time Series

Reading Variables

Geographical Distribution

References and Further Reading

4 Readers: Books and Biography

References and Further Reading

PART II The History of the Material Text

The World before the Codex

5 The Clay Tablet Book in Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia

Books of Clay? Cuneiform Culture

School Books in Bronze Age Sumer?

Books as Cultural Capital in Iron Age Assyria

Books and Professional Identity in Hellenistic Babylonia

Conclusions: Re-reading Tablets in the Light of Book History

References and Further Reading

6 The Papyrus Roll in Egypt, Greece, and Rome

References and Further Reading

The Book beyond the West

7 China

References and Further Reading

8 Japan, Korea, and Vietnam

Japan

Korea

Vietnam

References and Further Reading

9 South Asia

South Asia’s Manuscript Culture

The Invention of Writing

The Impact of Print

Publishing from Independence to Today

References and Further Reading

10 Latin America

References and Further Reading

11 The Hebraic Book

Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

The Decoration of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

Hebrew Scripts

The Hebrew Printed Book

Post-medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

Book Trade and Bibliophilism

Conclusion

References and Further Reading

12 The Islamic Book

References and Further Reading

The Codex in the West 400–2000

13 The Triumph of the Codex: The Manuscript Book before 1100

References and Further Reading

14 Parchment and Paper: Manuscript Culture 1100–1500

Scribes and their Status

Books in Vernacular Languages

Books of Theology and Law

Making Personal Books

Learning to Read

References and Further Reading

15 The Gutenberg Revolutions

The Technique: (1) Manufacturing Movable Type

The Printing House

The Spread of Printing after the Invention

Fifteenth-century Books

The Trade in Printed Books

References and Further Reading

16 The Book Trade Comes of Age: The Sixteenth Century

Incunables and Post-incunables: Continuity and Innovation

Scholar Printers

Religion

Regulation

Geography: The Continued Spread of Printing Centers

The Book Trades

Customers

Look to the Future

References and Further Reading

17 The British Book Market 1600–1800

The World of the Book

Authors: The Primary Producers of the Book Trade

Growing the Market

The Distribution of Books: The Circuit Completed

Buyers and Readers: The End and the Beginning

References and Further Reading

18 Print and Public in Europe 1600–1800

International Book Trade

The Expansion of the Public Sphere

The Emancipation of Writers

Constraints on Books

References and Further Reading

19 North America and Transatlantic Book Culture to 1800

References and Further Reading

20 The Industrialization of the Book 1800–1970

Papermaking

New Presses

Stereotyping and Electrotyping

Bookbinding

Hot Metal

Lithography

Color

Photography

The Mass-market Paperback

The Shape of Things to Come

References and Further Reading

21 From Few and Expensive to Many and Cheap: The British Book Market 1800–1890

The 1800s and 1890s

Communications and Literacy

Literary Property and its Consequences

Patterns of Production

Cheap Books and Part-works

Lending and Selling

Other Bestsellers

The World We Have Lost

References and Further Reading

22 A Continent of Texts: Europe 1800–1890

A Second Revolution of the Book?

Industrial Literature

Guidebooks, Practical Books, and Mass-market Dictionaries

The Internationalization of the Novel

References and Further Reading

23 Building a National Literature: The United States 1800–1890

References and Further Reading

24 The Globalization of the Book 1800–1970

Copyright and Technological Innovation

Global Book-trade Expansion

Exporting the Industrialized Book-trade Model

Literary Agents

Globalization and the Twentieth Century

References and Further Reading

25 Modernity and Print I: Britain 1890–1970

References and Further Reading

26 Modernity and Print II: Europe 1890–1970

References and Further Reading

27 Modernity and Print III: The United States 1890–1970

The Business of Publishing

The Rise of the American Author

A New Generation of Publishers

The Impact of War

The Paperback

Engulf & Devour

References and Further Reading

28 Books and Bits: Texts and Technology 1970–2000

References and Further Reading

29 The Global Market 1970–2000: Producers

Conglomeratization

Content

Convergence

Conclusion

References and Further Reading

30 The Global Market 1970–2000: Consumers

The Global Market

Globalized Content and the Consumer

Market Research

References and Further Reading

PART III Beyond the Book

31 Periodicals and Periodicity

References and Further Reading

32 The Importance of Ephemera

References and Further Reading

33 The New Textual Technologies

Notes

References and Further Reading

PART IV Issues

34 New Histories of Literacy

The Trouble with “Literacy”

A Short History of the History of Literacy

The Ethics and Politics of Literacy History

Finding Literacy in All the Wrong Places

The Poetics of Literacy

References and Further Reading

35 Some Non-textual Uses of Books

Egypt, Greece, and Rome

The Ritual Function of Christian Bibles and Service Books

Divination

Talismanic Use of Books and Texts

“Associational Copies”: The Book as Relic

Taking Oaths upon the Book

Books that Boast

Non-textual Uses of Libraries

Books and Ornament

Books as Interior Decoration

References and Further Reading

36 The Book as Art

References and Further Reading

37 Obscenity, Censorship, and Modernity

References and Further Reading

38 Copyright and the Creation of Literary Property

References and Further Reading

39 Libraries and the Invention of Information

References and Further Reading

Coda

40 Does the Book Have a Future?

The Digital Revolution

Society and Culture

Free Culture

The Book’s Digital Future

The Resilience of Print

References and Further Reading

Index

“As a stimulating overview of the multidimensional present state of the field, the Companion has no peer.”

CHOICE

“If you want to understand how cultures come into being, endure, and change, [the editors] imply, then you need to come to terms with the rich and often surprising history of the book .... Eliot and Rose have done a fine job. Their volume can be heartily recommended as the best available starting point for any historian interested in learning about this enterprise . . . the Companion does not restrict itself to chronicling the development of the book itself. It also devotes attention to regimes of regulation and jurisdiction – censorship, intellectual property, and the like – and to systems of storage and taxonomy-libraries and bibliography.” Adrian Johns, Technology and Culture

“A valuable resource. Academic libraries with any kind of interest in the history of the book or the history of publishing will want this Companion on their shelves.” Publishing Research Quarterly

“An exceptional resource for anyone working in fields such as literature, history, cultural studies or media studies – to name a few. Drawing on a large group of experts, Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose have compiled a selection of essays that guide readers through many episodes in the long history of books, both inside and outside the Western tradition ... A Companion to the History of the Book is just that – a companion ... an essential text for students and scholars from a wide variety of disciplines who are led to ask questions about the commissioning, publication, distribution and consumption of books. This book is a milestone in the history of the book for it makes the first attempt to map the field like no other book before it.” Script and Print

“This book serves as a coherent guide to the study of the history of the book. The experts bring the latest research to their work.”

Umbrella Magazine

“A Companion to the History of the Book provides a wealth of information to readers of all levels in a well laid out and written volume ... a very solid foundation to the history of the book.”

The Bonefolder

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the expe�rienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

Published

1.A Companion to RomanticismEdited by Duncan Wu2.A Companion to Victorian Literature and CultureEdited by Herbert F. Tucker3.A Companion to ShakespeareEdited by David Scott Kastan4.A Companion to the GothicEdited by David Punter5.A Feminist Companion to ShakespeareEdited by Dympna Callaghan6.A Companion to ChaucerEdited by Peter Brown7.A Companion to Literature from Milton to BlakeEdited by David Womersley8.A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and CultureEdited by Michael Hattaway9.A Companion to MiltonEdited by Thomas N. Corns10.A Companion to Twentieth-Century PoetryEdited by Neil Roberts11.A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature and CultureEdited by Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne12.A Companion to Restoration DramaEdited by Susan J. Owen13.A Companion to Early Modern Women's WritingEdited by Anita Pacheco14.A Companion to Renaissance DramaEdited by Arthur F. Kinney15.A Companion to Victorian PoetryEdited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison16.A Companion to the Victorian NovelEdited by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing17-20.A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: Volumes I–IVEdited by Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard21.A Companion to the Regional Literatures of AmericaEdited by Charles L. Crow22A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical CriticismEdited by Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted23.A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American SouthEdited by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson24.A Companion to American Fiction 1780–1865Edited by Shirley Samuels25.A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914Edited by Robert Paul Lamb and Cj. R. Ihompson26.A Companion to Digital HumanitiesEdited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth27.A Companion to RomanceEdited by Corinne Saunders28.A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000Edited by Brian W. Shaffer29.A Companion to Twentieth-Century American DramaEdited by David Krasner30.A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and CultureEdited by Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia31.A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and CultureEdited by Rory McTurk32.A Companion to TragedyEdited by Rebecca Bushnell33.A Companion to Narrative TheoryEdited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz34.A Companion to Science FictionEdited by David Seed35.A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial AmericaEdited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer36.A Companion to Shakespeare and PerformanceEdited by Barbara Hodgdon and W B. Worthen37.A Companion to Mark TwainEdited by Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd38.A Companion to European RomanticismEdited by Michael K. Ferber39.A Companion to Modernist Literature and CultureEdited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar40.A Companion to Walt WhitmanEdited by Donald D. Kummings41.A Companion to Herman MelvilleEdited by Wyn Kelley42.A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c. 1350–c. 1500Edited by Peter brown43.A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama: 1880–2005Edited by Mary Luckhurst44.A Companion to Eighteenth-Century PoetryEdited by Christine Gerrard45.A Companion to Shakespeare's SonnetsEdited by Michael Schoenfeldt46.A Companion to SatireEdited by Ruben Quintero47.A Companion to William FaulknerEdited by Richard C. Moreland48.A Companion to the History of the BookEdited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose49.A Companion to Emily DickinsonEdited by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz50.A Companion to Digital Literary StudiesEdited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman51.A Companion to Charles DickensEdited by David Paroissien52.A Companion to James JoyceEdited by Richard Brown53.A Companion to Latin American Literature and CultureEdited by Sara Castro-Klaren54.A Companion to the History of the English LanguageEdited by Haruko Momma and Michael Matto55.A Companion to Henry JamesEdited by Greg Zacharias56.A Companion to the British and Irish Short StoryEdited by Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm57.A Companion to Jane AustenEdited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite58.A Companion to the Arthurian LiteratureEdited by Helen Fulton59.A Companion to the Modern American Novel: 1900–1950Edited by John Matthews60.A Companion to the Global RenaiissanceEdited by Jyotsna G. Singh61.A Companion to Thomas HardyEdited by Keith Wilson

This paperback edition first published 2009

© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2007 by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2007)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007- Blackwell's publishing program has been merged with Wiley's global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to the history of the book / edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose,

p. cm.—(Blackwell companions to literature and culture; 48)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9278-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4051-2765-3 (hardback : alk. paper)

1. Books—History. 2. Printing—History. 3- Book industries and trade—History. I. Eliot,

Simon. II. Rose, Jonathan, 1952–

Z4.C73 2007

002.09—dc22

2006102104

Illustrations

3.1Number of titles published in nineteenth-century Britain5.1Map of ancient Iraq showing major cities5.2A Type II tablet from House F5.3Scribes using writing boards and parchment5.4A tablet from Nineveh recording the myth of the goddess Ishtar’s descent to the Underworld5.5Shamash-êtir’s intellectual network5.6A tablet from Hellenistic Uruk7.1Standard format of traditional Chinese printed books and manuscripts7.2Frontispiece woodcut and initial lines of text of the Jin’gang j’ing7.3Woodcut scene depicting the late Ming commercial publisher Yu Xiangdou8.1A page showing chrysanthemums from Genji ikebana ki (1765)8.2A page from the 1797 edition of Chunchu jwa ssi jeon8.3A woodblock-printed school textbook printed in Vietnam in the late nineteenth century17.1The circuit of the book17.2The book trade in the early seventeenth century20.1The Albion press20.2Koenig printing machine of 181120.3Hoe’s eight-cylinder printing machine20.4Hoe’s bed-and-platen book-printing machine20.5A double-letter Linotype matrix20.6A line of single-letter Linotype matrices and spacebands20.7A Monotype matrix case32.1William Caxton’s advertisement for Commemorations of S arum Use, C.147832.2Receipt from Robert Allardice, bookseller and stationer, 183132.3Bill from Joseph White, bookseller, printer, and stationer, 183032.4Trade card for W. Porter, bookseller, stationer, and binder, c.1830s32.5Trade card for Bettison, bookseller, publisher, and stationer, c.183032.6Price list for Roach’s Circulating Library, c.183032.7Notice from the Wandsworth Public Library, 188932.8Bookplate, Thomas Burch of Petersfield, early nineteenth century32.9Reward of Merit, c.l860s32.10Packaging label for reading lamp candles, c.189032.11Advertisement for the “Reading Easel,” c. 1870s36.1Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili36.2Pierre-Simon Fournier, Manuel typographique36.3Geoffrey Chaucer, Works36.4H. C. Andersen, Sneedronningen [The Ice Queen]36.5Tatana Kellner, 71125: Fifty Years of Silence

Notes on Contributors

Michael Albin was an acquisition specialist for Islamic books, most recently as Director of the Library of Congress office in Cairo, Egypt. He is now an independent scholar and teacher of Arabic.

Martin Andrews is a senior lecturer in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where he teaches the history of printing. He is Deputy Director of the Centre for Ephemera Studies at the university and curator of the department’s extensive lettering and printing collections. He is also the author of The Life and Work of Robert Gibbings (2003).

Rob Banham is a lecturer in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where he teaches the history of graphic communication and practical design. He is Chairman of the Friends of St. Bride Library, and edits and designs The Ephemerist, the journal of the Ephemera Society.

Megan L. Benton is a fellow of the Humanities Faculty at Pacific Lutheran University. She is the author of Beauty and the Book: Fine Editions and Cultural Distinction in America (2000), and co-editor of Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation (2001).

Michelle P. Brown, formerly Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, is Professor of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Studies, University of London. She is also a lay canon and member of the chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Her publications include A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 (1990), The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (2003), Painted Labyrinth: The World of the Lindisfarne Gospels (2004), and The World of the Luttrell Psalter (2006).

Marie-Françoise Cachiri is Professor Emerita of British Literature and Literary Translation at the University of Paris VII. Her current research and publications concern British publishing in the Victorian period, and she is in charge of a research group working on various aspects of book history in the English-speaking world. She has recently co-edited a special issue of the Cahiers Charles V entitled Histoire(s) de livres with a preface by Roger Chartier.

Hortensia Calvo has a PhD in Spanish from Yale University (1990) and is currently Doris Stone Director of the Latin American Library at Tulane University. She has published essays on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish-American chronicles and on the historiography of the early Spanish-American book.

Charles Chadwyck-Healey received an honors degree from Oxford University. In 1973, he founded the Chadwyck-Healey publishing group, which published reprints, microforms, CD-ROMs, and online via the Internet in the humanities and social sciences for libraries all over the world. There were Chadwyck-Healey companies in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Spain, and the company was the largest publisher of German literature in electronic form. Now retired, he is a director of openDemocracy.net, writes and takes photographs, and invests in start-up companies, mainly in IT and biotech.

M. T. Clanchy is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He is the author of From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (2nd edn., 1993) and Abelard: A Medieval Life (1997).

Stephen Colclough is a lecturer in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature at the School of English, University of Wales, Bangor. He has published widely on the history of reading and text dissemination and is currently completing a monograph entitled

Consuming Texts: Readers and Reading Communities, 1695–1870.

Patricia Crain is Associate Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000).

J. S. Edgren received his PhD in Sinology from the University of Stockholm. After employment at the Royal Library (National Library of Sweden) in Stockholm, he was active in the antiquarian book trade. Since 1991, he has served as Editorial Director of the Chinese Rare Books Project, an online international union catalogue of Chinese rare books, based at Princeton University. He is writing a book on the history of the book in China.

Simon Eliot is Professor of the History of the Book in the Institute of English Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study in the University of London, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Manuscript and Print Studies. He is General Editor of the new multivolume History of Oxford University Press and editor of the journal Publishing History. His publications include Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800–1919 (1994) and Literary Cultures and the Material Book (2007). He was president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing between 1997 and 2001.

John Feather has been Professor of Library and Information Studies at Loughborough University since 1987. He was educated at Oxford, and was the first Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge. His writings on book history include The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-century England (1985), Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (1994), and A History of British Publishing (rev. edn., 2006), as well as many articles in Publishing History and other journals.

David Finkelstein is Research Professor of Media and Print Culture at Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh. His publications include The House of Blackwood: Author–Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002), and the co-authored An Introduction to Book History (2005). He has co-edited The Nineteenth-century Media and the Construction of Identities (2000), The Book History Reader (rev. edn., 2006), and The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, 1880–2000 (2007).

David Greetham is Distinguished Professor of English, Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and Medieval Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He was founder and past president of the interdisciplinary Society for Textual Scholarship and co-editor of its journal, Text. He is the author of Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (1994), Textual Transgressions (1998), Theories of the Text (1999), and other works, and wrote the most recent essay on “Textual Scholarship” for the MLA’s Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Literatures and Languages. He is currently working on copyright theory and practice as it affects textual studies.

Robert A. Gross holds the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. A social and cultural historian focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, he is the author of Books and Libraries in Thoreau’s Concord (1988) and The Minutemen and their World (25th anniversary edn. 2001). He is a member of the general editorial board of A History of the Book in America, sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society, and co-editor with Mary Kelley of the second volume in the series, An Extensive Republic: Books, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (forthcoming).

Deana Heath is a lecturer in South Asian and World History at Trinity College Dublin. She has published a number of articles on censorship, sexuality, and governmentality in India, Australia, and Britain, and is currently working on a book on the governmentalization of the obscene in all three contexts.

Lotte Hellinga was until 1995 a deputy keeper at the British Library. Her publications include The Fifteenth-century Printing Types of the Low Countries (1966, jointly with her late husband Wytze Hellinga), Caxton in Focus (1982), and, most recently, the “England” volume of the Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century now in the British Museum (2007). She edited jointly with J. B. Trapp, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, volume 3 (1999).

T. H. Howard-Hill, who is editor of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, has published nine volumes of the Index to British Literary Bibliography (1969–99) and contributed to the forthcoming Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland. His multi-volume The British Book Trade, 1475–1890: A Bibliography is expected to be published by the British Library in 2007.

Peter Kornicki is Professor of Japanese History and Bibliography at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (1998), Catalogue of the Early Japanese Books in the Russian State Library, 2 vols. (1999, 2004), and The Iwakura Embassy, 1871–3, vol. 4 (2002). He set up and maintains the bilingual Union Catalogue of Early Japanese Books in Europe website, and is currently working on vernacularization and publishing for women in seventeenth-century Japan.

Beth Luey is Director Emerita of the Scholarly Publishing Program at Arizona State University, and an editorial consultant in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books, including Handbook for Academic Authors (4th edn., 2002) and Revising your Dissertation (2004). She has served as president of the Association for Documentary Editing and of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.

Paul Luna is Professor of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where he teaches the practice, theory, and history of the subject. His research centers on the design of complex texts such as dictionaries. While design manager for Oxford University Press, he designed the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the Revised English Bible, and many trade series. He has recently designed the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and published the first serious appraisal of the typographic design of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.

Russell L. Martin III is Director of the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University. He contributed to volume 1 of A History of the Book in America (2000) and has published other articles and reviews on bibliographical matters. He is at work on an edition of the poems of Jacob Taylor, compiler of almanacs in eighteenth-century Philadelphia.

Jean-Yves Mollier is Professor of Contemporary History and Director of the Doctoral Program in Cultures, Organizations and Laws at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, where he also helped found the Centre d’Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines, which he directed from 1998 to 2005. He specializes in nineteenth-century subjects on which he has published numerous books, including Louis Hachette (1800–1864), le fondateur d’un empire (1999) and La Lecture et ses publics à l’époque contemporaine (2002).

Angus Phillips is Director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies and Head of the Publishing Department at Oxford Brookes University. He is a member of the International Advisory Committee for the International Conference on the Book and a member of the editorial advisory board for the International Journal of the Book. He has written articles on the Internet, book covers, and the role of the publishing editor. He is the editor, with Bill Cope, of The Future of the Book in the Digital Age (2006), and the author, with Giles Clark, of Inside Book Publishing (2008).

Eleanor Robson is a university lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. A major focus of her research is the social history of literacy and numeracy in ancient Iraq and its neighbors. She is the author of Mesopotamian Mathematics, 2100–1600 BC (1999) and co-author, with Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, and Gábor Zólyomi, of The Literature of Ancient Sumer (2004).

Cornelia Roemer is Director of the Vienna Papyrus Collection and Papyrus Museum in the Austrian National Library. Before joining the team in the library, she was the curator of the Cologne Papyrus Collection and had taught for several years at University College London. Her main interests in papyrology are literary texts and the uses of writing in Greco-Roman Egypt.

Jonathan Rose is Professor of History at Drew University. He was the founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, and is co-editor of the journal Book History. His publications include British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1965 (1991), The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (2001), and The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001).

Emile G. L. Schrijver is curator of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, the Hebraica and Judaica special collection at Amsterdam University Library. He is editor-in-chief of the yearbook Studia Rosenthaliana and serves on the boards of related national and international institutions. He has published on the history of the Hebrew book in general, and on Hebrew manuscripts in particular. He has catalogued for auctioneers, book dealers, and private collectors, and has contributed to numerous international exhibitions.

David J. Shaw is Secretary of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) and previously taught French at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He is a former president of the Bibliographical Society and writes particularly on the history of the book in France in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Graham Shaw is Head of Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections at the British Library. His particular field of research is the history of printing and publishing in South Asia. Apart from many articles on the subject, he has published Printing in Calcutta to 1800 (1981) and The South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography (SABREB): Stage 1: 1556–1800 (1987), and was co-compiler of Publications Proscribed by the Government of India (1985). Most recently, he has completed a study of censorship in India and its circumvention under the British Raj from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Claire Squires is Senior Lecturer in Publishing in the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University, and Programme Leader for the MA in Publishing. Her publications include Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials (2006) and Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (2007).

Rietje van Vliet writes as a freelance research journalist for various media about higher education in the Netherlands. In 2005, she took her PhD at the University of Leiden for her dissertation “Elie Luzac (1721–1796): Boekverkoper van de Verlichting.” She has, among other subjects, published about Dutch hacks, propaganda in the Dutch revolution of 1783–99, and Dutch–German book-trade relations. She is currently working on a research project about the eighteenth-century Amsterdam bookseller Marc-Michel Rey

James Wald is Associate Professor of History at Hampshire College, where he directs the Center for the Book. He is also a member of the board of the Massachusetts Center for the Book and treasurer of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.

Rowan Watson is a curator in the National Art Library, part of the Word and Image Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has published works on illuminated manuscripts, and on illustrated and artists’ books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He teaches in the History of the Book program at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Alexis Weedon is the author of Victorian Publishing: Book Publishing for the Mass Market 1836–1916 (2003) and co-editor of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. She is Professor of Publishing Studies and Director of the Research Institute for Media Art and Design at the University of Bedfordshire. Her research interests include the economics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing, the publishing industry and cross-media integration, and online bookselling.

Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Professor of Recent Dutch Book History at the University of Leiden. His research interests include Anglo-Dutch relations in the field of the book; the production, distribution, and consumption of popular and trivial literature; and digital textual transmission. He edits the yearbook of the Dutch Book Historical Society.

Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies and Professor of American Studies at Florida State University. He is the author of ‘An Active Instrument for Propaganda”: American Public Libraries during World War I (1988) and Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (1996). He is co-editor with James P. Danky of Print Culture in a Diverse America (1998), with Thomas Augst of Libraries as Agencies of Culture (2001), and with Anne Lundin of Defining Print Culture for Youth: The Cultural Work of Children’s Literature (2003).

Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she held a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship between 2002 and 2006. Her most recent book is No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (2004).

Introduction

Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose

The history of the book is a new scholarly adventure, still in its pioneering phase, which offers an innovative approach to studying both history and literature. It is based on two apparently simple premises, which have inspired some strikingly original work in the humanities. The first is that books make history. In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), Elizabeth Eisenstein argued that the invention of print technology made possible the scientific revolution, mobilized the Protestant Reformation, and broadcast the achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Meanwhile, Robert Darnton was making the case that scurrilous underground literature undermined France’s ancien régime to the point where it collapsed in 1789. They inspired other scholars to pose similar questions about books and historical causation. Did escalating press rhetoric precipitate the French Reign of Terror and the American Civil War? Did samizdat literature contribute to the implosion of Soviet communism? Can the arrested development of Middle Eastern print culture, hemmed in by censorship, help to explain problems of modernization in that part of the world? Book historians do not claim that books explain everything, but they do recognize that books are the primary tools that people use to transmit ideas, record memories, create narratives, exercise power, and distribute wealth. (That remained true even in the twentieth century, when cinematic, broadcast, sound recording, and digital media became increasingly pervasive.) Therefore, when we study any literate human society, we must ask what books it produced, where they were distributed, which libraries held them, how they were censored (or smuggled past the censors), where and how they were translated, and who was reading them. We should also be aware that readers can read the same book in a variety of ways, with important consequences: after all, wars have been fought over differing interpretations of scriptures and treaties.