Introduction

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521810173.002

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2010

Michael Suarez S. J.

Edited by

Michael F. Suarez, SJ and

Michael L. Turner

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Michael F. Suarez, SJ: Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Michael L. Turner: Affiliation:
Bodleian Library, Oxford

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Summary

The worldliness of print

This is a book about the worldliness of print in Britain from the final lapse of the Printing Act in 1695 to the thoroughgoing development of publishing as a specialist commercial undertaking and the industrialization of the book in 1830. The collective aim of the forty-nine contributors to this volume is ‘the intrusion of more history’ into the study of books and readers, copyrights and profits, censorship and advertising, technologies and trades – the manifold particulars that condition the pluriform ways in which meanings are made.

This is a book about the history of ‘the book’, a shorthand for any recorded text: catechisms and commodity price currents, encyclopaedias and children’s ABCs, manuscripts and mezzotints, serials and playbills. Just as ‘there cannot be a history of ideas without a history of objects’, so too is there no authentic history of objects without a dedicated effort to recover their makers. And if such a history does not attend to the ever-developing circumstances of production and distribution, to the fugitive testimonies of consumption, then how may it claim a degree of historical legitimacy? Produced and distributed by networks of workers from authors to hawkers, ‘the book’ – and the concomitant cultures forged by its consumers — proved a powerful agent for the construction of communities and corporate identities. Nor was this constitutive power of print limited to the literate: many unlettered persons could listen to a single reader.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain , pp. 1 - 36

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521810173.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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