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Whereas book history focuses on original sources, book historiography zooms out to bring book histories themselves into view. Like other forms of historiography, it analyzes the writing of history and therefore the labor of historians—in this case, the work of the literary and book historians who have written of the poetry miscellanies of fourteenth-to seventeenth-century England. The article traces scholars' retrospective application of the word "miscellany" to these books of poems. It surveys them in the order in which historians have called them miscellanies. This order might seem backward, because scholars generally imposed the word on printed books before manuscripts, and on early modern manuscripts before medieval manuscripts. At the beginning and the center of this renaming process was Tottel's so-called miscellany, Songes and Sonettes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1586 to 1587 the English merchant John Sarracoll wrote an account of the first privateering voyage sponsored by George Clifford, the third Earl of Cumberland (1558-1605). Sarracoll's journal is best known as part of Richard Hakluyt's anthology of English voyage narratives, The Principall Navigations of the English Nation (first published 1589), and would later supply the micro-historical "anecdote" in a famous essay by Stephen Greenblatt. Philip S. Palmer investigates the multiple surviving versions of the journal to uncover an extensive process of textual refashioning, wherein the narrative, especially its description of a town burned in Sierra Leone, was reshaped for various readerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the printing and book design of the book "Leaves of Grass," by U.S. poet Walt Whitman. Emphasis is given to Whitman's role in creating a typography for the titling and numbering of poems that was reflective of his identification with the working man and his interest in the physical structure of the book. Whitman's designs are considered within the context of nineteenth-century printing technology and conventional forms of commercial typography. Other topics include typefounding using hand moulds, the employment of a wood engraver for illustrations, and working with the publisher Thayer and Eldridge.

A growing body of empirical bibliography and critical making aims at re-creating historical practice and interrogating book history through firsthand material means. None of this work has questioned the role or place of gender in the book trades by investigating either how women labored physically or how they were treated in a male-dominated workplace. How does the immediate physical experience of the embodiment of art shift when the person working the press, casting the type, or binding the books is female? This essay draws on experiences in re-creating historical practices to reflect on how gendered work intersects with gendered book history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers Charlotte Brooke in Ireland, Anne Grant in Scotland, and Felicia Hemans in Wales, analyzing the various ways in which they promoted their nations' oral culture during what is now called the Romantic era. Examining these women and their intermedial work can help us build a fuller picture of women's contributions to book history throughout the British Isles, as well as better appreciate the role of orality, including voice and song, within a book history tradition frequently oriented toward print and manuscript. The essay also discusses these women writers' subsequent disappearance from their respective national canons, as projects to legitimize the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh nations have focused overwhelmingly on the printed productions of male creative writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues for an expansion of the work of book history at the interface between the magazine and the personal verse miscellany. The manuscript verse miscellany was a widely practiced genre in the eighteenth century but has remained largely invisible to scholars. The genre forms an archive of interest for, among other things, how it adapts to, and exploits, the newly developed eighteenth-century print form of the periodical, especially the magazine. Existing at the intersection of new print forms and established strategies of literary production and networking through manuscript exchange, the verse miscellany reveals how readers, many of them women, "hacked" printed poetry that offered private, transferable affect that they could then repurpose to their own ends. One product of this dynamic exchange is a countercanon of manuscript-based poetry that varies significantly from the established print canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores how acts of forgetting in literary and book history take place by suggesting that obscurity is not merely the opposite of being recovered but is instead a powerful and multivalent force that operates in various and complex ways, often inflected by gender. Because obscurity is difficult to trace and define, Andrew Winckles argues in this essay, personal, familiar, and religious networks are an important nexus for studying it. He traces the intertwined lives of Sally Wesley and Marianne Francis as an exercise in discovering some of the conditions of obscurity and more broadly theorizing what it means for women in book history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]