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Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismShortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa SocietyA history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to todayWhy do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time.Dames begins with the textual compilations of the Roman world, where chapters evolved as a tool to organize information. He goes on to discuss the earliest divisional systems of the Gospels and the segmentation of medieval romances, describing how the chapter took on new purpose when applied to narrative texts and how narrative segmentation gave rise to a host of aesthetic techniques. Dames shares engaging and in-depth readings of influential figures, from Sterne, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Dickens to George Eliot, Machado de Assis, B. S. Johnson, Agnès Varda, Uwe Johnson, Jennifer Egan, and László Krasznahorkai. He illuminates the sometimes tacit, sometimes dramatic ways in which the chapter became a kind of reckoning with time and a quiet but persistent feature of modernity.Ranging from ancient tablets and scrolls to contemporary fiction and film, The Chapter provides a compelling, elegantly written history of a familiar compositional mode that readers often take for granted and offers a new theory of how this versatile means of dividing narrative sculpts our experience of time.

A richly illustrated look at some of the British Library's most beautiful books from around the world. For centuries across the world, books have been created as objects of beauty, with bookmakers lavishing great care on their paper, binding materials, illustrations, and lettering. The Book by Design, featuring an array of books from the British Library's collection, focuses on the sensory experience of holding and reading these objects. Each selection represents a specific moment in the development of what we know today as the book—from scrolls and bound illuminated manuscripts to paperbacks and formatted digital information. These range from the seventh century to the present and include examples from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America, in addition to a look at book traditions in Africa and Oceania. John James Audubon's Birds of America, the works of Chaucer, Russian Futurist books, limited editions, historic copies of the Qur'an and the Bible, mass-market paperbacks, and more come together to tell the visual, tactile, artistic, and cultural history of books. Expert curators and specialists explore these books from the perspective of design and manufacturing, original art photographs offer vivid representations of their textures and materials, and graphics detail the size and specifications of each book. Offering a wide-ranging look at the creation and use of books, illustrated with hundreds of color images, this volume is itself an object of beauty.

Histories you can trust. In 14 original essays, The Oxford History of the Book reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope. The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets to scrolls, from inscribed codices to printed books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, from written parchment to digital texts. The history of the book is a history of different methods of circulation and dissemination, all dependent on innovations in transport, from coastal and transoceanic shipping to roads, trains, planes and the internet. It is a history of different modes of reading and reception, from learned debate and individual study to public instruction and entertainment. It is a history of manufacture, craftsmanship, dissemination, reading and debate. Yet the history of books is not simply a question of material form, nor indeed of the history of reading and reception. The larger question is of the effect of textual production, distribution and reception - of how books themselves made history. To this end, each chapter of this volume, succinctly bounded by period and geography, offers incisive and stimulating insights into the relationship between books and the story of their times.

Literaturausstellungen bieten zahlreiche Perspektiven für literarästhetische Erfahrungen im Raum. Literatur wird dabei nicht auf ihre Trägermedien reduziert, sondern als immaterieller Gegenstand betrachtet. Diesem Ansatz folgend untersucht Sebastian Bernhardt die didaktischen Potenziale von Ausstellungen, die Literatur mittels Szenografie in den Raum übertragen. Neben einer Systematisierung der Möglichkeiten solcher Übertragungen erschließt er die sich daraus für eine mediale Erweiterung des Literatur- und Medienunterrichts ergebenden Potenziale. Damit liefert er spezifische Einsichten in die genuin literarästhetischen Erfahrungen im Ausstellungsraum.

Cet ouvrage présente le livre et la bibliothèque comme objet et lieu privilégiés où s'incarne la quête des savoirs et de la culture. Qu'on pense en mode analogique ou numérique, le livre et la bibliothèque ne sont-ils pas les meilleurs moyens de répondre au besoin essentiel que nous avons tous de connaître, de savoir, de nous développer? Le livre comme support de la connaissance et la bibliothèque comme milieu de recherche du savoir ont fourni de tout temps une contribution importante à l'apprentissage, à la progression, bref à l'évolution de l'être humain. L'ouvrage que nous proposons aborde ce vaste terrain de réflexion dans une approche nationale et internationale avec un regard historique, actuel et tourné vers l'avenir. Ce livre est également l'occasion de souligner la riche carrière du professeur Marcel Lajeunesse, qui s'est investi pendant plus de 50 ans dans le développement de la bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information. Par son œuvre, cet éminent chercheur a fait connaître et rayonner l'histoire des bibliothèques et du livre québécois partout dans le monde. Son entourage est honoré de lui rendre un hommage grandement mérité. Grâce à la vingtaine de textes que ce livre propose, le lectorat, qu'il soit composé de la communauté étudiante ou universitaire, de spécialistes, de personnes issues du milieu de la recherche ou simplement curieuses, devrait mieux comprendre les tenants et aboutissants du livre et de la bibliothèque, et ainsi mieux saisir leur contribution fondamentale à la diffusion des savoirs et de la culture.

Bibliophobia is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of'the death of the book'implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty-first-century experiences of paranoia and literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion back to the origins of writing in ancient Babylon and Egypt, then forwards to the age of Google. It uncovers bibliophobia from the first Chinese emperor to Nazi Germany, alongside parallel stories of bibliomania and bibliolatry in world religions and literatures. Books imply cognitive content embodied in physical form, in which the body cooperates with the brain. At its heart this relationship of body and mind, or letter and spirit, always retains a mystery. Religions are founded on holy books, which are also sites of transgression, so that writing is simultaneously sacred and profane. In secular societies these complex feelings are transferred to concepts of ideology and toleration. In the ambiguous future of the internet, digital immateriality threatens human equilibrium once again. Bibliophobia is a global history, covering six continents and seven religions, describing written examples from each of the last thirty centuries (and several earlier). It discusses topics such as the origins of different kinds of human script; the development of textual media such as scrolls, codices, printed books, and artificial intelligence; the collection and destruction of libraries; the use of books as holy relics, talismans, or shrines; and the place of literacy in the history of slavery, heresy, blasphemy, censorship, and persecution. It proposes a theory of writing, how it relates to speech, images, and information, or to concepts of mimesis, personhood, and politics. Originating as the Clarendon Lectures in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, the methods of Bibliophobia range across book history; comparative religion; philosophy from Plato to Hegel and Freud; and a range of global literature from ancient to contemporary. Richly illustrated with textual forms, material objects, and art works, its inspiration is the power that books always (and continue to) have in the emotional, spiritual, bodily, and imaginative lives of readers.

El libro, más allá de ser un mero soporte textual, debe ser considerado como una obra de arte en sí misma y como un medio de comunicación a muy diferentes niveles. Es un artefacto físico en cuya materialidad intervienen las más variadas técnicas; pero también es un espacio en el que lo textual y lo icónico interactúan, posibilitando un ámbito de mutua influencia entre literatura y artes plásticas. Nuestro propósito es presentar el libro desde sus más variadas dimensiones, ofreciendo un recorrido lo más completo y novedoso: desde su carácter material hasta el valor simbólico que lo rodea; desde su concepción más práctica hasta la más artística; desde su función como medio para conocer otros espacios y tiempos hasta su capacidad para adaptarse a los retos de la era digital.

Literatur kann auch als Verbund von Medien betrachtet werden, die in Kooperations- und Konkurrenzverhältnissen auftreten. Dies wird umso deutlicher, wenn aus literatur- und designwissenschaftlicher Perspektive auf die Beobachtung der Differenz von typographischen und anderen, grundsätzlich nonverbalen visuellen Daten abgestellt wird. Die Beiträger•innen des Bandes leiten daraus ein Verhältnis von Literatur- und Kunstwissenschaft zu ihren Gegenständen ab, das nicht zuletzt zu einer neuen Aufmerksamkeit für die skripturale und typographische Materialität und Medialität der Literatur führt. Dabei geht es um die Theorie der Reflexion und die Praxis der Erzeugung einer je spezifischen Buch-Ästhetik.

This innovative collection examines how book history and digital humanities (DH) practices are integrated through approach, access, and assessment. Eight essays by rising and senior scholars practicing in multiple fields—including librarians, literature scholars, digital humanists, and historians—consider and reimagine the interconnected futures and horizons at the intersections of texts, technology, and culture and argue for a return to a more representative and human study of the humanities. Integrating intermedial practices and assessments, the editors and contributors explore issues surrounding the access to and materiality of digitized materials, and the challenge of balancing preservation of traditional archival materials with access. They offer an assessment in our present moment of the early visions of book history and DH projects. In revisiting these projects, they ask us to shift our thinking on the promises and perils of archival and creative work in different media. Taken together, this volume reconsiders the historical intersections of book history and DH and charts a path for future scholarship across disciplinary boundaries.

A history of one of humankind's most resilient and influential technologies over the past millennium—the book. Revelatory and entertaining in equal measure, Portable Magic will charm and challenge literature lovers of all kinds as it illuminates the transformative power and eternal appeal of the written word.Stephen King once said that books are “a uniquely portable magic.” Here, Emma Smith takes readers on a literary adventure that spans centuries and circles the globe to uncover the reasons behind our obsession with this captivating object.From disrupting the Western myth that the Gutenberg Press was the original printing project, to the decorative gift books that radicalized women to join the anti-slavery movement, to paperbacks being weaponized during World War II, to a book made entirely of plastic-wrapped slices of American cheese, Portable Magic explores how, when, and why books became so iconic. It's not just the content within a book that compels; it's the physical material itself, what Smith calls “bookhood”: the smell, the feel of the pages, the margins to scribble in, the illustrations on the jacket, its solid heft. Every book is designed to influence our reading experience—to enchant, enrage, delight, and disturb us—and our longstanding love affair with books in turn has had direct, momentous consequences across time.

Il libro è stato paragonato da Umberto Eco a un cucchiaio: un oggetto perfetto e non ulteriormente migliorabile. Ma come si è arrivati a questo risultato? Federica Formiga spiega quali siano gli elementi che identificano il prodotto librario e propone, in un percorso sistematico attraverso i secoli, le tappe del suo sviluppo e i suoi maggiori protagonisti. È tra Quattrocento e Cinquecento che si stabilizza un'accezione di libro come oggetto in grado di contenere testo in quantità considerevoli, prodotto a costi relativamente bassi e capace di resistere nel tempo. Il Settecento e l'Ottocento sono invece i secoli di svolta per gli autori, che iniziano a vivere del lavoro della propria penna, mentre gli editori si aprono alle nuove tecniche di stampa, che hanno lanciato il libro verso la modernità, passando dalla censura e dai diritti editoriali. Infine, agli e-book è riservata l'ultima parte, in cui si cerca di capire quali, forse, nuovi scenari aspettano il libro.

This open access collection of essays examines the literary advice industry since its emergence in Anglo-American literary culture in the mid-nineteenth century within the context of the professionalization of the literary field and the continued debate on creative writing as art and craft. Often dismissed as commercial and stereotypical by authors and specialists alike, literary advice has nonetheless remained a flourishing business, embodying the unquestioned values of a literary system, but also functioning as a sign of a literary system in transition. Exploring the rise of new online amateur writing cultures in the twenty-first century, this collection of essays considers how literary advice proliferates globally, leading to new forms and genres.

In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope. The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets to scrolls, from inscribed codices to printed books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, from written parchment to digital texts. The history of the book is a history of different methods of circulation and dissemination, all dependent on innovations in transport, from coastal and transoceanic shipping to roads, trains, planes and the internet. It is a history of different modes of reading and reception, from learned debate and individual study to public instruction and entertainment. It is a history of manufacture, craftsmanship, dissemination, reading and debate. Yet the history of books is not simply a question of material form, nor indeed of the history of reading and reception. The larger question is of the effect of textual production, distribution and reception - of how books themselves made history. To this end, each chapter of this volume, succinctly bounded by period and geography, offers incisive and stimulating insights into the relationship between books and the story of their times.

De l'Antiquité à aujourd'hui, le livre a toujours accompagné les sociétés humaines. Cette histoire du livre et de l'écrit, s'inscrivant dans une histoire des cultures, touche aux domaines de l'histoire littéraire, mais aussi économique, technique, sociale, politique et culturelle. Désormais classique, cet ouvrage est une introduction indispensable à l'histoire du livre en Occident et un bilan sur un domaine d'étude aux méthodes et aux approches profondément renouvelées.Prenant en compte les révolutions technologiques, il offre également des clés pour analyser et mieux comprendre les nouveaux médias et interroger la place du livre dans notre monde actuel.

The celebrated text on the history of the book, completely revised, updated and expanded The revised and updated edition of The Companion to the History of the Book offers a global survey of the book's history, through print and electronic text. Already well established as a standard survey of the historiography of the book, this new, expanded edition draws on a decade of advanced scholarship to present current research on paper, printing, binding, scientific publishing, the history of maps, music and print, the profession of authorship and lexicography. The text explores the many approaches to the book from the early clay tablets of Sumer, Assyria and Babylonia to today's burgeoning electronic devices. The expert contributions delve into such fascinating topics as archives and paperwork, and present new chapters on Arabic script, the Slavic, Canadian, African and Australasian book, new textual technologies, and much more. Containing a wealth of illustrative examples and case studies to dramatize the exciting history of the book, the text is designed for academics, students and anyone interested in the subject.

A literary scholar explains how eighteenth-century novels were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call “literature.”Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt's theories to James Watt's inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female.For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers'hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature (“character”) that was in fact incubated in religious books.The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel's main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre's insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the “media platform” it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print.

An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year“Grafton presents largely unfamiliar material…in a clear, even breezy style…Erudite.”—Michael Dirda, Washington PostIn this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, Anthony Grafton captures both the physical and mental labors that went into the golden age of the book—compiling notebooks, copying and correcting proofs, preparing copy—and shows us how scribes and scholars shaped influential treatises and forgeries.Inky Fingers ranges widely, from the theological polemics of the early days of printing to the pathbreaking works of Jean Mabillon and Baruch Spinoza. Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and the delicate, arduous, error-riddled craft of making books. Through it all, he reminds us that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands, and the nitty gritty labor of printmakers has had a profound impact on the history of ideas.“Describes magnificent achievements, storms of controversy, and sometimes the pure devilment of scholars and printers…Captivating and often amusing.”—Wall Street Journal“Ideas, in this vivid telling, emerge not just from minds but from hands, not to mention the biceps that crank a press or heft a ream of paper.”—New York Review of Books“Grafton upends idealized understandings of early modern scholarship and blurs distinctions between the physical and mental labor that made the remarkable works of this period possible.”—Christine Jacobson, Book Post“Scholarship is a kind of heroism in Grafton's account, his nine protagonists'aching backs and tired eyes evidence of their valiant dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.”—London Review of Books

For more than 20 years now, the publishing industry has been highly influenced by innovations in digital technology. This is not the first time that technological changes affect the book trade. Both the printing press and industrialized production methods vitally changed the book industry in their time. With a macroscopic, comparative approach, this book looks at the transitional phases of the book of the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries to locate distinctive patterns in the acceptance of new technologies. Using specific book value categories, which shape the acceptance context of innovations in book production, helps us find continuities and discontinuities of these patterns. It also offers a better understanding of current developments in publishing in the digital age.

This book leads readers through an intriguing examination of how books began and have evolved through history and explores where future technologies may lead them.From ancient clay tablet and scrolls to medieval manuscripts and printed books to personal computers and iPads, this guide examines the fascinating history of books from 4000 BCE to the present. At each step of this evolution, technologies are examined and evaluated to show how these ideas are present from the very beginning of written communication. Moving chronologically from the ancient world to the present, the book shows how written communication media evolved from cuneiform to the Kindle. Focusing on key technologies and vital periods of historical transition, it traces an evolution that elucidates the history of the written word, at each step examining and evaluating such aspects of technologies as memory capacity, readability and writability, durability, recyclability, information security, ease and mode of access, and cost. Additional attention is paid to how these technologies were made, how they were circulated, and who was reading them.

Algún cínico podrá decir que los libros son meras'láminas de árboles recubiertos con una vaca muerta'. Nada de eso. A lo largo del tiempo el libro ha representado conocimiento, libertad, fantasía, revoluciones y esperanza. Recorrer su historia, tanto para el investigador como para el público general, permite observar sus desarrollos, mutaciones y experimentos. ¿Qué es? ¿Cómo cambió? ¿Qué significa? Agitada por estas preguntas, la poeta e investigadora estadounidense Amaranth Borsuk parte desde los códices y llega hasta los ebooks y las experiencias más radicales en libros de artista para analizar los sentidos de sus variaciones con el fin de imaginar un futuro posible de este dispositivo. No se trata simplemente de una breve introducción al tema. Es mucho más. Al trazar las interrelaciones del libro como objeto, idea, interface y concepto, Borsuk no solo logra tender diálogos entre la historia, las artes y la literatura electrónica sino proponer un nuevo marco teórico construido desde el siglo xxi para expandir, de un modo sugerente, su definición.

Armando Petrucci ha transformado esa disciplina erudita que es la paleografía en una ambiciosa historia de los usos de la escritura. Este libro analiza con ingenio e inteligencia la construcción de la vasta biblioteca de Occidente para descubrir los fascinantes entresijos de la cultura del libro y, en suma, los fundamentos materiales de nuestras formas de pensar. De la práctica del'escribir sin leer'característica de la alta Edad Media, hasta el libro de mano o libro de alforja, que llegará años después de la invención de la imprenta, Petrucci nos acompaña en un fascinante viaje para conocer los modos en que la tinta, la pasta, la cola y demás materias se entremezclaron para generar un universo de sentido. La larga génesis de ese objeto perfecto que es el libro, entrelazada con la historia de los modos de lectura y las políticas de la escritura, nos permitirán entender el mundo del texto como ese espacio político de objetos, gestos y performances que todos nosotros habitamos.

Il volume vuole essere una introduzione alla complessa materia relativa alla produzione e alla diffusione del libro stampato a caratteri mobili, dai suoi primi passi'in culla'dalla metà alla fine del XV secolo. Intende mostrare i passaggi e le fasi nella tecnica di produzione, dall'approntamento dell'attrezzatura necessaria, alla carta, al testo medesimo e all'attenzione necessaria alla sua riproduzione. Rivolge inoltre ulteriore riguardo alla catalogazione degli esemplari conservatisi, soprattutto per la loro unicità. Viene anche fornita una fitta bibliografia, città per città, delle sedi di stampa nella nostra penisola come guida nello studio della produzione italiana, a vantaggio del lettore studioso o colto.

Grundlegende Kenntnisse der Buchgeschichte sind auch im heutigen Berufsalltag immer wieder von Nutzen. So setzt beispielsweise die Vorbereitung von Ausstellungen oder die Präsentation historischer Bestände einschlägiges Wissen voraus. Dieses Buch wendet sich an alle, die sich das dafür notwendige buchhistorische Hintergrundwissen aneignen wollen. Diese Einführung vermittelt einen allgemeinen Überblick zur Geschichte des Buches von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Die Entwicklung von Zeitungen, Zeitschriften, Karten und Atlanten, Noten und Musikdrucken wie auch orientalischen und ostasiatischen Büchern ist ebenfalls Teil des Inhalts.

What would an anatomy of the book look like? There is the main text, of course, the file that the author proudly submits to their publisher. But around this, hemming it in on the page or enclosing it at the front and back of the book, there are dozens of other texts — page numbers and running heads, copyright statements and errata lists — each possessed of particular conventions, each with their own lively histories. To consider these paratexts — recalling them from the margins, letting them take centre stage — is to be reminded that no book is the sole work of the author whose name appears on the cover; rather, every book is the sum of a series of collaborations. It is to be reminded, also, that not everything is intended for us, the readers. There are sections that are solely directed at others — binders, librarians, lawyers — parts of the book that, if they are working well, are working discreetly, like a theatrical prompt, whispering out of the audience's ear-shot Book Parts is a bold and imaginative intervention in the fast growing field of book history: it pulls the book apart. Over twenty-two chapters, Book Parts tells the story of the components of the book: from title pages to endleaves; from dust jackets to indexes — and just about everything in between. Book Parts covers a broad historical range that runs from the pre-print era to the digital, bringing together the expertise of some of the most exciting scholars working on book history today in order to shine a new light on these elements hiding in plain sight in the books we all read.

The emergence of digital technologies in the realm of archives has enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we have hitherto largely ignored. Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page responds to this provocation by setting out an approach or an orientation to ‘thinking through paper'. Critically, it questions what work the archived page does if it is more than an invisible or transparent support to text. Three exemplary case studies are offered on the letters of Greta Garbo, the messy archival remains of Australian writer Eve Langley and the letters and manuscripts of English poet Valentine Ackland. Together they demonstrate how approaches grounded in concerns with materiality and matter can shift how we understand archival research and what we accept as archival ‘evidence'. They also reveal the emergent capacities of the paper page.

James Raven, a leading historian of the book, offers a fresh and accessible guide to the global study of the production, dissemination and reception of written and printed texts across all societies and in all ages. Students, teachers, researchers and general readers will benefit from the book's investigation of the subject's origins, scope and future direction. Based on original research and a wide range of sources, What is the History of the Book? shows how book history crosses disciplinary boundaries and intersects with literary, historical, media, library, conservation and communications studies. Raven uses examples from around the world to explore different traditions in bibliography, palaeography and manuscript studies. He analyses book history's growing global ambition and demonstrates how the study of reading practices opens up new horizons in social history and the history of knowledge. He shows how book history is contributing to debates about intellectual and popular culture, colonialism and the communication of ideas. The first global, accessible introduction to the field of book history from ancient to modern times, What is the History of the Book? is essential reading for all those interested in one of society's most important cultural artefacts.

Contrary to the apocalyptic pronouncements of paper media's imminent demise in the digital age, there has been a veritable surge of creative reimaginings of books as bearers of the literary. From typographic experiments (Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts) to accordion books (Anne Carson's Nox), from cut ups (Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes) to collages (Graham Rawle's Woman's World), from erasures (Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow) to mixups (Simon Morris's The Interpretations of Dreams), print literature has gone through anything but a slow, inevitable death. In fact, it has re-invented itself materially.Starting from this idea of media plurality, Book Presence in a Digital Age explores the resilience of print literatures, book art, and zines in the late age of print from a contemporary perspective, while incorporating longer-term views on media archeology and media change. Even as it focuses on the materiality of books and literary writing in the present, Book Presence also takes into consideration earlier 20th-century'moments'of media transition, developing the concepts of presence and materiality as analytical tools to perform literary criticism in a digital age. Bringing together leading scholars, artists, and publishers, Book Presence in a Digital Age offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital.

Im Zentrum des Bandes stehen die von materiellen und kommunikativen Wechselfällen gekennzeichneten Karrieren des Buches. Ausgangspunkt dieses Bandes ist das Konzept der Objektbiographie, von dem aus eine neue kulturhistorische Perspektive auf das gedruckte Buch und die Handschrift eröffnet werden soll. Mit Blick auf die materielle Kultur des Buches diskutieren Literatur- und Buchwissenschaftler, Historiker, Philosophen, Judaisten, Bibliothekare und Restauratoren die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer biographischen Herangehensweise. Die Aufmerksamkeit für das durch Brüche und Karrieren gekennzeichnete Leben von Büchern kommt nicht von ungefähr: Die Herausgeberinnen und Herausgeber sowie einige Autorinnen und Autoren arbeiten in einer der größten Altbestandsbibliotheken Deutschlands und sind daher nicht nur von den wissenschaftlichen und konservatorischen Herausforderungen einer bedeutenden musealen Sammlung umgeben, sondern auch von noch offenen und zu erschließenden Buchbiographien. Die Biographien des Buches sind zugleich der erste Band der neuen Reihe »Kulturen des Sammelns. Akteure, Objekte, Medien«, die von der Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel herausgegeben wird.

Le “storie di libri” qui raccolte in memoria di Alessandro Daneloni approfondiscono aspetti inediti di singole tradizioni testuali latine e neolatine e vicende finora poco indagate di libri manoscritti e a stampa. L'approccio filologico dei contributi, mai slegato dalle sue ricadute sul piano storico-culturale, mira a mettere in luce la centralità del libro come manufatto e ‘medium'culturale dall'Antichità all'Umanesimo. Con saggi su Valerio Catullo, Aulo Gellio, Francesco Petrarca, Giovanni Dondi dall'Orologio, Bartolomeo Sachella, Lorenzo Lippi, Angelo Poliziano, Pier Vettori, Tilman Rasche, Conrad Celtis e Nostradamus.

This new book by Malcolm Parkes makes a fundamental contribution to the history of handwriting. Handwriting is a versatile medium that has always allowed individual scribes the opportunity for self-expression, despite the limitations of the pen and the finite number of possible movements.The purpose of this study is to focus on the writing of scribes from late antiquity to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and to identify those features which are a scribe's personal contribution to the techniques and art of handwriting. The book opens with three chapters surveying the various environments in which scribes worked in the medieval West. The following five, based on the author's Lyell Lectures at the University of Oxford, then examine different aspects of the subject, starting with the basic processes of handwriting and copying. Next come discussions of developments in rapid handwriting, with its consequent influence on new alphabets; on more formal'set hands'; and on the adaptation of movements of the pen to produce elements of style corresponding to changes in the prevailing sense of decorum. The final chapter looks at the significance of some customized images produced by handwriting on the page. The text is illustrated with 69 plates, and accompanied by a glossary of the technical terms applied to handwriting, which in itself makes a significant contribution to the subject.

Major transformations in society are always accompanied by parallel transformations in systems of social communication – what we call the media. In this book, historian Frédéric Barbier provides an important new economic, political and social analysis of the first great'media revolution'in the West: Gutenberg�s invention of the printing press in the mid fifteenth century. In great detail and with a wealth of historical evidence, Barbier charts the developments in manuscript culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and shows how the steadily increasing need for written documents initiated the processes of change which culminated with Gutenberg. The fifteenth century is presented as the'age of start-ups'when investment and research into technologies that were new at the time, including the printing press, flourished. Tracing the developments through the sixteenth century, Barbier analyses the principal features of this first media revolution: the growth of technology, the organization of the modern literary sector, the development of surveillance and censorship and the invention of the process of'mediatization'. He offers a rich variety of examples from cities all over Europe, as well as looking at the evolution of print media in China and Korea. This insightful re-interpretation of the Gutenberg revolution also looks beyond the specific historical context to draw connections between the advent of print in the Rhine Valley (�paper valley�) and our own modern digital revolution. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of early modern history, of literature and the media, and will appeal to anyone interested in what remains one of the greatest cultural revolutions of all time.

Bücher schreiben Geschichte, und das im mehrfachen Wortsinn. Ihr historisches Potenzial ergibt sich daraus, sie als Dokumente ihrer Epoche zu lesen. Aufschlussreich wird diese Lesart durch das Wissen um die Kräfte, die in ihrem Entstehungskontext wirkten. Die historische Verlags- und Medienforschung der Buchwissenschaft Leipziger Prägung hat diesen Ansatz vielfältig weiterentwickelt. Der 60. Geburtstag des Lehrstuhlinhabers Siegfried Lokatis bietet den Anlass, aus aktuellen Studien von rund 30 Mitarbeitern, Schülern und kooperierenden Wissenschaftlern zu berichten. Im Zentrum des Bandes steht das Agieren von Autoren, Herausgebern und Verlegern, die Buchhandelsgeschichte, die Werk- und Editionsgeschichte, Fragen der Gestaltung und Ästhetik des Mediums Buch sowie die zensorische Überwachung von Druckschriften im nationalen und internationalen Kontext.

En la temprana modernidad europea, los primeros lectores de un libro no eran quienes lo compraban: era los escribas que copiaban el manuscrito del autor o del traductor, los censores que lo autorizaban, el editor que decidía poner ese título en su catálogo, los revisores que preparaban el texto para la imprenta, lo dividían en capítulos o secciones y le añadían la puntuación, los cajistas que componían las páginas, los lectores de pruebas que lo corregían. La mano del autor no podía ser separada del espíritu del impresor. Este libro está dedicado al proceso de publicación de las obras que dan el marco a las representaciones que los lectores se hacen del pasado o del mundo.

This study offers an authoritative and readable account of the hidden history of book theft in eighteenth-century London. It exploits a rich primary source, the compelling narratives of crime contained in the digitised Proceedings of the Old Bailey. The authors explain how cases of book theft came to court, and how in the ensuing trials the nature of the book itself became a question for legal debate. They assess the motives which led Londoners to steal books and the methods they employed in thefts from households and booksellers. Finally, the authors ask what the Proceedings tells us about the social ownership of books, and how the phenomenon of book theft differently affected book producers and consumers. Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London will appeal to readers interested in the connected histories of metropolitan life, crime, and the book in this period, and in the uses of digital resources in humanities research.

Although the connection between the invention of printing and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century has long been a scholarly commonplace, there is still a great deal of evidence about the relationship to be presented and analysed. This collection of authoritative reviews by distinguished historians deals with the role of the book in the spread of the Reformation all over the continent, identifying common European experiences and local peculiarities. It summarises important recent work on the topic from every major European country, introducing English-speakers to much important and previously inaccessible research.

The Reader in the Book is concerned with a particular aspect of the history of the book, an archeology and sociology of the use of margins and other blank spaces. One of the most commonplace aspects of old books is the fact that people wrote in them, something that, until very recently, has infuriated modern collectors and librarians. But these inscriptions constitute a significant dimension of the book's history, and what readers did to books often added to their value. Sometimes marks in books have no relation to the subject of the book, merely names, dates, prices paid; blank spaces were used for pen trials and doing sums, and flyleaves are occasionally the repository of records of various kinds. The Reader in the Book deals with that special class of books in which the text and marginalia are in intense communication with each other, in which reading constitutes an active and sometimes adversarial engagement with the book. The major examples are works that are either classics or were classics in their own time; but they are seen here as contemporaries read them, without the benefit of centuries of commentary and critical guidance. The underlying question is at what point marginalia, the legible incorporation of the work of reading into the text of the book, became a way of defacing it rather than of increasing its value-why did we want books to lose their history?

This collection of essays illustrates various pressures and concerns—both practical and theoretical—related to the study of print culture. Procedural difficulties range from doubts about the reliability of digitized resources to concerns with the limiting parameters of'national'book history.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. Covering materials ranging from Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and inscribed objects to contemporary comics, The Visible Text rewrites the history of textual media and technologies. Arguing that media are not defined by technologies alone, but by a combination of technologies and the ideas that people hold about those technologies, Bredehoft identifies four distinct periods or domains in the history of English literature that correspond to four ways in which media ideologies interacted with the two basic defining technologies of manuscripts and printed books. Examining two complementary ways of defining texts (as subject to a reproductive medium, on the one hand, and as surrounded and defined by paratexts, on the other), The Visible Text points out how Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and contemporary comics share a remarkable similarity in being structured as productions rather than reproductions. Contrastingly, the late-medieval and print-era periods share a cultural investment in textual reproduction, but they differ both in their characteristic technologies and in how they conceptualize the object of reproduction itself. A final epilogue, briefly considering the nature of electronically-mediated textuality, highlights the importance of understanding the history addressed here, as electonic text both parallels and departs from typographic print in ways that earlier reproductive domains clarify and complicate. Filled with concrete examples of both books and texts, The Visible Text will be of interest to readers in the fields of literature, book history, literary theory, media studies, and visual culture.

This Festschrift honours the dedicated book historian and medievalist Gabriele Müller-Oberhäuser. Her wide-ranging scholarly expertise has encouraged and influenced many adepts of the book. The essays in this volume reflect the variety of her interests: The contributions range from Chaucer's Fürstenspiegel to the value of books in comedy, from the material book to the magical book in religious and literary cultures, from collaborative efforts in manuscript production to the relations of distributors of books across national and ideological boundaries, from the relations between the makers of books to the relation of readers to their books. Covering a period from the Middle Ages to the present, the volume concludes with a look at the future of book history as a field of study.

In Thinking Outside the Book, Augusta Rohrbach works through the increasing convergences between digital humanities and literary studies to explore the meaning and primacy of the book as a literary, material, and cultural artifact. Rohrbach assembles a rather unlikely cohort of nineteenth-century women writers -- Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, Augusta Evans, and Mary Chesnut -- to consider the publishing culture of their period from the perspective of our current digital age, bringing together scholarly concepts from both print culture and new media studies. In nineteenth-century America, women from a variety of racial and class affiliations were bombarding the print market with their literary productions, taking advantage of burgeoning rates of literacy and advances in publishing technology. Their work challenged prevailing modes of authorship and continues to do so today. Each chapter of Thinking Outside the Book positions a focal figure as both paradigmatic and problematic within the context of key terms that define the study of the book. In lieu of terms such as literacy, authorship, publication, edition, and editor, Rohrbach develops an alternate typology that includes mediation, memory, history, testimony, and loss. Recognizing that the field spans radio, cinema, television, and the Internet, she draws comparisons to the present day, when Web 2.0 allows writers from varying backgrounds and positions to seek out readers without'gatekeepers'limiting their exposure. More than a literary history, this book takes up theories of recovery, literacy, authorship, narrative, the book, and new media in connection with race, gender, class, and region.

The complexity of print culture in Britain between the seventeenth and nineteenth century is investigated in these wide-ranging articles.The essays collected here offer examinations of bibliographical matters, publishing practices, the illustration of texts in a variety of engraved media, little studied print culture genres, the critical and editorial fortunes of individual works, and the significance of the complex interrelationships that authors entertained with booksellers, publishers, and designers. They investigate how all these relationships affected the production of print commodities and how all the agents involved in the making of books contributed to the cultural literacy of readers and the formation of a canon of literary texts. Specific topics include a bibliographical study of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and its editions from its first publication to the present day; the illustrations of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the ways in which the interpretive matrices of book illustration conditioned the afterlife and reception of Bunyan's work; the almanac and the subscription edition; publishing history, collecting, reading, and textual editing, especially of Robert Burns's poems and James Thomson's The Seasons; the'printing for the author'practice; the illustrated and material existence of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, and the Victorian periodical, The Athenaeum. Sandro Jung is Research Professor of Early Modern British Literature and Director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Ghent University. Contributors: Gerard Carruthers, Nathalie Collé-Bak, Marysa Demoor, Alan Downie, Peter Garside, Sandro Jung, Brian Maidment, Laura L. Runge.

A concise edition of the highly acclaimed Oxford Companion to the Book, this book features the 51 articles from the Companion plus 3 brand new chapters in one affordable volume. The 54 chapters introduce readers to the fascinating world of book history. Including 21 thematic studies on topics such as writing systems, the ancient and the medieval book, and the economics of print, as well as 33 regional and national histories of'the book', offering a truly global survey of the book around the world, the Oxford History of the Book is the most comprehensive work of its kind. The three new articles, specially commissioned for this spin-off, cover censorship, copyright and intellectual property, and book history in the Caribbean and Bermuda. All essays are illustrated throughout with reproductions, diagrams, and examples of various typographical features. Beautifully produced and hugely informative, this is a must-have for anyone with an interest in book history and the written word.

While the importance of writing has often been recognized, the role of books and especially that of libraries has just as often been slighted. Knowledge, once generated, has to be communicated, preserved, and accessible. Books in their varying formats—from clay tablets to scrolls and manuscripts to pixels—have been instrumental in spreading knowledge, although relatively little attention has been given to the story of books themselves.A Social History of Books and Libraries from Cuneiform to Bytes traces the roles of books and libraries throughout recorded history and explores their social and cultural importance within differing societies and changing times. It presents the history of books from clay tablets to e-books and the history of libraries, whether built of bricks or bytes. Following an introduction that sets the theoretical basis for the historical importance of books and libraries, chapters alternate between the history of the book and the history of libraries. Included within the chapters are short excursions on some particular development, such as book emblems or cataloging. Case studies are given as thematic illustrations of libraries everywhere.Patrick M. Valentine argues that social and cultural forces have been more influential in determining the nature and status of information, books, and libraries than has technology. But A Social History of Books and Libraries is far from a jeremiad against technology; rather it presents history within the subtle yet shifting context of time and place. Although written primarily for librarians and library students, it will also be of interest to a wider audience of scholars and those interested in books, libraries, and cultural history.

The Book of Lost Books is a book of stories involving kings, heretics, untimely interruptions and back room deals, falling tortoises and fairy princesses, train crashes and war atrocities, bravery, cowardice, rent boys, chamber maids, love, quests, puzzles and a crocodile. From Homer to Jane Austen, Shakespeare to Ernest Hemingway, this is an account of books destroyed, misplaced, never finished, or never even begun. With academic shaggy dog stories, swashbuckling historical fables, wry ironies and imaginative fantasia, The Book of Lost Books is the perfect read for all bibliophiles. Hilarious, insightful, endlessly fascinating, sometimes shocking - The Book of Lost Books is a wonderfully quirky but utterly romantic saga of our love affair with books.

Das Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens veröffentlicht wissenschaftliche Beiträge und Quelleneditionen und pflegt alle mit dem Buch und seiner Geschichte zusammenhängenden Themen. Band 67 enthält neben Rezensionen folgende Beiträge: Schäfer, Jochen: Adeliger Buchbesitz in der Zeit des bürgerlichen Wandels. Die Bibliothek von Georg Ernst von und zu Gilsa (1740-1798). Estermann, Monika: Gustav Freytag und das Sammeln im Historismus. Vogler, Sebastian:'Angekauft Tiniussche Auction in Leipzig'- Bücher aus der Bibliothek eines vermeintlichen Mörders in der Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Jena. Herz, Randall: Two Proof Sheets of Unrecorded Incunabula from the Presses of Peter Wagner and Conrad Zeninger. Green, Jonathan: Prining and Prophecy in 15th and 16th century.

Habitué à la bidimensionnalité, le livre découvre la troisième dimension avec les pages animées offrant des transversales et du volume. Toutefois, l'arrivée de la technologie numérique généralise de nouvelles pratiques. La découpe de la page papier ou de la page-écran permet de laisser apparaître une partie de l'image séparément. Le propre des nouveaux supports serait de réunir l'écriture et la lecture, le texte, l'image et le son, les écritures électroniques retrouvant une proximité originelle entre l'écriture et la parole.