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In this article, relying on Readex's electronic database 'Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690–1876: From Colonies to Nation', I use the evidence of newspapers to construct a picture of the encyclopaedias most mentioned in British North America and the early United States during the period before 1790. I begin by explaining my methodology and reviewing other approaches to studying the American market for encyclopaedias before 1790. Then, working on the assumption that mentions of encyclopaedias in newspapers roughly represent interest in encyclopaedias, I attempt to quantify Americans' evolving interest in different encyclopaedias and kinds of encyclopaedias. Lastly, having sketched out the landscape of encyclopaedias in eighteenth-century America, I consider the uses to which they were put. Among other conclusions, I argue that, despite assertions to the contrary by encyclopaedists and their publishers, encyclopaedias functioned less as substitutes for private libraries than as complements to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jordan Alexander Stein's book, "When Novels Were Books," explores the relationship between the material qualities of books and the experience of character in Anglophone novels. Stein argues that the size, shape, and organization of a book can have a profound impact on readers' perceptions of character and their own sense of self. The book's argument is of interest to those studying book history and material texts, as it highlights the importance of considering the material aspects of literature. Stein's thesis challenges the notion of authenticity in literature and invites readers to question their own artificiality. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses Kathleen Lubey's book, "What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century," which explores the history of pornography and its connection to social justice. Lubey argues that pornography can be a site of social protest and challenges the assumption that it is inherently misogynistic. She examines the evolution of a midcentury bawdy novel, "The History of the Human Heart," and its various editions, highlighting how the editing process shaped the portrayal of sex scenes and gender dynamics. Lubey's book offers a new perspective on the history of pornography and its potential for feminist discourse. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the surprisingly prevalent incidence of contemporary handstamps impressed upon the final leaf of Restoration playbooks. These are all circular and contain either individual letters or are bisected and contain a combination of letters and numerals. As they are demonstrably not part of the printing process, they have not attracted the attention of textual editors; but as this article shows, neither are they markers of ownership that would interest scholars researching provenance. We identify the marks as being the stamps of letter receivers; in particular, receivers (James Magnes and Richard Bentley) who were also stationers involved in the publishing of the plays we examined. The presence of these stamps suggests that Magnes and Bentley served not only as publishers and booksellers, but as distributors of the playbooks they produced. The presence of these stamps thus has implications for the distribution of Restoration playbooks through the English postal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional book distribution was central to political mobilization in the localities during the English Civil Wars. A contextual approach, building up a picture from print and manuscript sources such as journals, reveals the multiple ways in which books circulated, through a case study of Devon and the south west. In contrast to recent emphasis on activist publishers, these sources highlight the significance of book distribution by puritan clergy. Book distribution in Devon was dominated by the unmatched south-western network of the London publisher Francis Eglesfield (publisher of Robert Herrick's Hesperides). However, the political agency of book distribution lies beyond the conventional book trade with the activities of local ministers, exemplified by John Bond of Exeter, Thomas Larkham of Tavistock, and John Syms of Sheepstor and Plymouth. Their distribution efforts provided multiple routes by which books reached their political audiences and created opportunities for political participation in parish communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of history of science has evolved and diversified over the past few decades, encompassing not only the natural sciences, medicine, and mathematics, but also the social sciences, humanities, and the study of the relationship between science and technology. The discipline has embraced inter- and transnational perspectives, as well as postcolonial and decolonial aspects. The history of science has become an interdisciplinary field, exploring the relationship between science and other forms of knowledge. This special issue aims to highlight the diversity and vibrancy of current research topics and approaches in the histories of science, including the history of the humanities, social sciences, mathematics, communication practices, digital history, and the role of technology. The contributions also demonstrate the connections between histories of science and other fields of historical research, such as gender history, colonial history, media history, and environmental history. [Extracted from the article]

Late 19th-century Singapore is considered the centre for the printing and distribution of Muslim-Malay lithographed texts in the Malay archipelago. In 1890, the island's print output was approximately six million pages, with many of these printed from lithography. Thus informed, our recent readings of Singapore's role in regional histories of the printed book tend to locate its prominence along contemporary, national lines – this is anachronistic. The island, historically, was neither nation nor state, but a British colonial settlement. Singapore's advantageous geographical position certainly established it as a prominent site for book production and distribution. However, the existing corpus of lithographed publications, printed at multiple localities, indicate a broader range of regional locations involved in Muslim printing. These texts, from mushaf to syair, often feature printed defects and paratextual marks on their pages. Informed by approaches from analytical bibliography and printing history, the materiality of these marks and defects can be 'read' to identify specific print production techniques. These, in turn, suggest printing methods that were common in British and Dutch territories, and beyond – an indication of the mobility of techniques, materials, and practitioners within the lithographic trade, and the collaborative nature of print enterprises in the Malay world. By discussing these printed marks, this article will (a) re-situate and revise our understanding of interactions and practices within the Muslim-Malay lithographic printing trade; and (b) posit the notion that late 19th-century Singapore is not the locus, but one of several sites of significance within a regional 'constellation' of printing activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Women's Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England" edited by Valerie Wayne explores the question of whether women have a book history in early modern England. The book utilizes a range of new original sources and analysis to provide a resounding answer that women did indeed have a significant role in the book trade and cultural life during this period. The book is praised for its successes but also acknowledges its limitations, particularly in terms of its focus on English borders and its definition of "woman." Despite these constraints, the book is considered an essential piece of women's history and book history for future scholars and students. [Extracted from the article]

Marcy J. Dinius's book, "The Textual Effects of David Walker's 'Appeal': Print-Based Activism against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829–1851," explores the impact of David Walker's pamphlet, "An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World," which called for Black liberation. Dinius examines five adaptations of the pamphlet over a twenty-year period, analyzing the materiality of the text and its influence on Black and Indigenous rhetorical and print cultures. The book highlights the interconnectedness of these texts and their role in advocating against slavery and racial discrimination. Dinius's work contributes to the field of Black bibliography and emphasizes the importance of preserving and studying these texts in the face of censorship and the erasure of marginalized voices. [Extracted from the article]

Giancarlo Petrella's book, "Scrivere sui libri: Breve guida al libro a stampa postillato," serves as a guide to annotated early printed books, known as postillati. The book is divided into three chapters that explore the history of annotated books, ownership traces and provenance, and reading evidence. Petrella provides numerous examples and a solid methodological approach to understanding the material history of books and reading. While the book may have some flaws, it is an important and indispensable work in the field of marginalia studies, particularly in Italy. [Extracted from the article]

This article considers the fugitive slave narrative as an important episode in the history of the book. It notes the multiple editions to which many of these books ran, and the difficulty of determining a comprehensive bibliographic record of publication. We establish this bibliographic record for Moses Roper's autobiography, Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery , whose sixteen editions were published between 1837 and 1849 in English and Welsh, in what the article identifies as six phases of publication. The article argues for the documentary importance of the paratextual material and visual imagery folded into each edition as extensions of the autobiographical record and, therefore, moments of historical redefinition that respond to the material, economic, social, and cultural conditions of production. This includes the capacity of Black writing to establish spheres of Atlantic print culture other than Anglophone. The article shows that the bibliographic surfeit of nineteenth-century Black writing exemplified by Roper's work provides an untapped biographical resource in which important clues to the biographies of their authors, and of their families in slavery and in freedom, lie hidden in plain sight. Bibliographic attention to Roper's work therefore reveals the novel ways in which the book was systematized as a form of archival practice at a time when it was necessary to travel light, and the public sphere provided one of the few hopes of establishing a durable record of the author's personal and family history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In medieval bestiaries, knowledge about animals and their behavior is regularly given a Christian moral interpretation. This article explores the use of imagery related to the bestiary tradition in three Hebrew books made around the year 1300, focusing especially on the richly decorated Rothschild Pentateuch (Los Angeles, Getty Museum MS 116). These Hebrew books signal how bestiary knowledge and its visual expression could be adapted to enrich the experience of medieval Jewish reader-viewers, adding to our understanding of Jewish-Christian interactions in medieval Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces the winners of two prestigious prizes in the field of intellectual history inclucing Morris D. Forkosch Prize to Nathan Vedal and Selma V. Forkosch Prize to Dan Edelstein.

This essay explores the possibilities of thinking about the production, circulation, and reception of books through the form of the network. Using archival material of the Council of Books in Wartime, the essay reassembles some of the many attachments that formed the Armed Services Editions during World War II, one of the largest enterprises in the history of publishing. The essay traces the selections of the council, the networks of soldier-readers created by the books themselves, and the acts of reading constrained and made possible by these attachments across front lines and through bureaucratic memos. This assembly provides the backdrop for a consideration of the text of Thomas Mann's "Mario and the Magician," a short story published in the Armed Services Editions in 1944, whose plot not only mirrors the tension between authority and free will manifested in the geopolitical conflict of World War II, but also elucidates the dialectic of power and agency modeled by the form of the network as articulated in the council's reader-producing experiment itself. What is ultimately at stake in positing an uneven network of actors who negotiate, maintain, extend, and possibly even subvert vectors of cultural power is a reconsideration of the agency attributed to readers in sociological studies of literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the typical meaning of the term incunabula. Firstly, because the date that defines it does not have a solid foundation. Secondly, because defining it from temporality excludes a series of elements that are key to the birth and establishment of the book. The American historian Robert Darnton, in his famous article, extended the history of the book beyond the object, extending it to communication circuits and the different agents related to its production and uses, namely: authors, publishers, printers, suppliers, sellers, readers, and bookbinders (1982). This bibliographic review recovers other aspects that also define the incunabulum but that have been neglected and attempts to address the birth of the book from the circuits of communication and not only from temporality. Likewise, it brings together facts, discussions and definitions that are little known in the Spanish language, and that will allow specialists and communicators to have greater clarity about the books of the 15th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on reevaluating the significance of the 1623 Shakespeare Folio, discussing its resistance to a fixed chronology and challenging traditional perceptions about its creation and literary value. It explores the complexities surrounding the Folio's historical context, scholarly narratives, and its role as a representation of Shakespeare's work within a multi-dimensional temporal framework.

The article delves into how editors' perceptions of Shakespeare's First Folio evolved over 400 years, challenging established beliefs and revealing potential prior publications of his plays that might change their historical significance.

The article focuses on the interrelation between theater history and the history of books, examining an actor's inventory to illuminate the significance of high-status books and their implications for the 1623 Shakespeare Folio. Topics include the construction of a fictionalized "Shakespeare Company" in the Folio's list of actors, its exclusions and representations, and the exploration of alternative narratives revealed through contemporaneous lists and references within the plays.

The article focuses on the cultural significance and diverse roles of the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare's works, exploring its representation of Shakespeare, its existence as a collection, and its widespread presence in institutional and personal collections worldwide. It delves into the book's multifaceted nature, discussing its functions as a symbolic representation of Shakespeare, a collection of plays, and a highly sought-after item in various collections globally.

In order to survive, books in the Philippines have had to contend with multiple forces: the humid tropical climate, typhoons, floods, fires, earthquakes, termites, wars throughout the nation’s colonial history. This fact is often raised in studies on the history of the book in the Philippines, but how and why the book survives in spite of such conditions has hardly been given attention. Such a lacuna in Philippine book history is what this study seeks to fill. It explores the survival of Philippine incunabula (books printed from 1593 to 1640), with a focus on the transformation from material object to cultural artifact that the book undergoes in the course of enduring through the centuries. This study examines the case of the Vocabulario de Iapon (Japanese vocabulary), with a particular interest in the copy in the Bernardo Mendel Collection at the Lilly Library of Indiana University. The Vocabulario de Iapon, which was printed in Manila in 1630, is both typical and unique among Philippine incunabula for the circumstances it saw from its publication to its survival. It has much to tell about publishing in the Philippines in the seventeenth century, the reception of books through the ages, and the culture of collecting in modern times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Polish-Jewish novelist, poet and translator Józef Wittlin (1896–1976), author of the classic Sól ziemi (1935, English Salt of the Earth, 1939), lived in Lwów (until 1918 Lemberg, today Lviv) for about 20 years until 1922. Thereafter, whether in Poland or from 1939 in exile first in France, then the United States, he cherished his memories of this architecturally distinguished and multiethnic city, publishing his memoir Mόj Lwów [My Lwów] with an exile press in New York in 1946 (English translation 2016). The article draws on archival documents from Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States and other published sources to give a history of the book's conception and reception, above all in the exiled Polish diaspora, and makes a case for Mόj Lwów 's enduring significance as a work of imaginative reconstruction written in exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albums assembled from fragmentary materials present a special set of problems for bibliographic research. Inaccurately described in catalogs and often caught between different fields, these hybrid objects can be tricky to find within collections and even more difficult to place historically in terms of genre. Yet understanding these seemingly idiosyncratic albums has become more important to book history than ever, as the field pushes to tell deeper histories of the material text. This essay begins from the premise that the modern library catalog is, as an ordering technology, incapable of accurately describing these unique books. In order to dispel the fog of naïve wonderment that often persists around them, I proceed to develop a taxonomy of what fragments are (whether remnants , snippets , or pieces , with the related notion of scraps) and a spectrum of their use within collections (as specimens of something or as raw stuff to create something new). Finally, I draw on the terms laid out in this essay to survey some major genres of assembled albums, including Romantic albums, scrapbooks, paper doll houses, chromolithographic albums, Victorian photocollage, design portfolios, sample books, leaf books, and extra-illustrated volumes. By beginning to trace connections across time, this essay shows how a more sensitive reading of fragments might transform book history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The remarkable theatrical history of Joseph Addison's 1713 tragedy Cato is well known, but the play is also an exceptional case in book history. This essay looks in detail at its two entirely distinct "first" editions. It resolves the relationship between these two editions and considers the quite different problems they raise for the bibliographer: the one of how we distinguish between edition and issue in a context of frenzied publication, standing type, and incremental resetting; the other, of how a manifestly substandard and suspicious edition came to carry the self-proclaimed hallmark of the play's true publisher, Jacob Tonson. The early print history of Addison's Cato , this essay shows, both puts pressure on the language of bibliography and also marks an important and revealing episode in a number of larger histories: those of the Tonson house, of book piracy and copyright protection, and of the bestseller. Appendices provide bibliographical descriptions of the 1713 Qα and Qβ editions, press variants of the earliest three issues of Qα, and uncorrected errors in Qβ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1643, a manuscript was sent from Batavia to Amsterdam. It described in vivid detail a world virtually unknown to the West, that of South-Indian Hinduism, taken from the words of local Brahmins and drawn up by VOC minister Abraham Rogerius. It was not until 1651 that De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom appeared from the presses of the Leiden printing house of François Hackius. By then, its author had died, and circumstances regarding the actual publication are shrouded in mystery. This is also true about the life of Abraham Rogerius and the identity of the Open-Deure's anonymous editor, A.W. JCtus. Traditionally associated with the Polish Socinian theologian Andreas Wissowatius, A.W's annotations added a wealth of scholarly detail to Rogerius plain narrative. In this paper, I greatly expand upon the existing biographies of Rogerius and draw lines between the various actors involved with the eventual publication of his writings. I provide a fresh insight into the editorial history and afterlife of the Open-Deure, showing that there are in fact two different editions that diverge at key points. Moreover, I demonstrate that the elusive A.W. JCtus is most certainly not Wissowatius, but instead the Leiden lawyer and politician Arnoldus Wittens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the long fifteenth century, scholars and books moved across regions and spurred transcreations of numerous Islamicate manuscripts in South Asia. This essay undertakes a close reading of an early sixteenth-century Persian transcreation—that is, a translation in both form and content—of a twelfth-century Arabic compendium on mechanical devices. I examine what the historical event of translation in the South Asian region of Malwa and town of Mandu meant as it is read amidst cultural flows between Mamluk Egypt, Yemen, Mecca, and Hindustan. By analyzing the colophons of early Arabic copies of al-Jazari's Compendium of Theory and Useful Practice for the Fabrication of Machines along with Da'ud Shadiyabadi's Wonders of Mechanics in Persian, this study demonstrates how Shadiyabadi's translation distances itself from al-Jazari's book. As Shadiyabadi's Wonders of Mechanics becomes the standard Persian translation of al-Jazari—appearing in subsequent Mughal and Iranian copies—the work of a scholar from a small North-Central Indian court links scholars, sultanates, and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of "regions" in North India and the Deccan during the 14th-16th centuries. It questions the usefulness of regional perspectives in historical interpretation, given the prevalence of regional developments and the growth of regionalism during this time. The article discusses the presence of small independent kingdoms in northern and central India and their impact on the geopolitical landscape. It also explores the historiography of regional polity, highlighting a shift towards more nuanced understandings of regional societies and polities. The text argues for a reevaluation of the historiography of medieval India, challenging the traditional narrative of the Delhi Sultanate and emphasizing the importance of considering multiple perspectives and sources to understand the regional dynamics of this period. [Extracted from the article]

The US psychologist Rona M. Field's book A Society on the Run (1973) offered a psychological account of the nature and effects of the Northern Irish Troubles at their peak in the early 1970s. The book was withdrawn shortly after publication by its publisher, Penguin Books Limited, and never reissued. Fields alleged publicly that the book had been suppressed by the British state, a claim that has often been treated uncritically. Local Northern Irish psychologists suggested that the book was taken off the market because of its scientific deficiencies. Rigorous book‐historical investigation using Penguin editorial fields reveals, however, that what might appear to be a case of state suppression, or an instance of disciplinary boundary work, can be explained instead by the commercial interests and professional standards of a publisher keen to preserve its reputation for quality and reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the efforts of Matthew Parker and his scholarly circle to understand the medieval books that he collected as archbishop of Canterbury. It argues that Parker made sense of his books by connecting them to what amounted to an emerging history of the book. That is, Parker began to piece together the formal features of different medieval books into a rough but increasingly refined timeline of the history of book production in order to contextualize any given manuscript. The evidence can be found scattered throughout Parker's library, in the form of annotations, transcripts of passages, copied illustrations, and printed books that offer a wealth of information about how Parker's team understood the books they handled. This documentation reveals how they combined scribal knowledge with textual information, to powerful ends. By connecting Parker's practices to contemporary developments in other areas of knowledge production, from alchemy to conjectural emendation, this article offers a new way forward for scholarly analysis of the early modern study of older books, especially for our analysis of early modern practices and paradigms that do not fit modern definitions of paleography and codicology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers news briefs related to various notices. Nathan Vedal won the prize for his book "The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge". The Institute for Advanced Study provides opportunities for scholars worldwide to pursue research, offering both stipendiary and non-stipendiary memberships. The Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews includes scholars from diverse disciplines.

In this article we analyze the design values of selected baby books published in England, the United States and Italy across 100 years. The examples we focus on are What is This? What is That? (1905) of the Dean's Rag books series, Pat the Bunny (1940), I PRELIBRI (1980), and Wiggle! March! (2009) of the Indestructibles series. We group these books into two pairs of simple or complex designs, based on either a drive for durability or the aim to provide a multisensory experience: the Dean's Rag books and the Indestructibles form one set, and Pat the Bunny and I PRELIBRI the second. We approach the books by examining the relationships among the materiality, narrative and formal design elements, the implied co-presence of a young child and adult care, issues of context and gender, and how the later examples remediate or rework the materials and beliefs of the earlier ones in a contemporary manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies carried out in Europe are of great importance in terms of the history of the Book of Dede Korkut studies. The present study is based on the analytical evaluation of studies conducted in Europe on the Book of Dede Korkut and in foreign languages spoken in Europe. For the list of academic studies in this article, previous bibliographic studies, European and USA-centered databases/online catalogs were utilized. The bibliographic list obtained was classified as "translations" and "selected other works". This study, which has a descriptive character in terms of presenting a bibliographic list on the Book of Dede Korkut, can also be accepted as an analytical review in terms of a holistic evaluation of the studies in question. The present study, which aims to bring the studies on the Book of Dede Korkut in foreign languages to the attention of scholars who read and write in Turkish, to determine the general tendencies of the Dede Korkut researches in Europe and to make a general evaluation based on these determinations, has the purpose of contributing to the corpus of the Book of Dede Korkut researches. In addition, in the light of the data and evaluations put forward, it can be considered as another aim of the article to direct new studies on the Book of Dede Korkut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, the author draws from The Brothers Karamazov, a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, to consider the idea of love and its relevance to burnout in modern medicine. They argue that active love, as espoused by one of Dostoevsky's characters, might help clinicians care for their patients even in moments of exhaustion or disillusion. Coherent with Dostoevsky's Christian background, the author examines active love alongside the Christian concept of grace and Simone Weil's concept of attention. These explorations may yield fresh insights for clinicians struggling with burnout in health care, as well as those striving to master the timeless art of caregiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores archaeological programmes on the BBC between 1922 and 1939 through an entangled approach to broadcast and printed talks. Supported by archival sources and programme schedules in The Radio Times and The Listener, it focuses on the intertwined archaeological, broadcasting and publishing careers of Charles Leonard Woolley based on his excavation at Ur in southern Iraq. This highlights the important place archaeology held in the interwar listening and reading market with the BBC offering high fees for a popular speaker. Incorporating periodical studies and aspects of book history demonstrates the importance of an integrated approach to media history to further our understanding of the relationship between media, science and the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of African Philosophy and Enactivist Cognition: The Space of Thought responds to four critiques of his book. After giving some context and history of the book, he addresses points raised by each of the readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes and analyzes the methods of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place , a digital humanities contribution to book history. Footprints collects and aggregates information about the movement of copies of Hebrew books and books of Judaica in other languages printed in the early modern period (roughly corresponding to the hand-press era) and follows evidence of their movement into the twenty-first century. It stores this information in a relational database in which users can run specific queries and delivers the results in a number of visual representations for analysis and interpretation. Footprints undertakes two concurrent and more open-ended aims: (1) the on-going assemblage of a dataset about post-print mobility based on evidence other than the printed text (e.g. marginalia, catalog records, archival letters, other printed texts); and (2) the creation and iterative refining of a scholarly instrument to analyze the dataset through computational methods and modes of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Jesuits considered the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth a missionary territory. This perception was linked to the exceptional writing and publishing activity. The Jesuits not only had about seven hundred editions of their writings published before 1620, they also established their own printing presses. This article identifies the main purposes of Jesuit publishing activity, demonstrates the Society's proficiency with various printed media and reflects on their role in the dissemination of printing craft throughout the Commonwealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article employs the Scottish Jesuit John Hay as a starting point for a wider exploration of the relationship between Jesuits and print, the theme of this special issue. Hay demonstrates how important print could be to a Jesuit's self-worth and identity. In this, as contemporary catalogs of Jesuit publications attest, he was not alone, but he was a controversial outlier. Hay's superiors prevented him from continuing a vociferous polemical exchange and appeared to guide him towards a more suitable subject: translations of missionary reports. Hay's career in print points to the importance of geography and context in shaping Jesuit publications, and to the conflicts between individual authorial projects and institutional restraints. His example shows above all that the commonplace equation of Jesuits with print requires urgent historical investigation. The essays presented here seek to remedy this oversight by paying attention to Jesuits as authors, printers, and readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distant reading promises access to "the great unread", which should allow scholars to rethink the history of literature. However, the rise in volume of data does not guarantee the understanding of a corpus and its relation to the literary population. This article discusses how a "complete" corpus of the 19th-century poetry books in Russian might be collected with account for historical data and potential survivorship bias. Even if bibliographical sources cannot provide a complete list of books printed in a given period, the amount of "incompleteness" can be directly estimated with the unseen species models. The estimation of survival ratios for printed poetry shows differences in the loss rate across different types of sources: with conventional editions, like books and anthologies, are well-preserved, while booklets and pamphlets are the largest expected source of loss. These findings allow us to estimate what an "exhaustive" corpus can look like and define the features of "the unread" and "unseen" inside it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are living through a cultural moment in which strident criticisms are being made of the ethical validity and utility of the discipline of the history of political thought (H.P.T.). In Whatmore, the subject has a champion who makes a bold case for H.P.T.'s importance, defends it against often mistaken criticisms, yet also incorporates the productive elements of recent critiques. Whatmore's confidence in H.P.T.'s ability to inform current political thinking stems from the tenets that "past generations have faced comparable predicaments" and past generations have "experienced everything, and nothing at all is new" (8). [Extracted from the article]

"The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible" is a collection of essays edited by Georgina Colby, Kaja Marczewska, and Leigh Wilson. The book explores the world of small presses in the UK and the US, with a focus on their history, artistry, and impact on the publishing industry. The essays cover a range of topics, including the relationship between small presses and modernist experiments, the publishing history of black poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and the role of small presses in promoting inclusive literature. While the book provides valuable insights into the small press sector, it acknowledges the challenge of comprehensively representing such a diverse and extensive industry. [Extracted from the article]

This document provides a list of contributors to the journal Book History. The contributors come from various academic backgrounds and specialize in different areas of research related to literature, publishing, and book history. Their research interests include children's literature, medical and erotic print networks, early modern printing, Canadian literatures, religion and reading, the history of the book trade, and African American studies. The contributors are affiliated with universities and research institutions in France, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. [Extracted from the article]

This article ends the special issue that aims to introduce the conception of "books known only by title" as a fruitful new focus of research. In this article, we include an annotated assortment of books known only by title. This collection of fifty such books is not exhaustive, but it may serve as an inspiration and a springboard for future researchers by demonstrating the breadth and rich diversity of this phenomenon. To aid such research, we have provided bibliographic information for each entry. We also discuss ways of categorizing these books and the challenges of those categorizations. The list is hardly exhaustive, but it is selective. Our examples center on the first millennium C.E., and they center on the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Certain entries may push at those boundaries but were included because of their special interest to us. Most notably, the classical texts of Greco-Roman culture were not included; nor were the canons of East Asia, or many other literary cultures across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixth-century prologue to a collection of Sibylline Oracles introduces the anthology according to a pattern recognizable in prologues to a number of texts of the period. It begins by praising the oracles for the great value they have for readers. But then, it introduces a problem: the oracles have suffered from destruction, loss, and corruption at several points in their history. The prologue goes on to offer a solution: the creation of the very anthology of Sibylline Oracles being produced. The rhetorical function of such a prologue is clear: It ensures the value of Sibylline Oracles while simultaneously demonstrating the utility, or even necessity of the newly created collection. Of interest in this study is the way the prologue introduces and illustrates the problem of destruction, loss, and corruption. In no less than three different vignettes, the prologue shows how the oracles are especially resistant to preservation. And these instances are not alone. A discourse of sibylline loss circulated around the textual world of antiquity. This study argues that the discourse is best understood within the framework of ancient ideals concerning intergenerational transfers of knowledge from fathers to sons, and some ancient theories of reproductive science, which held that only men contained reproductive potential, while women were empty vessels or fallow fields waiting to be filled. The article concludes that sibyls are so frequently sites of loss and destruction of knowledge because, as women, they are believed to lack the capacity to reproduce themselves both intellectually and biologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses Indian activist V. K. Krishna Menon's early political thought, formed during his years in Britain prior to Indian independence. It argues that this was more nuanced than has been previously characterized, with a range of influences and foundations. To analyse the formation and evolution of Menon's political thought, it looks at his political actions from this period, which largely fall into three areas; the India League, his engagement with the British Left, and his publishing career. His editorial work is what often tied together these strands of political action and was where his political thought manifested and expressed itself. This article analyses Menon's publishing career from roughly 1928 to 1938, highlighting the engagement of the three strands of his political action, before undertaking a book history of the India League text Condition of India. The article is a continuation of the expansion of book histories of twentieth-century empire, and argues for a reassessment of anti-colonial texts and figures along these lines, whilst also contributing to the growing historiographical trend that seeks to recast modern Indian political thought, as well as the politics of internationalist activists in interwar Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY: The book Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition (1968) is widely acclaimed as the masterwork of Joseph Wolpe, a great pioneer in the development of behavioural therapy, and is considered one of the most influential books in the history of clinical psychology. In this article, a brief biography of Wolpe is followed by a critical review of the book that illustrates his major contributions to the evolution of cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT) as the most empirically supported model of psychotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Isabel Hofmeyr's latest book begins with stories around and about the colonial port, though the initial spotlight is on decidedly nonnarrative texts such as classification lists of cargo items, customs handbooks, and what she intriguingly calls the "book-as-form," namely diaries and registers. These, she says, "offered one unwitting model of colonial writing in which a template from the metropolis was filled with local scribblings" (12). The port is, by definition, a liminal, watery, zone, with uncertain borders between land and sea, but which often acts as the site of border policing that regulates entry into and out of the colony and nation-state. It is a powerfully evocative place around which to set Hofmeyr's ambitious and wide-ranging book, and the port's polysemous implications allow her to intervene across a series of disparate fields: climate humanities, postcolonial studies, object-oriented ontology, South African literary histories, and studies of custom and copyright. It is a masterly and original revisioning of what it means to do book history, offering a radically new method of reading. Even more importantly, it proposes a new definition of the book as object: as customs cargo, as charismatic "thing" that creates literary canonicity far from the metropole, and as an epidemiological vector of "contamination" in the mind of the colonial customs official on the alert for seditious or obscene texts, among other suggestive meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While books typically dominate in the field of print and publishing history, what happens when we redirect our attention towards ephemeral texts? Employing a widely dispersed material source base, this article focuses on Chinese gazettes: daily publications that recorded official communications and state activities at the provincial and imperial levels during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Gazettes, rarely studied under the auspices of book history and existing on the periphery of xylographic book publishing, offer important revelations about the geography, economics, and procedures of print and scribal publishing in late imperial China. Their producers employed a diverse range of rarely recognized techniques including movable typography, wax stereotype printing, slat printing, and other adaptations. Like other non-book ephemera, publishing practices for gazettes were determined locally in vernacular contexts, and not dictated by the imperial state. Attention to ephemeral texts brings less recognized print techniques to the fore, challenging assumptions previously formed from the perspectives of book collecting and bibliographical studies. As digitization and cataloguing efforts reveal non-book texts preserved in private, library, and archival collections, continued attention to the material record is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]