Abstract
This contribution examines some of the key themes that recur throughout the volume, including: the materiality of books; the social interactions that gave books their meaning in sociable contexts, and that facilitated their distribution; the relevance of censorship; and the nature of the spaces in which those social interactions took place. The author suggests that book history, far from being a specialized discipline restricted to the history of texts, provides a useful tool with which to explore the history of human culture and human action more generally.
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Notes
- 1.
R. Darnton, ‘What is the history of books?’, Daedalus 1982, 63–83; also The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1996), 182–183 and The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York, 1990), ch. 7; see also W. Undorf, From Gutenberg to Luther: Transnational Print Cultures in Scandinavia 1450–1525 (Leiden, 2012), esp. 311–320.
- 2.
Not Dead Things: The Dissemination of Popular Print in Britain, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500–1900, ed. R. Harms, J. Raymond and J. Salman (Leiden, 2013), especially ‘Introduction: The distribution and dissemination of popular print’, 1–29.
- 3.
D.R. Carlson, ‘A theory of the early English printing firm: Jobbing, book publishing, and the problem of productive capacity in Caxton’s Work’, in Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, ed. W. Kuskin (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), 35–68; P. Stallybrass, ‘“Little Jobs”: Broadsides and the printing revolution’, in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. S. Alcorn Baron, E.N. Lindquist and E.F. Shevlin (Amherst, 2007), 315–341; M. Jenner, ‘London’, in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. Joad Raymond (Oxford, 2011), 294–307.
- 4.
See also M. Nevitt, ‘Books in the News in Cromwellian England’, forthcoming in Media History, 2017.
- 5.
E.L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979); A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998).
- 6.
On publishing and the law, see also Ian Williams’s unpublished paper ‘Becoming Normal? Law Printing in the 1630s’. On international censorship, Joad Raymond, ‘Les libelles internationaux à la période moderne: étude préliminaire’, Etudes Episémè, 26 (2014), <http://episteme.revues.org./297>; and for an account of the chilling effects, see idem, ‘Censorship in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century England: Milton’s Areopagitica’, in Oxford Handbook to English Law and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. L. Hutson (Oxford, 2017), 507–528.
- 7.
G. Campbell et al., Milton and the Manuscript of ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ (Oxford, 2007), 5–38.
- 8.
The National Archives, SP 29/408 f.278.
- 9.
See also Media History, 21.1 (2015), Special issue on ‘Paper Scarcity and its Impact on Print Culture/Historical Parallels with the Spectrum Scarcity Debate’, ed. J. Kittler, J. Nerone and J. Raymond.
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Raymond, J. (2017). Matter, Sociability and Space: Some Ways of Looking at the History of Books. In: Bellingradt, D., Nelles, P., Salman, J. (eds) Books in Motion in Early Modern Europe. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53366-7_13
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