In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: "It Makes a Fellow Feel Responsible!"Anglo-American Imperial Vistas and "The White Man's Burden" in McClure's Magazine, 1898–99 Laura Jeffries While Rudyard Kipling's immeasurably famous poem "The White Man's Burden" generally is seen as an example of British imperial literature, looking at the material context of its publication in American

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Humanism, Painting, and the Book as Physical Object in Renaissance Culture Craig Kallendorf (bio) In a famous letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, Niccolò Macchiavelli (1469–1527) explains that after he has spent the day dealing with all the toils and tribulations of public life, he would return home, retreat into his study, and "step

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reading as Patterned PlayEveryday Religion and the Spatialization of Doctrine in a Buddhist Board Game Charlotte Eubanks (bio) Let us take a moment to situate our text. It is cold. You are waiting with your family on the grounds of Tokuzen'in, outside a mid-sized Pure Land Buddhist temple in your neighborhood of the bustling merchant city

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The House of HarperMelville's Anti-Catholic Publisher James Emmett Ryan (bio) I can hardly imagine how under any circumstances the Harper brothers could have been other than good men. In ruminating over the reasons why they became the men they were, I find that much importance must be attached to the influence of Methodism, and still more

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Transatlantic Dickens; or, Travels Through Nineteenth-Century Book History in America David Bordelon (bio) "I was as fond as ever of reading, and somehow I managed to combine baby and book. Dickens's 'Old Curiosity Shop' was just then coming out in a Philadelphia weekly paper, and I read it with the baby playing at my feet, or lying across

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Visualizing the Stanley-Livingstone MeetingThe Birth and Lives of an Iconic Scene in Print Media and Beyond since 1872 Leila Koivunen (bio) The meeting between David Livingstone and Henry M. Stanley in the autumn of 1871 in the village of Ujiji, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania, was an incident in history that has

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Postwar American Poet's LibraryAn Archival Consideration with Charles Olson and the Maud/Olson Library Mary Catherine Kinniburgh (bio) Book history follows the principle of an entropic universe: cohesion succumbs to eventual diffusion. The flow of historical materials between people, institutions, and spaces renders our records "atomized

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Between Two MarketsGordon Murray, Ryerson Press, and the Publishing of Medical Autobiography in the 1960s Jennifer J. Connor (bio) Canadian surgeon Gordon Murray (1894–1976) envisaged his life story as a two-volume publication, up to 1949 in the first volume, and from 1949 to 1962 in its sequel. The Ryerson Press of Toronto produced both

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Forgetting Fiction: An Oral History of Reading(Centred on Interviews in South London, 2014–15) Shelley Trower (bio) What do you remember about the first, or the last novel you read? Can you remember the plot, its characters, or even its title? In a project designed to explore what people remember about fiction they have read, "Memories

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Lost Erotica of James West Patrick Spedding (bio) On the cold, cloudy, and damp afternoon of Saturday 3 April 1773, on the eighth day of the sale of "the Curious and Truly Valuable Library of the Late James West"—one-time President of The Royal Society and one of the original trustees of the British Museum—three particularly important

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Role and Function of Author Interviews in the Contemporary Anglophone Literary Field Rebecca Roach (bio) As my title suggests, this article examines interviews with authors today. While the phrase "author interview" might connote the highly-edited examples of the Paris Review "Art of Fiction" series or an onstage interview at a literary

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors David Bordelon is Professor of English at Ocean County College in Toms River, New Jersey. His publications include essays and chapters on nineteenth-century popular fiction, American book history, and graphic narratives. Mohamed Cheriet is Full Professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at University of Quebec's Ecole

Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research

Abstract:This essay addresses two issues, one bearing on scholarly method, the other on what might be called the aesthetic and political character of a literature that embraces failure as a necessary condition of its work rather than perfection as an aspiring goal. Melville’s work, in particular Moby-Dick, provides the exemplary case in each instance. Implicit in the argument is the view that American

Abstract:In November 1888, influential printer and engraver Emery Walker gave a lecture on historical typefaces to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which featured lantern slide enlargements of early printed typographic examples. These enlargements prompted William Morris to try his hand at type design. This article reconsiders Morris’s turn to typography and printing through a focus on both

Abstract:This overview presents a critical examination of the existing body of scholarship on textbooks and their production and reception. Textbooks are complex pedagogical artifacts imbued with varied literary style and educational substance. I argue that the methods of book history have the potential to reinvigorate textbook scholarship, and that there is still considerable room for growth in the

Abstract:This essay considers the relationship between scrapbooks and archival research by focusing on one of the most influential Shakespearean scholars of the nineteenth century: James Orchard Halliwell. Over his long career, he compiled hundreds of scrapbooks filled with cuttings from rare books and manuscripts. Halliwell’s scrapbook practice drew on the emergent discipline of archeology to establish

Abstract:This article uses Dutch auction catalogues to trace the eighteenth-century reception and circulation of the works of the prominent natural scientist Maria Sibylla Merian. It opens up discussion of book history methodologies by demonstrating how auction catalogues can be used to study the public personas of collectors, book ownership, authorial reputation, the literary market, and reading practices

Abstract:Historians of American tourism have agreed that Gideon Davison’s 1822 The Fashionable Tour; or, A Trip to the Springs, Niagara, Quebeck, and Boston, in the Summer of 1821 was the first American tourist guidebook. This article identifies generic precedents for Davison’s guidebook—particularly transatlantic eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century genre of the road book—in order to understand

Abstract:Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is one of the most prestigious and influential publishing houses in the United States—and it was founded and has been largely staffed by Jews. These Knopf, Inc. staff members were regularly faced with the question of what kind of books about Jews should be published by a nonsectarian house like theirs, with famously high artistic and commercial standards. Thus the extensive

Abstract:The London-based publisher John Maxwell established a global network of distribution in eleven countries to market Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s magazine Belgravia in the 1860s–70s. This cosmopolitan network is particularly significant as it helps expose the tensions of the transnational trade and the reshuffling of geographical categories operated by an evolving business model. The essay discusses

Abstract:This paper examines at the physical traces of cognition left on papyrus manuscripts from Graeco-Roman Egypt. It borrows from theories developed in the cognitive sciences and philosophy which extend cognition beyond the brain to view it as a cooperation between mind and environment. Examined from this perspective, the classic opposition between scribe as wilful editor and scribe as pure medium

Abstract:Lewis Carroll’s Alice books advocate a playful mode of reading driven by curiosity rather than dutifulness. Yet Carroll considered dutiful reading the business of life, and life as a worryingly finite period within which to read as much as possible. These anxieties are particularly pronounced in his understudied fin-de-siècle writings, which speak directly to the threat of information overload

Abstract:What makes a text “transnational”? This article examines two historical intervals of the translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress (published in England in 1678). One interval hinges on Isabel Hofmeyr’s 2004 The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which traces the translation and indigenization of the text in colonial and postcolonial Africa. The other interval

Abstract:This essay argues that Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie shows how various forms of paper such as records, licensures, newspapers, and credentials altered late nineteenth-century American conceptions of identity. No longer was identity tied primarily to a person’s word, but how one was presented and preserved on paper began to matter much more significantly at the turn of the century

Abstract:Reading is a core concern of book historians, and never more so than now as the internet’s characteristic interactivity expands the reader’s role. This article takes the reader as its central focus to examine not just uses of the internet to comment upon reading after the fact, but also how online reading formations mediate the act of reading itself. The burgeoning phenomenon of online book

Abstract:Constantine Cavafy, who identified as “Hellenic” but lived in Egypt, never published a commercial book. Instead, he circulated hundreds of copies of a dozen different hand-made editions whose assemblage was radically fluid: they utilized multiple bindings, drew together multiple media, experimented with alternative orderings of the poems, and shifted through multiple imprints and revisions

Surveys have often been used to find out what children were reading in any given time period. This article examines a range of surveys taken over the 1940s and 1950s in Australia and New Zealand, focusing on W. J. Scott's 1947 survey of New Zealand children's reading habits, and Connell, Francis, and Skilbeck's account of Australian adolescents' reading habits published in 1957. Rather than focusing

Abstract:"Babylon Revisited," universally regarded as one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's most accomplished stories, was first published in the Saturday Evening Post on 21 February 1931. Readers of the story in the Post encountered the text within a nexus of bibliographic codes – from the placement of the story in the magazine, to the illustrations that accompany it, to the advertisements and other materials

This paper analyzes how the "particular symbolic fortunes" of Canada's most widely recognized literary prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, undergo what James English calls "capital intraconversion"––how they are "culturally 'laundered'" through their association with Frontier College, Canada's longest-running adult literacy organization. While the Giller initially benefitted from fashioning itself

The transatlantic book trade between Spain and Spanish America during the colonial period has received a great deal of academic attention, yet the same cannot be said for the Philippines. Though some scholars have mentioned the arrival of certain books to the islands, no one has attempted to systematically document the movement of books across the Pacific to the archipelago. To rectify this substantial

In the eighteenth-century English publishing trades, a master could be convicted of seditious libel even if a servant sold libelous items without the master's knowledge or consent. Several trials early in the century highlighted the injustice of this situation, and when coupled with changing views about the nature of servants' work, a debate ensued about a jury's right to consider fully the intent

This paper argues that the study of Ottoman printing developed from the European experience of print, and that this history continues to impact contemporary scholarship on the topic unduly. To illustrate this point, the paper provides a factual overview for incidents of printing among Ottomans and compares them to their historiographical portrayal. It then goes on to chart the life-cycle of the rumor

This article foregrounds materiality in examining Henry Highland Garnet's 1848 volume, which includes two texts of black militancy—a reprint of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829, 1830) and Garnet's Address to the Slaves (1843). My argument situates Garnet's Address within the volume in which it appeared, considers Garnet's role as compiler, and recognizes the book's

This article examines the "communication circuit" of Spenser St. John's Hayti; or, The Black Republic. In this, the most widely read work on Haiti at the close of the nineteenth century, St. John helped to crystallise ideas about that country as steeped in Vodou, and quickly "decaying" into a condition of barbarism. As the book "travelled" around the Atlantic, it was read by radically different audiences

This article examines the "communication circuit" of Spenser St. John's Hayti; or, The Black Republic. In this, the most widely read work on Haiti at the close of the nineteenth century, St. John helped to crystallise ideas about that country as steeped in Vodou, and quickly "decaying" into a condition of barbarism. As the book "travelled" around the Atlantic, it was read by radically different audiences

Abstract:Katherine Cecil Thurston's novel, John Chilcote, MP (London: Blackwood, 1904), very quickly became "the novel of the season" across the English-speaking world, but the status and meaning of this popularity was not at all clear to contemporary readers and critics. This essay traces the reception of John Chilcote, MP and argues that its uncertain literary status is far from extraordinary in

Posters with graffiti are among the most visible examples of vandalism against Postwar Britain's nanny state; this essay focuses on more off-the-wall exploits by 1960s public library prankster and playwright Joe Orton. After spending six months in prison for defacing library books, Orton emerged to become one of Postwar Britain's most important dramatists. Linking histories of libraries, propaganda

This article traces the development of studies of book history in the German language from the 1840s almost to the present day. It demonstrates how the community developed from being a small circle of librarians to scholars of all departmental backgrounds. It traces the diversification of the field and changes in perspective upon the subject of the book. It also demonstrates how the discipline proliferated

Abstract:This article examines the publication history of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, which has received only occasional scholarly attention. Recent publications of the book, from both W. W. Norton & Company and Oxford University Press, reprint the first edition of the text without mentioning changes to the second printing. Likewise, the book's editor has been widely misidentified by

In 1900 the Swedish botanist Carl Lindman was assigned responsibility for the republication of a one-hundred-year old illustrated flora, J. W. Palmstruch's Svensk botanik (1802–43). The old hand-colored copperplates were meticulously examined, corrected, and supplied with new magnified details and then printed in color lithographs. This article closely examines, from a book historical perspective,

This paper examines anthologization in late nineteenth century in Japan, and has broad appeal to those studying concepts of authorship, the history of the publishing industry, archives and provenance, literary history, the study of fandom and fan culture, and Asian studies, in addition to the specific author and editors under discussion. The paper tells the story behind the canonization, via print

This article investigates how a loose network of Victorian book collectors, bibliographers, self-styled sexual scientists, and pornographers represented the obscene as a multifarious category of print, encompassing a generically, historically, and linguistically varied range of works about (or associated in the public imagination with) sex. By examining this elite network's reading, writing, collection

This article argues that scholars must understand mass digitized texts as assemblages of new editions, subsidiary editions, and impressions of their historical sources, and that these various parts require sustained bibliographic analysis and description. To adequately theorize any research conducted in large-scale text archives—including research that includes primary or secondary sources discovered

This article traces the afterlives of the papers of the Anglo-Prussian intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (ca.1600-1662), incorporating insights from recent studies of the archive and material history. Beginning with the idea that Hartlib’s papers are a social artefact, in the sense that their story is inextricable from the stories of those that have possessed, consulted, used (and abused) them, this paper

Concentrating on the rich tradition of graphic culture that permeated Scotland’s universities during the long eighteenth century, this essay argues that student lecture notebooks were a sophisticated form of scribal media. I reveal that they were inscribed, assembled, bound, bought, sold, disassembled, edited, annotated, pirated, plagiarized, and circulated in a manner that transformed them into tools

This paper makes a methodological and theoretical intervention into the direction(s) in which the field of book history is progressing. It is argued that is essential to reaffirming two somewhat neglected aspects of Robert Darnton’s communications circuit—its holism and its internationalism—as we contemplate the future of the discipline today. To get a clearer sense of the stakes involved, and to approach

Starting during the colonial period, the process of discovering, assessing, and describing Arabic manuscript collections scattered across West Africa helped debunk the myth of a continent steeped in oral tradition and ritual. This, in turn, paved the way for a growing number of initiatives from the 1960s onwards, particularly in manuscript-rich areas in Mali, Mauritania, and northern Nigeria. Mainly

Abstract:This article explores the landscape of retail bookstores in New York City between 1820 and 1860, tracking patterns of growth and trade through original maps and examining the material and symbolic significance of the built environment of bookstores. Antebellum New York City was an incubator for the emerging forms and functions of the retail bookstore. These bookstores sold more than books—not

This article interrogates the practices of authorship by John Barrow in his anonymously published narrative The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of HMS Bounty: Its Cause and Consequences (1831). Sources documenting the publication of The Eventful History demonstrate both Barrow’s motivations for anonymity and the strategies used to maintain the work’s authority. Authority was achieved

Founded in 1841, the London Library occupied a unique position in the intellectual landscape of Victorian London, offering books “in all departments of knowledge and in all languages” for loan to subscribing members. John Stuart Mill was a founder lifetime member of the library. A forensic examination of his membership is presented. Bibliographic details of volumes borrowed from the library by Mill

This paper considers British private subscription libraries and their European (near) equivalents at a turbulent period of history. Following the French Revolution, many governments tried to prevent libraries from acquiring inflammatory and heretical literature: “infidel books”. In Britain arguments about book selection were confined to individual library committees, but governments abroad took direct

Abstract:In the 1920s and 1930s, pulp science fiction editor Hugo Gernsback taught readers of his Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories magazines that “scientifiction,” as he called it, was not mere mechanical romance but a scientific enterprise in itself, with the power to shape and advance technology and the physical sciences. In his philosophy, the mundane act of reading constituted participation in

The study of literary anonymity and pseudonymity outside of our existing disciplinary infrastructure raises a variety of questions for book history scholars. How can we study areas of print culture not organized in terms of the relationship between authors and texts, and/or resisting such organization altogether? How can our analyses progress critical debates arising from our existing author-centered

Abstract:Theories of the public sphere and of imagined political communities of shared reading have had lasting effects on the theoretical conceptualization of Americanist book history, but they also largely overlook the materiality of texts in ways that early and nineteenth-century American readers and writers did not. This essay reads early and nineteenth-century American texts about paper that show

British daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth century, ballooning in size and reorganizing staffing and production. Newspaper historians generally explain this era in terms of strategic choices by publishers or the pressures of cultural and historical forces, but a data-mining experiment on the Gale Cengage Times Digital Archive shows that growth of the London Times followed

This essay contends that the methodological questions raised by recent scholarship on digital archives and databases require reframing the selection of materials as a process of data creation. Using the physical archives of nineteenth-century American amateur newspapers, it treats the process of data creation as a heuristic for understanding the relationship between an archive or a set of archives