Week 1: What is the History of Books?
Seminar Questions
- What is the history of the book?
- How is a book printed, and why does this matter to the historian?
- How can the history of the book contribute to the history of empire (and vice versa)?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of Darnton’s ‘communication circuit’?
Seminar Readings
* Darnton, Robert, ‘What Is the History of Books?’ Daedalus, 111 (1982)
* Mosley, James, ‘The Technologies of Print’, in Suarez, Michael and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Book: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2013)
* Burton, Antoinette, and Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Introduction: The Spine of Empire’, in Burton and Hofmeyr (eds), Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham, NC, 2014)
* Withers, Charles W. J and Miles Ogborn, ‘Introduction: Book Geography. Book History’, in Withers, Charles W. J and Miles Ogborn (eds), Geographies of the Book (London, 2010)
Additional Readings
Altick, Richard, English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago, IL, 1957)
Boehmer, E., Kunstmann, R., Mukhopadhyay, P., Rogers, A. (eds), The Global Histories of Books: Methods and Practices (London, 2017)
Burton, Antoinette, and Isabel Hofmeyr (eds), Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham, NC, 2014)
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2012)
Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972)
Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL, 2000)
Keighren, Innes M, 'Geographies of the Book: Review and Prospect', Geography Compass, 7 (2013)
Klancher, Jon P, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison, WI 1987)
Michael F. Suarez, and H. R. Woudhuysen, The Book: A Global History (Oxford, 2013)
Withers, Charles W. J and Miles Ogborn (eds), Geographies of the Book (London, 2010)
Seminar Powerpoint
Seminar Books
Nineteenth-century quarter leather binding with marbled boards.
The Penny Magazine (1832-45)
Reader's notes in French.
The Penny Magazine (1832-45)
'George J. Hilton', owner's inscription.