The History of the Book (Yearbook of English Studies (45) 2015)

Edited by Sandro Jung and Stephen Colclough, the 2015 number of the MHRA Yearbook of English Studies features contributions that investigate the materiality of texts, their advertising and marketing, as well as readerly engagements with different works that are, as part of their attempts at classification, conceived of as acts of canon formation. Extending from the late seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, the contributions revolve around questions related to the reading and interpretation of texts, the shaping of authorial reputations, and the role that booksellers and/or publishers played in introducing new print objects into a highly competitive marketplace for print commodities. Devoted to the subject of 'The History of the Book', the essays in this volume examine texts that range from the cheaply produced ego documents for daily use (such as almanacs and pocket diaries) to the conceptual artist Brian Dettmer's extremely limited edition sculpted volumes. Essays investigate the functions of printed visual culture, the significance of illustrations for cultural literacy, and the interrelationship between engraved image and typographical text. Booksellers' decisions to promote paratextual interpretations of literary texts are discussed in contributions on eighteenth-century anthologies, the illustrations to Thomas Baker's Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, and early twentieth-century illustrated editions of Shakespeare. While paratextual readings furnished by editors and designers are central to a number of the essays, the uses of print forms, as well as the collecting of books, are investigated by others. Contributors consider seventeenth-century illustrated media such as commemorative broadsheets and offer considerations of the significance of jobbing printing and paper-based ephemera in the eighteenth-century marketplace. Essays on Charles Dickens and Catharine Sedgwick study the transatlantic travels of books -- often through the medium of pirate editions -- and the ways in which publishers sought to make a profit by reprinting works, both with and without the authors' permission. The volume's concern with the production, history and different ways of reading literature is illustrated by detailed examinations of both canonical works in codex format and alternative print objects not usually considered by literary historians.