scholarly journals Thinking Through the History of the Book

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Howsam
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Technological Determinism ◽  
Conceptual Category ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Form ◽  
Organic Change

An impressive body of meticulous scholarship in the history of the book has led scholars to reject outmoded models of revolutionary change and technological determinism, and instead to explore themes of evolution and organic change. Similarly, the old unitary and Eurocentric book history is being supplanted by a series of parallel narratives where the focus is on human adaptation of new technologies to newly felt needs and fresh marketing opportunities. The article suggests that the study of book history is a way of thinking about how people have given material form to knowledge and stories. It highlights some particularly ambitious recent arguments, and emphasizes research, theory and pedagogy as the means to a wider understanding. Rather than being an academic discipline, book history is identified as an “interdiscipline,” an intellectual space where scholars practicing different disciplinary approaches and methodologies address the same capacious conceptual category.

Introduction to AJS Review Symposium: The Jewish Book: Views and Questions

AJS Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-357
Author(s):  
Adam Shear
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Book History ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
History Of ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Impact

In the last several decades, the study of reading, writing, and publishing has emerged as a lively field of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Historians and literary scholars have engaged with a number of questions about the impact of changes in technology on reading practices and particularly on the relationship between new technologies of reading and writing and social, religious, and political change. The new field of the “history of the book,” merging aspects of social and intellectual history with the tools of analytical and descriptive bibliography, came to the fore in the second half of the twentieth century at the same time that the emergence of new forms of electronic media raised many questions for social scientists about the ways that technological change have affected aspects of human communication in our time. Meanwhile, while the field of book history emerged initially among early modernists interested in the impact of printing technology, the issues raised regarding authorship, publication, relations between orality and the written word, dissemination, and reception have enriched the study of earlier periods.

scholarly journals Human, not too Human: Technology, Rites, and Identity

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Author(s):  
Stefania Operto
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Conceptual Category ◽  
Human Behaviors ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract In the social sciences, the term “rite” identifies a set of practices and knowledge that contribute to forming the cultural models of a given society and has the aim of transmitting values and norms, institutionalization of roles, recognition of identity and social cohesion. This article examines the relationship between technology and ritual and the transformations in society resulting from the diffusion of new technologies. Technological progress is not a novelty in human development; though it is the first time in the history of humanity that technology has pervaded the lives of individuals and their relationships. The analyses conducted seem to show that the ritual is not intended to disappear but to change; to change forms and places. Postmodern societies have undergone profound modifications, but the conceptual category of ritual continues to be applicable to many human behaviors and it would be a mistake to support the idea that rituals are weakening.

scholarly journals A Companion to the History of the Book, 2nd edition. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds.

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Jessie Sherwood
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Book History ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
History Of

When he declared, “the physical book really has had a 500-year run” in a 2009 interview, Jeff Bezos might well be forgiven for thinking that the book began with Gutenberg. Histories of the book have tended to give the impression that it emerged with movable type and existed largely, if not exclusively, in Mainz, New York, London, Paris, Venice, and environs. The first edition to A Companion to the History of the Book, first published in 2007, was a welcome, albeit modest, corrective to this narrow focus. While the bulk of its attention was on print in Western Europe and the United States, it incorporated chapters on manuscripts, books in Asia and Latin America, and the Hebraic and Islamic traditions, broadening the scope of book history both chronologically and geographically.

Insides and Outsides

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Alberto Campagnolo
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Historical Information ◽  
Big Picture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Book Covers

Because of the prominence of book covers, the history of bookbindings has long been synonymous with the history of bookbinding decoration. These “outsides” of books carry plentiful information, but so do their often-ignored “insides,” since bookbinding structures and materials changed with time and geography. Beautiful decorations catch the eyes of many, but binding structures can also be read as full of historical information. New technologies make old books available in an unprecedented manner, but in configurations that have mostly ignored their original forms: complete book digitization requires more than photographs and transcriptions. The digital now offers new possibilities: books can be presented in the manner of the cubist painter, offering their outsides and insides concurrently. Through digital means, books as objects can begin to be read more wholly, leading to a better understanding of the big picture of the history of the book.

Literary Debt

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1480-1488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Natural Habitat ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Book Production ◽  
North African ◽  
The North ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of

Postcolonial Publishing and Indigenous Publishing, like Hegel's Africa, are Often Imagined to be Without a History. Indeed, in A Companion to the History of the Book, published by Wiley Blackwell in 2009 and heralded by Adrian Johns as particularly exemplary in that the editors “take the term book in a broad sense to include not only codex volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals, ephemera, and even ancient Babylonian clay tablets” (Review of Companion 782), no region of the global South gets a chapter to itself, and Africa gets only two entries in the index: in a one-sentence remark about Middle Eastern and North African Islamic book production before 1100 and in a parenthetical reference to slavery in a chapter on libraries that mentions colonization. Johns himself has written a huge work on “the book”—that is, about early modern Britain (Nature). In David Finkelstein and Alistair MacCleery's recently reprinted An Introduction to Book History, “the book” is unapologetically introduced as a Western form: the introduction makes it clear that the topic of the volume is overwhelmingly “Western European traditions of social communication through writing …” (30). The definite article is fearless in book history and occludes the history and travels of the book elsewhere, reinstalling it, time after time, in the North Atlantic regions that seem to be its natural habitat.

UNESCO and the Book in the Developing World

2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Brouillette
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Developing World ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Global History ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Media System ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Developed World

This article establishes the importance of UNESCO’s role within the global history of the book. Its focus is the research on the book in the developing world that UNESCO sponsored in the 1960s and 1970s, and how that research supported claims that government should intervene in book and media industries in order to shift the disastrous imbalance in the global media system. It shows how these claims were undermined by the interests of the developed world and sidelined by the emerging discipline of book history.

scholarly journals Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing Bibliographical Alterities

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Drucker
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Book History ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Graphic Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Current Practices

To conceptualize a future history of the book we have to recognize that our understanding of the bibliographical object of the past is challenged by the ontologically unbound, distributed, digital, and networked conditions of the present. As we draw on rich intellectual traditions, we must keep in view the need to let go of the object-centered approach that is at the heart of book history. My argument begins, therefore, with a few assertions. First, that we have much to learn from the scholarship on Old and New World contact that touches on bibliography, document studies, and book history for formulating a non-object centered conception of what a book is. Second, that the insights from these studies can be usefully combined with a theory of the “conditional” document to develop the model of the kinds of distributed artifacts we encounter on a daily basis in the networked conditions of current practices. Finally, I would suggest that this model provides a different conception of artifacts (books, documents, works of textual or graphic art), one in which reception is production and therefore all materiality is subject to performative engagement within varied, and specific, conditions of encounter.

scholarly journals National Histories of the Book in a Transnational Age

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyn Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Book History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Traditional Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
National Book ◽  
The Impact

In the 1990s and 2000s, national histories of the book achieved a double milestone: firstly, they marked the coming to maturity of the subdiscipline of the history of the book itself, especially in English-speaking countries; at the same time they established landmarks in the cultural history of their own countries. My presentation will discuss the fate and the impact of national book histories from the point of view of the History of the Book in Australia, which I coedited and to which I contributed several chapters. Two historiographical events have challenged the agenda of national book histories. The ‘transnational turn’ has thrown into question the fundamental framework which governed their conception and production. To a lesser extent, the growth of the digital humanities also makes a radical departure from the ‘traditional’ research methods of the 1990s. My presentation will assess the legacy of the History of the Book in Australia so far, and ask whether national book history has any role to play in the age of transnational approaches. I will suggest in answer to my own question that there remains a place at the table for all three levels—transnational, national and also micro-histories of the book.

Institutional Forme

2020 ◽  
pp. 245-259
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Todd Knight
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Book History ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Aesthetic Sense ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores prospects for a reenergized history of the book amid the recent turn to a capacious formalism in literary studies that encompasses the sociopolitical reverberations of “form” in the traditional, aesthetic sense. The chapter argues that a key opening for book historians is the new formalists’ emphasis on the organizing power of institutions, something that book history implicitly engages in the course of its work but that literary criticism too often ignores or treats with hostility. Rereading D. F. McKenzie’s paradigm-setting proposals for a research program in the history of the book and using as a case-study that most literary of institutions, the library, I advocate a turn away from the field’s particularist mantra, “forms effect meaning,” toward McKenzie’s forgotten parallel claim that a sociology of texts “alerts us to the roles of institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and present.”

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