Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I THE QUANTITY AND NATURE OF PRINTED MATTER
- PART II ECONOMIC, LEGAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
- PART III THE TECHNOLOGIES AND AESTHETICS OF BOOK PRODUCTION
- PART IV THE BOOK TRADE AND ITS MARKETS
- V BOOKS AND THEIR READERS
- I RELIGIOUS BOOKS
- II LITERATURE AND THE CULTURE OF LETTERS
- III SPECIALIST BOOKS AND MARKETS
- 38 Collecting and the antiquarian book trade
- 39 The Stationers’ Company and the almanack trade
- 40 Children’s books and school-books
- 41 Music
- 42 Maps, charts and atlases in Britain, 1690–1830
- 43 Enlarging the prospects of happiness: travel reading and travel writing
- 44 Law books
- 45 Philosophical books
- 46 Scientific and medical books, 1695–1780
- 47 Scientific and medical books, 1780–1830
- 48 ‘Radical publishing’
- 49 Mining the archive: a guide to present and future book-historical research resources
- Abbreviations used in bibliography
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontispiece
- Plate section
- References
49 - Mining the archive: a guide to present and future book-historical research resources
from III - SPECIALIST BOOKS AND MARKETS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2010
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I THE QUANTITY AND NATURE OF PRINTED MATTER
- PART II ECONOMIC, LEGAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
- PART III THE TECHNOLOGIES AND AESTHETICS OF BOOK PRODUCTION
- PART IV THE BOOK TRADE AND ITS MARKETS
- V BOOKS AND THEIR READERS
- I RELIGIOUS BOOKS
- II LITERATURE AND THE CULTURE OF LETTERS
- III SPECIALIST BOOKS AND MARKETS
- 38 Collecting and the antiquarian book trade
- 39 The Stationers’ Company and the almanack trade
- 40 Children’s books and school-books
- 41 Music
- 42 Maps, charts and atlases in Britain, 1690–1830
- 43 Enlarging the prospects of happiness: travel reading and travel writing
- 44 Law books
- 45 Philosophical books
- 46 Scientific and medical books, 1695–1780
- 47 Scientific and medical books, 1780–1830
- 48 ‘Radical publishing’
- 49 Mining the archive: a guide to present and future book-historical research resources
- Abbreviations used in bibliography
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontispiece
- Plate section
- References
Summary
Students of book history working in the period that this volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain investigates – from the definitive end of the Printing Act (1695) to the more imprecise advent (c.1830) of the book as an industrial object produced and financed by specialist commercial publishers – are fortunate in the wealth of bibliographical and book-historical scholarship at their disposal. The more than 2,000 items comprising the bibliography of this history speak volumes about the richness and diversity of what has already been written, so that any scholar contributing so much as a photon to our illumination might say with Newton, ‘If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ In this brief chapter, I would like to gesture toward some of the resources – primary in several senses – for the conduct of book history, 1695–1830, and to highlight some archival research projects that most need to be conducted. Such a highly attenuated survey, tendered in the hope of stimulating further undertakings, must perforce be indicative rather than exhaustive.
Undoubtedly the most fundamentally important resource for bibliographical and book-historical research in the eighteenth century is The English shorttitle catalogue (ESTC). ESTC is sometimes usefully supplemented by The hand press book database, produced by the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL). As the sole extant online union catalogue for European hand-press books produced c.1455 to 1830, its reach into the early decades of the nineteenth century is especially welcome. Similarly, the broad scope and chronological range of WorldCat, the OCLC Online Union Catalog, makes it highly useful.
Keywords
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- The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain , pp. 849 - 859Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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