AS PART OF A SESSION at the 1977 Annual Meeting of the Association of American University Presses, five scholarly publishers prepared business plans for an imagined work entitled No Time for Houseplants, by Purvis Mulch. The University Presses at Chicago, MIT, North Carolina, Texas and Toronto each presented detailed procedures for the acquisition, editing, design, production and marketing of this made-up book. Published as One Book / Five Ways a year later, the results of the experiment illustrate how the physical embodiment of a single verbal text can display quite different stylistic and bibliographical characteristics. Each press brought to the experiment a wealth of expertise based on decades of successful publishing. The University of Chicago Press, founded in 1891, had the longest track record of the group, while the University of Texas, created in 1950, was the relative newcomer. Considered together, the exercise provides an opportunity, as Joyce Kachergis observes, to ‘see the differences and similarities between equally valid and startlingly different solutions’.

Recent scholarship on the history of printing and publishing, and the concurrent growth of interest in material culture, especially the impact of books on society, all underscore the integral part played by physical characteristics in our perception of a text. The MIT edition of No Time for Houseplants would be a fundamentally different work from one issued by Texas or Toronto. Furthermore, had the participating presses taken the experiment to the next step and actually published No Time for Houseplants, the editorial processes in each establishment would have necessarily generated textually distinct editions: individual editors have different ideas on how to make problem passages clearer; house styles dictating form vary from press to press; punctuation and spelling conventions change when crossing the Atlantic or the US–Canada border; even the book's title would be subject to revision.

Books, as material manifestations of and durable witnesses to, verbal texts, make available to the scholar a dizzying array of complex systems of meaning. Yet any research that considers these systems of meaning must depend first and foremost on physical evidence that is at times confusing and contradictory. In the English-speaking realms, making sense of books and book forms has been a focus of scholarly concern for nearly 300 years.