This essay uses concepts drawn from the field of New Materialism, which posits that material objects possess forms of agency that shape human culture rather than just being passively acted upon, to move the history of the book beyond common assumptions that “the book” is a physically coherent and obviously identifiable entity. Looking closely at how the transportation infrastructure of the nineteenth-century print market determined and complicated American understandings of what a book was, it uses the legal and aesthetic debates triggered by evolving distinctions between bound and unbound texts to explore the historically malleable nature of “the book.” Concentrating particularly on the US postal system, which constantly struggled to define and regulate the printed matter passing through it during the nineteenth century as publishers sought to access cheaper circulation rates by presenting book-like material in periodical formats, this study of quasi-books ranges from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819–1820) through the “mammoth weeklies” of the 1840s to the “Library” series of the 1870s.

This chapter examines the production, circulation, and reception of books in the digital landscape, comprising a complicated entanglement between bricks-and-mortar bookstores and digital technologies that transforms every aspect of the way books are produced, published, distributed, and experienced. The history of the relationship between bookselling, reading devices, publishing and printing platforms, and the shape of the literary marketplace in the digital age reveals elements of the publishing circuit that are examined along with the increasing platformization of cultural production. The digital literary sphere affects authorship and the remuneration authors receive; the increased conflation between publishing and bookselling; the tension between e-books and print, and online versus bricks-and-mortar stores; and the relationship between fan fiction and literary consumption. The literary marketplace in the digital age is one marked by flux, but also the rise of new forms of access and new meaning for books and literature in the digital age.

This chapter positions digital editions within a broader and longer tradition of textual scholarship, book history, and scholarly editions. In it we consider the spatial, conceptual, and methodological approaches to editorial practice used in print editions and show the ways in which digital scholarly editions both extend and remake existing editorial paradigms and practices. In particular, we consider three elements of digital editions: networked structures, interactive reading, and multimodality. Throughout the chapter we consider both the potential and the ongoing challenges of making and using digital editions.

Goldsmith’s library is suggestive of his wide interests and of his status as a participant in the circulation of Enlightenment thought. His books were auctioned off after his death and they were advertised as a ‘Select Collection of Scarce, Curious and Valuable Books, in English, Latin, Greek, French, Italian and other Languages’. The chapter extrapolates the main trends within Goldsmith’s collection from the catalogue but also addresses the difficulties of drawing conclusions about the owner of a collection from an auction catalogue. The discernible referentiality of Goldsmith’s works provides, in many ways, a preferable index of his reading. The chapter also discusses the opportunities for reading books without owning them that Goldsmith, whose means were always limited, would have had as a student in Dublin, Edinburgh and Leiden and as a writer in London.

In its broadest sense, book history is concerned with all the media – electronic, printed, handwritten, oral – in which dictionaries have been preserved and circulated. Lexicography began at a particular point in the development of the book, and many topics in the global history of lexicography are book-historical topics. One of the most fundamental of these is the distinction, seen in western and non-western traditions alike, between dictionaries which are made to support ready reference, and dictionaries which are made to support slower, more thorough, study. Another is the distinction between the dictionary text as a single entity, and the body of lexicographical material as a repertoire from which different selections can be made on different occasions. Another is the dependence of the textual structure of the dictionary as we know it on the physical structure of the codex (as opposed to scrolls, clay or wooden tablets, and other media). These topics are of evident continuing relevance to the compilers, publishers, and users of dictionaries in electronic form.

In the first decades of the printed book in Britain, the book trade was dominated by bookmakers from continental Europe. However, as the trade expanded and was consolidated by the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557, it has been treated as if it became more insular. Landmark histories of the book in Britain in the sixteenth century have, until recent years, tended to overestimate the extent to which books that were read in Britain were printed in Britain. As part of a revisionist trend in this field, this chapter explores the intertwined relationship between continental printers and booksellers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. How did English authors view the possibilities, opportunities, and dangers of printing in continental Europe? How did religious, political, and commercial motives intertwine to encourage the printing of Latin works produced in England on the continent? And how were those continental printings of Latin works read and consumed back in England? Overall, the chapter offers a significant contribution to our ongoing reassessment of the interfused relationship between the history of the British and continental European book.

Periodisations are inevitable and useful short-cuts in conceptualising the past. But they are often inherited without reflection or a clear idea of their origins; in literature they can endow fashionable aesthetic judgements with lasting canonical force in ways that can be intellectually harmful. Latin is a language with a literary history of over two millennia, with highly differentiated levels of survival from different periods, and with a complex scholarly tradition: its periodisation is both important and challenging. I open with three vignettes of attitudes to Latin literature which in their different ways show the tendency to esteem antiquity above all. I look at six possible ways in which the history of Latin literature has been periodised or could be better periodised, with a recurring focus on two particularly dynamic periods : the last half-century before Christ and the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. An examination of changes in language, metre, prose rhythm, politics, religion and book history is used to challenge and test established periodisations, and to suggest the benefits of a greater acknowledgement of continuities and the longue durée.

In the 1980s, a theoretical turn in African American literary criticism helped institutionalize the study of African American literature by insisting on its formal complexity and distinctiveness. The racial text could no longer be read as reducible to its social context. In that same decade, a materialist line of inquiry sought to reconcile formal and contextual analysis by examining the ways black-authored books were published by major companies and received by the critical establishment. Drawing on methods from book history and print culture studies, a sociology of African American literature developed as the academic field of study took shape around canon-building projects. Two approaches to African American literary sociology emerged out of the 1990s: skepticism about the book’s capacity to represent racial experience, and optimism about the commercial success of diverse authors. Over time, these approaches merged into general studies of the racial text’s shifting status in the literary marketplace. With that expanded focus, the sociology of African American literature today sheds light on the way culture and commerce intersect in the making, selling, and reading of black-authored books.

This chapter investigates the affordances of the digital edition (the ability to advance nonsequentially or randomly, the possibility for representing multiple modalities, the incorporation of interaction between networked readers via group comments, etc.) alongside the affordances of the printed book (the possibilities of manual annotation, the ability to display one’s collection on a bookshelf, the archivability of a book versus that of a digital edition, etc.). Often positioned as the dangerous other to the printed book, auguring its obsolescence, Brown argues that digital editions are and will remain in dialogue with printed books. Brown offers a sketch of a future for the digital edition – one of new “conventions and infrastructure to pry editions away from the legacy of print towards the wide range of affordances offered by digital instantiations of texts.” The digital edition of the future, she argues, carries with it the promise of another “sea change.”

Focussing on the 1820s and 30s, traditionally seen as transitional decades when many leading Romantic writers passed away, Chapter Fifteen analyses the effects of politics and of the cultural marketplace on literary production, arguing for a late-Romantic episteme recognisable in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. After discussing some of problems inherent in the concept of late Romanticism, the author defines it as a series of cultural practices including improvisation, speculation, and performance that reflect the transitory nature of the period. This has been alternately labelled in German literary history as Spätromantik, Biedermeier, and Vormärz, none of which perfectly correspond. Informed by recent research in book and media history, the chapter discusses periodicals’ role in shaping the literary field, in particular Costumbrismo in Spain. These new forms of experimental and ephemeral writing reflect the period’s intense commercialism and consciousness of time, which contrast with the Romantic desire for transcendence. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s last story, ‘Des Vetters Eckfenster’ [My Cousin’s Corner Window], Walladmor, a satirical hoax in imitation of Walter Scott, and Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, serve as examples of late-Romantic tendencies.

This chapter analyses colonial botanical collection to reveal the role of non-elite collectors and Indigenous interlocutors in providing knowledge that underpinned British science. The Endeavour brought the new taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to the Southern Hemisphere. Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Sydney Parkinson recorded findings and took over 30,000 plants back to London, many of them viewed for the first time by Europeans swept up in the rage for botany. Knowledge production after James Cook’s first voyage was exponential, and it had both scientific and territorial consequences. New kinds of scientific writing also emerged from the controversial publication of Parkinson’s journal, and scientific bodies used innovative magazines to broaden access to and public support of science in the service of empire. Reliable collectors in the settler colonies worked with Indigenous collaborators to identify novel plant and animal materials, and send them to Britain. These included George Caley who worked with the Eora youth Daniel Moowaatin. The history of colonial science was informed by diverse participants, interests and motivations, and it changed how field work was conceived and scientific authority was established.