Synopsis
With this first volume of an annual series the study of the history of the ramification of the book trade outside the metropolis, with its overseas connexions, can be said to have come of age as a subject worthy of serious scholarly study.
Print production and distribution, the 'Print Network' of the series title, looks into the social and economic aspects of print, into its fundamental context - the 'archaeological artefacts' of a literate society.
The series of papers in this volume, dealing mainly with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, over newspapers, chapbooks, popular images, small-town booksellers and printers, industrial relations, non-English publishing and readership. These are topics which reflect the current preoccupations of book-trade studies, while suggesting new themes and approaches for further research.
Synopsis
Over the last three decades, academic and popular interest in the social history of Britain outside London (including the "colonies") has transformed the study of the history of the book into a scholarly discipline. This volume, the first in a series, comes from the Fourteenth Annual Seminar on the British Book Trade. The series is intended to record the very varied research in progress in Britain and overseas into the production, distribution and use of books and allied material. The papers presented here demonstrate the breadth of the field, but also its essential unity. Newspapers and book clubs, chapbooks and printing practice are all common elements of the book trade throughout Britain. The contributors deal with several aspects of print distribution and readership, as well as the distribution of images which are often as important as the texts they illustrate. The vast outpourings of books, chapbooks, street literature, newspapers and ephemeral jobbing work points to a far greater degree of literacy at all levels of society than is often held to be the case.
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