From the time they first met as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the mid-1930s, the noted editor Robert Giroux (1914-2008) and the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (1915-1968) became friends. The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton capture their personal and professional relationship, extending from the time of the publication of Merton's 1948 best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, until a few months before Merton's untimely death in December 1968. As editor-in-chief at Harcourt, Brace & Company and then at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Giroux not only edited twenty-six of Merton's books but served as an adviser to Merton as he dealt with unexpected problems with his religious superiors at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, as well as those in France and Italy. These letters, arranged chronologically, offer invaluable insights into the publishing process that brought some of Merton's most important writings to his readers. Patrick Samway, S.J., had unparalleled access not only to the materials assembled here but to Giroux's unpublished talks about Merton, which he uses to his advantage, especially in his beautifully crafted introduction that interweaves the stories of both men with a chronicle of their personal and collaborative relationship. The result is a rich and rewarding volume, which shows how Giroux helped Merton to become one of the greatest spiritual writers of the twentieth century.

Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown - Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost ...

In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky. He takes us with him on buying trips to old estates and auction houses, recommends books (both lost classics and new discoveries), introduces us to the thrill of the unexpected find, and evokes the rhythms and charms of small-town life, always with a sharp and sympathetic eye.

This book introduces the fast-developing field of book history. James Raven, a leading historian of the book, offers a fresh and accessible guide to the global study of the production, dissemination and reception of written and printed texts across all societies and in all ages. Students, teachers, researchers and general readers will benefit from the book s investigation of the subject s origins, scope and future direction. Based on original research and a wide range of sources, What is the History of the Book? shows how book history crosses disciplinary boundaries and intersects with literary, historical, communications, media, library and conservation studies. Raven uses examples from around the world to explore different traditions in bibliography, palaeography and manuscript studies. He analyses book history s growing global ambition and demonstrates how the study of reading practises opens up new horizons in social history and the history of knowledge. He shows how book history is contributing to debates about intellectual and popular culture, colonialism and the communication of ideas. The first global, accessible introduction to the field of book history from ancient to modern times, What is the History of the Book? is essential reading for all those interested in one of society s most important cultural artefacts.

Edmund Curll was a notorious figure among the publishers of the early eighteenth century: for his boldness, his lack of scruple, his publication of work without author's consent, and his taste for erotic and scandalous publications. He was in legal trouble on several occasions for piracy and copyright infringement, unauthorized publication of the works of peers, and for seditious, blasphemous, and obscene publications. He stood in the pillory in 1728 for seditious libel. Above all, he was the constant target of the greatest poet and satirist of his age, Alexander Pope, whose work he pirated whenever he could and who responded with direct physical revenge (an emetic slipped into a drink) and persistent malign caricature. The war between Pope and Curll typifies some of the main cultural battles being waged between creativity and business. The story has normally been told from the poet's point of view, though more recently Curll has been celebrated as a kind of literary freedom-fighter; this book, the first full biography of Curll since Ralph Straus's The Unspeakable Curll (1927), seeks to give a balanced and thoroughly-researched account of Curll's career in publishing between 1706 and 1747, untangling the mistakes and misrepresentations that have accrued over the years and restoring a clear sense of perspective to Curll's dealings in the literary marketplace. It examines the full range of Curll's output, including his notable antiquarian series, and uses extensive archive material to detail Curll's legal and other troubles. For the first time, what is known about this strange, interesting, and awkward figure is authoritatively told.

In post-World War II America and especially during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, the psychologist Rollo May contributed profoundly to the popular and professional response to a widely felt sense of personal emptiness amid a culture in crisis. May addressed the sources of depression, powerlessness, and conformity but also mapped a path to restore authentic individuality, intimacy, creativity, and community. A psychotherapist by trade, he employed theology, philosophy, literature, and the arts to answer a central enduring question: "How, then, shall we live?" Robert Abzug's definitive biography traces May's epic life from humble origins in the Protestant heartland of the Midwest to his longtime practice in New York City and his participation in the therapeutic culture of California. May's books-Love and Will, Man's Search for Himself, The Courage to Create, and others-as well as his championing of non-medical therapeutic practice and introduction of Existential psychotherapy to America marked important contributions to the profession. Most of all, May's compelling prose reached millions of readers from all walks of life, finding their place, as Noah Adams noted in his NPR eulogy, "on a hippy's bookshelf." And May was one of the founders of the humanistic psychology movement that has shaped the very vocabulary with which many Americans describe their emotional and spiritual lives. Based on full and uncensored access to May's papers and original oral interviews, Psyche and Soul in America reveals his turbulent inner life, his religious crises, and their influence on his contribution to the world of psychotherapy and the culture beyond. It adds new and intimate dimensions to an important aspect of America's romance with therapy, as the site for the exploration of spiritual strivings and moral dilemmas unmet for many by traditional religion.

This is the first analysis of periodicals' key role in U.S. feminism's formation as a collective identity and set of political practices in the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1973, more than five hundred different feminist newsletters and newspapers were published in the United States. Agatha Beins shows that the repetition of certain ideas in these periodicals-ideas about gender, race, solidarity, and politics-solidified their centrality to feminism. Beins focuses on five periodicals of that era, comprising almost three hundred different issues: Distaff (New Orleans, Louisiana); Valley Women's Center Newsletter (Northampton, Massachusetts); Female Liberation Newsletter (Cambridge, Massachusetts); Ain't I a Woman? (Iowa City, Iowa); and L.A. Women's Liberation Newsletter, later published as Sister (Los Angeles, California). Together they represent a wide geographic range, including some understudied sites of feminism. Beins examines the discourse of sisterhood, images of women of color, feminist publishing practices, and the production of feminist spaces to demonstrate how repetition shaped dominant themes of feminism's collective identity. Beins also illustrates how local context affected the manifestation of ideas or political values, revealing the complexity and diversity within feminism. With much to say about the study of social movements in general, Liberation in Print shows feminism to be a dynamic and constantly emerging identity that has grown, in part, out of a tension between ideological coherence and diversity. Beins's investigation of repetition offers an innovative approach to analyzing collective identity formation, and her book points to the significance of print culture in activist organizing.

Denis Janot is the prime example of a vernacular printer espousing the highest standards of French Renaissance printing, highly influential in the adoption of roman type to the printing of vernacular material, and a key figure in the development of book illustration. This bibliography, a comprehensive revison of the author's Warwick Ph.D. thesis of 1976, listing 391 editions (41 more than the original version), is based firmly on the description of Janot's books. Some 1300 copies have been examined, about 80% of the known total. Alongside the bibliography there is an description of Janot's printing material (including an index of more than 1000 woodcuts), and some analysis of the subjects of his publications.