Reprinting, republishing and re-covering old books in new clothes is an established publishing practice. How are books that have fallen out of taste and favour resituated by publishers, and recognised by readers, as relevant and timely? This Element outlines three historical textures within British culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s - History, Remembrance and Heritage - that enabled Virago's reprint publishing to become a commercial and cultural success. With detailed archival case studies of the Virago Reprint Library, Testament of Youth and the Virago Modern Classics, it elaborates how reprints were profitable for the publisher and moved Virago's books - and the Virago brand name - from the periphery of culture to the centre. Throughout Virago's reprint publishing - and especially with the Modern Classics - the epistemic revelation that women writers were forgotten and could, therefore, be rediscovered, was repeated, again and again, and made culturally productive through the marketplace.

Henrik Ibsen, the 'Father of Modern Drama', came from a seemingly inauspicious background. What are the key contexts for understanding his appearance on the world stage? This collection provides thirty contributions from leading scholars in theatre studies, literary studies, book history, philosophy, music, and history, offering a rich interdisciplinary understanding of Ibsen's work, with chapters ranging across cultural and aesthetic contexts including feminism, scientific discovery, genre, publishing, music, and the visual arts. The book ends by charting Ibsen's ongoing globalization and gives valuable overviews of major trends within Ibsen studies. Accessibly written, while drawing on the most recent scholarship, Ibsen in Context provides unique access to Ibsen the man, his works, and their afterlives across the world.

The 'long twelfth century' (1075-1225) was an era of seminal importance in the development of the book in medieval Europe and marked a high point in its construction and decoration. This comprehensive study takes the cultural changes that occurred during the 'twelfth-century Renaissance' as its point of departure to provide an overview of manuscript culture encompassing the whole of Western Europe. Written by senior scholars, chapters are divided into three sections: the technical aspects of making books; the processes and practices of reading and keeping books; and the transmission of texts in the disciplines that saw significant change in the period, including medicine, law, philosophy, liturgy, and theology. Richly illustrated, the volume provides the first in-depth account of book production as a European phenomenon.

What has fifteenth-century England to do with the Renaissance? By challenging accepted notions of 'medieval' and 'early modern' David Rundle proposes a new understanding of English engagement with the Renaissance. He does so by focussing on one central element of the humanist agenda - the reform of the script and of the book more generally - to demonstrate a tradition of engagement from the 1430s into the early sixteenth century. Introducing a cast-list of scribes and collectors who are not only English and Italian but also Scottish, Dutch and German, this study sheds light on the cosmopolitanism central to the success of the humanist agenda. Questioning accepted narratives of the slow spread of the Renaissance from Italy to other parts of Europe, Rundle suggests new possibilities for the fields of manuscript studies and the study of Renaissance humanism.

Natural language generation (NLG) is the process wherein computers produce output in readable human languages. Such output takes many forms, including news articles, sports reports, prose fiction, and poetry. These computer-generated texts are often indistinguishable from human-written texts, and they are increasingly prevalent. NLG is here, and it is everywhere. However, readers are often unaware that what they are reading has been computer-generated. This Element considers how NLG conforms to and confronts traditional understandings of authorship and what it means to be a reader. It argues that conventional conceptions of authorship, as well as of reader responsibility, change in instances of NLG. What is the social value of a computer-generated text? What does NLG mean for modern writing, publishing, and reading practices? Can an NLG system be considered an author? This Element explores such question, while presenting a theoretical basis for future studies.

Book, Text, Medium: Cross Sectional Reading for a Digital Age utilizes codex history, close reading, and language philosophy to assess the transformative arc between medieval books and today's e-books. It examines what happens to the reading experience in the twenty-first century when the original concept of a book is still held in the mind of a reader, if no longer in the reader's hand. Leading critic Garrett Stewart explores the play of mediation more generally, as the concept of book moves from a manufactured object to simply the language it puts into circulation. Framed by digital poetics, phonorobotics, and the rising popularity of audiobooks, this study sheds new light on both the history of reading and the negation of legible print in conceptual book art.

These are turbulent times in the world of book publishing. For nearly five centuries the methods and practices of book publishing remained largely unchanged, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century the industry finds itself faced with perhaps the greatest challenges since Gutenberg. A combination of economic pressures and technological change is forcing publishers to alter their practices and think hard about the future of the books in the digital age. In this book - the first major study of trade publishing for more than 30 years - Thompson situates the current challenges facing the industry in an historical context, analysing the transformation of trade publishing in the United States and Britain since the 1960s. He gives a detailed account of how the world of trade publishing really works, dissecting the roles of publishers, agents and booksellers and showing how their practices are shaped by a field that has a distinctive structure and dynamic. This new paperback edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to take account of the most recent developments, including the dramatic increase in ebook sales and its implications for the publishing industry and its future.

The inspiring novels that have left a significant mark on the world of literature and popular culture. Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had been stories and epic poems from ancient times – Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey recounted ancient Greece, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a chivalric romance in Middle English, but it was not until the seventeenth century, when the European middle classes had money and leisure, that anything so frivolous as a novel could be sold for entertainment. Colin Salter traces the evolution of the novel from the earliest examples through to the postmodernist best-sellers of the 21st century. Rather than dwelling too long on the technical nuances of innovative writing style he has amassed 100 of the greatest novel writers and chosen their most significant work. For writers such as Herman Melville, James Joyce or Harper Lee the decision is not a difficult one. For Charles Dickens, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, the choice is perhaps more difficult. Following the style set with previous books in the 100 series, most notably 100 Children’s Books and 100 Science Discoveries, each author is given a concise biography and their major novel analysed and then set in context with their other published work. Readers can become ridiculously well-read in 224 pages. Authors included: Alexandre Dumas, Daniel Defoe, Victor Hugo, Mary Shelly, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hilary Mantel, Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Harper Lee, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, Louisa M. Alcott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, John Steinbeck, CS Lewis, Chinua Achebe, Jack Kerouac, John Le Carre, Arundhati Roy, Mila Kundera, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Miguel Cervantes, Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Graves, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Hunter S. Thompson, Khaled Hosseini.

When does a book that is merely old become a rarity and an object of desire? David McKitterick examines, for the first time, the development of the idea of rare books, and why they matter. Studying examples from across Europe, he explores how this idea took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how collectors, the book trade and libraries gradually came together to identify canons that often remain the same today. In a world that many people found to be over-supplied with books, the invention of rare books was a process of selection. As books are one of the principal means of memory, this process also created particular kinds of remembering. Taking a European perspective, McKitterick looks at these interests as they developed from being matters of largely private concern and curiosity, to the larger public and national responsibilities of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Edited collections are widely supposed to contain lesser work than scholarly journals; to be incoherent as volumes, no more than the sum of their parts; and to be less visible to potential readers once published. It is also often taken as axiomatic that those who make decisions in relation to hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding do so agree. To publish in or edit an essay collection is thought to risk being penalised for the format before even a word is read. After examining the origins of this critique, this Element explores the modern history of the edited collection and the particular roles it has played. It examines each component part of the critique, showing that they are either largely unfounded or susceptible of solution. It proposes the edited collection as a model of one possible idea of scholarly community: collaboration, trust, and mutual obligation in pursuit of a wider good.

First Published in 1977. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The modernist bookshop, best exemplified by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. and Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, has received scant attention outside these more prominent examples. This writing will review how bookshops like David Archer's on Parton Street (London) in the 1930s were sites of distribution, publication, and networking. Parton Street, which also housed Lawrence & Wishart publishers and a briefly vibrant literary scene, will be approached from several contexts as a way of situating the modernist bookshop within both the book trade and the literary communities which it interacted with and made possible.

On March 20, 1760, a fire broke out in the Cornhill district of Boston, destroying nearly 350 buildings in its wake. One of the ruined shops belonged to the eminent Boston bookseller Daniel Henchman, who had published some of Jonathan Edwards's most important works, including The Life of Brainerd in 1749. Less than one year after the Great Fire of 1760, Henchman died. Edwards's chief printer Samuel Kneeland and literary agent and editor, Thomas Foxcroft, had also passed away by the end of the decade, marking the end of an era. Throughout Edwards's lifetime, and in the years after his death in 1758, most of the first editions of his books had been published in Boston. But with the deaths of Henchman, Kneeland, and Foxcroft, the publications of Edwards's writings shifted to Britain, where a new crop of booksellers, printers, and editors took on the task of issuing posthumous editions and reprints of his books. In Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture, religious historian Jonathan Yeager tells the story of how Edwards's works were published, including the people who were involved in their publication and their motivations. This book explores what the printing, publishing, and editing of Jonathan Edwards's publications can tell us about religious print culture in the eighteenth century, how the way that his books were put together shaped society's understanding of him as an author, and how details such as the formats, costs, quality of paper, length, bindings, and the number of reprints and abridgements of his works affected their reception.

This volume offers an expansive survey of the role of single-sheet publishing in the European print industry during the first two centuries after the invention of printing. Drawing on new materials made available during the compilation of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, the twenty contributors explore the extraordinary range of broadsheet publishing and its contribution to government, pedagogy, religious devotion and entertainment culture. Long disregarded as ephemera or cheap print, broadsheets emerge both as a crucial communication medium and an essential underpinning of the economics of the publishing industry.

This is the first comprehensive survey of the history of the book in Britain from Roman through Anglo-Saxon to early Norman times. The expert contributions explore the physical form of books, including their codicology, script and decoration; examine the circulation and exchange of manuscripts and texts between England, Ireland, the Celtic realms and the Continent; discuss the production, presentation and use of different classes of texts, ranging from fine service books to functional schoolbooks; and evaluate the libraries that can be associated with particular individuals and institutions. The result is an authoritative account of the first millennium of the history of books, manuscript-making and literary culture in Britain which, intimately linked to its cultural contexts, sheds vital light on broader patterns of political, ecclesiastical and cultural history extending from the period of the Vindolanda writing tablets through the age of Bede and Alcuin to the time of the Domesday Book.

This book charts the publishing industry and bestselling fiction from 1900, featuring a comprehensive list of all bestselling fiction titles in the UK. This third edition includes a new introduction which features additional information on current trends in reading including the rise of Black, Asian and LGBTQIA+ publishing; the continuing importance of certain genres and up to date trends in publishing, bookselling, library borrowing and literacy. There are sections on writing for children, on the importance of audiobooks and book clubs, self- published bestsellers as well as many new entries to the present day including bestselling authors such as David Walliams, Peter James, George R R Martin and far less well known authors whose books s sell in their thousands. This is the essential guide to best-selling books, authors, genres, publishing and bookselling since 1900, providing a unique insight into more than a century of entertainment, and opening a window into the reading habits and social life of the British from the death of Queen Victoria to the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Young adult fantasy (YA fantasy) brings together two established genres - young adult fiction and fantasy fiction - and in so doing amplifies, energises, and leverages the textual, social, and industrial practices of the two genres: combining the fantastic with adolescent concerns; engaging passionate online fandoms; proliferating quickly into series and related works. By considering the texts alongside the way they are circulated and marketed, this Element aims to show that the YA fantasy genre is a dynamic formation that takes shape and reshapes itself responsively in a continuing process over time.