Books are the cornerstone of our culture. They disseminate ideas,
and preserve and transmit literature. Their contents underpin great
religions, and have been responsible for wars and revolutions. They
lie at the heart of education and scholarship. They have brought
pleasure (and some pain) to countless millions of people for nearly
three millennia. The systematic study of books and the means by
which they are created and distributed began in the eighteenth
century, but it is only in the last 150 years or so that it has
developed into an important field of scholarship. After an
intellectual transformation in the last quarter of the twentieth
century, the history of books-and particularly the commercial
history of books-is now a vibrant and widely practised area of
study and research. Literary scholars, historians, and many others
in the humanities and social sciences, have a keen interest in how
texts have reached us, how they were created, marketed and
distributed, and what impact the commercial processes of publishing
had on their contents. As serious academic work on and around
publishing and the printed book continues to flourish as never
before, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series,
Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, meets the need for
an authoritative reference work to make sense of a growing and ever
more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of the area
as it has emerged and developed. It is a landmark collection of
foundational and the best cutting-edge scholarship in the field and
is organized in four volumes. Volume I ('Concepts and Theories:
Issues in Book History') deals with the discipline itself, its
parameters, its theoretical foundations, and the issues and
controversies which have helped it to develop and which are still
carrying it forward. Volume II ('Publishing and the Book Trade'),
meanwhile, focuses on the development of the publishing industry,
the commercial heart of the book world, and the engine of its
evolution. In the third volume ('Publishers and Authors'), the
emphasis is on the extremities of the chain of production and
distribution-the authors who create books, and the readers who use
them-and on the complex relationships between both and the
publishers. The final volume ('Printing and Book Production') is
concerned with the history of printing-the most important single
technological development in the whole history of the book. The
materials gathered in this collection exemplify schools of thought
and the development of ideas about the discipline, as well as
embodying some of the key results of scholarship, to give a
coherent view of its achievements and of its potential for further
development. For the novice or advanced student, the collection
will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing
scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. And,
for the more advanced scholar, it will be welcomed as a crucial
tool permitting rapid access to less familiar-and sometimes
overlooked-texts. For both, Book Publishing will be valued as a
vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.
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