An Introduction to Book History

The Editors

This is a new journal for a new kind of history. Historians have always relied on documents to reconstruct the past, and perhaps for that reason they overlooked, until very recently, the history of documents themselves. American historiography began to turn in that direction in 1979, with the publication of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change and Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie. “Book history” is the least unsatisfactory name for this scholarly frontier, which is certainly not limited to books—or to historians.

Our field of play is the entire history of written communication: the creation, dissemination, and uses of script and print in any medium, including books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts, and ephemera. We will explore the social, cultural, and economic history of authorship, publishing, printing, the book arts, copyright, censorship, bookselling and distribution, libraries, literacy, literary criticism, reading habits, and reader response. And in so doing, we will freely disregard disciplinary and professional boundaries. Our pages are open to academics and nonacademics, to scholars of history, literature, sociology, economics, art, education, the classics, communications, journalism, religion, and anthropology, as well as to publishing professionals, book collectors, and librarians.

All of those constituencies have contributed to the accelerating growth of book history over the past twenty years. Following the completion of the magisterial Histoire de l’édition française in 1986, teams of scholars have completed, prepared, or planned similar multivolume histories for the United States, Britain, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. Academic presses are developing book history lists and monograph series. A modest but growing network of campus centers for the history of the book has taken root, and formal graduate programs are beginning to organize. Meanwhile, book history societies have sprung up on an almost annual basis: Britain’s Book Trade History Group (founded 1985), the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (1987), the Early Book Society (1987), the Association québécoise pour l’étude de l’imprimé (1987), the Association internationale de bibliologie (1988), the Leipziger Arbeitskreis zur Geschichte des Buchwesens (1990), the Research Society for American Periodicals (1990), the Réseau international sur l’histoire du livre et de l’édition (1991), the Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging (1993). Our sponsor, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, has built up a world membership of one thousand since it was launched in 1991.

In that short interval, book history has energized more established fields of study. We have already transformed such historical controversies as the origins of the French Revolution, shifting attention from economic causes to the role of print in subverting the ancien régime. With the exhaustion of literary theory, younger professors of literature are finding that book history provides a more rigorous and empirical approach to such issues as reader response, canon formation, and the politics of literary criticism. Church historians are discovering that every religious denomination is also a publishing firm, that evangelicals pioneered mass-market publishing and the big business corporation as we know it today. Classicists are turning to such questions as the origins of the Greek alphabet and literacy in Periclean Athens. Musicologists have come to see the importance of producing their own publishing histories and reception studies. Librarians, once consigned to the margins of academia, are now venturing into the mainstream of social and cultural history, exploring the role of libraries in shaping reading tastes, assimilating immigrants, censorship, racial segregation, prisons, and the Nazi holocaust. Russian scholars have long produced superb studies in the history of print and the sociology of reading, which we intend to translate and publish; and now Slavicists in the West are beginning to look at the thrillers and romances and science fiction that always made up the bulk of the modern Russian literary diet. Even some computer scientists have come to see the history of books as part of a larger unified field of the history of information.

The fact that book history is information history might explain its recent vigorous growth. Just as the industrial societies of the late nineteenth century...