Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects ed. by Evanghelia Stead (review)

At first glance, Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects may appear to be an unusual book for review in Victorian Periodicals Review. For a start, the essays gathered here focus neither on periodicals and serials specifically nor on the nineteenth century. The remit is far wider—"from the fall of the Roman Empire to Amazon's e-reader hardware"—and includes research on early devotional manuscripts, Baroque prints, nineteenth-century gift books, and twentieth-century illustrated books, among other topics (5). Most of the discussions focus on European rather than British material. Still, this fascinating collection will be of interest to many VPR readers for its emphasis on the methodologies of studying text and image in the broad context of print (and manuscript) culture. It provokes those of us working in the orbit of nineteenth-century periodicals to think more comparatively about our approaches to the media we research.

In her useful introduction, Evanghelia Stead makes a case for the seemingly disparate essays and provides an excellent overview of the research context for the volume. What unites the work is a strong sense of the materiality of the objects being studied, whether book, print, or manuscript. This attention to the material object is something which all of us who work with nineteenth-century print feel deeply, and most of us will, at some point, have felt the precarity of the material we are reading, with paper sometimes crumbling in our hands as we turn pages and handle volumes. "We set out to retrace here, across books and prints, cultural stories analysed in context and retold," Stead writes; "the extreme, the growing value, even the perishable quality of cultural objects, all register and reflect the passage of time, the rise and fall of trends, the changes in purpose, the shifting functions" (4).

The goal throughout is to render the broad and deep significance of books and prints in their own contexts and beyond. This requires a cross-disciplinary approach, drawing on the traditional fields that have informed studies in the history of the book: history, literary studies, and bibliography. The suggestion, which I find convincing and which many of the essays bear out, is that no single discipline can grasp the complexity of this material as cultural object:

By combining literary analysis and looking at how books and prints are shaped by design, format, uses, and, later, marketing, [this volume] investigates their impact on cultural trends; similarly, it explores how cultural trends shape the reading and deciphering of books and prints. Books and prints may well be the outcome or consequence of procedures, transactions, or trades (as well as a witness to the legitimacy and strength of Bibliography); still, they concern us here as active and complex representatives of culture through their manifold uses and many-sided reading processes.

(9)

Here, Stead describes the broad goal of each essay, but she is keen to emphasize that this goal is not intended to provide a singular lens for thinking about image and text; it does not amount to a unified method or overarching theoretical position. She explains, "Starting from a plurality of methodologies, materiality, figurative imagination, and poetics have thus proved a threefold way to look at books and prints as telling objects of cultural history" (11). In taking a transhistorical, multimedia, and multigenre approach, the volume offers us pleasingly different ways of getting at the cultural life of these objects.

The approach outlined so carefully by Stead in the introduction speaks to many of the methodological concerns we grapple with in periodical studies. What is the object of study when studying the periodical? How do we begin to approach questions of readership and divergent practices of reading? How do we do justice to the complexity of the relationship between text and image in much of our diverging forms of print? What is the cultural significance of the periodicals we research? And so on.

One of...