Project MUSE®: Book History - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/23
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Book History.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1998) through current issueLatest Articles: Book HistoryTWOProject MUSE®Book History1529-14991098-7371Latest articles in Book History. Feed provided by Project MUSE®“Of a Dangerous Nature”: Quaker Publishing and Colonial Censorship in the 1690s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990530
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In 1685, William Bradford opened his printing shop in Philadelphia. George Fox (the founder of the Society of Friends) saw the press as being able to supply Quakers from the Carolinas to Plymouth with “answers against apostates or wicked professors books.”1 Almost as soon as Bradford’s press began operations, he found himself in conflict with the Pennsylvania Provincial Council (the legislative body of the colony of Pennsylvania) and the Monthly Meeting of Friends in Philadelphia (the governing body of Quakers in Philadelphia). By 1692, Bradford was in jail for printing the treatises of George Keith, a dissident Quaker who had attacked the leaders of Pennsylvania. Four years later, another of Bradford’s books
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/23/image/coversmall“Of a Dangerous Nature”: Quaker Publishing and Colonial Censorship in the 1690s2026-05-15text/htmlen-US“Of a Dangerous Nature”: Quaker Publishing and Colonial Censorship in the 1690s2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®1349152026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Readers of and on Manchu-Language Books in Qing China
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990531
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Book in front of him, brush in hand: Yūn Ši was ready to start reading. He had decided to read a section of the bilingual Manchu-Chinese language primer, the Cing wen ki meng bithe/Qingwen qimeng 清文啟蒙 (“The Manchu Preceptor”). He already knew how to read the Manchu script, so he turned to the second fascicle, which consisted of a series of written Manchu-Chinese dialogues between two speakers. The text started with a line about how one ought to read: “If one is going to read a Manchu book, one must know each and every word clearly.”1 Yūn Ši added three little dots next to the first Manchu word, manju (“Manchu”) and three little dots next to its Chinese equivalent, Manzhou 滿洲 (“Manchu”), marking them as the same.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/23/image/coversmallReaders of and on Manchu-Language Books in Qing China2026-05-15text/htmlen-USReaders of and on Manchu-Language Books in Qing China2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®1395092026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Significance of Scraps: Paste-Overs and Parastructure in Nineteenth-Century American Poem-Making
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990532
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In the summer of 1881, a disgruntled Illinoisan attorney named Charles Julius Guiteau arrived at a railroad station in Washington DC armed with a five-round pocket revolver. Incensed at being rejected for a consulship to Vienna and later Paris by James Garfield’s administration, Guiteau designed to ambush the newly elected president as he arrived by train. Waiting until Garfield and an accompanying cabinet member had crossed the station’s waiting room, Guiteau stepped forward and fired two shots: the first scraping his victim’s shoulder, while the second entered the president’s lower back, piercing his vertebral column and becoming lodged behind the pancreas. In spite of his doctors’ attempts at employing Alexander
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/23/image/coversmallThe Significance of Scraps: Paste-Overs and Parastructure in Nineteenth-Century American Poem-Making2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Significance of Scraps: Paste-Overs and Parastructure in Nineteenth-Century American Poem-Making2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®970462026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The British Book Export Scheme, 1939–1951
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990533
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In 1940, the British Treasury approved an unorthodox scheme to bring British English-language books to markets they had barely penetrated before, including Uruguay, Colombia, Iraq, and Sweden. The Book Export Finance Scheme, later shortened to Book Export Scheme or BES, would use the tools of the state, through the British Council, to spread British cultural goodwill throughout the globe while profiting commercial book publishers.2 BES would be an instrument of cultural diplomacy and commercial growth for British firms. Over the following six years, BES would export £458,679 of books to dozens of countries including Brazil, Algeria, and Iran.3 Though BES exported all genres of British books, dictionaries and novels
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/23/image/coversmallThe British Book Export Scheme, 1939–19512026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe British Book Export Scheme, 1939–19512026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®1566792026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15La Cleta Cartonera: Limits and Potentialities of the Expendable in Puebla’s Publishing Market
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990534
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Over the past decade, Mexico has seen several noteworthy publishing projects, from large-scale independent publishers like Sexto Piso Ediciones to copyleft publishing houses such as Tumbona Ediciones and the collective and deterritorialized Editorial Sur+. However, outside of these well-known examples, others have been somewhat ignored due to their regionality. From 2011 to 2020, for example, a publishing house that questioned the editorial market and the materiality of books, La Cleta Cartonera (La Cleta), emerged in Puebla. This article offers a micro-historical approach, aiming to recount La Cleta’s various periods, from its foundation to its last published book to better understand the context and its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/23/image/coversmallLa Cleta Cartonera: Limits and Potentialities of the Expendable in Puebla’s Publishing Market2026-05-15text/htmlen-USLa Cleta Cartonera: Limits and Potentialities of the Expendable in Puebla’s Publishing Market2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®930192026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15AI and Australia’s Trade Publishing Industry: A Digital Anti-Colonial Inquiry
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990535
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In mid-2023, managers, lawyers, and engineers at tech giant Meta discussed purchasing Simon & Schuster, one of the five largest trade publishing houses in the English-speaking world.1 Meta’s discussion took place amidst an increasingly aggressive rush to access the vast quantities of data needed for training text-generating Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms such as Meta’s Llama. Meta had quickly discovered that the fragmented text drawn from its own platforms was of too low a quality. To compete with rival AI developers, what Meta needed was long-form, carefully written, and meticulously edited prose—and lots of it. In other words, to train their Llama, Meta needed books.Throughout 2023, in the rush to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/23/image/coversmallAI and Australia’s Trade Publishing Industry: A Digital Anti-Colonial Inquiry2026-05-15text/htmlen-USAI and Australia’s Trade Publishing Industry: A Digital Anti-Colonial Inquiry2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®1106042026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Audiobook Studies: The State of the Discipline
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990536
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Popular discourse about audiobooks is dogged by ontological prevarication. How do audiobooks compare to their print counterparts? Does reading an audiobook “count” as reading? Are audiobooks in fact books at all? A half-hearted reanimation of “weary” death-of-the-book discourse,1 these questions and the conversations that follow treat audiobooks as both derivatives of and less valuable versions of their print counterparts. This article argues that the nascent field of audiobook studies is at the precipice of a coherent (inter)disciplinary identity, and it outlines how greater disciplinary cohesion will assist in developing scholarly and subsequently public narratives productively uncoupled from these
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/23/image/coversmallAudiobook Studies: The State of the Discipline2026-05-15text/htmlen-USAudiobook Studies: The State of the Discipline2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®1524372026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15