EarLy in ThomaS hardy’S noveL DeSpeRATe RemeDIeS, The narrator announces his intention “to turn now to the more material media through which this story moves”(36). Today, literary criticism is making that turn. There’s nothing new about at tention to the material media of texts (from stone to paper); nor is an interest in the movement of stories—their circulation, transmis sion, and reception—a recent invention. Bibliography, paleography, and editing have been central to scholarship (and not just literary scholarship) since at least the fiffeenth century. In the twentieth, the book stood at the center of the analytical bibliography developed in the anglophone world, the literacy statistics crunched by the Anna listes, the biographies of authors and histories of publishing houses that provided later cultural theorists with their raw material, and the socialscience fictions craffed by Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. But only in the past few decades have those enterprises coalesced into a discipline that owns up to a raff of aliases: book history, print culture, media studies, textual scholarship. Its material media in clude multivolume national histories of the book (one published in 1982–86 in France, others in process in the United States and else where1); a professional society with a prizewinning journal (Book History), a hyperactive discussion list (SHARPL@ listserv. indiana. edu), and a bulging Web site (www. sharpweb. org); and a growing canon of textbooks, anthologies, and degree programs. 2 So far, so triumphalist. According to some media theorists, our working conditions will inevitably revive interest in past bib liographic forms. In their account, the advent of the screen has made it harder to take the page for granted: the death of the book means the birth of its history (Winkler). Seth Lerer’s afferword to