When we wrote the blog post for the 1000^th Element celebrations in 2023, we could not have imagined that a mere two years later we’d be celebrating the 2000^th title in the series! Our own list, Publishing and Book Cultures, now has 78 published titles, and we will soon be adding 3 more strands to the 14 already advertised: Readers and Reading; Publishing Genre Fiction, and Language; Translation and Book Publishing. It’s been a very busy couple of years, and one of the highlights has been feedback saying how useful the series is for teaching. This is one of the ambitions we had for the series when we started it, and now the list covers so many areas of the field, it is proving to be a useful tool for introducing students to the many diverse and exciting subjects within it. UCL MA Publishing students, for example, were asked to pick a title and review it as part of their Publishing Studies module this year – a task which resulted in many valuable comments and responses – and there were hardly any duplicate choices in a class of 55, showing the scope the series has to appeal to different interests.

We continue to be inspired and grateful for the work our strand editors do, and for the trust authors put in the series. The responsibility to produce high quality outputs, giving everyone involved the smoothest and most efficient process possible, is something we take very seriously. In this we want to acknowledge, as we did before, that the work of Bethany Thomas and her team at CUP continues to be exceptional. When a series like this grows to have so many moving parts, the challenge is to ensure the responsiveness to queries and effectiveness of results continues to be maintained. Where glitches have happened, it is often on our end, rather than at the Press’s, and given that this is just one of Bethany’s many lists, it is testimony to her skills that we never feel overlooked or the need to chase. The network of collaboration between everyone is a hugely positive by-product of the series, and we continue to welcome new proposals each week, so there are plenty more Elements in the pipeline, coming soon!

Below you can find some updates from many of our strand editors: do get in touch with us if you’d like to propose a new Element, or have news on how you’ve used the series in teaching or research – we’d be delighted to hear from you! 

From the Strand Editors

The strand on Editors and Editing aims to expand our understanding of editing practice, and the work that the ‘idea’ of editing does in society, as part of a wider field of editing studies. It is led by Susan L. Greenberg, author of A Poetics of Editing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). The strand has just published its third Element, Scholarly Editing in Perspective by Wim van Mierlo, following titles on practical editing in fiction and issues in teaching publishing and editing practice. Future projects include historical case studies and ethical dilemmas in editing, and Greenberg is keen to hear about potential new contributions to the list.

 “The whole editorial process was thoroughly enjoyable and supportive, from commissioning to copy-editing,” says Van Mierlo.

Young adult (YA) literature has, historically, been subsumed under the broader category of children’s publishing: yet it speaks to a distinct audience with its own needs, challenges, and cultural resonance. The YA Publishing strand recognises YA as a dynamic and influential literary field, warranting serious scholarly attention. YA fiction has emerged as a leading space for experimentation, representation, and reader engagement, particularly in matters of diversity, identity, and social justice. Our recently commissioned titles reflect this richness: from Noah O’Connor’s Asexuality in YA Fiction to Melanie Ramdarshan Bold’s exploration of anthologies as platforms for marginalised voices; from Sarah Mygind’s work on transmedia storytelling to Karen Sands-O’Connor’s historical study of inclusion in YA publishing. Together, these Elements demonstrate YA’s role at the cutting edge of literary, cultural, and publishing trends (past, present, and future) and signal the importance of recognising YA as a vital and distinct area of research in book culture.

The bright red Bookshops and Bookselling strand explores the pivotal role booksellers and bookshops play in the history of print culture. It examines how retail practices, shop environments, and distribution networks shaped the accessibility and reception of books across time. Elements in the strand engage with the bookshop as a counter-space, both commercial and social, exploring the evolving relationship between readers, sellers, and texts. It also sheds light on the influence of bookshops as cultural spaces and gatekeepers of literary trends, contributing to the study of historical and contemporary publishing landscapes. Recent titles have ranged from British women bookseller and the book bazaars of Delhi to the algorithms that control online bookselling.

Feminist book and publishing history is thriving but there is still much work to be done! Women, Publishing and Book Culture explores the history and futures of women and gender minorities in the book trade and the intersections between feminism, sex and gender, publishing, and the book. We invite proposals from different critical perspectives exploring women’s various bookwork and how book cultures interact with women, gender minorities, feminism, sex and gender.  Recent titles have included Claire Battershill’s study of women and letterpress printing, D-M Wither’s work on reprints and the Virago Press, and Jodi McAllister, Claire Parnell and Andrea Anne Trinidad’s work on publishing romance fiction in the Philippines.

The books that form the Publishing the Canon strand of the series explore this slippery and provocative term by opening up its mechanism and setting up other alternatives through which we may approach literary studies. Authors in this strand turn to literary cultures in countries from the Global South, drawing on archival and textural sources; unearth the roots of popular genre fictions; consider how both older and contemporary texts gain canonical authority through publishing and circulation strategies; and how we might use these enquiries to diversify canons. Forthcoming titles will push the boundaries of what is not only ‘good’ literature, but ‘literature’, and in doing so will ask readers to engage with the contexts of publishing even as they are closely attentive to the text itself.

Currency and timeliness are two of the hallmarks of Elements, and authors in the Digital Literary Culture strand have made the most of both. Elements like Leah Henrickson’s Reading Computer-Generated Texts (2021) and Francesca Benatti’s Innovations in Digital Comics: A Popular Revolution (2024) capture moments of profound change, informing the current conversation but also gathering critical data before it’s lost, and laying foundations for future scholarship. New discoveries aren’t just about the present: Simon Rowberry’s The Early Development of Project Gutenberg c.1970-2000 uses archival research to challenge entrenched narratives and restore histories of collective creation too long obscured by ‘great man’ tropes. Upcoming titles on topics including algorithmic reading cultures and authorship in the digital era will carry on the tradition, documenting, theorising, and critiquing the literary culture being remade today.

The History of Book Collecting and Book Cultures is a fairly new Element strand. We published our first book, The Trade in Rare Books and Manuscripts between Britain and America c. 1890–1929 by Laura Cleaver and Danielle Magnusen in 2022. This was followed in 2023 by Kate Ozment’s study, The Hroswitha Club and the Impact of Women Book Collectors. Scholarly work on the history of book collecting is connecting with popular interest in this subject and its contemporary practice.  This year, the ABAA Fair in New York featured their first ‘ambassadors’, the most high- profile of which was Patti Smith’s daughter, Jesse Paris Smith. We’re interested in publishing work on both historic and the contemporary intersections of the trade.

Another more recent strand is Typography and Book Culture. The first title in this thread, Will Hill’s Space as Language, was published in August 2023 to very positive reviews in specialist journals Parenthesis and Letter Exchange Forum. The second title, Sheena Calvert’s Writing Which is to be Spoken is scheduled for completion in January 2026.  Key authors in typographic research have expressed an interest in submitting proposals for further titles, so this looks set to be a really dynamic list!

A new thread, Readers & Reading, forthcoming, captures the dynamics of the post-digital environment, in which books are produced, disseminated, read and responded to online and offline simultaneously and with equal importance. Contributors will address one of the most important debates in contemporary culture/society today: the importance, values, and modes of reading. New technologies, including social media platforms, have had a profound influence on all stages of a book’s life cycle, but readers are at the core of Readers & Reading. Individual Elements will explore: readerly identities; individual and shared or collective book discovery and reading practices; the material book from readers’ perspectives; and, the commercial, cultural, political, personal, and social values inherent in variant reading cultures, their modes of reading, and their chosen reading material. Readers and Reading highlights diverse work that interrogates what it means to be a reader in our contemporary global reading culture.

Our most recently launched strand is called Doodles and Marginalia. It capitalises on recent scholarly interest in the full range of marginal—or not-so-marginal—markings, shining light on the ambiguous yet revealing marks that exist precariously at the edges of varied texts from different eras and cultures. From seemingly random jottings and transgressive drawings to pointed and scholarly annotations, these often-dismissed forms challenge our traditional understanding of authorship, readership, intention, and the boundaries of a ‘text’. They provide essential, yet often contradictory and deeply personal, windows into the minds of readers and writers—revealing private anxieties, inspirations, fixations, and digressions. Studying these miscreant marginalia is key to grasping the vibrant yet chaotic reality of the creation and reception of texts. The strand’s first Element, The Form and Theory of Literary Doodling, was just published, and two more Elements are in the pipeline for this year: Modernist Doodling and British Literary Doodling, 1789-1930.

Our Book History strand takes a historical approach to book and publishing cultures, with various Elements within it asking questions about what it means to publish not only in the traditional format of print in the post-Gutenberg era, but also in a pre-print world. Samu Niskanen’s Publication and the Papacy in Late Antique and Medieval Europe (2022) and Benjamin Pohl’s Publishing in a Medieval Monastery (2023) are important cases in point. Forthcoming is an Element focusing on another historical format: pamphlets in Pierre-Héli Monot’s Pamphleteering: Polemic, Print, and the Infrastructure of Political Agency. Our strand is always keen to hear from would-be Element authors for studies of historical forms of publishing, especially where they tackle questions of what publishing means in historical environments, whether pre- or post-print, or track publishing and book culture trends from a transhistorical perspective.