This book draws together reflective and analytical essays by renowned intellectuals from around the world who critically engage with the work of one of the global South's leading scholars of African print cultures and the oceanic humanities. Isabel Hofmeyr's scholarship spans more than four decades, and its sustained and long-term influence on her discipline and beyond is formidable. Her contributions range from her early work in orality and feminist critical engagement, to transnational histories of the book, to Mohandas Gandhi's conceptualisation of print culture and its potentialities in his philosophy of satyagraha, to ‘dockside reading’, hydrocolonialism, and the ‘landing’ of books and settler subjects on African shores.

If the history of print cultures has been written primarily from the North, Isabel Hofmeyr is one of the leading thinkers producing new knowledge in this area from Africa, the Indian Ocean world and the South. Her major contribution to print histories encompasses the history of the book as well as newspapers, pamphlets, extracts, multiple editions, anthologised textual segments, excised books and abridged iterations of canonical works such as John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. Hofmeyr has pioneered archival research on the ways in which such printed matter moves across the globe, focusing on intra- African trajectories and circulations as well as movements across land and sea, port and shore. The essays gathered here are written in a blend of intellectual and personal modes, and mostly by scholars of Indian and African descent. They in turn elaborate and contribute to, via an engagement with Hofmeyr's path-breaking work, studies of the history of the book as well as critical oceanic studies, consolidating these fields from the point of view of Southern historical contexts and textual practices.

Hofmeyr has published four major monographs, all highly influential: ‘We Spend Our Years as a Tale That is Told’: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (Wits University Press/Heinemann/James Currey, 1993); The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of ‘The Pilgrim's Progress’ (Wits University Press/Princeton University Press, 2004); Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Harvard University Press, 2013); and Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (Wits University Press/Duke University Press, 2022). A wide array of her writing has also circulated and percolated between, around and beyond these books.