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  3. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain

The history of the book offers a distinctive form of access to the ways in which human beings have sought to give meaning to their own and others' lives. Our knowledge of the past derives mainly from texts. Landscape, architecture, sculpture, painting and the decorative arts have their stories to tell and may themselves be construed as texts; but oral tradition, manuscripts, printed books, and those other forms of inscription and incision such as maps, music and graphic images have a power to report even more directly on human experience and the events and thoughts which shaped it. The seven volumes of the History of the Book in Britain will help explain how these texts were created, why they took the forms they did, their relations with other media, and what influence they had on the minds and actions of those who heard, read or viewed them. Its range, too - in time, place and the great diversity of the conditions of text production, including reception - challenges any attempt to define its limits and give an account adequate to its complexity. It addresses, whether by period, country, genre or technology, widely disparate fields of enquiry, each of which demands and attracts its own forms of scholarship. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain seeks to represent much of that variety. The volumes investigate the creation, material production, dissemination and reception of texts, effectively plotting the intellectual history of Britain.

  • General Editors: John Barnard, University of Leeds, D. F. McKenzie, University of Oxford, David McKitterick, Trinity College, Cambridge, I. R. Willison, Institute of English Studies, University of London

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7 results in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Volume 7, The Twentieth Century and Beyond
  • Edited by Andrew Nash, Claire Squires, I. R. Willison
  • Published online:
    08 June 2019
    Print publication:
    13 June 2019
  • The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain is an authoritative series which surveys the history of publishing, bookselling, authorship and reading in Britain. This seventh and final volume surveys the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a range of perspectives in order to create a comprehensive guide, from growing professionalisation at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the impact of digital technologies at the end. Its multi-authored focus on the material book and its manufacture broadens to a study of the book's authorship and readership, and its production and dissemination via publishing and bookselling. It examines in detail key market sectors over the course of the period, and concludes with a series of essays concentrating on aspects of book history: the book in wartime; class, democracy and value; books and other media; intellectual property and copyright; and imperialism and post-imperialism.

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Volume 1, c.400–1100
  • Edited by Richard Gameson
  • Published online:
    28 March 2012
    Print publication:
    22 December 2011
  • This is the first comprehensive survey of the history of the book in Britain from Roman through Anglo-Saxon to early Norman times. The expert contributions explore the physical form of books, including their codicology, script and decoration; examine the circulation and exchange of manuscripts and texts between England, Ireland, the Celtic realms and the Continent; discuss the production, presentation and use of different classes of texts, ranging from fine service books to functional schoolbooks; and evaluate the libraries that can be associated with particular individuals and institutions. The result is an authoritative account of the first millennium of the history of books, manuscript-making and literary culture in Britain which, intimately linked to its cultural contexts, sheds vital light on broader patterns of political, ecclesiastical and cultural history extending from the period of the Vindolanda writing tablets through the age of Bede and Alcuin to the time of the Domesday Book.

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Volume 5, 1695–1830
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, Michael L. Turner
  • Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009
  • This volume covers the history of printing and publishing from the lapse of government licensing of printed works in 1695 to the development of publishing as a specialist commercial undertaking and the industrialization of book production around 1830. During this period, literacy rose and the world of print became an integral part of everyday life, a phenomenon that had profound effects on politics and commerce, on literature and cultural identity, on education and the dissemination of practical knowledge. Written by a distinguished international team of experts, this study examines print culture from all angles: readers and authors, publishers and booksellers; books, newspapers and periodicals; social places and networks for reading; new genres (children's books, the novel); the growth of specialist markets; and British book exports, especially to the colonies. Interdisciplinary in its perspective, this book will be an important scholarly resource for many years to come.

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Volume 6, 1830–1914
  • Edited by David McKitterick
  • Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009
  • The years 1830–1914 witnessed a revolution in the manufacture and use of books as great as that in the fifteenth century. Using new technology in printing, paper-making and binding, publishers worked with authors and illustrators to meet ever-growing and more varied demands from a population seeking books at all price levels. The essays by leading book historians in this volume show how books became cheap, how publishers used the magazine and newspaper markets to extend their influence, and how book ownership became universal for the first time. The fullest account ever published of the nineteenth-century revolution in printing, publishing and bookselling, this volume brings The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain up to a point when the world of books took on a recognisably modern form.

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Volume 2, 1100–1400
  • Edited by Nigel J. Morgan, Rodney M. Thomson
  • Published online:
    28 November 2008
    Print publication:
    27 March 2008
  • This is the first history of the book in Britain from the Norman Conquest until the early fifteenth century. The twenty-six expert contributors to this volume discuss the manuscript book from a variety of angles: as physical object (manufacture, format, writing and decoration); its purpose and readership (books for monasteries, for the Church's liturgy, for elementary and advanced instruction, for courtly entertainment); and as the vehicle for particular types of text (history, sermons, medical treatises, law and administration, music). In all of this, the broader, changing social and cultural context is kept in mind, and so are the various connections with continental Europe. The volume includes a full bibliography and 80 black and white plates.

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Volume 4, 1557–1695
  • Edited by John Barnard, D. F. McKenzie
  • With Maureen Bell
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 November 2002
  • Volume 4 of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain covers the years between the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557 and the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695. In a period marked by deep religious divisions, civil war and the uneasy settlement of the Restoration, printed texts - important as they were for disseminating religious and political ideas, both heterodox and state approved - interacted with oral and manuscript cultures. These years saw a growth in reading publics, from the developing mass market in almanacs, ABCs, chapbooks, ballads and news, to works of instruction and leisure. Atlases, maps and travel literature overlapped with the popular market but were also part of the project of empire. Alongside the creation of a literary canon and the establishment of literary publishing there was a tradition of dissenting publishing, while women's writing and reading became increasingly visible.

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Volume 3, 1400–1557
  • Edited by Lotte Hellinga, J. B. Trapp
  • Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    09 December 1999
  • This volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain presents an overview of the century-and-a-half between the death of Chaucer in 1400 and the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557. The profound changes during that time in social, political and religious conditions are reflected in the dissemination and reception of the written word. The manuscript culture of Chaucer's day was replaced by an ambience in which printed books would become the norm. The emphasis in this collection of essays is on the demand and use of books. Patterns of ownership are identified as well as patterns of where, why and how books were written, printed, bound, acquired, read and passed from hand to hand. The book trade receives special attention, with emphasis on the large part played by imports and on links with printers in other countries, which were decisive for the development of printing and publishing in Britain.