An Introduction to "Book History"

Source: Book History , 1998, Vol. 1 (1998), pp. ix-xi

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227279

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 AN INTRODUCTION TO
BOOK HISTORY

The Editors

This is a new journal for a new kind of history. Historians have always
relied on documents to reconstruct the past, and perhaps for that reason
they overlooked, until very recently, the history of documents themselves.
American historiography began to turn in that direction in 1979, with th
publication of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change and Robert Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishin
History of the Encyclopedie. "Book history" is the least unsatisfactory
name for this scholarly frontier, which is certainly not limited to books-or
to historians.
Our field of play is the entire history of written communication: the cre-
ation, dissemination, and uses of script and print in any medium, including
books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts, and ephemera. We will ex-
plore the social, cultural, and economic history of authorship, publishing
printing, the book arts, copyright, censorship, bookselling and distribution,
libraries, literacy, literary criticism, reading habits, and reader response
And in so doing, we will freely disregard disciplinary and professional
boundaries. Our pages are open to academics and nonacademics, to schol
ars of history, literature, sociology, economics, art, education, the classic
communications, journalism, religion, and anthropology, as well as to pub
lishing professionals, book collectors, and librarians.
All of those constituencies have contributed to the accelerating growth
of book history over the past twenty years. Following the completion of the
magisterial Histoire de l'ddition franpaise in 1986, teams of scholars have
completed, prepared, or planned similar multivolume histories for the
United States, Britain, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and th
Netherlands. Academic presses are developing book history lists and mono
graph series. A modest but growing network of campus centers for the his-
tory of the book has taken root, and formal graduate programs ar

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x AN INTRODUCTION TO BOOK HISTORY

beginning to organize. Meanwhile, book history soc

on an almost annual basis: Britain's Book Trade His
1985), the International Society for the Empirical
(1987), the Early Book Society (1987), the Associatio
ude de l'imprime (1987), the Association intern
(1988), the Leipziger Arbeitskreis zur Geschichte d
the Research Society for American Periodicals (1990
tional sur l'histoire du livre et de l'edition (1991), the N
orische Vereniging (1993). Our sponsor, the Societ
Authorship, Reading and Publishing, has built up a
one thousand since it was launched in 1991.
In that short interval, book history has energized more established fields
of study. We have already transformed such historical controversies as the
origins of the French Revolution, shifting attention from economic causes
to the role of print in subverting the ancien regime. With the exhaustion of
literary theory, younger professors of literature are finding that book history
provides a more rigorous and empirical approach to such issues as reader
response, canon formation, and the politics of literary criticism. Church
historians are discovering that every religious denomination is also a pub-
lishing firm, that evangelicals pioneered mass-market publishing and the big
business corporation as we know it today. Classicists are turning to such
questions as the origins of the Greek alphabet and literacy in Periclean Ath-
ens. Musicologists have come to see the importance of producing their own
publishing histories and reception studies. Librarians, once consigned to the
margins of academia, are now venturing into the mainstream of social and
cultural history, exploring the role of libraries in shaping reading tastes,
assimilating immigrants, censorship, racial segregation, prisons, and the
Nazi holocaust. Russian scholars have long produced superb studies in the
history of print and the sociology of reading, which we intend to translate
and publish; and now Slavicists in the West are beginning to look at the
thrillers and romances and science fiction that always made up the bulk of
the modern Russian literary diet. Even some computer scientists have come
to see the history of books as part of a larger unified field of the history of
information.
The fact that book history is information history might explain its recent
vigorous growth. Just as the industrial societies of the late nineteenth cen-
tury invented the discipline of economic history to explain the origins and
consequences of the Industrial Revolution, so the Information Revolution
of the late twentieth century has driven us to explore the social transforma-
tions brought on by writing and print technologies. If there is any universal
lesson to be drawn from the history of the book, it is that every literate
society has been an "Information Society." Everywhere and at all times,

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 AN INTRODUCTION TO BOOK HISTORY xi

script and print create wealth, distribute it, and set

cultural change. That is why this scholarly project is e
will not explain everything, nor will it render all earl
obsolete. What we can promise is that every issue of
new perspectives and innovative methods, which w
read words on paper.

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