The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
Book History
General Description
BOOK HISTORY is a scholarly journal devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the creation, dissemination, reception, and use of script, print, and mediacy. The journal will publish research on the social, economic, and cultural history of authorship, editing, printing, publishing, media, the book arts, the book trade, periodicals, newspapers, ephemera, copyright, censorship, literary agents, libraries, literary criticism, canon formation, literacy, literary education, reading habits, and reader response. The journal is open to all disciplines and methodologies, and it will consider articles dealing with any literary culture and any historical period.
In December 1999, the Council of Editors of Learned Journals selected Book History as "Best New Journal" of the year, with the CELJ awards committee praising its "impressive range" and "sustained engagement with the subject," and predicting "real staying power on the academic landscape." In the years since, the journal has fulfilled this early promise and become a well-established and influential leader in its field.
Book History is coedited by Ezra Greenspan (Southern Methodist University) and Jonathan Rose (Drew University). It is sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) and published by Penn State University Press as a hardcover annual. Tables of contents can be browsed here:
Online access to the full text of the journal is available to subscribers to Project Muse and to all members of SHARP (create your login here).
Guidelines for Submission
Contributions will be accepted on a year-round basis, with a submission deadline of August 31 for inclusion in the following year's volume. Authors should send to the appropriate editor one copy of their work -- either in hard copy or in electronic form as a Microsoft Word file, or both -- which should be typed double spaced (including notes and citations) and documented in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style. The manuscript may be submitted as an email attachment, after advance notice to the editor. The title page should include the author's name, telephone number, postal address, and E-mail address. Contributors are welcome to submit illustrations and graphs with their texts. Due to the journal's book-length format, essays of unusual length are welcome. Submissions acceptable to the editors will be double reviewed by outside experts in the field.
The editors of BOOK HISTORY award an annual prize for the outstanding graduate student essay submitted to our journal. The competition is open to anyone pursuing a course of graduate studies at the time of submission. The deadline for submission for each editorial year is 31 August. The author of the winning essay will receive a prize of $400, and the essay will be published in the journal.
Articles dealing with any part of the American hemisphere, Judaica, or the Middle East should be submitted to Professor Ezra Greenspan, Department of English, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275-0435, USA, egreensp AT smu.edu . All other articles should be submitted to Professor Jonathan Rose, Department of History, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940, USA, jerose AT drew.edu (replace "AT" with "@").
Subscriptions
Membership in SHARP includes a subscription to Book History and all other SHARP publications. Annual SHARP membership costs $55 in North America, $60 elsewhere.
Institutions may order subscriptions to Book History through Johns Hopkins University Press.
Contact jrnlcirc@press.jhu.edu or phone 1-800-548-1784, or 410-516-6987.
Table of Contents - Volume 12 (2009)
Elizabeth Yale. With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive
Jeffrey Todd Knight. "Furnished" for Auction: Renaissance Books as Furniture
Sharon Murphy. Imperial Reading? The East India Company's Lending Libraries for Soldiers, c. 1819-1834
Emily B. Todd. Establishing Routes for Fiction in the United States: Walter Scott's Novels and the Early Nineteenth-Century American Publishing Industry
Teresa A. Goddu. The Antislavery Almanac and the Discourse of Numeracy
Mike Esbester. Nineteenth-Century Timetables and the History of Reading
Michael Anesko. Collected Editions and the Consolidation of Cultural Authority: The Case of Henry James
Jennifer J. Connor. Stalwart Giants: Medical Cosmopolitanism, Canadian Authorship, and American Publishers
Kathleen McDowell. Toward a History of Children as Readers, 1890-1930
Claire Parfait. Rewriting History: The Publication of W.E.B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
Alice Staveley. Marketing Virginia Woolf: Women, War, and Public Relations in Three Guineas
The State of the Discipline:
Ben Kafka. Paperwork
Table of Contents - Volume 11 (2008)
Joanne Filippone Overty. The Cost of Doing Scribal Business: Prices of Manuscript Books in England, 1300-1483
Margaret Schotte. "Books for the Use of the Learned and Studious": William London's catalogue of Most Vendible Books
Nicole Howard. Marketing Longitude: Clocks, Kings, Courtiers, and Christiaan Huygens
Mark R. M. Towsey. "Patron of Infidelity": Scottish Readers Respond to David Hume, c. 1750-c. 1820
Ross Alloway. Cadell and the Crash
David Faflik. Authorship, Ownership, and the Case for Charles Anderson Chester
Lize Kriel. From Private Journal to Published Periodical: Gendered Writings and Readings of a Late Victorian Wesleyan's "African Wilderness"
Janice Cavell. In the margins: Regimental History and a Veteran's Narrative of the First World War
Mary A. Nocholas and Cynthia A. Ruder. In Search of the Collective Author: Fact and Fiction from the Soviet 1930s
Robert Franciosi. Designing John Hersey's The Wall: W. A. Dwiggins, George Salter, and the Challenges of American Holocaust Memory
Trysh Travis. The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications
The State of the Discipline:
Matt Cohen. The History of the Book in New England
Table of Contents - Volume 10 (2007)
Laura Cruz. The Secrets of Success: Microinventions and Bookselling in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands
Jeffrey Glover. Thomas Lechford's Plain Dealing: Censorship and Cosmopolitan Print Culture in the English Atlantic
Richard Yeo. Lost Encyclopedias: Before and After the Enlightenment
Keri A. Berg. Contesting the Page: The Author and the Illustrator in France, 1830-1848
Matt Miller. Composing the First Leaves of Grass: How Whitman Used His Early Notebooks
Solveig C. Robinson. "Sir, It is an Outrage": George Bentley, Robert Black, and the Condition of the Mid-List Author in Victorian Britain
Shafquat Towheed. Geneva v. St. Petersburg: Two Concepts of Literary Property and the Material Lives of Books in Under Western Eyes
Erin A. Smith. "'What Would Jesus Do?": The Social Gospel and the Literary Marketplace
Matthew C. Fishburn. Books are Weapons: Wartime Responses to the Nazi Bookfires of 1933
The State of the Discipline:
- Cynthia Brokaw. Book History in Premodern China
- Christopher A. Reed. Modern Chinese Print and Publishing Culture
Table of Contents - Volume 9 (2006)
Sarah Covington. Paratextual Strategies in Thieleman van Braght's Martyrs' Mirror
Emma Jay. Queen Caroline's Library and its European Contexts
Jeff Loveland. Unifying Knowledge and Dividing Disciplines: The Development of Treatises in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Melissa Free. Un-Erasing Crusoe: Farther Adventures in the Nineteenth Century
Andie Tucher. Reporting for Duty: The Bohemian Brigade, the Civil War, and the Social Construction of the Reporter
Ellen Gruber Garvey. Anonymity, Authorship, and Recirculation: A Civil War Episode
Bernadette A. Lear. Book History in Scarlet Letters: The Beginning and Growth of a College Yearbook during the Gilded Age
Emily Oswald. Imagining Race: Illustrating the Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Ronald Jenn. From American Frontier to European Borders: Publishing French Translations of Mark Twain's Novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1884-1963)
Michelle Denise Smith. Soup Cans and Love Slaves: National Politics and Cultural Authority in the Editing and Authorship of Canadian Pulp Magazines
The State of the Discipline:
David S. Miall. Empirical Approaches to Studying Literary Readers
Table of Contents - Volume 8 (2005)
Kay Amert. Intertwining Strengths: Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne
Paul Patterson. Reforming Chaucer: Margins and Religion in an Apocryphal Canterbury Tale
Roger Chartier, translated by Maurice Elton. Crossing Borders in Early Modern Europe: Sociology of Texts and Literature
Richard Gassan. The First American Tourist Guidebooks: Authorship and the Print Culture of the 1820s
Jonathan R. Topham. John Limbird, Thomas Byerley, and the Production of Cheap Periodicals in the 1820s
Joanne E. Passet. Freethought, Children's Literature and the Construction of Religious Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century America
Patricia May B. Jurilla Florante at Laura and the History of the Filipino Book
Valerie Holman. Carefully Concealed Connections: The Ministry of Information and British Publishing, 1939-1946
Caroline Davis. The Politics of Postcolonial Publishing: Oxford University Press's Three Crowns Series 1962-76
Joseph Ripp. Middle America Meets Middle-Earth: American Discussion and Readership of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, 1965-1969
The State of the Discipline:
Christine Haynes. Reassessing "Genius" in Studies of Authorship
Table of Contents - Volume 7 (2004)
John A. Buchtel. Book Dedications and the Death of a Patron: The Memorial Engraving in Chapman's Homer
Shlomo Berger. An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam 1650-1800
Neil Safier. "...To Collect and Abridge...Without Changing Anything Essential": Rewriting Incan History at the Parisian Jardin du Roi
Thomas S. Kidd. Recovering The French Convert: Views of the French and the Uses of Anti-Catholicism in Early America
Cree LeFavour. "Jane Eyre Fever? Deciphering the Astonishing Popular Success of Charlotte Bronté in Antebellum America
Barbara Hochman. Uncle Tom in the National Era: An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading
Iris Parush, translated by Saadya Sternberg. Another Look at "The Life of 'Dead' Hebrew: Intentional Ignorance of Hebrew in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society and Its Effects on Modern Hebrew Literature and Its Readership
Lisa Lindell. Bringing Books to a "Book-Hungry Land" Print Culture on the Dakota Plains
Willa Z. Silverman. "Books Worthy of Our Era: Octave Uzanne, Technology, and the Luxury Book in fin de siècle France
Peter D. McDonald. The Writer, the Critic, and the Censor: J. M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature
The State of the Discipline:
Leah Price. Reading
Table of Contents - Volume Six (2003)
Edward Jacobs. Eighteenth-Century British Circulating Libraries and Cultural Book History
Anindita Ghosh. An Uncertain "Coming of the Book": Early Print Cultures in Colonial India
Lisa Spiro. Reading with a Tender Rapture: Reveries of a Batchelor and the Rhetoric of Detached Intimacy
David Finkelstein. "Jack's as Good as His Master": Scots and Print Culture in New Zealand, 1860-1900
Graham Law and Norimasa Morita. Japan and the Internationalization of the Serial Fiction Market
Paul Eggert. Robbery Under Arms: The Colonial Market, Imperial Publishers, and the Demise of the Three-Decker Novel
Jason Camlot. Early Talking Books: Spoken Recordings and Recitation Anthologies, 1880-1920
Andrew Nash. A Publisher's Reader on the Verge of Modernity: The Case of Frank Swinnerton
David Shneer. Who Owns the Means of Cultural Production?: The Soviet Yiddish Publishing Industry of the 1920s
Ross Alloway. Selling the Great Tradition: Resistance and Conformity in the Publishing Practices of F. R. Leavis
Rebecca Rego. The Neo-Classics: (Re)Publishing the "Great Books" in the United States in the 1990s
The State of the Discipline:
Hortensia Calvo. The Politics of Print: The Historiography of the Book in Early Spanish America
Table of Contents - Volume 5 (2002)
Matt Cohen. "Morton's Maypole and the Indians: Publishing in Early New England"
M. O. Grenby. "Adults Only? Children and Children's Books in British Circulating Libraries 1748-1848"
Jyrki Hakapää. "Internationalizing Book Distribution in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Origins of Finnish Bookselling"
Marija Dalbello. "Franz Josef's Time Machine: Images of Modernity in the Era of Mechanical Photoreproduction"
Ingrid Satelmajer. "Dickinson as Child's Fare: The Author Served up in St. Nicholas"
Christine Pawley. "Seeking 'Significance': Actual Readers, Specific Reading Communities"
Alistair McCleery. "The Return of the Publisher to Book History: The Case of Allen Lane"
Sarah Brouillette. "Corporate Publishing and Canonization: Neuromancer and Science-Fiction Publishing in the 1970s and Early 1980s"
Paul Gutjahr. "No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader-Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America"
The State of the Discipline: The Epistemology of Publishing Statistics
- Robert Darnton. "Book Production in British India, 1850-1900"
- Priya Joshi. "Quantitative Method, Literary History"
- Wendy Griswold. "Number Magic in Nigeria"
- Simon Eliot. "Very Necessary but not Quite Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History"
Table of Contents - Volume 4 (2001)
John Barnard. London Publishing 1640-1660: Crisis, Continuity, and Innovation
Eugenia Roldan Vera. Reading in Questions and Answers: The Catechism as an Educational Genre in Early Independent Spanish America
Thomas J. Cragin. The Failings of Popular News Censorship in Nineteenth-Century France
Elaine Hoag. Caxtons of the North: Mid-Nineteenth Century Arctic Shipboard Printing
Helen Williams. Ringing the Bell: Editor-Reader Dialogue in Alexander Herzen's *Kolokol*
Robert Darnton. Literary Surveillance in the British Raj: The Contradictions of Liberal Imperialism
Eric Lupfer. Before Nature Writing: Hougton, Mifflin and Company and the Invention of the Outdoor Book, 1880-1900
Troy Bassett and Christina M. Walter. Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by *The Bookman*, 1891-1906
Matthew Skelton. The Paratext of Everything: Constructing and Marketing H. G. Wells's *The Outline of History*
Chris Baggs. How Well Read Was My Valley? Reading, Popular Fiction, and the Miners of South Wales, 1875-1939
Rimi B. Chatterjee. Canon without Consensus: Rabindranath Tagore and "The Oxford Book of Bengali Verse"
The State of the Discipline:
Paul Gutjahr. Sacred Texts in the United States
Table of Contents - Volume 3 (2000)
Andrea Finkelstein. Gerald de Malynes and Edward Misselden. The Learned Library of the Seventeenth-Century Merchant
Stephen Colclough. Procuring Books and Consuming Texts: The Reading Experience of a Sheffield Apprentice, 1798
James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes. Reassessing the Reputation of Thomas Tegg, London Publisher, 1776-1846
Simon Eliot. "Hotten: Rotten: Forgotten"?: An Apologia for a General Publisher
Julie F. Codell. Serialized Artists' Biographies: A Culture Industry in Late Victorian Britain
Samantha Matthews. Psychological Crystal Palace?: Late Victorian Confession Albums
Bill Bell. Beyond the Death of the Author: Matthew Arnold's Two Audiences 1888-1930
Peter France and Sian Reynolds. Nelson's Victory: A Scottish Invasion of French Publishing 1910-1914
Erin A. Smith. How the Other Half Read: Advertising, Working-Class Readers, and Pulp Magazines
Ann Haugland. Book Propaganda: Edward L. Bernays's 1930 Campaign Against Dollar Books
Trysh Travis. What We Talk About When We Talk About *The New Yorker*
Laura J. Miller. The Best Seller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction
The State of the Discipline:
Eike Barbara Durrfeld. Terra Incognita: Towards a Historiography of Book Fastenings and Book Furniture
Table of Contents - Volume 2 (1999)
Germaine Warkentin. In Search of "the Word of the Other": Aboriginal Sign Systems and the History of the Book in Canada
T. H. Howard-Hill. "Nor Stage, nor Stationers Stall Can Showe": The Circulation of Plays in Manuscript in the Early Seventeenth Century
Eleanor F. Shevlin. "To Reconcile Book and Title, and Make 'em Kin to One Another": The Evolution of the Title's Contractual Fucntions
K. A. Manley. Rural Reading in Northwest England: The Sedbergh Book Club 1728-1928
Melanie Archangeli. Subscribing to the Enlightenment: Charlotte von Hetzel Markets Das Wochenblatt fur's schone Geschlecht
Nancy A. Mace. Litigating the Musical Magazine: The Definition of British Music Copyright in the 1780s
Leon Jackson. The Reader Retailored: Thomas Carlyle, His American Audiences, and the Politics of Evidence
Daniel Barrett. Play Publication, Readers, and the "Decline" of the Victorian Drama
Alexis Weedon. From Three-Deckers to Film Rights: A Turn in British Publishing Strategies 1870-1930
Joan Shelley Rubin. The Boundaries of American Religious Publishing in the Early Twentieth Century
Beth Luey. "Leading the Public Gently": Popular Science Books in the 1950s
The State of the Discipline:
Edward Kasinec, with Robert H. Davis, Jr. The Rise and Decline of Book Studies in the Soviet Union
Table of Contents - Volume 1 (1998)
The Editors. An Introduction to Book History
Ian Donaldson. The Destruction of the Book
Fiona A. Black. Bertrum H. MacDonald, and J. Malcolm Black, Geographic Information Systems: A New Research Method for Book History
Richard B. Sher. Corporatism and Consensus in the Late Eighteenth-Century Book Trade: The Edinburgh Booksellers Society in Comparative Perspective
Sherry Lee Linkon. Reading Lind Mania: Print Culture and the Construction of Nineteenth-Century Audiences
Alice Fahs. The Market Value of Memory: Popular War Histories and the Northern Literary Marketplace, 1861-1868
Amy M. Thomas. There Is Nothing So Effective as a Personal Canvass: Revaluing Nineteenth-Century American Subscription Books
Michael Hancher. Gazing at The Imperial Dictionary
Shef Rogers. Crusoe among the Maori: Translation and Colonial Acculturation in Victorian New Zealand
Priya Joshi. Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India
Emily Jenkins. Trilby: Fads, Photographers, and Over-Perfect Feet
Arlen Viktorovich Blium. Forbidden Topics: Early Soviet Censorship Directives
The State of the Discipline: Wallace Kirsop. Booksellers and Their Customers: Some Reflections on Recent Research