Book review
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Andy Martrich. Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot: A Peripheral History of the Jargon Society as Told through Its Missing Books.
This history of the small Jargon Society press combines bibliography, literary history, and literary criticism to demonstrate that absence deserves study as a poetic form.
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David Pearson, Speaking Volumes & Nicholas Perkins (ed.), Gifts and Books
Taken together, these two books provide insightful and illustrative examples of the centrality of books in social history.
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Ann-Marie Hansen and Arthur der Weduwen, eds. Publishers, Censors and Collectors in the European Book Trade, 1650-1750.
This collection sheds new light on an understudied period of book history and interrogates commonly held assumptions about the Enlightenment’s impact on the European book trade.
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Tyler W. Williams. If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi.
This book investigates how examining Hindi manuscripts as material texts rewrites the literary historiography of late medieval and early modern north India.
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Nicola Wilson et al., eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020.
The companion disrupts traditional histories by attending not only to women’s work in publishing but also to the networks and collaborations that sustained so many women’s careers in the publishing…
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Roland Allen. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.
Allen’s book offers an engaging and well-written overview of the notebook-as-object, notebook-as-container, and notebook-as-tool for critical thinking and intellectual advancement.
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Samuel V. Lemley, ed. The Four Shakespeare Folios, 1623-2023: Copy, Print, Paper, Type.
This collection presents a fascinating case for examining a specific library’s collections to see how that library presents a version of a rare book.
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Shelby Shapiro. Words to the Wives: The Yiddish Press, Immigrant Women, and Jewish-American Identity.
This book argues that the Yiddish press of the early twentieth century played a fundamental role in shaping Jewish immigrant women’s identities.