For anyone interested in the production and dissemination of printed books since the fifteenth century, this collection of essays offers a way of studying how tastes and practices have changed and can be understood. Using evidence from tiny fragments to entire libraries, from the manufacture of type and the creation of bindings to the sale of books, Professor McKitterick explores how people have come to decisions about what and how to read. As the world now depends increasingly on digital resources, these essays provide the means of understanding how print was dominant for five centuries.
David McKitterick FBA, was for many years Librarian of Trinity College and Honorary Professor of Historical Bibliography at Cambridge. He is one of the general editors of the Cambridge History of the book in Britain. His monographs include The Invention of Rare Books; Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840 (2018), based on his Panizzi lectures at the British Library, and Readers in a Revolution; Bibliographical Change in the Nineteenth Century (2022).
Contents
Preface List of Figures
Libraries
1 Henry Bradshaw and M. F. A. G. Campbell: Some Further Correspondence
2 Henry Bradshaw and J. W. Holtrop: Some Further Correspondence
Abbreviations
Further Reading
3 John Christopherson, Humanist and Benefactor
Further Reading
4 Cardiff: an End or a Beginning?
Note
The Book Trade
5 Customer, Reader and Bookbinder: Buying a Bible in 1630
Further Reading
6 Thomas Osborne, Samuel Johnson and the Learned of Foreign Nations: a Forgotten Catalogue
Further Reading
7 ‘Ovid with a Littleton’: the Cost of English Books in the Early Seventeenth Century
Further Reading
8 Books for Barbados and the British Atlantic Colonies in the Early Eighteenth Century: ‘A Catalogue of Books to Be Sold by Mr. Zouch’
1 Barbados
2 Zouch’s Catalogue
3 The Contents of the Catalogue
4 Beyond Barbados
5 The Missionary Societies and the Trade in Books
6 Missionaries and Tracts
7 Zouch’s Later Career
8 A Note on Copies of the Catalogue
Typography and Book Design
9 A Type Specimen of Christoffel van Dijck?
Note
Acknowledgements
10 Bruce Rogers at Cambridge, 1917–19
Further Reading
11 The Acceptable Face of Print
Further Reading
12 Old Faces and New Acquaintances: Typography and the Association of Ideas
Further Reading
13 What Is the Use of Books Without Pictures? Empty Space in Some Early Printed Books
Further Reading
14 How Can We Tell If People Noticed Changes in Book Design? Early Editions of the Imitatio Christi
1 The Imitatio Christi from Manuscript to Print
2 Format and Typography
3 English Innovations
4 Into the Seventeenth Century
5 In Conclusion
Further Reading
Book Collecting and Scholarship
15 Women and Their Books in Seventeenth-Century England: the Case of Elizabeth Puckering
I
II
Iii
Further Reading
16 Where Did Cambridge Undergraduates Get Their Books in the Nineteenth Century?
1 Libraries: College, University, Faculty
2 Buying and Selling
17 Adding to the Family Library: an Englishman in Italy in the 1630s
Further Reading
18 Publishing and Perishing in Classics: E. H. Barker and the Early Nineteenth-Century Book Trades
19 The Hand in the Machine: Facsimiles, Libraries and the Politics of Scholarship
Further Reading
20 Putting the Past on Show: Old Books and Communal Memory in the Nineteenth Century
1 Bibliophily: a Luxury, or a Public Pastime?
2 Cultural Memory and the History of Books
3 Belgium and National Identity
4 Dante, Bibliography and the Reunification of Italy
5 William Caxton and English Social Identity
6 The Museum: Presenting Memory to the World at Large
Further Reading
Retrospective Bibliography
21 ‘Not in STC’: Opportunities and Challenges in the ESTC
I
II
Further Reading
22 Bibliography, Population, and Statistics: a View from the West
1 Recent Interest: Limitations and Challenges
2 Measuring Evidence
3 Sources of Evidence
4 Survival: Measuring What?
5 Growth
6 East Asia: Parallels and Differences
Notes and Further Reading
Index
For readers from graduate students upwards, these essays address book design, the study of reading, and the history of the book trade and collecting, using evidence from across much of Europe. Keywords: Typography. Bookbinding. Book collecting. Book trade. Publishing statistics. Italy. Humanism. Cambridge. Bruce Rogers. Grand tour. Barbados. Facsimiles. Samuel Johnson. Cardiff. Public libraries. Library history. Printing anniversaries. Incunabula. Classical studies. J.W.Holtrop. M.F.A.G.Campbell. Bible publishing. Henry Bradshaw. Book illustration, Women’s reading.