Studies in the culture and history of the book are a burgeoning academic specialty. Intriguing, rigorous, and vital, they are nevertheless rooted within three major academic disciplines - history, literary studies, and bibliography - that focus respectively upon the book as a cultural transaction, a literary text, and a material artefact. Old Books and New Histories serves as a guide to this rich but sometimes confusing territory, explaining how different scholarly approaches to w...

Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.Framed as a ‘research memoir’, Eliza Orme’s Ambitions fills out earlier scant accounts of this intriguing life, while speculating about why it has been overl...

The Kegan Paul imprint was created and its reputation for a distinguished list of titles established during a forty-year period from 1871 to 1911. Several publishers, and their firms, were involved in the development of the imprint during this period, beginning with Henry S. King and Company, and following in 1877 with Charles Kegan Paul and his partner Alfred Chenevix Trench. A financial crisis in 1889 forced an amalgamation with two other businesses and the new firm changed managers peri...

Throughout human history, the world's knowledge and fruits of the creative imagination have been produced, circulated and received through the medium of the material text. This Companion provides a wide-ranging account of the history of the book and its ways of thinking about works from ancient inscription to contemporary e-books, discussing thematic, chronological and methodological aspects of this interdisciplinary field. The first part considers book cultures from local, national and gl...