Scrutinising Sterne's fiction through a book history lens, Helen Williams creates novel readings of his work based on meticulous examination of its material and bibliographical conditions. Alongside multiple editions and manuscripts of Sterne's own letters and works, a panorama of interdisciplinary sources are explored, including dance manuals, letter-writing handbooks, newspaper advertisements, medical pamphlets and disposable packaging. For the first time, this wealth of previously overlooked material is critically analysed in relation to the design history of Tristram Shandy, conceptualising the eighteenth-century novel as an artefact that developed in close conjunction with other media. In examining the complex interrelation between a period's literature and the print matter of everyday life, this study sheds new light on Sterne and eighteenth-century literature by re-defining the origins of his work and of the eighteenth-century novel more broadly, whilst introducing readers to diverse print cultural forms and their production histories.

‘In Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book, Helen Williams has written a careful, scholarly study of lasting value about Sterne as a book designer. No one has yet attempted so thorough and meticulous a study of Sterne's 'graphic and typographic ingenuity'. His audacious blank, black and marbled pages are placed in the context of other printed design materials -'print sources beyond the novel'. What Thomas Keymer did for Tristram Shandy's context of writing-identifying the antecedents for what seems'post-modern' in Tristram's floating world-Williams has done for the physical design of first editions of the book.’

Source: TLS Reviews

‘… written as a clear work of scholarship with all that that implies in language … Recommended.’

R. Stone Source: Choice Magazine

'… all readers will find much in this lucidly arranged, intelligently curated Wunderkammer of antecedents and developments to prompt serious reconsideration of Sterne …'

Paul Baines Source: Eighteenth-Century Fiction

‘… a substantial and insightful study, which takes us significantly beyond previous discussions of Sterne’s relationship to the book as material and visual artefact.’

Shaun Regan Source: Modern Language Review

‘Any and all further commentary on Sterne’s experimental typography must begin with Williams, for in her thorough, eminently readable treatment of the effects of typography in Tristram Shandy, she uncovers new meaning as she excavates and elaborates the material context in which the novel first appeared.’

Elizabeth Kraft Source: The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cat