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5 results

  • PART I - THE MAKING OF BOOKS

  • Edited by Richard Gameson, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2012
    Print publication:
    22 December 2011, pp -

  • Summary

    As this famous Riddle from the Exeter Book of Old English poetry teasingly records, medieval books were made from sheets of parchment which were cut to size, folded and gathered into groups to form quires. The basic material of the medieval book was, as the Riddle advertises, animal skin. A potentially important factor here, however, was the circumstance that the manuscript was prepared with wide margins on both sides of the main text-block to provide space for glosses. The aesthetic of the page, not to mention the important practical detail of how much text it could contain, was established by the dimensions of the written area as well as by the size and shape of the volume as a whole. Anglo-Saxon books were composed of more regular quire structures than their Irish equivalents. The sheets were marked with prickings to guide the rulings, which in their turn guided the script.

  • 28 - The British book in North America

  • from IV - THE INTERNATIONAL MARKET
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 544-559

  • Summary

    Throughout the colonial period, most books read in America were British, as was to be expected in a mercantilist colonial system; however, in the first half of the eighteenth century, the London book trade paid little attention to the colonies. In the second half of the century the book trade awoke to the potential of the American market, just as it was slipping away. Some American publishers offered Canadian booksellers discounts of 30-40 per cent, which alleviated the burden of a 30 per cent duty. This made American reprints of British books competitive with British imports, at least in some regions, and it encouraged Canadians to buy American editions of American authors as well, notwithstanding frequent warnings from civil and religious authorities about their pernicious effects. The legal and economic barriers to book production in Canada before the 1820s were much stronger than they had been in the lower thirteen colonies before 1776.

  • 11 - The morphology of the page

  • from PART III - THE TECHNOLOGIES AND AESTHETICS OF BOOK PRODUCTION
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 248-267

  • Summary

    The shape of words on a page followed conventions adopted without alteration from those of manuscript books. The study of the changes induced constitutes the morphology of the book, a phrase used by Henri-Jean Martin at a conference in 1977 to describe this process. The last decade of the eighteenth century and first of the nineteenth, a period of prosperity in time of war, were thus a high point in the appearance of books in Britain. It was also a period of great technological change, with the introduction of machine-made paper by the Fourdriniers, Lord Stanhope's iron press and first stereotype office, and finally the steam-powered press of Koenig and Bauer, of which Bensley and Richard Taylor were joint patentees. The increase in the number of newspaper and periodical titles in the last half of the century had been dramatic, and with it the demand for posters, playbills, forms and other jobbing work.

  • 29 - The British book in India

  • from IV - THE INTERNATIONAL MARKET
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 560-576

  • Summary

    This chapter describes the various purposes for which books were exported from Britain, the scale of that export trade, and the emergence of an embryonic infrastructure for book selling and distribution within India. Apart from the end products of the printing trade, Britain was also the essential source of manpower and materials for the fledgling book trade in India. Trained personnel began to reach India in the late eighteenth century specifically to man the presses of the expanding expatriate printing market in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. By the end of the eighteenth century, the professional elite of British society in India possessed private libraries of considerable size. The commercial importation of British books into India began with the captains and officers of East India men who were allowed to ship out freight-free a certain weight of speculative cargo according to rank.

  • 37 - British books abroad: the American colonies

  • from BEYOND LONDON: PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, RECEPTION
  • Edited by John Barnard, University of Leeds, D. F. McKenzie, University of Oxford
  • With Maureen Bell, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 November 2002, pp 744-752

  • Summary

    The historians of seventeenth-century book culture in the British colonies have traditionally focused on the advent of printing and on the private libraries of a few distinguished bookmen: the Winthrops, the Mathers, Elder Brewster, John Harvard, Isaac Norris and William Byrd, among others. The low incidence of American imprints in colonial inventories is noteworthy and probably reflects both their negligible value and the limited purposes for which they were printed. European printing occupied the commercial sector of the market; colonial printing was subsidized, official and of small commercial value. Before the establishment of printing in Boston, in 1675, the distribution of native printing was virtually monopolized by Hezekiah Usher and his son John, general merchants who incidentally dealt in books and stationery. The Ushers were certainly selling British books before 1675, on exactly the same lines as English provincial booksellers.