A Companion to the History of the Book

Search WorldCat for the subject “Book history” and prior to 1980 the majority of titles are works on printers, printing, and typography, histories of collectors or libraries, or the bibliographical analysis of an author or text. The first edition of A Companion to the History of the Book provided a useful guide to the emergence of book historiography as a scholarly discipline with interests in economic, social, intellectual, and political aspects of books following the 1980 publication of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. The second edition updates and expands on advances and changes in the discipline, especially considering digital technology.Editors Simon Eliot and Johnathan Rose have added sixteen new essays to the original forty, reorganized the contents, and produced a two-volume work. The new essays cover aspects of the book not included in the earlier edition (paper, paleography, archives, typography, printing, and bookbinding); expand the geographic coverage to include Africa, the Slavic countries, and Canada and Australasia; and cover publishing in the sciences, cartography, and music. The final section adds essays on writers, authorship as a profession, lexicography, and book collecting. Simon and Rose have assembled leading scholars to write each chapter. Each essay provides an overview of the field, introduces readers to the essential scholarship, and suggests future research opportunities. They are consistently well written and accessible, making them suitable for academic and general readers alike.Several of the chapters have been totally rewritten by new authors. It is in these essays that the shift in focus for the history of the book during the thirteen intervening years can be seen most clearly. Dirk Van Hulle's “Textual Scholarship” discusses how the digital text brought about a shift in the goal of textual scholarship, from the desire to establish the definitive text using various methods, to creating a version of the text which takes into account the multiplicity of documents underlying a given text and the process by which a text is created (24-27). The shift brought about by digital technologies (what Van Hulle, citing Jerome McGann, calls the “digital turn,” or “digital condition”) is echoed in “The New Textual Technologies” by Elena Pierazzo and Peter Stokes.1 Here the discussion centers on the ways in which “[n]ew technologies produce new forms of textuality and refashion older ones.” (677). The authors discuss hypertexts, markup languages, and FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) in relation to their role in understanding their influence on book history. The possibility that the book is on the “edge” of transformation into “a more fluid and dynamic concept of e-textuality” (687) echoes the shift described by Van Hulle in textual scholarship.Changes that have occurred in the 13 years between editions are reflected in the final essay, “Does the Book Have a Future?” Technology lauded as new has now passed (CD-ROMS as a promising form of publishing); trends identified as interesting, such as self-publishing and ebook and cell phones as digital readers, are part of everyday life. While it is possible to question the data supporting the claim that publication of new titles is still growing,2 it is, perhaps, the function of the final essay to proclaim that the book is not dead.The second edition of A Companion to the History of the Book occupies a unique place among available titles on the history of the book. It is more than textbook, less than a history; it does not present a neat chronology of its topic, nor is it limited to a single national perspective. For a more narrative and condensed approach, look to The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (ed. Leslie Howsam, 2015) which presents many of the same themes – book cultures, book materials, and methods and approaches to studying the history of the book – in a manner more useful as a class text (providing a chronology and a glossary useful to those coming to the history of the book for the first time). A slightly more comprehensive introductory text is An Introduction to Book History by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (Routledge, 2013), which addresses authorship more directly and fully than the Cambridge Companion.The strengths of A Companion to the History of the Book include its greater depth of coverage both in number of topics and in the deeper coverage each chapter provides, and its more current overview of scholarship and scholarly trends. Use the Howsam or Finkelstein and McCleery texts as introductions for the general public, undergraduates, and graduate students, then refer them to specific essays in A Companion to the History of the Book to continue their growth and deepen their interests. Librarians and scholars will value this book for its near-comprehensive overview of a large and developing field of academic study. This edition should not replace the first edition but should be offered alongside it – its “Introduction” provides a good summary of both editions, and the entire text has its own place in the development of book history.

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