History of the Book 

History of Reading

  

Overview

Books have been and remain central to how knowledge has been disseminated in modern culture. Encompassing areas of inquiry as diverse as copyright law, censorship, the reading practices of social classes, editing, bibliography, publishing, and the relationship between oral and print cultures, the study of book culture in all its aspects, instead of lying scattered in various disciplines, has in the past fifteen years developed a strong presence in universities and libraries around the world.

As a mode of inquiry book history concerns itself with the variety of activities related to print culture, from the production of books, to their distribution, to the laws that govern their use, to the reading practices of its consumers. Rarely do issues in understanding the function of books limit themselves to one discipline-specific mode of inquiry. For example, understanding the cultural impact of romances written in a particular manuscript in London in 1340 requires not only the literary knowledge of genre and linguistic competence in medieval languages, but also the then accepted principles of manuscript compilation, the circumstances of production of the manuscript, the rapidly changing social implications of choosing one vernacular language (English) over the more usual other (French), and all that we can know about contemporary reading practices and training for men and women, learned and lay.

Or, when in the late 1990s Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium in Vancouver had a shipment of books seized by Canada Customs, it called upon complex understandings of censorship, copyright, the reading practices of a subgroup, and publishing practices to achieve a usefully nuanced sense of how this moment of conflict between gay culture and government agencies in Canadian culture worked.

Book history is a strong research cluster in FASS, with more than 20 researchers from 10 units and/or departments and other areas at Dalhousie. Research projects within this cluster include:

• Censorship
• Copyright law
• Questions of forgery and fraud
• Middlebrow reading practices
• Practices of reading aloud in eighteenth-century Germany
• Ethics and reading in nineteenth-century fiction
• Reading as therapy
• The meeting of literate and oral cultures
• History of the Book in Canada
• Canadian editions
• Electronic editions of the work of Mikhail Kuzmin and William Wordsworth
• Electronic journals

 

People         Links to Research Libraries


The SHARP website includes information on Publishers' Records, Research Resources, Projects and Societies, Exhibits, Teaching, Programs, Announcements, and Journals

The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress provides a comprehensive directory of history of the book centres.