The Book: A Global History - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019967941X ISBN 13: 9780199679416

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2014

Synopsis

A concise edition of the highly acclaimed Oxford Companion to the Book, this book features the 51 articles from the Companion plus 3 brand new chapters in an affordable format! The 54 chapters introduce readers to the fascinating world of book history. Including 21 thematic studies on topics such as writing systems, the ancient and the medieval book, and the economics of print, as well as 33 regional and national histories, offering a truly global survey of the book around the world, The Book: A Global History is the most comprehensive work of its kind. The three new articles, specially commissioned for this edition, cover censorship, copyright and intellectual property, and book history in the Caribbean and Bermuda.

All essays are illustrated throughout with reproductions, diagrams, and examples of various typographical features.
Beautifully produced and highly informative, this is a must-have for anyone with an interest in book history and the written word.

About this title

About the Author

Michael F. Suarez S.J. is Professor and Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Formerly the J. A. Kavanaugh Professor of English at Fordham University in New York and Fellow and Tutor in English at Campion Hall, Oxford, he is co-editor of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 5, 1695-1830 (2009) and co-general editor of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 8 vols (2006- ).

H. R. Woudhuysen is Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. He has edited The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (1992), with David Norbrook; Love's Labour's Lost (1998) and, with Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare's Poems (2007) for the Arden Shakespeare third series. His book Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640 was published in 1996.

Reviews

*Starred Review* This work contains essays previously published in volume 1 of The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010) with three additional essays: one on intellectual property and copyright, one on censorship, and one covering the Caribbean and Bermuda. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part consists of 21 thematic essays covering familiar topics, such as sacred books, various print technologies, and bookbinding, as well as the less familiar, such as missionary printing. In the second part, 49 essays explore the history of books in various parts of the world. Just as in the original work, the essays are of a scholarly nature and are geared toward specialist academicians, but they are extremely well written. The notion of “book” is very broad, as is the coverage here. A wide variety of topics are explored: the physical book from the beginning of writing systems to digital texts (including pre-Gutenberg forms such as tablets, hides, shells, and leaves); the production of books (covering areas such as printing, bookbinding, and bookselling); legal topics (such as intellectual property and censorship); and specialized forms (such as children’s books and religious texts). Curiously, there isn’t a thematic essay on libraries—which seems especially erroneous since some of the essays cover esoteric or less common aspects of books. The geographic essays occupy about two-thirds of the text. The coverage here is extensive, but it is biased toward Western countries—possibly because mass printing was invented in Europe. Readers looking for Central Asia have to reference the chapter on the Muslim world as well as the chapter covering China. Unfortunately, geographic regions are very sparingly referenced in the index. There are short bibliographies at the end of each essay. For readers interested in an academic treatment of the history of books, bookmaking, and the business of books, this collection of essays is a good place to start. More affordable than the original two-volume set, this dissemination of The Oxford Companion to the Book is highly recommended for academic libraries and for public libraries where there is an interest in a scholarly treatment of books. --Muhammed Hassanali

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019967941X
• ISBN 13: 9780199679416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 748
• Editor: Suarez S.J. Michael F., Woudhuysen H. R.