Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

or £50 the set. Bookmen have never managed to achieve an agreed definition of their field of study. Bibliography has been claimed on the one hand by mere, but useful, enumerators of authors and titles and on the other by lofty textual critics and scarcely less elevated literary ones. The librarians appropriated the subject as part of their professional mystery, only to abandon it for the siren lure of silicon chip and management studies. There were the chaps whose austere and sole delight was to reveal, exclusively to each other, the intricacies of press-figures, skeleton-formes, turned chain-lines, pin-holes, and compositorial analysis. Others devoted their labours to charting the evolution of type design, the careers of publishing houses, or the distribution of paper-mills. Some even deserted the medium for the package, in spite of the late Harry Carter's contemptuous dismissal of the ancient craft of bookbinding as \"a species of cobbling\". Over the last fifteen years many of these traditional and sometimes competing kinds of bibliography have been drawing together into a new historical genre represented by a growing volume of monographs and journal articles and complete with the now obligatory French label as a seal of academic respectability-histoire du livre, best translated perhaps as \"the historical sociology of the book\". It will come as no surprise to learn that the French inspiration and first embodiment of the enterprise came in a series called Histoire et civilisation du livre, sponsored by the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Centre de Recherches d'Histoire et de Philologie in Paris.' The general editor, and a notable contributor, Henri Jean Martin, was a pupil of, and later a collaborator with, no less a scholar than the social historian and co-founder of Annales, Lucien Febvre. The flavour of the new bibliographical history (\"la biblio-logie retrospective\" is a recently used alternative label) may be caught from the title of Martin's own contribution to the series, Livre, pouvoirs et societe 'a Paris au XVII siecle.2 English-language readers had their first substantial taste of the new French confection in 1976 with the publication of David Gerard's translation of Febvre and Martin's L'apparition du livre under the title The coming of the book: the impact of printing 1450-J800.3 Much of the factual material in that book was from well-known secondary sources but the arrangement and conclusions revealed the authors' intellectual allegiance. English readers received a salutary jolt from a crisp demonstration …

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The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe

Knowledge management: An information science perspective

The enormously energetic working-class reading cultures occupying the core of Jonathan Rose’s magnificent study grew up from rather unpromising roots. For long periods, reading, like publishing, could be a dangerous business. In the sixteenth century, Thomas Cranmer had ‘proposed to confiscate heretical texts and prosecute bible readers’; and, as Rose informs us, ‘at least twenty people were burned for discussing heresy between 1539 to 1546’. We can see where Cranmer was coming from: just like Carlo Ginzburg’s Mennochio the Miller, in The Cheese and the Worms (Routledge & Kegan Paul; London, 1980), those who could read might develop critical, political views or levelling tendencies. Robert Darnton’s Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (W.W. Norton; New York and London, 1995) shows that the authorities, fully in awe of the power of the word, worked themselves into frenzies about books, burning dummy tomes and imprisoning booksellers. In these early times, publishing and reading might have carried a health warning.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

The project behind this book has been carried out with the support of the European Community in the framework of the Socrates programme. It should be noted that sole responsibility lies with the authors and that the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained in the book.

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Leif Kajberg

Papers

European Curriculum Reflections on Library and Information Science Education