Book History 

About: Book History is an academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Reading (process) & Print culture. It has an ISSN identifier of 1098-7371. Over the lifetime, 305 publications have been published receiving 3458 citations.

Reading: The State of the Discipline

Abstract: Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet . . . how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life signiWcant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behaviour? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life?1

How Well Read Was My Valley?: Reading, Popular Fiction, and the Miners of South Wales, 1875-1939

Abstract: dom describing the state of the book trade.1 Of Wales he stated that “books are coming to be more part of the life of the Welsh people than they once were,” and he noted that “the Welsh miner is a great reader.”2 Milne’s judgment has since become a commonplace, seemingly confirmed by autobiographical reminiscences, library records, local newspaper articles and other primary documents. In this essay I will investigate how far South Wales miners in the fifty years up to 1939 could legitimately be called “great readers.” What were the roots of their alleged appetite for books and reading; how was this appetite satisfied; and of what did their fare consist? The hard meat of dialectical materialism, namely, the philosophical, economic, and sociopolitical writings of Marxism-Leninism, has often been seen as a major component of the miners’ reading diet.3 Milne himself called the miner “a student of serious books, including Carlyle and Emerson and the prophets of what may be called the social gospel.”4 Twenty years later the Reverend Reginald Barker, a Methodist minister in Tonypandy in the Rhondda Fawr between 1924 and 1935, confirmed Milne’s impression, stating that in the Rhondda Valleys, the geographical and intellectual center of How Well Read Was My Valley?

Very Necessary but Not Quite Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History

Abstract: Before one says anything else about book history, one should remind readers and practitioners alike that the subject is rooted in the material world. Textual or iconographic information is produced, processed, transmitted, received, and preserved by a series of physical acts on material objects within the real world. The writer’s cramp, the aching back of the scribe, the stench from parchment being prepared, the creaking frame of the common press, the weight and yet fragility of type, the roar and racket of newspaper presses, the clatter of Monotype casters, the damp solidity of printed sheets, the glazed garishness of yellowbacks and pulp Wction, the extravagant juxtapositions in encrusted layers of Xy posters on unattended walls—all tell us of one thing above all others: meaning and signiWcance in human affairs is not conveyed with immaculate and abstract precision from writer to reader. What it also tells us is that this material world is characterized in part, and therefore is to be understood in part, by countable quantities: reams of paper, tons of type, print runs, and percentage returns on capital. Very Necessary but Not Quite Sufficient

Paperwork: The State of the Discipline

Abstract: "However many people complain about 'red tape,' " Max Weber remarks in Economy and Society, "it would be sheer illusion to think for a moment that continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices. The whole pattern of everyday life is cut to fit this framework."1 Weber's account of the rise of bureaucracy has long served as both a master and a mistress narrative for the humanities and social sciences. A master narrative because it makes sense out of the wildly uneven yet strangely similar processes of state formation that have taken place around the world over the last two or three centuries; a mistress narrative because its existence, while known to all, nevertheless remains a bit scandalous. There seems to be something about the stories we tell each other of our encounters with the bureaucracy those complaints about red tape that are as endless as the red tape itself that make us feel like we've been naughty. Freud calls this "joke-work," and for a long time bureaucracy talk was mainly after laughs. Indeed, the word owes its early success to its origins as a pun, when Vincent de Gournay, a protoliberal political economist in mideighteenth century France, added to democracy, aristocracy, monarchy rule by the many, the few, the one rule by a piece of office furniture.2 In his article on "bureaucracy" for his Tableau de Paris (1788), Louis-Sebastien Mercier explained that "it was a word recently coined to indicate, clearly and concisely, the overgrown power possessed by simple clerks."3 In his early critiques of Hegel, Karl Marx borrowed the French term to mock the philosopher's ambitious claims for the state. In the preparatory materials for The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), Tocqueville jotted down a reminder to himself to resist its semantic temptations. "Bureaucracy" was nothing more than "modern jargon that one should try to avoid." He was