overview revolutions publishing retailing reading technologies illustration going digital reviews bodies

revolutions For those seeking precedents for how 'connectivity' is reshaping the world we'd suggest Elizabeth Eisenstein's magisterial two volume The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 79) rather than the much-hyped but altogether too gnomic The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, Uni of Toronto Press 62) by Marshall McLuhan.   Skip the neo-Thomist mumbo-jumbo from Toronto and head for Walter Benjamin's 1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, translated by Harry Zohn and edited by Hannah Arendt in Illuminations (New York, Schocken 85) or Ithiel de Sola Pool's superb Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge, Belknap 87) and Technologies Without Boundaries (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 90). Eisenstein's one volume The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge Uni Press, Cambridge 83) is a beautifully illustrated distillation of her masterwork. She argues that print was instrumental to the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, nationalism and individualism but did not cause any of them. All were emerging before the advent of the press but were not able to gain wide currency because of the tendency of scribal copies to degenerate. George Atiyeh's The Book In The Islamic World (Albany, State Universities of New York Press 95) offers a point of reference. The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology In The First Age of Print (London, Routledge 00) edited by Neil Rhodes & Jonathan Sawday, The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print & Digital Culture (Ann Arbor, Uni of Michigan Press 98) edited by George Bornstein & Theresa Tinkle, and Johannes Pedersen's The Arabic Book (Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 84) provide other perspectives. Insights into originality and copying are found in Anthony Grafton's Forgers & Critics (Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 90) and Hillel Schwartz's The Culture of the Copy (New York, Zone 96). Mark Rose, in Authors & Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 93) examines the birth of copyright - originally restricted to printers, considered to be the true producers of books and the ones most hurt by cheap knock-offs. In considering the long debate before authors were given legal rights over their work in the eighteenth century Rose examines the disagreements - alive and well in cyberspace - about what is to be protected: an original idea or an original way of putting an old idea. We've pointed in our intellectual property guide to other examinations of copyright as a precondition for the publishing explosion. One of the highlights is the set of essays in Of Authors & Origins (Oxford, Clarendon Press 94) edited by Griffith University's Brad Sherman. Lucien Febvre & Henri-Jean Martin's The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 (London, NLB 76) is of similar importance to Eisenstein and replete with analysis about distribution channels, pricing, innovations in ink and press technology, and the weight of paper. A fine example of the Annales school before it succumbed to obsessive cliometry. Febvre & Martin lack McLuhan's mystical delirium about print as the satanic force that exiled us from some edenic innocence, to which we're presumably returned by the 'new media'. Martin also wrote The History & Power of Writing (Chicago, Uni of Chicago Press 94) a benchmark for the study of western writing from Mesopotamian clay seals to the advent of digitized text. Roger Chartier's Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer (Philadelphia, Uni of Pennsylvania Press 95) and The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the 14th & 18th Centuries (Cambridge, Polity Press 93) discuss the anxiety provoked by the proliferation of books in the late Middle Ages, akin to the current explosion of content on the Web, and efforts to bring them into some order and coherence.  As a recent reviewer noted, "the ongoing tension between the ideal of total inclusion and the constraints of manageable selection and ideological control is manifest in these 'libraries without walls' and has remained with us ever since". Frederick Kilgour's The Evolution of The Book (Oxford, Oxford Uni Press 98) is less analytical. The Nature of the Book: Print & Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, Chicago Uni Press 98) by Adrian Johns builds on Eisenstein in considering publishing, printing, authorship, authority and readership in restoration England. He's particularly acute on contemporary myths of Gutenberg and the invention of printing, of interest as this year is the 600th anniversary of the printer's birth. His study is lavishly illustrated.  There's a valuable cross-cultural exploration of New Paradigms & Parallels: The Printing Press & the Internet project.  George Painter, biographer of Proust, Gide & Chateaubriand, produced the graceful William Caxton: A Quincentenary Biography of England's First Printer (London, Chatto & Windus 76). It sums up what we know about the elusive Mr Caxton and the birth of British publishing. David Zaret's Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions & the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 00) adds another dimension. Lee Erickson's The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature & The Industrialisation of Publishing 1800-1850 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Uni Press 96) - a rather sobering study of why fat three volume novels swamped thin volumes of poetry - complements Peter McDonald's more readable British Literary Culture & Publishing Practice 1880-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 97).  David McKitterick is editing the 7 volume Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 99-) and a similar project is underway in Australia. Among other historical studies we recommend the brilliant three volume The Enlightenment (New York, Knopf 96) by Peter Gay - a definitive and compelling study of the interrelationship between 18th century ideas, authors, readers and publishers - and the more restricted publishing studies by specialist Robert Darnton.  The latter's The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 82), The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie 1775-1800 (Cambridge, Belknap 79), The Forbidden Best-Sellers of PreRevolutionary France (New York, Norton 95) and The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France 1769-1789 (New York, Norton 95) are exemplary. Carla Hesse's Publishing & Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 (Berkeley, Uni of California Press 91) is also of value. David Hall's Cultures of Print: Essays In The History of the Book (Amherst, Uni of Massachusetts Press, 86) has a broader scope. Darnton is the inspiration behind the US HistoryE-book project of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the American Historical Association's Gutenberg-e Prizes project, concerned with electronic publication of new and old historical monographs.  His recent essay A Historian of Books, Lost & Found in Cyberspace, complements his presidential address to the American Historical Association - An Early Information Society.  Darnton's thoughtful essays on The New Age of the Book and Paris: The Early Internet appeared in the 4 March 1999 and 29 June 00 issues of the New York Review of Books.      next page  (publishing)