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Early modern books were not stable or settled outputs of the press but dynamic shape-changers, subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision, and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected, and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. Processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation, and posthumous publication resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author's name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book's identity or contents. This collection brings together original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history that explore these various kinds of textual inconstancy and variability. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical, and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy, and of authors including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, John Dryden, Thomas Burnet, John Tillotson, Henry Maundrell, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Wesley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The result is a richly diverse collection that demonstrates the embeddedness of the book trade in the cultural dynamics of early modernity.

L'étonnante diversité des possibilités esthétiques offertes par le livre comme support matériel de la fin du XIXe siècle aux expérimentations les plus contemporaines, est au cœur de la réflexion proposée dans ce livre. La page, le feuillet et le livre, l'écran aussi, débordent le cadre du codex et du livre relié (livre en éventail, leporello, recueil d'affiches, livre dressé, livre sculpté, livre éclaté, livre numérique, etc.), par l'hétérogénéité de leurs matières, de leurs formes et de leurs formats. Ils deviennent des supports actifs dans le processus de conception et de réception de l'œuvre. Observer les processus de composition et de diffusion des œuvres dans leurs singularités matérielles, tel est l'objet de ce livre. Cette recherche engage à prendre la mesure du rôle des différents acteurs dans la conception du livre, non plus seulement l'écrivain et l'artiste mais aussi le typographe, le relieur, l'éditeur ou le galeriste, chaque acteur pouvant lui-même être polyvalent. La porosité des frontières entre les activités, les métiers, engendre naturellement la porosité entre les genres littéraires et artistiques. The heart of the reflection in this book is the diversity of aesthetic possibilities of the book as material support, from the late nineteenth century to contemporary experiments. The page, the sheet and the book go well beyond the codex and the bound book, in the heterogeneity of their materials, forms and formats (fans, leporellos, poster collections, upright books, book sculptures, exploded books, electronic books, etc.): they are active supports in the design and reception process. This book observes the process of composition and distribution of works in their material singularities, including the role of the different stakeholders in the design of the book, not only the writer and the artist but also the typographer, bookbinder, publisher or gallery owner, each playing a multiplicity of roles. Such porous borders between roles and crafts generate porosity between the literary and artistic genres.