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The book "Women's Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England" edited by Valerie Wayne explores the question of whether women have a book history in early modern England. The book utilizes a range of new original sources and analysis to provide a resounding answer that women did indeed have a significant role in the book trade and cultural life during this period. The book is praised for its successes but also acknowledges its limitations, particularly in terms of its focus on English borders and its definition of "woman." Despite these constraints, the book is considered an essential piece of women's history and book history for future scholars and students. [Extracted from the article]

Marcy J. Dinius's book, "The Textual Effects of David Walker's 'Appeal': Print-Based Activism against Slavery, Racism, and Discrimination, 1829–1851," explores the impact of David Walker's pamphlet, "An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World," which called for Black liberation. Dinius examines five adaptations of the pamphlet over a twenty-year period, analyzing the materiality of the text and its influence on Black and Indigenous rhetorical and print cultures. The book highlights the interconnectedness of these texts and their role in advocating against slavery and racial discrimination. Dinius's work contributes to the field of Black bibliography and emphasizes the importance of preserving and studying these texts in the face of censorship and the erasure of marginalized voices. [Extracted from the article]

This article considers the fugitive slave narrative as an important episode in the history of the book. It notes the multiple editions to which many of these books ran, and the difficulty of determining a comprehensive bibliographic record of publication. We establish this bibliographic record for Moses Roper's autobiography, Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery , whose sixteen editions were published between 1837 and 1849 in English and Welsh, in what the article identifies as six phases of publication. The article argues for the documentary importance of the paratextual material and visual imagery folded into each edition as extensions of the autobiographical record and, therefore, moments of historical redefinition that respond to the material, economic, social, and cultural conditions of production. This includes the capacity of Black writing to establish spheres of Atlantic print culture other than Anglophone. The article shows that the bibliographic surfeit of nineteenth-century Black writing exemplified by Roper's work provides an untapped biographical resource in which important clues to the biographies of their authors, and of their families in slavery and in freedom, lie hidden in plain sight. Bibliographic attention to Roper's work therefore reveals the novel ways in which the book was systematized as a form of archival practice at a time when it was necessary to travel light, and the public sphere provided one of the few hopes of establishing a durable record of the author's personal and family history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giancarlo Petrella's book, "Scrivere sui libri: Breve guida al libro a stampa postillato," serves as a guide to annotated early printed books, known as postillati. The book is divided into three chapters that explore the history of annotated books, ownership traces and provenance, and reading evidence. Petrella provides numerous examples and a solid methodological approach to understanding the material history of books and reading. While the book may have some flaws, it is an important and indispensable work in the field of marginalia studies, particularly in Italy. [Extracted from the article]

Albums assembled from fragmentary materials present a special set of problems for bibliographic research. Inaccurately described in catalogs and often caught between different fields, these hybrid objects can be tricky to find within collections and even more difficult to place historically in terms of genre. Yet understanding these seemingly idiosyncratic albums has become more important to book history than ever, as the field pushes to tell deeper histories of the material text. This essay begins from the premise that the modern library catalog is, as an ordering technology, incapable of accurately describing these unique books. In order to dispel the fog of naïve wonderment that often persists around them, I proceed to develop a taxonomy of what fragments are (whether remnants , snippets , or pieces , with the related notion of scraps) and a spectrum of their use within collections (as specimens of something or as raw stuff to create something new). Finally, I draw on the terms laid out in this essay to survey some major genres of assembled albums, including Romantic albums, scrapbooks, paper doll houses, chromolithographic albums, Victorian photocollage, design portfolios, sample books, leaf books, and extra-illustrated volumes. By beginning to trace connections across time, this essay shows how a more sensitive reading of fragments might transform book history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The remarkable theatrical history of Joseph Addison's 1713 tragedy Cato is well known, but the play is also an exceptional case in book history. This essay looks in detail at its two entirely distinct "first" editions. It resolves the relationship between these two editions and considers the quite different problems they raise for the bibliographer: the one of how we distinguish between edition and issue in a context of frenzied publication, standing type, and incremental resetting; the other, of how a manifestly substandard and suspicious edition came to carry the self-proclaimed hallmark of the play's true publisher, Jacob Tonson. The early print history of Addison's Cato , this essay shows, both puts pressure on the language of bibliography and also marks an important and revealing episode in a number of larger histories: those of the Tonson house, of book piracy and copyright protection, and of the bestseller. Appendices provide bibliographical descriptions of the 1713 Qα and Qβ editions, press variants of the earliest three issues of Qα, and uncorrected errors in Qβ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through I Intermediate Horizons: Book History and Digital Humanities i , editors Mark Vareschi and Heather Wacha curate a collection of chapters by scholars representing a variety of bookish interests. Some chapters (e.g., Pottroff, Yahr, Leaner, Alvis) complement gentle introductions to questions about digitality and digitization for settled book historians. For Alvis, book history and bibliography may serve as conceptual lenses for digital phenomena; Alvis likens institutional and individual contributions to the #LibraryTwitter hashtag to the various textual and visual elements in medieval books of hours. [Extracted from the article]

The essay talks about the Book History Workshop at the Texas A&M University. It states that the Workshop has proved useful for students of bibliography, printing history, and textual studies. According to bibliographer Ronald B. McKerrow, for understanding books, a student needs to understand all the processes of starting a book to finishing the book. Prominent bibliographer Philip Gaskell is mentioned.

The article contains an annotated chronological catalogue of advertisements for printed dramas appearing in English serial publications between July 1646 and November 1668. Topics considered include issues with dating early modern print materials such as competing calendars, booksellers' advertisements, and extant catalogs of seventeenth-century dramas by scholars W. W. Greg and Sybil Rosenfeld.

The article examines the publication and reception history of the book "Black Rock," by Charles William Gordon. It explores the cause of the spectacular popularity of Gordon as an author, as well as the wide reception of his novel. The author analyzes that the lack of copyright of the book was a major factor of its wide production and reception.

The article discusses the publication of the first complete edition of the book "Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography," by Charles and Jules Renouard. It explores how the editors of the book collate the memoirs of Benjamin Franklin which are not written all at once. The article also traces the bizarre history of editions of autobiographies of Franklin.

Examines book history to validate the contemporary concepts of the `author.' Evidence for commodification of the author in publishing practices; Fusion of two separate ontologies of the word `author'; Account of the disjunction in the concept of the author; Cultural and economic discourses depicted on the materiality of books.