Historical and literary studies of the history of the book and of reading habits in modern Anglo-American history tend to approach their subject either from the perspective of readers and publishers or from that of authors. The former works constitute a nascent historiography, addressing the problem of how the material book was used to create and replicate culture; the latter studies are more concerned with how literary authors used texts to influence and negotiate culture. This article critically reviews the two bodies of scholarship and identifies the importance of copyright and reprinting; it comments on the value of transnational or other broad studies as opposed to specific investigations of a particular canonical text or local publishing/reading community.
The theory, method and disciplinary foundations of ‘book history’ are addressed in the
context of a close examination of the International Scientific Series, a set of monographs that
appeared from 1871 to 1911 in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States.
Working closely with entrepreneurial publishers, most authors of ISS volumes were scientific
professionals (T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer and E. L. Youmans were among the
founders) aiming to educate a broad popular audience. Commercial, scholarly and other pressures
made the texts less fixed than they appear: revisions, appendices and other evidences of textual
instability have been overlooked by previous commentators.
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