The leading historians who are the authors of this work offer a highly original account of one of the most important transformations in Western culture: the change brought about by the discovery and development of printing in Europe. Focusing primarily on printed matter other than books, The Culture of Print emphasizes the specific and local contexts in which printed materials, such as broadsheets, flysheets, and posters, were used in modern Europe. The authors show that festive, ritual, cultic, civic, and pedagogic uses of print were social activities that involved deciphering texts in a collective way, with those who knew how to read leading those who did not. Only gradually did these collective forms of appropriation give way to a practice of reading--privately, silently, using the eyes alone--that has become common today. This wide-ranging work opens up new historical and methodological perspectives and will become a focal point of debate for historians and sociologists interested in the cultural transformations that accompanied the rise of modern societies. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"The leading historians who are the authors of this work offer a highly original account of one of the most important transformations in Western culture: the change brought about by the discovery and development of printing in Europe. Focusing primarily on printed matter other than books, The Culture of Print emphasizes the specific and local contexts in which printed materials, such as broadsheets, flysheets, and posters, were used in modern Europe. The authors show that festive, ritual, cultic, civic, and pedagogic uses of print were social activities that involved deciphering texts in a collective way, with those who knew how to read leading those who did not. Only gradually did these collective forms of appropriation give way to a practice of reading--privately, silently, using the eyes alone--that has become common today. This wide-ranging work opens up new historical and methodological perspectives and will become a focal point of debate for historians and sociologists interested in the cultural transformations that accompanied the rise of modern societies."--Publisher's description.

Planned nine-volume series devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present.

Building on recent work on Victorian print culture and the turn toward material historical research in modernist studies, this collection extends the frontiers of scholarship on the 'Atlantic scene' of publishing, exploring new ways of grappling with the rapidly changing universe of print at the turn of the twentieth century.

With the advent of new digital communication technologies, the end of print culture once again appears to be as inevitable to some recent commentators as it did to Marshall McLuhan. And just as print culture has so often been linked with the rise of modern industrial society, so the alleged demise of print under the onslaught of new media is often also correlated with the demise of modernity. This book charts the elements involved in such claims--print, culture, technology, history--through a method that examines the iconography of materials, marks and processes of print, and in this sense acknowledges McLuhan's notion of the medium as the bearer of meaning. Even in the digital age, many diverse forms of print continue to circulate and gain meaning from their material expression and their history. However, Frances Robertson argues that print culture can only be understood as a constellation of diverse practices and therefore discusses a range of print cultures from 1800 the present 'post-print' culture. The book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students within the areas of cultural history, art and design history, book and print history, media studies, literary studies, and the history of technology.

The first book-length presentation of Roger Chartier's work in English, this volume provides a vivid example of the new directions of cultural history in France. These essays probe the impact of printing on all social classes of the ancien régime and reveal the surprising range of ways in which texts and pictures were used by audiences with different levels of literacy. Professor Chartier demonstrates that those who attempted to regulate behavior and thought on behalf of church or state, for example, were well aware of the wide influence of the printed word. He finds fascinating evidence of fundamental processes of social controls in texts such as the guides to a good death or the treatises on norms of civility, rules that originated at court but that were eventually appropriated in various forms by society as a whole. Essays on the evolution of the fête, on the cahiers de doléances of 1789, and on the early paperback genre known as the Bibliotheque bleue complete the picture of what people read and why and of what was published and what influenced the publishers. These essays offer a critical reappraisal of the complex connections between the new culture of print and the oral and ritual-oriented forms of traditional culture. The reader will discover essential patterns of the cultural evolution of France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Introduction to Contemporary Print Culture examines the role of the book in the modern world. It considers the book’s deeply intertwined relationships with other media through ownership structures, copyright and adaptation, the constantly shifting roles of authors, publishers and readers in the digital ecosystem and the merging of print and digital technologies in contemporary understandings of the book object. Divided into three parts, the book first introduces students to various theories and methods for understanding print culture, demonstrating how the study of the book has grown out of longstanding academic disciplines. The second part surveys key sectors of the contemporary book world – from independent and alternative publishers to editors, booksellers, readers and libraries – focusing on topical debates. In the final part, digital technologies take centre stage as eBook regimes and mass-digitisation projects are examined for what they reveal about information power and access in the twenty-first century. This book provides a fascinating and informative introduction for students of all levels in publishing studies, book history, literature and English, media, communication and cultural studies, cultural sociology, librarianship and archival studies and digital humanities.