Bibliography and Modern Book Production is a fascinating historic journey through the fields of print history, librarianship and publishing. It covers key developments from 1494 to 1949 in bibliography and book production from the history of scripts and paper manufacture to the origins of typefaces and printing. Although not a textbook, the book was a guide for library students in the 1950s on the essential literature of librarianship. As the first librarian appointed to Wits University in 1929, Percy Freer’s near encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject of bibliography enabled him to develop a key resource for relevant library examinations in South Africa and abroad. Due to its immense value as a historic record, and to acknowledge Freer’s contributions as scholar, librarian and publisher, it is being reissued as part of the Wits University Press Re/Presents series to make it accessible to scholars in book histories, publishing studies and information science.

This volume provides an innovative and detailed overview of the book publishing industry, including details about the business processes in editorial, marketing and production. The work explores the complex issues that occur everyday in the publishing in

Connolly has chosen and described the 100 books that best define the Modern Movement which began as a revolt against the bourgeois in France, the Victorians in england, the puritanism and materialism of America.

This book offers an analysis of paratextual infrastructures in editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and shows how paratexts functioned as important instruments for publishers and commentators to influence readers of this ancient text.

The Book in Society: An Introduction to Print Culture examines the origins and development of one of the most important inventions in human history. Books can inform, entertain, inspire, irritate, liberate, or challenge readers, and their forms can be tangible and traditional, like a printed, casebound volume, or virtual and transitory, like a screen-page of a cell-phone novel. Written in clear, non-specialist prose, The Book in Society first provides an overview of the rise of the book and of the modern publishing and bookselling industries. It explores the evolution of written texts from early forms to contemporary formats, the interrelationship between literacy and technology, and the prospects for the book in the twenty-first century. The second half of the book is based on historian Robert Darnton’s concept of a book publishing “communication circuit.” It examines how books migrate from the minds of authors to the minds of readers, exploring such topics as the rise of the modern notion of the author, the role of states and others in promoting or restricting the circulation of books, various modes of reproducing and circulating texts, and how readers’ responses help shape the form and content of the books available to them. Feature boxes highlighting key texts, individuals, and developments in the history of the book, carefully selected illustrations, and a glossary all help bring the history of the book to life.

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tend to see the Book of Mormon through the lens of personal use, as a single textual and scriptural monolith—the Book of Mormon. That is somewhat natural, since we tend to have at hand and in-use, only the copy or version in our language needed to study it for inspiration. In the process, the point tends to get overlooked that while we may accept the text as inspired, the physical embodiment of that text—the Book of Mormon—is a mortal reality. The Book of Mormon, while it has a “spirit,” also has a mortal “body” (or rather, bodies) existing in space and time. As such, it has a history—and because it comes to us in the form of a book, it also has a book history. This study is divided into three parts. The first part is a straightforward history of the edition’s editing, production, and manufacturing processes. It examines key points in the reprint history of the book, following important factors in the subsequent impressions of the work across nearly thirty years of re-impressions, corrections, transfers, and one new format. The narrative crowded into chapters one through four together leave Part II to catalogue the bibliographic minutia that is the beating heart of analytic book history and which provides entertainment for true-blooded bibliophiles. The details contained in the production and manufacturing contracts and coupled to the typographical evidence explained in Part III, together resolve once and for all the question of what constitutes the 1920 edition and what does not.

This important reference volume covers developments in aspects of British library and information work during the five year period 2001-2005. Over forty contributors, all of whom are experts in their subject, provide an overview of their field along with extensive further references which act as a starting point for further research. The book provides a comprehensive record of library and information management during the past five years and will be essential reading for all scholars, library professionals and students.