A comprehensive resource to understanding the hand-press printing of early books Studying Early Printed Books, 1450 - 1800 offers a guide to the fascinating process of how books were printed in the first centuries of the press and shows how the mechanics of making books shapes how we read and understand them. The author offers an insightful overview of how books were made in the hand-press period and then includes an in-depth review of the specific aspects of the printing process. She addresses questions such as: How was paper made? What were different book formats? How did the press work? In addition, the text is filled with illustrative examples that demonstrate how understanding the early processes can be helpful to today’s researchers. Studying Early Printed Books shows the connections between the material form of a book (what it looks like and how it was made), how a book conveys its meaning and how it is used by readers. The author helps readers navigate books by explaining how to tell which parts of a book are the result of early printing practices and which are a result of later changes. The text also offers guidance on: how to approach a book; how to read a catalog record; the difference between using digital facsimiles and books in-hand. This important guide: Reveals how books were made with the advent of the printing press and how they are understood today Offers information on how to use digital reproductions of early printed books as well as how to work in a rare books library Contains a useful glossary and a detailed list of recommended readings Includes a companion website for further research Written for students of book history, materiality of text and history of information, Studying Early Printed Books explores the many aspects of the early printing process of books and explains how their form is understood today.

While text processing is often associated with the digital humanities, it is still seen as worlds apart from literary modernism and its aesthetic preoccupations. This book upsets that narrative. Examining literary manuscripts from some of the twentieth century's best-known and lesser-known novelists, from Marcel Proust to Mina Loy, Alex Christie reveals where authors experimented with proto-digital writing methods by hand. Instead of looking to computers as sources of inspiration, the authors discussed turned to twentieth-century media for their ability to reveal new layers of the material world. From analog fantasies of contacting the dead to digital anxieties of invisible information, the aesthetic ambitions of these novels can be traced back to their author's interest in emerging media devices and their technical operation. To capture the magic of such devices through writing, these authors devised radical methods for generating literary text, anticipating today's digital humanities.

Medieval robots took such forms as talking statues, mechanical animals, or silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed surveillance or discipline. Medieval Robots explores the forgotten history of real and imagined machines that captivated Europe from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries.

Seven manuscript fragments of the Old French Suite Vulgate du Merlin discovered in a set of early-printed books in the Bristol Central Library hit global headlines in 2019: this is a comprehensive study with accompanying transliteration of these fascinating Arthurian fragments.

The publishing industry in France in the years before the Revolution was a lively and sometimes rough-and-tumble affair, as publishers and printers scrambled to deal with (and if possible evade) shifting censorship laws and tax regulations, in order to cater to a reading public's appetite for books of all kinds, from the famous Encyclop die, repository of reason and knowledge, to scandal-mongering libel and pornography. Historian and librarian Robert Darnton uses his exclusive access to a trove of documents-letters and documents from authors, publishers, printers, paper millers, type founders, ink manufacturers, smugglers, wagon drivers, warehousemen, and accountants-involving a publishing house in the Swiss town of Neuchatel to bring this world to life. Like other places on the periphery of France, Switzerland was a hotbed of piracy, carefully monitoring the demand for certain kinds of books and finding ways of fulfilling it. Focusing in particular on the diary of Jean-Fran ois Favarger, a traveling sales rep for a Swiss firm whose 1778 voyage, on horseback and on foot, around France to visit bookstores and renew accounts forms the spine of this story, Darnton reveals not only how the industry worked and which titles were in greatest demand, but the human scale of its operations. A Literary Tour de France is literally that. Darnton captures the hustle, picaresque comedy, and occasional risk of Favarger's travels in the service of books, and in the process offers an engaging, immersive, and unforgettable narrative of book culture at a critical moment in France's history.

This book critically evaluates the prevailing idea that north-west European migration was central to the transformation from post-Roman to 'Anglo-Saxon' society in Britain, and explores the increasing evidence for more evolutionary change.