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This particular book seeks to have experts on East Asian and European book history explore issues of mutual interest, to the benefit the main concerns and other issues of book history at the opposite ends of Eurasia. Here the editors concentrate on the book cultures of the two regions of Eurasia, East Asia and Western Europe, which in pre-modern times made the most of publishing books. Just as the most influential Western scholars of the European book have relished researching how the book has shaped the history of European countries other than just their own, so do we now wish to analyze the development of book production, distribution, and consumption of these regions from a consciously comparative perspective. Our hope is that our findings will cast new light on the history of books and book culture within each of these regions.

McKitterick identifies the pitfalls encountered by historians of the Western book in classifying, counting, and identifying the materials they use in their research and thereby offers clear advice for East Asian bibliographers on European practices to avoid as well as to follow. McDermott identifies a distinctive feature of Chinese and Japanese book production, private non-commercial publishing, and shows how its popularity in East Asia complicates efforts to transfer to its book history the conventional Western historical narratives that identify the rise of printing with the rise of capitalism and the linkage of market expansion with the public expression of private opinion on public matters.

James Raven’s essay is concerned with the transmission of books in Europe and its colonies in the period between Gutenberg’s invention of the hand press and the nineteenth century introduction of the steam press. Besides telling a story of market expansion for publishing, he examines the geographical and social range of distribution and considers whether publications circulated within a ‘closed’ or an ‘open’ circuit and whether the sellers remained at home or travelled with the books.

Brokaw draws upon her field research in China to give an exceptionally rich account of the production practices in ordinary book publishing outfits in market towns and villages in key production sites of south China in late imperial times. She pays particular attention to publishing technology, noting that printing with moveable type, which had been tried in China, was ‘not cost effective’ and that woodblock printing had ‘certain economic advantages over European-style letter-press printing’, since it did not require investment in expensive machinery or the need to estimate in advance the number of copies of a text that would be bought.

McDermott identifies a distinctive feature of Chinese and Japanese book production, private non-commercial publishing, and shows how its popularity in East Asia complicates efforts to transfer to its book history the conventional Western historical narratives that identify the rise of printing with the rise of capitalism and the linkage of market expansion with the public expression of private opinion on public matters.

The essay by Burke and McDermott is concerned with the production, indeed the proliferation of reference books (defined as books intended to be consulted, rather than read from cover to cover) in both Europe and China. He discusses general reference books such as encyclopaedias, large and small, and calls attention to the increasing number of different kinds of ‘how to do it’ books in both East Asia and Europe in the early modern period, and also to the relative lack of interest in China in the production of dictionaries or translations. The differences between these two traditions of reference works are linked to the types of elite careers available in these societies. Tokugawa Japan is also discussed, if only to highlight how distinctive the Chinese tradition of reference books and encyclopaedias remained throughout the centuries covered by this book.

Peter Kornicki discusses consumption, examining both books for women and women readers in early modern East Asia, including Korea, Japan and Vietnam as well as China. He compares the rise of printing in the vernacular and the proliferation of conduct books for women in East Asia with similar trends in Europe, but also notes important differences, notably the ‘lack of anxiety about women’s literacy’ in East Asia and the greater emphasis on religious messages in the West.

For important secondary scholarship on specific topics the footnotes in each essay provide expert guidance. But, as readers of these essays may wish to pursue broader book history interests, a list of some of the seminal studies that have over the past half-century made book history so vital a field of scholarship in the West and East Asia may prove of interest.

This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s novels within the transnational context of the debates on international copyright and the nationalist restructuring of the trade that followed copyright legislation. Both aspects were covered in the pages of the periodical The Author directed by Besant in the same period, thus making a transnational approach in the study of Victorian fiction all the more necessary. The novels provide a poignant critique of the misleading power of make-belief that sustained several forms of literary, economic and social fictions, thus redefining the notion of literary value against the rhetoric adopted by the proponents of the triumphant and often unfair practices of monopolistic liberalism. Walter Besant’s fiction takes aim at the remnants of the Romantic ideology that clouded a materialist assessment of the author’s value in the marketplace, problematizing the Platonist theory of creativity, that was rather counterproductive to the affirmation of the author’s advancement as independent force in the marketplace, the goal of Besant’s reformism.

‘Scott Unbound’ shows how thinking about print in the 1820s and 1830s in a disaggregated, messy and material way, and seeing it as part of a new media world of performance, text, and image, can help us to think differently about the immense cross-class popularity of Walter Scott’s work. Right from the start, Scott’s powerful Romantic presence as the literary author of books rested on ‘Scott’ as a multimedia phenomenon. Taking the nineteenth-century print serial seriously challenges assumptions about what a ‘book’ might be. By unbinding Scott’s work, this chapter disperses his texts and restores them to their original promiscuous sociability. The Romantic idea of the author is complicated through the remediations of the multi-genre productions of ‘The Magician of the North’ (a.k.a. Walter Scott), and the phenomenon of ‘Scott’ in the early nineteenth century is produced by the generative possibilities of the serial more than has been previously recognized.

The chapter discusses William Faulkner’s relationship to Random House from the merger of Smith & Haas with Random House in 1936 to just before he won the Nobel Prize. The first half of this period was a prolific time in Faulkner’s career but the second half was a phase of low productivity and artistic struggle. When Faulkner came to Random House in 1936, he had the potential to bring new prestige to the relatively young Random House imprint. But the energetic young publishers he had joined had much to offer Faulkner as well. The chapter discusses the skillful and timely marketing strategies Random House employed to re-establish the “Faulkner” brand—a brand that would later help to cement Faulkner’s place in the American Literary canon.

The introduction summarises recent scholarship on (1) literary modernism in the marketplace; (2) book history and print culture studies, including the study of publishers’ series. The guiding thread of the argument developed in the book is introduced here: that European publishers’ series made modernist texts available to a mainstream readership – including many non-English native speakers in Continental Europe and elsewhere.

This chapter focuses on acts of reading, and on the nature and circumstances of childhood encounters with the Arabian Nights in Britain, both as a collection of narratives and as a series of objects such as books, pictures, and toy theatres. Despite their association with the innocent joys of childhood throughout the nineteenth century, the tales of the Arabian Nights were neither written nor designed for children. It was their abiding attraction to children that led to their designation as children’s literature, and also to their continued use as metaphors for adult fantasies and constructions of childhood. As the time and space of childhood were increasingly associated with the time and space of these Oriental tales, the Arabian Nights came to operate not only as a souvenir of childhood, but as metonymic of childhood itself: exciting, unpredictable, and culturally and temporally other.

Through a case study of psalms, this chapter shows how the Bible sets the agenda for the study of early Jewish literature, and how removing biblical lenses reveals a new picture of the literary imagination. Conventional wisdom has it that the book of Psalms was the most popular book among the Dead Sea Scrolls and enjoyed great authority in early Judaism. But this is a mirage: the material and literary evidence suggests there is no such thing as the “book of Psalms” in early Judaism. Instead, diverse manuscripts preserve psalmic texts, in various genres, orders, and numbers, revealing practices of collection that cannot always be placed on a linear timeline of “the making of the Bible.” The psalms are not conceptualized as a “book” before the New Testament and rabbinic texts. Instead, they are imagined as an open genre, a heavenly archive only partially reflected in the extant texts. New metaphors suggested by theoretical work in book history—including efforts to describe the unbound textual world of the digital—can help reconceptualize a literary landscape not organized around books, but imagined in terms of overlapping clusters, mosaics of fragments, and expanding archives.