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In order to understand fully the proposed communication circuit between map maker and map reader, one may turn to a variety of tools, such as semiotics, the framework for my map image analysis. The investigation of colour, shapes, symbols, and text on maps of Third-Republic Paris help uncover underlying themes of modernity, stability, ease of movement, and growth. There are also benefits to be gained from working with maps. The visual nature of the medium has the potential to draw a reader’s eye much more effectively than pages and pages of black and white script. Beyond discourse, this chapter also investigates the changing role of the French state in the history of cartography. With a population that could more readily access and understand maps as the Third Republic progressed, cartography helped foster the growing field of French urbanism and planning. Furthermore, the government shifted from presenting what it had accomplished in Paris throughout the Third Republic to planning and managing its growth and state cartography needed to adapt. An investigation of historic cartographic colour printing techniques will show how this is done and support this book’s map analysis.

After the Time of Troubles new currents of thought began to appear in Russian religious literature. Both innovators and conservatives were open to the religious literature of the Ukraine, though in different degrees. The strongest connection comes in the work of Prince Ivan Andreevich Khvorostinin, the author of both a history of the Troubles and of innovative religious works. Khvorostinin's historical works reveal the transition, but he was a religious writer as well. As such he was one of a small number of innovative thinkers of the second quarter of the seventeenth century, most of them laymen. Besides Khvorostinin, there are the monk Ivan Nasedka, the poets of the Printing Office, and Druzhina Osorʼin, the author of the life of luliana Muromskaia, a pious noblewoman of the early seventeenth century.

This introductory chapter begins with a description of the four key individuals at the top of the London book trading during the reign of James I: Robert Barker (1570-1645), the Shropshiremen John Bill (1576-1630), John Norton (1556/7-1612), and his cousin Bonham Norton (1564-1635). It then outlines the story behind the writing of this book.

This chapter details the activities of four men as they were carried on through five intertwined business arrangements. The four men are Robert Barker (1570-1645), and the three Salopians John Bill (1576-1630), John Norton (1556/7-1612), and his cousin Bonham Norton (1564-1635). The businesses included: (i) a London and continental book-trade partnership established by the Salopians in 1603; (ii) a semi-detached overseas operation in which Bill and the Nortons acted with certain German and other continental associates; (iii) a Bible syndicate which the Nortons and Bill used as a front organization in their attempt to gain control of the Bible trade; (iv) the office of King's Printer in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and finally, (v) another and quite separate office of King's Printer, whose monopoly encompassed the main official English-language publications — including, above all, vernacular versions of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and royal proclamations. This last business involved bitter disputes between Bill, Bonham Norton, and Barker and his sons; disputes which went on well into the reign of Charles I.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the continuing disputes between Barker and Norton. It then details John Bill's 1619 petition and his later fortunes. It shows that Norton lost his grip on the King's Printing House (KPH) with the decree of 1629, which found in favour of Robert Barker and left Norton in prison in 1630 and possibly beyond. The latter died in 1635, but Robert Barker continued as King's Printer even after being committed to prison for debt in the same year. He died there in 1645.

This chapter addresses the following questions: How did they run the King's Printing House (KPH), an institution that stood at the summit of the London printing trade in the Jacobean period? How did they run a business that had to be in a position at short notice, and often at its own expense, to satisfy the market or royal demands for the production of everything from a broadside proclamation to a folio church Bible? These questions could be answered by asking a range of subsidiary questions: for instance, how did the KPH acquire type, paper, ink and all the myriad material objects on which the business depended? How did it organize its printing of its products, and their subsequent storage and distribution? The chapter looks further at some of the personnel involved in the KPH, and especially at those who were not immediate members of the Barker, Bill, and Norton families: the compositors, pressmen, correctors, accountants, legal advisors, warehouse keepers, shopkeepers, apprentices, and miscellaneous servants.

The King's Printing House was the only begetter of that Behemoth of books, the Bible in English. In fact, the production of vernacular Bibles, together with New Testaments and the Book of Common Prayer, was to a large degree the point and raison d'être of the King's Printers in the reign of James I. Monopoly production of editions of these texts made the King's Printers the mediators of artefacts which embodied the three inseparables: an official politics, the state religion, and an emergent national culture. This chapter discusses Bible production before the King James Bible, the advent of the King James Bible, Bible production from 1611, the value of the Bible trade, and The Book of Common Prayer.

This chapter examines one year's work at the King's Printing House in 1620. The year 1620 was an annus mirabilis in at least two ways: (a) during no other year was it less certain as to who was King's Printer from one week to the next; and (b) during few if any other years can the output of the office have been greater than it was then. Accordingly the goal is not to see what the KPH produced in a typical year but to see what it produced when it was working at the top of its bent, both at the personal level and at the level of demand for its services.

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.

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.

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.

Chapter 6 draws the consideration of Romantic literary manuscripts forward to the present moment, examining their shifting cultural status from the late eighteenth century onward, including their preservation and dissemination in print and now in digital form. Significant changes to the treatment and valuation of literary manuscripts began in the late eighteenth century, as they began to be preserved and collected as never before. The attention to contemporary manuscripts arose from a growing scholarly and public interest in ancient scripts and manuscripts, and a new devotion to handwriting and to handwritten manuscripts. The second half of this chapter turns to critical treatments of the period’s manuscripts in its textual scholarship, to ask how the privileging of the textual has impacted our engagements with the period’s literary manuscripts. It investigates the major scholarly critical editions of the last five decades to understand how editorial practice has grappled with the period’s literary manuscripts and the literary culture in which they were embedded. It examines how recent digital editions of the period’s manuscripts have improved our access to and revived our interest in literary manuscripts as bearers of cultural meaning beyond the textual.