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This chapter focuses on the production of a music book. The organization of the workforce within the print shop, how a music book was produced, and what materials and supplies were required are explored. Details are provided concerning editorial practices, typographical materials, paper, formats, title pages, type fonts, decorative initials, and printers' marks used by Venetian presses, giving us a sense of the operation of a 16th-century music print shop.

This chapter examines the emergence of new reading publics in China during the late Ming Dynasty. It traces the shifting constructions of readers, authors, and editors; the broadening of reading practices during this period; and the emergence of an apologia for vernacular print. The chapter discusses the paradigms underlying notions of readers; authors and reading practices, beginning with the standards set by the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi; and argues that the expanding lexicon for authoring and reading texts was based on a set of suppositions seeking to legitimize vernacular print. It also describes the editorial practices of Yu Xiangdou, who was perhaps the first to write commentary aimed specifically at readers with low educational and literacy levels.

This chapter describes the environment in which the popular press was produced and consumed. It begins by outlining the main characteristics of British newspapers, including the structure of the market, circulation trends, patterns of ownership and control, and basic editorial practices. The second section describes the wider media landscape. In particular, it describes how other media forms, including the cinema, radio and television broadcasting, magazines and popular literature, approached sex, and private life. The final part provides a broad overview of the patterns of change in British sexual culture over the 20th century. It includes information about fluctuating rates of marriage, fertility, and divorce, and the use of contraception and abortion. It examines the impact of intellectual developments such as feminism, sexology, and psychoanalysis on the understanding of sexuality; the role of the state and changes in the law; the effects of increasing affluence; and medical and scientific advances.

This chapter discusses the editorial treatment of poems contained in letters. Not poems enclosed with letters, as discrete items, but poems enclosed by letters. The essay focuses on John Keats’s long journal-letter of 14 February-3 May 1819 to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana.

This chapter foregrounds the essential role of critical analysis in an era when facts, feelings, opinions, news, and propaganda have become increasingly hard to disambiguate. Carla Della Gatta explains that Shakespeareans are in an excellent position to help students navigate this terrain, thanks to our field’s “lengthy, cross-cultural, and international history of determining, disputing, and reinterpreting facts,” a habit that can be put to especial use in identifying various modes of misinformation and bias. This chapter relates exercises in introductory scholarly editing and comparative theatrical/film analyses that enable students to be makers, not just consumers, of knowledge. Putting primary sources directly in students’ hands empowers them to apply rigorous analysis, solve interpretive problems, and hone their confidence in questioning established authority and venerated “facts.” The payoffs span from the understanding of Renaissance literature to informed encounters with “fake news,” biased sources, or unresearched content.

The fourth chapter analyzes BLKARTSOUTH (the leading collective of the Black Arts Movement in the South). Crawford focuses on Nkombo journal produced by BLKARTSOUTH. She argues that the practice of the local and the global in NKOMBO prepared the way for the practice of diaspora and the local in Callaloo, the most prominent journal in current African diasporic literary and cultural studies. This chapter shows how editorial practices during both the Black Arts Movement and the 21^st century pivot on making the local and the global inseparable in a manner that parallels the inseparability of blackness and post-blackness.

This chapter considers Shakespeare’s editorial practices in Sonnets 1–60. In them, the strange combination of early rare and late rare words suggests late revisions of early drafts, and the prominence of echoes from Philip Sidney’s and Edmund Spenser’s sonnets likewise suggests a deliberate incorporation of their work not found elsewhere in Shakespeare’s sequence. It is unknown how much autobiographical freight Sonnets carries, and whether revisions—if any—intensify or diminish the author’s relationship to the poetic speaker. The published Sonnets nonetheless invests a fair amount of irony in the speaker’s hesitant advancement, much as Astrophil and Stella and Amoretti do in theirs, and this investment appears palpable in sonnets 1–60.

Through examination of codicology and editorial procedure Chapter Two shows how The Canterbury Interlude and The Tale of Beryn (companion texts found two thirds of the way through MS Northumberland 455), upset chronological linearity and confound normative co-ordinates of time and place. The signs of personhood (especially props and names) in all these texts, and the Anglo-Norman source, Bérinus are radically unstable. In their Canterbury setting, narrated by a Merchant pilgrim, preceded by a Chaucerian Prologue, and in the midst of a codex of The Canterbury Tales, the foreign bodies of Bérinus become persons rather familiar from the works of Chaucer, especially Gioffrey and the inconsistent cameo appearances of ‘Chaucer himself’. The borders of narrative text and literary history unravel.

Since its publication in 1732, most readers and scholars have treated Richard Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost with hardly muted laughter, finding it easy to dismiss as an aberration in a teleology of modern editing practice. However, when considered as a response to a nascent English critical tradition that was arising around Milton’s epic as admirers attempted to defuse its political content, Bentley’s edition may be better contextualized and understood. Far from being the singular, monstrous creation it was made out to be by the wits of the time, Bentley’s project becomes more intelligible (if still not quite defensible) in light of its contextual relationship to the critical and editorial work of John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and Alexander Pope.

Nearly every monthly magazine published in the eighteenth century had a poetry section, a regular slot given over in each issue to poetic expression of all kinds, written by a broad range of writers, both male and female, provincial and metropolitan, amateur and established. This chapter assesses the place that women poets, both familiar and unfamiliar, occupied in the rich poetic culture that made magazines possible. Jennifer Batt’s case studies are drawn from national periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), London Magazine (1732–85) and British Magazine (1746–51), as well as from regional magazines. Collectively, these examples shed light on the possibilities that periodicals made available to female poets (of giving them a voice, a readership, a public profile and place within a poetic community). At the same, Batt demonstrates that women could be exploited by the medium and its editorial practices (publishing without author consent, for instance, or intrusive framing of poems) in ways that have overdetermined women poets’ critical reception.

This chapter offers a personal account of how its author came to edit Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). In doing so it reflects on how previous editions of correspondence were edited, including The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941 (1950), and the extent to which letter writing offers readers powerful examples of literary style while at the same time providing deep glimpses into personal and literary history. The chapter also considers how the practice of editing and publishing the letters of poets has changed since 1950.