Book Trade Connections From The Seventeenth To The Twentieth Centuries

The book trade historically tended to operate in a spirit of co-operation as well as competition. Networks between printers, publishers, booksellers and related trades existed at local, regional, national and international levels and were a vital part of the business of books for several centuries. This collection of essays examines many aspects of the history of book-trade networks, in response to the recent ‘spatial turn’ in history and other disciplines. Contributors come from various backgrounds including history, sociology, business studies and English literature. The essays in Part One introduce the relevance to book-trade history of network theory and techniques, while Part Two is a series of case studies ranging chronologically from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Topics include the movement of early medieval manuscript books, the publication of Shakespeare, the distribution of seventeenth-century political pamphlets in Utrecht and Exeter, book-trade networks before 1750 in the English East Midlands, the itinerant book trade in northern France in the late eighteenth century, how an Australian newspaper helped to create the Scottish public sphere, the networks of the Belgian publisher Murquardt, and transatlantic radical book-trade networks in the early twentieth century.

Broadside ballads-folio-sized publications containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery-related cautionary tales, current events, and simplified myth and history to a wide range of social classes across seventeenth century England. Ballads straddled, and destabilized, the categories of public and private performance spaces, the material and the ephemeral, music and text, and oral and written traditions. Sung by balladmongers in the streets and referenced in theatrical works, they were also pasted to the walls of local taverns and domestic spaces. They titillated and entertained, but also educated audiences on morality and gender hierarchies. Although contemporaneous writers published volumes on the early modern controversy over women and the English witch craze, broadside ballads were perhaps more instrumental in disseminating information about dangerous women and their acoustic qualities. Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; until now, however, the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has yet to be investigated. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from musical analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales for and about women.

This is the latest in an important series of reviews going back to 1928. The book contains 26 chapters, written by experts in their field, and reviews developments in the principal aspects of British librarianship and information work in the years 2006-2010.

This deeply researched collection offers a comprehensive introduction to the eighteenth-century trade in street literature – ballads, chapbooks, and popular prints – in England and Scotland. Offering detailed studies of a selection of the printers, types of publication, and places of publication that constituted the cheap and popular print trade during the period, these essays delve into ballads, slip songs, story books, pictures, and more to push back against neat divisions between low and high culture, or popular and high literature. The breadth and depth of the contributions give a much fuller and more nuanced picture of what was being widely published and read during this period than has previously been available. It will be of great value to scholars and students of eighteenth-century popular culture and literature, print history and the book trade, ballad and folk studies, children’s literature, and social history.

In 1758 Peter Williamson, dressed as an Indian, peddled a tale in Scotland about being kidnapped as a young boy, sold into slavery and servitude, captured by Indians, and made a prisoner of war. Separating fact from fiction, Timothy Shannon illuminates the curiosity about America among working-class people on the margins of empire.

Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, volume 8 (CMR 8) is a history of everything that was written on relations in the period 1600-1700 in Northern and Eastern Europe. Its detailed entries contain descriptions, assessments and comprehensive bibliographical details about individual works.

For centuries, street literature was the main cheap reading material of the working classes: broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, prints, engravings, and other forms of print produced specifically to suit their taste and cheap enough for even the poor to buy. Starting in the sixteenth century, but at its chaotic and flamboyant peak in the nineteenth, street literature was on sale everywhere – in urban streets and alleyways, at country fairs and markets, at major sporting events and holiday gatherings, and under the gallows at public executions. For this very reason, it was often despised and denigrated by the educated classes, but remained enduringly popular with the ordinary people. Anything and everything was grist to the printers’ mill, if it would sell. A penny could buy you a celebrity scandal, a report of a gruesome murder, the last dying speech of a condemned criminal, wonder tales, riddles and conundrums, a moral tale of religious danger and redemption, a comic tale of drunken husbands and shrewish wives, a temperance tract or an ode to beer, a satire on dandies, an alphabet or “reed-a-ma-daisy” (reading made easy) to teach your children, an illustrated chapbook of nursery rhymes, or the adventures of Robin Hood and Jack the Giant Killer. Street literature long held its own by catering directly for the ordinary people, at a price they could afford, but, by the end of the Victorian era, it was in terminal decline and was rapidly being replaced by a host of new printed materials in the shape of cheap newspapers and magazines, penny dreadful novels, music hall songbooks, and so on, all aimed squarely at the burgeoning mass market. Fascinating today for the unique light it shines on the lives of the ordinary people of the age, street literature has long been neglected as a historical resource, and this collection of essays is the first general book on the trade for over forty years.