The Huntington Library Quarterly

Chapbooks formed the staple reading matter of ordinary people during the 18th and much of the 19th centuries. These chapbooks derive from romances which were current in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance.

Scholars, librarians, students, and database vendors have all applauded the increase in access to rare, old, venerated, and obscure texts that has resulted from the rise of electronic resources. Almost everyone associated with any branch of cultural history has heard the claims about unlimited research opportunity and the rediscovery of overlooked sources. But are these claims true? Have high-tech systems and methods enhanced or inhibited scholarship? Nowhere is this question more pressing than in the area of eighteenth-century studies, where so much of the subject matter relates to the first wave of informational abundance: to that great period of profuse printing during which presses produced a mass market full of diverse readers. Textual Studies and the Enlarged Eighteenth Century probes the assumptions about the advanced tools that may be replicating this period of profusion among contemporary scholars. HSow much access to “period” information do current cost and present institutional support really allow? Who is accessing what—and who is not? Which authors and which topics get lost in the processor-driven shuffle? How do electronic tools bias scholarship? What are the disadvantages of databases? These and many more questions receive a brisk and robust review in this first critique of new-wave research. A variety of acclaimed scholars from an interdisciplinary array of specialties look at topics ranging from legacy bibliographical projects to standards for online editions to para-textual materials to the appropriateness of importing electronic research techniques into the study of a low-tech period and on to the transatlantic exchange of information in both the early modern and the present periods. Scholars in all fields will benefit from this vigorous analysis of the assumptions underlying the tools and the methods of twenty-first century humanities scholarship.

Race riots. Labor strikes. Women's battle for the vote. The aftermath of the Great War. The transformative events and harsh realities of the year 1919 still reverberate a century later. Nineteen Nineteen, published to accompany a centennial exhibition of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, explores the institution and its founding through the lens of this single, tumultuous year. The fully illustrated catalog features works from The Huntington's vast collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and art, many of them never exhibited or published before.