Leslie Howsam – författare

The cheap Bibles of nineteenth-century Britain were read in millions of homes, and were also potent symbols of national virtue. In an age of social ferment, cheap Bibles - most published by the British and Foreign Bible Society - represented both the promise of mass literacy and the benefits of industrialisation. This book, based on correspondence and other archival records, tells the story of the BFBS from two perspectives: its place in the history of publishing and printing and in contemporary society. The BFBS, founded in 1804, grew out of the evangelical revival and became a popular crusade. 'Ladies Bible Associations' sprang up to supply the poor with cheap Bibles and contribute to the production of Bibles in foreign languages for the salvation of souls abroad. To meet the growing demand the Society experimented with new technologies including stereotyping, machine printing and bookbinding, and a unique distribution system.

This book is the history of a publisher's imprint and tells two connected stories: one about the personalities of a group of London publishers and the impression their characters made on the people who knew them: the other about a remarkable collection of books whose title pages bore those publishers' names over the course of four decades in the Victorian age. It is both a case study in nineteenth and early twentieth-century publishing and a contribution to the method and theory of the history of the book. The intention is to demonstrate how that history, sometimes characterized as the study of authorship, reading and publishing, can benefit from a focus on the publishers whose purpose it was to bring together the demands ·of readers with the preoccupations of authors. Charles Kegan Paul is only the best-remembered' of the publishers whose lives and work are chronicled in the pages that follow.

Studies in the culture and history of the book are a burgeoning academic specialty. Intriguing, rigorous, and vital, they are nevertheless rooted within three major academic disciplines - history, literary studies, and bibliography - that focus respectively upon the book as a cultural transaction, a literary text, and a material artefact. Old Books and New Histories serves as a guide to this rich but sometimes confusing territory, explaining how different scholarly approaches to what may appear to be the same entity can lead to divergent questions and contradictory answers. Rather than introduce the events and turning points in the history of book culture, or debates among its theorists, Leslie Howsam uses an array of books and articles to offer an orientation to the field in terms of disciplinary boundaries and interdisciplinary tensions. Howsam's analysis maps studies of book and print culture onto the disciplinary structure of the North American and European academic world. Old Books and New Histories is also an engaged statement of the historical perspective of the book. In the final analysis, the lesson of studies in book and print culture is that texts change, books are mutable, and readers ultimately make of books what they need.

Throughout human history, the world's knowledge and fruits of the creative imagination have been produced, circulated and received through the medium of the material text. This Companion provides a wide-ranging account of the history of the book and its ways of thinking about works from ancient inscription to contemporary e-books, discussing thematic, chronological and methodological aspects of this interdisciplinary field. The first part considers book cultures from local, national and global perspectives. Part two, organized around the dynamic relationship between the material book and the mutable text, develops a loosely chronological narrative from early writing, through manuscript and early printing, to the institution of a mechanized book trade, and on to the globalization of publishing and the introduction of the electronic book. A third part takes a practical turn, discussing methods, sources and approaches: bibliographical, archival and reading experience methodologies, as well as pedagogical strategies.

Throughout human history, the world's knowledge and fruits of the creative imagination have been produced, circulated and received through the medium of the material text. This Companion provides a wide-ranging account of the history of the book and its ways of thinking about works from ancient inscription to contemporary e-books, discussing thematic, chronological and methodological aspects of this interdisciplinary field. The first part considers book cultures from local, national and global perspectives. Part two, organized around the dynamic relationship between the material book and the mutable text, develops a loosely chronological narrative from early writing, through manuscript and early printing, to the institution of a mechanized book trade, and on to the globalization of publishing and the introduction of the electronic book. A third part takes a practical turn, discussing methods, sources and approaches: bibliographical, archival and reading experience methodologies, as well as pedagogical strategies.

This book is the history of a publisher's imprint and tells two connected stories: one about the personalities of a group of London publishers and the impression their characters made on the people who knew them: the other about a remarkable collection of books whose title pages bore those publishers' names over the course of four decades in the Victorian age. It is both a case study in nineteenth and early twentieth-century publishing and a contribution to the method and theory of the history of the book. The intention is to demonstrate how that history, sometimes characterized as the study of authorship, reading and publishing, can benefit from a focus on the publishers whose purpose it was to bring together the demands ·of readers with the preoccupations of authors. Charles Kegan Paul is only the best-remembered' of the publishers whose lives and work are chronicled in the pages that follow.

The Kegan Paul imprint was created and its reputation for a distinguished list of titles established during a forty-year period from 1871 to 1911. Several publishers, and their firms, were involved in the development of the imprint during this period, beginning with Henry S. King and Company, and following in 1877 with Charles Kegan Paul and his partner Alfred Chenevix Trench. A financial crisis in 1889 forced an amalgamation with two other businesses and the new firm changed managers periodically until George Routledge and Son took over the business in 1911.Leslie Howsam combines biography and analytic bibliography in her study of the Kegan Paul imprint to demonstrate the value of publishing history as a contribution to the scholarly study of the book. Basing her research on intensive work in the company's surviving archives and supplemented by extensive library work with the actual books, Howsam looks at the wide range of significant titles published for the imprint. In addition, she reconstructs a biographical and business history of the firm based on published and unpublished accounts of the individuals involved, including the publishers and their families, and looks at the effects of changing business practices. The focus of Victorian Imprint – Kegan Paul is the duality of imprint: the publisher's imprint upon a list of books, and publisher's personalities, the imprint of their taste and judgment on the culture in which they lived.

Past into Print explores history books and periodicals as sites of conflict and compromise in order to question how and why historical knowledge is created. Using primary documents and the history books of the period, Leslie Howsam combines two distinct strands of scholarship: the history of the book and publishing and the development of history as a scholarly discipline.Howsam examines the relationships of historians and their publishers through correspondence and readers reports to reveal the assumptions that drove historical projects, which in turn came to shape the careers of writers, the reputations of publishing houses, and the values of a discipline. The first systematic exploration of the publishing history of history, Past into Print uncovers the ways in which historical writing was mediated by the book trade and traces how mid-Victorian narrative certainties gave way to twentieth-century disciplinary anxieties.