Home to the so-called big five publishers as well as hundreds of smaller presses, renowned literary agents, a vigorous arts scene, and an uncountable number of aspiring and established writers alike, New York City is widely perceived as the publishing capital of the United States and the world. This book traces the origins and early evolution of the city’s rise to literary preeminence. Through five case studies, Steven Carl Smith examines publishing in New York from the post–Revolutionary War period through the Jacksonian era. He discusses the gradual development of local, regional, and national distribution networks, assesses the economic relationships and shared social and cultural practices that connected printers, booksellers, and their customers, and explores the uncharacteristically modern approaches taken by the city’s preindustrial printers and distributors. If the cultural matrix of printed texts served as the primary legitimating vehicle for political debate and literary expression, Smith argues, then deeper understanding of the economic interests and political affiliations of the people who produced these texts gives necessary insight into the emergence of a major American industry. Those involved in New York’s book trade imagined for themselves, like their counterparts in other major seaport cities, a robust business that could satisfy the new nation’s desire for print, and many fulfilled their ambition by cultivating networks that crossed regional boundaries, delivering books to the masses. A fresh interpretation of the market economy in early America, An Empire of Print reveals how New York started on the road to becoming the publishing powerhouse it is today.

A guide to print culture in Aotearoa, the impact of the book and other forms of print on New Zealand. This collection of essays by many contributors looks at the effect of print on Maori and their oral traditions, printing, publishing, bookselling, libraries, buying and collecting, readers and reading, awards, and the print culture of many other language groups in New Zealand.

A world list of books in the English language.

The German novelist, poet and critic W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) has in recent years attracted a phenomenal international following for his evocative prose works such as Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn) and Austerlitz, spellbinding elegiac narratives which, through their deliberate blurring of genre boundaries and provocative use of photography, explore questions of Heimat and exile, memory and loss, history and natural history, art and nature. Saturn's Moons: a W. G. Sebald Handbook brings together in one volume a wealth of new critical and visual material on Sebald's life and works, covering the many facets and phases of his literary and academic careers -- as teacher, as scholar and critic, as colleague and as collaborator on translation. Lavishly illustrated, the Handbook also contains a number of rediscovered short pieces by W. G. Sebald, hitherto unpublished interviews, a catalogue of his library, and selected poems and tributes, as well as extensive primary and secondary bibliographies, details of audiovisual material and interviews, and a chronology of life and works. Drawing on a range of original sources from Sebald's Nachlass - the most important part of which is now held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach - Saturn's Moons6g will be an invaluable sourcebook for future Sebald studies in English and German alike, complementing and augmenting recent critical works on subjects such as history, memory, modernity, reader response and the visual. The contributors include Mark Anderson, Anthea Bell, Ulrich von Buelow, Jo Catling, Michael Hulse, Florian Radvan, Uwe Schuette, Clive Scott, Richard Sheppard, Gordon Turner, Stephen Watts and Luke Williams. Jo Catling teaches in the School of Literature at the University of East Anglia and Richard Hibbitt in the Department of French at the University of Leeds.