Cheap print moved across Europe in surprising ways, crossing unusual distances by unusual routes and by unusual means. Pedlars, news, and cheap print defy the conventional categories and models of distribution: we need to think about their extraordinary diversity, and about the means by which their unstable cultural images inflect distribution. Books were not dead things, and the examination of Italy, the Netherlands and Britain, three regions that contain instructive parallels and contrasts, reveals their unpredictable liveliness. This collection of essays, which emerges from transnational dialogues about pedlars and commerce and communication, examines the various means by which cheap print moved across Europe, and the cultural and material and economic premises of the European landscape of print. Contributors include: Alberto Milano; Jason Peacey; Jeroen Salman; Jo Thijssen; Joad Raymond; Joop Koopmans; Karen Bowen; Kate Peters; Melissa Calaresu; Roeland Harms; Rosa Salzberg; Sean Shesgreen.

Engaging with histories of the book and of reading, as well as with studies of material culture, this volume explores ’popularity’ in early modern English writings. Is ’popular’ best described as a theoretical or an empirical category in this period? How can we account for the gap between modern canonicity and early modern print popularity? How might we weight the evidence of popularity from citations, serial editions, print runs, reworkings, or extant copies? Is something that sells a lot always popular, even where the readership for print is only a small proportion of the population, or does popular need to carry something of its etymological sense of the public, the people? Four initial chapters sketch out the conceptual and evidential issues, while the second part of the book consists of ten short chapters-a ’hit parade’- in which eminent scholars take a genre or a single exemplar - play, romance, sermon, or almanac, among other categories-as a means to articulate more general issues. Throughout, the aim is to unpack and interrogate assumptions about the popular, and to decentre canonical narratives about, for example, the sermons of Donne or Andrewes over Smith, or the plays of Shakespeare over Mucedorus. Revisiting Elizabethan literary culture through the lenses of popularity, this collection allows us to view the subject from an unfamiliar angle-in which almanacs are more popular than sonnets and proclamations more numerous than plays, and in which authors familiar to us are displaced by names now often forgotten.

"This book is the first ever to explore the whole range of popular print production in England. The accompanying exhibition draws upon the holdings of the British Museum supplemented by rare examples from private and other public collections. Nearly 200 prints, often the single surviving impression, are illustrated here, and many have never been reproduced before." --Book Jacket.

The medium of print has always been identified as a crucial element in the exercise of power. Since the invention of printing a combination of interests - political, religious and cultural - have borne down on the Press in an attempt to shape and contain its output. Each stage of the production and distribution of printed material can be seen as a battlefield of competing ideologies, whether organized through such institutions as the Stationers' Company, Parliament, and the lending library, or represented by broad divisions within society at large. In this collection of essays leading scholars investigate the interaction between authors, publishers, booksellers, readers and regulatory bodies in England and France across three centuries, and show the key role that the book trade - resisting or adapting to external pressure - has played in defining what is permissible to publish. - See more at: http://www.oakknoll.com/pages/books/37463/robin-myers-michael-harris/censorship-and-the-control-of-print-in-england-and-france-1600-1910#sthash.LH8UYKGk.dpuf -- Publisher's website.

Fashion featured in black-letter broadside ballads over a hundred years before fashion magazines appeared in England. In the seventeenth century, these single-sheet prints contained rhyming song texts and woodcut pictures, accessible to almost everyone in the country. Dress was a popular subject for ballads, as well as being a commodity with close material and cultural connections to them.This book analyses how the distinctive words and images of these ballads made meaning, both in relation to each other on the ballad sheet and in response to contemporary national events, sumptuary legislation, religious practice, economic theory, the visual arts and literature. In this context, Clare Backhouse argues, seventeenth-century ballads increasingly celebrated the proliferation of print and fashionable dress, envisioning new roles for men and women in terms of fashion consumption and its importance to national prosperity. The book demonstrates how the hitherto overlooked but extensive source material that these ballads offer can enrich the histories of dress, art and culture in early modern England.

Printed images were ubiquitous in early modern Britain, and they often convey powerful messages which are all the more important for having circulated widely at the time. Yet, by comparison with printed texts, these images have been neglected, particularly by historians to whom they ought to be of the greatest interest. This volume helps remedy this state of affairs. Complementing the online digital library of British Printed Images to 1700 (www.bpi1700.org.uk), it offers a series of essays which exemplify the many ways in which such visual material can throw light on the history of the period. Ranging from religion to politics, polemic to satire, natural science to consumer culture, the collection explores how printed images need to be read in terms of the visual syntax understood by contemporaries, their full meaning often only becoming clear when they are located in the context in which they were produced and deployed. The result is not only to illustrate the sheer richness of material of this kind, but also to underline the importance of the messages which it conveys, which often come across more strongly in visual form than through textual commentaries. With contributions from many leading exponents of the cultural history of early modern Britain, including experts on religion, politics, science and art, the book's appeal will be equally wide, demonstrating how every facet of British culture in the period can be illuminated through the study of printed images.

This richly illustrated and interdisciplinary study examines the commercial mediation of royalism through print and visual culture from the second half of the seventeenth century. The rapidly growing marketplace of books, periodicals, pictures, and material objects brought the spectacle of monarchy to a wide audience, saturating spaces of daily life in later Stuart and early Hanoverian England. Images of the royal family, including portrait engravings, graphic satires, illustrations, medals and miniatures, urban signs, playing cards, and coronation ceramics were fundamental components of the political landscape and the emergent public sphere. Koscak considers the affective subjectivities made possible by loyalist commodities; how texts and images responded to anxieties about representation at moments of political uncertainty; and how individuals decorated, displayed, and interacted with pictures of rulers. Despite the fractious nature of party politics and the appropriation of royal representations for partisan and commercial ends, print media, images, and objects materialized emotional bonds between sovereigns and subjects as the basis of allegiance and obedience. They were read and re-read, collected and exchanged, kept in pockets and pasted to walls, and looked upon as repositories of personal memory, national history, and political reverence.

Archaeologists in Print is a history of popular publishing in archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a pivotal period of expansion and development in both archaeology and publishing. It examines how British archaeologists produced books and popular periodical articles for a non-scholarly audience, and explores the rise in archaeologists’ public visibility. Notably, it analyses women’s experiences in archaeology alongside better known male contemporaries as shown in their books and archives. In the background of this narrative is the history of Britain’s imperial expansion and contraction, and the evolution of modern tourism in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Archaeologists exploited these factors to gain public and financial support and interest, and build and maintain a reading public for their work, supported by the seasonal nature of excavation and tourism. Reinforcing these publishing activities through personal appearances in the lecture hall, exhibition space and site tour, and in new media – film, radio and television – archaeologists shaped public understanding of archaeology. It was spadework, scripted. The image of the archaeologist as adventurous explorer of foreign lands, part spy, part foreigner, eternally alluring, solidified during this period. That legacy continues, undimmed, today. Praise for Archaeologists in Print This beautifully written book will be valued by all kinds of readers: you don't need to be an archaeologist to enjoy the contents, which take you through different publishing histories of archaeological texts and the authors who wrote them. From the productive partnership of travel guide with archaeological interest, to the women who feature so often in the history of archaeological publishing, via closer analysis of the impact of John Murray, Macmillan and Co, and Penguin, this volume excavates layers of fascinating facts that reveal much of the wider culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The prose is clear and the stories compulsive: Thornton brings to life a cast of people whose passion for their profession lives again in these pages. Warning: the final chapter, on Archaeological Fictions, will fill your to-be-read list with stacks of new titles to investigate! This is a highly readable, accessible exploration into the dynamic relationships between academic authors, publishers, and readers. It is, in addition, an exemplar of how academic research can attract a wide general readership, as well as a more specialised one: a stellar combination of rigorous scholarship with lucid, pacy prose. Highly recommended!' Samantha Rayner, Director of UCL Centre for Publishing; Deputy Head of Department and Director of Studies, Department of Information Studies, UCL