The Work of Print traces a shift in the very definition of literature, from one that encompasses the material conditions of the production and distribution of books to the more familiar emphasis on the solitary author's ownership of an abstract text. Drawing on contemporary accounts of those involved in the trade - printers, booksellers, publishers, and distributors - Lisa Maruca examines attitudes about the creative process and approaches to the commodification of writing. The "work of print" describes the labors through which literature was produced: both the physical labor of making books and the underlying cultural work performed by a set of ideologies about who counted as a maker of texts. Printers' manuals, tracts on typography, legal documents, and booksellers' autobiographies reveal that print workers conceived of their roles as central to the production of literature. Maruca's insightful readings of these documents alongside traditional works of fiction and authors' correspondence show that the claims of print workers and booksellers were part of a struggle for ownership and control as the concept of author as proprietor of his or her intellectual property began to take hold in the mid-1700s, gradually eclipsing print workers' contributions to the process of textual creation. The print trade asserted its authority using a rhetoric of hierarchical and binary sexuality and gender, which affected women working in the industry and limited the type of work they were allowed to perform. In response, women developed strategies to redeploy conventional ideas of gender to gain concessions for themselves as publishers and distributors of printed material, strategies that formed a foundation for the rise of female authorship later in the eighteenth century. Encompassing the histories of literature, labor, technology, publishing, and gender, The Work of Print ultimately offers significant insights into the ideology of authorship and intellectual property and our understanding of textuality and print in the digital age.

In The Nature of the Book, a tour de force of cultural history, Adrian Johns constructs an entirely original and vivid picture of print culture and its many arenas—commercial, intellectual, political, and individual. "A compelling exposition of how authors, printers, booksellers and readers competed for power over the printed page. . . . The richness of Mr. Johns's book lies in the splendid detail he has collected to describe the world of books in the first two centuries after the printing press arrived in England."—Alberto Manguel, Washington Times "[A] mammoth and stimulating account of the place of print in the history of knowledge. . . . Johns has written a tremendously learned primer."—D. Graham Burnett, New Republic "A detailed, engrossing, and genuinely eye-opening account of the formative stages of the print culture. . . . This is scholarship at its best."—Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor "The most lucid and persuasive account of the new kind of knowledge produced by print. . . . A work to rank alongside McLuhan."—John Sutherland, The Independent "Entertainingly written. . . . The most comprehensive account available . . . well documented and engaging."—Ian Maclean, Times Literary Supplement

A comprehensive resource to understanding the hand-press printing of early books Studying Early Printed Books, 1450 - 1800 offers a guide to the fascinating process of how books were printed in the first centuries of the press and shows how the mechanics of making books shapes how we read and understand them. The author offers an insightful overview of how books were made in the hand-press period and then includes an in-depth review of the specific aspects of the printing process. She addresses questions such as: How was paper made? What were different book formats? How did the press work? In addition, the text is filled with illustrative examples that demonstrate how understanding the early processes can be helpful to today’s researchers. Studying Early Printed Books shows the connections between the material form of a book (what it looks like and how it was made), how a book conveys its meaning and how it is used by readers. The author helps readers navigate books by explaining how to tell which parts of a book are the result of early printing practices and which are a result of later changes. The text also offers guidance on: how to approach a book; how to read a catalog record; the difference between using digital facsimiles and books in-hand. This important guide: Reveals how books were made with the advent of the printing press and how they are understood today Offers information on how to use digital reproductions of early printed books as well as how to work in a rare books library Contains a useful glossary and a detailed list of recommended readings Includes a companion website for further research Written for students of book history, materiality of text and history of information, Studying Early Printed Books explores the many aspects of the early printing process of books and explains how their form is understood today.

Upon its invention in the mid-1400s, the printing press instantly became a revolutionary device. It introduced literacy to the masses and led Europe out of the Middle Ages. This book explores the press' exciting history, the social and political conditions in place at the time Johannes Gutenberg invented it, and the changes the invention wrought afterward. It traces the evolution of moveable type and information dissemination up to modern electronic communications technology, examining the positive and negative effects of these developments, both in the past and on democracy and humankind today. This book will give readers a new appreciation for the written word, whether it is printed on paper or displayed on a screen.

"In the beginning, all the world was America." John Locke In the beginning, everything was America, but where did America begin? In many narratives of American nationalism (both popular and academic), the United States begins in print-with the production, dissemination, and consumption of major printed texts like Common Sense , the Declaration of Independence, newspaper debates over ratification, and the Constitution itself. In these narratives, print plays a central role in the emergence of American nationalism, as Americans become Americans through acts of reading that connect them to other like-minded nationals. In The Republic in Print, however, Trish Loughran overturns this master narrative of American origins and offers a radically new history of the early republic and its antebellum aftermath. Combining a materialist history of American nation building with an intellectual history of American federalism, Loughran challenges the idea that print culture created a sense of national connection among different parts of the early American union and instead reveals the early republic as a series of local and regional reading publics with distinct political and geographical identities. Focusing on the years between 1770 and 1870, Loughran develops two richly detailed and provocative arguments. First, she suggests that it was the relative lack of a national infrastructure (rather than the existence of a tightly connected print network) that actually enabled the nation to be imagined in 1776 and ratification to be secured in 1787-88. She then describes how the increasingly connected book market of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s unexpectedly exposed cracks in the evolving nation, especially in regards to slavery, exacerbating regional differences in ways that ultimately contributed to secession and civil war. Drawing on a range of literary, historical, and archival materials-from essays, pamphlets, novels, and plays, to engravings, paintings, statues, laws, and maps The Republic in Print provides a refreshingly original cultural history of the American nation-state over the course of its first century.

A thorough rethinking of a field deserves to take a shape that is in itself new. Interacting with Print delivers on this premise, reworking the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work of twenty-two scholars who together have assembled an alphabetically arranged tour of key concepts for the study of print culture, from Anthologies and Binding to Publicity and Taste. Each entry builds on its term in order to resituate print and book history within a broader media ecology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central theme is interactivity, in three senses: people interacting with print; print interacting with the non-print media that it has long been thought, erroneously, to have displaced; and people interacting with each other through print. The resulting book will introduce new energy to the field of print studies and lead to considerable new avenues of investigation.

A full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change, first published in 1980.

The Author's Due offers an institutional and cultural history of books, the book trade, and the bibliographic ego. Joseph Loewenstein traces the emergence of possessive authorship from the establishment of a printing industry in England to the passage of the 1710 Statute of Anne, which provided the legal underpinnings for modern copyright. Along the way he demonstrates that the culture of books, including the idea of the author, is intimately tied to the practical trade of publishing those books. As Loewenstein shows, copyright is a form of monopoly that developed alongside a range of related protections such as commercial trusts, manufacturing patents, and censorship, and cannot be understood apart from them. The regulation of the press pitted competing interests and rival monopolistic structures against one another—guildmembers and nonprofessionals, printers and booksellers, authors and publishers. These struggles, in turn, crucially shaped the literary and intellectual practices of early modern authors, as well as early capitalist economic organization. With its probing look at the origins of modern copyright, The Author's Due will prove to be a watershed for historians, literary critics, and legal scholars alike.

A single line of code offers a way to understand the cultural context of computing. This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.