History of the Book

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, Book History or Print Culture has become embedded as a distinctive, cross-disciplinary field of academic study, its nature and significance outlined and explored in numerous textbooks, global companions and weighty scholarly works (Eliot and Rose 2020; Finkelstein and McCleery 2006; 2013; Howsam 2015; Levy and Mole 2017; Raven 2018; Suarez and Woudhuysen 2013). It achieves its relative distinctiveness by emphasizing the role of the book as a material object within culture, a text that for centuries was defined by a physical shape and form but which is now evolving. Books are one of a series of tools that have formed part of the history of human social communication. The building blocks that form our understanding of books and print culture can be traced back to the development of Sumerian cuneiforms, through to the evolution of the Phoenician, Greek and Roman alphabets, and on into the move from oral to written cultures (all covered in other chapters in this handbook). What this chapter looks at is the manner in which books have been produced, the place of books in contemporary society, the changing nature of authorship, the role of the digital sphere in challenging and reshaping our concepts of texts and authorship, and the manner in which contemporary critics are approaching these changes.