Reflections on Textual Editing in the Time of the History of the Book

Abstract

sideration too: the “book”. As a field of inquiry that is by its own admission incredibly diverse, the History of the Book encompasses multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural approaches to the study of the book and of the production and dissemination of all written and recorded knowledge. According to David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, book history aims “to study all aspects of the creation of books” whether as “physical artefacts” or objects with “unique cul tural symbols” (2005, 5), an undertaking that has its roots firmly in the traditional bibliographical disciplines such as descriptive and analytical bibliography and textual criticism. To these forms of study, book history added a new layer of social and socio-economic history that began with the paradigm-shifting work of D. F. McKenzie in the ground-breaking essay “The Printers of the Mind” (1969) and culminated in his Panizzi lectures collected in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1999). 1 In that early essay McKenzie not so much challenged traditional analytical bibliography as expanded it, when he showed how knowledge of printing-house practices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England by using quantifiable evidence from printing catalogues, accounts’ ledgers and business correspondence could significantly improve our bib liographical understanding. His emphasis on the conditions of book production, moreover, indicated a breaking away from the study of the individual book or text to plural. With that not just the production of literature, but the production of all books and their dissemination fall within the purview of the history of the book.