Wild Bibliography: The Rise and Fall of Book History in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

This essay is about a new field of study that arose in Britain around 1800 which called itself the ‘history of books’—a bibliographical field that was soon to become entwined with, if not indistinguishable from, the more notorious and volatile Bibliomania of the Romantic age. This book history was, of course, not the same history of print that we associate today with the names of Robert Darnton, Elizabeth Eisenstein, or Roger Chartier, which is of much more recent origin and which remains, to judge by a recent special issue of PMLA, not fully at ease with what its editors call ‘the idea of literature’ or literary history.1 Advocates of a new book history in the early nineteenth century believed itwas literary history, and they construed that history as a wide array of codex histories—those of writing, printing, typography, bookmaking and binding, the formation of private libraries and public archives, as well as categories of modern knowledges and imaginative works. From 1797, when the word bibliographia first appeared in a British encyclopedia of arts and sciences, to 1814, when Thomas Hartwell Horne published the two-volume Introduction to the Study of Bibliography, such efforts amounted to a then-unprecedented effort to reveal to British readers what Jerome McGann, with reference to the digital, has called the ‘bibliographical codes’ of the printed word.2