Abstract: Digital technologies have transformed reading experiences, from the formats we read, the hardware we use, and the ways we approach texts. The technical inability to separate ebooks from the platforms on which they are sold, distributed and accessed renders these dot.com domains important sites of paratext and the information etched into them part of the interpretive experience of the text. Building on scholarship that updates paratext theory for the digital age, this article theorizes platform paratext and examines resultant changes to the authorization, locality and functionality of paratext due to platformization. Using a grounded theory approach and drawing on a sample of 40 Amazon product pages of romance and bestselling titles, it explores how platforms’ affordances, interface design and algorithms contribute to new forms of paratext and modify and mediate author, publisher and user-generated paratext. Platform paratext on Amazon product pages demonstrate the influence of algorithms, datafication and commercial imperatives on the production and manifestation of paratext.

Abstract: “Litigating the Letter in Early Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” examines a unique case of letter writing and reading involving an epistle’s unauthorized publication in early nineteenth-century New York newspapers. The essay tracks reprintings and discussions of the letter across political newspapers, as well as trial proceedings related to the letter’s unauthorized publication. The work explores how the editorial and legal treatment of the letter illuminates the media-based contingencies that shape the social practice of genre, and it contributes to our understanding of how print genres such as newspapers help establish the generic meanings and capacities of traditionally manuscript forms such as letters.

Abstract: Memoir moves readers for genre-specific reasons, and memoir also moves across markets, languages, media, and fandoms. Despite its ubiquity and popularity, memoir is an under-researched genre in book history. Our article seeks to address this gap through a discussion of genre theory and the concept of “memoirification,” and then through a brief case study of how popular memoir moves between the anglophone and German-speaking markets. In our case study, we focus on mass-market, bestselling, celebrity-authored memoir. We argue that celebrity-authored memoirs are entangled within cross-media flows of profit, consumption and effects that are genre specific, including their embeddedness in celebrity (book) culture and multimedia fandoms. A second issue we address in this essay is that existing concepts for “long twenty-first century book studies” (Noorda/Marsden 2019) and “publishing studies” (Murray 2006) seem to ignore genre effects. Thirdly, we argue for the explicit consideration of celebrity and influencer culture when analyzing twenty-first century book culture.

Abstract: David Waldstreicher characterised the Wheatleyan moment as one in which the publication of personality acquired political significance in the history of Transatlantic slavery and American liberty. This article adduces some book historical evidence to that position. Spurred by close study of a particular copy of Wheat-ley’s Poems , and making close reference to Wheatley’s poems and letters, the article offers a fuller account of the literary, religious and professional life of her publisher, Archibald Bell. It also speculates that the larger firm of E. and C. Dilly, with its many salient American connections, may have been a route to Bell for Wheatley and her agents in London. The article considers the Dillys’ attitudes to American affairs and publications relating to Transatlantic slavery. It closes with a reassessment of the publication of Wheatley’s Poems as a complex, plural moment in rendering creative, religious and political subjectivity saleable in print, simultaneously setting the print marketplace to work for creative, religious and political ends.

Abstract: Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense is a foundational work in modern children’s literature. This essay traces its development from early manuscript limericks to the first two-volume edition of 1846 and then examines the 1855 one-volume edition, identifying four distinct states and reconstructing its complex production history. A census of known variants of this second edition is included in an Appendix. The 1861 edition’s added limericks are discussed, and finally Lear’s evolving approach to book design is compared with Lewis Carroll’s attention to the smallest details of his publications. The evolution of the Book of Nonsense is shown to have provided a model for Carroll’s work and that of the authors of the “golden age of children’s literature.”

Abstract: Following a period of profligate pulpwood logging that threatened domestic forest resources, a 1911 change in North American tariff policy made Canadian newsprint a duty-free import to the United States. While this gave newspaper publishers subsidized access to plentiful paper supplies, it also generated fears that the functioning of the American press was now dependent on a commodity produced in a foreign country. As part of a nationalist mood in the US in the 1920s, some sought to find new sources of domestic raw materials from which to manufacture paper, and Midwestern cornstalks were among the most promising options. By the late 1920s, the United States Department of Agriculture and private firms had proven the concept that corn paper was a practically viable alternative to imported Canadian wood paper, and a series of Midwestern newspapers did demonstration printings of editions meant to model what they believed to be both the future of newspaper publishing and the future of farming. The successful demonstrations were meant to show resource sovereignty over the material basis of public life and to assert that US newspapers could thrive using domestic resources. It was possible, many believed, to have farm to table reading in the heartland.

Abstract: A banned book list is a paradoxical document. In the form of what can be considered negative bibliography, a banned list enumerates what should not be known and records what has been removed from the official record. Banned lists are often secret, as the books they list should be secret. Their function is to collate objects of offence to prevent further offence, even though the nomination itself can aid the offence. For the period of their existence, banned lists aim to sequester titles out of the known bibliographic world. So, in the very fact of their collation, secret banned lists can be said to negate the principal function of bibliography. This article explores how banned lists negatively index the administration of power over what can be known and, thus, over what is not known.

Abstract: The foldout, also called a gatefold, is a double-page spread which expands through additional panels into a length that exceeds the format of the magazine. This changes the dimensions of the magazine page, requiring more space to unfold and read, as well as a different orientation of the reader's gaze and body. In this paper, we propose to read the fold-out page as a mode of materializing history in anniversary issues of fashion magazines. In doing so, we highlight the unfolding of gatefold features in magazines as a papery technology to represent and spatialize the (magazinal) past. Our argument draws on work in magazine studies and periodical studies that calls for more holistic approaches to the analysis of magazines and pays attention to the material substrate of reading. We show how this technology works, discussing anniversary issues of Vogue, i-D , and 032c . Our paper highlights how foldouts are incorporated into the respective stories that the magazines shape from their histories. The horizontally expanded page, we argue, not only affords opportunities to create and represent history in different visual and textual registers but also makes the past, and magazinal memories, tangible for the reader.