This article explores the evolving Chinese representations of Queen Victoria from the First Opium War (1839) to her Diamond Jubilee (1897), beginning with early Qing official histories that deliberately omitted or delegitimized her presence, portraying her implicitly as a female usurper whose rule violated Confucian gender norms and dynastic orthodoxy. Such initial silencing is later juxtaposed with increasingly complex portrayals across a broad spectrum of textual and visual sources, including painting captions, diplomatic travelogues, private poems, newspaper reports, and illustrations. Focusing on envoys like Binchun, whose cautious official diary contrasts with his more admiring private poetry, and Zhang Zuyi, whose pseudonymous writings convey ambivalence and critique, the essay examines how rhetorical strategies were shaped by genre, anonymity, and audience. The analysis also extends to popular and elite print culture, particularly Dianshizhai Pictorial and Shenbao , to trace how Queen Victoria’s image circulated among both literate and semiliterate readers. Throughout, the article argues that acts of translation and mediation—visual, linguistic, and ideological—shaped not only perceptions of the British monarch but also reflected the fractured modernity of the Qing empire. The study contributes to global Victorian studies by foregrounding non-Western receptions and complicating imperial iconography through a Sinocentric lens.

This paper challenges the Eurocentric framing of the Gothic by examining its presence and function in indigenous oral traditions, with a focus on the Galo community of Arunachal Pradesh. By analysing narratives featuring supernatural entities such as the Yapom and Dimi, the study argues that Gothic sensibilities, fear, the grotesque, and encounters with the unknown exist independently of European print culture. In these oral traditions, supernatural phenomena serve as instruments of social and ecological regulation, reinforcing moral codes and maintaining cosmic balance. Through a comparative and theoretical lens, this paper demonstrates that fear and supernaturalism are central to communal governance, positioning indigenous folklore as a legitimate site of Gothic expression. By decentring the Gothic, the study expands its conceptual boundaries and foregrounds the universality of the Gothic impulse across cultures.

This article examines the typographic and multilingual print culture of the late Ottoman Empire, situating it within broader debates on cultural identity, modernization, and visual representation. While the 1928 Alphabet Reform has often been studied primarily as a political or linguistic project, this study emphasizes the interplay between material infrastructures and cultural meanings that made reform feasible. It argues that the mechanical limitations of Arabic-script typography—such as labor-intensive typesetting, limited stylistic variety, and fragile metal types—combined with state monopolization of type production, created a constrained environment for print. At the same time, the pervasive circulation of Latin script in minority presses, textbooks, advertising, ephemeral documents, and urban signage cultivated a visual familiarity that resonated with everyday practices and associated Latin letters with commerce, education, and modernity. Methodologically, the study employs historical discourse analysis and a selective sampling of archival documents, periodicals, and ephemeral print materials to reconstruct the typographic and print environment of the late Ottoman Empire. By drawing on sources from the Ottoman Archives, contemporary newspapers, and visual ephemera, it demonstrates how typography functioned not only as a technical medium but also as a semiotic force that mediated ideas of Westernization and collective identity. The findings suggest that the Alphabet Reform should be understood as a historically contingent convergence of material constraints and cultural re-significations, where typography operated simultaneously as a limitation and as an opportunity in the remaking of national identity.

Anyone who uses sophisticated digital nautical charts is aware of the dangers posed by the standard ‘zoom’ function. Users of the digital scholarly editions do not risk their lives. However, the conflict between the amount of information and the size of the screen can lead to an intellectual disaster. In manuscript and print culture, the size of the page and the layout of the text determined the publication’s function. E-readers and smartphones have become how students engage with historical and literary sources. Due to the size of the screens, this creates information gaps and/or spikes, which become more pronounced the more sophisticated the source and its edition. The proliferation of mobile apps for scholarly editions of classical texts encourages scepticism about whether new possibilities have also resulted in losses.

The study of apprenticeship and professional training of printers in Eastern Galicia in the second half of the XIX century remains an insufficiently explored topic in Ukrainian historiography. The Polish professional newspaper Czcionka (1872–1876) provides a unique source for understanding the socio-professional discourse of the printing community, revealing the conditions, practices, and challenges of vocational education during this period. The relevance of this research lies in its potential to illuminate the historical foundations of professional training and labor relations in the printing industry, contributing to a broader understanding of social and economic history in Galicia. The purpose of the study is to analyze the system of apprenticeship and professional preparation of printers in Eastern Galicia, using Czcionka as a primary source, and to identify the social, economic, and organizational factors influencing the formation of skilled labor. The research methodology combines historical-comparative, source-critical, and discourse-analytical approaches. Articles, reports, and correspondences published in Czcionka were examined to reconstruct the practices of vocational training, the role of professional competitions, and the treatment of apprentices by employers. The results indicate that apprentices often faced exploitation, excessive work hours, and delayed professional advancement, while employers frequently prioritized profit over proper training. The newspaper highlighted exemplary practices in other European regions, drawing attention to the necessity of professional guidance, proper remuneration, and the observance of apprenticeship regulations. The analysis also reveals early expressions of labor solidarity and the role of professional communities in advocating for fair treatment. The scientific novelty of the study lies in its systematic examination of the Czcionka as a source for understanding the professional, social, and cultural dimensions of apprenticeship in Eastern Galicia. Unlike previous research focused mainly on general union structures and labor movements, this study provides insight into the micro-level dynamics of vocational training and labor relations in the printing sector. The practical significance is found in the potential application of historical lessons to contemporary vocational education and labor policy, highlighting the importance of proper guidance, ethical management practices, and structured apprenticeship programs. Conclusion. The research demonstrates that the system of apprenticeship in Eastern Galician printing houses was marked by significant challenges, but also by efforts to professionalize the trade and protect apprentices’ rights. The findings contribute to the historiography of labor, professional education, and print culture in Central and Eastern Europe in the XIX century.

A surprising majority of the existing images of Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, were created during a short period from 1789- 1791, and are essentially the result of his visit to London for a fencing exhibition match organized for the Prince of Wales by the Duc d’Orleans and his political operatives. The scarcity of French- origin images of Le Chevalier, so celebrated during his lifetime in France as a musician, composer, musical director, and fencing master, is perplexing. Why is this the case? Perhaps it can be explained in part by the French visual culture at the time, characterized by censorship and intolerance in the visual arts, in stark contrast to a popular print culture in England that tolerated political and social commentary and even satire, creating a market for prolific production and enthusiastic consumption by the British public.

This article traces the genealogy and nation-building role of the metonymy “breadbasket of Slovenia” as applied to the Prekmurje region. Located in northeastern Slovenia, Prekmurje has often been portrayed by politicians, scientists, and journalists as the country’s breadbasket—a land of agricultural abundance that provides essential grain and foodstuffs. This designation, grounded in fertile soil, a favorable climate, and significant production of wheat, corn, and potatoes, became prominent after the region’s incorporation into the Yugoslav state following World War I. Before 1919, the term žitnica (“breadbasket”) appeared in Slovenian print culture in a broader figurative sense, but its specific association with Prekmurje emerged in the context of Austria-Hungary’s collapse and the territorial reorganization that followed. The metonymy fulfilled a dual purpose: it served as an economic descriptor and as a symbolic instrument of national integration. Slovenian officials and intellectuals, largely unfamiliar with Prekmurje’s realities, emphasized its agricultural wealth to justify its incorporation into the Slovenian territory of the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Interwar journalism popularized the image of Prekmurje as “our breadbasket”, embedding it in the Slovenian national imagination despite the region’s persistent poverty, overpopulation, and food insecurity. This paradox—between the narrative of abundance and the lived experience of deprivation—illustrates how the breadbasket trope functioned as a tool of national integration. While obscuring structural fragilities, it fostered symbolic ownership and belonging, binding Prekmurje to the Slovenian nation. Persisting into the present, the metonymy is invoked across political and academic contexts, attesting to its ongoing significance.

Despite the censorship imposed by the GHQ in postwar Japan, the period saw the launch of numerous fetish magazines featuring explicit sexual expression. These magazines sometimes complied with the censorship of sexual expression and sexual norms and resisted it at other times. This niche print culture enabled the emergence of Japanese gay magazines like Sabu (1974–2002), the primary focus of this paper. Although previous studies have described Sabu primarily as a hardcore SM magazine, this paper argues that it also functioned as a space for articulating gay identities and resisting social discrimination. Through a close analysis of the magazine’s reader correspondence sections, the study demonstrates how Sabu emphasized personal acts of coming out and expressions of solidarity in response to the AIDS epidemic. Furthermore, it shows that Sabu sought to diversify stereotypical representations of gay men by attempting a crossover with the male–male romances created by and for women. By examining Sabu as a case study, this paper re-evaluates the magazine’s place in the history of Japanese gay magazines and explores how such publication employed erotic representations as a medium for the articulation and strengthening of minority identities.

ABSTRACT What type of icons can give face to a system that carries the mark of transience and rules with abstraction? Using this question as its point of departure, this article attends to popular representations of capitalism in the works of fin-de-siècle French graphic artists, especially those with radical political affiliations. The rise of speculative capitalism rendered the swollen body of ‘the laissez-faire industrialist’ an insufficient icon to capture the hegemonic financial system by the close of the nineteenth century. The print artists of this study found icons from the historical and mythical pasts as well as extracted modern icons from their daily lives to give recognizable faces to capitalism. Beyond being mere cogs in a mechanics of representation, these icons had to generate affective economies to unite, instruct and agitate their audiences. The biblical golden calf is among the most ubiquitous of these faces. This article brings the visual representations of Capitalism-as-the-modern-golden-calf in dialogue with a selection of nineteenth-century anti-capitalist texts in order to illustrate how the images of popular print culture present a comparable, yet largely overlooked capacity for theoretical interventions. Finally, I constellate these observations with artworks that animated, tamed, or destroyed ‘the Bull of Wall Street’ during the Occupy Movement (2011). The iconographic similarity between the calf and the bull not only bridges centuries and cultures together, but also opens up new pathways to explore historical moments marking the creation, dissolution, and resurfacing of popular icons that constitute a universally recognizable anti-capitalist visual vernacular.

When the Newcastle-born radical Thomas Spence moved to London in 1788 he is said to have claimed that the capital ‘was the only place where a man of talent could display his powers’. This may have been the case, but Spence had already formed his ideas – and his innovative methods for disseminating them – before he left. The unusual periodical format he deployed in Pigs’ Meat, his interest in language and linguistics, and his emphasis on making written works accessible to ordinary people, were all products of the distinctive political culture of north-east England in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, as the case of the less well-known Newcastle printer John Marshall indicates, that culture survived Spence’s departure. Like Spence, Marshall exploited the periodical format, encouraged the debate and dissemination of political ideas – including in local dialects, and sought to make such ideas accessible to the lower orders. The development of these radical ideas and methods was pioneered in north-east England meaning that some innovations that came to characterise nineteenth-century plebeian radicalism had northern roots.

George Jackson (1941–1971) was an African American prison-made revolutionary and a key intellectual in the Black Power Movement. At the age of eighteen, Jackson was sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence of one year to life inside California’s maximum-security prisons, where he was killed by a tower guard. His revolutionary knowledge exited the prison space through his letters and reached the wider public when published in 1970 as Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. This paper proposes a reading that centralizes epistolarity, embarking from the hypothesis that Soledad Brother is a series of multidirectional pedagogical encounters during which knowledge emerges and develops in conversation with multiple addressees and in relation to multiple moments in Jackson’s ongoing prison time. The first section examines Jackson’s parole board hearings as nodal points in his indeterminate incarceration and as learning occasions of difficult knowledge. The second section charts three praxes of allyship that can be drawn from the epistolary confrontations between Jackson and the intended recipients of his letters. The coda engages with the politics of publication and reception implicated in Soledad Brother, situating the publication within the Black print culture of the Long Sixties and highlighting the response of its multiple reading publics.

This article examines literary engagements with the nineteenth-century opium trade for what they tell us about Orientalism at sea. It focuses on the British-Chinese writer Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession (1986), a historical novel which imaginatively reconstructs the maritime worlds of the South China Sea during the First Opium War (1839–1842). Extending across 700 pages, the novel weaves together fictional and historical sources while commenting self-reflexively on the limits of the colonial archive upon which it relies. The plot meanwhile focuses on the establishment of a new press and the material difficulties involved in keeping it afloat. This article examines the novel’s representation of print culture at sea, focusing on the concept of piracy as a way of exploring problems of historical authenticity and authority. While An Insular Possession can be seen to ‘pirate’ the colonial archive and bring its authority into question, its representation of the way that literature travels from ship to shore as waterborne cargo draws attention to the powerful infrastructures of print, publishing, and copyright upon which this authority depends.

“Battala” is a Bengali metonym for commercial print culture which gained popularity during the Bengal Renaissance. This print culture became a translational palimpsest, disseminating literary genres and leading to the creation of a site where high and low culture converged. Our paper examines the complex relationship between 19th-century colonial Calcutta and the languages in this fast-developing city. The popular print culture blurred distinctions between cultural forms, transcending geographical and literary boundaries of the colonial cosmopolis. This paper contributes to the discourse on translating otherness in the city by demonstrating how Battala intricately reflected relationships between language, memory, and urban space within the historical and cultural context of colonial Calcutta. This is done through an analysis of selected works, including Koutuk Shatak by Harishchandra Mitra, Rar Bhar Mithya Katha Tin Loye Kolikata by Pyarimohan Sen, and Ki Mojar Koler Gari by Munsi Azimuddin. Other works that highlight the blurring of cultural spaces include the translation of The Arabian Nights by Avinash Chandra Mitra (titled Sachitra Ekadhik Sahasra Dibas). Additionally, translations of Ameer Hamzar Puthi by Abdun Nabi and Shah Muhammad Saghir’s Yūsuf Zuleikhā show significant Urdu and Arabic-Persian influence. By analyzing Battala’s interactions with marketplaces, different communities, and intellectual salons, this study adds to the interdisciplinary discussion on translation and urban space. It examines the city’s symbolic representations in popular literature, as well as its geographic location and social significance.

Bioprinting, a technology with the potential to support long-term space missions, offers medical solutions for human settlements on the Moon and Mars. Moreover, 'green bioprinting' presents a promising approach to address terrestrial environmental challenges. Effective and cost-efficient implementation of this technology beyond the Earth requires leveragingin situresources on celestial bodies. Consequently, this study examines the integration of Lunar and Martian regolith into bioprintable hydrogels as mechanically stabilizing and protective components as well as nutrient sources. Hydrogel blends composed of alginate and methylcellulose were supplemented with regolith simulants. Rheological characterization revealed maintenance of shear thinning and shear recovery properties, ensuring optimal printability. In regards to cultivation of microalgae, the ion release/uptake of the regolith simulants in culture medium was investigated, indicating that regolith has potential to serve as nutrient source. The microalgaChlorella vulgarisand bacteriaButtiauxella sp. MASE-IM-9 andSalinisphaera shabanensiswere bioprinted in regolith-based inks. Results demonstrate that the microalgae maintained their photosynthetic efficiency in regolith-containing bioinks during cultivation, exhibiting high viability and growth. The bacteria exhibited an enhanced resistance to desiccation as well as temperature and radiation stress when regolith simulants were present in the hydrogels. This study confirms the feasibility of employing Lunar and Martian regolith simulants in bioinks for green bioprinting and bacterial bioprinting. Such an approach could minimize the volume of stored printing materials and culture media, optimizing rocket transport capacity.

Abstract This article investigates the representation of Jews in al-Risālah, a major Egyptian literary magazine (1933–53), by integrating Cultural Analytics and postcolonial theory. Using digital text analysis methods, it identifies and interprets patterns of Jewish representation within al-Risālah’s archive, uncovering how Arab intellectuals negotiated Jewishness amid the political tensions of the interwar and early postwar periods. This interdisciplinary approach enables a nuanced examination of cultural production, bridging quantitative modelling with close textual reading to reveal the ambivalences of Arab print discourse during a pivotal historical moment. The study’s significance lies in its digital examination of media texts published during the rise of Zionism and the establishment of Israel, an era that reshaped intercommunal relations across the Arab world. As Arab Jews began departing Egypt en masse, al-Risālah’s evolving depictions of Jews became symptomatic of broader anxieties over national identity, religious difference, and colonial legacies. Structured in two parts, the first contextualizes al-Risālah within anti-colonial and post-Ottoman intellectual currents, illustrating how the magazine became a platform for competing visions of Arab modernity. The second part synthesizes distant reading with interpretive analysis to assess how al-Risālah conceptualized Jews: as symbols of modernity, victims of Western imperialism, or threats to Arab sovereignty. These portrayals are not merely historical curiosities but inform contemporary understandings of ethno-religious identity and political belonging. By fusing digital humanities tools with a postcolonial critique of knowledge production, this study contributes a new methodological and epistemological model for analysing Arab print culture, representation, and media history.

Local Paper, International News: Feminist Print Cultures and Women’s Centres Newsletters in 1970s-1980s Belgium, France and Britain

This article examines an understudied genre of music publication that gained popularity in the final decades of the nineteenth century: the mass-produced miniature score. While there had been earlier attempts at small-format publishing, it was in 1886 that the Leipzig-based firm Albert Payne started to issue its Kleine Partitur-Ausgabe—a series of cheap, pocket-sized scores of canonical chamber works sold to music lovers in Germany, Austria, and Britain. Inspired by recent scholarship on print culture, the article considers Payne’s scores as a form of print media, outlining developments in music publishing that enabled the production of these small volumes and comparing them to related musical and literary commodities such as the analytical program note, the piano duet arrangement, and the paperback book. The later sections of the article deal with the reception and use of the Kleine Partitur-Ausgabe. Sold at the Joachim Quartet concerts in Berlin and at the chamber concerts held in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Payne’s scores were the subject of numerous newspaper reviews in both cities. In Britain a revealing example of the personal use of the Kleine Paritur-Ausgabe is provided by the annotated scores and correspondence of the teenaged Donald Francis Tovey. Collectively these explorations of Payne’s small scores offer new insights into their capacity to encourage attentive, work-focused listening practices and to enable a new kind of material connection with the Austro-German chamber canon.

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to explore a complex cultural interface between India and Britain through the analysis of the writings of the Indian travellers from 1794 to 1857. It focuses on Dean Mahomed, Abu Taleb and Lutfullah, whose passages from India to the West were a site of socio-cultural negotiation with the metropolitan centre. Venturing into a new ‘Contact Zone', the early Indian travellers embarked on their journeys with a critical indigenous gaze. The entry of the colonized subjects in the print culture fostered a space for making self-representations vis-à-vis the colonial discourse that foregrounded a self-proclaimed project of making the Other knowable through the European epistemology. The encounter with the West provided the early Indian travellers a scope to initiate a cultural dialogue that formed a dialectical pattern of the selective acceptance and rejection of the Western culture through ‘autoethnographic expressions’. Though they were enamoured by British science and technology, they were extremely protective of their representation of religion and women. The defiance to accept the West in every sphere shows that the early Indian travellers created a sense of nationalist self despite working within the cultural and political dynamics of the empire.

Microfluidic chips play a crucial role in the field of cell analysis. These miniature chips integrate seamlessly across key cell analysis stages, including sample preparation, cell culture, sorting, lysis, and detection. They possess many advantages such as miniaturization, integration, automation, and portability. The size of their microchannels is comparable to that of cells, thus enabling research to be conducted at the single-cell or even subcellular organelle level. They can also simulate the physiological conditions in vivo, conduct non-destructive or minimally destructive detections, and meet the requirements of high-throughput cell analysis, which is beneficial for parallel operations and continuous analysis. This article reviews the technological progress of microfluidic chips, focusing on three major directions: cell sorting and enrichment, single-cell analysis, and dynamic microenvironment simulation. The article also analyzes the challenges faced by this technology, such as cell damage control, handling of multicellular heterogeneity, data interpretation, etc., and proposes coping strategies such as the development of new biomaterials, multimodal integration technology, and artificial intelligence assistance. By combining cutting-edge technologies such as nanotechnology, 3D printing, and organoid culture, the functions of microfluidic chips can be further expanded to enable the simulation and analysis of more complex biological systems and provide important technical support for cell biology research and clinical translation.

Periodicals in Latin America: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Serialized Print Culture