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Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 20 (2013)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 20

(2013)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

David McKitterick
The United Kingdom: a national history of the book

National histories

To dare to embark on a national history of the book demands a certain boldness. Overall concepts may be clear, but the details of how topics will relate to each other can emerge only by experience. Some contributors will prove more willing than others to work in a team. Editors must try to ensure that there is some continuity. More controversially, there is always the question of what exactly is the nation with which the project is concerned. Where are its linguistic, geographical or political boundaries? What has been the relationship between national ambitions and national imperialism? How have they affected, and how have they been affected by, the history of books in the broadest sense? How have all these questions changed over the centuries, and to what extent can they be accommodated? At a practical level, what bibliographical sources are available? Most of all, every national history of the book carries with it a question. How does it fit into the international world? So far, and perhaps understandably given the resources available, no history, in any country, has attempted an adequate answer to this question. Opinions differ even as to what we mean by the subject, the history of the book.

It is therefore not surprising that in recent years Britain has produced not only a national history of the book, but also two multi-authored general compilations both of which have sought to take a world view: one published by Blackwell and consisting of a series of short essays, and the other, with many more dictionary-like entries, by Oxford University Press.1 In the world-wide application of book history, so much remains only partially explored, and so many connections have still to be made.

Over the last few years, secondary literature on domestic topics has been dominated in Britain by two projects published by Cambridge University Press: the seven-volume History of the book in Britain (1999-, six volumes published so far), and the accompanying three-volume History of libraries in Britain and Ireland (2006).



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Figure 1. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume 6. Cambridge 2009


Both acknowledge their considerable debt to the inspiration of L'histoire de l'édition française (1982-1986), and L'histoire des bibliothèques françaises (1988-1992), works whose own boundaries - thematic, political and geographical - themselves offered a challenge to anyone following in their footsteps. But these date from some years ago, and the intervening time has brought new perspectives. Other countries including the United States, Canada, and Australia have worked on their own national histories, while nearer home there have developed projects concerning Wales, Scotland and Ireland.2 The existence of these other projects are reminders of how the British book trade has been international ever since early times. The further and related series for Ireland, Scotland and Wales provide not only for different perspectives, but also for fuller accounts of topics that had either to be set aside in the larger plan, or for which there was too little space.

From the beginning, the project was conceived as a history of the book in Britain. In other words, the indefinite article was a reminder that such a history could never be conclusive; and secondly, that this was not a history of the British book, but of books as they were traded and used in Britain, the extent to which British printing, publishing and reading have always depended on imports and exports. Each volume contains sev-

eral studies in more detail (not singled out in the present survey) beside chapters of more general application. This apart, the long time-span for the History of the book in Britain, from Roman times to the present, inevitably meant a considerable divergence of approach. Not only did most contributors prefer not to be led by theory. More importantly, evidence for each period exists on very different scales. It was this, for example, that led to the decision to include a full account of the processes of printing and type-founding not in the volume that included Caxton, England's first printer, but that for the eighteenth century, where the evidence of printers' manuals, archives such as those of the Bowyers3 or Cambridge University Press, and surviving equipment such as that at Oxford University Press, could be marshalled into a coherent and authoritative survey. The volume covering 1400 to 1557 was largely concerned with readership, that for 1557 to 1695 with the book trade, and that for 1830 to 1914 with the increasing ubiquity of print as well as with the many mechanical innovations. The concluding volume for the period since 1914 is expected in the next two or three years.

In general, the History of the book in Britain has not been concerned with the world of print as a whole. The appearance in 2011 of the first volume, entitled Cheap print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, edited by Joad Raymond, of a planned nine-volume Oxford history of popular print culture, was a timely reminder of some of the wider issues concerning what it meant to live in a world that was increasingly managed by, and dependent on, print. This examined not only popular literature of the cheapest kind, but also newspapers and the world of ephemera.

If the last few years have been dominated in Britain by the Cambridge project, it has also aired a host of further questions. In the following, I offer an account of some of the work that has been done in Britain concerning the history of the book. Occasionally I have alluded to work by scholars based in other countries, where this seemed to be particularly helpful in setting a context. All of it, without exception, airs needs for further investigations and sometimes new kinds of questions, whether about different approaches, different kinds of evidence, different groups of people, or different genres of publication. Sometimes the questions are explicit. More often they are implied challenges. In general, the twentieth century has so far attracted less in-depth consideration than earlier ones.

Infrastructures: people

If we search for a date to which we may attach the beginning of institutional interest in the history of the book, then we can do no better than look to the foundation of the Bibliographical Society in 1892. This has been followed since by other bibliographical societies, including those at Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge. With an eye to slightly different emphases, the Printing Historical Society was founded in 1964. The still predominantly Anglo-American Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and

Publishing (sharp) is a more recent arrival, founded in 1991. The principal annual specialist lecture series are the Sandars lectures, founded at Cambridge in 1895, the Lyell lectures (Oxford, founded 1952) and the Panizzi lectures (British Library, founded 1985). In university teaching, where the vagaries and changing demands of academic programmes and funding mean that there is no guarantee of longevity, the School of Advanced Study at the University of London offers an ma in the history of the book, as well as annual summer schools. At Oxford, the Bodleian Library has recently established a Centre for the Study of the Book, and at Oxford Brookes University there is an International Centre for Publishing Studies. The University of Edinburgh established a Centre for the History of the Book in 1995. At Cambridge, graduate seminars on the history of material texts draw their membership from departments including English, history, modern languages, the history of art and architecture, music and the history of science. At Reading, the Department of Typography has a strong historical element, reflected in its periodic series of Typography papers. The Open University offers a Book History Research Group. This list is far from exhaustive, but it indicates the range of approaches taken in teaching, managing and encouraging the subject.

Infrastructures: bibliographical resources

For the two Cambridge histories, it was possible to tackle a subject stretching over so long a period thanks not only to sufficient contributors, but also to a bibliographical infrastructure. For the period from the mid-fifteenth century to the nineteenth century, there are reliable, if varyingly complete, retrospective bibliographies. The English Short-Title Catalogue, based partly on older works including stc and Wing and covering 1475 to 1800, is not quite comprehensive, but it provides a sufficiently detailed account of what has survived.4 The Nineteenth-Century STC is less advanced,5 but again it offers a broader conspectus than is available in what is otherwise the most comprehensive record, in the British Library's catalogue. Neither of these, of course, is entirely complete; and neither lists what has not survived, not only of books but also of newspapers, pamphlets and all kinds of miscellaneous ephemeral material. To that extent, it remains difficult to judge with complete accuracy what is meant by a society dependent on print.

As in some other countries, much effort has been given over the last few years to compiling essential retrospective databases. Apart from the now well-established cerl,6 efforts are being made in St Andrews and in Dublin to compile a Universal short-title catalogue, initially to 1600 but now to be extended into the seventeenth century.7 Allied to them is the manuscript archival record. A sustained campaign to identify and preserve the archives of printers, publishers and other parts of the book trade has enabled new and fresh work. The archives of the eighteenth-century London printers

William Bowyer father and son have been published in facsimile, with an accompanying catalogue of the work recorded in the ledgers. Those of Cambridge University Press, published in part some years ago and now readily available in the University Library, have made possible a comprehensive re-evaluation of the history of the oldest press in the world (founded 1583).8 The Longman archives, housed in Reading University Library with those of several other publishers, were the basis of a substantial history of the firm, with a history dating from 1724.9 The papers of the firm of the publishers John Murray (founded at Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century) were bought by the National Library of Scotland, and are being steadily exploited.10 Many of the Macmillan papers are now in the British Library, and have been used for work on authors including ‘Lewis Carroll’, Tennyson, and Yeats.11 A major history of Oxford University Press, again based largely on archives that were only partly accessible until recently, will be published in the next few years. In London, the Faber archives are gradually becoming available online, and will cast a great deal of light on the publishing of twentieth-century poets including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes and others.12 So far, most of these publishers' and printers' papers have been little analysed by economic historians.

The third crucial part is access. The existence of eebo (Early English Books online) and Ecco (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), with their full-length images of thousands of books published between 1475 and 1800 has in the last few years transformed the study of British history generally, not only the history of the book. But they are only one aspect. Projects such as the digitisation of the Burney collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers in the British Library, of the state papers held at the National Archives and in some private collections, and of numerous nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers, have made progress in research possible with a speed and on a scale never before imaginable. Other extensive resources that have become available online, including the Old Bailey records (criminal trials), 1674-1913,13 and various Parliamentary and other state papers,14 have so far been explored only a little.

Meanwhile there have been major on-line projects to record members of the book trade. The British Book Trade Index, based at Birmingham, takes matters to c.1850,15 and there is a separate one for Scotland.16 The London Book Trades Database deals with the trade in printed books to c.1830.17 Two recent local directories of the Suffolk trade, pub-

lished in conventional format, may serve as examples of their kind.18 So far, the twentieth century has been little explored, perhaps because so much appears to be readily available in contemporary directories.

Like their equivalents for books from continental Europe, projects such as eebo and ecco bring immense benefits. They also all come at a price. As is being increasingly recognised, they focus attention on some survivals - which have been digitised and made easily available - at the expense of others which have not; and they distract from the further question that attends all kinds of evidence: what has not survived. The existence of a single digitised copy of a book is made to serve for many. I return to the importance of multiple pieces of evidence, and questions of provenance and copy-specific evidence, later on.

Secondly, digital copies are surrogates. Reproductions, and especially reproductions on film or digitised for screen presentation, cannot provide the physical immediacy of originals. Three dimensions are reduced to two, often distorted by the screen. Colour is unreliable. Paper quality and weight cannot be judged. Even the size of originals cannot be adequately represented. Variety is reduced to uniformity. These are not new issues. When in 1985 D.F. McKenzie reminded his audience at the British Library that ‘forms effect meaning’,19 he could not have predicted how rapidly electronic access to texts would develop in the coming years: in all manner of devices both small and large, and by all manner of software programmes. McKenzie's words, which have since been widely quoted, drew on long-standing bibliographical and critical observation. Forms of presentation not only affect meaning; they also help to create it, effect it. The maxim embodies a point that is central to the history of the book: the importance of artefactual evidence. Notwithstanding the lip service widely paid to McKenzie, one feature of recent work is an increasing divergence between historians who write about the history of the book from the evidence of primary materials - physical books whose format, weight, colour and materials are visible and tangible in all their glory, expense, cheapness, beauty or ugliness, pristine and barely touched or grubby from use - and those for whom secondary records or accounts are sufficient.

Varieties of book history

We may now turn to more particular aspects of book history. The fifteenth century has been exceptionally well served, with two major catalogues and one on-going project that has produced a number of unexpected results. The long-awaited publication of bmc xi, the catalogue of fifteenth-century English printed books in the British Library, was based on work dating from the first years of the twentieth century and continued by successive members of the staff of the British Museum (from 1973 the British

Library).20 But it was brought to completion by Lotte Hellinga, with crucial help (especially concerning paper evidence as a means of dating books) from Paul Needham. Much more than a catalogue, this volume also offered an introduction cast on a far greater scale than its predecessors, work that in itself provided an account of English fifteenth-century printing fuller than anything published, anywhere. It addressed not just issues of canon, dating, manufacture, authorship, the careers of printers and other topics that were to be expected, but also of survival and of the history of taste. It was pioneering not only in the detail of the contents of volumes, and the copy-specific information about provenance, type-setting, binding etc., but also in the substantial introduction including such matters as details of production and of survival, besides the traditional attention to type-faces. Dr Hellinga followed this with two further projects; an updated edition of Duff's standard bibliography of all English fifteenth-century printing,21 and a study of William Caxton and early printing in England (2010). In the latter, and in an article in the Bulletin du bibliophile,22 she put forward a powerful argument that Caxton's press in the Low Countries was not at Bruges, but at Ghent.



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Figure 2. Lotte Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England. London 2010


Two other catalogues of incunables set new standards. The six-volume catalogue of those in the Bodleian Library at Oxford paid especial attention to the multiple authorial responsibilities for books that have, traditionally, generally been credited to single individuals.23 In doing so, the catalogue made plain some of the ways in which ideas of authorship and attribution were to change quite dramatically during the following century as medieval traditions were gradually displaced. At Cambridge, where a printed catalogue of the incunabula in the University Library was published in 1954 and was then thought to be a model of its kind, a new computer-based catalogue was begun. Instead of simply transferring existing data, each book has been examined anew, resulting not only in the recording of more data, but also in the discovery of new features such as forgotten provenance details or evidence of use in annotations by (occasionally) well-known individuals. The project has been accompanied by an informative blog.24

With the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (istc), hosted in the British Library,25 the existence of this new generation of catalogues (supplemented by others abroad, especially in Germany) lends a fresh impetus to incunable studies. Meanwhile, subsequent periods have been approached from various viewpoints. My own Print, manuscript and the search for order (Cambridge, 2003) examined aspects of what was meant by a printing revolution, showing that this was much more protracted than is sometimes assumed: the period spanned 1450 to the 1830s, from the complicated transition from manuscript to print to the work of Charles Babbage. While work such as Harold Love's Scribal publication in seventeenth-century England (Oxford, 1993)26 had demonstrated the continuing importance of the written word not just for letters but also for publication, the interplay of print and manuscript is becoming ever clearer with respect to its complexity.

In the seventeenth century, the royal printers have attracted particular attention, notably in the work of Graham Rees and Maria Wakely on the century's early years.27 The anniversaries of the publication of the King James Bible in 1611, and of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, produced disappointingly little serious bibliographical analysis. Much more attention has been paid to questions of censorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example in a trio of works by Cyndia Susan Clegg.28

The business of bookselling and publishing was the subject of James Raven's The business of books, a study that, by taking a long period, showed how these changed not only in themselves but also in their relationship to each other.29 As international activities, they were also reflected in the national histories of the book in Australia, America and Canada, all chiefly (but by no means exclusively) anglophone markets. More detail of the eighteenth-century North American markets was offered in Raven's account of

the Charleston Literary Society,30 and in my own study of a Barbados bookseller, importing from London for re-export to the eastern seaboard.31 Such studies, complementing work done in the United States, serve as reminders of international trade, readership and personal and financial dependence, and of how much more needs to be done in exploring the mechanics and effects of the trade both internationally and nationally. Some of this emerged in a collection of essays on the twentieth-century antiquarian trade, edited by Giles Mandelbrote.32 This book reflected a gradual - and long overdue - growth in interest in the ordinary second-hand trade as well. For the seventeenth century, Matthew Yeo explored the use made of second-hand booksellers by the infant Chetham's library in Manchester.33 For the new books trade, Sue Bradley edited a collection of interviews by mostly British booksellers and publishers.34 Two series of annual conferences, one on the provincial trade and one designed more generally, have produced many useful and well-focussed studies of both individuals and themes.35

There is a pressing need for the international nature of the whole subject of production and trade to be more fully understood. It was explored in Andrew Pettegree's The book in the renaissance (Yale up, 2010), and in several more particular studies. Ian Maclean's work is also notable for assuming an international viewpoint.36 More locally, Brian Richardson's several books on Italian renaissance books have frequently been concerned with the relationship between manuscript and print.37 Conor Fahy (d. 2009) left a body of work that helped to transform sixteenth-century bibliographical study both in Italy and concerning Italian books.38 Taking a different palette, the publication of T.F. Earle's account of early modern Portuguese writers in some British libraries offered a welcome perspective on the ways in which interests developed, albeit within a strictly defined community.39 For older books, Kristian Jensen's Revolution and the antiquarian book employed catalogues, surviving copies and both home and overseas (chiefly French) archives to explore some of the largest of all changes in international emphases: a lega-

cy that is still very much alive in the ways in which older western European books are viewed in Britain.40

Ownership and reading

Interest in mentalités, expounded years ago by Robert Mandrou and others,41 has led to a burgeoning industry concerning copy-specific information about books of all kinds. This has taken various forms. Two detailed surveys of surviving copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare considerably expanded as well as updated the work of Sidney Lee at the beginning of the twentieth century,42 and in their methods bear comparison with the work of Owen Gingerich on the earliest editions of Copernicus's De revolutionibus.43 A similar approach was taken with surviving copies of Samuel Purchas's accounts of English voyages.44 While these have focussed on particular books, questions of provenance have been much more widely pursued for individuals. Accounts of National Trust libraries have brought much to light from shelves not easily available to ordinary country-house visitors.45 Contents of other individual collections have been summarised in the two series Libri Pertinentes and Private Libraries in Renaissance England (plre). David Pearson's Provenance research in book history. A handbook (1994, revised reprint 1998) has proved to be especially influential in an area of study that has attracted considerable interest internationally. His account of a group of copies of a work by Francis Bacon, in his more general study Books as history,46 offered a further example of the ranges of readership and taste, readily apparent in the kinds of bookbindings distributed amongst early owners. Besides this, he has also made available an on-line index to English book owners in the seventeenth century.47 For bookbinding studies, the completion of Mirjam Foot's magisterial three-volume catalogue of the Henry Davis gift in the British Library offers an exceptional, and international, range of examples, not just in the history of decoration but also frequently suggestive for the history of taste - and use.48 The continuing work of Anthony Hobson, especially on bookbinding in the renaissance, has further demonstrated the extent to which the study of bindings can enable a better understanding of circles of scholarship and friendship.49 As for ownership in Britain, in his Inventory of sale catalogues the late Robin Alston was concerned more with owners than with the book trade, and turned to newspaper advertisements to record sales of

which no catalogue survives.50 Unfortunately, his focus meant that he omitted hundreds of catalogues recording anonymous sales. While the nineteenth century remains under-explored, the bicentennial history of the Roxburghe Club by Nicolas Barker (2012) was as much a reminder of major collectors as a challenge to further work among those not at the centre of bibliographical fashion.



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Figure 3. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge 2004


The history of reading, drawing on bibliographical and archival evidence, has attracted especial attention, exemplified in work on the early modern period, from different viewpoints, by Eamon Duffy, Kevin Sharpe and William Sherman.51 The study of provenance can often be closely related to the study of reading as it is manifest in personal annotation. So far, this kind of evidence has been less discussed for later periods,

but meanwhile the history of reading is attracting very considerable interest among literary historians as well.

William St Clair's The reading nation in the romantic period (2004) was based on an examination of production statistics for different formats of books. It showed how the ending of perpetual copyright in the 1770s affected publication in sometimes unexpected ways, and it demonstrated amongst much else the practice followed by publishers of new titles exploiting each part of the market in turn, offering more expensive formats (quarto, large octavo) before the smaller and cheaper ones (small octavo, duodecimo etc.). While his study was widely welcomed, it remains that a great deal more remains to be explored about the reading nation at this time, as reflected in the growing periodical market and among the individual choices recorded in innumerable personal manuscript anthologies. In The Enlightenment and the Scots, Richard Sher tackled some of the same issues, not always agreeing with St Clair.52

Illustration has aroused detailed interest only in some areas. While in my Print, manuscript and the search for order I addressed the phenomenon of manuscript and printed illustration appearing side by side in some early books, Sachiko Kusukawa has addressed the rather wider question of sixteenth-century scientific book illustration in her Picturing the book of nature (2012).53 In the seventeenth century, engraved illustration has recently attracted especial attention, particularly in the project led by Michael Hunter to compile a fully indexed digital library of British prints to 1700, including indexes to subject-matter.54 Unfortunately there is no archive in Britain comparable to that of the Plantin press, on which Bowen and Imhof drew for their pioneering investigation of the relationship between letterpress and intaglio.55 Among studies of later periods, the appearance of Nigel Tattersfield's immense bibliography of the wood engraver Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) set new standards in its attention to archival sources and questions of attribution.56 In the twentieth century, interest in the design of dust-wrappers and other covers was reflected in Joseph Connolly on those of Faber (dominated for many years by Berthold Wolpe, as the firm's typographer) 57 and in Phil Baines on those of Penguin.58 The whole subject calls for extended analysis, but so far the only person to have written more generally and at length about the history of book-jackets is the American scholar G. Thomas Tanselle.59

The dispersal of libraries

In the last few years, the management, and the dispersal, of some major libraries of early printed books has become a cause for concern. Partly, it reflects the crisis in library funding that is common through much of the western world. Partly it reflects various crises in institutional funding more generally, whether in universities, the churches, or in societies. Partly also it reflects an increasing belief in the sufficiency of scanned versions of books as being adequate both for immediate use and for long-term preservation. So-called rationalisation of book stocks may help library budgets, but it always obscures the history of books. These are all long-term issues, and the effect of decisions taken now will affect public understanding of books for all time. So, for example, Keele University sold a substantial collection of books on the history of science and mathematics, including books annotated by Sir Isaac Newton. Scandalously, in 2006 the diocese of Truro sold a major library of early printed books including not only a copy of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible but also a copy of Macklin's monumental edition of the Bible (1800) extra-illustrated on a unique scale, the inserted pictures bulking the original to no fewer than sixty-three volumes. The set was dismantled, and the illustrations dispersed in the print trade. The rest of the library, mostly sent to a bookseller, was sold for very considerably less than its true value, and the sale seems to have been done by the diocese without taking any serious professional advice. More cheerfully, when in 2008 the city of Cardiff decided to sell its historic collection from the public library, a campaign successfully saw the books bought by the University of Cardiff helped substantially with a grant from the Welsh Assembly. The books, including a quantity of incunabula and a collection of seventeenth-century English drama of exceptional importance, had been collected in the late nineteenth century on a scale that was intended to form the core of a new National Library of Wales, and continued for a generation even after that Library was established on an entirely fresh site at Aberystwyth. Early reports suggest also that the provenances of many of the books, from early Welsh libraries, will substantially extend knowledge of the history of the use of books among Welsh families. The gradual attrition of historic libraries, and with them the evidence of book ownership and use, shows no sign of halting, and the tale is a mixed one. Many of the books from the Benedictine abbey of Fort Augustus, for example, are now in the National Library of Scotland. The early books from Ushaw College, a Roman Catholic seminary with its roots in the sixteenth-century English College at Douai, are now under the umbrella of Durham University Library. But much of the library of Cheshunt College, Cambridge, originally a nonconformist training college, was sold in 2012. Easily the most spectacular sale of this kind was that of the seventh-century manuscript of the Gospel of St John, from Stonyhurst, sold by the Jesuit order in 2012 to the British Library for £9 million.

Private libraries are a separate matter, but many people lamented the dispersal of the library of the Earls of Macclesfield, one of the greatest of all private libraries formed mostly in the first half of the eighteenth century.60 An exceptional record of how New-tonianism and other traditions of natural philosophy were sustained, developed and shared, it can now never be studied in its entirety.

A further look ahead

Looking ahead, what further work is needed, and where can we expect interests to develop? Computer-based projects such as cerl, the istc and the Universal Short-Title Catalogue being developed at St Andrew's University draw daily attention to the international nature of the subject. In the last few pages, some lines of enquiry - both international and insular - have already been suggested. Most importantly, the primacy of the printed artefact as evidence stands as a reminder to librarians and scholars alike of the importance of its maintenance, preservation and study. How much can we afford to throw away? As our world grows ever more dependent on the Web and other kinds of non-print environments, so it becomes ever more urgent to understand a medium that in the course of over five hundred years became dominant, but that was never a monopoly. How has print related to speech, the word to image, verbal language to the language of signs? First, we need to develop our knowledge of the extent to which print penetrated many aspects of society in ways of which we are so far largely ignorant. While great strides have been made in searching family, ecclesiastical, legal and business archives, the largest relevant question remains. What has been lost? What kinds of documents (not simply what books) have been lost? How many copies were printed, of books, and of more ephemeral publications such as notices, advertisements, licences, catalogues? Quantification is taking a more central role, and it has the potential to inform present-day challenges concerning preservation as well as our understanding of the past, and what was meant by the power of print. Second, and related to the first: for some scholars, this is a question that is centered on books. William St Clair (a former civil servant in the Treasury) has suggested that estc records could be linked to archival records so as to produce the beginning of a census of production: such a project would require considerable care in its detail, if false trails and false links are to be avoided. These same archival records provide some of our best evidence of what has either completely, or almost, disappeared. Third, how do new books relate to old ones, and how does this relationship change? Fourth, how has the book trade worked - locally, nationally, internationally - and how has it changed over more than five centuries? Fifth, what is print for? Here, a growing interest in the history of information by Asa Briggs, Peter Burke and others suggests a new stress on the relationship between print and other forms of communication.61 Most of these and other questions addressed above require international outlooks.


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