Before La Cleta Cartonera collective published its first book, their mani-festo expressed two main ideas: the expendability of the book and the importance of publishing according to the editors' literary preferences. Here lies La Cleta's contradiction between the expendability of their production process and the precious nature of book-objects. Breaking away from the cartonera movement-a move-ment typically made up of non-profit collective publishing projects that use recycled materials to make their books-it sought to align itself with independent Mexican publishing houses that reflected on the act of publishing and the book as a medium, such as Alias, Tumbona, or Sur+. As one of La Cleta's members said, their interest in the expendable can be characterized as a rhetorical gesture. This paper analyzes the potentialities and questions La Cleta Cartonera brings to Mexico's publishing mar-ket. Three interviews were conducted for an in-depth perspective of the collective, combined with the examination of various material copies of their books. Finally, the paper takes a theoretical and micro-historical approach to understand La Cleta's project and its rooting in materiality.
The field of audiobook studies has grown substantially in recent years, and now has an increasingly coherent interdisciplinary identity. It draws together con-ceptual and methodological strands from book history, literary studies, and media studies, as well as education and library research. This article offers an overview of existing research in audiobook studies and proposes five pillars for future scholar-ship. Pillar 1, "Locations," considers the audiobook market's simultaneously local, global, and virtual dynamics. Pillar 2, "Infrastructures," looks at the infrastructural systems that shape how audiobooks are created, circulated, and read in the form of platforms, institutions, and individuals and the relationships between them. Pillar 3, "(Non-)commerciality," pays attention to the mixed dynamics of commercial and non-commercial production that characterize audiobooks, including the relationships between audiobooks and talking books produced as accessibility aids. Pillar 4, "Old and new," analyses how audiobooks are both historical and contemporary media: simultaneously the publishing industry's next big thing, and somewhat oldfashioned. Pillar 5, "Practical valorization," engages with the applied and advocacy issues relating to audiobooks' integration into existing systems of valorization and control, including digitization, preservation, remuneration, and regulation. These pillars are offered as inexhaustive examples of research directions that take audio-books on their own terms as material, intermedial, and post-digital instantiations of the book, and consequently support analysis and understanding of how audiobooks intervene in twenty-first century book culture.
This article explores a unique instance of the British state supporting the book trade's global export ambitions for both cultural and commercial motives: the British Book Export Scheme (BES). It chronicles how BES operated as a public-private partnership between the British Council and the book trade to help export British books to nonimperial markets despite the challenges of the Second World War from 1940 to 1951. During the six years at the height of the scheme (1940-1946), BES exported 458,679 pound of British books to more than a score of countries including Brazil, Algeria, and Iran. Yet this unusual balance of cultural and commercial goals proved challenging for government officials and the book trade to reconcile, especially under the pressures of the war, and the scheme was ended in 1951. The article argues that BES's failure as both a cultural and commercial initiative helps us understand why so many subsequent instances of Cold War cultural diplomacy were explicitly noncommercial. BES had shown that it was exceedingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to pursue commercial and cultural imperatives while retaining both state and trade support.
Material texts featuring supplementary attachments-revision slips, edi-tor's notes, newspaper clippings, photographs, or even structural supports for un-easily assembled documents-are certainly familiar to scholars accustomed to the immense variety of textual media. And yet, despite their pervasiveness, these at-tachments have been largely overlooked as a distinct bibliographical category. Set in place by their author or appended at a later date by an intermediary, inscribed supplements command a startling range of appellations: "paste-ins," "paste-ons," "overlays," "enclosures," "patches," "fold-outs," "revision slips," and even "com-posite leaves" or "part-leaves" (among others). This article posits the broadly uni-fying term paste-over as a provisional designation for such objects and examines their use among a handful of manuscripts constructed by three American poets of the nineteenth century: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. As these manuscripts reveal, paste-overs were deployed by these poets not only as an incidental feature of textual revision but as a central constituent of the poem-making process. These glued, taped, pinned, or otherwise adhered supplements modify the written artifact's material architecture-what I call its parastructure. By refocusing interest onto this deceptively simple device, the paste-over emerges as a broadly recognizable object that appears with surprising regularity across material history.
This essay examines the unfolding impact of AI on Australia's trade publishing industry. Currently, AI developers are pursuing an aggressive rollout of their technologies through pre-existing infrastructures. This rollout continues to have varying impacts on different states and industries depending largely on how reliant they might already be on foreign technology and how easily they might be subjected to automation. Using a Digital Anti-Colonial framework (a conceptual framework that centres the role of technology in establishing and maintaining relationships of economic, political, and cultural domination) this essay inquires into the encroachment of AI into terrain traditionally the reserve of Australian trade publishing. After reviewing the unique role of trade publishing in Australia, this essay first analyzes the ways AI is currently being used to automate audiobook production and "summary book" production. It then analyses the use of intellectual property in training AI and the ongoing debate around fair use. This essay argues that the risk posed to the Australian publishing industry by AI is significant. AI threatens to reduce important processes of knowledge creation, evaluation, sharing, and stewardship to one automated process of economic extraction. Unmediated, AI is at odds with Australian trade publishing, which serves important functions in Australian society and culture that go beyond economic accumulation. It is important, therefore, that Australia's trade publishers, industry bodies, and other stakeholders involve themselves in shaping legal frameworks around AI in ways that protect these vital socio-cultural assets.
While scholarship on reading in late imperial China has primarily focused on monolingual literati readers of Chinese, this article sheds light on a different kind of reader: the ambilingual reader of the Manchu language, the native language of the Qing rulers (1644-1911). By examining both how readers learned to read Manchu and marginalia left by readers on their books, this article contends that readers engaged in a multilingual reading practice in which readers simultaneously read both Manchu and Chinese together. Fostered by the focus on translation in Manchu-language schools and pedagogy, this reading practice left physical marks on Manchu-language books in the form of multilingual glosses, dots, and other reading marks.
In the 1690s, America saw its first two trials for seditious libel: those of the Quakers William Bradford and Thomas Maule. Neither trial produced a conviction, and both marked a divergence between American and English practice in the role of juries in seditious libel cases. This paper examines these two trials and their context within the development of American censorship in the years immediately following the Glorious Revolution. In an era of rapidly degrading public trust in government, the trials of William Bradford and Thomas Maule demonstrate a growing public sympathy towards a de-regulated press, as well as illustrating the challenges faced by colonial governors in controlling the transmission of the printed word.
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 Wheatley'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: 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.
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.
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.
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."
"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 re-printings 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.
Following a period of profligate pulpwood logging that threatened domes-tic 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.
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.
