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Studies in the history of books and the book trade

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posted on 2018-05-09, 13:37 authored by John P. Feather
The books and papers offered in this submission are concerned with the history of books and the book trade. Three papers (nos. 1, 2, 3) offer a theoretical and conceptual framework for historical studies of the book. In essence, it is argued that since the book is a societal object it can only be understood in a societal context. Consequently historical studies of books are concerned with far more than physical bibliography, important as that is. The writing, publishing and reading of books are activities which develop out of, and influence the further development of, political and economic systems. The political context of publishing and its legal status is of central concern to the book historian (nos. 12, 14, 15); so too are the mechanisms of sale and distribution (nos. 9, 10, 11, 16) and the relationships between the author who is the primary producer, and the publisher who provides his commercial link with the reader (no. 13). More specifically, the central group of works is concerned with the provincial book trade in 18th-century England. The general study (no. 8) is a wide-ranging survey, largely based on primary sources, of the development and operation of the complex systems which allowed the printed word to permeate English society at every level and in every part of the country between 1700 and 1800. Shorter studies consider some more detailed aspects of the same subject (nos. 4, 6, 7) and survey previous work in the field (no. 5 ).

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Information Science

Publisher

Loughborough University of Technology

Rights holder

© J.P. Feather and the assignees

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

1985

Notes

Publications submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Ph.D. of Loughborough University of Technology. This submission has been redacted for reasons relating to the law of copyright. The complete submission in hard copy is kept at the University Library, Loughborough University.

Language

  • en

Qualification name

  • PhD

Qualification level

  • Doctoral

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