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The
print
networks conferences ... have never been assigned themes,
but one
would not guess that from the proceedings brought together
by John
Hinks and Catherine Armstrong. Most of the essays in Printing Places: Locations
of book
production and distribution since 1500 really do
have something
to do with the sense of place that can be created through
the medium of
print. Every one of the fourteen papers from the 2002
conference is
included in this book, so it is not surprising that the
quality of
contributions is a little uneven. There are some gems,
however,
including Peter Isaac's, which uses the John Murray and
the Oliver
& Boyd archives to elucidate the complicated
relationship between
London publisher (Murray) and Edinburgh agent (Oliver
& Boyd)
during the first half of the nineteenth century. Iain
Beavan's
contribution serves as a useful postscript, answering some
of the
questions raised by Isaac. Graham Law ("Imagined Local Communities: Three Victorian novelists") reminds us that magazines were not the only nineteenth-century periodicals to serialize fiction. Newspapers did too, particularly when the novels had a local flavour. For example, the Leicester Chronicle serialized The Lily of Leicester, or A Wife for an Hour by James Skipp Borlase. Law's essay naturally incorporates discussion of those mysterious bestsellers of bygone days. There are few today who have read or even heard of Borlase and fellow writers such as David Pae or J. Monk Foster, but before they disappeared into oblivion, their novels entertained thousands of readers. The unified message of these essays is that local factors must be taken into account when writing the big history of the book. C. Y. Ferdinand, "Books in brief: Bibliography" Review in TLS (24 February 2006) |