Suarez 2009

Suarez, Michael, SJ. “The Worldliness of Print” and “Mining the Archive: A Guide to Present and Future Book-Historical Research Resources” (The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 5, 1695–1830) (2009)

Worldliness of Print 1695-1830

• 1 nice quote from Tanselle: "there cannot be a history of ideas without a history of objects"
• "the fugitive testimonies of consumption"
• 1-2 Intervention: Observing that contemporary treatments of text are too often 'worldless', Edward Said diagnosed that a fundamental weakness of textual theory and practice in our time is that it has routinely 'isolated textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical sense that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work.' Yet no printer, no book, no reader, [2] no scholar is free from the conditions of material existence.
• 2 ...how the performances and institutions of publication, distribution and reception are imbedded in and informed by larger economic, social and political structures.
• he ties the "efflorescence of a comprehensive 'print culture'" to the development of the British nation (echoing Anderson 1983) but elsewhere (here?) he's at pains to emphasize the internationality of print
• 3-4 demographic growth and economic development in England 1695-1830 (cf. Cambridge History of Libraries for its effect on libraries)
• 8-9 literacy rates in England in the 1710s approx 45% for men and 25% for women (est. from signing names in marriage registers -- contested)
• 11 correlates literacy rates with population statistics to arrive at estimates of English "reading public" -- remarkable growth through the period, especially after 1760
• 14 developing transportation networks essential to distribution of books, newspapers, periodicals to the provinces well before trains (roads, bridges, wagons instead of pack-horses, rise in productivity)

and from the provinces/smaller cities to London and between themselves, too

• 16-17 development of the post office becomes a distribution network for newspapers and other printed matter through the franking system (sending postage free, which the Clerks of the Roads and MPs could do)
• 18-19 chapmen distributing printed material as well as small goods to and from London
• 20 rise of "bourgeois 'public sphere'" in C18 Britain (Habermas 1962) tied to role of coffee houses, "not only sites of reading and reception; they were also places of promotion, distribution, production and sale" (21)
  • 22 Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row, where the Brontes would later stay and which is represented in Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853), which Bonnell Thornton observed of in 1754, "When they say a good book they do not mean to praise the style or sentiment, but the quick and extensive sale of it. That book is best which sells most."
    • the cyclicality of this: it comes up again in Pendennis (Thackeray, 1850) and New Grub Street (Gissing, 1891)
  • 24 Book auctions also held at coffee houses from 1670s on, and the Roxburghe Club was founded at a coffee house in 1812
• 25ff how people paid for printed matter tied to development of currency and banking. Credit economy especially important for book trades
  • 32 the embeddedness of establishing book trade businesses to social networks: "Again and again, the social capital of 'connection to networks of association, obligation, and support' translated into economic capital" (with many examples on the preceding pages)
• 34 frequency of bankruptcy - the fall of Walter Scott along with printing houses of Archibald Constable and James Ballantyne in 1826 just the most famous example (and tied to the economics of credit)