SHARP President Professor Leslie Howsam recently encouraged SHARPists to comment on her blog on Book History's Best Books. Now, the Open University, UK's regular Book History and Bibliography seminar, held at the Institute of English Studies, is hosting a seminar entitled 'Landmarks in Book History: The Future of the Discipline'.

The organiser of the series, Dr Shafquat Towheed of the Open University, reports on the first in the series, asking what book history and media history might learn from one another:

In a fascinating and wide-ranging talk given on 11 January 2012, Dr Karin Littau from the University of Essex suggested some of the ways in which book history could draw upon media history and vice versa. A comparative literature scholar with an interest in book history, critical theory, translation and film studies, Littau engaged Robert Darnton’s landmark essay, ‘First Steps towards the History of Reading’ (1986), in particular noting that over the last 25 years, Darnton’s championing of the material text had forced both reception studies and reader response criticism to engage with the history of reading. But how, Littau asked, might book history be studied in relation to the histories of other cultural modes and forms, with their own partially excavated material traces? How might book history and film history, for example, be studied comparatively?

Uncovering the parallel technological developments in production and the cultural shifts in consumption in other media (such as film and radio), Littau argued, can flesh out changes in the use and impact of books in a cross-media world. For example, did the rise of new media such as film and radio increase or decrease the speed of reading, or have an effect on what people read, and how often? Littau’s talk encouraged us to consider once again whether in the face of recorded sound and vision, reading accelerated in the first decades of the twentieth century. Glancing at the automatic reading experiments of Gertrude Stein and Leon Mendez Solomons, and the technologically enabled fantasy of Octave Uzanne and Albert Robida’s ‘La Fin des Livres’ (‘The End of Books’, 1894), Littau’s approach asked us to examine again the hidden byways in media history to freshly interrogate the history of the book and of reading practices. How might Robert Carlton Brown’s futurist manifesto of automated labour saving reading machines, The Readies (1930), for example, be used to examine anxieties about reading practices at the time of the rise of talking cinema?

Leslie Howsam, President of SHARP and University Professor, University of Windsor, Canada, writes:

What have been the most innovative monographs in the field of book history published in the past 20 years, since the foundation of SHARP in 1991?  The question arose a couple of months ago when I read, on Twitter, the feedback and controversy generated by History Today. Their editors celebrated the popular history magazine’s 30th anniversary by surveying readers and interviewing prominent historians about ‘the most important historian’ and ‘favourite works of history’ over the past 60 years.

SHARP had an anniversary of its own in 2011, and our society has even generated a list of potential ‘best books’, the record of winners of the SHARP De Long Book History Book Prize. But recent SHARP blog posts by Amadio Arboleda and Claire Squires show us that those awards were arrived at with difficulty, and some deserving works are bound to have been overlooked. Others will have emerged into prominence too late for the cycle of prize giving.

To start what I hope will be a vigorous discussion in the comments section below, I’ll put forward a book we discussed last semester in my own graduate class on the history of the book. I am a huge admirer of Isabel Hofmeyr’s The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (published in 2004 by Princeton University Press). It tells the story of the transnational circulation of John Bunyan’s 17th-century work, regarded by many as quintessentially English, but redefined in Hofmeyr’s hands as ineluctably African. She stresses translation, translatability and circulation, and her approach to some 80 translations is ‘guided by a method of keeping one’s eye on the book as a material object’.

That’s my vote for one of the most innovative monographs of the past two decades. What’s yours?

Katie Halsey is a lecturer in eighteenth-century literature at the University of Stirling. She mostly works on Jane Austen and the history of reading, and has been a SHARP member since 2005.

Of late, I have found myself wandering somewhat off the beaten track, both metaphorically and literally. Taking a turning off the well-trodden paths of mainstream Jane Austen studies, I became a historian of reading. And from there, I followed an enticing little scholarly pathway that led me to my current research project and a very real byroad – the B8062 between the small rural Perthshire towns of Auchterarder and Crieff, to be precise. The B8062 leads to the tiny library of Innerpeffray, Scotland’s oldest public lending library, established in 1680 by David Drummond, 3rd Lord Madertie. Books from the library were made available to the local community from at least 1747 (although this may have been as early as 1680) to 1968. Starting from Lord Madertie’s private collection of 400 books, the collection grew through the generations to encompass works of divinity and theology, law, science and natural history, geography and travel, domestic economy and conduct books, periodicals and journals, and, in later years, fiction. Borrowers came from a wide variety of social backgrounds, from local laird to shepherd and schoolchild. Initially housed in the loft of the chapel, a purpose-built library was opened in 1762, and the collection of books is still housed there today. In conjunction with the school, also set up by Lord Madertie, the library functioned as part of an important Scottish Enlightenment project described in Lord Madertie’s will as being “for the improvement and education of the population particularly the young students.” The library was also, and continues to be, a site for local, national and international visitors, with Visitors’ Books dating from 1859 to the present day, signed by some notable celebrities (Bing Crosby, George Bernard Shaw and J. M. Barrie are some of the names to be found in the Visitors’ Books).

This blog post comes to us from John B. Hench, winner of this year's DeLong Book History Book Prize. He writes:

I am grateful beyond words for having been awarded SHARP’s George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize.  It is a great honor, considering the strength of our field and the excellence of the previous awardees.  My astonishment and my pleasure were all the greater for learning about the rigor of the judging process, as described by Amadio Arboleda in an accompanying blog and by the presentation made at the Washington meeting of SHARP by panel member Marija Dalbello.  The panel’s work was incredibly difficult.  I salute their dedication and tenacity.

Like a fine piece of jazz, every book is both a collaboration and an improvisation.  If there is anything we have learned from the study of book history, it is to understand the roles that mediators and even meddlers of all kinds play in the process that turns a gleam in an author’s eye into a published book.  And anyone who has ever written a book knows that it is also a product of trial, error, and reconcepualization, that is, of improvisation.

I would never have written Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets had I not decided, about a dozen years ago, to begin to collect books, magazines, and newspapers published by private and governmental organizations to advance particular wartime agendas.  In doing so, I stood on the shoulders of my father, smitten for life by the “gentle madness” of book collecting, whose stateside service in the army medical corps left me with a lifelong interest in World War II. I already knew about most of the wartime publication series.  When I encountered one called Overseas Editions, which was entirely unknown to me, I realized immediately that this was something else entirely.  Rather than being produced for the education and entertainment of US troops overseas, these books were meant to reach European civilians as soon after their liberation from the Nazis as possible.  Produced by a partnership between the US government and American book publishers, the Overseas Editions were considered weapons in the war of ideas.  For the government, the books were crucial to a propaganda program to “disintoxicate” European civilians from years of Axis propaganda, and, as it quickly developed, to inoculate them also from the certain onslaught of Soviet propaganda.  For the American publishers, the books provided an all-expenses-paid avenue toward unprecedented market share for their wares overseas.

Our latest blog comes from DeLong Book History Book Prize juror, Professor Amadio Arboleda:

During the many years I worked as a publisher I thought the most difficult job was selecting a manuscript from many submissions for publication as a book. When I became a DeLong Book Prize juror the responsibilities seemed somewhat similar but I recognized a crucial difference. We were selecting from books that had already been vetted and published.

Last year, Claire Squires approached me, in a manner of speaking, by e-mail to ask if I would accept to fill an opening among the three jurors for the annual SHARP George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Book Prize. She explained that the task of the prize jury would entail reading an estimated 40 or so books, based on the number of entries submitted in the previous year, and deciding on the winning book in time for the annual SHARP conference (last year, Helsinki; this year, Washington). While I was both flattered and intimidated, I was also worried about the number of books to read. My immediate concern was how to effectively shuffle my schedule to squeeze this new task in with several pressing assignments my university had recently given me. Fortunately, my love-of-books seventh sense honed in on the prospect of reading lots of books on various topics and convinced me to send a positive reply to Claire, and so began my experience as a juror in 2010.