The winner of the 2026 award and the highly commended titles are posted below. Watch this space for an announcement of the opening of the 2027 award applications.

Submissions

Each year, the annual SHARP Book History Book Prize recognizes the best book published on any aspect of the history or present conditions of authorship, reading, or publishing with a US$1,250 award to its author(s).

The prize honors the work of an individual or group of people working closely together to produce a full-length monograph, by which we generally mean a cohesive, sustained, scholarly study based on original research that makes a substantial contribution to the field, generally in the region of 70,000 words or more. 

All submissions must be in the English language and copyrighted in 2025. Translations of works into the English language are eligible and translations of works originally copyrighted earlier are eligible if translation is copyrighted in 2025. We do not currently accept edited collections, critical/scholarly editions, reference works, digital tools or datasets, or works that mainly consist of bibliographical apparatus, for this prize.

To nominate a title, email executiveassistant@sharpweb.org specifying the title(s) for nomination and requesting mailing addresses to mail 6 (non-returnable) copies of each title. Print copies are expected and preferred whenever possible. Please confirm with the SHARP Executive Assistant when you have mailed your titles.

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The 2026 Winner

We are delighted to announce the outcome of the 2026 SHARP Book History Book Prize:

Winner

The jury of the SHARP Book History Book Prize is delighted to announce The Politics of Common Reading: Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China, 1894–1954 by Joan Judge (University of Chicago Press, 2025) as the winner of this year’s award.

The Politics of Common Reading is a work of exceptional scope, archival ambition, and methodological invention. Judge recovers a vast, unofficial knowledge infrastructure of low-budget publishers, rustic bookstalls, and piecemeal distribution networks, and reconstructs from it a “politics of accommodation”, remaining attentive throughout to the material conditions of print, the social lives of texts, and the epistemological stakes of who counts as a knower. Working with over five hundred cheap how-to collections alongside government documents, archival materials, periodicals, and fiction, she situates everyday reading within the epistemic upheavals of a century of revolution.

The book’s insistence on readers as active consumers of these texts is of particular significance. Judge traces in granular detail how knowledge was sought out, adapted, and deployed in the face of everyday questions and crises—how to cure an opium addiction, avoid an electric shock, prevent a cholera infection, or graft a plant. Her method of devising composite reader-figures, assembling individual lives from scattered archival traces, is a historiographical innovation scholars will find generative well beyond China scholarship. Judge offers a compelling and thoroughly useful model for anyone working with large, fragmentary swathes of historical material.

In moving the unit of analysis from the state and the intellectual elite to the everyday reader, Judge offers a genuinely new perspective on modern Chinese history, one built from the ground up through the production, marketing, and reading of cheap print. The jury was struck by what the book accomplishes with its archive. Using the tools of book history, Judge arrives at fresh insight into the politics and society of revolutionary China, tracing not only the production and distribution of these texts but the responses of the readers who relied on them to navigate institutional failure and historical upheaval.

The jury congratulates Joan Judge for a brilliant and exemplary contribution to the field of book history.

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Highly Commended

• Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape (Princeton University Press) by William Stroebel takes its readers on a fascinating journey of textual recovery, of refugee and diasporic literature resulting from the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923. The texts and languages violently displaced from their geographical and cultural moorings have nevertheless survived in scraps and fragments and ultimately find  ‘refuge’ in Stroebel’s book. Stroebel is an inventive, self-reflective critic who looks for effaced narratives ‘in the cracks’ of history. Literature’s Refuge makes a remarkable intellectual contribution across languages and boundaries and exudes the sense of new work being done in new ways.
• Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics (Yale University Press) by Eike Exner offers a richly researched and engagingly written account of Japanese comics, tracing Japanese comics from the late 19th-century through to the contemporary, with an excellent sense of the global manifestations of this form. The formal evolution of manga remains largely untheorised, and its publishing infrastructure understudied. Exner’s book is a substantive corrective. Balancing cultural history with close attention to particular titles, Manga will become an indispensable resource for anyone working within comic studies, and an eye-opening introduction for those new to the field. 

2026 Finalists

• Matthew P. Brown, The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in Eighteenth-Century British America (Johns Hopkins University Press)
• Sarah Bull, Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press)
• Sara Kippur, New York Nouveau: How Postwar French Literature Became American (Stanford University Press)
• Anne Lawrence-Mathers, The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts (Yale University Press)
• Simone Murray, The Digital Future of English (Oxford University Press)
• Krista A. Milne, The Destruction of Medieval Manuscripts in England: Institutional Collections (Oxford University Press)
• Susan Pickford, Professional Translators in Nineteenth-Century France (Routledge)
• Thomas Sawyer, The Making and Meaning of a Medieval Manuscript: Interpreting MS Bodley 851 (Boydell & Brewer)
• Teresa C. Zackodnik, Great Thinkers and Doers: Networking Black Feminism in the Black Press, 1827–1927 (Johns Hopkins University Press)

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Previous awardees

2025

• Martin Paul Eve, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History (Stanford University Press, 2024)
• Highly Commended: Mark Lester, Deuteronomy and the Material Transmission of Tradition (Brill, 2024) and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024)

2025 Finalists

• James M. Brophy, Print Markets and Political Dissent in Central Europe: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800-1870, Oxford University Press.
• Beth Driscoll, What Readers Do: Aesthetic and Moral Practices of a Post-Digital Age, Bloomsbury Academic.
• Stephanie A. Leitch, Early Modern Print Media and the Art of Observation: Training the Literate Eye, Cambridge University Press.
• Aakriti Mandhwani, Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India, University of Massachusetts Press.
• Alexander Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of American Canon, Columbia University Press.
• Peter D. McDonald, The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-Making the Reader, Edinburgh University Press.
• Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature, 1762–1860, University of Massachusetts Press
• Bryan Sinche, Published by the Author: Self-Publication in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, University of North Carolina Press.
• Geoffrey Turnovsky, Reading Typographically: Immersed in Print in Early Modern France, Stanford University Press.
• Wayne A. Wiegand, In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries, University Press of Mississippi.

2024

• Sebouh David Aslanian, Early Modernity and Mobility: Port Cities and Printers across the Armenian Diaspora, 1512-1800 (Yale University Press, 2023)
• Highly Commended: Yael A. Sternhell, War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023) and Adrian Johns, The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (Chicago University Press, 2023)

2023

• Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (Harvard University Press, 2022) and Michelle R. Warren, Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford University Press, 2022)

2022

• Elizabeth McHenry, To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship (Duke University Press, 2021)
• Highly Commended: Margaret Meserve, Papal Bull: Print, Politics, and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)

2021

• Kathy Peiss, Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe (Oxford University Press, 2020)
• Highly Commended: Robert Goree, Printing Landmarks: Popular Geography and Meisho Zue in Late Tokugawa Japan (Harvard Asia Center, 2020)

2020

• Jeffrey T. Zalar, Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
• Highly Commended: Robert Culp, The Power of Print in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2019); Jennifer Richards, Voices and Books in the English Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2019); Fei-Hsien Wang, Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China (Princeton University Press, 2019)

2019

• Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (Yale University Press, 2018)
• Highly Commended: David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

2018

• Eric Marshall White, Editio Princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible (Brepols, 2017)
• Highly Commended: Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton University Press, 2016)

2017

• Eva Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• Highly Commended: Jonathan G Alexander, The Painted Book in Renaissance Italy, 1450–1650 (Yale University Press, 2016); Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

2016

• Kristina Lundblad, Bound to be Modern: Publishers’ Cloth Bindings and the Material Culture of the Book, 1840-1914 (Oak Knoll Press, 2015; translated by Alan Crozier)
• Highly Commended: Nick Hopwood, Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015); Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys and His Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660-1703 (Oxford University Press, 2015)

2015

• Daniel Wakelin, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375-1510 (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
• Highly Commended: Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press, 2014)

2014

• David McKitterick, Old Books, New Technologies. The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books since 1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
• Highly Commended: Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2013)

2013

• Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012)
• Highly Commended: Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Mary Franklin-Brown, Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

2012

• Barbara Hochman, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Reading Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011)

2011

• John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Cornell University Press, 2010)

2010

• Catherine J. Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (University Press of Florida, 2009)

2009

• Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008)

2008

• James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850 (Yale University Press, 2007)

2007

• Rimi B. Chatterjee, Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India During the Raj (Oxford University Press, 2006)

2006

• Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Freedom and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

2005

• Simone Murray, Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2004)

2004

• Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

2003

• Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Duke University Press, 2002)

2002

• Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale University Press, 2001)

2001

• Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2000)

2000

• Scott Caspar, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-century America (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)

1999

• Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

1998

• Marianna Shreve Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang: A Princely Manuscript from Sixteenth-Century Iran (Yale University Press, 1997)

1997

• Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s-1910s (Oxford University Press, 1996)