I’ve had a long-held interest in Penguin’s infamous Penguincubator, and bookshops more generally, and saw an opportunity to combine both for a couple of conference papers this year. And then – on the 24th March, my inbox and social media feeds started to light up. A new Penguin books vending machine had been installed at Exeter railway station, and people were extremely excited. And I mean, extremely excited. Suddenly, I was trying to process all the pictures being posted, comments logged, and articles written: I wanted to use the research to highlight some of the challenges of pursuing bookselling histories, but I hadn’t anticipated this would become such a timely tie-in with what Penguin were doing.
Tag: publishing
G. Thomas Tanselle, Descriptive Bibliography.
Descriptive Bibliography embodies G. Thomas Tanselle’s lifelong dedication and significant, enviable contributions to the discipline; and its content amounts to a cornucopia of bibliographical delights for those seeking to learn, reinforce or revisit what descriptive bibliography is and its “role as history and biography” (page 28), such as from aspiring higher-degree students, early- to mid-career scholars, to researchers from adjacent disciplines, such as library cataloguing, whose work exists tangentially to, or intermixes with, that of bibliographers. The book’s objective to “offer a comprehensive guide to descriptive bibliography” (page ix), though limited to printed books, is without doubt (and, given the author, predictably) achieved.
Georgina Colby, Kaja Marczewska, and Leigh Wilson, eds. The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible.
Publishing industry news has been rife recently with announcements of mergers and acquisitions instigated by The Big Five publishing companies. As such, industry and arts news outlets are giving attention to the legalities surrounding some of these deals, including articles in Quill and Quire and Publishers Weekly. With multinational conglomerates continuing to increase the gap between themselves and independent publishers—both small and mid-size—it is important to pay tribute to and appreciate the work that smaller independent publishers do for their communities of authors and readers. This multi-authored collection about small presses does just that.
Troy J. Bassett. The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel.
From its obscure beginnings as “one publisher’s calculated gamble” in 1821 to its becoming the format most favored by women authors (96), the Victorian three-volume novel was central to how books were written, marketed, and consumed from the 1840s until the end of the century. The first study to provide a comprehensive examination of the form “as a literary and economic product” (12), Bassett’s rich history takes us from its inception to demise through scrutiny of the organizations that published, circulated, and, ultimately, rejected it. Beyond giving a general economic and cultural history of the format, the book addresses gaps in previous scholarship relating to the form’s financial viability, its longevity, and the complex reasons behind its decline in the 1890s.
Harrington-Lueker, Donna. Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading.
While we may sometimes remember particular “beach reads” and other vacation reading we bring with us, most of the light reading that dominates the myriad summer reading lists isn’t meant to last. Donna Harrington-Lueker has traced the origins of the phenomenon of summer reading in the late-nineteenth-century United States, highlighting the role of ephemerality and entertainment as publishers and reviewers developed the concept of “summer reading,” as well as how tenacious many of the practices of summer reading are, from reading in public spaces to stockpiling books in convenient corners of a hotel room or guest house.