Scholarship on the role of precedents and precedential reasoning in law has tended to focus on questions concerning a commitment to stare decisis and the nature of analogy and justification. This chapter, by contrast, examines the use of rhetorical and formal techniques to convey an opinion’s precedential status. Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench from 1756 to 1788, used a range of such techniques to indicate that he was changing the law and to signal that a given decision should govern future cases. His law reporter, James Burrow, credited as the creator of the headnote, complemented these efforts through his use of typography and page layout. Burrow’s ideas about clearer, fuller, and more focused reporting of legal decisions probably owed a considerable amount to his long-standing involvement with the Royal Society, whose published Transactions exhibit a series of generic changes, anticipating in some respects those that Burrow would adopt.

The sociology of the text has been instrumental in the development of the discipline of book history, but it has also had (and is still having) an impact on genetic criticism. This chapter argues that a rapprochement between both disciplines can be mutually beneficial, exploring a sociology of writing. Joyce was well aware of the ‘human agency’ involved in his literary enterprises. He had a knack for finding all kinds of textual agents to help him produce his works. The increased attention to human agency beyond the myth of solitary authorship has had quite an impact on textual scholarship, including in Joyce studies. The chapter discusses how this development impacts on our study of the writing, reading, revising, editing, and archiving of Joyce’s works, as well as on the ways in which we present them in the digital age, enabling a next generation of Joyce scholars to examine not only the teleological development of Joyce’s works towards a published text but also the dysteleological dead ends, the ‘vestigial’ notes that did not make it into Joyce’s published texts yet played a discreet, but no less valuable, role in the creative ecology of Joyce’s writing practice.

The chapter explores the economics of translating Virgil, examining the role of patrons, printers, publishing houses and presses. I first explore the relationships of translators with their patrons, publishers and printers, in France, Italy and Britain during the first two centuries of the print era. I reveal the tension between the desire to satisfy the elite’s need for exclusive badges of culture and the impulse to extend the vernacularization of Virgil by producing accessible translations for less educated readers. I investigate the power relations involved in initiating or commissioning translations, with examples from Cinquecento Italy, and the funding of expensive folio editions in France and England. In Victorian England, translations published in low-priced series of books, including Everyman’s Library, flourish alongside ambitious luxury productions. The chapter concludes with a study of Virgil’s works in the Penguin Classics series in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This chapter is an introduction to the Enlightenment mock arts, set out in three historical hypotheses. First, early-modern writers became increasingly interested in the cognitive (rather than simply material) value in the work of skilled technicians. The mock-arts were models for the intuitions involved in skilled manufacture, related to certain ineffable components of literary production. Second, the literary framing for those investigations was invariably satirical (or oblique and critical in other ways). As specialists in literary wit, authors of mock arts put themselves forward as experts in curiosity, invention and communication. Third, writers became more subtle in their assumptions about the print trade and the suitability of books as tools that might contribute to the communication of personal knowledge. Since convention defined that sort of knowledge by the impossibility of pinning it down in books, this opened another field for irony and indirection.

This essay uses concepts drawn from the field of New Materialism, which posits that material objects possess forms of agency that shape human culture rather than just being passively acted upon, to move the history of the book beyond common assumptions that “the book” is a physically coherent and obviously identifiable entity. Looking closely at how the transportation infrastructure of the nineteenth-century print market determined and complicated American understandings of what a book was, it uses the legal and aesthetic debates triggered by evolving distinctions between bound and unbound texts to explore the historically malleable nature of “the book.” Concentrating particularly on the US postal system, which constantly struggled to define and regulate the printed matter passing through it during the nineteenth century as publishers sought to access cheaper circulation rates by presenting book-like material in periodical formats, this study of quasi-books ranges from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819–1820) through the “mammoth weeklies” of the 1840s to the “Library” series of the 1870s.

This chapter examines the production, circulation, and reception of books in the digital landscape, comprising a complicated entanglement between bricks-and-mortar bookstores and digital technologies that transforms every aspect of the way books are produced, published, distributed, and experienced. The history of the relationship between bookselling, reading devices, publishing and printing platforms, and the shape of the literary marketplace in the digital age reveals elements of the publishing circuit that are examined along with the increasing platformization of cultural production. The digital literary sphere affects authorship and the remuneration authors receive; the increased conflation between publishing and bookselling; the tension between e-books and print, and online versus bricks-and-mortar stores; and the relationship between fan fiction and literary consumption. The literary marketplace in the digital age is one marked by flux, but also the rise of new forms of access and new meaning for books and literature in the digital age.

This chapter positions digital editions within a broader and longer tradition of textual scholarship, book history, and scholarly editions. In it we consider the spatial, conceptual, and methodological approaches to editorial practice used in print editions and show the ways in which digital scholarly editions both extend and remake existing editorial paradigms and practices. In particular, we consider three elements of digital editions: networked structures, interactive reading, and multimodality. Throughout the chapter we consider both the potential and the ongoing challenges of making and using digital editions.

Goldsmith’s library is suggestive of his wide interests and of his status as a participant in the circulation of Enlightenment thought. His books were auctioned off after his death and they were advertised as a ‘Select Collection of Scarce, Curious and Valuable Books, in English, Latin, Greek, French, Italian and other Languages’. The chapter extrapolates the main trends within Goldsmith’s collection from the catalogue but also addresses the difficulties of drawing conclusions about the owner of a collection from an auction catalogue. The discernible referentiality of Goldsmith’s works provides, in many ways, a preferable index of his reading. The chapter also discusses the opportunities for reading books without owning them that Goldsmith, whose means were always limited, would have had as a student in Dublin, Edinburgh and Leiden and as a writer in London.

In its broadest sense, book history is concerned with all the media – electronic, printed, handwritten, oral – in which dictionaries have been preserved and circulated. Lexicography began at a particular point in the development of the book, and many topics in the global history of lexicography are book-historical topics. One of the most fundamental of these is the distinction, seen in western and non-western traditions alike, between dictionaries which are made to support ready reference, and dictionaries which are made to support slower, more thorough, study. Another is the distinction between the dictionary text as a single entity, and the body of lexicographical material as a repertoire from which different selections can be made on different occasions. Another is the dependence of the textual structure of the dictionary as we know it on the physical structure of the codex (as opposed to scrolls, clay or wooden tablets, and other media). These topics are of evident continuing relevance to the compilers, publishers, and users of dictionaries in electronic form.