This chapter begins its discussion of Australian poetry in the decades immediately following World War II, post-Ern Malley hoax. It identifies the impulse in major poets of this time to establish a canon of Australian poetry that reinforced a strong sense of settler identity. The chapter reflects upon this expansionary period of Australian literary culture, as evidenced by the growth of Australian publishers, literary magazines, government support for the arts, professional networks, and forums for the discussion of poetry. It considers canon-building manoeuvres in light of a deep divide between conservative and left-wing viewpoints. The role of Douglas Stewart and Beatrice Davis, and Angus & Robertson’s Australian Poets Series, is detailed. The chapter also describes the expansion of Australian literary studies as underpinned by the growth of tertiary education. It discusses how a number of poets assumed elevated university positions, encouraging scholarly accounts and criticism of poetry. Lastly, the chapter concludes that the advent of Oodgeroo’s work presented a formidable challenge to this mid century envisioning of a national canon.

This chapter considers the role of periodicals, little magazines and literary clubs in fostering communities of Australian poets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It discusses the importance of such communities in encouraging debate, circulating new poetries and encouraging generative connections between poets. The chapter discusses periodicals such as The Bulletin as a hub for what came to be known as the Bush School of poetry, and Vision that became an instrument for the poetics of the Lindsay circle. Yet it also discusses other little magazines such as The Heart of the Rose, The Triad and Stream. It considers the proliferation of literary clubs, which began as bastions of male homosociality but also began to include women writers or were for women only. It also discusses how periodicals and little magazines drew attention to and encouraged experimentation with new forms and concepts such as Symbolism and Vitalism. The chapter also includes the significance of literary magazines, some of which were supported by or emerged out of universities.

This chapter considers the history of the introduction of printing presses in northern Nigeria and demonstrates how changes in technology facilitated change both within the world of manuscript culture and within roman script book culture in Hausa. Developments in the reproduction of one form of written expression, roman script, had a radical effect upon the other, ajami (Hausa written in the Arabic script). The move from letterpress to photo-offset printing opened up a new field of reproduction for handwritten ajami and Arabic language manuscripts. The chapter traces the establishment from 1910 of the earliest letterpress in northern Nigeria, a Christian mission press. The education department of the colonial government made use of the mission press until the establishment of the Gaskiya Corporation in Zaria, intended as a training and collaborative enterprise for the production of roman script Hausa literature, along with literature in other languages of northern Nigeria.

The two possibly most-sold and most-read ‘classics’ of the postcolonial canon, such as it may be, are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Both have achieved bestseller status, and have been reprinted in the thousands, in iconic editions in Everyman’s, OUP’s World’s Classics, and Heinemann’s African Writers Series, not to mention Penguin. Both works have become exemplary literary commodities, extracted from their complex initial contexts of production, launched into mass-market global circulation and transformed into packaged teaching texts (often within the framework of similarly commodified anthologies) within highly normed pedagogical systems. This article takes a third mass-market paperback novel, M. J. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1996), to make an argument about the ways in which postcolonial texts can also be read as anti-commodities, as auratic entities that resist commodification. As such, they give rise to affective networks within which commodities are constantly accruing social use values – thereby making them co-agents in processes of subversion and revivification.

Chapter 12 discusses the potential opportunities and challenges associated with disseminating the findings of corpus-based approaches to health communication, which also apply more generally to interdisciplinary research and collaborations between researchers and non-academic stakeholders. We include two case studies. The first case study involves work on patient feedback with members of the NHS who had provided a list of questions for us to work on. We discuss the importance of and challenges around building and maintaining relationships with members of this large, changing organisation, as well as outlining how we approached dissemination of findings, both in academic and non-academic senses, and the extent that we were able to carry out impact. The second case study considers our experiences of disseminating findings from a project on metaphors and cancer, focussing particularly on writing for a healthcare journal, dealing with the media, and going beyond corpus data to create a metaphor-based resource for communication about cancer.

While exploring how specialist medical publishers and regular practitioners worked together to publish and advertise medical works on sexual matters, Chapter 3, Publishing for Professional Advantage, shows that the boundaries between communicating knowledge, promoting expertise, and trading on medical eroticism were not just blurry in contexts of the pornography trade and irregular medical practice. They were also blurry in regular medicine. Works on reproduction and sexual health issued by medical publishers were often textually similar to those issued by pornographers and irregulars, worked up using similar techniques, advertised, and distributed to non-medical readers in similar ways, and, regular practitioners often argued, for similar purposes. The chapter explores how and why these overlaps aroused particular concern among groups that advocated radical reforms to the medical profession. Rather than seeking to discipline regular medical publishing, however, reformers initially took a different route: they launched campaigns aimed at stamping out irregular practitioners’ trade in sexual health manuals.

This introduction outlines how studying the book trade can help us better understand the circulation of medical knowledge about sex and reproduction during the Victorian period, and the development of busineses, institutions, and narratives that claimed authority over it. Weaving a historiographic overview with an overview of the book’s approach and argument, it turns readers’ attention to medical works’ status as more than texts, highlighting the fact that they are material objects that must be made, promoted, and distributed, and that these actions accrue meanings of their own. It then articulates the book’s focus on the activities of four differently identified groups of players – pornographers, radicals, regular practitioners, and irregular practitioners – who brought sexual knowledge into non-expert readers’ hands and, in various ways, became embroiled in debates about medical obscenity. The introduction then outlines how the book tracks these agents’ intersecting activities to open up an argument about how and why allegations of obscenity became a means of selling books, contesting authority, and consolidating emergent collective identities.

This chapter situates three Latinx literary organizations – CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets – in a trajectory of institution building dedicated to the support and development of Latinx poetry and poetics. Moving through organizational origins, concrete support strategies, founding members, and institutional alliances, the chapter maps out the practical as well as philosophical outcomes of developing Latinx poetry and poetics as a diverse, multiform set of voices. Coinciding with greater recognition of Latinx poets in terms of fellowship support, book prizes, and publication numbers, CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets, as well as organizations that have built alongside and with them, have decisively shaped twenty-first-century Latinx poetry and given it many possible routes for future development.

This chapter details the creation and management of the Nautical Almanac, one of the Board of Longitude’s most important concerns. Appointed Astronomer Royal and thus a Commissioner of Longitude in 1765, Nevil Maskelyne oversaw its publication and that of associated texts, directing the work of a group of mathematical computers overseen by comparers. Hierarchical organisation and increasing costs preoccupied much of the Board of Longitude’s subsequent affairs. Calculated up to a decade in advance, the Nautical Almanac became a symbol of the Board’s repute among foreign academies and observatories, although its accuracy was later subject to satire and criticism. After Maskelyne’s death, work seems to have suffered and its management was overhauled by the Longitude Act of 1818 that brought it under Thomas Young’s management. Controversy wracked the Board’s direction of the Nautical Almanac for the next decade. Its assignment from 1831 to the astronomer William Stratford as superintendent was a major element of the aftermath of the Board’s abolition.

Contemporary science depends heavily on peer review. Usually without compensation, experts evaluate the reliability and quality of work contributed by other scientists. The system of peer review now confronts serious challenges. The volume of scientific work that requires peer scrutiny has grown exponentially, placing pressure on reviewers’ availability. Academic publishing has been challenged by two trends. First, uncompensated peer reviewers are less willing to offer evaluations. The rate of declining invitations to review has dramatically increased. Second, commercial publishers charge authors exorbitant fees to publish their work. Younger authors, and those from less wealthy countries, can’t afford these charges. We offer several remedies to address these problems. These include reevaluating the relationships between universities or scholarly societies and for-profit publishing houses. An alternative system might return publishing to university libraries and scholarly societies. The system would be funded by the hundreds of millions of dollars that academia currently transfers to commercial enterprises.

Although a product of his time – the literary traditions of Pope, Addison, and Swift; the Toryism and churchmanship of the eighteenth century – Samuel Johnson also transcended it through his own gifts and forceful character. After a difficult early life, marked by melancholy, a troubled relationship with his family, and an early departure from Oxford University, Johnson began to find his way in the 1730s. He married Elizabeth Porter, moved to London, and began to make his mark through work at the Gentleman’s Magazine and works such as the Life of Savage. He achieved renown as an essayist and fame as the compiler of the Dictionary but also suffered from bereavement and continuing financial insecurity. After the award of a government pension in 1762, Johnson’s works have a more relaxed style, and his final major work, the Lives of the Poets, helped to establish this era as the Age of Johnson.

This chapter uses book history and digital humanities approaches to situate e-books’ liminal ‘book but not real book’ status in historic and contemporary contexts. The question of whether digital books deserve full status as ‘books’ – and equality with print – has dogged e-books since their inception. Readers are now negotiating e-book realness on their own terms. Addressing definitions of bookness and long-standing debates on digital materiality, the chapter progresses through aspects of legitimacy to analysis of qualitative data on whether, and why, readers consider e-books real. The complexity of readers’ conceptions of the realness of e-books demonstrates how strands of the metaphor of the book, the bookness of physical books, the realness of electronic texts, and the particularities of paratext and literary status for digital works interweave, setting the stage for subsequent chapters following the reader through stages of discovering, obtaining, reading, retaining, displaying, and (sometimes) loving a digital book.