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The shape of words on a page followed conventions adopted without alteration from those of manuscript books. The study of the changes induced constitutes the morphology of the book, a phrase used by Henri-Jean Martin at a conference in 1977 to describe this process. The last decade of the eighteenth century and first of the nineteenth, a period of prosperity in time of war, were thus a high point in the appearance of books in Britain. It was also a period of great technological change, with the introduction of machine-made paper by the Fourdriniers, Lord Stanhope's iron press and first stereotype office, and finally the steam-powered press of Koenig and Bauer, of which Bensley and Richard Taylor were joint patentees. The increase in the number of newspaper and periodical titles in the last half of the century had been dramatic, and with it the demand for posters, playbills, forms and other jobbing work.
The study of the printed page as expressive form is a relatively recent development. This chapter provides a list of case studies, which demonstrates how the details of physical form, from whole book to individual page, resonate with larger social, intellectual and political issues. Some of the case studies described in the chapter include rhetoric of paratext in early printed books, typography of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the Polyglot Bible. All aspects of the text's physical form are capable of constituting meaning. The arrangement of illustration and text on the page has particularly engaged the attention of scholars of emblem books. The meaning of the early modern text inheres in its typographic expression, the layout of the page and the choice of type, which can be examined not only for its embodiment of textual structure and content but also for its embodiment of orality.
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