This chapter explores the reception of David Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain by linking computational methods of text reuse detection with more traditional approaches to the history of ideas. We find that many of Hume’s essays were frequently reprinted individually, in whole and in part, including in anthologies, grammars, style guides, and collections such as The Philosophical Dictionary, where editors often moulded for their readers what they took Hume’s message to be. As the century drew to a close, Hume’s essays were firmly integrated into the diverse landscape of eighteenth-century British literary culture. We reveal which essays underwent the most extensive reuse, carefully analysing them based on their respective collections and as individual titles. We find that, just because Hume ‘withdrew’ an essay from his collection, it did not necessarily mean it was withdrawn from the public eye. Several essays by Hume experienced evolving life cycles, and numerous authors incorporated his texts discreetly, some without explicitly acknowledging their use. Taking Hume’s essays as a whole, the range of topics and venues involved in the history of their eighteenth-century reuses is striking. Our story includes not only prominent political and economic thinkers, historians, philosophers, lawyers and clergy but also scores of hack writers, anonymous authors and a range of publishers, editors and compilers. The chapter demonstrates how a more comprehensive grasp of the reception of Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Britain accommodates all these facets.

Chapter 4 focuses on a selection of bestselling genres on the colonial book market in Peru by analysing them in terms of production modes, materiality, and potential users. It exposes how a focus on the colonial market must necessarily include the entire array of print publications and, in particular, the small printing jobs relating to local affairs that penetrated various spheres of urban life. While the many small-format reprints of prayer booklets prove that religion was a popular subject for books, an unpublished calendar enterprise serves as a case study to assess knowledge of religious and scientific nature in print. In line with hypotheses of a Catholic Enlightenment, the chapter turns from religion to practical knowledge with an analysis of manuals and how-to books, revealing a shared canon of reading material within the empire. Depending on local relatedness, titles of each of the genres originated either from local workshops or as imports.

The year 1559 saw two more ‘Jugge and Cawood’ editions in folio, each printed by five of the original team (Jugge, Cawood, Kingston, Rogers, and Payne). The first of these is known only from a single copy that lacks the preliminaries (discovered during the research for this book); six copies are known of the later of the two. For the most part the relationship between the reprints is clear and straightforward, although a few odd sheets ‘belonging’ to one edition are found in one or more copies of the other. Amid the predictable crop of errors in each reprint, a few readings show that attempts were made to correct errors that were evidently noticed. But the overall trend in accuracy is (predictably) downhill.

This chapter surveys how Irish titles singled out for reprinting by the British firm Penguin were presented in terms of the materiality of the book as an object, and particularly in the paratextual zones of their editions. It discusses how writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, Joyce Cary, Elizabeth Bowen and Seán O’Faoláin were reprinted, branded and circulated by the British firm Penguin, drawing on Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext as denoting the threshold area or gateway to the text, which comprises elements like cover art, blurbs, laudatory quotations reprinted on covers or endpapers, and editorial introductions. It then offers a case study of one major Irish writer, the novelist Kate O’Brien, and explores how her novels were packaged and marketed within the Penguin and wider reprints milieu. The conclusion juxtaposes the publication of Irish writing by a London-based mass-market concern like Penguin with the activities of the Dolmen Press in Ireland. This native Dublin-based publishing house was modest in comparison to major British commercial presses, but would nonetheless evolve into an important force in the construction of an Irish literary culture in this period in its conscious definition of itself in opposition to international mass-market entities like Penguin.