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Welcome to the new books network. Hello, happy new year. And welcome back to New Books and Intellectual History, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Alexandra Autolubed, a host of the channel.
And today I'm talking to Luisian Felier and Benedict Miyamoto, editors of the new volume, Forms, Formats and Circulation of Knowledge, British Printscapes, Innovations, 1688-1832, published by Brill in 2020. We always like to begin the show by asking our guests to just tell us a little bit about themselves and your research, and perhaps how this kind of personal and research background perhaps brought the volume about. Okay, well, I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Southern Newville in Paris. And I'm Luisian Felier, and I'm the Digital Resources Manager at the Royal Society, Centre for the History of Science.
The book is actually edited by me, an art market historian, and Luisian, a historian of ideas. And we suddenly realized that we overlapped on book history. That was quite a long time ago when we were fellow PhD candidates at Paris Digital University now, University of the Valley. And we were both working on the 18th century in the British Isles.
And we were part of the Adam Smith seminars, the Adam Smith seminars of Professor Robert Menken, to whom the book is dedicated actually. I was working on the trade of pictures in London, and looking at all the artists and the auctioneers in London, around the Royal Exchange, the Solhu Corffing Garden, Pommel. And Luisian was actually working on the trade of books and Quaker Prince sellers also in London. And so we realized we were pouring over the same maps for our dissertation.
And so we organized a joint talk on the mapping of London artifacts trade. And that's how our friendship began and took a very material turn. And then Luisian had the opportunity with the Centre for the Study of the Book, and the Botheon Library, to organize a conference while she was lecturing at the University of Oxford, following her PhD. So she set up the most amazing conference on forms and formats, experimenting with print in 2014.
And that's when she called me on board. It was a great conference because of this material attention. There were copies of the relevant works from the host libraries that the speaker chose. So those works were displayed with each paper coming from the Botheon Library, or Jesus College Fellows Library, the Oriel College Senior Library.
And so each paper ended up becoming an interactive object lesson between the curators, the librarians, and the historian in the audience. And it was an amazing time. We even got to try your hands at the different steps of the printing process on the antique Oxford University presses at the Story Museum. So that was a fantastic conference organized by Lissian.
And from it, actually the second subject of the book arose during that conference. Because we suddenly realized we were always ending up with the frictions between the circulation of knowledge and copyright. So I ended up organizing a second conference with Lissian at the Sovereign L'Well in 2016, and also with fellow organizers, Will Slaughter, Sarah Pika, and Emma Lianna Fris. And that's how the book came about.
And it's so fascinating how book history is often that meeting point between different fields of historians, which is perhaps something we might come back to later in the interview. But sorry, Lissian. Yeah, absolutely. I think the book really symbolizes the interdisciplinary nature of book history, but also of the department where Benedict and I did our doctoral studies, maybe to give you a little bit more context as to how we came to it.
The department at Paris D'Hour University is titled Ongler Fund Studies. And you can find this type of department across Europe really. And in some ways, they correspond to area studies because they cover cultural studies, literature, history. But rather than defining a geographical area, it focuses on language as the unifying theme.
And I think this context, this interdisciplinary context, is really shaped both our approach is really deeply. And as Benedict mentioned, the book is dedicated to my PhD supervisor, Professor Robert Menken. Who we study last in 2017. And I really think that the book is a continuation of the discussions that I was lucky enough to have with him as part of his doctoral supervision, where we discussed the material, the intellectual and the commercial forces that shaped knowledge.
To say maybe a little bit more about Benedict's research, doctoral research and my doctoral research, I looked at the circulation of ideas in the 17th century and early 18th century in Britain, Europe and the American colonies. My dissertation was an intellectual biography of the serial converts and mathematics in George Keith, of whom no one will have heard about, but he's a fascinating figure. And the questions that I looked at really concentrated around geographical and religious mobility. And I was looking at his very, very large book production from Scotland to the Dutch Republic, from Pennsylvania to England.
And I was interested in questions of how religious and scientific discourses were formatted to appeal to different audiences. So although I suppose my dissertation would primarily be related to the history of idea, book history was there at the core really from the beginning. And then as Benedict has already mentioned, I was lucky enough to delve closer and closer into the materiality of text through fellowship at the Bolian Center for the Study of the Book, and a wonderful, postdoctoral opportunity to join the digital project, Library Without Walls, at UCL Center for Editing Lives and Letters, which was then headed by Force of Nature, his own historian of science, Professor Lisa Jardine. And it is from there that I have joined the Royal Society to work primarily to digitize the philosophical transactions.
And I haven't left the Royal Society, but let me stop here so that I may tell you a little bit more about how she came to book history from studying the British art market. Yeah, I think that's a common thread we have is that we didn't start in book history, but we got attracted to book history, which I think happens a lot to PhD researchers when they get into libraries and they get immersed in the world of rare books. My dissertation was in art market studies. It examined how painting was perceived throughout the long 18th century in Great Britain.
So I was looking at the cultural value and the legitimacy of taste for painting. But I realized quite quickly that neither moral nor aesthetic values could account entirely for the value of painting at the time. Of course, it included a commercial component. And I started looking into how it was influenced by the art agents, the merchants, as well as the artists themselves.
So they were all busy redefining promoting their professions, starting auction houses, etc. And so I looked at how they were operating as middlemen to bring pictures and public together, how they influenced a large larger public relationship to art. And this was done especially and that's how I got interested also in the theory behind the book history, is it happened also because they promoted collecting on a small scale. They promoted things like chimney tees or small verdutas that are normally not looked at so much by art historians whose discipline is into aesthetics.
And so all this network put painting within the reach of a larger public and they redefined the pedagogical value of those paintings, but also the pleasure principles behind them. And those are actually questions, both centralist and empiricist, that also preoccupied a lot of the contributors to our books about forms and format. Thank you both. So helpful to see how you really got to the volume.
But could you perhaps tell us a little bit about what your motivations really were? What are some of the changes, what are some of the developments that we're seeing with forms, formats and the circulation of knowledge? Absolutely. Maybe before I let our Benedict reply on a more theoretical aspect of our motivations, just on a personal note, I'd like to say that we wanted to put together this book because the speakers at the two conferences at Benedict has already mentioned were just wonderful.
And so what we wanted was to share with as many people the enthusiasm that we had for this presentation. And I really, really do hope that readers are going to be able to enjoy each and every one of the chapters. I think we were both warned that editing a book is a long road. And I'd like to say that even after re-reading the chapters, I kept on being excited by each of the contributions.
And I really think that the quality of the interventions, the first thing that motivated us, but I'll let Benedict respond more on the academic motivation behind the book. Well, the theoretical question of the book of forms, formats and copyright, it wasn't just theoretical. I mean, it became vividly material in both of our trajectories, but because I mean, Louisiana moved to her Royal Society project. I took up fellowships in Red Book library, so we really became immersed in red books.
And of course, we wanted to honor the amazing contributions. But also, we realized that something had happened between the two conferences. We really wanted to dig deeper and to follow up on all the coherent threads running through the papers. Some of the papers actually happened to pair so well from one conference to the other.
For example, on geographical knowledge, there's a chapter by Isabel Alexander, and that response to a chapter by Katie Parker. And I think it's actually a great plus that you can't even tell which one was at which conference from the book. So there's really sort of a coherence that happened. Also, some of the contribution mined a very rich vein of primary source material that we really thought deserved to be better known.
Things like the mortality bills and the news reports on unfortunate accidents. That's the chapter from Craig Spence, or the amazing advertising prospectuses from David Duff's chapter, or the turnips in Jacqueline Raghwell's chapter. I have to say that also what made it easier. I mean, our motivation was very high, but what made it easier is the immediate supportive answer of ending Andrew Pettigree from the real series, the library of the written world, the hand press world.
And that was of course an added motivation and added help. It's been an absolute pleasure to work with a series that is not only very respectful of the text and the chapters, we sent them, but also that was very respectful of the paratext. I mean, we see on the end of the index that we created, for example, and we got the same here on the other end of the copy editing and the type setting. I mean, real is publication house that cares so much for book history, that it actually has its own font, which as a fact we were quite attracted by.
But we also thought it was meaningful to have a 17th century publishing institution for our book. We were quite just by that because we all started in 1683. So we quite like that. And it's so important, you know, this is as you say, this is such a process and to be part of a very kind of understanding, a very enthusiastic publishing house, I think, makes the experience so much higher for all involved.
And I just kind of want to point out here, it's very unfortunate that this is exclusively audio, but the book has, you know, really incredible images in it, which is something that for those interesting book is just the topic more generally, I think we'll find very, very intriguing and very satisfying because, you know, unlike many other volumes, you know, the focus on the visual and material element is also kind of mirrored in the images which are available. Now, I just want to kind of, before we kind of dig into the chapters more specifically, could you just give listeners a kind of broad outline of the scope of the book? Well, the volume revisits, I mean, it's not a new issue format, it's not a new issue, but it revisits this central issue in the history of the printed book, namely the relationship between format and meaning, how the choice of format and the physical shape of the book plays a role in determining what a book means and how it's received. What we really underline with the general scope of the book is that the choice is not so really the authors or the publishers, we see all through the chapters the works of printers, typographers, and also readers' response involved in the choice of format.
So the contributions weigh these choices also against many frameworks, the legal framework, the material limitations, and the economic reality of the printing trade. Also, what is important to underline is that it does so over a very broad knowledge terrain, very often in the questions of the relationship between format and meaning, you go through the literature journals, for example, the folios of forensic Wikipedia and the quartos for drama plays, but in the book, we range from geography to popular religions to book auctions, celebrity, literature, children's literature, disaster reporting, so we're hoping to actually have given a much larger printscape to this central issue. And just to pick up on that term, printscape, I was wondering, because it's such a wonderful title, the British printscape's innovations, could you also be elaborate on this term, printscape, which I'm pretty sure you must have coined in response to James Raven's bookscape, I'm assuming here, but what exactly makes up this early modern printscape and what are the advantages, do you think, of expanding this term to encompass the entirety of the world of print, or is it really even the entirety of the world of print, or is it kind of slightly more stratified? You're exactly right, I mean, but we've coined that term to follow up on the term bookscape, so that's the title of James Raven's 2014 tone, and it was first coined by him for his 2010 paninci lectures at the British Library, and it was such a useful term, it was immediately taken up, also for its capaciousness by all book historians, for example, by Robert Daunton in the case of the books as soon as 2010.
So we've inscribed the volume in this idea of the bookscape, this revisionist reinterpretation of Isabella Eisenstein, we think a useful genealogy of book history, following on from the likes of D.F. Mackenzie, Edwardian Jones, and also James Second, but by using printscape, we're hoping to extend it to encompass other printed formats, we hope it encompasses the variety of printed formats in our volume, and the chapters actually demanded it. If I make the list of all the things that can, that are in the chapters, most of them can barely be called books, things like slips, turn up books, prospectuses, funeral tickets, globals, with the term printscape, we encompass a wider mental mapping of knowledge, this mental mapping within which book publishing took place through the things like owning reading and making books and other print formats. I think what we were trying to do as well by extending the term was, as we mentioned in the introduction, was to deconstruct the importance given two books over other print formats.
The book is often so fetishised as a format, and we felt that this fetishization obscured the wealth of printed material, which is in circulation in a period. I think the idea of knowledge bound so tidily between two boards is very appealing, but in reality, early modern readers will have encountered knowledge in a variety of formats, and definitely a mess of papers. As James Raven, who contributes himself to the volume, establishes in chapter two, we are really really biased in our approach to the printscape by the very poor survival rates of those less worthy formats of single sheets, and the archives often have poor information about the other formats. When you look at a catalogue, it is quite difficult to find a prospectus.
It will not be catalogued as such individually, but beyond the question of whether something is bound or unbound, our printscape is also rich because it considers other paper productions, such as globes, games printed on papers, paper inserts, etc. And let's not forget that the printscape also didn't appear in isolation. It is complemented within the circulation of knowledge by oral and manuscript forms. So, yeah, we're extending the bookscape to the printscape, but there is this much to be said for just looking more widely at the circulation of knowledge through all of the different forms in which it occurred.
Well, let's maybe turn then to actually look at some of those forms now. And your joint introduction to the volume is entirely called the shape of knowledge. It's a lovely title. Could you tell us a little bit about some of these actual shapes that print was taking during the period, perhaps for those who are less familiar, either with book history or maybe perhaps the period or Britain in particular, and maybe tell us a bit about why it's really so important to consider prints format specifically when we're thinking about the early modern British printscape.
Yes, thank you for picking up on this point. I think this is really at the core of what we hope to be the book's message. Just to give listeners a bit of background, as Benite has already mentioned, these importance of shapes or form for print is not something new. So, eminent historian of the book, Rojo Chatea, already demonstrated in the 1990s that the forms taken by a text influenced their circulation and reception by different audiences.
So, for listeners who are not familiar with the topic, please do read Chatea's landmark forms and meanings, text performances and audiences from Codex to computer. It's just a wonderful volume if you want to know more on this. When we think of the shapes given to paper in the early modern British printscape, there are various variations between book formats. So, you have really, really small books designed to fit in the palm of your hand or in your pockets.
I think a smaller one I've encountered is called something like a sex-adjusting more quarto and it's a very minimal edition, but you also have extremely large luxurious volume editions. So, even if you just restrict yourself to looking at books, you have this really rich variety of formats. And it has to be said that shapes and sizes do matter in this instance because they come in cost and thereby dictate the size and the socioeconomics of the audiences that any text can reach. But there are fields of knowledge that I think also resist any standardized structure that the book can have.
So, for instance, scientific illustrations have to play with notions of scale and therefore they justify the fact that you may have a book of a certain size but you will need to insert foldouts, larger pieces of paper inserted within a volume. A great example of this is Robert Hook's Micrographia, the famous volume of microscopic observations where some of the plates, if you look at them physically, measure up to nearly twice the size of the page that they're attached to. But beyond the book, geographical knowledge, for instance, it needs to circulate through formats which are less regulated, less standardized, so obviously through maps, but early board games or globes. And I think this is really due to the nature of geography.
You need a variety of representations and printed formats to accommodate the discipline itself. So, all these considerations are, I think, crucial specifically for the period that we're looking at, specifically for the late 17th century and up until the 19th, because this is really the moment when the printed press has rich technological maturity. But it's also a time when you have new legislations are being passed, which will shape a fundamentally denotion of copyright. That being said, early modern Britain is certainly not the only important place or time to consider the shape of knowledge.
And I hope that our introduction bears a clear invitation for scholars who study, for instance, logographic languages. I really hope that it can contrast how knowledge circulated in their cultural context to what we've done for for Britain. Formats necessarily have to adapt to script, to practices, to legal and commercial factors. So, I think we really hope that this is also an invitation to consider something else in the British Brinscape.
I think it's fair to say that we really need a truly global history of print written by scholars of different academic and linguistic backgrounds. There's been a really good attempts to do this. But if you look at, for instance, the book entitled A Book of Global History, which was put together by Woodhouse and Saguaras, Britain have about 30 pages, I think if I remember correctly, while there's only 10 pages devoted to Sub-Saharan Africa. So, our book certainly continues this imbalance in the scholarship.
But at least we hope to have invited other scholars to take the flag forward to look at different places and different times as well. Absolutely. And I think you make that very, very clear in your introduction. But I think we also might pick up on this a little bit later in the interview.
But before we do something, just thinking about this idea of adaptability that you've brought up, one of the types of kind of print that you kind of really focus on in your introduction are Compendia. I was wondering if you could possibly give us some of the kind of rich examples that you kind of provide in your introduction. And really explain perhaps why these Compendia particularly tell us quite a lot about how knowledge was circulating in the period. I think we could do this by taking one of the extreme examples from a book.
One of the subtitles from our joint introduction is I quote, since the sizes of books could not all agree. And it's this question which comes from a very bizarre compendium that I was privileged to look at at the Vulture Shakespeare Library. It's Bartimakum titled Visis Le Belli, and it's 800-leaf copy bursting at the seams of a very, very tiny format with a nine centimeter spine. I don't know if it can make you feel the material feel of it just by description.
But it's basically a cut and paste selection of printed manuals. And it's literally just cut and paste because sometimes the text is cut right through mid-lesson and it's pasted on part of a map or a Cartesian diagram. And then it's all put together, which it doesn't really work in the end. It becomes an unusable compendium.
And it's author, this Cribble, there's a full word, boasting this book will save you the trouble and opinions of carrying and turning great many book packages. And so that's the idea of adapting so much that in the end, in some of the green cases, it becomes unusable. But to us, it's interesting because it's about the periods in science for making knowledge both exhaustive but also accessible. And I think it's important for us as book historians because it warns us against applying the fetishism that Riziano was talking about earlier in the interview.
The fetishism for the bound book, this bound book symbolizing knowledge harnessed and controlled, perfected in a way. And if we apply it onto the 18th century thirstful learning, we're forgetting a little bit of something. We're forgetting, for example, that the compiler of the Visas Nibeli, once he had bound all this cut and paste material, he couldn't actually resist adding a bit more. And so he sort of saw, he had it, another added manuscript sewn in after the volume was bound.
It's like a never-ending compilation. And I think just to build on this, you have the same sense of a never-ending quality of publication, even in formats that some people might think has been quite tidy, which are really at the core of the period. I'm thinking here, for instance, of periodical publications from broach sheets to scientific periodicals, such as the Royal Society's own philosophical transactions. You end up having the same idea that Benedict was just talking about, where you have just the constant arrival of news that means that you're required to keep on publishing, keep on adding.
There's a very large volume of essays, which was published in the same series in hours in 2016, edited by Joe Raymond and Noamoksem, which looks at the early modern news making and how news was gathered, edited, published, and circulated. But on volume, Craig Spence, for instance, considers how periodicals were adapted to certain subject matters. And one of the things that I thought was really interested is that he could show how women played a particular role in reporting of accidents and deaths. And so by considering other types of collections beyond Compendia, I think you get to see and reveal actors who are not too often neglected.
So looking at messy or more complicated type collections, I think, and less canonical formats is a good way to discover how people participated in this collecting effort. And you draw attention really to how this variety of formats was really required to basically ensure that knowledge was circulating at its most kind of efficient way during the period. And I was just wondering if you could perhaps tell us a little bit about some of the repercussions of this desire for efficiency for some of those new elements, such as copyright and contracts and the financial transactions which go on within the kind of print state? Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, copyright is essential to what we're looking at as well. The period is the time when we have the first act that proclaims to be a copyright act as a status of an. And at its core, it is saying that it's trying to encourage learning. This is what the act is supposed to do.
And that question of whether copyright was an encouragement to learning or whether it was a restriction is really at the core of the chapters by Geoffrey Hope, Isabelle Alexander and Rebecca Shofkartin. What we see is that the act created monopolistic property rights for booksellers and publishers. It gave them really extra weight in choosing formats. And these rights were then used to restrict the dissemination of knowledge rather than encourage it.
So the tensions were relieved inside the profession in practice. It was really a practical and constant moment of transactions where in fact some copying took place when you could change the format, when improvements on the text were made. So for instance, when you had different editions, when you had a change of formats, a compilation or a compendia being created, then the bookseller or the publisher would relinquish parts of their copyright. They would accept that a new product was being created and that they had to relinquish some of their rights.
And generally speaking, I think the printscape is built upon innovative forms of transactions. As James Raven's opening chapter reminds us, the books, as in the financial books of the printers, had to be filled with regular orders of small jobs to be profitable. You couldn't finance book printing without the printing of single sheets. And both Rebecca Shofkartin and then Isabelle Alexander's chapters, I think, established very convincingly the transactional origins of even copyright in Britain, generally speaking.
Well, let's move into the first section of the book, which is entitled Informing Professional Networks in being in brackets there. So it got in forming and forming professional networks. And this section includes contributions on jobbing printing in early modern London. So we've already mentioned James Raven.
There's a chapter on the books that are John Dunton on copyright issues in the station as company records and in geographical publications, and also the voxel of fray. Could you tell us then a little about the different types of printing networks that existed in the British printscape of this period and their role really in circulating knowledge. So this is going beyond, I suppose, the forms and formats themselves, but back then further to the networks behind them. Well, yes, and the first part of the book is indeed preoccupied with this ecosystem of trades and materials that we used in the printscape in London.
And it investigates this whole network. And it does so with interdisciplinary scholars, because we have book historians with James Raven, but also modern historians with the own Cornish legal scholars with Alexander and Joffkirten and literature professors, such as Jeffrey Houlkes. And there's been overwhelming attention paid to the publisher who sell the books in book history. But what this first part does is that all those chapters shown they relied on ancillary traits, from those who founded the types, to those who engraved the plates, to who bound the books.
So the printed paper was at the center of a huge amount of trade, a trade network. So in book history, a lot of attention has also been devoted to how the monopoly of the station is company shaped the network of the book trade. So to give a bit of feedback, the delivery company, which had the monopoly on book production from its royal charter, and the very name of copyright is derived from the act of entering a copy in the register book of the station's company. It's where that marks that a book set on its specific text.
So for sure, the company shaped the British printing network. But for instance, in our first part, Jeffrey Houlkes shows how even established bookseller such as John Dunton, scurted around the monopoly, tried to outpace the centralizing force. For example, he started selling the stock abroad or making auctions. So more generally, the attention to the company in book history, a little bit like institutional history generally, in the discipline of history, it sort of obscures the agency of the actors inside the trade.
This agency is not officially recognized. It's very hard to find the records of it. And the office part, we hope, shows that these networks, these trade networks, were continuously oiled by frictions and by practical accommodation that are not on record for the most part, and which are revealed specifically by the format. Because the format reveals this ongoing corporation.
And just as the material were fitted to the form in the printing press rooms, the actors also accommodated their trades. They cooperated. They made transactions. And I think that's how it's important to see, that this is how knowledge circulated.
And that's why you circulate it so fast, sometimes adulterated, but quite fast, despite this heavily centralized monopolistic machine at the top of it. Now, in your introduction, you also argue that the distribution of knowledge was a result not only of the intellectual impetus of authors, but also by material and negative and commercial factors. And as you've just made very clear, this kind of network that people were part of. But this latter dimension of commercial factors that I've mentioned really does come out quite strongly in the first section of the volume.
So I was wondering if you could explain perhaps some of the ways in which is kind of financial dimension bore quite direct effects on the distribution of knowledge in the period. Yes, we've really tried to underline the commercial ramifications of knowledge distribution and tried to go further than the classic differentiation between the book price and then the book cost. We actually hope that this first part of the book can help book historians to see more clearly the book as a risk. I mean, all publishers faced very high upfront costs.
They were faced with one of investments for the most time. And these were coupled with potentially very, very slow returns, if you think about subscription publishing, for example. So this liquidity predicament they were faced with heightened the importance for them to have on their schedule, to have on their books, things that were surefire calculable undertakings, things like sheet fractional printing, slips, blanforms, re-edition of tried and tested books, but in small deformats or abridgments or compendiums. These were risk-averse solutions.
And this first part shows that they were actually central to the printing community, at least to the printing community's survival or economic health. So these are the printing house practices. It can help us recover, have to do with your patronage structure and just general economic usages, such as the importance of cash flow, the importance of a steady turnover, like in dropping, for example, the reliance of a lot of the presses on things that could be called hot off the press, things that were easily compiled, easily consumed, for example, the four to ten leaves printed text of the box of the fray in the even-cornish chapter, or the innumerable disaster ballads in Craig's Men's chapter that also with titles like a true relation of the many sad and the medical accidents, and which are only two or three leaves. And I have to say that this was actually very important to us to to Reza and I.
And at the editing stage, we really took care to reinforce these commercial and financial causes and consequences. I think the index, the best out, the importance of these themes, the financing side of the business of books is one of the supermanes of the index. And if you go to it, we really hope you will listen as well. We have recurring subheadings under each professional entries.
For example, we've made entries for publishers, booksellers, MacMakers, typographers, and even authors, yes, but specifically for the printers entry, we have a lot of those financial and commercial subheadings, such as debt, bankruptcy, cost, capital invested and cash flow. We look into accounting, income, things like work rate for pressmen, labor and stock for MacMakers. And we've done the same thing also for the material side. We look at cost.
We have a subhead entry for quantity, for paper, for type. Also, we have reuse and importation. So those are really, we hope this is the structure of the chapters that you can find in this first part. And so the book then moves in the second part away from these networks to talking about what you call performing knowledge in print.
And this is the section where we're presented contributions on this sumptuous diversity of formats and techniques. So this ranges from globes, which you mentioned in newspapers, but there are also contributions about typography, about turn up books, which is absolutely magnificent, and things like prospectuses as well. I was wondering if for listeners you could explain perhaps what you actually mean by performing knowledge here and maybe outline a couple of ways in which different print forms were shaping or altering or enhancing actually the forms of knowledge that they disseminated. Yes, for sure.
The performative quality of print as a media is really crucial dimension for book historians. And I've already mentioned Roger Shout-Ez book earlier. But I think the second part of the volume considers how this performance takes place in in broadly two ways. First of all, it looks at how printed formats need to be performed to unleash the knowledge they contain.
In order for print to be an efficient mode of circulation of knowledge, it has to be an active response. I'm already thinking here of Lisa Jardine and Tony Grafton's and Landmark's Study for Action, how Gabriel Harvey read his Levy. At the very least printed material has to be read to perform a function, but ideally it has to be acted upon. But what our contributors look at are really the physical interaction.
So with print objects such as the tenor books that you've mentioned which are studied by Jacqueline Reed Walsh in her volumes or the globe studied by Catherine Parker or even the Valver, which is this paper instrument which illustrates the cover of our book. All those objects need to be interacted with in order for the knowledge itself to be revealed. The playful reading that is staged with the movable books in Jacqueline Reed Walsh's Study. What I find fascinating is that every time that the reader will interact with them, the story will be reinvented.
So just for listeners, just imagine that those are constructed with flaps and a reader will flip over various flaps and every time they will reveal a new imagery and a new text. So every time they're turning the flaps in turn, they will create a new narrative. And the narrative itself as Jacqueline Reed Walsh shows in the chapter is reshaped according to the political or religious context. And you have the same sort of illustrations that will be accompanied by different texts depending on when they're being published.
And if we think of globes with Catherine Parker's chapter, I think it is important to remember the three-dimensionality that print can take. And in her case, obviously, she's looking at globes. So some listeners might be interested in knowing why we think that a globe is a print instrument. Well, if you look at how the globes are being made, it is a printed sheet of paper that is cut out and then pasted over a support.
And Catherine Parker really shows beautifully how the globe becomes meaning maker in many ways. It acts as a social symbol, as a symbol of the colonial expansion of Britain, as well as the fragility of geographical knowledge, because it gets outdated very quickly. There's beautiful globes that are thrown in the middle of the country, a house in Britain. But yeah, so this first first dimension of performing knowledge is the fact that all those objects need to be interacted with to give meaning.
The second aspect I would say is that print itself serves as a stage. Craig spends demonstrating in his chapter how pamphlets and birdsides were formatted to sensationalize the news of accidental death. And the interesting thing is that you have a really wide variety of ways in which the sensationization, sorry, orca's. Sometimes they use statistical representation, sometimes they're using flameter in language, or attention grabbing imagery.
So different choices are being made to actually stage the knowledge in print. And to understand how those choices are made, you have to look at who makes it and who gathers it and who are the actors behind those choices. James Asher in his volume considers the very atomic level of the page. And he tracks some of the actors of the printscape that are very often considered as having no agency.
And that is the composites. So the people who are typesetting in the 18th century. And there, again, James Asher reveals that actually those composites were making active choices. And that the composition of a page was the result of technical decisions of intellectual choices, but also of commercial factor.
If you do not have a specific type in possession because it's too expensive, you will just use another one. And finally, the inclusion of advertising prospectuses within books, which is studied in our final chapters by David Duff, our key me, me, Zansen of the book to come, which stages a contract between the author and his intended readers. It's a print that promises more print. And just as Benite was saying earlier, we've built the index again here so that people can navigate through the volume by looking for specific print forms.
I've already mentioned how challenging it was to find minor formats in library and archives catalogs. And so we wanted to remedy this problem in our volumes. So we've included index entries such as pamphlets, which not only give you the reference of whether topic is discussed, but we've included specific titles for those pamphlets as well so that people can find different types of performed shapes. Well, on that promise of more print, I'd like to kind of come back to what Luzian you already brought up at the beginning of our interview.
And that's really the kind of cool that you put out there in the volume about where the field of book history and its interactions with intellectual is really going. And I'd like to think about the contribution of the volume to the field, which is significant. How do you really see the kind of transdisciplinary exploration of the British printscape that you have in forms of mr. relationship knowledge, shifting some of the perceptions of scholars working on early modern print culture.
And what do you really see as being the next steps for this line of inquiry? I mean, that might be your own kind of forthcoming projects, but also where you kind of see this going perhaps in a longer term trajectory. Well, we really hope it will reinforce perception of the level of playfulness that was happening in the printed world between the readers and the books and those who are producing the books and also the level of performance that was involved that Luzian just talked about. Basically, we hope that people concentrate a little bit more on how messy the whole business was.
But that's not, that's actually something that scholars of the history of the books are grappling with now. There's a general trend towards trying to recover the imaginative variety of the trade. Many excellent studies dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge in manuscript have already established this. And they've already established that print did not replace manuscript at the period we're looking at.
Instead, it opened new ways of quickly copying knowledge to sell it to as large a readership as possible, thereby opening a first information age. This meant that there were lots of choices to make, choices of titles structuring the layout, choices on the body of paper, the material reality of the book was very pliable to a range of imaginative variety. And I hope that this is going to become a real focus of book history. And it was dependent on the messy tensions, between the actors of the trade.
I think there's an increasing interest in the line of David McKittrick works on manuscript for how much readers were continuing to accept a measure of compromise. They were still keen to accommodate with this messiness. And I think that's, we hope that this is what the audience of the book, be they researcher in book history or scholars of the history of copyright or readers interested in the material circulation of knowledge. I hope that's what they take away first and foremost from the book.
And I'd say on my part that we'd also like to see a shift happening where book history is not only on discipline, but it's as an open method employed across subjects. In a very similar way that digital humanities are being discussed as either their own field of inquiry or as a set of tools that can be employed across the humanities, I feel that print studies can be a methodology that any textual scholar can employ convincingly. Be they are the market historian or historian of ideas in our case. But I think they would benefit just a wide variety of disciplines.
And as I mentioned earlier, we have this invitation in our introduction that the printscape is enlarged and also that the geographical areas of studies be enlarged, that we move on from looking at the European market in isolation and that we look much more widely at the global printscape. I think that's another of our wishes, I suppose. Well, on that note, and before I let you both go and enjoy your evening, I was wondering if you could just let us have a glimpse of what perhaps you're both currently working on. I'm continuing in that research around messiness, actually.
I'm looking at drawing manuals, which are very dirty books for the most of them because they've been used and deformed by pinholes, stains, paint stains, added copies, etc. So I'm looking at how knowledge was performed and how it actually deformed the book by use in the workshop, in the workplace. And I'm also looking at how all those manuals, be they drawing manuals or geometry manuals, military perspective manuals, how they were all used in a way that circulated knowledge in a very tight-knit community, much tighter than or cataloging in different disciplines helps us to see. I suppose I'm taking the other route away from messiness and towards a very high standardization, and looking at the current reformatting that is occurring.
In my current role at the Royal Society, I focus on the creation of digital resources, which means that what I'm doing is really trying to fit this messy early modern collections into the digital world. So the latest digital interactive version that we've released is our copy of Robert Hook's Micrographia, and I would invite everyone to discover it online. It's a free resource that you can find. But I'm also working on digitizing and transcribing a series of catalogs of the 18th century collections of objects and books of the Royal Society.
And what I hope that this does is provide academics with the tools to look at how the Royal Society collections evolve over time. And in relation to this, I'm working on a chapter at the moment which discusses early modern collections in the digital age. We should be publishing a volume on the collecting habits of early modern learning academies in 2021. So I suppose, yes, trying to fit the round pegs of early modernity into the various square halls of the digital age.
Well, on those very big question marks of messiness and playfulness, I will let you both go. Thank you so much, Louisiana Benedict for being on the podcast today. The fantastic wonderful volume that everyone should go and pick up a copy of is Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge, British Prince Scapes, Innovation, 1688-1832, published by Brill in 2020. Thank you both for being on the podcast today.
Thank you so much for having us. Thank you so much. And I think we couldn't dream of a more fitting title than New Book Networks to talk about this book. Absolutely.
Well, we'll have to find some new books to talk about then in the forthcoming years.