Things - 12 March 2014 - Reading Things

Professor Jim Secord (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge)Reading science in a utopian world of printDr Kristina Lundblad (Division of Book History, University of Lund, Sweden)Bound to be modern. Cloth bindings and literature as thing AbstractsProf Jim Secord.For a brief, utopian moment in the late 1820s and early 1830s, the reading of science appeared to offer a remedy for Britain's social, political and religious malaise. Conversation about science pervaded elite society, new institutions for practising and disseminating knowledge were founded, and hundreds of thousands of men and women paid a penny a week to gain access to chemistry, geology, astronomy and other sciences. Even the most esoteric aspects of advanced calculus would, it was believed, become accessible to all. These millennial hopes were based on a perception that the physical quality, price and availability of printed word was being transformed by machine production. Changes in the m