Making meaning
Subtitle: "Printers of the mind" and other essays
By: D.F. McKenzie ; edited by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez.
Contributors: McDonald, Peter D.; Suarez, Michael Felix.
Series: Studies in print culture and the history of the book
Publisher: University Of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Amherst
Language: eng
Number of pages: 286
Subjects: Bibliography, Critical -- Social aspects.; Transmission of texts -- Social aspects.; Criticism, Textual -- Social aspects.; Book industries and trade -- Social aspects -- Europe -- History.
Description: "The greatest bibliographer of our time," was how historian Robert Darnton described D. F. McKenzie. Yet until now many of McKenzie's major essays, scattered in specialist journals and inaccessible publications, have circulated mainly in tattered photocopies. This volume, edited by two of McKenzie's former students, brings together for the first time a wide range of his writings on bibliography, the book trade, and the "sociology of texts." Selected by the author himself before his sudden death in 1999, the essays range from the material transmission of Shakespeare's plays in the seventeenth century to the connections among oral, manuscript, and print cultures. Making Meaning reflects McKenzie's virtuosity as a traditional bibliographer and reveals how his thought-provoking scholarship made him a driving force in the genesis and development of the new interdisciplinary field of book history. His refusal to recognize the traditional boundary between bibliography and literary history re-energized the study of the social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of book production and reception. -- Book cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Part 1 BIBLIOGRAPHY; title: 1. Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices; title: 2. "Indenting the Stick" in the First Quarto of King Lear (1608); title: 3. Stretching a Point: Or, The Case of the Spaced-out Comps; title: Part 2 THE BOOK TRADE; title: 4. The London Book Trade in 1668; title: 5. The London Book Trade in 1644; title: 6. Trading Places? England 1689-France 1789; title: Part 3 THE SOCIOLOGY OF TEXTS; title: 7. "The Staple of News" and the Late Plays; title: 8. Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve; title: 9. Speech-Manuscript-Print; title: 10. "What's Past Is Prologue": The Bibliographical Society and History of the Book; title: I Our Textual Definition of the Future: The New English Imperialism?.