The Economics of Book Production

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-69
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 161-179
Author(s):  
Outi Paloposki

The article looks at book production and circulation from the point of view of translators, who, as purchasers and readers of foreign-language books, are an important mediating force in the selection of literature for translation. Taking the German publisher Tauchnitz's series ‘Collection of British Authors’ and its circulation in Finland in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a case in point, the article argues that the increased availability of English-language books facilitated the acquiring and honing of translators' language skills and gradually diminished the need for indirect translating. Book history and translation studies meet here in an examination of the role of the Collection in Finnish translators' work.


Author(s):  
Daniel Ngabalin ◽  
Eygner Gerald Talakua

Smoked fish processing business in Wab Village still used traditional methods (fumigation open) and are household enterprises (micro-scale enterprises) can be seen from the aspect of production and management aspects. Two aspects of this raise the priority issues faced by partners namely: how the fish correct fumigation techniques? What forms fumigation appropriate tool? How to manage capital and production business properly? How do I do the recording business activities in the notebook business correctly? And how to sell or market products correctly? Through methods of participatory rural appraisal, fisheries extension method, and the method pretest-posttest control group design, the implementation of community service activities carried out as a priority the settlement solution problem by doing: 1) Initial extension of community service activities; 2) Extension of heat curing, heat curing tool making appropriate, and the use of heat curing; 3) Counseling on capital management and production; 4) Extension of book production business records; and 5) Counseling about pricing, promotion, and strategy for dealing with the business of competition. So the outcome reached was contained fish products and marine worms (increasingly) the smoke as much as 25 / week; there are two tools used fumigation partners; there were five notebooks submitted to partners and capable of recording the three notebooks (book purchases, sales, and profit/loss); and 50 fish and marine worms (increasingly) smoke marketed in Wab Village.


This collection of twelve original essays by an international team of eminent scholars in the field of book history explores the many ways in which early modern books were subject to reworking, re-presentation, revision and reinterpretation. Their history is often the history of multiple, sometimes competing, agencies as their texts were re-packaged, redirected and transformed in ways that their original authors might hardly recognize. The essays discuss the processes of editing, revision, redaction, selection, abridgement, glossing, disputation, translation and posthumous publication that resulted in a textual elasticity and mobility that could dissolve distinctions between text and paratexts, textuality and intertextuality, manuscript and print, author and reader or editor, such that title and author’s name are no longer sufficient pointers to a book’s identity or contents. The essays are alive to the impact of commercial and technological aspects of book production and distribution (discussing, for example, the career of the pre-eminent bookseller John Nourse, the market appeal of abridgements, and the financial incentives to posthumous publication), but their interest is also in the many additional forms of agency that shaped texts and their meanings as books were repurposed to articulate, and respond to, a variety of cultural and individual needs. They engage with early modern religious, political, philosophical and scholarly trends and debates as they discuss a wide range of genres and kinds of publication (including fictional and non-fictional prose, verse miscellanies, abridgements, sermons, religious controversy) and of authors and booksellers (including Lucy Hutchinson, Richard Baxter, Thomas Burnet, Elizabeth Rowe, John Dryden, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lucy Hutchinson, Henry Maundrell, John Nourse; Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, John Tillotson, Isaac Watts and John Wesley).


The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography provides a comprehensive overview of the development of Latin scripts from Antiquity to the Early Modern period, of codicology, and of the cultural setting of the mediaeval manuscript. The opening section, on Latin Palaeography, treats a full range of Latin book hands, beginning with Square and Rustic Capitals and finishing with Humanistic minuscule. The Handbook is groundbreaking in giving extensive treatment to such scripts as Old Roman Cursive, New Roman Cursive, and Visigothic. Each article is written by a leading expert in the field and is copiously illustrated with figures and plates. Examples of each script with full transcription of selected plates are frequently provided for the benefit of newcomers to the field. The second section, on Codicology, contains essays on the design and physical make-up of the manuscript book, and it includes as well articles in newly-created disciplines, such as comparative codicology. The third and final section, Manuscript Setting, places the mediaeval manuscript within its cultural and intellectual setting, with extended essays on the mediaeval library, particular genres and types of manuscript production, the book trade in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and manuscript cataloguing. All articles are in English. The Handbook will be an indispensable guide to all those working in the various fields concerned with the literary and cultural dynamics of book production in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period.


Author(s):  
TRAVIS W. PROCTOR

In this article, I analyse how the Shepherd of Hermas constructs an ancient Christian reading culture through concurrent portrayals of Christian reading, copying and book production. I argue that, by portraying its protagonist Hermas as an idealised reader, scribe and auditor, the Shepherd constructs an early Christian reading culture that authenticates Hermas's role as prophet, activates the textual dissemination of the Shepherd and ritualises the practice of Christian auditory ‘reading’. The article closes with ‘Hermas the freedman’, which considers how Hermas's self-presentation as a formerly enslaved person may have connections to the Shepherd's centralisation of ancient reading cultures.


1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 34-37
Author(s):  
Melva J. Dwyer

Canadian publishing was inhibited from the beginning by Canada’s colonial origins and dependence on Great Britain and the USA. Few art books were published until quite recently; the relatively small, scattered population, the flooding of the market with British, American and (in Quebec) French books, and limited (at best) or non-existent sales outside Canada continue to be constraining factors. The necessity to include both English and French texts adds to the cost of book production in Canada. The publication of art books, and of exhibition catalogues, depends on the availability of government grants. Publications on the art of the North American Indian and Inuit peoples are an exception, attracting widespread interest and leading in some instances to co-publishing initiatives. In addition to the larger publishing houses, a number of small presses produce occasional art books, thanks to grants and in a few cases with the added benefit of sales abroad achieved through international networking. A government programme of support for Canadian publishing, launched in 1986, is continuing.


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