Geographies of the Book

Miles Ogborn, Queen Mary University of London, UK and Charles W.J. Withers, University of Edinburgh, UK

• Introduction: Book Geography, Book History; I: Geographies Of Production; 1: The Amusements of Posterity: Print Against Empire in Late Eighteenth-Century Bengal; 2: Steam and the Landscape of Knowledge: W. & R. Chambers in the 1830s-1850s; 3: Construing the Spaces of Print Culture: Book Historians' Visualization Preferences; II: Geographies Of Circulation; 4: ‘Per le Piaze & Sopra il Ponte': Reconstructing the Geography of Popular Print in Sixteenth-Century Venice; 5: The Counting-House Library: Creating Mercantile Knowledge in the Age of Sail; 6: Printing Posterity: Editing Varenius and the Construction of Geography's History; III: Geographies Of Reception; 7: Geography, Enlightenment and the Book: Authorship and Audience in Mungo Park's African Texts; 8: Books, Geography and Denmark's Colonial Undertaking in West Africa, 1790–1850; 9: Volney's Tableau, Medical Geography and Books on the Frontier; 10: Reading the Messy Reception of Influences of Geographic Environment (1911)

'Impressively wide-ranging over time and space yet thematically focused, this rich collection of essays ably demonstrates the crucial importance of geography for understanding the production, circulation, and reception of books. It also shows how the study of geographical writings by authors such as Mungo Park, Varenius and Volney can benefit from the insights and methodologies of book history.' Richard B. Sher, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA 'Writing, editing, printing, distributing, selling, buying, reading, reviewing, debating ... All of these practices and more enter into the constitution of the book, into what it is, what it does and why it matters. And all of these practices have inescapable and influential geographies, from "the local" to "the far-flung", as this superb volume so convincingly demonstrates. Bringing together a range of scholars from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, its collective force is to put "geographies of the book" decisively on to all future maps of cultural, political and intellectual history. It is a most substantial accomplishment, far beyond what most edited collections can achieve.' Chris Philo, University of Glasgow, UK 'Whatever debates take place on determining how important geographical factors are in the history of the book, they will owe much to this volume.' Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society