SINCE THE PUBLICATION of Donald McKenzie's landmark book, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts in 1986, there has been a growing realization by researchers and practitioners of the significance of bookish forms of communication—their wholeness, materiality, contexts of production, and multiple meanings through time and space. This new series, Book Cultures, offers short and focused scholarly contributions to the field of bibliographical, media, and manuscript studies. Our books propose new approaches to technologies of text that contribute significantly to contemporary debates: how can documents, manuscripts, printed books, and contemporary digital platforms and devices be regarded afresh? How can new perspectives on form, genre, multimodalities, and multirealities provide innovative interpretations of early, modern, and contemporary textual objects to reveal different ways of understanding and appreciating the surviving historical record and, where relevant, foreground its distinctively handmade qualities? Book Cultures opens conversations and highlights innovative and creative thinking about all forms of written and illustrated communication from any period and any global tradition. We invite all scholars to participate in this ongoing discussion.

In her thoughtful and innovative scholarship, Liz Fischer engages in deep study of three major case studies, all reference works—the Digital Index of Middle English Verse, the lending records of Sir Robert Cotton's library, and the catalogue of Carl H. Pforzheimer's books. Fischer shows, through network analysis and visualization, how the process of bibliographical and digital data and its exploration works. Concerned to emphasize the skilled, but often invisible, labour involved in producing academic work on book history, Fischer offers the network method as a means of referencing and highlighting this labour—labour that represents collaborative enterprise too often overlooked by the scholar who gains the credit for advancing new knowledge. This is a book for all those in the humanities to enjoy and reflect upon, and it will have notable and important resonances for professionals immersed in the fields of Digital Humanities and Book History writ large.