This chapter introduces the fields in the digital humanities concerned with words, texts, and documents, from textual editing to topic modelling and corpus linguistics.

The introduction provides a general description of asylum periodicals and a brief introduction to the publishing and medical contexts within which they emerged. Then it discusses the place of asylum periodicals in the ongoing disputes over the social function of psychiatry and mental institutions. I challenge the suspicion with which historians and literary scholars have approached asylum periodicals due to their dual function of serving both patients and institutions. While scholars have perceived asylum periodicals as defined by censorship and, consequently, inauthenticity and unknowability, I argue that asylum periodicals’ positioning does not compromise their value as historical records but requires different approaches to their study, borrowed from book history and literary and periodical studies. A recognition of asylum periodicals and their producers as agents in wider literary networks enables further consideration of these publications and an acknowledgement of their potential to facilitate the generation of new insight about asylums, their inhabitants, and nineteenth-century print culture.

This chapter focusses on Curll’s relations with the civic affairs of London. It gives a brief survey of his admission to a guild and position as a liveryman of the Cordwainer’s Company, outside the powerful body of Stationers. Further, it outlines his behaviour over a number of years in City and national elections, from 1710 to 1734, noting his tendency to veer between votes for opposition parties and those for pro-ministerial candidates, depending on the political climate and his personal situation. His relations with Robert Walpole are sketched out. Comparisons are drawn between his actions and those of representative figures in the trade, especially those with whom Curll worked regularly. Where appropriate, the distinct voting patterns of Stationers and Cordwainers are noted. A conclusion summarises the changing political stance across the first four decades of the century, both of Curll himself and of members of the Stationers’ bloc.

Introduction. The Introduction sets out the aims of the book. No attempt has previously been made to investigate the detailed operations of any major figure as evidenced by his or her day-to-day practice. This is an effort to fill that gap by exploring the career of Edmund Curll, and to go beyond the mainly biographic treatment he has received so far. It describes how the succeeding pages seek to consider various aspects of Curll’s publications in the context of the London publishing industry as it then operated. An account is given of the content of various chapters, as this will be given in the abstracts below. Among topics briefly outlined are the range of Curll’s lists, his dealings with the law, his connections with contemporary authors (major and minor), with a review the most important scholarship on the condition of publishers in the eighteenth century.

This chapter describes ways in which Curll interacted with the book trade at large, and illustrates his methods as they relate to the common publishing practices then in operation. It is easier to spot the manner in which he differed from his colleagues than areas in which he resembled them. Under one crucial aspect, he never joined the mainstream: he was not a member of the Stationers’ Company, a fact whose implications underlie some of his publishing choices and his possible apprentices. In other respects, he went along with normal practices in the trade. Among other topics, attention is given to the scale of his output over time, pricing policies, his limited use of trade sales, his retail operations, some of his marketing strategies, and his legal problems, as compared with other booksellers. One section discusses his activities in co-publishing and his partnerships (longer or shorter) with figures such as Egbert Sanger, John Pemberton, and William Mears.

The Introduction explains the collection’s argument, structure, and its interventions in the field. We challenge the fetishization of firsts in early modern drama studies, first performances, and first editions and highlight problems with privileging “maiden” performances and print “inceptions” of Renaissance plays over their ghost-like “afterlives” on the stage and page. Engaging with recent work in theatre and book history and editorial studies, the Introduction explores the idea that plays are indelibly marked and transformed by their transhistorical movement through different cultural sites of production and reception. We argue, in short, that the social, political, and aesthetic meanings of Renaissance drama were shaped by processes of renewal.

Although book historians have tended to date the beginnings of an established market for printed plays to the mid 1590s, the first year of play publication, 1584, saw four plays printed, two of them in multiple editions. More plays were printed in this year than the rest of the decade combined; it would be another sixteen years before a play went into multiple editions in a single year. This chapter asks what this strange year tells us about plays as printed, reprinted, and revived commodities. The four plays discussed are John Lyly’s Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London, and George Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris. All four plays have things to say about reviving stories and performance, and three went on to be reprinted. Attending to them as a kind of corpus, this chapter investigates their place in the histories of revival, reprinting, and dramaturgy.

Law, with its seemingly endless paperwork, is almost overwhelmingly textual. From contracts to briefs to opinions to treatises, law lives in its texts. Simultaneously, law requires performances to produce authenticity and authority. Witness testimonies, pleadings, and trials all enact the law through participants’ bodies. There is no law without text. There is no law without performance. Legal texts and performances produce and reproduce each other: Legal texts record or script legal performances; legal performances generate or stage legal texts. Because law entwines text and performance, this chapter considers the law’s material textuality and its theatricality in tandem by probing how law brings performance to book. Drawing on theater studies and the history of dramatic texts, I offer methods for reading legal texts as scripts that precede or follow legal performances. Examples from Anglo-American law reveal that legal documents’ typographical conventions uncover law’s reliance on performance and its anxiety about deviating from textuality. More sophisticated legal attention to the relationship between text and performance would better serve law and, more importantly, justice.

The Epilogue reflects on the ways that nineteenth-century texts consistently acknowledge the post-lapsarian state of human existence. The literary works discussed in this book all, to some extent, either recreate the events of Milton’s epic in a world that is fallen or tell the story of what happens after the expulsion. Drawing on Christopher Ricks, the Epilogue identifies a single word – ‘error’ – as emblematic of Milton’s nineteenth-century legacy. ‘Error’ points to its post-lapsarian meanings even when used to describe Eden before the Fall. After opening with the 1790 disinterment of Milton’s corpse, the Epilogue turns to another disturbing anecdote to illustrate the complexity of Milton’s nineteenth-century reception: the history of a Victorian edition of Milton’s poetry, bound in tanned human skin. The skin in question belonged to George Cudmore, executed for murder in the 1830s. This instance of anthropodermic bibliopegy reveals that Milton’s works, while revered and respected by the Victorians – his body parts were treated as relics – were also open to disruption and reinterpretation.

This book begins by foregrounding that the material form of Kant’s 1785 essay could be analysed to critique the myth of proprietary authorship that presently prevails across copyright regimes. After reviewing four faces of Kant in authorship and copyright studies, I advance a medial rethinking of Kant by drawing on the intersecting traditions of book history, media theory and literary studies. In particular, Gérard Genette’s poetics informs my paratextual reading of Kant’s 1785 essay to uncover the historical and medial-material conditions of literary production.

This chapter explores the significance of a bookshop set up in Bloomsbury in 1919 by the writers David Garnett and Francis Birrell. Drawing upon archival material at the Bodleian, Oxford – including catalogues, order histories, correspondence, and financial documents – it deepens and nuances the emerging understanding of modernist bookshops as private enterprises that were also public spaces of intellectual, artistic, and cultural exchange. The first part outlines the bookshop’s links with its Bloomsbury customers and, most notably, the Hogarth Press. The second part then turns to the international custom base and professional networks to show how the bookshop, like the Hogarth Press, challenges narratives of the Bloomsbury group as an insular clique. In considering how friendship and business mixed, the chapter therefore demonstrates two key features of modernist bookshops set out by Huw Osborne in his edited volume The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop (2015), whereby they exist “on the threshold of commerce and culture,” and where they are “locally fixed in cities and towns and yet tied into transatlantic and global networks” that complicate the very division between the local and the global.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of books and printing in English, in four sections defined by time period. Each section briefly surveys the technological innovations of that period and discusses how the changing print industry influenced and reflected developments of English between 1476 and the present. After an introduction (7.1), Section 7.2 discusses the rise of print in England during the incunabula and early print period (1476–1640). Section 7.3 then follows the continued expansion of print across England and North America during the hand-press period (1641–c. 1800), and Section 7.4 considers the explosion of printed texts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final section culminates with an overview of the rise of digital reading platforms and a discussion of how the ongoing evolution of text technologies continues to influence the development of English today.