This ground-breaking collection of essays presents a new 'bookish' literary history, which situates questions about books at the intersection of a range of debates about the role of authors and readers, the organization of knowledge, the vogue for collecting, and the impact of overlapping technologies of writing and shifting generic boundaries.

A new 'bookish' literary history that rethinks the culture of the book during the time when print became incorporated into everyday life

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Towards a Bookish Literary History; I.Ferris  & P.Keen PART ONE: RECONFIGURING LITERARY HISTORY Wild Bibliography: The Rise and Fall Book History in Nineteenth-Century Britain; J.Klancher 'Uncommon Animals': Making Virtue of Necessity in the Age of Authors; P.Keen Making Literary History in the Age of Steam; W.McKelvy PART TWO: BOOKS IN THE EVERYDAY Canons' Clockwork: Novels for Everyday Use; D.Lynch Book-Love and the Remaking of Literary Culture in the Romantic Periodical; I.Ferris The Art of Sharing: Reading in the Romantic Miscellany; A.Piper Getting the Reading Out of London Labor; L.Price PART THREE: REMAPPING THE LITERARY FIELD Reading Collections: The Literary Discourse of Eighteenth-Century Libraries; B.M.Benedict Imagining Hegel: Bookish Form and the Romantic Synopticon; M.Macovski 'The Society of Agreeable and Worthy Companions': Bookishness and Manuscript Culture after 1750; B.A.Schellenberg The Practice and Poetics of Curlism: Print, Obscenity, and the Merryland Pamphlets in the Career of Edmund Curll; T.Keymer Charlatanism and Resentment in London's Mid-Eighteenth Century Literary Marketplace; S.During Index