Writing Print Cultures Past: Literary Criticism and Book History

GAVIN, MICHAEL. "Writing Print Cultures Past: Literary Criticism and Book History," BoH, 15.1 (2012), 26-47.

In his Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction, G. Thomas Tanselle reviews the rise of the New Bibliography a century ago and the more recent move to history of the book studies and the sociology of texts. He concludes that "the artifacts carrying verbal texts constitute an enormous reservoir of information about the past, quite apart from the meanings of the words themselves; and those who are interested in learning about the past will persist in exploring every conceivable way of extracting that information." The frequently discrete investigations of the words and the printed artifacts that carry them, and the extent to which each approach relies on and contributes to the other, is the challenge addressed by Mr. Gavin in his essay examining the analogous, entangled historiographies...