Overview

This volume brings together key documents covering technologies of production that affected the British publishing industry during a significant period of change. It focuses in particular on key source material related to industrialisation of print production, which saw major leaps forward as mechanised innovations increased the speed, efficiency and delivery of texts through the production process. The introduction of iron, steam and other forms of rotary power presses improved the output of the print room over the century. Alongside this came improvements in typesetting and associated tasks, with the adoption of linotype and monotype casting machines. Changes in available methods of reproducing illustrations such as the development of lithographic printing processes and, in the second half of the century, photographic processes such as half-tone and photogravure, enabled wider incorporation of illustrations into periodicals and books. Such technological changes also fed organisational changes within the print and publishing trade. National unions for the print trade were established in the middle of the century to adapt to new working conditions, and engaged in robust debates about technology and its effect in the workplace.

Full Product Details

9780367568405

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Professor David Finkelstein (BA, PhD, FEA, FRHistS, FRSA) is a cultural historian who has published over 90 books, essays and refereed journal articles in areas related to nineteenth-century cultural history, print culture and media history, several of which have won awards. His most recent work includes Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the 850 page edited Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Current projects include a co-edited volume on the colonial periodical press, as well as work on print workplaces in Edwardian visual culture. Dr Andrew Nash (MA, MSc, PhD) is Reader in Book History and Deputy Director of the Institute of English Studies in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study where he directs the MA in the History of the Book and the London Rare Books School. In addition to monographs on Victorian literature and Scottish literature, he has edited or co-edited many works in the field of book and publishing history including The Culture of Collected Editions (2003), Literary Cultures and the Material Book (2007), New Directions in the History of the Novel (2014) and, most recently, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 7: the Twentieth Century and Beyond (2019). He is part of a new Leverhulme-funded research project on the early history of the Society of Authors (2020-24).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available