JOURNALS & Scholarly Organizations

SHARP: Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing: Established in 1992, SHARP is a global scholarly society dedicated to the appreciation, development, and challenges of the social roles of print and other forms of communication throughout history and into the future. Members’ interests range from manuscripts to ephemera to digital texts, probing how print can promote and exclude, how digital trends both expand and limit the voices that find their way into public awareness, and the role of manuscripts in textual transmission.
Book History journal
Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation
Scholarly Editing

History of the Book

• Amaranth Borsuk, The Book (MIT Press, 2018)
• Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992)
• Finkelstein, David and Alaistar McCleerey, eds. The Book History Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002. [good textbook/reader– what I use in a Grad class on Book History]
• Nicole Howard, The Book: The Life Story of a Technology (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005)
• Michelle Levy and Tim Mole The Broadview Introduction to Book History (2017)
• Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters (University of Toronto Press, 2012)
• Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton University Press, 1991)
• Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)
• Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Basic Books, 2019), How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton UP, 2012)

• KEY TEXTS OF BOOK HISTORY (that I cut from our syllabus)– in no order
• Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?”
• Mark Rose, “Literary Property Determined”
• John Brewer, “Authors, Publishers and Literary Culture”
• Roger Chartier, “Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader”
• Adrian Johns, “The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book”
• Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production”
• Roger Chartier, “The Practical Impact of Writing”
• Elizabeth Eisenstein, “Defining the Initial Shift”
• D.F. McKenzie, “The Sociology of a Text”
• Janice Radway, “A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, literary taste, and middle-class desire”
• Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?”           
• D.F. McKenzie, “The Book as an Expressive Form”
• Jerome McGann, “The Socialization of Texts”
• On the Page
• -Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters, Chapter 1: “Architectures of the Pages” (9-21),

• On Bookshelves:
• Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (Penguin, 1999)
• Jessica Pressman, “Fake Books and Fake News” (Los Angeles Review of Books blog, 2020)

• On Marginalia:
• H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale UP, 2002)
• —Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia(2005)
• On Race, Gender, and Paper/Print History:
• Joseph Rezek, “The Racialization of Print” in American Literary History, )Volume 32, Issue 3, Fall 2020, Pages 417–445)
• Jonathan Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020)
• Paper through Time database

• On Reading
• Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (2006)
  explores centuries of painted images of reading, arguing that they collectively constitute an overlooked genre in the history of art.
• Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (1993)
  Why was the topic of women and reading so controversial for the Victorians and Edwardians? What was it assumed that women read, and what advice was given about where, when, and how to read?
• Further Reading , Edited by Matthew Rubery and Leah Price (Oxford UP, 2020)

On E-Readers

• Johanna Drucker, “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space” (2003)
• Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)
• –“Out of Touch: Reading on a Kindle isn’t Reading” Slate (2011)
• Yung-Hsing Wu, “Kindling, Disappearing, Reading” in Digital Humanities Quarterly (2013)

On Media Studies

• Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media [on how books get remediated into digital spaces]: intro here as PDF
• N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), esp. the introduction “Making, Critique: A Media Framework” {PDF here}
• CHILDREN”S LIT BOOK HISTORY
• Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford UP, 2000)
• —-Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America (U Penn Press, 2016)
• POETRY AND BOOK HISTORY
• Mike Chasar, Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America ( Columbia UP, 2012)

Digital Book History Projects

• Women in Book History Bibliography: a hub where scholarship and resources on women’s writing and labor is made visible.
• Black Bibliography Project: aims to revive the practice of descriptive bibliography for African American literary studies.
• “Mapping the Stacks”: aims to identify and organize uncatalogued archival collections that chronicle Black Chicago between the 1930s and 1970s, in order to increase their use by researchers and the general public
• Paper Through Time
• On Digital Literary Culture
• Amateur Reviews

Kinohi Nishikawa, “Do it for the Vine: Literary Reviews and Online Amplification” Post 45 (2019)

Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, “The Goodreads ‘Classics’: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism” Post 45 (2021)

Bibliotherapy
Leah Price, “Prescribed Print: Bibliotherapy after Web 2.0″Post 45 (2019)

On Digital Media & Electronic Textuality

• N. Katherine Hayles on “Technotexts” in Writing Machines (2002)
• Friedrich Kittler: “There is no software” (1995)
• Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2000)
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to New Media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson (2014)

on Elit:

teaching elit: https://teach.eliterature.org/
Hayles, Electronic Literature: What is it? (2007)

and Elit archiving/ preservation
“Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers” (BBC 2025)

On Feminist Media Studies of the Digital and Elit

• Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
• WomenTechLit, ed. Maria Mencia (2017)
• My essay: “Circling Back: Electronic Literature and Material Feminism,” The Handbook of Contemporary Feminism, eds. Andrea Press and Tasha Oren (Routledge, 2019).
• My essay: “Contexts of Digital Literature Criticism: Feminist, Queer, Materialist” in Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, eds. Anne Karhio and Álvaro Seiça (Spring 2019) (online)