Nové směry v dějinách knihy Série

This book addresses the gap between print and digital scholarly approaches by combining both praxis and theory in a case study of a new international collaborative digital project, the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP). MAPP is an international collaborative digital project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, that uses digital tools to showcase archival traces of twentieth-century publishing. The twenty-first century has witnessed, and is living through, some of the most dynamic changes ever experienced in the publishing industry, arguably altering our very understanding of what it means to read a book. This book brings to both general readers and scholarly researchers a new way of accessing, and thereby assessing, the historical meanings of change within the twentieth-century publication industry by building a resource which organises, interacts with, and uses historical information about book culture to narrate the continuities and discontinuities in reading and publishing over the last century.

This book presents the story of a unique collection of 140 manuscripts of ‘learned magic’ that was sold for a fantastic sum within the clandestine channels of the German book trade in the early eighteenth century. The book will interpret this collection from two angles – as an artefact of the early modern book market as well as the longue-durée tradition of Western learned magic –, thus taking a new stance towards scribal texts that are often regarded as eccentric, peripheral, or marginal. The study is structured by the apparent exceptionality, scarcity, and illegality of the collection, and provides chapters on clandestine activities in European book markets, questions of censorship regimes and efficiency, the use of manuscripts in an age of print, and the history of learned magic in early modern Europe. As the collection has survived till this day in Leipzig University Library, the book provides a critical edition of the 1710 selling catalogue, which includes a brief content analysis of all extant manuscripts. The study will be of interest to scholars and students from a variety of fields, such as early modern book history, the history of magic, cultural history, the sociology of religion, or the study of Western esotericism.

There has been a proliferation of literary festivals in recent decades, with more than 450 held annually in the UK and Australia alone. These festivals operate as tastemakers shaping cultural consumption; as educational and policy projects; as instantiations, representations, and celebrations of literary communities; and as cultural products in their own right. As such they strongly influence how literary culture is produced, circulates and is experienced by readers in the twenty-first century. This book explores how audiences engage with literary festivals, and analyses these festivals’ relationship to local and digital literary communities, to the creative industries focus of contemporary cultural policy, and to the broader literary field. The relationship between literary festivals and these configuring forces is illustrated with in-depth case studies of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Port Eliot Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Emerging Writers’ Festival, and the Clunes Booktown Festival. Building on interviews with audiences and staff, contextualised by a large-scale online survey of literary festival audiences from around the world, this book investigates these festivals’ social, cultural, commercial, and political operation. In doing so, this book critically orients scholarly investigation of literary festivals with respect to the complex and contested terrain of contemporary book culture.

Focusing on the intersection of book history and literary research, this work explores the reading experiences of a renowned writer through a three-part approach. It reconstructs the author's two decades of maritime and shore-based reading, linking it to his famous narrator Marlow's practices. The study delves into his connections with male friends and literate multilingual women, contextualized within Edwardian reading habits. Additionally, it examines fictional representations of reading, including genre trends and therapeutic uses, making it valuable for both Conrad scholars and reading historians.