This title was first published in 2002: This collection of essays looks at how the urban environment was fundamental to the development of printing, and how in turn, towns and cities used print culture to spread urban ideas and values to society at large.
This title was first published in 2002: Since the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century the production, distribution and consumption of printed matter have been the principal means through which new ideas and representations have been spread. In recent times cultural historians have taken a growing interest in the previously somewhat isolated field of book history, shifting the study of printing and publishing into the centre of historical concern. This study of print and printing culture has naturally led historians to a concern with its urban context. The urban environment was fundamental to the development of printing from the outset, since it was in towns that the necessary combination of technical and entrepreneurial competencies were located, and where a growing demand for printed texts was to be found. Print permeated the urban experience at every level, and formed the chief means by which its ideas, values and beliefs were exported to the rest of society. In this way print promoted the broader urbanisation of society, by spreading urban attitudes and ideas beyond the limits of the city.
Recenzijos
'Ashgate is rapidly becoming a major publisher in the field of book history... This collection of essays is as enjoyable as it is wide-ranging. The editors have done a good job in assembling this unique book... Printed matters deserves to be read - and enjoyed - widely, not least because it reminds us through some delightful case-studies, of the power of print as, primarily, a medium of urban culture.' Journal of the Printing Historical Society
Introduction, Malcolm Gee and Tim Kirk; Rouen and its printers from the
15th to the 19th century, Jean-Dominique Mellot; Lyons printers and
booksellers from the 15th to the 19th century, Dominique Varry; Gavarnis
Parisian population reproduced, David W.S. Gray; The literary dangers of the
city: policing 'immoral books' in Berlin, 1850-1880, Sarah L. Leonard;
Readers, browsers, strangers, spectators: narrative forms and metropolitan
encounters in 20th-century Berlin, Peter Fritzsche; Commercial spies and
cultural invaders: the French press, Pénétration Pacifique and xenophobic
nationalism in the shadow of war, Fae Brauer; Neutrality under threat:
freedom, use and abuse of the press in Switzerland, 1914-19, Debbie Lewer;
The cultured city: the art press in Berlin and Paris in the early 20th
century, Malcolm Gee; Text and image in the construction of an urban
readership: allied propaganda in France during the Second World War, Valerie
Holman; Structures of the typescript, Catherine Viollet
Malcolm Gee teaches Art History at the University of Northumbria. He has published widely on the history of the French art market in the early twentieth century. He is currently working on a study of artistic relations between France and Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic. Tim Kirk teaches history at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of Nazism and the Working Class in Austria (1996) and co-editor, with Dermot Cavanagh, of Subversion and Scurrility. Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present (2000).
