The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
10 best books like The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Adrian Johns): Libraries in the Ancient World, The Smithsonian Book of Books, The Anatomy of Bibliomania, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, The Book in the Renaissance, Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Preface to Plato, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion
| Author | Lionel Casson |
| ISBN | 0300097212 |
This delightful book tells the story of ancient libraries from their very beginnings, when “books” were clay tablets and writing was a new phenomenon. Renowned classicist Lionel Casson takes us on a lively tour, from the royal libraries of the most ancient Near East, through the private and public...
The Smithsonian Book of Books
Through more than 300 glorious illustrations from library collections around the globe, you'll discover a wealth of book lore in these pages and gain a new appreciation for the role of books in human society, from our earliest attempts at writing and recording information to the newest electronic...
The Anatomy of Bibliomania
| Author | Holbrook Jackson |
| ISBN | 0252070437 |
An unmitigated delight for any bibliophile, Holbrook Jackson's musings on the joys of reading combine his irrepressible wit with the wisdom of famous readers from all corners of the world. These three volumes, now back in print, are a leisurely, luxuriant confabulation on "the usefulness, purpose,...
| Author | Christopher de Hamel |
| ISBN | 0714834521 |
Medieval manuscripts are counted among the greatest glories of Western civilization. With their gold and painted decoration and their charming miniatures, they have always had immense appeal, and images from them can be seen everywhere - from greeting cards and wrapping paper to expensive facsimiles....
The dawn of print was a major turning point in the early modern world. It rescued ancient learning from obscurity, transformed knowledge of the natural and physical world, and brought the thrill of book ownership to the masses. But, as Andrew Pettegree reveals in this work of great historical merit,...
| Author | Lawrence Goldstone |
| ISBN | 0767908376 |
Michael Servetus is one of those hidden figureheads of history who is remembered not for his name, but for the revolutionary deeds that stand in his place. Both a scientist and a freethinking theologian, Servetus is credited with the discovery of pulmonary circulation in the human body as well as the...
| Author | Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick |
| ISBN | 0231082738 |
This is one of the first books that opened the new theoretical school of queer theory. As such, it made a lot of people mad back in the day and it is still pissing people off today. Sedgwick claims that the patriarchy has been using women to get closer to men. This is where she loses many people. This is where...
| Author | Eric Alfred Havelock |
| ISBN | 0674699068 |
Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition...
The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas
| Author | Umberto Eco |
| ISBN | 0674006755 |
The well-known Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco discloses for the first time to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness, breadth, complexity, and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, heretofore known principally...
| Author | Caroline Walker Bynum |
| ISBN | 0942299620 |
These seven essays by noted historian Caroline Walker Bynum exemplify her argument that historians must write in a "comic" mode, aware of history's artifice, risks, and incompletion. Exploring a diverse array of medieval texts, the essays show how women were able to appropriate dominant social...
| Author | Lucien Febvre |
| ISBN | 1859841082 |
Books, & the printed word more generally, are aspects of modern life that are all too often taken for granted. Yet the emergence of the book was a process of immense historical importance & heralded the dawning of the epoch of modernity. In this much praised history of that process, Lucien Febvre...
The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
| Author | Robert Darnton |
| ISBN | 0674536576 |
Robert Darnton introduces us to the shadowy world of pirate publishers, garret scribblers, under-the-cloak book peddlers, smugglers, and police spies that composed the literary underground of the Enlightenment.
Here are the ambitious writers who crowded into Paris seeking fame and...
| Author | Nicholas A. Basbanes |
| ISBN | 0060580801 |
In A Splendor of Letters, Nicholas A. Basbanes continues the lively, richly anecdotal exploration of book people, places, and culture he began in 1995 with A Gentle Madness (a finalist that year for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and expanded in 2001 with Patience & Fortitude, a companion...
| Author | Steven Shapin |
| ISBN | 0691024324 |
". . . Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have ventured beyond ordinary history of science or history of ideas to produce a novel "exercise in the sociology of scientific knowledge.' . . . a historical study rich in new interpretations and notable for the use of sources of a kind not hitherto fully exploited...
| Author | John Carter |
| ISBN | 1584561122 |
Eighth edition, completely revised and re-set, with additional information and an Introduction by Nicolas Barker. Shaken, Unsophisticated, Harleian Style, Fingerprint, E-book, Dentelle. Can you define these terms? If not, this is the book for you! John Carter's ABC For Book Collectors has long...
| Author | Elizabeth L. Eisenstein |
| ISBN | 0521607744 |
What difference did printing make? Although the importance of the advent of printing for the Western world has long been recognized, it was Elizabeth Eisenstein in her monumental, two-volume work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, who provided the first full-scale treatment of the subject....
From Memory to Written Record: England 1066 - 1307
| Author | M.T. Clanchy |
| ISBN | 0631168575 |
The second edition of Michael Clanchy's widely-acclaimed study of the history of the written word in the Middle Ages is now, after a much lamented absence, republished in an entirely new and revised edition. The text of the original has been revised throughout to take account of the enormous amount...
| Author | Sven Birkerts |
| ISBN | 0865479577 |
A reissue of the book that first examined the future of reading and literature in the electronic age, now with a new introduction and Afterword
In our zeal to embrace the wonders of the electronic age, are we sacrificing our literary culture? Renowned critic Sven Birkerts believes the answer...
Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books
| Author | Jo Steffens |
| ISBN | 0300158939 |
What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture? Unpacking My Library provides an intimate look at the personal...
| Author | Anthony Grafton |
| ISBN | 0674307607 |
The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the bEte noire of the "new" liberated scholar: the lowly footnote, long the refuge of the minor and the marginal, emerges in this book as a singular resource, with a surprising history that says volumes about the evolution of modern scholarship....
| Author | Gérard Genette |
| ISBN | 0521424062 |
Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs, and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In Paratexts, an...
Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570
| Author | Eamon Duffy |
| ISBN | 0300117140 |
In this richly illustrated book, religious historian Eamon Duffy discusses the Book of Hours, unquestionably the most intimate and most widely used book of the later Middle Ages. He examines surviving copies of the personal prayer books which were used for private, domestic devotions, and in which...
| Author | Thomas Mann |
| ISBN | 0195189981 |
With all of the new developments in information storage and retrieval, researchers today need a clear and comprehensive overview of the full range of their options, both online and offline, for finding the best information quickly. In this third edition of The Oxford Guide to Library Research, Thomas...
