In recent years, the growth of ‘history of the book’ as a major, multi-disciplinary area of investigation has energised traditional disciplines such as history and literary studies. Researchers in this area look at literature as embodied in its technological products–mainly those of the print industry, but also manuscripts, engravings, and electronic texts. Book history studies the personnel associated with the making of books: authors, printers, publishers, illustrators, booksellers, and of course readers. In so doing it restores a measure of historicism and objectivity to literary studies, by insisting on a rigorous engagement with the records and what they tells as about the modes of production, transmission and distribution of books. Despite being a country with a long and complex book culture, India does not have a developed tradition of book history, Print Areas is a pioneering attempt to write such a history. It brings together the work of leading contemporary academics in relation to the book in India. Essayists look at some major publishing houses; the first edition of a book of nonsense verse; Benares as a centre of publishing; the role of print in shaping Maharashtra’s politics; and the cultural impact of popular books in Bengal. These essays will interest not just the historian and literary scholar but also those interested in questions of tradition and modernity in colonial and postcolonial India.
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