Bokhistoria

Anyone who attempts to trace views of printing over the course of centuries has to confront one problem at the outset, namely, the transformation of printing processes themselves. A sixteenth-century commentator who referred to the art of artificial writing had in mind the wooden handpress and the inking of carefully aligned pieces of metal. By the nineteenth century, printing meant steam-driven rotary presses and linotype machines. Thereafter, the press was replaced by photographic processes, and 'hot type' was superseded by 'cold.' A literal-minded historian of technology might argue that, although sixteenth-century commentators and twentieth-century ones both refer to printing, they are in fact referring to entirely different things.... Fortunately, this argument need not detain us for long. The views to be discussed here seem to have been relatively unaffected by the several mutations printing and printers have undergone. Indeed, the persistence of similar reactions to similar problems is striking.

This volume brings together for the first time a wide range of his writings on bibliography, the book trade, and the "sociology of texts. The essays range from the material transmission of Shakespeare's plays in the seventeenth century to the connections among oral, manuscript, and print cultures. McKenzie's refusal to recognize the traditional boundary between bibliography and literary history re-energizedthe study of the social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of book production and reception.