By Richard B. Sher

The overdue eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of highbrow task in Scotland by means of such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by way of those seminal thinkers made an important mark in the course of their time in virtually each box of well mannered literature and better studying all through Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial heritage, Richard B. Sher breaks new flooring for our realizing of the Enlightenment and the forgotten function of publishing in the course of that interval. The Enlightenment and the booklet seeks to therapy the typical misperception that such classics because the Wealth of countries and The lifetime of Samuel Johnson have been written by means of authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries of their occupation. on the contrary, Sher indicates how the method of bookmaking throughout the past due eighteenth-century concerned a deeply advanced partnership among authors and their publishers, one during which writers observed the ebook not just as pivotal within the dissemination in their rules, but in addition as the most important to their desires of repute and fiscal achieve. equally, Sher demonstrates that publishers have been considering the undertaking of bookmaking so one can improve human wisdom in addition to to acquire profits. The Enlightenment and the e-book explores this rigidity among creativity and trade that also exists in scholarly publishing at the present time. Lavishly illustrated and assuredly conceived, will probably be needs to studying for someone attracted to the heritage of the booklet or the construction and diffusion of Enlightenment idea.

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The goal is both to reveal the material foundations of the “general diffusion of knowledge” exalted in the preface to Guthrie’s Geography and to illustrate the complex, interactive manner in which American book culture was constructed. 66. Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” 11. 67. Chaplin, “Expansion and Exceptionalism,” 1439– 40. 68. ” 69. ” 555–76, esp. 566; Amory and Hall, Colonial Book. indb 24 10/12/06 11:20:14 AM Introduction • 25 Designs an d Disclaimers Copyright and Reading Having indicated what this book is meant to be, I now add a few words about two important topics on which it has relatively little to say: literary property regulations and the reception and reading of books.

41. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 1:7–10, quoting 9–10; Hunter, Rival Enlightenments; Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 260– 66. 42. Outram, Enlightenment, 2– 4. Cf. Goodman and Wellman, Enlightenment, 3. 43. Darnton, “Case for the Enlightenment,” 4. indb 14 10/12/06 11:20:11 AM Introduction • 15 the Enlightenment” means going back to basics by focusing on the “elitist, Voltairean, and incorrigibly Parisian” Enlightenment that consisted of “a self-conscious group of intellectuals”—exclusively male—who set out “to persuade, propagandize, and change the world” (5– 6).

25 These publications represent milestones in the respective book histories of England, Scotland, Ireland, and North America, but they should also be seen as steps toward a more comprehensive, international understanding of the field. With regard to subject matter, similarly, Enlightenment book history 23. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, 5. See also Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book; and Eisenstein, Printing Press. 24. ” 25. Gillespie and Hadfield, Irish Book in English; Suarez and Turner, Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol.

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