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83 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 1 of 5

The People of Print

The People of Print
  • Eighteenth-Century England
  • Adam James Smith, Rachel Stenner, Kaley Kramer, Helen Williams, Jacob Baxter, Kate Ozment, Sarah Griffin, Lisa Maruca, Barbara Crosbie, Dominic Bridge, John Hinks
  • Published online:
    20 September 2025
    Print publication:
    16 October 2025
  • This collection profiles understudied figures in the book and print trades of the eighteenth century. With an explicit focus on intervening in the critical history of the trades, this volume profiles seven women and three men, emphasising the broad range of material, cultural, and ideological work these people undertook. It offers a biographical introduction to each figure, placing them in their social, professional, and institutional settings. The collection considers varied print trade roles including that of the printer, publisher, business-owner, and bookseller, as well as several specific trade networks and numerous textual forms. The biographies draw on extensive new archival research, with details of key sources for further study on each figure. Chronologically organised, this Element offers a primer both on individual figures and on the tribulations and innovations of the print trade in the century of national and print expansion.
The Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore in Contemporary India

The Brick-and-Mortar Bookstore in Contemporary India
  • Nayantara Srinivasan
  • Published online:
    17 September 2025
    Print publication:
    02 October 2025
  • This Element explores the landscape of anglophone trade bookselling in India, aiming to identify some key factors that have influenced the changing place of the brick-and-mortar bookstore over the last decade. The discussion focuses on a specific time period identified as a significant turning point, the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic led to a series of developments in the field of Indian publishing: a newly emerging body of public discourse within the industry, highlighting the persistent marginalisation faced by brick-and-mortar bookstores; the temporary weakening of Amazon's near-monopoly; and bookstores' growing use of online platforms for sales, publicity, and activism. Drawing upon a range of primary sources and case studies, this Element explores how these developments altered what John B. Thompson calls 'the logic of the field' of contemporary Indian bookselling, transforming the brick-and-mortar bookstore into a newly revitalised space with possibilities for further expansion, growth, and diversity.
Pamphleteering

Pamphleteering
  • Polemic, Print, and the Infrastructure of Political Agency
  • Pierre-Héli Monot
  • Published online:
    05 September 2025
    Print publication:
    02 October 2025
    • Element
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  • The 'Pamphlet Wars' of the seventeenth century, the activist texts of the Labour Movement, and the recent campaigns for climate justice have all drawn on the affordances of pamphleteering to advance their cause: pamphlets circulate across geographical boundaries and social divides, they attract a readership that is usually excluded from the classical public sphere, they can be produced at low cost, and they often provide anonymity to their authors. This Element provides a brief history of short-form polemical literature from the Reformation to the present. It argues that popular dissent and popular political agency must be understood in light of the material and, more recently, digital history of polemical literature. It makes the case that current online polemic is best understood as a late infrastructural transformation of classical and modern pamphleteering. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Inclusive Publishing and the Quest for Reading Equity

Inclusive Publishing and the Quest for Reading Equity
  • Agata Mrva-Montoya
  • Published online:
    25 July 2025
    Print publication:
    21 August 2025
  • Despite unprecedented opportunities to publish content in accessible formats, most books remain inaccessible to people with print disability. Technological advances and new legal frameworks are creating a transition toward inclusive publishing practices, but systemic barriers continue to limit equitable access to books for millions of individuals worldwide. Scholarship has also moved slowly, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of the strategic, technological and ethical dimensions of inclusive publishing. This Element offers the first holistic examination of this landscape, and argues for the need to move away from ad hoc remediation of books towards the commercial production of 'born-accessible' content. Through policy research, industry case studies, and strategic partnership mapping, it critically examines the rationale, implementation, and potential of inclusive publishing. By articulating both business imperatives and social responsibilities, it proposes a transformative framework for understanding accessibility that offer valuable insights for researchers, industry professionals, and advocacy groups.
Art Books for the People

Art Books for the People
  • The Origins of The Penguin Modern Painters
  • David Trigg
  • Published online:
    22 July 2025
    Print publication:
    21 August 2025
  • The Penguin Modern Painters (1944–1959) was a groundbreaking series of British art monographs designed to promote the work of contemporary artists to a general readership. In examining the factors that influenced the wartime conception and development of the series, this Element makes a contribution to the understanding of the relationship between publishing and the visual arts during the Second World War. The study argues that the emergence of The Penguin Modern Painters was inextricably linked to the aims of British wartime cultural policy and the ideology of the pre-war adult education movement. The key personalities involved are identified and their multiple and often conflicting motives analysed to provide new insights into the shifting perspectives of Britain's elites regarding the way that art was presented to the public in the 1940s. This Element provides a foundation on which further study of twentieth-century art publishing in Britain might be developed.
Scholarly Editing in Perspective

Scholarly Editing in Perspective
  • Wim Van Mierlo
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • Scholarly Editing in Perspective offers a critical reflection on the theory and methods of textual editing, as a contribution to a wider, comparative understanding of editorial practice. The analysis, written in a cogent, concise and accessible manner, offers an insight into the textual-philosophical principles and foundations of scholarly editing from the beginning of the twentieth century to the new opportunities offered by digital technologies in the twenty-first. Scholarly editing is presented as a process that makes an intervention in the text whereby the editor mediates between competing versions of textuality, authorship, and authority. In analysing the assumptions, beliefs, and critical underpinnings of scholarly editing, this Element provides a new perspective on the standard editorial models within the English tradition, how they have evolved, and how they are adapted for the digital age.
The Form and Theory of Literary Doodling

The Form and Theory of Literary Doodling
  • Jeremiah R. Mercurio, Daniel Gabelman
  • Published online:
    18 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • This Element investigates the phenomenon of literary doodling—the making of playful verbal and visual creations by professional authors while engaged in another activity. The first part focuses on defining the form and structure of doodles, comparing and contrasting them with adjacent genres such as sketches, caricatures, and illustrations. The second part explores the modality of doodling, examining doodles through the lenses of spectrality, liminality, and play. Drawing on a wide range of theories and backed up with numerous close readings, the Element argues that doodles, despite their apparent triviality, provide valuable insights into the creative processes, authorial habits, and finished works of literary doodlers. Ultimately, this study aims to legitimise doodles as worthy of serious critical attention, demonstrating how they trouble the meaning of texts, introduce semantic flexibility into literary works and their reception, and rejuvenate the joy of readerly discovery.
Transnational Crusoe, Illustration and Reading History, 1719–1722

Transnational Crusoe, Illustration and Reading History, 1719–1722
  • Sandro Jung
  • Published online:
    14 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025
    • Element
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  • Bringing illustration studies, the history of reading and transnational book history together, the Element offers an original micro-history of illustrated editions and iconic interpretations of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Unlike earlier accounts, it takes into account not only the copyright holder's editions but also studies Continental visualizations alongside a lower-end London abridgment issued by Edward Midwinter and illustrated by twenty-nine woodcuts. The Element covers the period from 1719 (the year of the work's first publication by William Taylor) to 1722 (the year Midwinter published his abridgment) and examines the illustrated editions published during that time, including those featuring translations of the work issued in Amsterdam (where Dutch and French translations were published) and in Germany. It recovers a hitherto unexplored archive of illustrations that played an essential role in the reading history – in Britain and abroad – of Robinson Crusoe. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Asexuality in Young Adult Fiction

Asexuality in Young Adult Fiction
  • Noah O'Connor
  • Published online:
    03 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • The Asexual Exile trope positions asexual characters outside of society by portraying them as loners, inhuman, or adjacent to death. This research identifies trends in these portrayals by considering a corpus of 42 traditionally published novels of Young Adult fiction featuring asexual protagonists. A distant reading of this corpus finds that the Asexual Exile trope is employed in approximately two-thirds of cases. The author analyses how this trope permutates across genres, and the frequency of its endorsement and subversion by these narratives. Presenting the first extensive investigation into the Asexual Exile trope in YA fiction, this research investigates how asexual characters are Othered as not truly alive, and how these messages then rebound into necropolitical cultural understandings of asexual people as expendable. The results prompt the questions: how does the Asexual Exile trope influence Young Adult readers in the formation of their ideologies? How can publishers do better?
Mudie's Select Library and the Shelf Life of the Nineteenth–Century Novel

Mudie's Select Library and the Shelf Life of the Nineteenth–Century Novel
  • Karen Wade
  • Published online:
    22 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
    • Element
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  • Mudie's Select Library was a major nineteenth-century literary institution. Substantially larger than its competitors, the library leveraged regional and global distribution networks and close commercial ties with publishers which allowed it to maintain a key position within the British publishing industry. In its heyday, it was widely believed that novelists and publishers were required to conform to aesthetic, moral and formal standards established by Mudie's, or risk the rejection and consequent failure of their books. However, the lack of a comprehensive study of the library's holdings leaves open questions about what the library actually stocked, and to what extent the library could determine a novel's fate. This Element describes a data analysis of a collection of Mudie's catalogues spanning eighty years, in order to reassess understandings of the library's role in the nineteenth-century publishing industry. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Women Booksellers in the Twentieth Century

Women Booksellers in the Twentieth Century
  • Hidden Behind the Bookshelves
  • Samantha J. Rayner
  • Published online:
    17 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
    • Element
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  • The British women booksellers who built and ran successful businesses before, during, and after the Second World War have largely been forgotten. This Element seeks to reclaim some of these histories from where they lie hidden or obscured in archives, accounts of the book trade of the time, and other sources. Though they were often called 'formidable', this research reveals astonishing impact at local, national, and international levels. Divided into four main sections, the Element first gives a literature review of materials about booksellers, before giving a short context to bookselling, the book trade, and book buyers and readers of the early twentieth century. A third section examines the position of women in society at that time, including how they were viewed as part of the book trade; the final section provides histories of nine women booksellers. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Unprinted

Unprinted
  • Publication Beyond the Press
  • Daria Kohler, Daniel Wakelin, Natascha Domeisen, Daniel Haywood, Edward Jones, Micah Mackay, Rosie Maxton, Brian M. Moore, Katie Noble, Felix M. Simon, Daniel Wojahn
  • Published online:
    15 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • This Element explores the idea of publication in media used before, alongside, and after print. It contrasts multiple traditions of unprinted communication in their diversity and particularity. This decentres print as the means for understanding publication; instead, publication is seen as an heuristic term which identifies activities these traditions share, but which also differ in ways not reducible to comparisons with printing. The Element engages with texts written on papyrus, chiselled in stone, and created digitally; sung, proclaimed, and put on stage; banned, hidden and rediscovered. The authors move between Greek inscriptions and Tibetan edicts, early modern manuscripts and AI-assisted composition, monasteries and courts, constantly questioning the term 'publication' and considering the agency of people publishing and the publics they address. The picture that transpires is that of a colourful variety of contexts of production and dissemination, underlining the value of studying 'unprinted' publication in its own right.
Printing Technologies and Book Production in Seventeenth-Century Japan

Printing Technologies and Book Production in Seventeenth-Century Japan
  • Peter Kornicki
  • Published online:
    14 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • This Element first sets the history of printing in Japan in its East Asian context, showing how developments in China, Korea and elsewhere had an impact upon Japan. It then undertakes a re-examination of printing in seventeenth-century Japan and in particular explores the reasons why Japanese printers abandoned typography less than fifty years after it was introduced. This is a question that has often been posed but never satisfactorily answered, but this Element takes a new approach, focusing on two popular medical texts that were first printed typographically and then xylographically. The argument presented here is that the glosses relied upon by Japanese readers could be much more easily be provided when printing xylographically: since from the early seventeenth century onwards printed books customarily included glosses for the convenience of readers, this was surely the reason for the abandonment of typography.
Behaviour Beyond the Text and the Morality Clause in Twenty-First-Century Publishing

Behaviour Beyond the Text and the Morality Clause in Twenty-First-Century Publishing
  • Chiara Bullen
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • A morality clause allows contracting parties to terminate a contractual agreement with those who exhibit behaviour deemed unacceptable. Established in 1920s Hollywood, these contractual clauses are now found in twenty-first-century publishing agreements. This Element investigates the presence of the morality clause in the UK book publishing industry in relation to an increased focus on author behaviour beyond the text in the twenty-first-century, examining the way it operates within the publishing field in the context of behaviour perceived to be 'problematic'. It asserts the clause is perceived to be needed due to the emergence of social media and twenty-first-century social contexts combining to impact the author-reader relationship which, in turn, leads to author behaviour acting as a paratextual threshold to their work. This Element presents an analysis of the morality clause in practice, concluding the clause has the potential to further the power imbalance between author and publisher.
Libraries and the Academic Book

Libraries and the Academic Book
  • Matthew J. Shaw
  • Published online:
    01 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • This Element explores the history of the relationship between libraries and the academic book. It provides an overview of the development of the publishing history of the scholarly - or academic - book, and related creation of the modern research library. It argues that libraries played an important role in the birth and growth of the academic book, and explores how publishers, readers and libraries helped to develop the format and scholarly and publishing environments that now underpin contemporary scholarly communications. It concludes with an appraisal of the current state of the field and how business, technology and policy are mapping a variety of potential routes to the future.
Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar

Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar
  • Kanupriya Dhingra
  • Published online:
    24 November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • This Element looks at Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar's spatiality - its location, relocation, and respatialisation. Three actors play a major role in creating and organising this spatiality: the sellers, the buyers, and the civic authorities. The second section narrativizes the biographies of the booksellers of Daryaganj to offer a map of the hidden social and material networks that support the informal modes of bookselling. Amidst order and chaos, using their specialised knowledge, Daryaganj booksellers create distinctive mechanisms to serve the diverse reading public of Delhi. Using ethnography, oral interviews, and rhythmanalysis, this Element tells a story of urban aspirations, state-citizen relations, official and unofficial cultural economies, and imaginations of other viable worlds of being and believing.
Selling Books with Algorithms

Selling Books with Algorithms
  • Anna Muenchrath
  • Published online:
    24 November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • In 1997 Amazon started as a small online bookseller. It is now the largest bookseller in the US and one of the largest companies in the world, due, in part, to its implementation of algorithms and access to user data. This Element explains how these algorithms work, and specifically how they recommend books and make them visible to readers. It argues that framing algorithms as felicitous or infelicitous allows us to reconsider the imagined authority of an algorithm's recommendation as a culturally situated performance. It also explores the material effects of bookselling algorithms on the forms of labor of the bookstore. The Element ends by considering future directions for research, arguing that the bookselling industry would benefit from an investment in algorithmic literacy.
Innovations in Digital Comics

Innovations in Digital Comics
  • A Popular Revolution
  • Francesca Benatti
  • Published online:
    03 September 2024
    Print publication:
    03 October 2024
    • Element
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  • The success of popular webcomics (comics produced and read entirely digitally) is the greatest revolution in the comics medium of the last two decades. Webcomics exploit a socio-technical convergence between digital platforms and participatory cultures, enabling global authors to work together with global audiences to transcend established print comics structures. After defining digital comics, webcomics and webtoons, this Element presents a case study of Korean platform WEBTOON, which achieved 100 billion global page views in 2019. The study analyses data from their website, including views, subscriptions and likes, to quantify and assess whether WEBTOON's commercial and critical success is connected to its inclusion of a wider range of genres and of a more diverse author base than mainstream English-language print comics. In so doing, it performs the first Book Historical study of webcomics and webtoons. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
YA Anthologies

YA Anthologies
  • Amplifying Voices, Building Community
  • Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
  • Published online:
    07 June 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • Despite their long publishing history, anthologies have received little scholarly attention. However, they play an important role in collecting, and reflecting upon, voices and identities that have all-to-often been on the fringes of publishing. This Element explores the sociocultural functions of anthologies in relation to discussions around exclusion/inclusion in the publishing industry. Focusing on YA anthologies, using a case study of A Change Is Gonna Come anthology (2017), this Element argues that the form and function of anthologies allows them to respond to and represent changing ideas of socially-marginalised identities. In A Change Is Gonna Come, this medium also affords Black and Brown authors a platform and community for introspection and the development of both individual and collective identities. Beyond merely introducing writings by socially-marginalised groups, this Element contends that YA anthologies embody a form of literary activism, fostering community-building and offering a means to circumvent obstacles prevalent in publishing.
China's eBook Evolution

China's eBook Evolution
  • Disruptive Models and Emerging Book Cultures
  • Xiang Ren
  • Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
  • This Element explores the changing landscape of eBook businesses and cultures in China in the past two decades and examines how disruptive innovation and the platform economy have transformed one of the world's largest book markets. Through an evolutionary perspective, this Element documents and analyses the emergence, growth, and refinement of disruptive models in three areas of trade publishing, including free eBook developments, digital self-publishing, and platformed social reading. It offers a critical account of the complex interplay between emerging technologies, business innovations, and book cultures and conceptualises China's eBook evolution as both a part of global digital publishing transformation in the platform age and an embodiment of local dynamics in a transitional society. This Element is essential for scholars, students, publishers, and the interested publics to understand China's digital publishing innovations and their global implications.

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