The current issue of Modern Intellectual History features a symposium titled “What Was the History of the Book?” From the introduction:
In July 2005 a symposium took place under the auspices of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, the aim of which was to bring together three of today’s most influential practitioners of “book history” in order to take stock of how the field had developed over this prolific period. While we had initially intended to ask our speakers to speculate on that disciplinary history, as well as its potential future, the great danger of such exercises is that they can drift off into abstract speculation. In the end, we asked them to reflect on specific texts that they had written, to speculate on the kinds of influence that had informed them and to tell us how they would do things differently today. Thereby not only did we hope to get a more intimate sense of the moment of these influential texts, texts that have become absolutely central to the subject as it has developed in recent years, but more generally it was hoped that we would achieve a clearer sense of what it is that we do as historians of the book, why we do it and what its scholarly implications can or should be today.
The articles (links are to the Cambridge UP abstracts):
Bill Bell, What was the History of the Book? Introduction
Robert Darnton, “What is the History of Books?” Revisited
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books Revisited
Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge Revisited
David D. Hall, What was the History of the Book? A Response
