摘要：We who are gathered in this hall are all book historians in one way or another, and
each of us knows that book history research is detailed. We work with “slips and
scraps” (Yale) that steadily build upon each other until a mass of information comes
together into a pattern that thrusts itself before us with immediacy and urgency in
the form of a new understanding. Many such new understandings have emerged
over the last twenty or so years about the modern publishing industry (Todd) and the
ancient one (Overty), and the practice of reading among children as well as among
adults (Grenby; McDowell; Price), to name only a few contributions made on the
pages of Book History. It is out of multifarious details that printshop life, bookshop
culture, readers’ responses, collectors’ interests, even canon formation emerge.
