The Book Unbound: Material Cultures of Reading and Collecting, 17501850 [Hardcover]

Changes understandings of the book as a medium, exploring Romantic-era works as open-ended collections of leaves, plates, and serials.Exploring Romantic-period works as open-ended collections of discrete book parts, prints, watercolours, manuscripts, and serial publications, this monograph changes understandings of the book as a medium through case studies on Walpole's private press publications, Blake's printmaker-poet's book making, and Dickens's serial fiction.Exploring Romantic-period works as open-ended collections of discrete book parts, prints, watercolours, manuscripts, and serial publications, this monograph changes understandings of the book as a medium through case studies on Walpole's private press publications, Blake's printmaker-poet's book making, and Dickens's serial fiction.How does our understanding of Romantic literature change when we shift the focus from bound books to unbound forms? Assumptions about the book as a bound object have isolated literature from overlapping material cultures of book making, reading, viewing, and collecting. The Book Unbound reconstructs a Romantic textual condition of unbound forms in which the book acted as a repository for open-ended collections of discrete book parts, prints, watercolours, manuscripts, and serial publications, ca. 17501850. Three case studies trace changing material practices of book making before and after publisher's bindings marked a turning point from a culture of unbound books. Through the restricted coterie gathered around Horace Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill, William Blake's printmaker-poet's book making, and Charles Dickens's serialized part publications, this monograph changes understandings of the book as a medium.Introduction: material cultures of reading and collecting, 17501850; 1. Walpole's book parts; 2. Blake's scattered leaves: composition, disorder, and the dynamics of the book unbound; 3. Dickens unwrapped; 4. Coda: unbound, disbound; Bibliography.