Tracing the history of the book throughout the world from ancient times to the present day, this reference draws on the widely acclaimed Oxford Companion to the Book. It contains 51 articles from the Companion plus 3 new articles in one affordable volume. This is a treasure-trove for anyone wanting to learn more about the history of the book.

• Introduction


• Writing Systems


• The Sacred Book


• The Ancient Book


• The History of the Book in Byzantium


• The European Medieval Book


• The European Printing Revolution


• The Book as Symbol


• The Transmission of Jewish Knowledge through MSS and Printed Books


• Missionary Printing


• Paper


• The Technologies of Print


• The Economics of Print


• Censorship


• Copyright and Intellectual Property


• The Manuscript after the Coming of Print


• Printed Ephemera


• Children's Books


• The History of Illustration and its Technologies


• Bookbinding


• Theories of Text, Editorial Theory, and Textual Criticism


• The Electronic Book


• Britain, c. 1475-1800


• Britain, 1801-1914


• Britain from 1914


• Ireland


• France


• the Low Countries


• Germany


• Switzerland


• the Nordic Countries


• the Iberian Peninsula


• Italy


• Modern Greece, c. 1453-2000


• Austria


• Hungary


• Czech Republic and Slovakia


• Poland


• the Baltic States


• Slavonic Book in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus


• the Balkans


• Sub-Saharan Africa


• the Muslim World


• the Indian Subcontinent


• China


• Korea


• Japan


• Southeast Asia (1): The Islands


• Southeast Asia (2): The Mainland


• Australia


• New Zealand


• Latin America


• Canada


• America


• West Indies/Caribbean

Michael F. Suarez S.J. is Professor and Director of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. Formerly the J. A. Kavanaugh Professor of English at Fordham University in New York and Fellow and Tutor in English at Campion Hall, Oxford, he is co-editor of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 5, 1695-1830 (2009) and co-general editor of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 8 vols (2006- ).
H. R. Woudhuysen is Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. He has edited The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse (1992), with David Norbrook; Love's Labour's Lost (1998) and, with Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare's Poems (2007) for the Arden Shakespeare third series. His book Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640 was published in 1996.