Posts com a Tag ‘SHAW Mattew (Res)’

Anthony Grafton / Foto: Princeton University /

If it is hard to write a book review, then it is much harder to make a book. Anthony Grafton’s latest monograph, Inky Fingers, puts the difficulties of labour at the centre of this engaging study of book production in early modern Europe and North America (the latter included despite the expected limitations of the subtitle). He directs our attention to a cast of players more usually relegated to the wings of humanistic scholarship: printers, copyeditors, translators, compilers and other ‘native-born son[s] of the new city of books that printing created’ (p. 38).(1) In so doing, he reminds us that the life of scholarship ‘could cramp the hands and buckle the back’ (p. 4), to say nothing of the strain of texts and handwriting on the eyes. Building on the work of scholars including Anne Goldgar and William Sherman, and on Grafton’s own extensive contributions to the intellectual and textual history of humanistic scholarship, Inky Fingers provides a stimulating account of the back-and-forth of making books, and how this process shapes texts’ meanings and reception. Leia Mais