‘This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print’: Making Literary History in the Age of Steam

In the preface to A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), Philip Gaskell would justify the adjective in his title by pointing to his extended discussion of the mechanized modes of textual production that had transformed British print culture in the nineteenth-century. Noting how the previous authority on the topic—McKerrow’s An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927)—had only covered the era of the common hand-press, Gaskell described his work as the attempt ‘for the first time to give a general description of the printing practice of the machine-press period.’¹ And yet, despite this theme of novelty, it is striking from today’s perspective to witness how Gaskell’s New Introduction can appear to mark the end of the line for a school of analytical bibliography aiming to produce modern editions that would recapture authorial intentions that had been deformed or obstructed in print shops of the past. Gaskell’s work, in other words, does not get a great deal of attention in accounts of the rise of the new book history that is traced to the 1980s. And Gaskell himself conceded that the remarkable learning he displayed might leave literary critics puzzled. Quoting Fredson Bowers, he aligns himself with the view that ‘the general scholar’ was mostly unable to apply the accumulating knowledge to the business of criticism.²