From the Yale Program in the History of the Book: an essay by Eve Houghton (graduate student in English at Yale; graduate organizer of the Yale Program in the History of the Book), the first in a series on “The Political History of Book History.”
As teaser:
In fact, much of the most influential work in book history in the past three decades has focused on re-centering the market in our accounts of literary history, by focusing on the role of stationers, licensers, binders, booksellers, and other agents of book production. I haven’t seen this discussed very often, but I think book history’s deep commitment to the judgments of the market is one reason for the sometime antipathy between literary historians and more overtly politically-committed leftist critics, and would like to think about this more in future posts.
This and more by Eve Houghton and others in The Census, the blog of the Yale Program in the History of the Book.