The book we know is not an eternal form, divinely ordained. It is a familiar technological artifact, a product of industrial production. We can distinguish it at a glance from books of the earlier 20th century, and those are readily distinguishable from their early modern ancestors. . . . The book is a product of mass production. It is composed once and for all, and one size and sequence must fit everyone. Mass production was the price we paid for mass enlightenment. For many years, the printed and bound book was the only way to discuss large ideas with a large audience. — Mark Bernstein
Writing in the form of carving on stone, pen and ink on vellum, and the printing press. The figures represented and possibly Dante in the middle and Gutenberg on the right. This painting by Sir Edward Poynter appears on a cabinet designed by William Burges for a H. G. Yatman in 1858 that is nw in th Victoria & Albert Museum. — George P. Landow
Printing Technology
- Literature, Science, and Print Technology
- Changes in the Technology of Book Production
- The Printed Book — the Invisible Machine
- Isaac Disraeli on Early Printing
- ‘A Refined Division of Labour’: The Production of Cloth-Bound Books
- The complexities of book production
- Movable type and stereotyping
- Print & Stereotyping: Tennyson’s Poetical Works as Published by Ticknor and Fields
- How stereotypes were made
- Altering standing type
- Variation in printed text: the example of Thackeray
- Mixing multiple impressions within single copies of a book (note 27)
- Jasper Fforde on the Relation of Information Technology and Narrative
- The History of Printing: A Chronology
- Gutenberg's Printing Press
- Richard Whittaker Cope's Albion printing press at Morris's Kelmscott Press
- High-Speed Printing Press by Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer, 1812.
- Perkins D cylinder Printing Press (c. 1840; used to print postage stamps)
- The Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Illustration: Woodblock Engraving, Steel Engraving, and Other Processes
- Monument to Gutenberg, Strasbourg, France
- Scholars Studying Material Culture and the Victorian Book
Printing, Publishing, and Society
- Mudie's Select Library and the Form of Victorian Fiction
- The Victorian Book Industry: Political, Economic, and Technological Factors in the Rise of a Mass Audience
- Pickwick Papers and the Development of Serial Fiction
- Religion and Print Culture: the Evangelical Tract
- Victorian Trade Bindings — Technology and Design
- Advertising and Distribution at Mid-Century
- Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts Revolutionizes Publishing
- Print Culture, Imagined Communities, and the Poetry of John Keble, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti
- Newman and the Steam-Driven Printing Press: His Opposition to Inexpensive Books
- Newman and Information Technology
- Sexual Knowledge in Print Culture
- Victorian Periodicals (sitemap)
- Victorian Book Design
Bibliography
Anderson, Patricia. The printed image and the transformation of popular culture 1790-1860. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
Cronin, Richard. Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture After Waterloo. Oxford, 2010. [review]
Erickson, Lee. The economy of literary form: English literature and the industrialization of publishing, 1800-1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Fielding, Penny, and Andrew Taylor, ed. Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. [review]
Kernan, Alvin. Printing technology, letters & Samuel Johnson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Menke, Richard. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technology, 1880-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. [review]
Nesta, Frederick, ed. Where the Victorians Got Their Reading: Cultural Change in Marketing, Distribution, and Individual Access for "The Million" in Britain, North America, and Australia. Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2024. [review]
Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and his publishers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Price, Leah. How to do things with books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. [review].
Last modified 23 October 2025