Description: Bringing together a multidisciplinary and international team of leading scholars, and illustrated by original empirical material, this work explores the complex relationships between the making of books in certain geographical contexts, the movement of books (epistemologically as well as geographically), the ways in which they are received, and advances new perspectives on how this area of research should be approached.
Review Quotes: 'Impressively wide-ranging over time and space yet thematically focused, this rich collection of essays ably demonstrates the crucial importance of geography for understanding the production, circulation, and reception of books. It also shows how the study of geographical writings by authors such as Mungo Park, Varenius and Volney can benefit from the insights and methodologies of book history.' Richard B. Sher, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA 'Writing, editing, printing, distributing, selling, buying, reading, reviewing, debating ... All of these practices and more enter into the constitution of the book, into what it is, what it does and why it matters. And all of these practices have inescapable and influential geographies, from "the local" to "the far-flung", as this superb volume so convincingly demonstrates. Bringing together a range of scholars from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, its collective force is to put "geographies of the book" decisively on to all future maps of cultural, political and intellectual history. It is a most substantial accomplishment, far beyond what most edited collections can achieve.' Chris Philo, University of Glasgow, UK 'Whatever debates take place on determining how important geographical factors are in the history of the book, they will owe much to this volume.' Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society