Mark R. M. Towsey Livres

The Handpress World explores the impact of the invention of printing by moveable type from the first experiments of the incunabula age through to the end of the eighteenth century. In this crucial period of book history the new technology both transformed established markets for scholarly and religious literature and found a new public through the rise of the pamphlet and later the newspaper. The series will investigate every aspect of this cultural transformation, from the promotion in print of the great intellectual movements of the day through to the birth of the public library.

Before the Public Libraryexplores the emergence of community-based lending libraries in the Atlantic World before the advent of the Public Library movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Essays by eighteen scholars from a range of disciplines seek to place, for the first time, community libraries within an Atlantic context over a two-century period. Taking a comparative approach, this volume shows that community libraries played an important - and largely unrecognized - role in shaping Atlantic social networks, political and religious movements, scientific and geographic knowledge, and economic enterprise. Libraries had a distinct role to play in shaping modern identities through the acquisition and circulation of specific kinds of texts, the fostering of sociability, and the building of community-based institutions.