Book History (vol. 13, 2010)

notes 10 years ago...

Book History, Vol. 13, 2010. Papers interest me.

Charlotte Eubanks's "Circumambulatory Reading: Revolving Sutra Libraries and Buddhist Scrolls," pp. 1-24. Eubanks explores technologies developed in East Asia for the purpose of reading Mahayana Buddhist sutras with reference to the cultural and technological trends in China and in particular their adaptation in medieval Japan.

Spencer D. C. Keralis's "Pictures of Charlotte: The Illustrated Charlotte Temple and Her Readers," pp. 25-57. Keralis examines how several illustrated editions of the novel published between 1808 and 1905 engaged their readers and contributed to making Charlotte Temple one of the greatest steady-sellers in nineteenth-century America.

Living on the Margin: George Bentley and the Economics of the Three-Volume Novel, 1865–70Troy J. Bassettpp. 58-79.

Re-Authorship: Authoring, Editing, and Coauthoring the Transatlantic Publications of Charlotte M. Yonge’s Aunt Charlotte’s Stories of Bible HistoryLeslee Thorne-Murphypp. 80-103.

A Victorian Amazon.com: Edward Petherick and His Colonial Booksellers’ AgencyAlison Rukavinapp. 104-121.

Reading Beyond the Lines: Young Readers and Wartime Japanese LiteratureSari Kawanapp. 154-184.

Cold Warriors of the Book: American Book Programs in the 1950sGreg Barnhiselpp. 185-217. Books are weapons in the war of ideas. The US made books available to foreign audiences in multiple ways: at American "Information Center" libraries (the Library and Information Center Service), through a market-based export initiative called the Informational Media Guaranty (IMG) program, through donations of textbooks and scientific publications to foreign schools and aid programs, and through a government-directed project to translate, publish, and sell American books - with their origins disguised - in foreign markets (the Books in Translation program).

By far the greatest number and variety of anti-Communist volumes were produced and translated for and distributed in Chinese markets. An entire series was produced specifically for Chinese readers entitled How the Chinese Communists Treat ... (中共問題問答叢書－－中共怎樣對待......) had titles on religion, merchants and industrialists, overseas Chinese, farmers, students etc.

The over 200-title Chinese list (for distribution in two main markets, Hong Kong and "Formosa," although few Chinese titles were distributed in Singapore and one in the Philippines) is extremely thin on literature: from 1953 to 1956 only seven books that might be classed as serious American literature were distributed in Chinese through the State Department or United States Information Agency (USIA).

This essay reminds of the Chinese writer Eileen Chang, who worked as a translator for the United States Information Service in Hong Kong for three years (1952-55) during which she translated the works of Ernest Hemingway, Margery Lawrence, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Washington Irving, and was commissioned by the same agent to write two anti-Communist propaganda novels The Rice Sprout Song (1954) and Naked Earth (1956). Over the course of the 1950s, the Books in Translation program (an its subsidiary, the Low-Priced Book Program) distributed almost fifty million copies of American titles around the world.

Leon Jackson, "The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian: African American Cultures of Print—The State of the Discipline," pp. 251-308.

"The Production of Three-Volume Novels, 1863-1897." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 102, No. 1 (2008): 61-75.

"T. Fisher Unwin's Pseudonym Library: Literary Marketing and Authorial Identity." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 47, No. 2 (2004): 143-60.

"Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by The Bookman, 1891-1906." Book History, Vol. 4 (2001): 205-36.

"W. Somerset Maugham: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1969-1997." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 41.2 (1998): 133-84.