The Centre
for the History of the Book is very pleased to be associated
with one of the most important scholarly titles to emerge
in recent years on the eighteenth-century book trade.
Richard B. Sher undertook much of the research
on the The Enlightenment and the Book while
he was a Visiting Fellow at the CHB. Professor
Sher is Distinguished Professor of History at the New
Jersey Institute of Technology. He is the author of
Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment:
The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh .
The late eighteenth
century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity
in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith,
Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James
Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by
these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during
their time in almost every field of polite literature
and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and
the Americas.
In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks
new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment
and the forgotten role of publishing during that period.
The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy
the common misperception that such classics as The
Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson
were written by authors who eyed their publishers
as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary,
Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the
late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership
between authors and their publishers, one in which writers
saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination
of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams
of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates
that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking
in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate
profits.
The Enlightenment and the Book explores this
tension between creativity and commerce that still exists
in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated
and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for
anyone interested in the history of the book or the
production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.
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