Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing Since 1700

Description

This title was first published in 2000: The essays in this collection re-examine the phenomenon of "free print" in print culture. By focusing on free print the volume offers perspectives in the cultural history of textual transmission from the early-18th century to the mid-20th century. "Publishing" in the sense of making the print public, embraces the free and often unsolicited distribution of religious literature, political propaganda, and civic and personal gifts. The free print examined here includes gift-books; advertisements and commemorations; the promotion of knowledge, institutions and services; commercial and philanthropic lobbying; religious and missionary activity; and political propaganda both official and underground. Broad issues range from the consideration of press finances, government intervention, and private and institutional patronage, to textual familiarity and social ritual. The approach is deliberately comparative. Ten established scholars of book and printing history, who look at very different regions and periods, test the nature of the alleged authority of print and the apparent value of the commercial tag through the study of print which arrives unbidden in the hands of its consumers. The chapters in this volume are based on papers first given at the "Print for Free" conference organized by the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust in September 1996. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Print for Free: Unsolicited Literature in Comparative Perspective Chapter 2: A Free Transmission of Knowledge: The Literary Gifts and Reception of an Eighteenth-Century Scholar Chapter 3: Free Flattery or Servile Tribute? Oxford and Cambridge Commemorative Poetry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Chapter 4: 'The Abolition Blunderbuss': Free Publishing and British Abolition Propaganda, 1780–1838 Chapter 5: Free for All: Broadsides on the Streets of New Orleans, 1764–1900 Chapter 6: The Nineteenth-Century Bible Society and 'The Evil of Gratuitous Distribution' Chapter 7: Sent to the Wilderness: Mission Literature in Colonial America Chapter 8: Between Text and Reader: The Experience of Christian Missionaries in Bengal, 1800–50 Chapter 9: Limits to Propaganda: Soviet Power and the Peasant Reader in the 1920s Chapter 10: Air-Borne Culture: Propaganda Leaflets over Occupied France in the Second World War Chapter 11: Mau Mau's War of Words: The Battle of the Pamphlets Index