A New Introduction to Bibliography

Ronald B. McKerrow’s An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students has been the classic manual on bibliography, showing how the transmission of texts might be affected by the processes of printing, but he concentrated almost exclusively on Elizabethan printing – the period from 1560 to 1660. However, in recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the textual problems of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and, although McKerrow covered the period up to 1800, he did not describe the technology of the machine-press period. Gaskell incorporates work done since McKerrow’s day on the history of the printing technology of the hand-press period, and he breaks new ground by providing a general description of the printing practices of the machine-press period. Little has been previously published about the techniques and routines of nineteenth- and twentieth-century book production, making this book essential to students of literature, scholars, printing historians, librarians, and booklovers.