Will Finley, The Pictorial Publisher: Agents, Technologies and the Illustrated Book in Britain, 1830-1850
Live notes, so an incomplete, partial record of what actually happened.
Tags: dhist
My asides in {}
Stream/Deck: http://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2016/07/20/tuesday-8-november-2016-will-finley-tbc/
Disclaimer: no background in digital. Once got beyond 'digital' questions, got to historical questions: factional nature of book history.
Partially led by data - 6k books, 100k illustrations - interest in non-fiction: eg topography.
Little acknowledgement of how production of illustrations changed in the historiography: eg role of steel engraving in changing relationship between publisher, artist and authors, and the relationship between that and cheapness.
1840s onwards. Growth in number of embellishments and medium sized images.
Wanted to investigate how illustrations mediated between forms.
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>#dhist The code @willfinley91 used to find similar images in a corpus of book illustrations is at https://t.co/ZMnckOoPLT
— IHR Digital History (@IHRDigHist) November 8, 2016
Use of stock images used across a publisher's list.
Shift in illustration of topography did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. Vast numbers of engravings taking the reader on a 'tour'. Indebted to the mutability of wood engravings.
For rest of the talk, tease out tensions between authors and publishers. Case studies on History book of Charles Knight and Henry Cassell. New field of historical study. Accepted the publishers had authority of images. Question: is this true?
Knight: wanted to educate the working classes through popular literature, but not limited to there. Prioritised social history in his Histores. Illustrations reflected this concern: lettering, objects, scenery, costume, architectural scenes. In possession of woodblocks, employed authors, so seemed to have authority.
However.. Pictorial History (c1940s) front loading of illustrations and clustering .. tension between text and image? Clusters around social history. Sparse when religion and politics and military topics come up. Suggests tensions between the variety of writers involved and the publisher.
Compare with Popular History (1856-62). Grown wise to having a variety of authors work on the history. Reused many images but more evenly distributed. Synergy of image and text here underscores the failures of his control of the Pictorial History.
Cassell Illustrated History (1858-1862): images larger and in the middle of the page. Role of the visual not illustrative but conveyed narrative independent of the written word.
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>Enjoying @willfinley91 's presentation of detailed historical analysis, enabled but not dominated by data. Just what #dhist was set up for
— Peter Webster (@pj_webster) November 8, 2016
Printed image as a starting point for book history. Tendency to look at last scale change over time, but just as valuable to look at small scale change, so over one book.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Exceptions: embeds to and from external sources, and direct quotations from speakers