Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period

Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period illuminates the diverse ways that people in the British regional print trades exerted their agency through interventions in regional and national politics as well as their civic, commercial, and cultural contributions. Works printed in regional communities were a crucial part of developing narratives of local industrial, technological, and ideological progression. By moving away from understanding of print cultures outside of London as ‘provincial’, however, this book argues for a new understanding of ‘region’ as part of a network of places, emphasising opportunities for collaboration and creation that demonstrate the key role of regions within larger communities extending from the nation to the emerging sense of globality in this period. Through investigations of the men and women of the print trades outside of London, this collection casts new light on the strategies of self-representation evident in the work of regional print cultures, as well as their contributions to individual regional identities and national narratives.

1. Introduction: Print Culture, Agency, Regionality.- Part I: Yorkshire.- 2. Printed by Alice Broade: The Career of York’s First Female Printer, 1661–1680.- 3. Historiography, Regionality, and Print Trade Life Writing: The Case of Mr Thomas Gent, Printer, of York.- 4. The Newspaper, the Bookshop, and the Radical Society: Joseph Gales’ Hartshead Press and the ‘Reading and Thinking People of Sheffield’.- Part II: Circulation and Networks.- 5. Printing, Publishing, and Pocket Book Compiling: Ann Fisher’s Hidden Labour in the Newcastle Book Trade.- 6. Elizabeth Davison and the Circulation of Chapbooks in Early Nineteenth-Century Northumberland.- Part III: Regions and Nations.- 7. ‘The Privilege Granted to the Printer’: The Role of James VI in the Scottish Print Trade 1567–1603.- 8. Print Agency and Civic Press Identity Across the Border: Commerce and Regional Improvement in the Glasgow Advertiser, Liverpool General Advertiser, and the Urban Directories of Liverpool and Glasgow,1765–1795.- Part IV: Technology.- 9. For Lack of Letters: Early Typographical Shibboleths of English and Other Foreign Languages.- 10. A New Type: Sans Serif Typography and Midlands Regional Identity.- 11. Afterword.

Rachel Stenner is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities, University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature (2018) and co-editor of the collection of essays Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (2019).

Kaley Kramer is Deputy Head of English at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. She is the co-editor of Women During the English Reformations (Palgrave 2014) and Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination (Palgrave 2020).

Adam James Smith is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at York St John University, UK. He works on cheap eighteenth-century political print, with a particular interest in works of protest and satire. Smith has published on Joseph Addison, James Montgomery and Eliza Haywood.