Making Meaning

"The greatest bibliographer of our time", was how historian Robert Darnton described D. F. McKenzie. Yet until now many of McKenzie's major essays, scattered in specialist journals and inaccessible publications, have circulated mainly in tattered photocopies. This volume, edited by two of McKenzie's former students, brings together for the first time a wide range of his writings on bibliography, the book trade, and the "sociology of texts". Selected by the author himself before his sudden death in 1999, the essays range from the material transmission of Shakespeare's plays in the seventeenth century to the connections among oral, manuscript, and print cultures.

Making Meaning reflects McKenzie's virtuosity as a traditional bibliographer and reveals how his thought-provoking scholarship made him a driving force in the genesis and development of the new interdisciplinary field of book history. His refusal to recognize the traditional boundary between bibliography and literary history re-energized the study of the social, political, economic, and cultural aspect

Acknowledgments

ix

Editorial Introduction

3

(10)

Part 1 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices

13

(73)

``Indenting the Stick'' in the First Quarto of King Lear (1608)

86

(5)

Stretching a Point: Or, The Case of the Spaced-out Comps

91

(18)

Part 2 THE BOOK TRADE

The London Book Trade in 1668

109

(17)

The London Book Trade in 1644

126

(18)

Trading Places? England 1689-France 1789

144

(25)

Part 3 THE SOCIOLOGY OF TEXTS

``The Staple of News'' and the Late Plays

169

(29)

Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve

198

(39)

Speech---Manuscript---Print

237

(22)

``What's Past Is Prologue'': The Bibliographical Society and History of the Book

259

(17)

Our Textual Definition of the Future: The New English Imperialism?

276

(6)

A Chronological Bibliography of McKenzie's Writings

282

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