The essays collected here offer examinations of bibliographical matters, publishing practices, the illustration of texts in a variety of engraved media, little studied print culture genres, the critical and editorial fortunes of individual works, and the significance of the complex interrelationships that authors entertained with booksellers, publishers, and designers. They investigate how all these relationships affected the production of print commodities and how all the agents involved in the making of books contributed to the cultural literacy of readers and the formation of a canon of...

Edited by Sandro Jung and Stephen Colclough, the 2015 number of the MHRA Yearbook of English Studies features contributions that investigate the materiality of texts, their advertising and marketing, as well as readerly engagements with different works that are, as part of their attempts at classification, conceived of as acts of canon formation. Extending from the late seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, the contributions revolve around questions related to the reading and interpretation of texts, the shaping of authorial reputations, and the role that booksellers and/or publishers...