Offering a fresh history centred on the reactions and experiences of ordinary readers and writers, Lyons deals with key turning points that occurred throughout the centuries, such as the invention of the codex, the transition from scribal to print culture, the reading revolution and the industrialisation of the book. Tracing the major historical developments across Europe and North America which revolutionized our relationship with texts, this book provides an engaging and invaluable overview of the history of scribal and print culture.

Martyn Lyons re-assesses European history between the fall of Napoleon and the Crimean War. Refusing to characterize the period as a "Restoration." Lyons presents the struggle of the European monarchies for credibility in the wake of conflicts which had shattered the mystique of kingship. Lyons stresses the invented aspects of emerging nationalism, as well as the important process of rebuilding a political culture after 1815, and the democratic Revolutions of 1848.

As war and mass emigration across oceans increased the distances between ordinary people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of them, previously barely literate and unaccustomed to writing, began to communicate on paper. This fascinating account explores this surge of ordinary writing, how people met the new challenges of literacy and the importance of scribal culture to the history of individual experience in modern Europe. Focusing on correspondence and other writing genres produced by French and Italian soldiers in the trenches in the First World War, as well as...