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Print Culture

This book describes the changing material conditions of print production and reception within modern industrial society between 1800 to the present in relation to histories and practices of print in relation to cultural history, visual studies and the sociology of knowledge. It examines the currency of the term 'print culture' in contemporary academic and critical discourse, and challenges the common notion that print is now obsolete, in order to counter the dematerialisation of the study of communication caused by new media developments. In methods and theoretical approaches, the argument addresses the symbolic function of print as a designed object or ‘marked surface’, where materiality has equal significance alongside words and images. The book presents personal first hand research and also synthesises much current writing from disparate fields of practice and debate, from typographic manuals to postcolonial theory (to name two only). The book makes an original contribution to research because of its interdisciplinary approach allied with an emphasis on the banal or everyday aspects of print. The academic series editors of Routledge’s ‘New directions in cultural history’ invited my book proposal after they heard my conference paper on technical drawing practices (from my PhD dissertation ‘Ruling the line’ 2011) at the ISCH meeting in Ghent, 2008, and then consulted my article '‘The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Banknotes as Industrial Currency’ Technology and Culture 46, 2005: 31-50. The book is addressed to undergraduate and general readers within academic humanities programmes of cultural history, art and design history, book and print history, media studies, literary studies, and the history of technology, and also engages students of practice-based disciplines in art, design, and communication. By considering print as a made object, the book integrates narratives of production and reception at a time when digital technology appears to offer both roles to its readers.