Buying into Classes: The Practice of Book Selection in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Over the last three decades, the social and cultural “history of the book” associated with Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin, Donald McKenzie, Robert Darnton, and Roger Chartier has become what The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1991 called a “hot topic.”‘ In large part, book history has attracted such widespread interest because, as Darnton observes, it risks “interdisciplinarity run riot.”2 Fundamentally influenced by Febvre’s work as a founder of the journal Annales d’histoire economique et sociale, Febvre and Martin’s foundational L’Apparition du Livre of 1958 (published in English as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 14501800) certainly launched book history as a form of “l’histoire totale,” undertaking to analyze the overall “influence and the practical significance of the printed book during the first 300 years of its existence.”3 Despite considerable differences in methods and topical interests, the most prominent shapers of book history since Febvre and Martin follow their basic view of book history as a massive, interdisciplinary project. Darnton, for instance, calls on book history to analyze “the entire communication process” in “all its variations over space and time and in all its relations with other systems, economic, social, political, and cultural, in the surrounding environment.”4 Since the publication of “Printers of the Mind” in 1969, McKenzie has in a related way been practicing and calling for a “sociology of texts” that not only analyzes how “the material forms of books, the non-verbal elements of the typographic notations