Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture
The new history of the book has constituted a vibrant academic field in recent years, and theories of print culture have moved to the center of much scholarly discourse. One might think typography would be a basic element in the construction of these theories, yet if only we would pay careful attention to detail, Joseph A. Dane argues, we would find something else entirely: that a careful consideration of typography serves not as a material support to prevailing theories of print but, rather, as a recalcitrant counter-voice to them.

In Out of Sorts Dane continues his examination of the ways in which the grand narratives of book history mask what we might actually learn by looking at books themselves. He considers the differences between internal and external evidence for the nature of the type used by Gutenberg and the curious disconnection between the two, and he explores how descriptions of typesetting devices from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been projected back onto the fifteenth to make the earlier period not more accessible but less. In subsequent chapters, he considers topics that include the modern mythologies of so-called gothic typefaces, the presence of nontypographical elements in typographical form, and the assumptions that underlie the electronic editions of a medieval poem or the visual representation of typographical history in nineteenth-century studies of the subject.

Is Dane one of the most original or most traditional of historians of print? In Out of Sorts he demonstrates that it may well be possible to be both things at once.

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Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture
The new history of the book has constituted a vibrant academic field in recent years, and theories of print culture have moved to the center of much scholarly discourse. One might think typography would be a basic element in the construction of these theories, yet if only we would pay careful attention to detail, Joseph A. Dane argues, we would find something else entirely: that a careful consideration of typography serves not as a material support to prevailing theories of print but, rather, as a recalcitrant counter-voice to them.

In Out of Sorts Dane continues his examination of the ways in which the grand narratives of book history mask what we might actually learn by looking at books themselves. He considers the differences between internal and external evidence for the nature of the type used by Gutenberg and the curious disconnection between the two, and he explores how descriptions of typesetting devices from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been projected back onto the fifteenth to make the earlier period not more accessible but less. In subsequent chapters, he considers topics that include the modern mythologies of so-called gothic typefaces, the presence of nontypographical elements in typographical form, and the assumptions that underlie the electronic editions of a medieval poem or the visual representation of typographical history in nineteenth-century studies of the subject.

Is Dane one of the most original or most traditional of historians of print? In Out of Sorts he demonstrates that it may well be possible to be both things at once.

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Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture

Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture

by Joseph A. Dane
Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture

Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture

by Joseph A. Dane

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Overview

The new history of the book has constituted a vibrant academic field in recent years, and theories of print culture have moved to the center of much scholarly discourse. One might think typography would be a basic element in the construction of these theories, yet if only we would pay careful attention to detail, Joseph A. Dane argues, we would find something else entirely: that a careful consideration of typography serves not as a material support to prevailing theories of print but, rather, as a recalcitrant counter-voice to them.

In Out of Sorts Dane continues his examination of the ways in which the grand narratives of book history mask what we might actually learn by looking at books themselves. He considers the differences between internal and external evidence for the nature of the type used by Gutenberg and the curious disconnection between the two, and he explores how descriptions of typesetting devices from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been projected back onto the fifteenth to make the earlier period not more accessible but less. In subsequent chapters, he considers topics that include the modern mythologies of so-called gothic typefaces, the presence of nontypographical elements in typographical form, and the assumptions that underlie the electronic editions of a medieval poem or the visual representation of typographical history in nineteenth-century studies of the subject.

Is Dane one of the most original or most traditional of historians of print? In Out of Sorts he demonstrates that it may well be possible to be both things at once.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780812242942
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date: 12/03/2010
Series: Material Texts
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Joseph A. Dane is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of numerous books, including The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Analysis.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations ix
List of Illustrations
Introduction

PART I . OUT OF SORTS
Chapter One. On the Continuity of Continuity: Print Culture Mythology and the Type of the Gutenberg Bible (B42)
Chapter Two. Gottfried Zedler and the Twentieth-Century History of DK Type
Chapter Three. The Voodoo Economics of Space: From Gothic to Roman
Chapter Four. The Typographical Gothic: A Cautionary Note on the Title Page to Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

INTERLUDE
At the Typographical Altar: Interlude for Randall McLeod

PART I I . IMAGES AND TEXTS
Chapter Five. Fists and Filiations in Early Chaucer Folios (1532-1602)
Chapter Six. Editorial and Typographical Diplomacy in the Piers Plowman Archive
Chapter Seven. The Representation of Representation: Versions of Linear Perspective
Chapter Eight. Typographical Antiquity in Thomas Frognall Dibdin's Typographical Antiquities
Conclusion: Print Culture Redivivus/Note on a Note by Walt Whitman

Notes
Principal Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments

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