Disciplining the Author: A Look at the Author-Printer Relationship in America

Cécile Cottenet (1)

1 LERMA - Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone

The European tradition of printers’ manuals initiated in the early seventeenth century was vigorously perpetuated in the United States throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although first intended for the print shop, these manuals also aimed at teaching authors the mechanics of printing, in order to maintain a valuable partnership between printer and author. At the turn of the twentieth century, these texts, along with readers’ and publishers’ guidebooks, constructed a technical, professional and ideological discourse on bookmaking. This analysis of some eighteen volumes published between 1870 and 1918 focuses on the tensions between the printing house and the author, largely induced by the acceleration of mechanical tasks. It thus attempts to highlight the specificities of a discourse on bookmaking that reflects both how printers were coming to terms with mechanisation (or the threat thereof), and how they required the author’s contribution in an effort, perhaps, to ascertain the artistic and intellectual dimension of printing.

Mots clés: Book history; United States; printing history; authorship

Domaines: Histoire; Littératures

Cécile Cottenet. Disciplining the Author: A Look at the Author-Printer Relationship in America. Editions Universitaires de Lorraine. From Text(s) to Book(s) : Studies in the Production and Editorial Process, 4, 2014, Book Practices & Textual Itineraries. ⟨halshs-01310055⟩