This title was first published in 2000: The essays in this collection re-examine the phenomenon of "free print" in print culture. By focusing on free print the volume offers perspectives in the cultural history of textual transmission from the early-18th century to the mid-20th century. "Publishing" in the sense of making the print public, embraces the free and often unsolicited distribution of religious literature, political propaganda, and civic and personal gifts. The free print examined here includes gift-books; advertisements and commemorations; the promotion of knowledge, institutions and services; commercial and philanthropic lobbying; religious and missionary activity; and political propaganda both official and underground. Broad issues range from the consideration of press finances, government intervention, and private and institutional patronage, to textual familiarity and social ritual. The approach is deliberately comparative. Ten established scholars of book and printing history, who look at very different regions and periods, test the nature of the alleged authority of print and the apparent value of the commercial tag through the study of print which arrives unbidden in the hands of its consumers. The chapters in this volume are based on papers first given at the "Print for Free" conference organized by the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust in September 1996.
1 Print for Free: Unsolicited Literature in ComparativePerspective,2 A
Free Transmission of Knowledge: The Literary Gifts and Reception of an
Eighteenth-Century Scholar,3 Free Flattery or Servile Tribute? Oxford and
Cambridge Commemorative Poetry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 4
The Abolition Blunderbuss: Free Publishing and British Abolition
Propaganda, 1780-1838,5 Free for All: Broadsides on the Streets of New
Orleans, 1764-1900,6 The Nineteenth-Century Bible Society and The Evil of
Gratuitous Distribution,7 Sent to the Wilderness: Mission Literature in
Colonial America,8 Between Text and Reader: The Experience of Christian
Missionaries in Bengal, 1800-50,9 Limits to Propaganda: Soviet Power and the
Peasant reader in the 1920s, 10 Air-Borne Culture: Propaganda Leaflets over
Occupied France in the Second World War,11 Mau M aus War of Words: The
Battle of the Pamphlets. Index.
James Raven
