Author: Tom Mole

Tom Mole is Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His research interests include: book history and print culture; literature of the Romantic period in Britain, especially Lord Byron; Romantic periodicals and reviews; the cultural history of celebrity; and the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity. Contact him at tom.mole@ed.ac.uk.

What the Victorians commended for SHARP Book History Prize

What the Victorians Made of Romanticism has received the commendation (i.e. runner up) for the DeLong Prize for Book History presented by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) for ‘the best book on any aspect of the creation, dissemination, or uses of script or print published in the previous year’.  The award was announced at the SHARP conference in Sydney on 12 July 2018.  The winning book was Eric Marshall White’s Editio Princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible.

Broadview Intro to Book History Reviewed in JEBS

The Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society has published a review of The Broadview Introduction to Book History.  The reviewer, Stephen W. Brown of Trent University, describes the book as ‘a compact and accessible primer that wears its considerable erudition with comfortable humility’.  He writes: ‘the authors have adopted an appropriately conversational tone that conveys the unabashed pleasure they take from their subject, one that gives their prose the feel of a personal tutorial with that rare breed of tutor whose passion makes you want to study whatever they’re teaching.’  The review appears in JEBS 12 (2017), 87-89.

The Interacting with Print Multigraph is Here!

Interacting with Print: Keywords for the Age of Print Saturation has been published by the University of Chicago Press.  This is a ‘multigraph’ written by a collective of 22 scholars with the help of a dedicated wiki.  It’s the major output of the Interacting with Print research group, which I led from 2008-2013.  Writing it was an incredible collaborative experience, which completely changed my understanding of how scholars in the humanities might work together.  The book offers a new approach to the history of print culture in Europe from 1750-1900, based on the concept of interactivity.  We hope it will turn out to be an important intervention in the field, stimulating future work.