PRHB: Penn Reviews in the History of the Book

This page represents the first, still preliminary announcement of PRHB. See below for information about
  1. the intended scope of PRHB
  2. guidelines on contributing to PRHB
  3. how to subscribe to PRHB
  4. PRHB's Editorial Board
More information will be added, including links to archived reviews, as these start to become available during the current calendar year 1998.

  1. SCOPE

    2. PHRB intends to review new publications--monographs as well as occasional articles--in the burgeoning fields associated with the history of the book and material texts. Focusing primarily on the book within European and European-influenced cultures, PHRB will review publications in fields that include:

    1. traditional bibliography and editorial theory and practice;

    2. the nature of oral, pre-literate cultures and of manuscript cultures;

    3. the transition from oral to literate cultures;

    4. the later transitions from scroll to codex, and from manuscript to printed book, and the varied interrelationships between these formats;

    5. printing and publishing history;

    6. readership, circulation, and literacy studies; and

    7. investigations of ephemeral and popular formats, including periodicals, advertising, and their audiences.
    On occasion, the Editors may commission retrospective reviews of the ongoing influence of particularly influential works in the field's past or review essays that look at the current situation of work in a specific area of concern. PRHB's editors envisage most reviews of current publications as short. When comment or the nature of a publication suggests the value of distributing alternative points of view, the Editors will circulate longer reviews or "letters to the Editors" to subscribers.

    We intend PRHB to exist only as a refereed online journal. No printed product is planned.

    Our point is to provide timely information about, and an initial evaluative review of, the literature appearing in a field that is still in process of self-definition even as it is also producing an already large and rapidly growing body of important scholarly work.

  2. GUIDELINES

    3. For the time being, reviews and reviewers will be solicited by the Editorial Board. Guidelines to submissions will appear as PHRB establishes itself.

  3. SUBSCRIPTIONS

  4. EDITORIAL BOARD

    5. A distinguished Editorial Board has agreed to initiate PHRB and oversee its editorial content. Members of the Editorial Board whose names are highlighted below currently serve as initial contacts for PRHB. Members include:

Return to top of page or to information about the intended scope of PRHB, guidelines on contributing to PRHB, how to subscribe to PRHB, and PRHB's Editorial Board.

Last update: 12 November 1998.