Andrew Nash on the value of Publishers' Archives
Andrew Nash is Reader in Book History at the Institute of English Studies, University of London (a leading book history scholar in other words) and Director of the London Rare Books School.
We sat down in the stacks at the Mark Longman "Books about Books" Library at the University of Reading (well, actually the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading which is somehow connected to the University and its publishers' archives collections) to talk about\xa0a course Andrew teaches \u200bat the London Rare Book School on how to use/work with publishers' archives.
Th\u200bough this topic may sound a \u200btad niche, even for this podcast, it's not. Andrew makes the convincing \u200bc\u200base that publishers' archives are in fact \u200bof interest to many scholars, and have valu\u200be precisely because they can be studied from many\u200b different economic, social, \u200band cultural\u200b perspectives. Publishers' archives\u200b yield, among other things, fascinating, detailed information about how knowledge and "culture" is \u201cmade public\u201d in society. They\u2019re not just about author-publisher correspondence\u200bs, though these in themselves are justly recognized and valued as essential documents of cultural heritage, no, they\u2019re about providing scholars, and the world at large, with rich source documentation, from which all of us can better understand...yes, everything!
Archives referenced during our conversation include those of Allen & Unwin, Chatto and Windus, Longmans, John Murray, George Routledge, and The Hogarth Press.