This English author is deeply engaged with the world of books and the history of libraries. His works focus on bibliography and library history, often drawing from the rich environment of university libraries. He delves into the detailed examination of collections and their historical development, bringing the fascinating world of books and their stewardship through the centuries to readers. His writings offer valuable insights into the significance and preservation of written cultural heritage.
Explores how the idea of rare books was shaped by collectors, traders and libraries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Using examples from across Europe, David McKitterick looks at how rare books developed from being desirable objects of largely private interest to become public and even national concerns.
The years 1830-1914 witnessed a revolution in the manufacture and use of books as great as that in the fifteenth century. Using new technology in printing, paper-making and binding, publishers worked with authors and illustrators to meet ever-growing and more varied demands from a population seeking books at all price levels. The essays by leading book historians in this volume show how books became cheap, how publishers used the magazine and newspaper markets to extend their influence, and how book ownership became universal for the first time. The fullest account ever published of the nineteenth-century revolution in printing, publishing and bookselling, this volume brings the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain up to a point when the world of books took on a recognisably modern form.
Tracing a mid-nineteenth-century revolution in understandings of old and second-hand books, David McKitterick reveals a transformation in values that underpins bibliography, access and collecting today. This study illuminates how exhibitions, libraries, booksellers, scholars and popular writers all contributed to the modern world of book studies.
In A Changing View from Amsterdam ,the esteemed Cambridge librarian David McKitterick takes the readers back to the days of Frederick Muller (1817–81), the most important Dutch bookseller of his time, and offers an absorbing portrait of the nineteenth-century antiquarian book trade in Europe. McKitterick examines bookselling and the international trade in both new and old books as a frame for understanding the history of the book. Further, he considers how this history will affect the future development of the book.