ABSTRACT
The central tenet of book history may be simple to grasp but the discipline goes by a confusingly wide range of names. Chronologically, the earliest and in many ways most significant ancestor discipline of book history has been historical studies, specifically the so-called Annales school of social history that flourished in France from roughly the 1930s to the 1950s. The most recent attempts to redraw book history’s governing conceptual models position the disruptive effects of digital culture front and centre, noting how digital technologies pervade all aspects of the twenty-first-century book world. Related to the false dichotomy that the book belongs to ‘history’ and other media are the province of ‘communication or cultural studies’ is book history’s long-standing tendency to analyse the book in isolation from other media formats. The chapter concludes by acknowledging some weaknesses of the book history model, at least as the discipline has evolved to date.
