ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two literary representations of book culture suggested by V S Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur and Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease in order to outline the value attached to books and print culture. In these literary examples of attitudes towards book culture from within Anglophone West African and Caribbean writing, it explores how value, as such, is generated through the identification of modernity and social mobility with authorship, print and books in ways that lend a magical mystique and status to books and authors. Then to defamiliarise the production and consumption of literary material, the chapter addresses Pierre Bourdieu’s contributions to the methodology of book history, namely, his theorisation of the field of cultural production. The discussion includes the contexts of print and authorship to ask if—and how—book and print culture in the Anglophone Caribbean and West Africa melds with existing structures and contexts in London in the postwar period.
