ABSTRACT
ALL BOOKS ARE MATERIAL COMMODITIEs-printed, bound, advertised, sold, excerpted, reprinted, reviewed, read, and revised. They are part of a capitalist process of literary production that was at a critical juncture in the r840s'. As a manuscript, vestiges would have circulated among a few friends in Edinburgh. As a book, it served an extraordinary range of readers and gained a huge variety of new meanings. The manufacture of the first edition reveals only a small part of this process. Further editions appeared in different forms, and these were multiplied by reviews, excerpts, advertisements, editorials, and translations. The work was not a stable entity, but the sum total of an expanding array of representations.
