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Qing Guo, Wendorf, Richard. Printing History and Cultural Change: Fashioning the Modern English Text in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 60, Issue 4, October 2024, Pages 513–514, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqae064
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With this monograph, Wendorf provides a positive answer to the general challenge posed by D. F. Mackenzie to scholars of the history of the book several decades ago: ‘is bibliotextual history possible, as a fine conjunction of literary, cultural, social, economic, material and behavioural history expressed in the world of the book?’ (p. 3). To meet this challenge, Wendorf focuses on the development of the modern English book during the middle decades of the eighteenth century through an analysis of over 2,000 books published between 1740 and 1780. With the employment of heavy capitalization and italicization, the typographical appearance of the Old Style (as the author terms it) of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries gradually transformed into its contemporary form in England, the American colonies and Dublin. Wendorf charts this movement through visual examples and tables, reflecting the gradual abandonment of capital letters (majuscules) as well as the standardization of quotation marks; use of italics, caps and small caps; standardized title pages; and the disappearance of the long ‘s’. Such fundamental change in printing conventions from the Old Style to the New is mapped in five-year increments which reveal that the appearance of the modern page in English began to emerge around 1765 and that, once established, the New Style quickly found acceptance throughout the printing trades.
