SharpWeb.org
Title
SHARP Web
Description
INTRODUCTION
"Book history," reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, has become "a particularly hot topic in the humanities and not just in the United States." The history of the book is not only about books per se: broadly speaking, it concerns the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print, including newspapers, periodicals, and ephemera. Book historians study the social, cultural, and economic history of authorship; the history of the book trade, copyright, censorship, and underground publishing; the publishing histories of particular literary works, authors, editors, imprints, and literary agents; the spread of literacy and book distribution; canon formation and the politics of literary criticism; libraries, reading habits, and reader response.
A GLOBAL SCHOLARLY NETWORK
The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing was created in 1991 to provide a global network for book historians, who until then had usually worked in isolation. SHARP now has over 1000 members in over 20 countries, including professors of literature, historians, librarians, publishing professionals, sociologists, bibliophiles, classicists, booksellers, art historians, reading instructors, and independent scholars.
SHARP works in concert with a number of affiliated scholarly organizations around the world to encourage the study of book history. We were very proud that one of these societies, the American Printing History Association, chose SHARP as the winner of its Institutional Award for 2001. This award is given each year to an institution that has made "distinguished contributions to the study, recording, preservation, or dissemination of printing history." Past recipients have included the Gutenberg Museum, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the St Bride Printing Library and the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. Accepting the award for SHARP, the Society's co-founder and first president, Jonathan Rose, delivered an address in which he re-envisioned the field's future as an academic discipline. Since that time SHARP has continued to be an advocate, and a home, for historians of the book all over the world.
