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The Creation of the Modern English Page (and Book!)
by Professor Richard Wendorf FSA
Building on the publication of my book ‘Printing History and Cultural Change’ (OUP, 2022), I propose to focus on the development of the modern English page during the central decades of the eighteenth century. In London – but also in Dublin and the American colonies – the heavily capitalized and italicized texts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries slowly began to appear in their modern guise, with standardized capitalization, quotation marks, use of italics and caps and small caps, and title pages – and with the disappearance of the long ‘s.’ I chart this movement through visual examples as well as a table that reflects my scrutiny of over 2,000 books published in London between 1740 and 1780.
I also consider the relationship of this ‘New Style’ of printing to the earliest examples of printing in Britain, focusing on the development of the Bible during the early modern period. I then widen my focus a great deal by asking why these changes occurred during this particular period in the eighteenth century. To answer this question, I examine a number of other crucial changes in the cultural sphere: the publication of Johnson’s dictionary (1755), the reform of the calendar (1752), and the imposition of house numbers in London (1762), all of which indicate a cultural movement towards refinement, regularity and standardization. I conclude with several quotations – two from the eighteenth century, two from the twentieth – that provide a final spark to the argument I have been making.
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