Making, Distributing, Reading, Preserving, Retelling
Nineteenth-century mass industrialisation disrupted the traditional structures,
economies, livelihoods, and collective identity of many skilled occupations. The book trades were no exception. Printers, bookbinders, engravers, and papermakers, for instance, who may have been travelling journeymen in their early days, reinvented themselves as imperial careerists and colony hoppers. They arrived in port cities, like Southampton, on the cusp of migration, and helped fashion dynamic, albeit temporary, spaces for professional, social, and cultural exchange. Local history archives, private family records, museum collections, and digitized newspapers and periodicals all provide entrée into and kaleidoscopic lenses on this world of fluid geographies and global mobilities. Our research project aims to map Southampton’s book trade networks and recover the little-known stories of these transient bookworkers and the places they inhabited. |
The changing face of a city: Above Bar Street, Southampton (1900 / 1940 / 1960)
from F. J. Monkhouse, ed. A Survey of Southampton (1964)
from F. J. Monkhouse, ed. A Survey of Southampton (1964)