OMG, I am so exhausted. But in a good way. ( )

We think of books as distilled artifacts of knowledge, immutable, capable of speaking across time and space, the same in the US and in France. But that wasn’t always true—books did differ, printing was a move in a larger game rather than a source of independent artifacts that could be removed from their contexts--and Johns tells the story of how books, and printing, came to be understood as a standard of fixation: how they became trustworthy. For example, “the first folio of Shakespeare boasted some six hundred different typefaces, along with nonuniform spelling and punctuation, erratic divisions and arrangement, mispaging, and irregular proofing. No two copies were identical. It is impossible to decide even that any one is ‘typical.’” Any book could find itself called a “piracy,” because authors and books were part of a struggle for authority. Also challenges the idea that copy-right as initially developed by the Stationers covered only exact copies; Stationers claimed rights against condensed versions, paraphrases, and translations; they even claimed control over entire genres. Stationers and licensers alsohad a complex relationship beforelicensing was abandoned; somelicensors were quite compliant, others didn’t read the books they licensed,and many fell prey to politics for allowing or not allowing certain books through. Long but very interesting, especially given that reliability of print is once again in question now that we have all these revision histories on Wikipedia and so on. ( )

I'll keep this until I read it!