AustLit

'Robert Bell's Printing Career

'Robert Bell (1835-1876) departed Liverpool on Sunday 15 June 1862 in the Great Britain, which crossed the equator seventeen days out, during which voyage "the ship ran a record 380 knots in twenty-four hours" and arrived in Hobson's Bay on 14 August 1862 carrying the largest number of passengers (600) to be brought out "in one vessel for several years." Bell was noticed in the Melbourne press in March 1873 as a member of the Royal Society of Victoria, where he delivered a paper on the invention of his Eclectic Press, which, he described to members of the society at the first meeting of the year and which was entered in the exhibition catalogue as "No. 945." His family (wife Sarah, and sons Harcourt, aged four, and Robert, aged one) followed him out a year later, leaving Liverpool in the Southern Ocean, in the middle of May 1863 as unassisted passengers in company with 50 married couples and their children sponsored by the newly-formed Victoria Emigrants' Assistance Society.' (Introduction)

'Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies builds on his accomplished record as an editor and editorial theorist, most recently in Securing the Past (2009) and Biography of a Book (2013), to, quite fittingly, revise his idea of the literary work and its conceptual and practical connections to editing. As the second half of the title suggests, Eggert foregrounds the role of the reader here in ways that have been more implicit, though hardly obscured, in his previous contributions to the discipline, with the ultimate aim of (re)connecting readerly, book historical, and editorial approaches to “ those vehicles of material textuality that, for simplicity, we call books” (8). Accordingly, the focus of this inquiry is on the editorial presentation of books (that is, of the documents underlying an edition, especially in electronic form) more so than on the artistic and architectural examples that have drawn Eggert’s previous attention, especially in Securing the Past. (Though The Work and the Reader does occasionally reference non-literary examples, such as Venice’s Teatro la Fenice, and draws from philosophical arguments about the ontology of musical works.)' (Introduction)