Publishing is one of the oldest and most influential businesses in the world. It remains an essential creative and knowledge industry, worth over $140 billion a year, which continues to shape our education and culture. Two trends make this a particularly exciting time. The first is the...

This book highlights the contribution of language standardization to the economic rise of the West between 1600 and 1860. Previous studies have been unable to explain why during this period almost all industrial innovation was confined to small areas around the main cultural centers of three...

This book foregrounds the pressures that three transformative technologies in the long sixteenth century-the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass-placed on long-held literary practices, as well as on cultural and social structures. Sheila J. Nayar disinters the clash between...