"A fiendishly clever dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange is a fresh, stylized, and decidedly original debut about the dangers of technology and the power of the printed word"--

Rich authoritative study of the book before Gutenberg. Nearly 200 photographic facsimiles of priceless documents. Comprehensive.

"The Gilded Page is the story of the written word in the pre-Gutenberg age. Ranging from the earliest intact book in Europe, to the only known literary manuscript to be written in Shakespeare's hand, scholar Mary Wellesley reveals the secret lives of these literary and artistic treasures. Traipsing through the remarkable history, she recounts fires (the only surviving Beowulf manuscript is singed at its edges, losing a bit of its matter every decade)...

"This volume explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Wigalois / Viduvilt adaptations grow from a multistage process: a German text adapted into Yiddish adapted into German, creating adaptations actively shaped by a minority culture within a majority culture. The Knight without Boundaries examines...

"In 1823, Sir Henry Bunbury discovered a badly bound volume of twelve Shakespeare plays in a closet of his manor house. Nearly all of the plays were first editions, but one stood out as especially noteworthy: a previously unknown text of Hamlet that predated all other versions ... Q1, as the text is known, has been declared a rough draft, a memorial reconstruction, and a pre-Shakespearean "ur-Hamlet," among other things ... Zachary Lesser examines...