Book history is an emerging discipline in India. The editors of the present volume began the work of consolidating the dispersed writings in the field with Print Areas: Book History in India (Permanent Black, 2004). Reviewers welcomed that volume as the first significant Indian contribution to an academic discourse that is fast changing literary scholarship and challenging assumptions, if not practices, in the social sciences.

Moveable Type brings together a wider variety of the best recent work on the subject, combining compilation of primary data with rigorous historical analysis. Contributions range from a magisterial history of censorship in colonial India to reflections on the social construction of texts. Several essays focus on the study of historically symptomatic cases, such as the making of a Tamil encyclopaedia and the special number of a Hindi periodical.This collection is the latest in a series that promises to be an indispensable resource for future research in history, literature, textual scholarship, editorial theory, and cultural studies.

Swapan Chakravorty is Professor of English, Jadavpur University. He is the author of Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (1996) and contributory editor of The Oxford Middleton (2007). He has co-edited Print Areas: Book History in India (2004) with Abhijit Gupta. Chakravorty also writes in Bengali and has recently edited Mudraner sanskriti o bangla boi (2007)

Abhijit Gupta is Reader in English, Jadavpur University. He has co-edited Print Areas: Book History in India (2004) with Swapan Chakravorty. He is an associate editor of The Oxford Companion to the Book, and has finished a short-title catalogue of Bengali books over 1801-67.