The History of the Book and Libraries: Theories and Practices

This article gives an account of the development of the history of the book as a distinctive discipline and its relation to bibliography and social history, two disciplines that are complementary but that have too often been practiced selectively in the past, giving rise to the tension between Anglo-American analytical bibliography and French social history. The second part of the article includes some of the major trends in the scholarship of the last twenty years and some major unresolved issues that still must be addressed.