Histories of geography are, by their very nature, selective enterprises. The apparent tendency of geographers to disparage particular periods of the discipline’s history, at the same time as exalting others, is characteristic of the way in which progress has been measured, relevance defined, and novelty identified. Yet, whilst other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences actively engage with their textual canons and founding figures, geographers have notoriously avoided doing so. In this paper, we consider why this has been the case and how different conceptions of canonicity have mattered to the ways in which the history of geography and its intellectual foundations have been narrated. In thinking through the significance of geography’s texts to the ways we imagine the discipline – its past, present, and future – we consider how processes of remembering and forgetting have been employed to serve certain intellectual and ideological agendas. We conclude by advocating a more serious engagement with geography’s textual legacy: one which might benefit not only disciplinary historiography but also disciplinary consciousness, and thus the future of geography itself.

Whilst geography has formed an important yet often unacknowledged component in the description and analysis of print culture, its specific and potential contribution to understanding the making, distribution and reading of books has yet to be outlined fully. This paper seeks to describe the different ways in which Ellen Churchill Semple's 1911 volume Influences of geographic environment was received and understood – to explain why it was read both as a timely manifesto for a scientific approach to geographical research, and as a text which might damage the discipline's legitimacy. In exploring Influences’ trajectory of diffusion, I argue that it is possible to outline a geography of its reception – to reveal a locational particularity in its reading and reviewing. In so doing, I address questions relating to the epistemic and methodological bases of book geography, and describe the contribution that geography can make to explaining how knowledge and ideas, in textual form, are communicated and received.

This paper examines the relationships between authorship and editing in the production of narratives of travel and exploration. The context to the paper is the widespread interest in exploration and travel writing in geography and related fields, and the materialist hermeneutic apparent in the conjunction of geography, book history and the history of science. Through assessment of archival and printed evidence relating to the authorship and editing of books of travel and exploration published by the leading British publisher, John Murray, the paper examines the redactive relationships between writer and editor-publisher, illustrates the means by which authors sought status in their words and explores how Murray authorised explorers' words and works. In addressing the complex connections between author and editor, manuscript and print, private correspondence and public audience, the paper has implications for researchers in geography interested in the specific relationships between writing and print, and in the general connections between geography, book history and the history of science.key words geography travel narratives materialist hermeneutics authorship editorial redaction exploration

This paper traces the origins and recent history of the geography of the book: an interdisciplinary focus of study for geographers, book historians and historians of science. In describing this field's twin concern with geography in books and with the geography of books, the paper examines the ways in which printed texts matter to the study of geography's discursive and disciplinary histories and the contributions that geography, in turn, can make to explaining the circulation and reception of knowledge in print. Through an attention to the making and movement of texts, the paper examines how questions of geography inform understandings of the uneven diffusion and varied reception of knowledge and ideas. In addressing geography's print culture, and in examining geographies of reading, the paper reflects on the significance of books to the making of geographical knowledge and to the significance of geography in accounting for the making of textual meaning.

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