Publications Exchanges in Distribution

Abstract

Expanding the concept of ownership to include distributorship allows consideration of a book route that diverges from circuits often associated with book culture studies. In particular, as this article outlines, organized publications exchanges—which temporarily own and distribute—present opportunities for understanding the spread of books from a different perspective. To demonstrate the research potential of exchanges, the article retraces the path of a single copy of a book over the twentieth century through a continental medical publications exchange, from its donation by the author to a county medical library outside Philadelphia, through its shipment to Toronto where it was housed in two medical libraries, and its brief return to Philadelphia in a personal collection in 2000. As the discussion suggests, this book, The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, its publication and its subsequent transnational peregrinations, spotlight the field of medicine with respect to contemporaneous trends in medical education, publishing, and library movements.

An Author’s Delusion in Victorian Canada: Richard Maurice Bucke and Transnational Publishing of Popular Science

“…13 Just as the focus on place moved from "center-periphery models" to "multimodal networks of interactions between sites" in histories of science, according to Michael Worboys, 14 so too have studies of formal scientific literature exchanges shown the ebb and flow of publications through space and time, through shared sites of distribution after readers' initial acquisition of books from publishers and retailers. 15 General book history studies have also recently revealed that publications circulated in ways independent of commercial networks established by metropolitan printers, publishers, and booksellers. 16 In related fields of historical enquiry, this focus on circulation, movement, and exchange in global processes that are not contained within nations is known as transnationalism.…”