Intermediating the Book Beautiful: Shakespeare at the Doves Press

Published in #Bard, special issue of _Shakespeare Quarterly_ edited by Douglas Lanier, this essay combines the arguments of present-day neuroscience about “hard-wired” letter-recognition in the brain and theories of “intermediality” or movement between or among aesthetic methods of sensory communication with the mystical early twentieth-century theories of bookness, reading, and vision propounded by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, co-founder and co-director of the Doves Press. Specifically, it argues for the early twentieth-century fine press edition as a critical, as well as an aesthetic, intervention that intermediates public play-going and private reading. Moreover, it identifies the specific qualities of bookness, and the particular quiddities of type, that enable this intermediality. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663526/summar