A thorough rethinking of a field deserves to take a shape that is in itself new. Interacting with Print delivers on this premise, reworking the history of print through a unique effort in authorial collaboration. The book itself is not a typical monograph—rather, it is a “multigraph,” the collective work of twenty-two scholars who together have assembled an alphabetically arranged tour of key concepts for the study of print culture, from Anthologies and Binding to Publicity and Taste. Each entry builds on its term in order to resituate print and book history within a broader media ecology throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The central theme is interactivity, in three senses: people interacting with print; print interacting with the non-print media that it has long been thought, erroneously, to have displaced; and people interacting with each other through print. The resulting book will introduce new energy to the field of print studies and lead to considerable new avenues of investigation.

The Multigraph Collective is a team of twenty-two scholars at sixteen universities in Canada, the US, and the UK. Its members are Mark Algee-Hewitt, Angela Borchert, David Brewer, Thora Brylowe, Julia Carlson, Brian Cowan, Susan Dalton, Marie-Claude Felton, Michael Gamer, Paul Keen, Michelle Levy, Michael Macovski, Nicholas Mason, Nikola von Merveldt, Tom Mole, Andrew Piper, Dahlia Porter, Jonathan Sachs, Diana Solomon, Andrew Stauffer, Richard Taws, and Chad Wellmon. As the larger group came together, Piper had the idea of disseminating the work through an ambitious collaboration: a jointly authored book that would draw on everyone’s research interests, with writing and editing undertaken electronically, via wiki software. Anyone would be able to write or revise, insert or delete, expound or qualify. The book wouldn’t have one author but 22, each taking responsibility for all of its contents: instead of a monograph, it would be a “multigraph.” (The word wasn’t Piper’s originally, but it fit.) And so a massive collaborative enterprise—which came to be called the Multigraph Collective—was born.