Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies

transforming the field by exceeding or subverting its determinations”. See also Jarad Zimbler’s nuanced critique (2009), which draws on South African literary examples in support of its arguments.

      6Much of this and the preceding paragraph draws on formulations I offered in the introduction to a special issue of English Studies in Africa devoted to “Histories of the Book in Southern Africa” (see Van der Vlies 2004) and in the introductory chapter to my 2007 monograph, South African Textual Cultures.

      7For example, the three-volume University of Queensland Press A History of the Book in Australia (including volumes edited by Wallace Kirsop on the period to 1890 [forthcoming], Martyn Lyons and John Arnold on the period 1891–1945 [2001], and Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright on the period 1946–2005 [2006]), and the three-volume History of the Book in Canada, published by the University of Toronto Press under the general editorship of Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Yvan Lamonde (2004–07). The US and British national history projects are the University of North Carolina Press’s A History of the Book in America (five volumes to 2009), and Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (six volumes published to date, with a seventh, on Britain in the twentieth century, forthcoming under the editorship of Andrew Nash, Claire Squires and Ian Willison).

      8For important work on South Asian histories of the book (and of script and print), see Gupta and Chakravorty (2004; 2008). Ruvani Ranasinha (2007) and Sarah Brouillette (2007) have both written about the global fates of South Asian writers.

      9These include introductory and survey essays on the history of the book and of script and print cultures in sub-Saharan Africa (Van der Vlies 2010), the Muslim world (Roper 2010), the Indian subcontinent (Gupta 2010), South-east Asia (Wieringa 2010; Igunma 2010), Australia (Morrison 2010), New Zealand (Rogers 2010), Canada (Fleming 2010) and Latin America (Roldán Vera 2010).

      10I am indebted in part to Hofmeyr and Kriel, for their useful survey (2006, especially 10–14).

      11Anna H. Smith’s account of the spread of printing in South Africa (1971) has not been bettered, although doubtless new material has been uncovered that might contribute to a revised edition.

      12Poliva (1968, 52) writes engagingly about Nehemia Dov Hoffmann (1860–1928), pioneer Prussian-born printer and journalist who, having worked in Berlin and New York, arrived in Johannesburg in 1889, bringing with him the first “printer’s type in Yiddish characters”. Hoffman published Der Afrikaner Israelit for six months before returning to Cape Town and becoming a peddler. He later published a weekly called Haor, which ran for five years and, with a British Jewish immigrant, Der Yiddisher Herald, which lasted two years (Poliva 1968, 53–54). Mendelsohn and Shain’s The Jews in South Africa (2008) makes brief mention of Hoffmann, and of Yiddish publishing and intellectual life in District Six (see Mendelsohn & Shain 2008, 79, 82).

      13See Van der Vlies and Flanery (2008) further on “South African Cultural Texts and the Global Mediascape”, the title of their special issue of Scrutiny2 on the topic.

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