BiblioVault - Books about Fyfe, Aileen

A History of Scientific Journals

Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665–2015

Aileen Fyfe, Noah Moxham, Julie Mcdougall-Waters, and Camilla Mørk Røstvik

University College London, 2022

A comprehensive history of scientific publishing and its impact on scientific discourse.

Modern scientific research has changed significantly since the days of Isaac Newton, with professionalized, collaborative, and international networks that engage a more diverse community of researchers. Yet, the long history of scientific publishing reveals a deep mutual relationship between how academic discourse develops and what (and how) research is published. With unique insights from the Royal Society of London’s comprehensive archives spanning 350 years of scientific journal publishing, A History of Scientific Journals illustrates the entangled histories of scientific publishing and professional discourses. This volume provides insights into the editorial management, business practices, and financial difficulties of journals such as Philosophical Transactions, which was first published in 1665 and has published papers by Newton, Darwin, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Stephen Hawking. Highly illustrated with photographs of historic archived documents, including early publications and editorial annotations, this history extends to the present day and includes a look at digital journal publication and the open-access movement, making the book's publication through UCL Press both appropriate and symbiotic.

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Science and Salvation

Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain

Aileen Fyfe

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Threatened by the proliferation of cheap, mass-produced publications, the Religious Tract Society issued a series of publications on popular science during the 1840s. The books were intended to counter the developing notion that science and faith were mutually exclusive, and the Society's authors employed a full repertoire of evangelical techniques—low prices, simple language, carefully structured narratives—to convert their readers. The application of such techniques to popular science resulted in one of the most widely available sources of information on the sciences in the Victorian era.

A fascinating study of the tenuous relationship between science and religion in evangelical publishing, Science and Salvation examines questions of practice and faith from a fresh perspective. Rather than highlighting works by expert men of science, Aileen Fyfe instead considers a group of relatively undistinguished authors who used thinly veiled Christian rhetoric to educate first, but to convert as well. This important volume is destined to become essential reading for historians of science, religion, and publishing alike.

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Science in the Marketplace

Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences

Edited by Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The nineteenth century was an age of transformation in science, when scientists were rewarded for their startling new discoveries with increased social status and authority. But it was also a time when ordinary people from across the social spectrum were given the opportunity to participate in science, for education, entertainment, or both. In Victorian Britain science could be encountered in myriad forms and in countless locations: in panoramic shows, exhibitions, and galleries; in city museums and country houses; in popular lectures; and even in domestic conversations that revolved around the latest books and periodicals.

Science in the Marketplace reveals this other side of Victorian scientific life by placing the sciences in the wider cultural marketplace, ultimately showing that the creation of new sites and audiences was just as crucial to the growing public interest in science as were the scientists themselves. By focusing attention on the scientific audience, as opposed to the scientific community or self-styled popularizers, Science in the Marketplace ably links larger societal changes—in literacy, in industrial technologies, and in leisure—to the evolution of “popular science.”

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Steam-Powered Knowledge

William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820-1860

Aileen Fyfe

University of Chicago Press, 2012

With the overwhelming amount of new information that bombards us each day, it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when the widespread availability of the printed word was a novelty. In early nineteenth-century Britain, print was not novel—Gutenberg’s printing press had been around for nearly four centuries—but printed matter was still a rare and relatively expensive luxury. All this changed, however, as publishers began employing new technologies to astounding effect, mass-producing instructive and educational books and magazines and revolutionizing how knowledge was disseminated to the general public.

In Steam-Powered Knowledge, Aileen Fyfe explores the activities of William Chambers and the W. & R. Chambers publishing firm during its formative years, documenting for the first time how new technologies were integrated into existing business systems. Chambers was one of the first publishers to abandon traditional skills associated with hand printing, instead favoring the latest innovations in printing processes and machinery: machine-made paper, stereotyping, and, especially, printing machines driven by steam power. The mid-nineteenth century also witnessed dramatic advances in transportation, and Chambers used proliferating railway networks and steamship routes to speed up communication and distribution. As a result, his high-tech publishing firm became an exemplar of commercial success by 1850 and outlived all of its rivals in the business of cheap instructive print. Fyfe follows Chambers’s journey from small-time bookseller and self-trained hand-press printer to wealthy and successful publisher of popular educational books on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating along the way the profound effects of his and his fellow publishers’ willingness, or unwillingness, to incorporate these technological innovations into their businesses.

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The Victorian Information Revolution

Aileen Fyfe

Harvard University Press