“Because text production – in the past and now – frequently aimed at multiplying and spreading its product as much as possible, and because those texts commonly became subject to markets and market forces, historical records of books and the book trade sometimes take the form of lists of quantities” (Weedon 33).

“Unlike social or economic history, book history does not have a long tradition of using quantitative methods. It must learn to borrow methods from economic and business historians, statisticians, and accountants to broaden the scope and definition of the subject” (Weedon 37).

“The chief problem for the book historian wanting to use quantitative methods is the quality of the data. The sample is often small, selected for preservation or significance rather than at random, and the information on how the data were compiled or what they measured is sometimes lost. Primitive administration, bookkeeping, and reporting procedures have created pseudo-statistics in the historical record; even published government figures are not necessarily clear or reliable. Nevertheless, they are all the book historian has and, though we may distrust them, we can also offer a guide to how they should be interpreted through stated degrees of uncertainty, ranges of confidence, and levels of significance (Weedon 39).

“Readers of different occupations can be ordered by income and social status, as an extract from Richard Altick’s list of new borrowers to a branch of Manchester Public Library in 1857–8 shows (1963: 236): Possible class (social status) and income division:
Clergymen, surgeons, other professions 11
Clerks, salesmen, commercial travellers 121
Labourers, porters etc. 29
Errand and office boys 74 (Weedon 37)

“Whatever method is employed it needs to be faithful to the original data and alert to the reasons for its original collection. Nevertheless, data collected for one purpose can often be used by the historian for quite a different one” (Weedon 38).

“Half a century later [1850], printing, newspaper, and publishing companies were forced to keep good accounts by law, and this makes it easier to examine the workings and profitability of their business” (Weedon 38).

“The category of ephemera forms an elusive, sometimes contentious, element in the output of print. ” […] Ephemera challenges definition, and studies have tended to locate the material at the fringes of everyday life […] Indeed, whatever the extent of the electronic revolution, it has not undermined, and in many respects has multiplied, the variety of fugitive or ephemeral print” (Harris 204).

“Across the entire period in which the proliferation and diversification of print was taking place, collectors began to offer a gloss on the meanings and uses of an apparently inchoate mass of individual items. Through their intervention, large areas of what is still included with printed ephemera have moved out of the shadowy hinterland of the trivial and disposable to another level where a new set of definitions is required” (Harris 208).

“The street was and remains one of the most dynamic sites for the dispersal of ephemeral printed products. During the Victorian period, the average metropolitan flâneur could expect to be offered dozens of printed items, advertisements, and handbills during a stroll along Oxford Street in London. […] The wastage was almost total and the survival of single copies, used as bookmarks or wrapping paper, is almost miraculously unusual” (Harris 208)

“At the same time, within the flow of street-based print was to be found the commercial presence of paid-for material, such as ballads, almanacs, newspapers, and chapbooks; these represented a significant link between the respectable book trade and the popular consumer” (Harris 209).

“The very fact of identifying [material collectable and susceptible to cultural analysis] within material regarded as ephemeral created a mechanism for the continuous reassessment of its value and use” (Harris 216-7).

Newspapers
“There is no doubt that, at the point of consumption, the newspaper is an entirely ephemeral product. Created for the day, or some other limited period, it is produced for immediate use and, to some extent, predicated on equally immediate disposal. Its content is as current as possible, and its format, geared to cheapness and the exigencies of competition, has a built-in disposability (Harris 213).

Magazines
“[M]agazines are collaborations among proprietors, editors, writers (contributors), and sometimes illustrators … Collaboration among those running a magazine – the editorial ‘we’ is not always only a convention – is the norm even for the production of periodical fiction” (Patten 356)

“A population that was becoming more mobile across spaces and classes had vested its proofs of identity in detachable and forgeable, adjuncts such as birth and marriage certificates, names, and other tokens. These may fail to confirm identity, legitimacy, property, class, status, rights, and name, as they failed for Oliver and his mother” (Patten 363).

“Serials tend to be multiply authored, being written by the producers, editors, and other contributors to the magazine in which they appear. Serials have permeable generic boundaries, incorporating a miscellany of literary genres and appealing to readers in ways more theatrical than contemplative. (Patten 366).

Bibliography
Harris, Michael. “Printed Ephemera.” The Book: A Global History, 204-219.
Patten, Robert L. “When is a Book not a Book?” Reader, 354-368.
Wald, James. “Periodicals and Periodicity,“ Companion, 421-434.
Weedon, Alexis. “The Uses of Quantification” Companion, 33-50.