Noda Commentary

Noda Commentary

The eighteenth century saw a great rise of the middle class and their literacy, and with it, the tremendous expansion in book trade and wide circulation of books. People read novels and shared the reading experience with others; the importance of the role that books, specifically novels, started to play during this time is disreputable. Within the new capitalist society, moreover, books were commodities to be sold and circulated. Publishers advertised novels and sought to sell them.
This project was done in the hopes of capturing the aspect of novels as commodities. In the modern era, an amazon page is one of the first places people look for information on a book they consider to purchase. The page, targeted at consumers to provide them with information that would convince them to purchase the book, is a bibliography tailored for the customer. In creating this experimental bibliography, I took the image and data of the novel, The Mutability of Human Life; or, Memoirs of Adelaide, Marchioness of Melville, and created an amazon page of the novel as it may have looked back in 1777 when it was first published. The page includes traditional bibliographic data such as image, title, publication date, and author, as well as advertising material such customer reviews and recommendations for other best sellers.

This experimental bibliography of the novel The Mutability of Human Life; or, Memoirs of Adelaide, Marchioness of Melville attempts to capture the increasing nature of books as commodities in the eighteenth century. The amazon page style bibliography seeks to capture the way these novels were, with the rise of the middle class and its literacy, increasingly treated as commodities to be advertised and sold.