About

Bill Bell

Welcome to Crusoe’s Books, a blog for people interested in travel writing, human geography, and the history of books and reading. I am presently Professor of Bibliography at Cardiff University and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies, Munich. My research has been assisted by visiting posts in Canberra, Goettingen, Toronto, Oxford, Otago, and Kolkata. Among my publications are The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland (Edinburgh 2007); Travels into Print: Exploration, Writing and Publishing with John Murray, 1773-1859 (Chicago 2015); and Crusoe’s Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800-1918 (Oxford 2021). I was for some years editor of The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society and am a frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and The Literary Review.