Movable Type, Mobile Nations is concerned with what the Times Literary Supplement called the primary characteristic of the book: it is produced in one location to be used in another, with each relocation bringing geographic and interpretive changes to the text. Occasionally, the spaces that material books move through are constituted as nation states, but such contexts are hardly stable. On the contrary, the forces that helped create nation states and those which maintain them - such as juridical, technological, or economic forces, as well as the impact of literary texts - are driven and have been driven by the book's history. The history of the book, therefore, ought to be transnational, conducted not between nations but, rather, notwithstanding them. This collection is among the first to broach the new transnational aspect to book history. The essays tackle: global circulations of English-language literature around World War II * the distribution of 19th-century serial publications a