What happened to get celebrity culture started?
Printing and publishing became a full-blown industry at the end of the 18th century. That led to a massive growth in the number of books published and fuelled the rise of newspapers, magazines and advertising. At the same time the percentage of texts published anonymously went down. In the book I make this point with data drawn from the English Short Title Catalogue and the recent bibliographies of the novel and of poetry volumes. In the early days of industrial capitalism, this outpouring of printed matter produced a rich and fascinating print culture. But it also created two new problems. Firstly, people started to suffer from information overload. Isaac D’Israeli was already swamped by 1795. Since “every literary journal consists of 50 or 60 publications,” he wrote, “when I take the pen and attempt to calculate […] the number of volumes which the next century must infallibly produce, […] I lose myself among billions, trillions, and quartillions”. At the same time, the percentage
