On the Spot: Joseph Hone
Why are you a historian of the book?
Because books are the vessels through which historical knowledge is communicated between generations.
What’s the most important lesson history has taught you?
Destroy your drafts and personal papers, because one day a graduate student will comb through them looking for incriminating titbits.
Which history book has had the greatest influence on you?
Pat Rogers’ Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture.
What book in your field should everyone read?
Adrian Johns’ The Nature of the Book.
Which moment would you most like to go back to?
The death of Queen Anne. I would listen at closed doors and follow the court factions.
Which historian has had the greatest influence on you?
Recently, Mark Goldie.
Which person in history would you most like to have met?
Alexander Pope.
How many languages do you have?
Too few.
Is there an important historical text you have not read?
Too many.
What historical topic have you changed your mind on?
For a while I aspired to be a card-carrying Namierite. Now I recognise the importance of ideology and personal belief in shaping public conduct.
What is the most common misconception about your field?
That we book historians always have our heads buried in printed books, looking at typography and watermarks and so on. We study manuscripts, too!
Who is the most underrated person in history…
Robert Harley, Britain’s first prime minister.
… and the most overrated?
Sir Robert Walpole, ‘Britain’s first prime minister’.
What’s the most exciting field in history today?
Long-form biography.
What’s your favourite archive?
I love working in the Weston Library at Oxford, but there is a particular kind of joy in conducting research in small provincial archives.
What’s the best museum?
Impossible to answer. Today it is Sir John Soane’s Museum. Tomorrow it might be Beamish or the Fitzwilliam.
What technology has changed the world the most?
Professional pride makes me want to answer ‘the printing press’ but I suspect nothing can trump antibiotics.
Recommend us a historical novel…
Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost.
… and a historical drama?
Wolf Hall.
You can solve one historical mystery. What is it?
What is the Voynich manuscript?
Joseph Hone is Reader in Literature and Book History at Newcastle University. His latest book is The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime That Fooled the World (Chatto & Windus, 2024).
