Copyright in Historical Perspective
If you happen to be a copyright history geek, Patterson‛s Copyright in Historical Perspective is absolutely it for an overview of events from the 1484 Statute to the mid-nineteenth century. I‛m still working my way through it, but am mightily impressed. I suspect that if one read it back-to-back with Mark Rose‛s Authors and Owners one would have a fairly good handle on the invention and development of formal copyright and authorship. (Or I hope so, because that‛s more or less what I‛ve done, in addition to various articles.)
One thing you don‛t usually see addressed in IP history texts is the oral-aural distribution of knowledge in preliterate societies and the eventual shift to containment of knowledge in medieval scripts, which began to shift information flows. I‛ve done a little reading on this for my current history project, but need to know so much more. This is the reason for my sudden interest in book history (and Ong and Havelock), and I hope to read more on that this summer.