Much Matter in a Penny Paper

""Much Matter in a Penny Paper will shake up what is known and how it is known in Yorùbá studies, African studies, and histories of cultural formations in postcolonial studies. Only Professor Karin Barber could have written this compelling study of how an auspiciously positioned technology, placed in the hands of equally well-positioned individuals, fostered the making of the formidable early twentieth century Yorùbá language literary institutions."" - Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́, author of Arts of Being Yorùbá: Divination, Allegory, Tragedy, Proverb, Panegyric ""Karin Barber takes us onto the streets of the fast-paced, expanding city of Lagos in the 1920s. She maps the city’s dynamic print cultures and brings to life the energetic Yoruba newspapermen-personalities each and every one-as they zig-zagged between Yorùbá and English, translating across languages and cultures while innovating with genres and relishing the linguistic experimentation made possible by their printing presses."" - Stephanie Newell, author of The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa ""A rare and exceptional book. It succeeds in the difficult task of capturing the numerous moving dimensions of the Yoruba print world, driven as much by entrepreneurialism as philanthropy. Most impressively it captures the movement, vitality, exuberance, and energy of this world as a plethora of everyday forms were taken up experimentally in newspapers and publications. These themes gain further depth and resonance from a detailed picture of Lagos and its various social layers, contradictions and fault-lines. It was an utter joy to read."" - Isabel Hofmeyr, author of Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading