In the early modern learned world,

In the early modern learned world, substantial treatises and books were the respectable formats for appearing in print, assuming, of course, that a scholar had any such desire. Manuscript correspondence networks (see Chapter 25) were central to the communication of scholarship, and carried no taint of the commercial book trade. The same was true of the oral settings in which letters and specimens were dis- cussed. It was far from obvious that scholars in the late seventeenth century would wish to edit or contribute to a learned journal, nor that booksellers or printers would wish to take on such a product (Johns 2000).