Book excerpt: Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period illuminates the diverse ways that people in the British regional print trades exerted their agency through interventions in regional and national politics as well as their civic, commercial, and cultural contributions. Works printed in regional communities were a crucial part of developing narratives of local industrial, technological, and ideological progression. By moving away from understanding of print cultures outside of London as ‘provincial’, however, this book argues for a new understanding of ‘region’ as part of a network of places, emphasising opportunities for collaboration and creation that demonstrate the key role of regions within larger communities extending from the nation to the emerging sense of globality in this period. Through investigations of the men and women of the print trades outside of London, this collection casts new light on the strategies of self-representation evident in the work of regional print cultures, as well as their contributions to individual regional identities and national narratives.