"King excavates a basic but elusive concept--improvement--nearly lost to givenness. The resulting book is a tour-de-force work of cultural criticism that explains how and why we seek the history of ideas, and a landmark contribution to the humanities."--David Alff, SUNY-Buffalo "An elegant and persuasive meditation on improvement's relationship with the rich variety of eighteenth-century print, The Book of Improvement will quickly become essential reading for anyone interested in Enlightenment's trickiest term."--Jon Mee, author of Networks of Improvement "Rachael King's immersive, nuanced, multi-media survey refuses to take an 18th-century buzzword--improvement--at face value. Her methodologically daring study weighs improvement's sometimes regressive politics against the innovative means of its production. It will not be improved upon any time soon."--Jayne Lewis, author of Air's Appearance: Literary Fiction and the Rise of Atmosphere, 1660-1794 "In an extraordinarily supple reading of the Enlightenment concept of improvement, King brilliantly marshals multiple methods and approaches to conceptual history as she convincingly demonstrates that material texts have effects on and in the world."--Peter de Bolla, author of The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights "The Book of Improvement is a landmark study.

Learned and capacious, it offers a definitive and satisfyingly non-linear history of one of the most important and politically freighted concepts of the eighteenth century and our present moment and demonstrates the role of the book in its making and contestation."--Jennie Batchelor, University of York.