Can you tell me some URLs that tell about the history of "the edited book." The edited book here is from the view point of collection/selection of content based on some criterion and not from a printing/publishing point of view. Also include a list of the earliest edited books.
This was a rather difficult question in that it does seem most literature about the history of the book deals with printing and publishing. However, I was able to find a few URLs that deal with the history of anthologies, which may be a better word to search with than "collection" or "selection," and it seemed to bring up more related hits than when I searched for "history of editing" or "history of editing books."
Here is a link to the complete text of this book called Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies. Check out the third link from the top (in the table of contents) Producing Early Collections and the second to last link Chronological Listing of Early Anthologies. Make sure to also check the bibliography for related materials.
Here is a rather heady essay from the University of Wales online archives that includes some history of literary anthologies: The Diachronic Canon: Two Possible Universals in the Evolution of Literary Anthologies.
A UCSB professor's listing of English poerty anthologies dating back to the 1700s:
http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/anthologies/
The Greek Anthology kept coming up in my searches. Here is a good brief explanation of it from the Columbia Encyclopedia.
The Book History Online database is designed, managed, maintained and published by Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands. The database apparently has 33,682 records. I tried entering the words "anthologies" and "editing" into the "any word" search field and there seemed to be a few related links. The records retrieved contain only the bibliographic information of the article, but you can take the title and search online or in the database of your local library.
Lastly, you may want to open up your search to print resources. I found this journal called Book History in my searches, and according to the brief description on the Penn State Press Web site, it publishes "research on the social, economic, and cultural history of authorship, editing, printing book..." You may be able to find this journal at a public library, but you may have to try a university library.