Bromer, Anne C.  Miniature books: 4,000 years of tiny treasures, by Anne C. Bromer and Julian I. Edison.  Abrams, 2007.  215p bibl index ISBN 0-8109-9299-X, $40.00; ISBN 9780810992993, $40.00. Reviewed in 2007oct CHOICE.
45-0589  Z1033  2006-19887 CIP
 
This catalog of the summer 2007 exhibition at The Grolier Club in New York City celebrates books no taller than three inches. The excellent historical introduction reproduces two Babylonian clay tablets dating from more than 4,000 years ago. These and the other items reproduced in this sumptuous publication are indeed treasures. As is suitable for a publication of The Grolier Club, this work includes abundant information on the collecting of these books and on aspects of their publication, such as illustrations, type, paper, and bindings. Moreover, the beautifully designed catalog is itself a work of art with full-color illustrations. The authors also provide information on institutional collections. This is as complete a survey of the subject as could be written. Bromer (rare book dealer) and Edison (editor, Miniature Book News have been fascinated by miniature books for many years, and the selection for the exhibition includes medieval and modern manuscripts, ancient classics, poetry, drama, cookbooks, medical texts, religious texts for children, portable books for traveling, modern artists’ books, even a miniature hornbook from the early 19th century. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Institutions with miniature book collections and programs in the history of the book; general readers, lower-/upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students. — G. B. Barnhill, American Antiquarian Society 

The Cambridge history of the book in Britain: v.4: 1557-1695, ed. by John Barnard and D.F.McKenzie.  Cambridge, 2002.  891p bibl index ISBN 0-521-66182-X, $140.00. Reviewed in 2003sep CHOICE.
41-0002  Z8   MARC 
 
Planned for seven volumes, this set will treat the book in Britain from c.600 through the 20th century by explaining the creation of texts, their form, and their reception. The first volume (v.3, ed. by Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp, 1998) covered 1400-1557; this second volume treats the later Tudor period and most of the 17th century. In a style characteristic of Cambridge histories, the editors and 42 other noted scholars contribute 38 chapters and several statistical appendixes arranged under eight major headings that reveal the work’s scope and organization–the religious and social context, the manuscript tradition, scholarly literature, creative works, vernacular press, printing arts and the book trade, the book trade beyond London, and the status of the book trade at the end of the 17th century. Many chapters are predictable codifications of cumulative scholarship, but others are more novel, such as “Books for Daily Life” and “Women Writing and Women Written.” A bibliography of about 1,300 entries, an extensive index, and 32 pages of black-and-white illustrations conclude the book. A volume and a series that every interdisciplinary research collection requires. Summing Up: Essential. General and academic collections. — D. G. Davis Jr., University of Texas at Austin 

Cultural history of reading: v.1: World literature; v.2: American literature, v.1 ed. by Gabrielle Watling; v.2 ed. by Sara E. Quay.  Greenwood, 2009.  2v bibl index afp; ISBN 9780313337444, $199.95.  Outstanding Title! Reviewed in 2009may CHOICE.
46-4754  Z1003  2008-19927 CIP 
 
A Cultural History of Reading explores what people have read–and why–around the globe from “before the common era” to the present. This two-volume set is divided geographically. Volume 1 covers the Americas (excepting the United States); Europe and Britain; Asia and the Pacific; South Asia and the Indian Subcontinent; and Africa and the Middle East. Chapters within these five sections are arranged topically or chronologically. Volume 2, also arranged chronologically, deals with the United States. The essays, written by scholars in the fields of English, history, languages, and cultural studies, share a common theme of relating how key cultural events and changes are linked to what people read in any given period of time. The chapters share a standard format: a chronology, a historical introduction, and an overview of reading trends and practices, followed by an examination of several specific trends and texts. Each chapter closes with a list of recommended readings. Although other works have examined the history of reading in particular cultures or at particular times, presently this is the most comprehensive work on the subject, and as such, is certain to be an indispensable addition to any academic library collection. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers. — L. K. Speer, Southeast Missouri State University 

The Enduring book: print culture in postwar America, ed. by David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson.  North Carolina, 2009.  618p afp  (A History of the book in America, 5); ISBN 9780807832851, $60.00. Reviewed in 2010feb CHOICE.
47-2906  Z473   MARC
 
This last volume in a five-volume series offers a very readable and insightful account of how print in America–the book in particular–has developed since 1946. While taking the story up to 2007 somewhat combines history with prognostication, evident throughout is print’s resilient and competitive response to demographic and technological changes. Print’s endurance may not ensure survival for another century, but that capacity does not hurt its chances. Twenty-eight numbered chapters with multiple subchapters by different academic authorities cover general foundational topics, such as organization, production technologies, market and audience analyses, and retail sales applicable to books (mostly), consumer magazines, and newspapers; and more selective topics, including the oppositional press, African American press, textbooks, science books, academic publishing, Protestant book publishing, and Spanish-language books. Other chapters cover government censorship, copyright law, and government publishing. The emphasis is on trends toward commercialization and catering to the market; technological innovation in production and delivery; and corporatization and integration with other media. An appendix on statistical resources for data on books, newspapers, and magazines is most useful. This volume and the series will be standards for a long time. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. — J. K. Bracken, Ohio State University 

An Extensive republic: print, culture, and society in the new nation, 1790-1840, ed. by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley.  American Antiquarian Society/North Carolina, 2010.  697p index afp  (A history of the book in America, 2); ISBN 9780807833391, $60.00. Reviewed in 2011mar CHOICE.
48-3588  Z473  2009-52183 CIP 
 
Collecting 37 essays by 32 scholars, this is the last of five books covering the history of the book in the US. In terms of chronological treatment, the series begins with The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. by Hugh Amory and David Hall (2000), and concludes with The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America, ed. by Joan Shelley Rubin, David Paul Nord, and Michael Schudson (CH, Feb’10, 47-2906). The present title considers the problems of disseminating information and educating the white male electorate in a republic whose physical size and undeveloped infrastructure challenged the period’s technologies. The scholarship is up-to-date in every way, as the contributors (many leading scholars on their subject) look at every facet–human and machine–of producing the written word. For example, James Green provides a compact summary of how the first American publishers, Isaiah Thomas and Mathew Carey, struggled to develop national distribution networks. Gross and Kelley provide lucid, helpful overviews in their introductions to the book as a whole and to its six sections. No other single book offers such a rich and comprehensive analysis of how the written word helped shape antebellum America, and the series as a whole is magnificent. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. — L. Schachterle, Worcester Polytechnic Institute 

Howard-Hill, T. H.  The British book trade, 1475-1890: a bibliography.  Oak Knoll/British Library/Bibliographical Society/Bibliographical Society of America, 2009.  2v index; ISBN 9781584562559, $175.00. Reviewed in 2009jul CHOICE.
46-5930  Z324   MARC 
 
These two volumes complement other works by Howard-Hill, the doyen of bibliographers–his great nine-volume Index to British Literary Bibliography (1969- ) and his British Book Trade Dissertations to 1980 (1998). They provide “for the first time a bibliographical conspectus of the history of the British book trade and books from the beginning of printing in Britain to 1890” (when the coverage of the Index begins). A clearly written explanatory introduction encompasses the scope, entries’ style and arrangement, indexes, and the “Index to topics mentioned in the Introduction.” Also included are an abbreviations table and listing of bibliographical references. Contents include book production and distribution, regulation, censorship, trials, individual publishers and printers, typographers, paper and papermaking, illustration processes, presses and machines, prices and wages, bookbinding, copyright, collections and sales, and libraries, among many other topics. The first volume covers nos. 1-11120, and the second nos. 11121-24567. An accompanying CD-ROM contains a comprehensive author and subject index that reveals the eclectic coverage of this monumental work. Composed in clear, computer-generated typeface and firmly bound, this work provides entry numbers and names in boldface, followed by title and, if required, journal pagination and dating. The author includes brief descriptive notes on personal inspection of each item. In short, this is a great work of bibliographical reference that should be in all libraries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers, general readers. — W. Baker, Northern Illinois University
 

Jackson, H. J.  Marginalia: readers writing in books.  Yale, 2001.  324p bibl index afp ISBN 0-300-08816-7, $27.95.  Outstanding Title! Reviewed in 2001sep CHOICE.
39-0069  Z1003  00-43721 CIP
 
Annotators of the world unite! Throw off the chains of bibliophilic repression, take up pencil, scribble in books! Argue with the author, compose an index of the book’s key ideas, express yourself in the margins! Although librarians and bibliophiles frown on books marred by marginalia, Jackson’s magnificent survey of the practice of writing in a book’s margin demonstrates its rich history. From roughly the 18th century to the present, writing in books was a commonplace activity in which readers engaged the author or sent messages to friends. Using numerous case studies, Jackson (Univ. of Toronto) examines the various methods by which readers have annotated their, and sometimes others’, books (Coleridge’s marginalia comprise one of the largest volumes in his collected works). Although not all marginalia are equal, they provide insights into the readers’ historical circumstances and motivations–anger, jealousy, love. Jackson even suggests “qualities that make for good marginalia”: intelligibility, relevance, honesty, good writing. Jackson does not invite defacing library books, but she encourages readers to mark up their private copies of books to “foster[ ] attentive reading, intellectual self-awareness, and incisive writing.” Jackson’s lively prose, deep learning, and lucid critical insights make this a magisterial survey not only of marginalia but also of the history of reading. Highly recommended. All levels. –
H. L. Carrigan Jr., independent scholar 

Jackson, H.J.  Romantic readers: the evidence of marginalia.  Yale, 2005.  366p bibl index afp ISBN 0-300-10785-4, $35.00.  Outstanding Title! Reviewed in 2005nov CHOICE.
43-1339  Z1003  2004-24638 CIP 

In this delightful sequel to her outstanding Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (CH, Sep’01, 39-0069), Jackson (Univ. of Toronto) argues that studying marginalia helps one reconstruct (even if only in partial fashion) the experiences and practices of reading in earlier historical periods. To make her case, she draws on a sample of approximately 1,800 books annotated between 1790 and 1830 by readers both famous and obscure. After a lengthy introduction devoted to the contexts of early 19th-century reading, Jackson turns in chapter 1 to what she calls “mundane marginalia”–annotation as a routine. These include annotations readers made as part of the educational process, supplementing texts with parallel passages, cross-references, and indexes. In chapter 2, the author demonstrates that readers often thought of annotation as a “social” activity, whether for communing with the author or with other readers. In the last two chapters, Jackson demonstrates that books purchased as collectibles were also annotated, whether to record provenance or to display the owner’s taste, and she discusses what marginalia can reveal about how figures such as Coleridge actually experienced the reading process. This splendidly argued book is a must for Romanticists, bibliographers, and anyone interested in the history of the book. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above. — M. E. Burstein, SUNY College at Brockport 
 

Kearney, James.  The incarnate text: imagining the book in Reformation England.  Pennsylvania, 2009.  309p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780812241587, $65.00.  Outstanding Title! Reviewed in 2010jan CHOICE.
47-2449  PR418  2008-50863 CIP 
 
In this fascinating study, Kearney (Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) draws on an astonishingly wide range of scholarship in Renaissance studies and employs a number of current critical practices, especially in the history of the book, cultural materialism, intellectual history, and good old-fashioned close reading. Responding to the past 30 years of scholarly interest in “the history of the codex,” Kearney answers a question he poses on the first page: “How were books imagined in early modern England?” The author “explores the ways the book was imagined during a crisis in representation and language … that was sparked by the Reformation.” He investigates the place of the book in material culture of the early modern period by “attending to the ways in which writers in the period thought in materialist terms” through the “dialectic of subject and object, the interpenetration of self and world.” Kearney closely reads key Renaissance texts of Erasmus, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and Francis Bacon, illustrating his premise in clear, elegant prose that provides readers with a rich, deep appreciation of the period. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. — M. Cole, Alfred State College 

Lyons, Martyn.  A history of reading and writing: in the Western world.  Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.  267p bibl index; ISBN 9780230001619, $89.50; ISBN 9780230001626  pbk, $31.95. Reviewed in 2010oct CHOICE.
48-1091  Z4   MARC 
 
Lyons (Univ. of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) explores reading and writing in the West from the viewpoint of the consumer rather than the producer. His goal is to “show how the relationship of readers (and writers, too) with their texts has changed over time, and how those changes have been influenced by the technological, economic, political and cultural developments which are central to Western history.” What follows is a concise, lucid account of printing and reading from the medieval world to the present. Lyons argues that the printed book reached a limited audience from its introduction in the 15th century until the industrialization of the book and mass literacy during the 19th century. According to Lyons, “not until at least four centuries after Gutenberg did a mass culture of print emerge in Western Europe.” The author deftly summarizes and analyzes a vast amount of secondary scholarship in the field, making this an excellent introduction to book history for undergraduate students. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. — T. J. Bond, Washington State University 

Manguel, Alberto.  A history of reading.  Viking, 1996.  372p index afp ISBN 0-670-84302-4, $26.95. Reviewed in 1997sep CHOICE.
35-0059   96-2703 CIP 
 
What is reading about? Why and when and where do readers read? What are the pleasures of being read to? What happens when authors and translators read? What is the importance of memory? What are the attractions of forbidden books? What does illustration lend to reading? These and many other questions are examined in this original, stimulating study. Manguel (translator, editor, anthologist, and novelist) treats his subject with sure erudition, weaving between the fourth millenium BCE, when clay tablets carried a “few discrete markings,” through the Middle Ages, when scribes read and copied manuscripts, to the modern reader “seated at a desk, chin in hand where the text unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root.” Manguel provides 22 brief essays on topics such as “Private Reading,” “The Shape of a Book,” “Stealing Books,” and “Metaphors of Reading,” which can be read separately or together. Manguel refers to a host of readers and writers: on a typical page he may cite Dante, Lady Murasaki, Saint Augustine, Colette, and Ray Bradbury. Reading can never be final, since “We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.” In the “Endpaper Pages,” Manguel ingeniously summarizes an imaginary “History of Reading,” which he would like to read. It would be “eclectic … amicably written, accessible and yet erudite, informative and yet reflective”–thereby characterizing his own remarkable book. Highly recommended for academic readers, all levels. — D. C. Dickinson, University of Arizona 

Pearson, David.  Books as history: the importance of books beyond their texts.  British Library/Oak Knoll, 2008.  208p bibl index; ISBN 9781584562337, $49.95. Reviewed in 2009apr CHOICE.
46-4167  Z4  2008-39127 MARC 
 
The digital age has brought the prospect of the world’s texts being available at the click of a mouse. Whether this will be realizable or not remains to be seen, but most prognosticators assume that it will be so. Where this leaves the usefulness of physical books thus becomes a matter of some urgency, and in this context Pearson (Univ. of London) offers one answer: the consideration of books as historical artifacts. Books as History introduces readers to some of the many ways that books can speak to people beyond their texts. Chapters are devoted to design, production, ownership, binding, and library collections. Also included is a section on future library policies, along with a case study of copy variation, in this case Francis Bacon’s Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (1622). The whole effort is richly illustrated with the kind of superlative examples that one might imagine at the command of a London bookman at the top of his game. Books as History is an absolute must for all libraries supporting information science or the study of book history. Schools with strong liberal arts programs will want to add this to their collections as well. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers; general readers. — P. L. Holmer, Southern Connecticut State University

Pettegree, Andrew.  The book in the Renaissance.  Yale, 2010.  421p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780300110098, $40.00. Reviewed in 2011jan CHOICE.
48-2407  Z291  2009-26513 CIP 

This new book by Pettegree (Univ. of Saint Andrews) is sure to become a classic account of the first age of print, roughly the period from Gutenberg to the end of the 17th century. At heart it is a history of the book business: the story of how printers learned to become economically and culturally viable. Early printers, it appears, were less dependent on disseminating the classics–the humanist myth–and more appreciative of everyday work of the ephemeral sort. The numbers here could be very large; the monastery of Montserrat ordered 200,000 indulgences in two years. Books could be profitable too, but misjudging the market was easy, and a miscalculation of the enormous investment required could be fatal. Gutenberg died a bankrupt, and many of his contemporaries fared little better. By the end of the 16th century, however, printing was a well-established and profitable component of the European world. This book is a pleasure to read. Not only does Pettegree tell a story well, but he avoids becoming bogged down in the minutiae beloved by many bibliographers. As a result, this book is an ideal text for undergraduates and sure to become recommended reading for courses in early modern history and literature as well as the book. Instructors and students also will appreciate the judicious bibliography. A required book for liberal arts and graduate programs at all levels. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers; general readers. — P. L. Holmer, Southern Connecticut State University 

Striphas, Ted.  The late age of print: everyday book culture from consumerism to control.  Columbia, 2009.  242p index afp; ISBN 9780231148146, $27.50. Reviewed in 2009oct CHOICE.
47-0611  Z471   CIP 
 
The Late Age of Print takes as its title a phrase coined by pioneering new media scholar Jay David Bolter. This volume takes its place among many recent scholarly and popular works concerning contemporary print culture, the future of the book, and the digital media revolution. Striphas (Indiana Univ.) takes a cultural studies approach to his subject, examining social and rhetorical structures of “everyday book culture” through the lens of their (often unacknowledged) commodity-driven nature. Unlike some other works that have drawn popular attention with provocative or alarmist claims, or broken bold new theoretical ground, this volume instead stands as a solid work of scholarship that fills in several significant gaps in popular and academic understandings of its subject matter, presenting a cogent, historically informed explication of trends and phenomena. Striphas’s conclusions are modest, recognizing the contemporary period as a “dynamic and open-ended moment characterized by both permanence and change.” His five chapters contextualize the e-book movement, “big box” bookstores, online bookselling, Oprah’s Book Club, and the Harry Potter craze. This work will support many interdisciplinary areas, including American studies, media studies, and history of the book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. — D. Orcutt, North Carolina State University