SHARP NEWS Winter 2009 Volume 18, Number 1 EXHIBITION REVIEWS Libros de Emblemas y obras afines en la Biblioteca Universitaria de Santiago de Compostela Santiago de Compostela, Spain 7 – 11 July 2008 This exhibition was originally conceived to accompany the Sixth International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies that took place at the Universidad de La Coruña in 2002. For security reasons, the exhibition was only open for three days and lacked a catalogue. Six years later, the eighth congress of the Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro offered the opportunity to remount the exhibition and to prepare a proper catalogue, under the direction of Sagrario López Poza. The phenomenon to which this exhibition is devoted traces its origin to the publication in 1531 of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber, which was widely imitated throughout Europe through the eighteenth century. In its canonical form, an emblem contains an inscriptio, a cryptic title; a pictura, an engraving that illustrates the title; and a subscriptio, an explanation that describes the picture and offers a commentary, generally moralizing, on it. In other words, the emblem book unites image and word to transmit a message of a generally moralizing character. Much has been written about emblems of late, so that it would have been an easy matter for López Poza simply to have gone into the stacks of the Biblioteca Universitaria in Santiago de Compostela and pulled out the usual suspects. It is much to her credit that she resisted this temptation, deciding instead to devote considerable thought and study to some of the problems surrounding scholarship on the emblem. Unlike many genres in early modern literature, this one appeared suddenly and unexpectedly, with the publication of Alciato’s emblem book. As López Poza shows, however, Renaissance culture linked word and image in a number of other similar ways. Once born, the emblem book achieved instant popularity, but it in turn affected the development of several later genres as well. By situating the emblem book within the parallel phenomena that gave it life and tracing the influence it had in later cultural activities, López Poza has created an unusually interesting exhibition. Among the precursors of the emblem book was the group of 3,700 epigrams that circulated as the Greek Anthology and the collections of loci communes (commonplaces) made during the Renaissance, both of which provided ready-made titles for emblems. Illustrated books like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in 1499 by Aldus Manutius, along with the Imagines of Philostratus the Elder and Younger and the Descriptiones of Callistratus, got readers accustomed to a tight link between word and image. Egyptian hieroglyphs also contributed to the creation of emblems, in that authors like Giovanni Pierio Valeriano and Athanasius Kircher saw the hieroglyph as a symbol that also hid a profound truth in need of decipherment. The Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, along with the mythology manuals of Lilio Gregorio Gyraldi, Natale Conti, and Vincenzo Cartari, presented images and stories from antiquity that, like emblems, were understood to have philosophical and moral content. Coins, perhaps surprisingly, worked in a similar way: Roman coins often presented a portrait of an emperor on one side accompanied by an allegorical or mythological composition on the other, accompanied by an inscription, and beginning with Pisanello, Renaissance medallists worked toward an even more unified presentation, linking their medals to the origin and development of the emblem. Finally, we should not forget the fable, especially the ones derived from the Corpus fabularum of Aesop, which circulated throughout the Renaissance in illustrated editions that linked word and image around a moral observation, often focused conveniently on a maxim or sententia. Readers familiar with these genres, as López Poza suggests, doubtless found Alciato’s Emblematum liber less of a shock than we might imagine if we continue to view it in isolation. Alciato began with the epigrams, in this case taken in part from the Greek Anthology, and it was actually the printer, Steyner, who proposed adding illustrations to make the book more saleable. The resulting emblem book proved most useful indeed for presenting and reinforcing a lesson, but it was difficult and expensive to produce, requiring in each case an author who could select and organize the material, an artist who could illustrate what the author conceived, an engraver who could make the plates, and a printer or publisher who could finance the edition. Paris and Lyon became the centers of publication, with Guillaume Rouillé and Christophe Plantin among the most active printers. The Jesuits found the new genre especially useful, as much for combating Protestantism as for teaching, with a good number of school occasions being celebrated by emblems as well. Emblem books also proved useful to authors wishing to make political statements, like Diego Saavedra Fajardo, whose Idea de un príncipe político christiano representada en cien empresas entered the seventeenth-century debate about whether a Christian prince could adopt Machiavellian methods. Once established, emblem books proved useful in a number of allied fields, as López Poza shows. The ... / 3 CONTENTS EXHIBITION REVIEWS DANKY FELLOWSHIP 2009 SUMMER INSTITUTES FORTHCOMING EVENTS CONFERENCE REVIEWS CALL FOR PAPERS BOOK REVIEWS IN SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY 1 2 2 5 6 9 10 23 24 2 e WINTER 2009 SHARP NEWS EDITOR Sydney Shep, Wai-te-ata Press Victoria University of Wellington PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand editor@sharpweb.org REVIEW EDITORS Fritz Levy, Book Reviews – Europe University of Washington, WA, USA reviews_europe@sharpweb.org Gail Shivel, Book Reviews – Americas University of Miami, FL, USA reviews_usa@sharpweb.org Simone Murray, Book Reviews – Asia/Pacific Monash University, Melbourne, AUS simone.murray@arts.monash.edu.au Lisa Pon, Exhibition Reviews Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX, USA reviews_exhibs@sharpweb.org Katherine D. Harris, E-Resources Reviews San José State University, CA, USA kharris@email.sjsu.edu BIBLIOGRAPHER Robert N. Matuozzi Washington State University Libraries Pullman, WA 99164-5610 USA matuozzi@wsu.edu SUBSCRIPTIONS The Johns Hopkins University Press Journals Publishing Division PO Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211–0966 membership@sharpweb.org e SHARP News [ISSN 1073-1725] is the quarterly newsletter of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Inc.. The Society takes no responsibility for the views asserted in these pages. Copyright of content rests with contributors; design copyright rests with the Society. Set in Adobe Garamond with Wingdings. COPY DEADLINES: 1 March, 1 June, 1 September, 1 December SHARP WEB: http://sharpweb.org SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 DANKY FELLOWSHIP 2009 SUMMER INSTITUTES Book History & Media History In honor of James P. Danky's long service to print culture scholarship, the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, in conjunction with the Wisconsin Historical Society, is again offering its annual short-term research fellowship. The Danky Fellowship provides $1000 in funds for one individual planning a trip to carry out research using the collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society (http:// www.wisconsinhistory.org). Grant money may be used for travel to the WHS, costs of copying pertinent archival resources, and living expenses while pursuing research here. If in residence during the semester, the recipient will be expected to give a presentation as part of the colloquium series of the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America (http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/). Preference will be given to: proposals undertaking research in print culture history; researchers from outside Madison; research likely to lead to publication. We strongly encourage applicants to speak with the WHS Reference Archivist ph: 608-264-6460; email: askarchives@wisconsinhistory.org before applying for a grant. We are happy to help identify potential collections of which you may not otherwise be aware. There is no application form. Applicants must submit: 1) A cover sheet with name, telephone, permanent address and e-mail, current employer/affiliation, title of project, and proposed dates of residency. 2) A letter of two single-spaced pages maximum describing the project and its relation to specifically cited collections at the society and to previous work on the same theme, and describing the projected outcome of the work, including publication plans. If residents of the Madison area are applying, they must explain their financial need for the stipend. 3) Curriculum vitae. 4) Two confidential letters of reference. Graduate students must include their thesis advisor. Applications are due by 1 May. The recipient will be notified by 31 May. Please mail applications to: Christine Pawley, School of Library and Information Studies, University of WisconsinMadison, 4234 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706 USA. American Antiquarian Society 22 – 26 June 2009 What does it means to ‘do’ book history in the digital age? Does it matter that nineteenth-century printed texts are today increasingly encountered as digital images and searchable data? This seminar will explore points of contact between book history and media history. Focusing on the efflorescence of popular print in the period from 1830 to 1870, our aim will be to better understand the circulation of culture under conditions of social and technological change. The seminar will be led by Lisa Gitelman and Meredith McGill. Gitelman is Visiting Associate Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and author of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. McGill is Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-53. Further information about the seminar is available from http:// w w w. a m e r i c a n a n t i q u a r i a n . o r g / sumsem09.htm. America Engages Russia, 18801930: Studies in Cultural Interaction 14 June – 3 July 2009 This NEH Institute will bring together twenty-five university teaching faculty, curators, and senior bibliographers with nationally-recognized session leaders to consider, investigate, and reflect upon the implications of the various forms of cultural engagement between the United States and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the 1930s. During the Institute, participants will have the opportunity to work with many of North America greatest repositories of Americana and Slavic and East European materials, among them the NYPL and Columbia University Libraries plus museums and archives in the Greater New York Metropolitan area. A full description of the program, and details of the application process are available at: www.nypl.org/ research/chss/slv/2009_neh.pdf. WINTER 2008 f 3 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 ... / 1 Mondo simbolico (1653) of Philippo Picinelli, for example, was the most popular of a series of compilations or encyclopedias that were organized and indexed as aids for rhetorical invention and widely used by speakers, preachers, academics, and poets. Printers’ marks did not generally have all the parts of an emblem, but as Aldus Manutius’s anchor and dolphin with its accompanying motto semper festina lente shows, they functioned according to the same basic logic. And public festivities of the early modern period, especially the triumphal entries of princes, were accompanied in turn by emblems which could then be reproduced in an accompanying book that functioned as a guide to the symbolic and ideological value of the artistic works commissioned for the occasion. The exhibition was accompanied by a nicely produced, ninety-eight-page catalogue which is available from the Servizo de Publicacións of the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (www.usc.es/spubl). One always says that even the best catalogue cannot substitute for actually seeing an exhibition, and that is unfortunately true here as well. The catalogue does a good job of repeating the narrative content that made the exhibition special, but instead of dividing the 149 books that López Poza selected among the relevant topics (e.g., coins and medals, festivals), as was done in the display cases, it lists them in alphabetical order by author, leaving the reader to figure out where each book fits into the narrative. But that is a small quibble. López Poza produced an unusually thoughtful exhibition that mixed significant new observations into a well-organized synthesis of much previous scholarship, and this comes through in the catalogue as well. Anyone with a serious interest in emblem books will find the catalogue well worth having. Craig Kallendorf Texas A&M University e Imprentit: 500 Years of the Scottish Printed Word National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh 27 June – 12 October 2008 In 1508, having been granted a license by King James IV, Walter Chepman and Androw Myllar set up Scotland’s first printing press, in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, in order to print a book of prayers, psalms, and hymns for the use of priests. 2008 marked the 500th anniversary of the first printing in Scotland, and in commemoration, the National Library had organized an exhibit designed to investigate no less than the ‘role of print in the life of Scotland, 1508-2008.’ The exhibition room is just inside the National Library’s main entrance. Visitors first pass through a hall with panels charting the library’s history and describing some recent acquisitions. Imprentit: 500 Years of the Scottish Printed Word is housed in the next room, large and T-shaped. The exhibit begins with a display on how and why printing first came to Scotland, explaining how William Elphinstone commissioned Chepman and Myllar to print a book ultimately known as the Aberdeen Breviary, and the exhibit displays the only known copy of this work, as well as unique copies of other books and pamphlets from Chepman and Myllar’s press, including a humorous poem called “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,” which visitors can hear read aloud. No works printed in Scotland survive for the period 1511 to 1540, but thereafter Scottish printing became more firmly established and the exhibit features examples of other early printed Scottish books, including the 1540 Acts of Parliament. Around the walls near the top is an A-to-Z featuring the names of notable people, places, and things associated with the print culture of Scotland. A number of hands-on components punctuate the exhibit, including a desk where visitors are instructed on how to design a logo for a publishing house, and a table where children can draw illustrations. But the most significant and interesting elements of the exhibit are the large glass cases each examining the influence of print culture on a different aspect of life: education, leisure, religion, politics, literature, children’s books, and science. Diverse printed items from the past five hundred years reveal the way print is ever-present in our lives and shapes our history. The religion section discusses the role of the publication of the 1637 Book of Common Prayer in fomenting the religious dissent that turned violent during the Covenanting period. Further, it features a pulpit at which visitors can hear a sermon preached and published in Dundee in 1853, in which the preacher links a recent cholera epidemic in the area to God’s anger at the community’s loosening morals. Along a wall, one panel discusses the ability of print to preserve yet distort oral culture, citing Robert Burns’s mother’s famous reaction to Walter Scott’s ‘transcriptions’ of her traditional songs. The literature section includes a sofa and a table piled with books by Scottish authors or with Scottish settings. Elsewhere, one panel displays a timeline history of Scottish publishing, tracing the history of major houses including Oliver & Boyd and Chambers. The corresponding display case features a diverse set of books published in Scotland, from influential science works like J.H. Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) to recent best-sellers like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002). By contrast, a display of locally printed, small-circulation fanzines shows how print publication has long created underground communities. The exhibit no doubt raises awareness of this important anniversary for Scotland, and is full of fascinating individual items from Scottish printing history. Yet the broad scope of the exhibition necessarily limits its depth. Since literally thousands of items from the National Library’s vast holdings might have been included, the items that have been selected seem slightly haphazard. Print has become so integral to life that to chronicle five hundred years of Scottish printing history is to chronicle five hundred years of Scottish history in general. And perhaps this is the point. The end of the exhibit features desks devoted to two related projects. Firstly there is the Book Crossing Corner. The Book Crossing project [http://www.bookcrossing. com] allows readers to share books by leaving them at designated locations or elsewhere. The books at this spot have Scottish authors or were published in Scotland, but the shelf was empty during both my visits. Another table features the Scottish Readers Remember project, at the Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records [http:// www.sapphire.ac.uk], and includes audio testimonials from Scots born before 1945 on their experiences with reading. More information about the exhibition can be found at <http://www.nls.uk/events/ printing-exhibition>. Ruth M. McAdams University of Edinburgh 4 e WINTER 2009 Artifacts of Childhood: 700 Years of Children's Books The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois 27 September 2008 – 17 January 2009 The Newberry Library acquires children's books, not as a genre unto itself, but as a necessary and desirable complement to its rich holdings for adult readers in subjects across the humanities. The result is an exhibition, co-curated by Jenny Schwartzberg and Paul F. Gehl, that combines traditional themes in the study of children's literature with several unexpected perspectives on the interaction of children and books throughout history. The exhibit opens with a selection of Latin texts from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries chosen to make the point that there were few, if any, texts designed for beginning readers in the Middle Ages. A child might be handed a manuscript book containing the Psalms, for example, and told to pick out all the A’s on the page: a challenging task, made more so by the often tiny lettering used. The occasional instructional text was likely to be based on a title originally for adults, as with the sixteenth century De re vestiaria libellus. This abridgement of a longer work was prepared by a wealthy family's tutor to provide simplified Latin readings for his student. The use of literature to teach moral values and ethical behavior, rooted in the oral tradition, continued strongly into the manuscript and printed book eras. Newberry holdings range from fifteenth-century manuscripts of Aesop's fables, to tiny illustrated storybooks from the American Anti-Slavery Society, to the Girl's ethical reader, published in Shanghai in 1912. The stern rectitude of nineteenth-century moral tracts is even reflected in many works marketed directly to children, such as the colorful, single-sheet illustrated stories known as ‘Épinals’ after the French printing house that originated them. One such in the Newberry exhibition, The sailor-boy's dream, tells the tale of a lonely, homesick sailor boy, whose bittersweet memories of a happy family life contrast sharply with the hard work and harsh discipline aboard ship. At the end, we learn that the boy's father handed him over to the ship's captain as a punishment for laziness. "In vain he deplored his fault, it was too late! Sail away, poor boy!" The expression ‘children's literature’ usually denotes works for children, rather than works SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 by children. This assumption is challenged in a section of the Newberry exhibition examining the child as creator of texts, images, and music. Publication necessarily involves adults, so it is highly likely that children's creativity was co-opted for adult agendas. Examples offered in the exhibition include Three lessons for the harpsichord or piano forte, composed by Elizabeth Weichsell, a child eight years of age (published about 1775 and heavily promoted by Elizabeth's parents) and Granma, proa a la historia, published 200 years later in Cuba. The latter work uses Cuban children's drawings about the 1959 coup to illustrate a historical text. The Cuban Revolution was sixteen years in the past by the time Granma was published, so the young artists' views had to reflect school lessons or family stories, not personal experience. The use of children's drawings rather than photographs, however, endows the historical commentary with a wealth of emotional associations: innocence; the tragedy of children suffering from political violence; perhaps a suggestion that revolution is justified to secure the well-being of children and their families. Another book, Sailor Tommy, involves children as the targeted audience, and, unexpectedly, as protagonist as well. Its appearance during World War I (with a companion title, Soldier Bob) suggests it was intended to convey to young children what Daddy was doing far away in the Navy. Presented as an example of books as toys, the 16-inch hardcover is die-cut in the shape of its hero and could stand on a shelf like a doll: ready for battle, with a cutlass on his shoulder and a pistol in his belt. Strikingly, Sailor Tommy is not a teenager or even close. He is a toddler: round face, wide blue eyes, and rosebud lips pursed as if obediently preparing to give Grandmother a kiss. But Tommy is a full participant in the war at sea. Ships explode in the cover image, and the text speaks of gun-boats and submarines. "Twas Boom! at night and Boom! by day / Before we chased the boats away, / The enemy who sailed the sea / And wrecked the boats of boys like me." Mothers reading this little story to their small boys must have dreaded the wars they would fight when grown. Artifacts of Childhood offers many valuable insights into the interaction of children and books throughout history, and the way books (perhaps unwittingly) document the social history of childhood. A checklist of books in the exhibit is available at <www.newberry.org/exhibits/ images/Artifacts%20of%20Childhood%20 Checklist.pdf>. Ruth Ann Jones Michigan State University Libraries e Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper The Folger Shakespeare Library Washington D.C., USA 25 September 2008 – 31 January 2009 In October of 2008, The Christian Science Monitor – the Monday-through-Friday daily newspaper founded by Mary Baker Eddy – announced that it would end its century-old tradition of print publication and shift to an online-only format, becoming the first national American newspaper to do so. The paper’s decision is hardly surprising given the competition from multiple sources of information and the longstanding decline of printed newspaper circulation. And although neither has signaled any intent to abandon print, both The Washington Post and The New York Times have experimented for years with the information they provide online, adding and tinkering with such digital features as audio, video, blogs, sophisticated interactive graphics, and – most recently – social computing functions mimicking such widelyused sites as Delicious <www.delicious.com>, LinkedIn <www.linkedin.com>, and Facebook <www.facebook.com>. Clearly, readers interested in news at the beginning of the twenty-first century find themselves on unstable ground: while readers’ appetite for news is unlikely to diminish, the forms and practices through which news will be gathered, distributed, and consumed are bound to change. Lest we think these contemporary issues are anything new, this admirable exhibition, curated by Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey, provides much-needed historical context. The two historians have organized an impressive selection of materials from the Folger’s archives to illustrate the developments that brought about the birth and evolution of the newspaper in England. The several sections of Breaking News not only follow a roughly chronological order but also address a variety of issues related to material form, WINTER 2008 f 5 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 content, government restrictions and manipulations, and market demands. As in our own increasingly digital ecosystem of media, the news in the early decades of widespread print was made available in a constantly shifting array of media. Among the earliest documents on display are personal letters reporting the latest to the addressee, including a 1606 letter from James Montagu to Elizabeth Hardwick Talbot, Countess of Shewsbury Whitehall, in which he shares with her London’s court gossip and political developments. Before the advent of the print newspaper, these letters were the most efficient means of spreading the news, but they persisted even after the newspaper had been established, in part because they were less likely to incur the wrath of censorious government officials. Printed news in these pre-newspaper decades included Tudor-backed propaganda, scandalous anti-Catholic gossip, and single-sheet broadside ballads that wrestled with issues of the day. News publishers experienced varying degrees of regulation, interference, and even competition from government officials, who quickly recognized the power that newspapers held over public opinion. Breaking News features a regulatory proclamation from Queen Elizabeth, in both a printed copy and a signed manuscript, a pairing which not only demonstrates the investment of the monarchy in controlling sources of information. The two copies also provide a telling example of a transitional moment in English book history as manuscript and print practices begin to alter in response to each other: the printed copy of the Queen’s proclamation had the advantage of possible wide distribution but the singular manuscript was carried the authority of the crown. A particular strength of the exhibit is the detailed explanation – and documentary evidence – of the decades preceding the debut of the now-familiar genre of the newspaper. Not until 1620 did the first proper example of this genre appear in England, imported from Amsterdam and containing news from the continent. The decades that followed were marked by many experiments in form and content in various attempts to respond to – or perhaps create – a reading public with an appetite for news. These experiments went on for decades before the 1702 appearance of the first newspaper to publish successfully a daily issue: The Daily Courant. By this point, readers had become accustomed – “addicted” is the curators’ term – to staying informed about a variety of topics domestic and global, serious and satirical. London’s coffeehouse culture had in the meantime grown to such a degree that sustained and intense conversations by townspeople were fueled by the latest news and strong doses of caffeine, leading to the later development of what Jürgen Habermas famously (and controversially) theorized as the eighteenth-century public sphere. A much-needed reminder of the material objects that brought about these sometimes overly abstract-sounding developments is provided by a replica of a Gutenberg-era press displayed in the exhibition hall corner. The only possible quibble is that this exhibit of early modern information technology and its impacts would have been effectively supplemented with contemporary information technology, ideally in the form of a companion website. However, this is a minor complaint regarding an otherwise superb scholarly achievement. An exhibition catalogue ($29.95, ISBN 9780295988733) is available for purchase from the Folger shop website: <http:// w w w. f o l g e r . e d u / s t o r e / s i t e / product.cfm?id=775E4DF3-1CC4-74E01C17ACCF727DFE9D>. George H. Williams University of South Carolina Upstate FORTHCOMING EVENTS Congreso Internacional. Lectura y Culpa en la Europa del siglo XVI. En el 450 Aniversario de la publicación del Índice de libros prohibidos de Valdés (1559). San Millán de la Cogolla, 6-8 de marzo de 2009. Organizan: Cilengua, Instituto Biblioteca Hispánica, Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Poética Europea del Renacimiento. http://www.lasemyr.es/?p=64 International Congress: Reading and Sin in Sixteenth-Century Europe. On occasion of the 450th Anniversary of the Publication of the Valdes’ Index of Prohibited Books (1559). San Millán de la Cogolla (Spain), 6-8 March 2009. Organized by: Cilengua, Instituto Biblioteca Hispánica, Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Poética Europea del Renacimiento. http://www.la-semyr.es/ ?p=64 Book Networks and Cultural Capital: Space, Society & the Nation. Fifth annual Conference on the Study of Book Culture, sponsored by the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture / Association canadienne pour l’étude de l’histoire du livre – at Carleton University in Ottawa – during the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences – 26 and 27 May 2009. For further information on CASBC/ACEHL, please consult our website: http://casbcacehl.dal.ca/. Réseaux du livre et capital culturel : territoire, société et nation. Cinquième colloque annuel de l’Association canadienne pour l’étude de l’histoire du livre / The Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture (ACÉHL/CASBC), dans le cadre du congrès de la Fédération canadienne des sciences humaines, qui aura lieu à l’Université Carleton à Ottawa, les 26 et 27 mai 2009. Inaugural Conference on Intellectual Property (CIP) will be held on 12-13 June 2009 at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY, and will include keynote addresses by Laura M. Quilter, M.L.S., J.D. and painter Joy Garnett. The purpose of this conference is to explore intellectual property, in a crossdisciplinary context, as both a concept and a reality relating to the professional fields whose concerns intersect in understanding its essence and implications. CIP papers and/or abstracts will be included in a conference proceedings, and selected essays may be published in a proposed collection for a peerreviewed press. For information, please see the conference website at www.iona.edu/cip. Book & Media Science: Research, Researchers, and Communication. An international Conference dedicated to the 200th anniversary of Lithuanian book science at Vilnius University, 22-23 October 2009. Organised by the Institute of Book Science and Documentation at the Faculty of Communication of the Vilnius University & the Nordic-Baltic-Russian Network on the History of Books, Libraries and Reading (HIBOLIRE). Languages of the Conference: Lithuanian, English, Russian. Simultaneous translation will be provided. For more information, please contact: Prof. habil. dr. Domas KAUNAS domas.kaunas@kf.vu.lt; Assoc. prof. dr. Ausra NAVICKIEN ausra.navickiene@kf.vu.lt or the departmental administrator Iveta JAKIMAVICIUTE iveta.jakimaviciute@kf.vu.lt 6 e WINTER 2009 CONFERENCE REVIEWS Networks of Design University College Falmouth, Tremough Campus, Penryn, Cornwall, UK 3 – 6 September 2008 Cornwall lies on the periphery, or so said Alan Livingstone, the Rector of University College Falmouth in his speech of welcome to the delegates of the 2008 Annual International Design History Conference. The statement, which bemused the many Antipodean delegates present, prefaced a small explanation of the presence and the state of the University itself as a site and as a learning institution. Cornwall's 'peripheral' status was accorded attention from EU policies to advance the fortunes of the less economically and socially advantaged places within the Union's sphere of interest. As a consequence of this special attention a university had recently been built in Falmouth to serve the needs of young local populations who might otherwise leave the area for their tertiary education, and thus almost inevitably become lost to Cornwall. It was also designed to foster the growth of an economy that included tertiary education, and all that that brings with it, in the cultural landscape of the county. Reimaging in Cornwall: networks and narratives, an exhibition of design at The Poly (the old Polytechnic Institution) reinforced the notion of a Cornwall in the process of re-designing its place in a twenty-first-century world. The theme of the conference, Networks of Design, took its impetus from a move away from consideration of the objects of design and the activities of the designer towards the many and varied interactions, mediations and agencies that inform design. It was a conference that, as its organisers Fiona Hackney, Caroline Pullee and Viv Minton explained, was ‘determinedly international’ and indeed it was, not just including delegates from all parts of the world, but embracing the many disciplinary activities that feed into design theory, process and praxis. The three keynote speakers were emblematic of this international and interdisciplinary approach. The first to deliver his keynote speech was the eminent philosopher/anthropologist turned historian/scientist, Bruno Latour, whose development of actor network theory inspired the conference theme. Ironically, he chose to speak, not of actor network theory, but of design, about which he professed to know SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 very little. This proved not to be the case as he proceeded to deliver an address entitled “A cautious Promethea? A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk)” that adroitly explored the term ‘design.’ He was interested in how design works both materially and symbolically and how its meaning has extended beyond the modernist notion of form and function in the production sense to a term which encompasses every aspect of life, human and otherwise. This notion is, of course, part of the actor network theory in which every entity in the mix has agency and a role to play in the whole. The second keynote speaker was the design journalist, activist and researcher Jeremy Myerson who traced the development of the twentieth-century-designed workplace and its ability to control and constrain in “Power of the network: Transitions in working life from Taylorist time and motion to networked space.” Beginning with the early Taylorite office which was designed to regulate, oversee and control activity in the workplace and, curiously, was often depicted from an elevated vantage point, he wandered through the spaces of the commodious and light-enhanced offices of the post-war period. Myerson's exploration of how power structures are facilitated through the design of office spaces extended to those of the present, where the control is maintained, not through specific physical arrangements of employer and employed, but in a climate of work being done increasingly at home, through digital networks. Dutch designer and co-founder of Droog Design, Jan Konings, the third and final keynote speaker, presented a view of what might be the future for the design of spaces for living in “Infill attractions.” His stance was ethical, his view universal and his approach inclusive. The modern high-density, concrete Dutch urban landscape became, under his imagined direction, a medium-density living space in which the indoors spilled out into the outdoors in which families might gather, children might play and gardens might grow. Anxious to include all sectors of society, he told of projects where the interior spaces of derelict buildings were ‘tented’ to afford clean, comfortable and warm living spaces for the homeless, and public seating was designed to accommodate the habits of the young to deposit themselves anywhere but on the seats of benches. It was a little difficult to see quite how these ideas might fit within a broader bureaucratic and pragmatic vision of urban design, but they do belong to a peculiarly Netherlandish and utterly charming brand of social utopianism. The conference proper was categorised under thematic strands that included ideas, things, technology, people and texts. It is the latter that I assume would be of interest to this audience and thus to which my attention will now turn. In keeping with what has become known as the 'visual turn' and what is now being explored as the 'material turn' in, among other disciplines, textual studies, I will choose presentations that deal specifically with these two approaches to texts. There were over two hundred delegates to the conference and thirty-four in this strand. At the time I chose to attend those presentations that interested me and here I have selected those among them which I feel represent the diversity of interests that were contained in just this one strand. In the strand, ‘The visual in texts,’ art historian Marilyn Cohen explored the ways in which the 1930s American movie poster acted beyond its function as an advertisement to entice people into theatres and became a text through which a number of sociological phenomena might be read. For Cohen, these movie posters became the ubiquitous face of American technological modernity, underscoring the new visualities that emerged through industrial cinematic production. Her presentation “Reading the American movie poster or the movie poster as text” attempted to override perceptions of them as anonymous, aggressive and conventional advertising material and to understand them as commentaries that spoke of their time and place. They were, and can be read as, affirmations of social and contractual arrangements such as the star system; their internal narratives encouraged and embedded a growing contemporary consumerism; and, she argued, they created the symbolic Hollywood out of a small Los Angeles suburb. They acted, in other words, as agents for social change, for cultural formation and, through their ubiquitous presence in the visual landscape, reflected and reinforced a contemporary view of modern American life. Also assuming a speaking role for visual texts, design researcher Jacqueline Naismith examined how New Zealand holiday magazines and publicity material were complicit in the transformation of particular towns into tourist destinations. In “A world in miniature: Travel networks and the mediation of New Zealand as a holiday destination in the 1950s,” she argued that New WINTER 2008 f 7 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 Zealand became increasingly a part of the international tourist network through changing travel modes and shifting views of what constituted leisure activity and that this could be demonstrated in the publicity material designed to promote New Zealand. Naismith analysed the imagery contained in the material, identifying the rhetorical strategies and style codes that worked to position local places as holiday destinations. In the strand, ‘The material in texts,’ a number of papers addressed the notion that the materiality of texts contained knowledges no less expository than their visuality or, indeed, their textuality. Archivist Anja Tollenaar is project co-ordinator of the Central Register of Design Archives in the Netherlands. The lack of one central and secure home for these archives has led to a coordinated and collaborative project involving a growing number of institutions which Tollenaar explained is crucial to the continued survival of the archival material. In her paper, “The Central Register of Design Archives as a network of artefacts, metadata and cultural heritage institutions,” she argued that its survival was, in turn, crucial to the history of design in the Netherlands as it embodies, not the products of design, but their processes. They comprise preliminary sketches, correspondence with other parts of the design network, prototypes and all the traces of the how and why of design that are not evident in the what of design. Everything is relevant. Were this material to be lost or simply made unavailable to research, then a great deal of the narrative of design in its contemporary context would also disappear, including much of what Latour argued as the extended comprehension of design as a touchstone. Reinforcing Latour's view of design as an extended or limitless term, William Macauley took his audience into outer space via the NASA space programme. His paper, “Inscribing scientific knowledge: Interstellar communication c. 1959-1977, with particular reference to design of NASA's Pioneer plaque and Voyager record,” explored the necessarily interdisciplinary relationships between the methodological and analytical tools of the visual, and scientific and technology histories in the work of scientists, technicians, and artists. They were responsible for the graphical inscripted messages on the artefacts attached to Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft of the 1970s. Macauley positioned this interdisciplinary approach as one which might assist understanding of material practices and artefacts that were designed to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence. Extending beyond the simple, didactic scientific drawings designed to support textual messages, these material messages, comprising images and non-linguistic symbols, were calculated to initiate a scientific dialogue. In summary of this stand, I might also add that there were discussions on the textual or narrative possibilities in the 1930s movie Metropolis, Japanese furniture drawings, landscape architecture, vivisectionists' websites, digital databases and my own paper which analysed the visual in the texts of nineteenth-century emigration advertising. The strand exemplified a conference of impressive diversity and, while some papers appeared to neglect the historical dimension of design, all enthusiastically engaged with the theme of the networks implicit in the design process. The social life of the conference was equally diverse: a trip up the River Fall to the famous Trelissick Gardens was preceded by a tour of Falmouth's new Maritime Museum and followed by a visit to the ZedShed, a small eco-community in Penryn was my choice for the first day. A highlight was a celebratory reception for the joint anniversary of the Design History Society and the Journal of Design History held at Pendennis Castle. Sitting high on a promontory overlooking the entrance to the Fall River basin, the castle provided spectacular views over Falmouth for some and a few Rebecca moments for others. A splendid conference in a stunning location and one that reminds us that design is now a term that resides in a world where increasingly, everything is designed, or perhaps re-designed. That might even include nature if one takes into consideration the present need to control, or re-design, phenomena like climate change. Patricia Thomas Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand e The Culture of Print in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) University of Wisconsin, Madison 11 – 13 September 2008 This conference, sponsored by the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, focused on the intersection of print culture, communication and science. In his introduction to the conference, Professor Greg Downey of the University of WisconsinMadison School of Library and Information Studies and Department of Journalism, set the tone for the subsequent presentations by noting that the artifacts of print culture and social processes are central to the study of science, technology, engineering and medicine in America. Print is essential to the past in these fields, but even the technology which purports to replace print still draws on metaphors from the world of print. A print culture of laboratory notes, gray literature, and other materials continues to lie behind the digital surface of the sciences. In a broader sense as well, science study is about charting knowledge in all its forms. The conference demonstrated the scope and variety of the world of the print culture of science. Sessions were wide-ranging including: Engineering Education & the Home; Popularizing Science in Print & Popular Medical Texts; Promoting the Medical Profession; Science & Literature; Government, Commerce, & International Communication; Representations of the Body & Nature; New Technologies & Graven Images; Technological Fascination; Rural Networks; Libraries; Political Controversies; Old Information & New Technology; The Natural World in Print; Mathematics – Code and Text. Presenters and participants meeting around these topics came from the fields of history, the humanities, information studies, social sciences, medicine, nursing, art, mass communication, agriculture, engineering, mathematics, and others in a fruitful crossfertilization of ideas which provided a sense of energy and engagement for the sessions. Conference presentations included such subjects as the process leading to displacement of folk names in ornithology by scientific nomenclature, the colorful reception history of the X-ray, the cultural commentary of classification, including issues surrounding fiction about science, a variety of approaches to promoting science in a number of settings, issues surrounding children and science through time, and a variety of approaches to science in rural areas in the United States and Canada. Several sessions dealt with the popularization of science, and it was this subject which prompted lively discussions and exchange of ideas. In this context, participants were able to consider the print culture of the twentieth-century environmental movement ... / 8 8 e WINTER 2009 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 ... / 7 along with related topics such as the intersection of philanthropy and advertising, and the fraught subject of scientists as popularizers of science and the fictional treatment of science and scientists. Examples of these issues in earlier times included such formats as medical catalogs as well as the popular reporting on new developments in the past, such as the Xray. Contemporary changes in publication patterns for popular science, and issues surrounding engineering education were also part of this stream. Political controversy surrounding scientific and technological controversies including disease, terrorism and eugenics provided another perspective on the popularization of science. Aspects of networking and coding provided themes which moved through several sessions. Sessions included discussion of code and coding as both unifying and distancing features in contemporary scientific and technological environments, while other presentations dealt with early networks such as those provided by bookmobiles and by the movement of scientific materials across the ocean in the baggage of immigrants. The organizers anticipate publishing selected papers from the conference in the University of Wisconsin Press series "Print Culture History in Modern America." The volume will be edited by professors Rima Apple, Greg Downey and Stephen Vaughn. Barbara Walden University of Wisconsin-Madison e 50 Years since l’Apparition du livre University of Helsinki, Finland 16 October 2008 The Department of History at the University of Helsinki and the Nordic-BalticRussian Network on the History of Books, Libraries and Reading arranged a workshop “50 Years since l’Apparition du livre” to commemorate the publication of Lucien Febvre’s and Henri-Jean Martin’s eminent work on book history and to create discussion on the current traits of book history. The workshop gathered around thirty book historians from five countries and various academic institutions and libraries. Prof. Laura Kolbe (University of Helsinki) welcomed participants, remarking how book history has recently emerged as a significant research field in Finland. The first guest speaker, Prof. Simon Eliot (University of London), began with introducing Febvre’s and Martin’s work. He concentrated on showing Febvre’s and Martin’s far-sightedness: although book historians remember in the first place the emphasis on the social and economic aspects of the print culture, l’Apparition du livre includes such visionary point of views as stressing the continuity between manuscript and print cultures, or seeking to break the European limits and write book history in global settings. During the latter part of his presentation, Eliot concentrated on explaining the development of the field. As book history is an emerging research domain, Eliot did not limit himself to scientific results only but included also the institutional developments of book history into the presentation. The second guest speaker, Prof. Emer. Margareta Björkman (Mälardalen University), presented views on the history of reading. Björkman concentrated on tracing the changes in reading habits which took place during the eighteenth century. She outlined tentative plans for studying core or even ideal reader groups, such as educated elites, peasants, women and children. At the same time, she aimed to create a holistic view which would not be limited by over-determined social classifications. Three Finnish speakers presented local researchers’ views on book history. Jaakko Tahkokallio (University of Helsinki) spoke about the importance of studying manuscript cultures as a part of the book history tradition. He emphasized how l’Apparition du livre does include a chapter on the late medieval manuscript culture, written by Marcel Thomas, and that researchers of the medieval manuscript culture have for decades concentrated on some of the central book history issues, such as the study of distribution networks. Dr. Jessica Parland-von Essen (Swedish Literature Society in Finland) introduced research about studying book collections. She emphasized the diversity of the theme: although researchers might concentrate on studying book collections that exist still today as complete entities, many of them have in fact their own individual past that reveal histories of various earlier collections. Similarly the histories of book collections are available through secondary sources. Finally, Dr. Jyrki Hakapää finished the workshop with a presentation on the Finnish book history tradition. In the ninteenth century, the emphasis of the national culture on studying the Finnish folklore and language and bringing the Finnish language up to the same level with other vernaculars, meant the study of books and writings in Finnish began early. Aside from the bibliographic tradition, certain Finnish literature researchers and historians picked up continental influences and studied the history of reading or the history of literature from the social point of view. As a result, these articles and books from the era between the two world wars carry similar themes and ideas of Febvre’s and Martin’s book, whose views and visions were not ‘invented’ in the 1950s, but basically were results of Febvre’s and Marc Bloch’s annalist approach from the 1920s. After the workshop participants visited the National Library of Finland. Dr. Sirkka Havu showcased the current exhibition of the library “Passion for Books” and the recently received Reenpää Collection, which includes a good amount of rare Finnish printed works. All in all, the workshop emphasized the visionary aspects of Lucien Febvre’s and Henri-Jean Martin’s title. It became evident, that researchers of book history are substantially still working on fulfilling their visions and following their paths. Jyrki Hakapää University of Helsinki e Réseaux et circulation internationale du livre: diplomatie culturelle et propagande 1880–1980 Université de Lausanne, Université de Fribourg 13 – 15 November 2008 Over the past decade, a community of French-speaking scholars has sprung up around the topic of the book as an object of international relations. Thriving on the comparisons made possible by the culminating national book history projects, this group, under the esteemed guidance of Jean-Yves Mollier (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), François Vallotton (Université de Lausanne), Claude Hauser (Université de Fribourg), Jacques Michon (Université de Sherbrooke), Martyn Lyons (University of New South Wales), and WINTER 2008 f 9 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 others, has organized five conferences since 2000 to investigate the internationalization of the book trade and the cultural dynamics of books that cross political boundaries. The latest meeting occurred in Switzerland, at the universities of Lausanne and Fribourg, on the topic of books as deliberate instruments of cultural diplomacy or propaganda in the latenineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is at stake in the exportation of a book? Immediately after the Second World War, Switzerland undertook a large-scale distribution of books to Germany. Was this action an altruistic measure of reconstruction offered by a German-speaking neighbour, or an ideological buffer calculated to halt the westward expansion of communism? Luc van Dongen (Université de Lausanne) probed this question in a memorable paper that encapsulated as well as any the delicate meaning of ‘cultural diplomacy.’ Whether the term is a euphemism for ‘propaganda’ or a designation of a fairer sort of cultural exchange depends on the power differential involved and one’s perspective. Another case from the same period is The European Inheritance, a history launched by the Allies with the goal of uniting war-ravaged Europe within a common narrative of Western progress. Edited by Ernest Barker, it was imagined as objective anti-propaganda, but in fact the project soon foundered on crosscultural misunderstandings that exposed its biases, as Leslie Howsam (University of Windsor) showed, and the book never reached its intended audience. The Vatican’s international anti-Bolshevik novel prize of the mid-1930s, described by Stéphanie Roulin (Université de Fribourg), appears in hindsight to have been mere propaganda, although a number of German and Swiss writers of the time used it to air sincere concerns on the paradigm of the nearby Soviet Union. Swiss books in the United States between 1940 and 1960, by contrast, seem harmless cultural diplomats, spreading neutral images of mountains and Swiss horns. As Thomas Kadelbach (Université de Fribourg) explained, however, this ‘neutrality’ was itself designed to present Switzerland as an autonomous, stable land during the Cold War – one that belonged to the Atlantic world rather than the Sino-Russian, and one that was open for business with the United States. The character of a nation is perhaps most easily perceived by or projected to a foreign audience. Indeed, foreigners can be instrumental to the making of a national culture. The canonization of Balzac, for example, is inextricable from the American market. This is the argument of Thomas Loué (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines), who has investigated the crucial role of the critic Ferdinand Brunetière in recuperating Balzac, an author whose value was disputed in the late-nineteenth century. Brunetière’s literary biography appeared in the grand series, Frenchmen of Letters, published by J.B. Lippincott of Philadelphia, and it was this foreign event that rendered irrevocable Balzac’s fame. If early twentieth-century cases such as this were somewhat fortuitous, the interplay between domestic culture and the foreign market has since been increasingly rationalized and consciously deployed. One outcome is the policy of ‘nation branding,’ the strategy of organizing a country’s information industries (tourism, publishing, research, education, etc.) under the umbrella of a single attractive logo. Maxi Freund (Universität des Sarrlandes) discussed the strikingly successful brand, “Germany – Land of Ideas.” The international dynamics of the Arabic book were outlined in an excellent paper by Franck Mermier (Institut français du ProcheOrient). Here, as in the West, piracy and censorship have created industry booms and intellectual gradients, most notably in the case of Lebanon, which emerged as a centre of Palestinian and pan-Arab culture after 1965 because of its liberalization of publishing. Other fine papers treated other regions of the globe, and I was constantly impressed by the insights that scholars working in other languages bring to the field. If as a phenomenon the book is indisputably international, the scholarly gaze that tracks it must be equally so. The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing will only benefit from increased contact with nonAnglo-American groups such as this. Eli MacLaren Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada e Moscow calling The Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, at Oxford Brookes University, and Moscow State University of Printing Arts notched up another first when the new Master’s in Publishing opened its doors to a 50-strong cohort in Moscow on 1 November 2008. The two institutions have been working closely together over the past four years to develop the award, which gives the graduating student an MA in Publishing from Oxford Brookes and its equivalent from Moscow State University of Printing Arts. The new qualification will significantly increase the student’s employability both in Russia and beyond. CALL FOR PAPERS Library & Information History (formerly Library History) Throughout history, libraries have been the repositories of knowledge of all kinds. More recently, this has broadened into a history of information as we have entered the information age, with historians reconsidering the fundamental concepts and manifestations of knowledge and information in society. Library & Information History is a fullyrefereed, quarterly journal publishing articles of a high academic standard from international authors on all subjects and all periods relating to the history of information, in its broadest sense, and on the history of libraries and librarianship world-wide. Library & Information History is a journal for anyone interested in the social, cultural and intellectual history of information, books, libraries and all forms of knowledge in society. The editorial board invites scholars to submit papers to their learned journal that conform to the usual standards of publishing within the journal. Papers relating to all aspects of the journal's aims and scope are welcome, but the editorial board are very interested in developing particular themes within the journal, areas of interest are: the theory, development and methodology of information history; the history and origins of the information age; the cultural and social role of the library and/or librarian in the past; the role of the library and/or librarian in times of war or conflict; the history of the intellectual organisation of knowledge; the future directions of Library History as a discipline. Contributions and other correspondence should be sent to the Editor, Dr Toni Weller via email: tweller@dmu.ac.uk. Please see the website for submission guidelines and Notes for Contributors: www.maney.co.uk/journals/notes/ libraryhistory 10 e WINTER 2009 BOOK REVIEWS Eve Tavor Bannet, ed. British and American Letter Manuals, 1680-1810. 4 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008. 1712p. ISBN-10: 1851969187; ISBN-13: 9781851969180. £350.00/$595.00 [cloth]. This four-volume set traces the history of letter manuals published in Britain and America during the long eighteenth century, providing facsimiles of manuals as well as prefaces by Eve Tavor Bannet, author of Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680-1820 (Cambridge, 2005). Bannet starts the first volume with a general introduction that establishes the significance of the letter manual, a genre that influenced conduct and the culture of letters. She argues that these manuals reveal conventions of eighteenthcentury letters, thereby enabling us to recognize departures that create meaning and commonplaces that are more opaque than we might assume. As conduct literature, these manuals are equally illuminating in their attention to the manners and morals of social groups rarely covered in other types of conduct books (1:xi-xii). This set is excellent in a number of ways, starting with the organization. Bannet arranges the letter manuals to illustrate broad shifts over the century, devoting each of the four volumes to one kind. The first volume consists of “Academies of Complement, 1680-1805”; the second volume focuses on “Secretaries, 1687-1760”; the third volume is “Complete Letter-Writers, 1740-1795”; and the final volume has “The Art of Correspondence, 1770-1810.” In each volume, Bannet begins by explaining what is distinctive about the particular kind of manual as well as how it relates to the other kinds in style, audience, and objective. For instance, the “Academies of Complement” reflect an older, courtly tradition in modeling compliments between courtiers and extravagant love-letters between gentlemen and ladies, but they increasingly show the interests of the developing Secretaries. The “Secretaries” address men and women in a wider range of ranks and provide model letters concerning social, professional, and domestic matters. Bannet illustrates her points about generic change through her selection of popular manuals that reached a broad, transatlantic audience. SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 Within each volume, Bannet demonstrates further transformations by organizing the letter manuals geographically: each volume contains facsimiles of manuals published in London followed by American and/or Scottish adaptations. Bannet’s concise sectional introductions highlight how successive editions of manuals significantly abridge or reorder letters. A manual published in London might therefore appear in a different region with a new narrative, moral emphasis, or local appeal. For instance, the Glasgow edition of The Complete Letter Writer reworks the original London edition to address local anxieties about trade following the American War of Independence (3:176). Throughout each volume, Bannet’s remarks create a larger narrative about letter manuals while teaching readers to be more sensitive in their own interpretations of particular texts. Bannet supplements her lucid introductions with brief notes at the end of each volume and a good index at the end of volume four. The only weakness in the editing of this set is the occasionally unclear transition between letter manuals. This shift, particularly between excerpts from texts included in a single section, is indicated by a small symbol that blends too well with the facsimiles (see, for example, the shift between Complete Letter Writers 1:13-14). However, this minor problem is greatly outweighed by the strengths of this outstanding set, a set that will be useful for anyone interested in the culture of letters, conduct books, and transatlantic connections. Caroline Breashears St. Lawrence University, New York e T. H. Barrett. The Woman Who Discovered Printing. London: Yale University Press, 2008. xiv, 192p. ill. ISBN 0300127286. $25.00 Can the discovery of printing be attributed to the only woman who ever ruled China as emperor (690-705CE)? For some this may bring up memories of the media controversy surrounding Al Gore’s alleged claim of having ‘invented’ the Internet. Even though the title suggests otherwise, Barrett’s contention is much closer to the claim that Al Gore actually made. The former Vice-President said in an interview in 1999 that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” and hoped thereby to underscore his early support as a congressman for a technology that had already been invented [“Transcript: Vice President Gore on CNN's 'Late Edition'”; March 9, 1999. http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/ stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/ transcript.gore/]. Barrett similarly sets out to demonstrate that the few archeological remains and the snippets of textual evidence we have for the use of printing in seventh through ninth-century China, and East Asia more broadly, suggest that the Empress Wu Zetian played a central role in the exploitation and dissemination of a technology that had its antecedents in the decades and centuries preceding her rule. In the first half of this slim volume (chapters 2-5) the author examines the political, religious, technological and environmental factors that may have contributed towards the use of printing for the mechanical reproduction of texts on a large scale in the seventh and eighth centuries. The early invention of paper and its use for recordkeeping within the bureaucracy from the second century onwards meant that Chinese artisans had at their disposal a material highly suitable to bear inked impressions when compared to the materials in use elsewhere in the medieval world. Interestingly, Barrett contends that the efficiency of paper and manuscript copying may also have been a deterrent to the adoption of print. Techniques for carving and impressing seals and for taking rubbings off inscriptions incised on hard materials such as stone and jade were already used for the reproduction of longer texts by the late fifth century, but then and in later centuries manuscript copying on paper allowed for the large-scale reproduction of texts (in tens of thousands of copies) at an affordable cost. The author traces the main impetus behind the mass production of texts in China to the Buddhist reconceptualization of the written word as a relic: a material artifact that embodies the presence of the Buddha and his teachings. The multiplication of written artifacts propagating Buddhist teachings became a means through which to assist others in the pursuit of enlightenment and to show concern for the rebirth of the deceased, all practices that contributed to the accumulation of karmic merit. Historians have long recognized the special significance of Mahayana Buddhism in the early history of printing and book culture. To this general acknowledgement the author adds that the WINTER 2008 f 11 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 specific circumstances of the late sixth century made the reproduction of texts a more pressing concern and thus contributed to the demand for a technology that could satisfy this demand more adequately. Relying on recent work on the world history of climate change, he argues that worsening climate conditions contributed to anxieties regarding the disappearance of the Buddhist faith. Such anxieties may have inspired Sui and Tang emperors in the late sixth and early seventh centuries to imitate the model of the Indian ruler Ashoka who allegedly had 84,000 stupas established throughout the Indian peninsula in an effort to preserve and spread the Buddha’s teachings in the third century BCE. What is the evidence for the case that Wu Zetian’s role in the development of printing went beyond that of earlier rulers who invested in the mass (manuscript) production of texts? The evidence is scanty. Apart from the stamped security passes that may have been in use at the court during her rule, the case rests on her patronage of a Sogdian monk, Fazang, who participated in the translation of the first text known to have been massproduced in print: The Great Spell of Unsullied Pure Light. Fragments of this text are known to have been printed in Korea between 705 (when it was first translated in Tang China) and 751, and in Japan between 764 and 770. The sequence of events leads the author to propose that Fazang had his translation of the text printed as an offering for the spiritual well-being of his patron who had died of natural causes during the year in which he finished the translation. This scenario would also imply that the main rationale for the use of print was in this case the greater speed at which large numbers of copies could be produced. Speed was of the essence among those who believed that little time was available between the departure of the soul and its next reincarnation. The primacy of the Buddhist rationale for the earliest uses of printing also explains the dearth of evidence of printed material during the century following Emperor Wu’s rule. The author argues that the emperors who restored Tang rule increasingly turned to Daoism and discontinued the earlier practice of state support for the large-scale distribution of Buddhist texts. It wasn’t until the ninth century that further evidence emerges of the official as well as commercial printing of Buddhist and other texts, but that later history of printing remains the subject for another tome. In sum, this tiny volume offers a compelling reconstruction of what the early history of printing may have looked like given the scanty and disparate clues that remain today. The author alerts the reader to its speculative and incomplete nature, and I would caution the reader the same way. This is a highly readable and humorous story targeted at specialists and non-specialists alike. Whether historians of printing and reading will now be prodded to accept the role of Buddhist merit and Chinese xylog raphy, and the contributions of concubines, monks and other non-heroic characters in the global history of printing remains to be seen. e Hilde De Weerdt University of Oxford Lynn Cain. Dickens, Family, Authorship. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Kinship and Creativity. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. xviii, 183p. ill. ISBN 9780754661801. £50.00 This short book comprises mainly a close reading of four of Dickens’s novels from the central, well-explored period of the author’s life when he transformed himself from ‘Boz’ to ‘Charles Dickens.’ After a dense eighteenpage introduction and a six-page Foreword – an essential read if one is to understand the orientation of the rest – there are four chapters, each devoted to a single novel: Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and Bleak House. The blurb claims that Cain “interweave[es] critical analysis of the four novels with biography and the linguistic and psychoanalytic writings of modern theorists, especially Kristeva and Lacan.” Cain is well aware of the embattled position of psychoanalysis in literary study (pace the blurb, there is no substantial use of linguistics here) and her Foreword seeks to defend it as an interpretative mode, claiming that the historicist method “hermetically seals [novels] within their own time-frame, oppressively censoring the reader’s responses in favour of the ‘real’ understanding to which only the culturally-informed critic has access” (x). The proper application of psychoanalysis to literature, claims Cain, confirms Freud’s famous admission that fiction writers had realised the operations of the mind long before he had. Dickens’s greatness for Cain lies in his anticipation of what psychoanalysts would come to systematise in the twentieth century. Psychoanalytic theory provides Cain with a ready-made set of hierarchies that enables her to trace a developmental narrative over the four novels whereby the ‘maternal’ becomes increasingly important to the extent that on the last page she can claim that Bleak House realises that the paternal symbolic needs “the linguistic, domestic and cultural support of the maternal” (159). We all use hierarchising maps to generate our readings. The question is how valid any particular use of a theoretical map might be. The major problem with Cain’s book for me is that it is not as in control of what it does as it could be, and thus not as valid as it might be. The book consistently overclaims and overgeneralises, is confused (or perhaps not as open as it might be) regarding its premises, and uses a limited palette of psychoanalytic texts, all in English translation and often secondary. What ‘psychoanalysis’ is – what set of texts it comprises – is not argued, explained or justified. There is no trace of the newer translations of Freud (and certainly none of the original German). Despite their names being highlighted in the blurb, there is no mention of Lacan’s writing beyond the old and very limited selection in Sheridan’s 1977 and 1981 translations, and Kristeva’s works run to just three well-known short books and two essays. Much psychoanalytic material appears to derive from secondary sources. As regards the book’s use of generalisation, at a fundamental level there is, for example, no new or convincing justification of why the idea of a mother-father-child triad should be prioritised when a good deal of recent work (e.g. by McClintock) has reminded us that children were and are brought up in social units much more complex than that. There are many unsupported statements where juxtaposition or amplificatio rather than real logical subordination provides the linguistic coherence. Then the idea that psychoanalysis opens texts to readers who are not culturally informed is belied by a book which projects an idea of a reader whose lexicon belongs exclusively to high and often classical culture (we have here no work on the fliegende Blätter Freud recommends, and which Sally Ledger has recently explored in relation to Dickens). There is extensive reference to Dickens’s life (and especially words) drawn from published letters and biographies as well as to more general secondary contextual material. There is also a decent (and, regrettably, hardly sourced) overview of the variety of visual ... / 12 12 e WINTER 2009 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 ... / 11 experience in the nineteenth century as the introduction to the chapter on Dombey and Son. This goes on to claim, however, that that novel’s stress on the visual shows, for example, how “Dombey senior is apparently trapped in the minute interstice between Winnicottian mirroring and Lacanian mirror stage” (53). A psychoanalytic approach to reading Dickens might indeed be unfashionable, but this, regrettably, is not a book to reinstate it. It uses psychoanalysis as a Procrustean grid derived from just a few well-known Anglophone sources and overlaid on just a few well-known texts. It does not, alas, fulfil the potential of psychoanalysis as a careful, subtle and self-reflexive investigative process that tests its own methods and theories with new data to generate new, surprising and illuminating narratives. Andrew King Canterbury Christ Church University, UK e Des Cowley and Clare Williamson. The World of the Book. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2007. xiv, 249p. ill. ISBN 9780522853780. $AUD59.95. What is striking about this book, before you even begin to read it, is its great visual presence and beauty – a true celebration of the book as object and even as art. The production values are very high, with attention paid to paper, design, colour saturation, typography, binding, and various other elements that make up the visual and the physical book. The choice of illustrations is also excellent, as befits a book that started life accompanying the State Library of Victoria’s permanent exhibition Mirror of the World: Books and Ideas. The World of the Book “is written by and intended for those who love and read books” (xii). It is not an academic text (with no notes, references or other scholarly apparatus, apart from a list of texts for further reading), and the essays are not intended to be comprehensive analyses. It seems rather that they are meant to complement and to provide an entry point into and context for the many illustrations. The World of the Book begins with a broad survey of the history of the book, using a very wide-ranging definition of ‘the book’ – from ‘The Book Before the Book,’ referring to cuneiform tablets and hieroglyphics on papyrus, through illuminated manuscripts, to genres as diverse as pulp fiction and comic books. These chapters are lively and accessible, and a reminder that the search for a balance between durability or preservation, and accessibility or portability, has been ongoing for as long as people have been writing things down. While it could be argued that the early essays contain a very European focus – they mention only in passing the production of manuscripts in the Islamic world, and the use of paper and block printing in China, for instance – when the essays shift to a more thematic focus there is a distinct opening up to other parts of the world. Indeed, the thematic essays display a very wide range of interests, including ‘Books that Changed the World,’ a discussion of the use of design and typography at Penguin Books, a section on maps and travel books, and (fittingly, for such a visually appealing book) several essays on art and design. The range is sometimes so wide that one wonders precisely how the different themes or topics were chosen – there are essays, for instance, on relatively obscure topics such as Beat poetry, the book in Edo Japan, and books that focus on classical antiquity. The focus is often on the book as object and on the physicality of how books look and are handled, as well as their social impact. This does lead one to consider the question of the intended audience for the book, and to return to the notion that it is for ‘those who love and read books’ – perhaps it should be read purely for entertainment and pleasure. At the same time, it could be of great use as a sourcebook for teachers and lecturers of book design and publishing history. And when we put aside our academic leanings and theoretical frameworks, every book-lover will surely find something of interest in the broad offerings collected here. Beth le Roux Director, Unisa Press, South Africa e Grace Eckley. Maiden Tribute: A Life of W.T. Stead. Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2008. vi, 458p. ill. ISBN 9781425727086 (pb) $24.99. The difficulty in writing the life of W.T. Stead is that, as a central figure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century press, he was also an influential figure in the period more broadly. Grace Eckley’s Maiden Tribute provides a much-needed account of the life of Stead but, in attempting to tell the life through the events that it touched, often loses sense of both Stead as an individual and the culture with which he was inextricably bound. Stead is not an easy person about whom to write. An energetic supporter of causes ranging from spiritualism to feminism, imperialist in outlook while advocating a brand of socialism, Stead put his principles into practice, using his networks, founding organizations and, of course, writing and publishing voluminously. Eckley’s response is to tell his life chronologically, beginning from his birth in Yorkshire in 1849 to his death on the Titanic in 1912, dividing the intervening years into seventeen chapters, each devoted to a particular branch of Stead’s activities. Although necessary, this method of organizing such a life is only partially successful. Stead rarely focused exclusively on any one activity for a period of time and, as Eckley requires the time periods to line up in a chronological sequence, she imposes artificial temporal constraints on the subjects under discussion. As a result, the most successful chapters are those that have a tight thematic focus such as Chapter 7 “Telepathy: Psychics, Spirits, and Parapsychologists,” or discuss a particular event such as Chapter 4 “‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ 1885.” The majority, however, are uncomfortably bound by their thematic and temporal boundaries, and Eckley often excludes relevant material in an attempt to maintain their coherence. The result can be bewildering for readers, who are forced to piece together information scattered throughout different chapters in order to fully understand an event or incident from Stead’s life. This difficulty arises, in part, due to the diversity of Stead’s interests and the doggedness with which he pursued them. Eckley ably communicates both the tenacity of his character and the scope of his activity, but does so at the expense of explanatory details. Although Maiden Tribute is an accessible read, without a wide knowledge of the period much of its import is lost. I suspect even experts in the period will find themselves occasionally confused by the people and events who are introduced in passing. The overall effect is to render the period flat, a one-dimensional background of names and events against which Stead acts that diminishes both the importance and complexity of his various struggles and achievements. The book is, however, excellently researched and Eckley is keen to establish the WINTER 2008 f 13 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 evidence for the various claims that have been made about Stead, particularly with regards to his role in the ‘Maiden Tribute’ scandals and his presence on the Titanic. Her emphasis is very much on Stead himself, and those interested in his influence on the press will have to recover the valuable information that is distributed throughout the book. Maiden Tribute is a celebration of a remarkable life and, although at times a little defensive over his legacy, remains a vital contribution in our attempts to understand the influence of Stead upon both publishing history and his culture more broadly. James Mussell University of Birmingham e A. S. G. Edwards, ed. English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, Volume 14: Regional Manuscripts 12001700. London: The British Library, 2008. vi, 268p. ill. ISBN 9780712349888. $90.00. The most recent volume of English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700 continues to spare no expense in terms of its production values, though perhaps to more modest effect than in previous editions. This installment is a bit slimmer than usual, and fewer of its contributors than normal have taken advantage of the journal’s willingness to reproduce high quality images of the manuscripts under consideration. The subtitle, “Regional Manuscripts 1200-1700,” also obscures a noticeable chronological emphasis, as eight of the eleven articles concentrate on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, perhaps, in fairness, as a corrective to the journal’s more frequent emphasis on sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and even eighteenthcentury materials. One recurring interest in the volume is the transmission of manuscript texts by generations of users. Kathryne A. Lowe studies the work of both government and monastic scribes to demonstrate that, contrary to their name, inspeximus charters were not routinely inspected prior to recopying. Vincent Gillespie argues that the Speculum Christiani was only the most successful of several early fifteenth-century experiments to produce a vernacular aid to parish priests from the Cibus Anime, a Latin reference work aimed at clerics and monks. Peter Murray Jones studies the social textuality of the Tabula medicine, a fifteenth-century medical encyclopedia that he suggests had its roots in mendicant circles but which continued to be consulted and actively reconstituted by a diverse readership well into the sixteenth century. Andrew Taylor shows how a sixteenth-century manuscript ballad collection may constitute the efforts of a Northern balladeer to compile regional works for subsequent print publication in London. In addition to these specific cases, A. I. Doyle has provided an introduction to four pages of notes from the late Neil Ker, offering helpful guidelines, if somewhat limited in their range of topics, to the shifting norms of manuscript production in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. Alongside these studies of transmission history, three articles focus on chronicle readers or writers: John Spence’s survey of AngloNorman prose chronicles reveals a geographically, socio-economically, and intellectually diverse English audience for these texts, notwithstanding the growth of Middle English; Anne F. Sutton provides further evidence to identify the Robert Bale who authored a London chronicle with the scrivener of the same name and shows how his professional life would have facilitated that chronicling; and Christopher Lay explores a manuscript containing both chronicle material and notes by London historian John Stowe to examine how he synthesized source material for his city history. Another two articles offer accounts of new manuscript discoveries: Kathleen L. Scott reviews some newly discovered booklets that very nearly complete a Middle English manuscript miscellany probably disassembled by Thomas Rawlinson at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and Simon Horobin offers a compelling case for identifying a recently discovered translation of the Legenda Aurea with a previously lost work by fifteenth-century poet and translator Osbern Bokenham. Finally, Marlene Villalobos Hennessy shows how a grouping of Marian texts in a Carthusian manuscript reveals the integrated nature of these monastic communities, providing texts that bridged the purportedly insuperable gap between lay-brothers and choir-monks. The volume closes, as always, with a catalog of recent manuscript sales at auction. A. S. G. Edwards once again fills this duty, covering sales from January 2006 to December 2007. Garth Bond Lawrence University, Wisconsin Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds., A companion to the history of the book. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007. xvi, 599p. ill. ISBN 9781405127653. $149.95. The publication of Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose’s Companion to the history of the book is a real event for aficionados of this nascent discipline, which is as flourishing as any field can be in today’s human sciences. Comprehensive in its coverage and authoritative in its analyses, this is the singlevolume introduction that we have been wanting for a long time. It is much more than a ‘companion’ in any conventional sense – which is a good thing, and not only because of its distinctly uncompanionable price. Eliot and Rose have produced a definitive survey to which specialists as well as lay readers will find themselves returning frequently for information and analytical insight. Eliot and Rose take the term ‘book’ in a broad sense, embracing not only codex volumes and scrolls, but also periodicals, ephemera, clay tablets, and a variety of other communicative objects. The forty chapters they have corralled together add up to a composite global history of the making, distribution, and use of these objects. The narrative extends in a grand arc from the invention of writing, around 5,000 years ago in what is now Iraq, to the digital revolution. Across that immense period, regimes of regulation and jurisdiction (censorship, intellectual property) and systems of storage and classification (libraries, bibliography) also get substantial attention. There are inevitably gaps, but they are surprisingly hard to identify. The equally inevitable variations in the quality of description and analysis are also slight given the scope. It is only mildly unfortunate, for example, that the book opens with chapters on bibliography and textual scholarship that set a dry and defensive tone quite unrepresentative of the whole. Skip them; the rest is much more welcoming. Some of the most impressive contributions actually deal with relatively unfamiliar topics. Eleanor Robson’s account of tablets in ancient Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia is intellectually gripping; at the other end of the story, Paul Luna’s account of technologies in the latemodern age provides an account of recent developments in publishing that is revelatory for the contemporary author. And there are plenty more fine contributions in between. To select winners would be artificial when the overall quality is so consistent. The collective ... / 14 14 e WINTER 2009 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 ... / 13 achievement is what really matters, and that is substantial indeed. A major synthesis such as this invites the reader to stop and reflect on the shape and purpose of the field as a whole – the “adventure,” as Eliot and Rose call it, that is the history of the book. The moment is also opportune because 2008 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the work that, more than any other, launched the history of the book. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s l’Apparition du livre was published in 1958 as the lynchpin of a grand positivist project, originally mooted at the turn of the century, to tell the story of civilization itself. It is worth asking how the nature of the history of the book that is represented in the Companion realizes Febvre and Martin’s ideals, and how far the enterprise has become something different. Febvre and Martin’s vision was in one sense much narrower than Eliot and Rose’s: they took ‘the book’ to be the codex, and especially the printed codex. But in another it was broader. Febvre and Martin were interested in the printed codex for a reason, and that reason was extrinsic to the book itself. They wanted to know about what they called “the book in the service of history.” Febvre’s conception was that the book was one of the “tools” with which people fabricated culture, society, and politics. That process was their real target. This distinction corresponds loosely to one that Eliot and Rose frame at the outset of their Companion, between two ‘premises’ of the history of the book. These are the premises that books make history and, in turn, are made by it. The first they associate with Robert Darnton and Elizabeth Eisenstein (whose Printing revolution in early modern Europe itself turned 25 this past year). The second has no such obvious heroes, but seems to be the principal concern of scholars in general who nowadays self-identify as disciplinary specialists in the history of the book. In consequence, while the Companion emphasizes that an ambition to pursue both aspects simultaneously is precisely what makes the history of the book exciting and important, in practice it allows the second to overshadow the first. This accurately represents the field as it now exists, as a glance at recent influential work will confirm. What it indicates is that the entrenchment of the history of the book as a discipline – cause for satisfaction as it is, and occasion for such a fine celebratory Companion – has not been without costs. For good reasons, disciplines tend to narrow the focus of their practitioners and to direct their gaze away from broader questions, which become somebody else’s business. Eliot and Rose know what their business is and they discharge it impeccably. But I do not think that Febvre and Martin – not to speak for Darnton or Eisenstein – would have committed themselves without at least some ambivalence to the history of the book as the enterprise it has become. The distinction that Eliot and Rose invoke has been the subject of a lot of academic polemic since the mid-1990s. They are right, I think, to identify the value of the history of the book with an ambition to pursue both sides of it at once. Their Companion, of course, is meant to exemplify the fruitfulness of doing that, not to challenge its very terms. But in the end that is what it does. It indicates, I think, that the way to realize the potential of the enterprise that Febvre and Martin launched and Darnton and Eisenstein established is to accept that the distinction is ultimately an empty one. And in new work it is possible to see it treated as such. In their very different ways, books like William St. Clair’s The reading nation in the Romantic period (Cambridge, 2004) and Richard Sher’s The Enlightenment and the book: Scottish authors and their publishers in eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago, 2006) simply ignore it. They take it as read that understanding the constitution of books is impossible without understanding both their context and consequences. Taken seriously, that distinctly Febvrean perspective would be a dizzying one for most of today’s historians of the book to adopt. But there too is a purpose of disciplinarity. Now that the history of the book finally has a secure footing, it can afford to be more truly adventurous. e Adrian Johns University of Chicago Trevor Fawcett. Georgian imprints: printing and publishing in Bath, 1729-1815, Bath: Ruton, 2008, 119p. ill. ISBN 0952632640. £9.00. Despite the unique position enjoyed by Bath from the late seventeenth century, as England’s principal spa and social resort, the noble art of printing arrived relatively late to the city in 1729. This was probably due to the proximity of Bristol, which was rapidly growing due to trade with the American colonies, especially in African slaves. However, by the mid 1740s the book trade in Bath was beginning to catch up with comparable provincial centres elsewhere and the city even had its own newspaper. For the remainder of the Georgian period Bath saw a rapidly growing volume and surprisingly wide variety of printing and publishing activity, as detailed and illustrated in Trevor Fawcett’s new study. This work consists of fifty illustrated accounts, dealing with individual businesses or else topics such as the printing office, jobbing, publishing the antiquities, experiments with lithography, each about two pages in length. These are presented in a broadly chronological order. Inevitably this structure provides more than enough space for some topics, but tends to limit others somewhat. Personally I would have welcomed more information relating to Samuel Hazard’s role as one of the two printers and publishers of the Cheap Repository Tracts. The work is copiously illustrated, showing that there were talented engravers as well as letter press printers in the city. Some of these illustrations are typical examples of contemporary provincial printing, but others have a vitality that is not often found, such as the illustration of the author canvassing for a subscription, which is also reproduced on the cover. In most cases the standard of reproduction was good, but illustrations of the Bath newspapers, in tight bindings, would have benefitted from more careful photography and some cleaning up before reproduction. Most of the illustrations are numbered and referred to in the text but there are a few which seem to have been added purely for decoration and are not identified. Trevor Fawcett clearly knows a great deal about his subject and has consulted a wide range of local materials, but there is a danger that those working on the trade in one area can become too focussed on local sources and forget that early eighteenth-century printers frequently moved around before they became established. For example, the mysterious “B. Lyons” who introduced printing to Bath about 1729/30, is probably the Benjamin Lyon who is mentioned in the stationers’ registers and who briefly operated a press in Norwich in 1718. This man served his apprenticeship in the same London printing shop as Samuel Farley, the grandfather of Felix Farley, the second Bath printer in 1733. New accounts of English provincial printing and publishing are always to be WINTER 2008 f 15 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 welcomed to help redress the long held misconception that there was little printing of value or interest in eighteenth century England outside London, Oxford or Cambridge. This is especially so with respect to Bath where the book trades have not been previously studied in great detail, although there are some accounts of individual tradesmen. There is much in this volume both in terms of the text and illustrations that will be of value to those interested in the history of the city and also of printing in the provinces. e David Stoker Aberystwyth University Peter R. Frank, Johannes Frimmel, Buchwesen in Wien 1750-1850: kommentiertes Verzeichnis der Buch-drucker, Buchhändler und Verleger. Mit einer um Informationen zur Verteilung der Befugnisse, Adressen und Biographien wesentlich erweiterten Fassung im PDF-Format auf CD-ROM. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008. (Buchforschung: Beiträge zum Buchwesen in Osterreich; 4.) XVIII, [3], 299p. ill. ISBN 9783447056595. The greatest part of this excellent volume consists of an alphabetical list of individuals, printers, publishers, booksellers, engravers, illustrators and others involved in the book trade in the capital of Europe’s most ethnically diverse empire. Each entry contains details of the various owners of each firm, sometimes shown by extant catalogues of its backlist(s), and secondary literature. The list confirms the published findings of other researchers such as Helmut Lang in highlighting the linguistic and typographical versatility commanded by many of these firms. By way of illustration of the volume’s value, I take one name from the list, that of the Trattner family, whose most famous member, Johann Thomas (1719-1798), exhibited the commercial and social possibilities, including ennoblement in 1764, open to a Protestant from the provinces blessed with a sharp business brain and driving ambition, who dominated the trade in Vienna and in several other cities. His backlist numbered some eight thousand titles, encompassing literature, school textbooks, almanacs, periodicals and musical scores, and, like some of his co-professionals, he did not scruple to deal in clandestine publications, although one presumes that he did not risk making these available in another of his enterprises, his lending library. The volume includes several lists, of secondary sources, of individuals and firms, of places where business was conducted, of engravers, of periodicals, almanacs and calendars and subjects covered in the main list. Also included is one of foreigners involved in the Viennese book trade, where, as further proof of the dazzlingly cosmopolitan nature of the Empire, one finds Serbs, Czechs, Ukrainians and Italians, besides the numerous Germans. Accompanying the volume is a CDROM, which, duplicating the information available in the printed version, makes for a very useful, space- and weight-saving aid to the travelling bibliographer. The publication of the present volume continues a disturbing trend in book history in that major advances in our knowledge of the individuals, printers, publishers, booksellers and others are left to nonlibrarians. As a trained librarian and active researcher in book history, I say ‘disturbing’ deliberately, for I am concerned that the great libraries of western Europe, national and university-linked, seem largely to have abandoned their traditional role of publishing specialised catalogues of their early holdings. If librarians are relegated to watching over their collections in the manner of prison guards, as was once bizarrely suggested to me by a senior colleague, why should they need specialised training? The volume is well printed and attractively laid out, as one would expect of Germany’s leading publisher, which deserves the thanks not only of the authors but also of all involved in the book history of the Germanlanguage areas of Europe for having taken over this important series. W.A. Kelly Napier University, Edinburgh e Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond. Books Without Borders, Vol. 2: Perspectives from South Asia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xiv, 204p. ISBN 0230210333. £45. From the outset this collection (the second of two interlinked volumes) announces its broad perspective on book culture and the term ‘book.’ The editors’ Introduction appreciates the power and significance of the inscribed word – including as opposed to presuming – the printed book, accounting too for varieties of editing, packaging and reading. This inclusive approach dovetails in one example of a materially, politically significant act of writing from the age of the Emperor Asoka, one-time ruler of Northern India, who commissioned a gigantic piece of political graffiti in 261 BCE. The Introduction notes that the idealistic statements carved into a rockface ‘would put the United Nations to shame’ (2). Even so they are surely a physical indicator of colonisation, signalling Asoka as the new controlling force in the region. The point should be that all writing, consumption, circulation, and so on is politically charged and culturally imbued, not just those examples emerging from relatively recent colonial systems. It is the translations carried out by James Prinsep in 1832 that are heralded here as an “appropriation of a pre-colonial past” (2). Prinsep emerges as the author of the inscriptions, unveiling the pre-colonial past to an Anglophone nineteenth century. In short, the near colonial past dominates this volume’s Introduction and extends across the volume as a whole: book culture is inescapably colonial, and the tension between Anglophone and a largely uncharted vernacular book history is prominent in this collection. Rather than theorising this, the editors allow the struggle to play out: Indian literature, for example, is “overwhelmingly” pre-colonial (3), yet the Introduction opens with a quotation from Forster’s A Passage to India. The geography of South Asia is not defined, and there is an obvious bias toward studies of India in the volume (a feature which, perhaps, cannot be helped since the volume developed from a conference, but might have been addressed by the editors). This volume, however, dealing with book cultures that are arguably on the threshold of established book history, is welcome, and the studies here are provocative and varied. In the volume’s first essay Harish Trivedi redresses one of the “fondest vanities of the colonial enterprise” – that imperial rule brought the book (12). This essay has an unnecessarily combative tone. Trivedi notes that in the 1770s, the British began produce “translations into English from Sanskrit of foundational works of Indian law, scripture and literature.” These acts of cultural appropriation did not appear to “promote or strengthen British rule but led on the contrary to the discovery of the greatness of Indian culture and civilization dating from a period when Britain had not had so much to ... / 16 16 e WINTER 2009 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 ... /15 show for itself ” (15). However Trivedi acknowledges the varied and local nature of books in a pre-print landscape, and implicit in his study is an insistence on the inclusivity of the term ‘book’ or manuscript, or codex, or grantha, when book history as a discipline frequently displays a print-bias. Of note are Kitty Scoular Datta’s readable treatment of the post-print treatment of Havez in both England and India (58-70), and Priya Joshi’s ‘Futures Past: Books, Reading, Culture in the Age of Liberalization’ (85-111), which, using India as a case study (reminding us that India should not be conceived of as a “discrete national identity or limited geographical space” [86]), interrogates each of the terms of her paper’s title. Datta notes that the terms overlap; indeed her section on ‘Books,’ rather than approaching the book as a symbol or attitudes towards books, is concerned with consumption and taste, describing Bombay’s markets in which publications (in English) are sold in food markets as an “urban, public display” (88). This is not at all unique to Bombay; perhaps what ought to be interrogated is the language and cultural bent of the books for sale. Fraser’s assessment of the flooding of the OUP India building in 1943, and the concurrent Japanese air strikes, is compelling. He reads the events as a single episode: a pivotal moment symbolising the ‘inner and outer’ threat to British cultural and political sway in India. Minor reservations aside, this book represents a valuable step towards a “holistic view” (8) of book history and textual transmission, highlighting issues of methodology and approach, and questioning the boundaries of the discipline itself. Carrie Griffin University College Cork, Ireland e Peter Holliday, Edward Johnston Master Calligrapher. London and New Castle: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2007. xx, 389p. ill. ISBN 9780712349277 (BL); 9781584561989 (Oak Knoll). £25.00; $49.95. Edward Johnston, calligrapher and type designer, has been the subject of a loving biography by his daughter and of a large number of appreciations by other calligraphers, but Peter Holliday’s book is the first attempt at a thorough examination of both Johnston’s life and work. It is to be regretted that the book is posthumous: Holliday died in 2003, and it was left to his sister to put his notes into some semblance of order. The results are both fascinating and uneven. A group of introductory chapters discuss Johnston’s almost fortuitous entry into the field of calligraphy, his employment as a teacher, first at London’s new Central School of Arts where he was hired by William Lethaby, later at the Royal College of Art, then continue with his association with the ‘heirs’ of William Morris, and his years analyzing the scripts of medieval manuscripts in the British Museum. These are followed by a further group of four chapters examining, in great detail, Johnston’s connections with the craft communities in Ditchling, Sussex, where his friend and former pupil, Eric Gill, was for a time the dominant force. Johnston – probably fortunately – was never altogether drawn into Gill’s orbit, and the increasing Catholicism of Gill, Douglas Pepler, and the rest of Father McNabb’s acolytes eventually caused a split; ultimately, it was Gill who left for deepest Wales, and Johnston who remained in Ditchling. Others joined him there, among them the weaver, Ethel Mairet; and there were visitors too, including Bernard Leach, the potter, and two Japanese folk artists – of whom one, Shoji Hamada, based his own pottery village on what he had observed in Ditchling. In these chapters, Johnston’s life as a member of a community matters almost as much as his artistic work, and these chapters serve as well as an introduction to a village where the craft traditions continue. The remaining chapters of the book focus first on Johnston’s relationship with Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, then examine Johnston’s influence in Britain and Germany. The problems of the book emerge most clearly here. In fact, while Bridges and Johnston admired and liked each other, their professional relationship consisted mostly of Bridges’ attempts to persuade Johnston to devise a phonetic alphabet – an enterprise of which Johnston was pretty skeptical. The two chapters on influence all too often degenerate into lists of names, without much analysis. And similar difficulties occur elsewhere: a long analysis of Lethaby’s philosophy of art, drawn almost entirely from secondary sources, sits uneasily amidst much else on the Arts & Crafts Movement, while the story of Johnston’s long and uneasy association with Count Harry Kessler is scattered and disjointed. Nor are we told as much as we might wish to know about Johnston’s most famous commission, the construction of a font for London Transport which, in modified form, still adorns the city’s signage. In the end, Johnston’s influence came most importantly through his handbook, Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering, first published in 1906 and still readily available, and through his lectures and demonstrations. For all its faults, Peter Holliday’s book, heavily annotated and profusely illustrated, is a worthy monument. Fritz Levy University of Washington e Andrea Krupp. Bookcloth in England and America, 1823-50. New Castle, DE and London: Oak Knoll, British Library Press and The Bibliographical Society of America, 2008. 92p. ill. ISBN 9781584562139 [Oak Knoll], ISBN 9780712350075 [The British Library]. US$35.00. This ‘field guide’ will help accurately identify and date early American and British bookbinding cloths. Andrea Krupp’s introduction offers a brief look at the technological development of early bookcloth, bookcloth grain nomenclature, and bookcloth manufacture. Three appendices then follow. The first is in the form of a dense table, where her nomenclature is compared to terms developed by other researchers. The second appendix, forming the bulk of the book, is the actual catalogue of nineteenth century book cloth grains. The third appendix covers the subset of ribbon-embossed cloths, where patterns are reproduced in actual size. The continued growth of interest in nineteenth-century books is evidenced by recent conferences such as the Well Dressed Book: A Symposium on Nineteenth-Century American Cloth Bindings held in College Park ,Maryland in 2008. Andrea Krupp spoke at that conference on her recent findings, and this publication makes her technical work, and her excellent color illustrations, more easily available. Some of this work was first published as an article in 2006, and the 2008 book expands on that earlier article with new information. Krupp has noted that 160 new grain patterns were found in compiling the research, and 135 of those appear before 1850. To date, using earlier sources, only 57 different grains were identified, with 17 appearing pre1850. WINTER 2008 f 17 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 Like many special collections projects today, this research is also going to have a digital existence. The Library Company of Philadelphia’s McLean Conser vation Department will soon be hosting on-line access to The Database of 19th-century Cloth Bindings and The Catalogue of 19th-century Bookcloth Grains (CBG). And it is also worth pointing interested readers to the University of Alabama’s excellent Publishers’ Bindings Online, 1815-1930 site, which actively gathers information about current exhibitions and research. While this book contains information and images that should eventually be available online, having this guide in your hand with the images, the introduction and the nomenclatures all united, is both elegant and convenient. As the book historian Sue Allen says in her preface, “Andrea’s book provides … dictionary and grammar” for looking at the glorious and often confusing visual and textural variety of bookcloths. Chela Metzger University of Texas at Austin e Jack Lynch. Deception and Detection in EighteenthCentury Britain. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. xiv, 218p. ISBN 9780754665281. £50.00. “To bring a fact within the compass of possibility, there is nothing required but that it should not contradict itself; but to make it probable, it is likewise required that it should not be contradictory to ordinary experience.” Thus Allan Ramsay in 1753 to Henry Fielding in their quarrel over the strange case of Elizabeth Canning, but it might have been the motto to Jack Lynch’s wide-ranging study of a curious phenomenon of the eighteenth century: the proliferation of literary hoaxes, forgeries and frauds. Canning’s case (she claimed that she had been abducted and kept in a room for over a month with next to nothing to eat before miraculously escaping) has never been satisfactorily resolved. It still is an interesting legal starting point for any discussion about the reliability of witnesses and the admissibility of evidence. The century’s fascination with fraudulent behaviour – from Mary Toft claiming to have given birth to a large number of rabbits to Chatterton’s fake Rowley poems – has everything to do with its ever increasing awareness of the epistemological boundaries between fact and fiction and of historical change. Shakespeare no longer got away with having Richard the Third mention Machiavelli, and William Lauder didn’t get away with accusing Milton of plagiarism because Milton’s defenders checked Lauder’s sources. Lynch’s book is of major importance because of the very specific and original angle he opts for. He rightly claims that “this book is different,” as he addresses, not the fakers themselves, but the critics who argued over the fakes: “Toft’s case deserves our attention not because of the prodigious birth – history is full of them – but because it prompted so much learned debate” (viii). This approach results in a fascinating and convincingly argued account of some major changes in our ways of thinking about authorial authenticity, the nature of evidence, and the connection between reputation and literary values. Well-written and entirely jargon-free – indeed, Foucault gets a deserved slap when Lynch says “Since many critics who draw on Foucault’s considerations of authorship are bogged down in the morass he has left, I hope to look for a more concrete illustration of the status of the author” (85) – this careful analysis of its subject opens up new areas, and makes one for instance aware of the possibility that “Ossian’s Fingal was far better than Macpherson’s Fingal” (28) because of modern ideas of authorial personality. Lynch sharpens one’s sense of the various degrees of the legal admissibility of evidence, and of the mutual influence of historiography and literary criticism. As he puts it: “Ossian’s supporters opened the historicist door. Ossian’s critics rushed through it. Once it was suggested that the epics afforded verifiable historical information … those who doubted Macpherson’s story could use historical information to discredit the poems” (125). Also, his account makes one wonder why those fakers did what they did. Lying successfully is an arduous task, and truth will always out (or so we hope). The first chapter of this excellent book is titled “Recognizing a Fake When You See One” – which raises a few questions, especially when one considers the concluding chapter, in which Lynch points out: “If we consider the fake as a literary kind, we know only the inferior exemplars of the genre: the best are by definition unknown to us” (180). This is a very sobering thought indeed. Peter de Voogd University of Utrecht Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody, eds. Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction. Aldershot, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. xxii, 191 p. ill. ISBN 9780754657316. £50.00; $99.95. This collection of essays sensibly takes up the topic of paperback cover art with the advent of mass-market publishing in the twentieth century. The thirteen chapters are widely different in focus and methodology, but this diversity is genuinely welcome as it opens up new ways to think about book design, marketing, and the changing roles that paperbacks have played in the broader discursive game of culture. To help the reader better comprehend this rather unwieldy subject, the editors have grouped the essays into four appropriate subsets. The opening quartet work out from an historical analysis of the surprisingly slow evolution of the paperback market (which can date its origins back to the disposable paperbound books issued in the nineteenth century by Baron Freiherr von Tauchnitz for Englishspeaking travelers to the Continent) through a series of different attempts to show how covers are read by potential – and actual – consumers of popular romance, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy. In the next group, three authors assess various factors that contribute to a book’s popularity: especially the impact that modern literary prize competitions (such as the Booker) has had on the marketing of paperbacks. As might be expected, these researchers have found that the affirmation of cultural distinction conveyed by a “strapline” banner – cutting diagonally across the cover or screaming from the top margin – can make a work an instant bestseller. But such power might come at a certain price, and these contributors are well aware of the paradoxes this subject invites. As Claire Squires observes, “The choices of winning books reflect not only on the books themselves . . . but also back on the Prize, affecting its reputation and creating journalistic capital which is vital for the Prize to achieve its prominence and impact” (81). Three more chapters then parse the lucrative interplay between paperback publishing and other so-called culture industries (most obviously, cinema). So conspicuous have these crossovers become that the covers of modern paperbacks can almost be said to provide – and promote – a kind of cartography of ... /18 18 e WINTER 2009 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 ... /17 subsidiary rights, a celebration of all the nonliterary ways in which a copyright can be made to pay. To emphasize the seamlessness of cultural production (even when the two products might be imagined or understood to be radically different), publishers have happily embraced and sought to replicate the model of movie poster art in the covers used for titles with Hollywood tie-ins. The last group of essays focuses on cover art as a mechanism to target very specific market segments – with examples drawn from lesbian pulp fiction (typically provocative silhouettes of female bodies) to the works of Muslim women writers, from the covers of which dark eyes peer from behind the necessary veil. Students of the American book trade may be disappointed to find that almost all of the contributors focus on British or Continental examples as the basis for their individual case studies. Even so, important generalizations and inferences can be drawn out that should prove helpful in thinking about the paperback revolution more generally. All of them give empirical weight to Gérard Genette’s suggestive theorizing of the significance of the “paratextual” elements of literary production. Michael Anesko Pennsylvania State University e Alistair McCleery and Benjaman A. Brabon, eds., The Influence of Benedict Anderson. Edinburgh: Scottish Centre for the Book, Merchiston Publishing, 2007. viii, 94p. ISBN 9780955356117. Much like Edward Said’s Orientalism, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities has become an extremely influential text for literary, cultural and postcolonial studies; armed with a concern with narrative and mythmaking that is the stuff of literary and cultural studies, both books strive to connect with diverse fields such as economics, politics and history to reflect on ties that bind and divide. While detractors point to inaccuracies in Anderson’s historical summations, a tendency to a certain sweeping generality, a somewhat breathless conflation of contrary methodologies and concepts, there is no doubting that Anderson’s handling of temporality, narrative, print capitalism and the rise of news media to meditate on the creation and fostering of imagined communities has been richly allusive and enormously productive. The Influence of Benedict Anderson brings together four essays to evaluate and critically engage with Anderson’s contributions to the debate on nationalism. Howard Wollman and Philip Spencer’s “Can such Goodness be profitably discarded?” points to Anderson’s foregrounding of literature and language in his political theorisations and their paper sets out to explore enabling and disabling paradoxes inherent in Anderson’s disciplinary and intellectual allegiances, and contradictions in his theorisations. They assert that Anderson’s generalisations are undertaken at the expense of detail, that his concern with discursive and rhetorical forms moves his work away from traditional Marxist approaches to politics and state, that his theories paradoxically reinforce an essentially colonialist orientation and that despite nationalism’s deeply problematic features (racism and ethnocentricism), Anderson’s attitude is, ultimately, one of sympathy. Cairns Craig’s excellent essay, “Benedict Anderson’s Fictional Communities,” looks at Anderson’s use and abuse of José Rizal’s novels (and their translations), that make their appearance in Anderson’s work from Imagined Communities to Under Three Flags. Craig turns Anderson’s assertions about the realist novels’ magical ability to conjure and recreate society on its head; instead of art imitating life, Craig argues, realist fiction shows just how “illusory is the reality which it describes.” Craig problematises what Anderson takes for granted as fiction by unpicking the temporal processes of reading, particularly, the theorisation of ‘homogenous empty time’ (what readers hold in their heads, simultaneously, despite the encounters with different characters and episodes in their lives), which Anderson uses as an analogy for a national awareness. Craig argues that that Anderson’s temporal analogy does not accurately reflect the reading process. Narratives often attempt to move the plot forwards through readers’ discovery of past lives, affiliations and events; nations resemble novels because both seek to imagine “a future they seek to turn into reality” by recovering “in that future the past’s imaginings.” Benjamin A. Brabon’s paper, “Benedict Anderson and the Gothic Cartography of Great Britain” engages with the spatialisation of the nation in relation to its naming of places, mapping, location and drawing of boundaries. While the essay isn’t always convincing on the specific links between the gothic novel and the nation (this section being all too cursory) Brabon’s analysis of how colonialist cartographic practices create ghosts and spectres that must be suppressed and repressed, but which may later provide the basis of future postcolonial national imaginaries, makes interesting reading. Robert Fraser’s essay takes the Bengal Emergency of 1907-6 as a test case for Anderson’s theory of the foundational contribution of print capitalism and vernacular languages to the formation of a national imaginary. While a print revolution may foster national consciousness in the case of Europe (Anderson, after all, is indebted to Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre, and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s Print Revolution in Early Modern Europe), Fraser argues that the strength of regional publishing and vernacular languages in India attests to the creation of diverse communities but that these do not amount to the unified whole that Anderson imagines. McCleery and Brabon bring together a cluster of provocative and critical responses to Anderson’s work but published as it is under the auspices of the Scottish Centre for the Book, it is perhaps curious given the volume’s preface that none of these essays engage in a sustained fashion with Scotland. The volume does, however, represent the first in a series of monographs emanating from a successful colloquia series, each focussing on a key figure in book history studies and engaging with scholars from around the globe. e Gail Low University of Dundee Matthew McLean. The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster: Describing the World in the Reformation. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. viii, 378p. ill. ISBN 9780754658436. $99.95. Sebastian Münster’s ambitious work Cosmographia attempted to comprehend the world’s geography, natural history and ethnography in one volume. Matthew McLean’s exhaustive study begins with a biography of Münster (1488-1552) who held the Chair of Hebrew at the University of Basel from 1529 until his death. The second chapter summarizes the history of cosmographies WINTER 2008 f 19 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 following two major styles developed by the ancients (the descriptive style of Strabo and the mapping style of Ptolemy) through to Münster’s own period. Chapters 4 and 5 summarize McLean’s close reading of the 1550 edition of Cosmographia, its engravings of cityscapes and descriptions ranging from local politics to exotic flora and fauna. Of most interest for members of SHARP would be chapter 3, in which McLean discusses the creation, printing, sales and uses of the Cosmographia (we learn for example that both Goethe and Montaigne found the book indispensable). McLean also outlines the differences between later editions of the text, both under Münster’s control and those outside of his control. One example of a foreign-language edition is the Frenchman François de Belleforest’s Cosmographia Universelle, which was more a “transposition” (Peter Burke’s term from The Fortunes of the Courtier, [90-93]) of the text than a translation. According to McLean, Belleforest’s “changes to the maps [and his] splicing in of various other authors, all radically altered the nature of the work” (175). Although McLean does not concern himself much with the historiography of authorship, reading and publishing (which might be the one weakness of the book), there is much there that could be explored. McLean’s findings could speak to the ongoing debate between Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns about the fixity of print in early modern Europe. For Eisenstein, the printing press made possible the wide proliferation of similar if not identical texts, allowing scholars to compare their writings with those of their contemporaries and of the ancients. Münster’s Cosmographia was a product of the culture of print in that it incorporated findings from a wide variety of printed sources, as well as the fruits of an open letter that Münster printed in 1528 inviting scholars across the Holy Roman Empire and the republic of letters to contribute histories, maps and descriptions of their cities for inclusion in the Cosmographia. Adrian Johns has shown that an edition of an early modern book was not all that uniform and a scholar could not be sure that he had the same text as another scholar. Münster was aware of such issues. He stayed close to the printing of his books maintaining relationships with printers in Basel, including the Frobens, Konrad Pellikan (for whom Münster worked as a corrector and editor) and Heinrich Petri (who was Münster’s stepson). When Pellikan’s shop undertook the risk involved in printing the massive Cosmographia in 1544, Münster “was still at work on the manuscript, correcting, having pictures cut and captioning the maps” (169). Münster even invented a printing forme in which he could lay out the engraving of a fixed map (which could speak to the ideal of Eisenstein’s fixity in print), but with “spaces for movable type” leaving open the possibility to change the text if necessary for the same or future editions. Adrian Johns argues that part of the fluid culture of early modern texts was the abundant pirating of texts. Johns provides an example where engravings of Galileo’s maps of the moon were “pirated” by German and London printers for their editions of Galileo’s books (Johns, Nature of the Book, 22-23). In McLean’s study, we find that printers freely shared their wood cuts and engravings with each other, and in the printing of Münster’s Cosmographia, several images were used multiple times (171). Such features of the culture of printing during Münster’s time pose the question whether we can call such practices pirating if they were the nor m? McLean’s study of Münster’s Cosmographia offers answers to these and other questions and will be a valuable addition to any library with holdings in the history of the book. Derek Jensen Brigham Young University, Idaho e Paradise: New Worlds of Books and Readers. Special issue of Script and Print: Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand vol. 29, no. 1-4 (2005, issued 2007). 384p. ill. ISSN 00847852, ISBN 9780975150023 (pbk). $AUD65.00 If, when you hear the title Paradise: New Worlds of Books and Readers, you are thinking of remote, tropical islands situated in turquoise waters, with white beaches and lush bush to which the power of print is being bought, then you will be disappointed to know that most of the articles contained in this special issue of Script and Print describe rather different, and differing, paradisiacal places of reading. All of the twenty-seven articles began as papers delivered at a SHARP regional conference in Wellington, New Zealand in January 2005. This issue therefore reflects the character of conference proceedings, and the scope and nature of the essays is accordingly wide-ranging. From Japanese print culture in early twentieth-century Saó Paulo, to the question of orality and literacy in critical perspectives on indigenous Australian lifewriting, the selection of papers offers a refreshing – and at times unexpected – approach to the overall theme. What unifies them – as outlined in the opening piece by Alberto Manguel – is an understanding of reading as an activity which questions existing boundaries, reflects on the self, and nurtures a power that is embedded in imagination. A large number of articles examine the emergence and intrusion of print into ‘new,’ albeit flourishing, cultures in relation to notions of power, political agenda and agency. Rimi Chatterjee’s outstanding paper on book history in India first provides a broad conceptual overview of the arrival of Western print culture on the subcontinent, before explaining in more detail how “the crossfertilisation of orality and literacy” (50) produced Bengal’s hybrid print culture. Like Nicola Cummins’ paper on children’s stories in the New Zealand newspaper, Otago Witness, Chatterjee illustrates that reading cultures in the colonies and outside the imperial centres were far more alive and diverse than was perhaps assumed. Local conditions impacted upon print cultures and facilitated cultural exchange and interaction independent from the ‘mother’ society. While most articles are confined in scope to national histories, a few convincingly argue for a transnational approach to book history. One of them is Alistair McCleery’s case-study on the publishing history of the Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in both New Zealand and the UK during the 1960s. McCleery argues that this was a key event in redefining the changing relationship between UK publishers and Dominion markets. Likewise, Kevin Molloy’s study of the Irish in New Zealand points to the significance of newspapers and book distribution channels for ethnicity- and identity-building in new places of paradise. Some essays explore the theme of new worlds of readers, not as a geographical category, but as one related to time: Raichel LeGoff examines the response to Imagines of Philostratus the Elder in early modern Greece more than twelve centuries after its initial creation. Her article is particularly striking as it sits at the intersection between art history and bibliography, highlighting the interplay of the text and its materiality in the form of ... /20 20 e WINTER 2009 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 ... / 19 paintings. These translate the imaginative paradise into images and thus create “a new ‘text’ from which Philostratus could be read” (158), in addition to the actual physical paradise of the Studiolo. This unusual perspective confirms once more that book history is enriched most when allowing interdisciplinary dimensions and methods. Even though not all the papers are equal in standard, the majority are convincing and testify that there is much work being done in book history outside the traditional metropoles which warrants greater attention. The volume will be particularly useful for scholars working on print culture in the Pacific, as a large number of papers have their geographical focus here, but also for anyone interested in the power and function of reading and print in marginalised societies. On a last note, Paradise is the inaugural volume of Script and Print, the re-fashioned Bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand. This is a good indication that book historians ‘down under’ are embracing current debates and trends in the field by providing a forum for questions that go beyond mere bibliography. Susann Liebich Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand e Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, eds. Michael Field and Their World. High Wycombe, U.K: The Rivendale Press, 2007. 255p. ill. ISBN 1904201083. $55. Heather Ingman. Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. 206p. ISBN 0754635384. $99.95. Michael Field and Their World is a collection of essays that originated in a 2004 conference held at the University of Delaware. The essays are arranged into four sections: Biography; Contexts: Literary and Cultural Worlds; Thematics: Sexuality and Religion; and Translations: Textuality and Genre. Individual essays represent a broad array of topics and approaches, including highly-theorized readings, studies of influence, close textual analysis, literary history, and publishing history. Stetz and Wilson, the editors, are correct to note that “some of the contributions, we admit, will be valuable mainly to academic readers and to specialists [while others] will be accessible and interesting to more general readers” (8). Two essays will be of particular interest to SHARP members, though book history is mentioned in several others, and the volume's illustrations provide context for discussions of book design. Marion Thain's “Apian Aestheticism: Michael Field and the Economics of the Aesthetic” offers an insightful discussion of how Field's 1908 volume Wild Honey from Various Thyme takes part in a Victorian conversation about bees. Bees, Thain asserts, “had gained a new and topical currency at the end of the nineteenth century” (224), and she concisely delineates the discussion on bees that Field was engaging. Thain works with aspects of the book as a physical object and considers how the thematic developments of the poems interact with their physical presentation in the volume. Joseph Bristow's essay, “Michael Field's Lyrical Aestheticism: Underneath the Bough,” shares Thain's interest in book history. Bristow's essay is part of the biographical cluster, and he provides a useful overview of Field's engagement with all aspects of their books' publication, describing their “characteristically exacting demands regarding the terms of their contract, the typography, page layout, and binding” (51). As he traces the evolving history of Under the Bough's publication, he provides an intriguing glimpse into the lives of Field, other late-Victorian authors, and publishing houses including the Bodley Head and Thomas B. Mosher of Portland, Maine. Because the collection originated in a conference, there are some regrettable omissions in subject (a comparison to Somerville and Ross would seem a natural inclusion) and approach (while Field's conversion to Roman Catholicism is important in several essays, all of the writers take a skeptical stance; the presence of a scholar versed in less-secular theory would have been welcome). Some repetitions could have been avoided by a stronger editorial hand; many essays repeat the same introductory explanation of Field and their work. As a reader new to Michael Field, I appreciated the introduction this volume provides to the unusual aunt-niece writing duo. A bibliography of their works, and an index, would have provided a valuable service to those reader who are not experts on Field. A minor distraction throughout the volume was the insertion of “sic” after English spellings in quotations from Field. All in all, this book offers a glimpse into the lives of two interesting yet little-known writers and puts them into a variety of contexts likely to interest members of SHARP. Ingman's book takes a two-part approach to its subject, switching back and forth between presenting the historical (and literary-historical) context for these writers and employing Julia Kristeva as a theoretical framework. Explaining her choice, Ingman notes that her “choice of Kristevan theory as a lens through which to consider fiction by Irish women was prompted by Kristeva's own interest, from the 1990s onward, in nations and nationalism and by the place she grants to women in this topic” (3). Those readers interested in Kristeva's theory will find Ingman's readings satisfactory. The book's opening chapter, “Irish Women in the Twentieth Century,” introduces her topic, and provides a chronological overview of political, social, and literary milestones of the century; the final chapter is on Northern Ireland. The intervening five chapters focus on different themes in Irish women's fiction, such as “Reclaiming the Mother in the Mother-Daughter Story" and “The Feminine and the Sacred.” Ingman provides close readings of novels by widelyknown authors, such as Edna O'Brien and Jennifer Johnston, and includes a valuable introduction to writers less familiar (particularly to North American readers), such as Deirdre Madden and Mary Morrissy. Her reading of Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September is excellent, and may provide readers with a different perspective on Bowen's betterknown novels such as The Death of the Heart. Ingman's political sensibilities sometimes shine through too clearly – she refers casually to ‘the colonial oppressor’ and the ‘Six Counties’ – and the chapter on Northern Ireland is the weakest in the book. Ingman fails to explain why Anne Devlin's play serves as an important example in a book on fiction, and a broader historical perspective (like that provided by Marianne Elliot's Catholics of Ulster) would have benefited the discussion. Overall, Ingman's book offers less that is directly of interest to SHARP members than the volume of essays on Field, but it presents a rewarding array of authors and persuasive readings of women's fiction. Were it not for the prohibitive price, the book's broad range and historical context would make it a useful undergraduate course text. Rosemary Erickson Johnsen Governors State University, Illinois WINTER 2008 f 21 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia. David L. Vander Meulen, ed. Vol. 56, 2003-04. Charlottesville, NC: The University Press of Virginia, 2006. [vi], 349p. ISBN 97808139253041 (cloth). $US70. Studies in Bibliography, Volume 56, contains ten articles that cover subjects from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Six, including G. Thomas Tanselle’s “Dust Jackets, Dealers, and Documentation,” Conor Fahy’s “Paper Making in Seventeenth-Century Genoa: The Account of Giovanni Domenico Peri (1651),” and B. J. McMullin’s “Watermarks and the Determination of Format in British Paper, 1794-circa 1830,” deal with various aspects of bibliography. Two, Richard Bucci’s “Tanselle’s ‘Editing without a Copy-text’: Genesis, Issues, Prospects” and Lance Schachterle’s “Cooper and His Collaborators: Recovering Cooper’s Final Intentions for His Fiction,” join the debates on scholarly editing that focus on such contested notions as final authorial intentions and authorial collaborators. And two, “Historiographical Problems and Possibilities in Book History and National Histories of the Book” by Michael F. Suarez, S. J. and “How to Read Book History” by David L. Vander Meulen, consider the strengths and weaknesses of the present state of book history. The articles are the work of good scholars, but they are not without faults. Tanselle reverses the name of Ernest Thompson Seton (72). Suarez uses “data” (147 et passim) as a single, rather than a plural, noun. Stanley Boorman’s “Bibliographical Aspects of Italian Printed Music of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” needs a context that allows it to be understood by a critic trained in bibliography but unfamiliar with printed music. In “The Dissemination of Shakespeare’s Plays circa 1714,” the tone employed by Don-John Dugas and Robert D. Hume to correct Harry M. Geduld’s Prince of Publishers: A Study of the Work and Career of Jacob Tonson (1969) – Geduld committed “gross” errors (263), and he made “ludicrous” statements (265) – seems inappropriate. Nevertheless, these articles represent some of the best that is being thought and written on bibliography and editing – and on such SHARP subjects as authorship, reading, and publishing. As an editor of early English-Canadian prose, my favorites were Bucci’s analysis of the importance of Tanselle’s many statements on editing, in particular his essay “Editing without a Copy-Text,” which first appeared in Studies in Bibliography in 1994, and Schachterle’s study of the editions prepared by “The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper.” Having taken a course on editing from Tanselle, I can only reinforce Bucci’s comments on the former’s “generous and inviting spirit” and the complexity that should make his ideas attractive to “the best editorial minds of all orientations” (44). And having been influenced by both Tanselle and David Nordloh, both of whom Schachterle names as “collaborators” (317), I was fascinated to discover how his comments about such matters as “holograph witnesses” (317) and the role that copyists and printers played in changing Cooper’s texts reflected their ideas – and my experiences. What was most challenging about these essays was their emphasis on the importance of actual artifacts, their conviction that these are being destroyed by librarians and ignored by many scholars of book history, and their concern about the lack of bibliographical knowledge. Tanselle’s plea “for libraries to preserve jackets” (90-91), Vander Meulen’s comments about the “attractions” of floating “above all disciplinary boundaries” (171) while forgetting “the centrality of artifacts and their study” (172), and Suarez’s “disturbing truth” that many “engaged in book-historical scholarship received no bibliographical training” as graduate students (155) reinforce these concerns. That there is room for hope, however, is amply demonstrated by the articles in this volume of Studies in Bibliography. Mary Jane Edwards Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada e Hamish Thompson. Cover Up: The Art of the Book Cover in New Zealand. Auckland: Godwit, 2007. 176p. ill. ISBN 9781869621230. $NZD39.99. Cover Up is a fine addition to the growing body of literature tracing the history of modern book cover design. With an indebtedness to Heller and Chwast (Jackets Required, 1997), and more recently, Drew and Sternberger (By its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design, 2005), Hamish Thompson synthesizes New Zealand book cover design from the 1930s through to the present, infusing international character into the concept of International Design. Thompson, a Wellington-based graphic designer educated in England and Switzerland, began his career teaching graphic art in the United States and New Zealand. After ten years as an educator, he became a designer for New Zealand’s National Library and Te Papa Tongarewa Museum, and is currently a freelance book designer. Singlehandedly shouldering the task of documenting and explicating New Zealand’s graphic arts history, Thompson’s first book, Paste Up (2003) explored his nation’s contributions to poster design. Cover Up performs a similar assessment for book jackets and paper-covered bindings, providing a first look at this little-explored aspect of book history. Cover Up celebrates the threedimensionality of the book. Its own paper binding depicts a circular arrangement of the spines of many of the covers illustrated within and emphasizes the need for a book to succeed in attracting attention face-on as well as in profile on the bookshelf. Organized chronologically by each artist’s date of birth, Cover Up explores the careers of thirty-six graphic designers with brief professional biographies and reproductions of their work. Their major covers provide a taste of New Zealand’s evolving book design aesthetic since World War I. Commercial art was not formally taught in New Zealand until the 1960s. Accordingly, early works emphasized drawing and lettering as taught by two of the country’s art schools and three technical colleges. Isolated from mainstream Modernism, covers from the 1930s through to the 1950s combine strong typographic elements with painted, engraved, or woodcut illustrations reminiscent of period travel posters. Many rely on a frugal pallet of one or two colors to keep production costs down. By the 1950s, Geoffrey Nees and Bill Sutch led the way to professionalizing graphic art in New Zealand by formally incorporating design within the Department of Industries and Commerce; Nees went on to found the New Zealand Design Council in 1967. The work of John Drawbridge, Mark Cleverly, and Graham Percy from this period merged Modernist elements with local sensibilities, clearly amalgamating local visual language with the international influence of Alvin Lustig, Paul Rand, and Rudy de Harak. Bold abstract constructions dominate the cover designs of Don Pebbles whose joyous ... / 22 22 e WINTER 2009 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 ... / 21 treatment of color and form reflects the influence of Leo Lionni. This reviewer was struck by the work of Gordon Walter, who converted indigenous Maori symbols into formal graphic archetypes, capturing the unique spirit of Kiwi awareness in classic Modernist constructions. Walter’s covers provide an excellent example of graphic art’s ability to fix a book’s identity in both time and place. Thompson’s survey sheds light on the relationship between production and reception. Cover Up provides rich and varied evidence that New Zealand book cover designs drew on regional traditions tempered by international style. The books appealed to an indigenous audience like nothing else on earth. Randy Silverman University of Utah and the cultural and social history of information. Information is ubiquitous in society, historically and now. Potentially, this makes for a subject that many would believe to be at best wide-ranging and therefore cumbersome and at worst opaque and nebulous – can a study of the taxonomy of routine at the Victorian dinner party be considered information history? Others, Weller included, would argue that the parameters of information history can be articulated, with historians in a wide variety of fields acknowledging its coherence and engaging in it flexibly, without having to sign up in perpetuity to a new domain. The aim, after all, would appear to be the construction of a new field, not a new college. If this is to be the path for information history, then this book will have helped to have cleared the way. e Toni Weller, Information history – an introduction: exploring an emergent field. Chandos Information Professional Series, Oxford: Chandos, 2008. xvi, 147p. ISBN 978184334 3943 (paperback); 9781843343950 (hardback). £39.95 (paperback); £59.95 (hardback). Significant events and developments in the contemporary social world tend to prompt historical studies of their roots and earlier manifestations. It is not surprising, therefore, that the revolution in digital information and communication technology, and the associated perceived emergence of an information society, should have encouraged scholars to investigate how in the past information was collected, organised and used. Weller’s book is both an outcome of this recent scholarship and an attempt to legitimise it as a field of history supported by a distinct, identifiable and growing academy (the sub-title takes for granted that the field is ‘emergent’ and, therefore, exists). Chapters offer an introduction to the recent literature of information history; reflect on how the field might develop in the future; show how information history has practical relevance to the information student and professional; and map out the components, or sub-fields, of information history – these being library and book history; the history of information systems and infrastructure; the history of the information disciplines; the origins and history of the information society; Alistair Black University of Illinois e Min Wild. Christopher Smart and Satire: ‘Mary Midnight’ and the Midwife. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. vii, 231p. ISBN 9780754661931.£50. Christopher Smart’s The Midwife, or Old Woman’s Magazine (1750-1753) has long been viewed as an irreverent work filled wild transformations, parodic history, mad schemes, and paradoxical commentary on the plight of the oppressed. Its subject matter includes the discovery of a “fossilized turd,” an organ constructed of tortured cats, a shop for exchanging heads, and copious parodies of rival journals. In the first book length study of the Midwife, Min Wild undertakes a broad contextualization of Smart’s highly entertaining but critically neglected magazine. Her revisionary argument – deriving from John and Deborah Ayer Sitter’s suggestion that Smart’s work provides “‘a rhetorical continuity between Swift and Sterne’” (45) – is that the Midwife is a product of Smart’s training in classical rhetoric and thus a late manifestation of the tradition of “learned dissent”(11-12, 45-6). Central to Smart’s technique is the “rhetorical trope called prosopopoeia” – “the representation of ‘an imaginary or absent persona as speaking, or acting; attributing life, speech, or human qualities to dumb or inanimate objects’” (27). In the female voice of “Mary Midnight,” Wild contends, Smart develops a flexible and sometimes self-contradictory instrument through which to engage satirically a wide array of eighteenth-century topics. Ranging from theoretical and historical speculation to detailed readings and summaries, Wild adopts a richly inclusive approach to Smart’s magazine that sometimes (like Smart’s work itself) risks incoherence. She argues that close attention to Smart’s various personae “can broaden our understanding of print culture [and] concepts of authorship,” while simultaneously illuminating “wider debates in the period: questions about the nature and status of gender, of political engagement, of personal identity, and ultimately of the cultural reception of aspects of Enlightenment thought” (3). On the topic of authorship, Wild’s layered readings of the Midnight persona provide stimulating new insights into Smart’s practice. But in the wider arena of Enlightenment culture and politics, her universalizing tendencies too often lead her to jostle together superficial snippets of historical, theoretical, and critical observation without the virtue of integration. Structurally, such an approach can produce choppy chapters made up of short sections addressing disparate issues: chapter two, comprising only twenty-eight pages, has no fewer than eleven sections, one as short as two paragraphs (64). If Wild succeeds in capturing, however irregularly, the complexity of the print culture that produced the Midwife, she offers surprisingly conservative conclusions about Smart himself. Her focus on “learned dissent” tends to cast Smart as a reluctant hack-bynecessity “who barely bothered to hide his disgust with what he was doing” (12) and who infused his ostensibly lunatic magazine with “sub-Scriblerian” literary and social doctrine (128). In part this is true: Smart could certainly work both sides of the porous Scriblerian-Modern divide. But Wild’s verdict that Smart wrote the Midwife “to satirize a society in which he saw materialism, greed and ignorance as threatening to obliterate not only a hard-won tradition of learning and scholarship, but also the cardinal human qualities of judgment and benevolence” (195) seems an overly moralistic reduction of the intermittently brilliant farrago of wit, outrage, pop culture, politics, filth, and foolishness that her study has traced. The dichotomy of Smart the enthusiastic (in both senses) student of the popular culture and Smart the conservative critic behind the “Midnight” WINTER 2008 f 23 SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 mask will remain a subject of complicated and continuing discussion. Wild’s Christopher Smart and Satire: ‘Mary Midnight’ and the Midwife is a noteworthy contribution to this debate and tells us more about the Midwife than we have ever known before. Lance Bertelsen University of Texas at Austin e Ruth Clayton Windscheffel. Reading Gladstone. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xvi, 330p. ill. ISBN 0230007651. $69.95. “The history of books cannot … be separated from the history of souls” (134). Why didn’t any of us ever think of stating our mission in such forceful and pithy terms? In fact, long before Lucien Febvre and HenriJean Martin, those words were written by William Ewart Gladstone. His fourteen volume dairies may be the most extensive document of reader response ever produced by one individual, recording roughly 17,500 books and pamphlets as well as innumerable periodical articles. He acquired books obsessively and preserved his collection by creating St. Deiniol’s Library at Hawarden. After their marriage, his wife was somewhat dismayed to discover that her new husband devoted every moment of his spare time to his books (rather than to her). Political historians have tended to play down the importance of Gladstone’s bibliophilia, treating it as a diversion from the real business of parliamentary government. But he makes an ideal subject for the book historian, and that challenge has been taken up by Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, who spent four years studying at St. Deiniol’s. Her objective is to reveal “Gladstone’s persona when he was engaging with texts … by examining how his reading functioned as an expression of self ” (2-3). She scrutinizes his marginalia, which extended to annotating and correcting tourist guides and maps – “interactive” avant la lettre (75). She details Gladstone’s management of his personal library, which his servants enjoyed access to. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer who struck down “taxes on knowledge,” Gladstone earned his halo as the apostle of cheap print, though he sometimes doubted whether the workers or the Irish could be trusted to enjoy an entirely free press. Of course Windscheffel discusses Gladstone’s choice of books, which covered every topic from chicken farming to pornography. Apropos of that, he often used reading as a tool in his efforts to rescue prostitutes. Perhaps thinking that one fallen woman would take an interest in a poem about another, he twice recorded reading Tennyson’s “Guinevere” to a retired courtesan “with undiminished admiration.” “Whether this was of the poem or his hostess is unclear,” Windscheffel observes (123). Windscheffel analyzes in detail the influence of Gladstone’s reading on his theology, but its influence on his politics gets surprisingly little attention. She tries to draw connections between his scholarly interests and his reengagement with national politics over the “Eastern Question,” but the two were not entirely compatible. Gladstone was torn between spending his precious hours in the study or in the House of Commons, and his public image as a monkish reader damaged him as a politician. Reading Gladstone is an original departure in book studies, prodigiously researched, but Windscheffel doesn’t fully connect the literary and the political, and that is something of a disappointment. As early as The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1968), John Gross highlighted the fact that Victorian and Edwardian parliaments were densely populated with litterateurs. Surely the next frontier for book historians should be to explain how politicians’ reading shaped their policy agendas. And not just in Britain: as recent studies by Timothy Ryback and Ambrus Miskolczy have shown, Adolf Hitler also had an impressive library. Jonathan Rose Drew University IN SHORT Anthony Grafton, Codex in Crisis. New York: The Crumpled Press, 2008. v, 53 p. ISBN 9780979696923. Limited edition, no price indicated. In this elegantly printed pamphlet, a revised and expanded version of an article that first appeared in The New Yorker in 2007, Grafton considers the effect of the vast proliferation of internet resources, but concludes that the library, and the codex, remain necessary for serious research and, particularly, for the training of young scholars. www.designinginformation.org A new website to support Designing Information for Everyday Life 1815-1914, an AHRC-funded research project at the University of Reading ... /24 Begin your membership in SHARP, and you will receive the annual Book History, SHARP News, and the SHARP Membership and Periodicals Directory, which is published each summer. Students and unwaged can opt for a rate that does not include a subscription to Book History. We accept Visa, MasterCard or cheques in American currency, made out to SHARP. Please send this form to The Johns Hopkins University Press, Journals Publishing Division, PO Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211-0966 USA. Name: _______________________________ Address: Institution: ________________________________ E-mail: ___________________________________ Cheque enclosed Visa MasterCard US/Canada: $55.00 Students and Unwaged $20 Elsewhere: $60.00 + $5 postage $25 + $5 postage Cardholder’s Name: ___________________________________ Card Number: _________________________ Exp.date: ________ Research interests: _______________________________ Signature: __________________________________________ I am donating _______ to the SHARP Endowment Fund. Check here if you wish your gift to remain anonymous: Check if you prefer not to be included in the SHARP directory and SHARP mailing lists: 18.1 24 e WINTER 2009 BIBLIOGRAPHY General Cornelius D. Andriesse, Dutch Messengers: A History of Science Publishing 1930-1980. Boston, MA: Brill, 2008. Laura Cruz, The Paradox of Prosperity: the Leiden Booksellers’ Guild and the Distribution of Books In Early Modern Europe. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2008. Antwan Qaysar Dabbas and Nakhlah Rashshu, Tarikh al-tiba ‘ah al- ‘Arabiyah fi alMashriq: al-Batriyark Athnasiyus al-Thalith Dabbas 1685-1724, muassis awwal matba ‘ah ‘Arabiyah lughatan wa-harfan fi al-Mashriq. Beirut, Lebanon: Dar al-Nahar lil-Nashr, 2008. Michael Empell, Gutenberg vor Gericht: der Mainzer Prozess um die erste gedruckte Bibel. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Lang, 2008. Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond, Books Without Borders: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture. 2 vols. Basingstoke, England and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Akira Isobe, ed., Higashi Ajia no shuppan to chiiki bunka: mukashi no hon no monogatari. Tokyo, Japan: Kyuko Shoin, 2008. Luc Knapen and Leo Kenis, Hout in boeken, houten boeken en de fraaye konst houtdraayen. Leuven, Belgium: Maurits Sabbebibliotheek, Faculteit Godgeleerdheid: Peeters, 2008. Miha Kovak, Never Mind the Web: Here Comes the Book. Oxford, England: Chandos, 2008. Alfred Noe, Renaissance. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 2008. David Pearson, Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond Their Texts. London, England and New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2008. Gabrielle Watling and Sara E. Quay, eds., Cultural History of Reading. 2 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. Martin Welke and Jürgen Wilke, eds., 400 Jahre Zeitung: die Entwicklung der Tagespresse im internationalen Kontext: 1605-2005. Bremen, Germany; Ed. Lumière, 2008. Austria Peter R. Frank and Johannes Frimmel, Buchwesen in Wien 1750-1850: kommentiertes Verzeichnis der Buchdrucker, Buchhändler und Verleger. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2008. SHARP NEWS VOL. 18, NO. 1 China Muzhi Yang, Gu ji zheng li yu chu ban zhuan jia lun gu ji zheng li yu chu ban. Nanjing, China: Feng Huang chu ban she, 2008. Jiarong Wang, Min zu hun: jiao ke shu bian qian. Beijing, China: Shang wu yin shu guan, 2008. Mark Wildermuth, Print, Chaos, and Complexity: Samuel Johnson and EighteenthCentury Media Culture. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Margaret Willes, Reading Matters: Five Centuries of Discovering Books. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. France Florence Bouchet, Le discours sur la lecture en France aux XIVe et XVe siècles: pratiques, poétique, imaginaire. Paris, France: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2008. Jean-Yves Mollier, Edition, presse et pouvoir en France au XXe siècle. Paris, France: Fayard, 2008. Eric Vigne, Le livre et l’éditeur. Paris, France: Klincksieck, 2008. United States Nicholas A. Basbanes, A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908-2008. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Al Silverman, The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors. New York: Truman Talley Books, 2008. Wayne A. Wiegand and Christine Pawley, eds, Alternative Print Culture: Social History and Libraries. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. [This is a special issue of Library Trends, vol. 56, no. 3 (Winter 2008).] Germany Stephanie Rahmede, Die Buchhandlung der Gelehrten zu Dessau: ein Beitrag zur Schriftstelleremanzipation um 1800. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2008. Italy Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder. London, England: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008. IN SHORT [CONT] Japan Masatsugu Matsumoto, Akio Ueno, and Kenya Washio. Watashi no sengo shuppanshi. Tokyo, Japan: Toransubyu, 2008. Robert D. Fleck, Books about Books. A History and Bibliography of Oak Knoll Press, 1978-2008. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2008. v , 232p. ill. ISBN 9781584562481 (pb); 978584562598 (hb). $25.00 (pb); $45 (hb) United Kingdom David Ainsworth, Milton and the Spiritual Reader : Reading and Religion in SeventeenthCentury England. New York; Routledge, 2008. Asa Briggs, A History of Longmans and Their Books, 1724-1990: Longevity in Publishing. London, England: British Library and New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2008. Laurie Ellinghuasen, Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567-1667. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Valerie Holman, Print for Victory: Book Publishing in Britain 1939-1945. London, England: British Library, 2008. Kate Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1660-1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. M.B. Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. Robert D. Fleck is known to most of SHARP’s members as the founder and proprietor of Oak Knoll Press, a publishing house specializing in books about books (defined very broadly), and to the more affluent among us as owner of a bookshop specializing in private press books and rare volumes concerning every part of the history of the book. In the fifty or so heavily illustrated pages at the front of the present book, Fleck details his struggle to establish the shop and the press, his successful efforts to co-publish with a variety of other presses, and his work within a number of booksellers’ associations. The style is light, even jaunty, and perhaps disguises what must have been a great deal of hard and often financially risky work. Fleck concludes with a detailed listing of the 309 titles the press has already issued, plus the eleven currently in the works.