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The History of the Book in the West: 1700-1800, vol. III, ed. Eleanor F. Shevlin (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2010). Pp. lix, 529. $275.00.
This massive reference text forms the third in Ashgate's series The History of the Book in the West: A Library of Critical Essays, under general editor Alexis Weedon. The preface to the series announces its orientation succinctly: "book history focuses on empirical research into the production and dissemination of the printed word, characterized by studies of the materiality of the book" (xiii). It then broadens the scope by declaring that within such studies there exists room for methodological debate. The editor of this volume, Eleanor Shevlin, has deftly selected twenty-five previously published articles and chapters and organized them into five sections, whose titles reflect some of the shifts in the critical questions being asked in recent book history studies: "The Physical Book, or Matters Material," "Matters Authorial," "Trade Matters: Practices and Practitioners," "Periodicals and Newspapers, or Matters Serial," and "Reading and Related Matters." The essays in these sections range from classic pieces representing early days of book history, such as Philip Gaskell's 1957 "Notes on Eighteenth-Century British Paper," and Cyprian Blagden's 1959 "The Stationers' Company in the Eighteenth Century," to chapters from more recent monographs and essay collections, including a selection from James Raven's 2007 The Business of Books, "Investing in Books: the Supremacy of the Booksellers," and Wallace Kirsop's chapter "Patronage across Frontiers: Subscription Publication in French Enlightenment Europe" in Bell, Bennett, and Bevan's Across Boundaries: The Book in Culture and Commerce (2000). The...