What is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books by Joseph A. Dane (review)

Historical bibliography has evolved into book history. Philip Gaskell opened his classic New Introduction to Bibliography, published forty years ago, by stating that ‘the chief purpose of bibliography is to serve the production and distribution of accurate texts’, a statement that today seems both narrow and old-fashioned. We now take a broader view of the value of historical books and the ways in which the evidence they manifest can inform our understanding of the past. We have seen the growth of national histories of the book, of university-based centres for book history and for material texts, and a burgeoning literature around the reading, ownership, annotation, use, and impact of books. Book history as a concept is increasingly taught to coming generations of researchers — what are the primers to put into the hands of such people, or of anyone else who wants to start to build their personal toolkit of knowledge and ideas around historic books? Gaskell remains wonderful for the mechanics of production but those newer horizons are missing. The past decade has seen several handbooks published that aim to give a compact but all-round overview, and they are all deficient to some extent. Try finding out about book binding from the Eliot/Rose Companion to the History of the Book, or the Finkelstein/McCleery Introduction to Book History (where the term doesn’t even feature in the index), or about the value of ownership and usage evidence from Mark Bland’s Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts.

Hurrah, therefore, for the book under review here, which is underpinned by a broader vision and feels altogether less like McKerrow with a few ideas tacked on and more like a fresh start to the subject. Presented as ‘an introduction to the study of books as physical objects’, it is divided into two parts, the first focusing on ‘Elements of Material Books’, and the second on ‘History of Books and Histories of Book-Copies’. The chapters in part one run through the mechanics of book production in the hand-press period covering ink, paper, composition, typography, and the mechanics of the press. It also includes a brief chapter on illustrations, which is thin on dates (when did these various techniques start to be used?), but which runs through the most commonly used methods between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second part focuses on copy-specific features: bindings, ownership evidence, fragments, tract volumes. It also includes some musings on ideal copy and on the main electronic databases in the field (ISTC, ESTC, EEBO, ECCO), before concluding with some case studies and a selective list of further reading.

The book has a strongly personal flavour, of the author’s own journey through the discovery of book history — ‘the chapters constitute an introduction to the study of material books as I have experienced them’ — with the strengths and weaknesses implicit in such an approach. Dane freely admits that his experience lies mainly with books printed in England before the nineteenth century, and his text and illustrations reflect that background. Some of his terminology, or his emphases, have an individual nature to them that may come across as eccentric; his definition of ‘book-copy’ as the way of distinguishing a particular copy of a book from the creative work in the abstract may not take hold, but the point he is making is an important one to draw out. His enthusiasm to demystify and to share the excitement of exploring books is infectious: ‘never close a book without knowing more than you did before opening it’. What is particularly welcome is the point he regularly makes about the potential multidimensional interest of every book, ‘whether it is a monumental book such as the Gutenberg Bible or a run-of-the-mill book [. . .] on your local library shelf’: ‘a material book is evidence of all kinds of...