La Naissance du livre moderne: Mise en page et mise en texte du livre francais (XIV-XVII siecles) (review)

After a long and illustrious career, we might think that Professor Martin would be happy to rest on his laurels (of which there are many, all of them shining). But no. He now presents the public and his fans with a new, important work, a history of the art of the book, layout, styles, and so much more, from the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century.

The main sections of this book, written with the collaboration of a team of younger scholars (Jean-Marc Chatelain, Isabelle Diu, Aude Le Dividich, and Laurent Pinon), are as follows:

1. Introduction
2. The Sources of Innovation
3. The Paths Traced by Innovators
4. Politics and Typography: The Triumph of the Roman Letter in France and Its Consequences
5. The Intervention of the Image and Its Relationship with the Text during the Renaissance
6. The Normalization or Standardization of Prose, Fifteenth through the Seventeenth Centuries
7. Imagination and Reason: Baroque and Classical "Textualization"

These parts are rounded out with a conclusion, an index, a table of illustrations, and a detailed table of contents. Wisely, the publishers (or perhaps Martin) allowed a page at the beginning for a summary of the contents.

The introduction explains how Professor Martin had decided many years ago to devote considerable time during retirement to this project, which allows him the opportunity to dissert on the history of the book, a discipline he has done so much to found and develop. What he wanted to do above all was to show how the structure of a book and its appearance transmit the prevailing logic (in the sense of structure itself) of a society (page 2 of the introduction). He is quick to point out the limits of his study, which leaves aside important aspects of the visualization and thus consumption of the books he discusses such as bindings and what accompanies them (endpapers and so on). Of course, that sort of thing is more the purview of copy-specific information, with limited influence until such time as books were covered by uniform bindings prior to publication. (These are generalities; the topic is complex.) Also important for Martin is the knowledge brought to various aspects of the discipline by others, so he was happy to seek the collaboration of specialists to author a couple of subsections and even an entire section, "The Intervention of the Image" by Chatelain and Pinon.

There is so much in this book that it is hard to know where to begin and how to stop. It is a folio-size volume in three columns for the main text, double for the introductions and conclusions. I write "introductions and conclusions" in the plural, because each major section has them. The book is beautifully organized.

It is also beautifully produced, a compliment to the author and a reflection of the wisdom and good taste of those who run the Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie in Paris. (Pascal Fouché is the director.) In a book about books, reading, typography, typology, and bibliology, it is interesting to note the parallels and lessons that this book of the third millennium presents. Prefaces are in italics, harking back to the Renaissance and seventeenth century. Likewise, text is set in columns to aid the process of reading. The fine paper adds to the reader's pleasure. Garamond's innovations in typography are analyzed. It is no coin-cidence that the type style of The Birth of the Modern Book is Garamond. Illustrations are inserted sometimes like a medieval illumination, sometimes leaping out like a paean gloriously trumpeting the marvels of...