A Bibliography of John Rastell by E.J. Devereux (review)

rtUMANlTIES 359 indebtedness to varied parts of Luther and Zwingli's teachings, or to his use nearly everywhere of Pauline texts and themes - but the edition as it now stands will assist historians and students of the Reformation notably. And because of its own crisp, lively, and jargon-free prose style, it will please and instruct lay readers too, or any non-specialist interested in the evolution of early modern Christianity. (PETER AUKS!) EJ Devereux. A Bibliography ofJohn Raslell McGill·Queen's University Press. xiv, 184. $65.00 The editors begin their preface by explaining that when E.J. Devereux died in '994 he was working on another project, 'having set aside the completed typescript of [this book] for consideration at a later date.' His family and some former colleagues have now tried to turn that (rather intractable) typescript into a book, evidently as a tribute and memorial. It is therefore painful to have to report that the typescript was only 'completed' in the sense that work on it had stopped, that those who saw it through the press were inadequately qualified for the task they set themselves, and that they were badly let down by some of those whose aid they enlisted. The book's raison d'';tre is the bibliography on pages 85-176. It is therefore excusable that the introductory biography of Rastell adds very little (as Devereux acknowledges in a footnote) to that produced by AW. Reed in the 1920S. More useful and original is the short 'Typographical Preface' that follows, in which Devereux discusses how the design of Rastell's books divides his output into six stylistic periods, each probably the result of the press's supervision by a different workman. This insight .remains valuable despite a misguided attempt to identify the supervising journeymen with the successive retail booksellers to whom Rastell sublet part of the bookselling frontage ofhis premises. Although Devereux asserts that those men were printers (one of them even 'a skilled printer'), there is no evidence that any of them ever operated or superVised a press. The next section - 'Book Designs' - consists mostly of reproductions, and ought to have been easy to get right. But the comparatively poor quality of the images, scanned from photographs, is only one of the problems. Whoever reduced the images that were too big for the page often forgot to scale them vertically as well as horizontally, so a substantial number have been distorted into uselessness (including pages 39, 47, 62, and 74, and worst of all, pages 58-61). The bibliography itself lists fifty extant books: forty-three printed in whole or in part by Rastell (Devereux overlooked two leaves printed by Peter Treveris in no. 50) and seven printed by other printersfor him (no. 51 wrongly attributed to Rastell's own press). There are also seventeen entries for lost books - six probably printed by Rastell and eleven probably never printed at all. 360 LEITERS IN CANADA 1999 The revised STC (volumes 1 and 2 published in 1976 and 1986) includes seven other items tentatively attributed to Rastell. All but one of those attributions (STC 17324-5) are certainly wrong-but they should have been discussed. Moreover, STC includes another six items unequivocally attributed to Rastell (one being his first lawbook, possibly his firstbook) and two almost certainly printed for him. A perfunctory list of 'Possible Additions' on page 177 hardly helps: a bibliography that omits at least 14 per cent of its subject's extant work cannot reasonably claim to be 'completed: The worst problems, however, are the bibliographical descriptions themselves - especially the transcripts. Masquerading as quasi-facsimile, these attempt to represent Rastell's blackletter by bold roman - something that no competentbibliographer would have approved. Lacking a matching long's: whoever botched together the camera-ready copy foisted in a jagged bitmap substitute (which always prints left of centre), but made no attempt either to reproduce or to indicate ligatures. Perverse substitutes were found for a few other characters (the most ludicrous being a lightweight sans-serif 'I", mutilated at the right, which we are seemingly meant to interpret as 'teT'); elsewhere an appended apostrophe apparently means 'I give up: Furthermore, despite what is said...