From Revolution to Revolution: Perspectives on Publishing and Bookselling 1501-2001 (review)

Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine B. Stern's From Revolution to Revolution: Perspectives on Publishing & Bookselling 1501-2001 covers a vast span of the joint industries, illuminating the characters and contexts of booksellers, publishers, and printers. The book is written in the coauthors' characteristic, richly detailed, personable writing style, and both specialists and nonspecialists alike will appreciate Stern and Rostenberg's wealth of knowledge about the commitment, struggles, and emotional contributions of publishers over the past four hundred years. Their combined experience as book collectors extends over the last half century, affording them colorful anecdotes that reveal their bibliophilic passions and intimate understanding of the book trade.

The authors reveal their love of "books as objects" in a final chapter addressing the second of two revolutions in their title (what they deem a "counterrevolution"), namely, the digital age (176). They outline the electronic industry's technological advancements that threaten the existence of small booksellers while diplomatically considering both the pros and cons of the new medium. In doing so, they admit to a shared "traditionalism," a preference for using typewriters and "devouring" books they "can take from a shelf and carry in [their] hands" (176). Their tactile propensities do not prevent a fair and balanced appreciation of all that publishing technology has to offer. They consider constant updates to textbooks and manuals made easier by e-publishing and applaud the convenience of electronically condensing large collections. The strength and value of this text, however, lie in its wealth of history, chronicling the Western world's book industry in all its permutations, occasionally lingering on the idiosyncrasies of figures in the trade and their remarkable, sometimes peculiar contributions.

The first case study describes the self-designed symposium that Aldus Manutius founded "to discuss the publishing of Greek texts" (13). The authors compare these sixteenth-century discussions of scholars and editors with contemporary publishers' meetings, though their predecessors "pledged to speak only in Greek" and threw parties with the collected fines for infractions (13). The seventeenth-century team of Butter and Bourne, "first newsmen to the people," published patriotic tabloid accounts of Irish rebellion, Turkish pirates, and English "prowess" on the high seas. And in the early 1800s, French bookseller Nicholas Dufief brought the Franco-American book trade together, collecting Benjamin Franklin's complete library and supplying Thomas Jefferson with the French philosophical basis of his "defense of the freedom of religion" (89). Stranger still, in the twentieth century, Walt Whitman was drawn to the publishing team of Fowler and Wells after phrenologist Fowler examined his head. These snapshots demonstrate the book world's vast array of characters situated in the text in relation to their historical backdrop and personal connections to those players introduced in previous chapters. The broad trajectory of historical periods appears in an almost seamless continuation that is easy to follow for even the neophyte scholar of publishing history.

The selection of highlighted figures seems primarily reflective of publisher Basil Blackwell's charge, related on the book's opening page: "The publisher . . . must recognize literary merit—more, he must discover it— . . . and he must anticipate by just the right . . . margin the changing tastes and interests of the reading public" (1). In addition to adeptly examining the joint poles of "muse and market" guiding the publisher, Rostenberg and Stern uncover how the book industry has served and influenced public knowledge and opinion. Moreover, they reveal the particular powerful influence certain nineteenth-century publishers had on authors. For example, in convincing them to assert their true selves, as Whitman does in Leaves of Grass, or aggressively marketing politically controversial tomes like Uncle Tom's Cabin, or dramatically changing the genre and style of Louisa May Alcott's creations, publishers provided far more than mere practical services. Thus Rostenberg and Stern, like their historic subjects, cultivate their readers...