The Stationers’ Voice: The English Almanac Trade in the Early Eighteenth Century by Timothy Feist (review)

151 that much of his criticism of his subjects is prompted by his political and religious prejudices.’’ The scope of the volume necessarily limits the depth of the discussion of selected texts, and, although a vast landscape is to be surveyed in limited space, several examples recur: we are told twice of Johnson’s complaint that Sprat’s life of Cowley was ‘‘a funeral oration rather than a history ’’; and twice that Aubrey describes Barrow ‘‘as pale as the candle he studied by.’’ As these instances suggest, the mode of this study is often descriptive and anecdotal , yielding information about the content of these texts, but not probing beyond the initial parameters of the discussion . One would like to hear more— but does not—about a potentially promising idea: that these seventeenth-century biographies are the prelude to the novel. In the interesting and persuasive account of Roger North’s lives of his brothers, Mr. Pritchard writes that his ‘‘phrasing and sentence structure are often marked by a certain awkwardness or oddity, which no doubt helps account for his dissatisfaction with his writing ’’—a puzzling conclusion given Mr. Pritchard’s argument that the selfesteem of the Norths was often at variance with their achievements, and belied by the vivid passages of prose he quotes but does not analyze. Given Mr. Pritchard ’s assertion of the importance of family history in seventeenth-century biography, he pays surprisingly little attention to the remarkable contribution that women made to this genre: Ann Fanshawe, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Halkett, Lucy Hutchinson and, most of all, Anne Clifford, whose monumental family history surely rivals ‘‘The Lives of the Berkeleys.’’ The rather slender Selected Bibliography and the Index, which includes proper names but none of the concepts that one might expect to find, may suggest something about the conception of this project, that it has not fully or imaginatively engaged with other critical approaches. It calmly categorizes rather than taking us to fresh understanding . Sharon Seelig Smith College TIMOTHY FEIST. The Stationers’ Voice: The English Almanac Trade in the Early Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2005. Pp. vii ⫹ 129. $24. Mr. Feist begins by making a case for examining only the eighteen bookalmanac titles published in 1712 held in the University of Texas collection at the Harry Ransom Center. They were the only almanacs he could easily check; there were, he says, only nineteen titles published that year at any rate; and analysis of a limited body of evidence can be tremendously productive. His strategy is plausible. He spends chapters providing a history of the almanac trade in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, explaining the structure of the Stationers’ Company and how it controlled its English Stock monopolies, recounting the cases of various almanac printers, and so on, but the reader catches only fleeting glimpses of his 1712 sample until the penultimate chapter, when their content is lengthily discussed . The book has flaws. The third sentence of the Introduction dubiously suggests that late seventeenth-century booksellers and printers were responsible for ‘‘instigating that chaotic jumble of political, scientific, and theological ideas which worried the young polem- 152 icist,’’ Defoe, who is quoted earlier. While they may have sympathized with those ideas, booksellers and printers are not generally regarded as their main intellectual source; they were the businessmen and women who produced and sold them. Occasionally Mr. Feist does not follow through on his research. He might have looked at Maureen Bell’s— among others’—work, before exhorting his readers to discover women in the booktrade among these well-known Stationers’ Company records. On-line searching of the ODNB would soon have shown that it is not accurate to say that ‘‘aside from Heptinstall’s devotion to him, nothing can be discovered of Pead,’’ for he turns out to be the relatively famous preacher Deuell Peade (d. 1727). His discussion of piecework printing fails to note that the practice was not confined to almanacs in the eighteenth century, but has a welldocumented history across most genres, and not just ‘‘as insurance against piracy .’’ He makes intriguing conjectures, such as that the Stationers’ Company was able to control Elinor James’s output by giving her husband lucrative...