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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 contracts to print almanacs. James’s printed output was formidable, eccentric, and possibly profitable (72 titles—almost every one of them an affordable broadside —are currently listed under her name in the ESTC). It may be true that none of her printed work was opposed outright to Stationers’ Company views, and Mr. Feist suggests that she was not so irrepressible as she might seem. He presents, however, little evidence to support this claim. This volume would have benefited from better copyediting, which should have eliminated a number of typographical and grammatical errors (‘‘to a yeomen ’’; ‘‘freeing . . . appear to have caused’’) and misspellings (‘‘Hartford’’ for ‘‘Hertford,’’ ‘‘Saunders’’ for ‘‘Saunder ’’); and advised on plain silliness (‘‘half-pennies, God bless them’’ or ‘‘the Great One Himself, Isaac Newton’’) and imprecision (‘‘Of the ten almanac pirates named in this narrative fully twothirds were insiders’’). The confusion that occasionally arises when Mr. Feist cites secondary sources could also have been avoided. (See n. 3, p. 23, where he seems to cite an article by J. Tonson entitled ‘‘The London Gazette, 5 October to 7 October 1710’’ in Cox and Budeit (eds.), Early English Newspapers; in fact he wants to refer to an advertisement placed by Tonson in the London Gazette (October 7, 1710), which is listed in Cox and Budeit’s bibliography and guide to a microfilm edition of early newspapers). Likewise, a sharp copy editor might have advised him against undermining his own arguments against Adrian Johns, who after all was writing about a different genre in a different era. In this respect he may have been let down by his publisher, who should have taken greater care with this first publication . Mr. Feist, nevertheless, has compiled a great deal of information. The Stationer ’s Voice ends with the long-awaited chapter on those 1712 almanacs. Its useful analysis of monthly almanac verse suggests a dominant theme of ‘‘order and stability,’’ and that, he concludes, is what the Stationers’ Company was aiming to promote through their almanac trade. Christine Ferdinand Magdalen College, Oxford AARON SANTESSO. A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia. Newark: Delaware, 2006. Pp. 221. $48. In this ambitious and wide-ranging 153 study, Mr. Santesso traces the emergence of the ‘‘nostalgia poem’’ throughout the long eighteenth century, from the poetry of Dryden and Pope to the very different poetry of Gray, Beattie, Goldsmith, Cowper, and Crabbe, among others. Mr. Santesso links these poets within a history of ‘‘tropic change,’’ a process whereby the conventionalized images (‘‘tropes’’) of elegy and pastoral were pried loose from those oldfashioned genres in order to create a new poetic kind with the power to generate newly conventionalized images. In tracing this process, Mr. Santesso claims that poems like Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village gave shape to a distinctly modern form of nostalgia— not a ‘‘desire for the past per se,’’ but rather a ‘‘longing for objects that are idealized, impersonal, and unattainable .’’ This definition implies that nostalgia is on some level a public emotion, for it depends less on the objects of personal experience (Gray did...

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