reviews.indd


478 College & Research Libraries September 2005 

tive American alternatives to the Western 
page. “Subversives” abound, including a 
Canadian artist, Edison del Canto, whose 
contribution is a mini-artist’s book that 
takes aim at the traditional page and its 
guardians: “Academic expert culture is a 
culture of command…. It achieves com-
mand and authority by subjecting you to 
institutionally legitimated intellectual and 
sociological power structures.” Whatever 
the future of the page, its past and present 
are anything but innocent to many of the 
contributors. 

However, the page itself is not really 
the focus of this volume. The concerns 
of most of the contributors are with the 
larger issues of print versus digital com-
munication. Whatever overall coherence 
“the page” may have given this volume 
was lost as contributors pursued their 
own agendas. The result is not a recon-
sideration of the durable page but, rather, 
a series of slimly connected speculations 
about the promises and perils of online 
formats. 

Although the volume feels at times 
ponderously PC and dated, it does con-
tain some useful pieces. Jerome McGann’s 
“Visible and Invisible Books” is a valuable 
chronicle of how the evolution of digital 
technologies has forced him to reconsider 
the very nature and meaning of editing 
text and image archives. For McGann, 
technology has a long way to go before it 
catches up with the needs of those who 
see texts as more than informational sites. 
A similar note is stuck by Michael Groden 
recounting his experiences in editing 
Joyce’s Ulysses online. Joseph Tabbi has 
a provocative piece on the potential of 
digital technology to facilitate the un-
derstanding of writing as a procedure (as 
opposed to a project) and in particular to 
capture the complicated self-referencing 
of what he terms “cognitive fictions.” 
Allison Muri provides an interesting 
diagnostic of those who fear for man’s 
very identity, his humanity, in an age of 
unembodied communication. 

Stoicheff and Taylor launch their vol-
ume with a smart and brisk introduction 

to the history of the page in the West. If 
they ever collaborate on that topic, I will 
be sure to make a return visit. Otherwise, 
the future is best left where it is—ahead of 
us, somewhere.—Michael Ryan, University 
of Pennsylvania. 

Against the Law: Crime, Sharp Prac-
tice and the Control of Print. Ed. 
Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and 
Giles Mandelbrote. New Castle, Del.: 
Oak Knoll; London: British Library 
(Publishing Pathways), 2004. 184p. 
$45 (ISBN: 158456153X, Oak Knoll); 
(0712348964, British Library). LC: 
2005-544193 

The eight essays in this handsomely 
printed volume constitute the published 
proceedings of the 26th annual book trade 
history conference held at the St. Bride 
Printing Library and Birkbeck College 
of the University of London. The list of 
approximately sixty att endees included 
scholars from England, Wales, France, 
Italy, and the United States. All these es-
says are concerned with historical aspects 
of the book trade and, specifically, its 
role as one of the gatekeepers to social 
status, reputation, money, and power. 
The editors state in their introduction 
that the contributors of essays “explore 
the underside of the book trade, revealing 
the ways in which laws and regulations 
relating to books have been exploited and 
manipulated, or evaded and broken, over 
many centuries.” 

Christopher de Hamel’s “Book Thefts 
in the Middle Ages” cites examples of me-
dieval book thefts and the measures taken 
by book owners and monastic librarians 
to protect their literary property, includ-
ing curses or anathemas on the person or 
persons who would steal their books. De 
Hamel shows that the very fact that book 
thefts were not uncommon is evidence of 
an active books market and furthermore 
that the book trade often was either con-
sciously or unwittingly an accomplice of 
the thieves, making it easier for thieves 
to ply their sharp practices, deceptions, 
and frauds. 



Book Reviews 479 

Adri K. Offenberg’s “The Censorship 
of Hebrew Books in Sixteenth-Century 
Italy” focuses on the efforts to control 
print by the papal authorities, who perse-
cuted Jewish printers and owners of He-
brew books for ideological and religious 
reasons. Offenberg, who recently retired 
as curator of the Bibliotheca Rosenthali-
ana at the University of Amsterdam, has 
completed a substantial catalog of the 
Hebrew incunabula in the British Library. 
Illustrations accompanying the text in-
clude black-and-white photographs of 
the signatures of five revisers, between 
1575 and 1640, on the verso of the final 
leaf of David ben Joseph Kimhi’s Sefer 
ha-shorashim (“Book of roots”––Hebrew 
dictionary) (1529) and of the title page of 
the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of 1564. 

Alastair J. Mann’s (author of the 2000 
book, The Scottish Book Trade, 1500 to 1720) 
“‘Some Property Is Theft’: Copyright 
Law and Illegal Activity in Early Mod-
ern Scotland” highlights the history of 
copyright in Scotland before the statute of 
1710 and “the essential role of print as the 
conduit of nonconformist religious and 
political ideas [that] made print culture 
the focus for illegal activity.” Black-and-
white illustrations include the title page 
of the genuine John Forbes’s Aberdeen’s 
True Almanack of 1685 as contrasted with 
Robert Sanders’s “counterfeit” almanac 
A New Prognostication of 1684; title pages 
of two Bibles printed by Agnes Campbell 
in 1707, one version a genuine Edinburgh 
Bible, the other being a counterfeit Lon-
don Bible; and the title page of Andro 
Hart’s “pirate” edition of Frances Bacon’s 
Essaies of 1614. 

Maureen Bell’s “Off ensive Behaviour 
in the English Book Trade, 1641–1700” de-
tails what “offensive behaviours” meant 
to the later seventeenth-century authori-
ties, including rudeness, insubordination, 
deliberate malpractice, and theft. 

Helen Berry’s (author of the 2003 book, 
Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-
Stuart England: The Cultural World of the 
Athenian Mercury) “Crimes of Conscience: 
The Last Will and Testament of John Dun-

ton” explores the sharp practices of the 
late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-
century book trade through the eyes of the 
bookseller John Dunton. In his detailed 
will, Dunton pours out his feelings of 
guilt and his desire to make amends for 
making profit through the overvaluing of 
collections. Black-and-white illustrations 
include a declaration of Dunton’s goods 
at the time of his death, dated 16 March 
1732/3, and the first page of his original 
will, dated 21 June 1711, and the last page 
of his last will, showing his signature and 
those of the witnesses. 

Nicholas Pickwoad’s “The History 
of the False Raised Band” recounts the 
history and construction of false raised 
bands. Binders regularly followed the 
fashion of sewing on false raised bands, 
a less time-consuming, more profitable 
practice that gave book owners what 
they wanted esthetically and binders 
more profit. 

Anthony Hobson’s “Guglielmo Libri,” 
tells the tale of the mid-nineteenth-cen-
tury Count Libri, who abused his official 
position and scholarly reputation by 
stealing some of the treasures from French 
and Italian libraries. Black-and-white il-
lustrations include a photographic print 
of a lithograph of Libri’s portrait by A. N. 
Noel, and photographs of title pages of 
various catalogues of Libri’s library. 

Bill Bell’s (general editor of the History 
of the Book in Scotland) “Bound for Botany 
Bay; or, What Did the Nineteenth-Cen-
tury Convict Read?” is based on his own 
research as well that of others on the topic 
of reading and literacy and their effect 
on English convicts bound for Australia. 
He refers to Charles Bateson’s observa-
tions from The Convict Ships, 1787–1868 
(Glasgow, 1969) that “the average level 
of literacy on a convict ship was higher 
than among the free emigrant popula-
tion of Australia during the period of 
transportation.” In his Convict Workers: 
Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge, 
1988), Stephen Nicholas discovered that 
“three quarters of the English convicts 
who arrived in New South Wales could 



480 College & Research Libraries 

read and/or write.” Bell concludes that 
for those English convicts who arrived 
in Australia with a level of education 
and a valuable trade, a minority would 
take their places in the highest echelons 
of the emerging Australian colonial elite. 
Black-and-white illustrations include a 
photographic print of convicts boarding 
the prison ship York in Portsmouth Harbor 
from E. W. Cooke’s Sixty Five Plates of Ship-
ping and Craft of 1829; photographic prints 
of the hulk Justitia and convicts at work 
near Woolwich and a team of Woolwich 
convicts near Blackfriars Bridge (both 
from The Malefactor’s Register; or, New New-
gate and Tyburn Calendar of 1779); a convict 
broadside; and convict love tokens. 

September 2005 

The front book jacket illustration 
features a sepia-toned illustration, “The 
Order of Prayer for the Visitation of Pris-
oners,” from The Book of Common Prayer 
(1843), and the back features a sepia-
toned illustration of the royalist author 
and editor Sir John Birkenhead, who was 
put in the pillory for libel (1644–1645). 
Copious endnotes and a detailed index 
complement the text of the volume, mak-
ing it useful for any academic library 
collection, especially libraries with col-
lections on copyright and other legal 
issues affecting print culture, or as an 
appropriate text for courses on the same 
content.—Plummer Alston Jones Jr., East 
Carolina University.