Book Reviews 501

The other essays favor what might be 
characterized as an hermetic approach, ig-
noring the connections that were essential 
to the nurturing of music’s dissemination. 
Jeremy L. Smith recounts the conflict be-
tween William Byrd’s religious conviction 
that he sought to promote through music 
and the practicalities, both commercial 
and legal, that his printer-publisher 
Thomas East had to negotiate. Byrd held 
the license to issue music, while East had 
his eye on the profits to be made from 
the monopoly on issuing the Whole Book 
of Psalmes (as set to music). East was an 
important figure in the Stationers’ Com-
pany and could not afford to jeopardize 
his standing.

Richard Luckett’s erudite account of 
the relationships between Henry and 
Frances Purcell (husband and wife) and 
John and Henry Playford (father and 
son) focuses on the “great posthumous 
anthology of Purcell’s songs, Orpheus 
Britannicus.” He concludes that it was 
Frances who was her husband’s “best and 
most devoted publisher.”

Donald Burrows provides a useful 
summary of George Frideric Handel 
and the publishing firm of John Walsh, 
father and son. As the leading music 
publisher of the time and the first signifi-
cant publisher to focus almost entirely on 
music, the Walsh firm deserves the close 
attention it has received. Burrows does 
not discuss what made such specializa-
tion possible; nor does he highlight the 
continuities such as paper supply, legal 
protection of intellectual property, or dis-
tribution channels except as they impinge 
on Handel.

One of those continuities was the 
sale of individual collections by public 
auction. Stephen Roe tells us about the 
belongings of Carl Friedrich Abel sold 
after his death in 1787, as listed in the sole 
surviving copy of the sale catalog. Roe 
claims “the first English auction catalogue 
devoted to music” was issued for the sale 
of William Gostling’s collection in 1777, 
though music historian John Hawkins 
named five earlier auctions (1714–66) and 

provided details presumably garnered 
from catalogs no longer extant.

As a distinctive element of musical 
publications, plate numbers long have 
been attended to by music bibliographers. 
As Rupert Ridgewell points out, “the most 
obvious function of a plate number is to 
act as a unique identifier for the edition 
and was typically engraved in a central 
position at the base of each plate. For 
the publisher it offered a simple method 
for keeping a set of plates together ... [it] 
would have also provided a useful tool at 
the point of assembling copies of an edi-
tion, to ensure that printed sheets relating 
to different editions were not confused.” 
Developed in the early eighteenth century, 
these numbers soon became used by pub-
lishers in their catalogs and thus came to 
function as an early form of SKU. Drawing 
on several ledgers, Ridgewell shows how 
the notable Viennese firm of Artaria man-
aged its stock of plates, their use, and the 
quantity of paper required to print a copy.

Some of the complexities of plate num-
bering one hundred years later are illus-
trated by Paul Banks, in his chapter on the 
early years of publishing Gustav Mahler’s 
works. While 1880 to 1900 may be regarded 
as a golden age of composition, it was not 
easy to publish high-art, large-scale concert 
works. Subsidies from patrons, family, and 
friends were often needed; and, rather than 
leave the choice of printer to the publisher, 
Mahler dealt directly with the printer Josef 
Eberle. The cost of printing the score, vo-
cal score, and parts of the first and third 
symphonies and the orchestral parts of 
the second symphony by Gustav Mahler 
was computed to be 12,000 Fl., “exactly 
Mahler’s starting annual salary as Director 
of the Vienna Court Opera.”

Recommended for all libraries serving 
historians of music, print culture, and 
dissemination.—David Hunter, University 
of Texas. 

Linda L. Stein and Peter J. Lehu. Liter-
ary Research and the American Realism 
and Naturalism Period: Strategies and 
Sources. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow 



502 College & Research Libraries September 2009

Press, 2009. 319p. alk. paper, $45 (ISBN 
9780810861411). LC2008-028963

Literary Research and the American Realism 
and Naturalism Period: Strategies and Re-
sources is the fourth of a planned nineteen 
books in the Scarecrow Press’s “Literary 
Research: Strategies and Sources” series, 
which emphasizes research methodolo-
gies and addresses the research needs of 
scholars studying specific British and 
American Literary periods, as well as 
other national literatures in English. This 
volume is divided into chapters almost 
identically to the first three volumes in 
the series and contains chapters on on-
line searching; literary reference sources; 
library catalogs; bibliographies, indexes, 
and annual reviews; scholarly journals; 
publishing history resources; magazines 
and newspapers of the period; microform 
and digital collections, manuscript and 
archival material; Web resources; and 
researching a difficult research problem. 
The similar format and chapter series of 
the first four volumes of the series allow it 
to be more easily used as a reference book; 
a series user will know what to expect 
when moving from one volume in the 
series to another. Although the book has 
been designed to have a narrative style 
and to be read from cover to cover, the 
clear and logical organization and clearly 
delineated headings and subheadings al-
low the researcher to easily scan through 
information. Titles of resources are 
bolded and are easy to locate on the page. 

The authors Linda L. Stein and Peter 
J. Lehu are well qualified to publish on 
research methodology in literature. Stein, 
an associate librarian in the Reference 
Department of the University of Delaware 
and a selector for material related to the-
atre and English and American literature, 
has published articles on library issues 
and collections. Lehu is a reference librar-
ian at Parkway Central Library of the 
Free Library of Philadelphia and holds a 
master’s degree in English. The introduc-
tion defines the American Realism and 
Naturalism period and the scope of the 
volume, which covers “the literary history 
that begins with the start of the Civil War 
in 1861 and continues to the beginning 
of World War I in 1914.” The authors 
describe that book as “not simply an an-
notated bibliography of sources” but “a 
specialized guide to doing research that 
describes information sources and dem-
onstrates how they contribute to search 
strategies”; as promised, the volume con-
centrates more on search strategies than 
on just listing resources. The introduction 
provides historical background for the pe-
riod, lists major authors, and describes the 
rise of big business, technological prog-
ress, and their influence on publishing 
practices. The authors state that the book 
is “intended to be a research companion 
to anyone doing extended research in the 
American realism-naturalism period” 
and defines the audience as “a graduate 
student writing a thesis or dissertation, or 
taking a seminar course on an aspect of 
the period; a professor who specializes in 
and writes about the period; or a librar-
ian who regularly assists researchers in 
finding materials relating to the period.” 
The volume is geared for researchers 
with a specialized and advanced research 
focus and provides information advanced 
enough for even the most sophisticated 
researcher; however, it is clearly laid out 
and plainly written and would also be 
practical for a less advanced researcher. 
Additionally, this volume, as well as the 
others in the series, would be useful to 
any reference librarian assisting a student 

Index to advertisers
ACRL 473, 496
American Association for  

Cancer Research cover 2, 411
Amer. Psych. Publishing cover 3, 506
Annual Reviews 412
Archival Products 445
Assoc. of Research Libraries cover 4
CHOICE 459
Daughters of the American 

Revolution  443
EBSCO 415
Palgrave 416
Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press 495



Book Reviews 503

researching literature from a specific liter-
ary period and would be particularly use-
ful for librarians who provide information 
literacy sessions to literature classes of 
the period or who are literature selectors. 

The first chapter, “Strategies for Online 
Searching,” incorporates search examples 
specific to the American Realism and 
Naturalism period to introduce basic 
online searching strategies essential for 
navigating online catalogs and databases. 
The remaining chapters review resources 
more specifically related to the American 
Realism and Naturalism period. The 
chapter sections are arranged logically, as 
the authors describe the features of each 
resource and explain which are better 
suited for particular information needs. 
Each chapter section provides, upfront, 
complete bibliographic information for 
the resources it describes. A bibliography 
is also provided at the back of the volume, 
and the sixteen-page index is thorough. 
The appendix, “Resources in Related 
Disciplines,” directs the reader to general 
resources including statistical resources, 
other general information resources and 
guides (directories, indexes, and bibliog-
raphies), and resources in related disci-
plines such as art, history, music, science, 
social sciences, and theatre. This volume 
contains twenty-four figures, most of 
which illustrate how resources appear 
when you access them and include, pre-
dominantly, examples of catalog records 
and entries in reference books. It is gener-
ally very helpful to a researcher to be able 
to see an example of the resource as it is 
being described; however, figure 3.2, a 
reproduction of a detailed MARC record, 
is not well reproduced and is hard to read 
because of the size of the print. 

Chapter six, “Publishing History 
Resources,” and chapter seven, “Maga-
zines and Newspapers of the Period,” 
are particularly well researched and 
examine technological advances and 
how they relate to historical publishing 
trends, especially the rise in the number 
of periodicals and book reviews. Chapter 
six is concerned with publishing history 

in general but does a particularly fine job 
of guiding researchers to trade catalogs 
that were just beginning to be published 
during this era and to book reviews of the 
period. The chapter section “Identifying 
First Editions” carefully describes print-
ing processes and defines printing terms 
that are related to identifying editions as it 
points to other resources for further study. 
Chapter seven addresses what Stein and 
Lehu identify as two of the key challenges 
to researchers of literature from this pe-
riod: searching for literature published 
in magazines and newspapers and iden-
tifying and locating articles on “current 
affairs, essays, and editorials published 
in contemporary magazines and news-
papers in order to study the significant 
social, technological, and philosophical 
changes that occurred during the Civil 
War and the decades that followed.” The 
authors well describe literature found in 
periodicals of the period, as they discuss 
the popularity of serial novels and the 
rise of the novella, short story, and even 
the “storiette,” which was developed 
during this time and was “published in 
magazines such as Everybody’s, Collier’s, 
and Massey’s.” 

As promised in the introduction, this 
volume does indeed have a narrative 
quality that makes it an absorbing read 
from cover to cover while still being 
easy to navigate as a reference book. The 
text is clearly written, terms are carefully 
defined, and library jargon is avoided. 
Moreover, it is well cited and is in itself a 
well-crafted piece of scholarship on this 
period in literature. I highly recommend 
this volume to anyone interested in re-
searching, or assisting researchers of, the 
American Realism and Naturalism pe-
riod.—Mary Manning, Adelphi University. 

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Literature of 
the Caribbean. 1st ed. Westport, Conn.: 
Greenwood Press, 2008. 244p. alk. 
paper, $49.95 (ISBN 9780313328459). 
LC2008-010293.

Literature of the Caribbean is the latest vol-
ume of Literature as a Windows to World