592

Book Reviews

Books for Sale: The Advertising and 
Promotion of Print since the Fif-
teenth Century. Eds. Robin Myers, Mi-
chael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote. 
New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 
2009. 191p. alk. paper, $49.95 (ISBN 
9781584562658). LC 2009-046880.

“Advertising is part of life,” asserts Mi-
chael Harris in an essay on the selling and 
promotion of books. “It is not simply a de-
plorable spin-off.” Proof of that assertion 
can be found in this delightful collection 
based on papers presented at the 30th 
Annual Book Trade History conference 
in Bloomsbury in November 2008. The es-
says—by academics, librarians, and pub-
lishing professionals—retain the brevity 
and accessibility of oral presentations 
without sacrificing scholarly depth. The 
book reads like a chronological sequence 
of microhistories. Each chapter stands 
alone, while implicitly enriching those 
that come before and after. The book is 
generously furnished with black-and-
white illustrations ranging from French 
trade cards to book jackets. 

In her essay on “Sale Advertisements 
for Books Printed in the Fifteenth Cen-
tury,” Lotte Hellinga examines 44 extant 
single sheets that were used for selling 
books, the “earliest witnesses to use of 
the printing press for retail purposes.” 
She concludes that there is growing 
“evidence for the big business of the book 
trade” even in this early period. Julianne 
Simpson’s piece on the selling of the Biblia 
Regia shows how complex the trade had 
become by the sixteenth century. The 
“shrewd” publisher Christopher Plantin 
used royal subsidies, custom editions, 
presentation copies, sales agents, book 
fairs, catalogs, and display posters to 
promote his polyglot Bible in 8 volumes. 

Boundaries between book selling and 
general trade were not at all fixed, as Mi-
chael Harris shows in his study of printed 
advertising in London around 1700. In 

printed publications, book 
notices might be interspersed 
with other commodities and 
services. Patent medicines 
were distributed at book-
shops. Book notices were 
fixed to the walls of bureaus 
of exchange, public gathering places that 
grew up in large urban centers to provide 
information on labor and trade. The essay 
by Phillippa Plock on an eighteenth-
century Parisian trade card collection also 
discusses such a gathering place, which 
in France was called a bureau d’adresse. 
Plock brings out the varied uses of printed 
paper materials, not only for advertising, 
but for their aesthetic qualities, to stimu-
late conversation, or to wrap purchases. 
Such ephemeral paper materials made up 
a large part of the printing trade, but most 
of them have not survived.

Like many of the other authors, 
Charles Benson draws on business re-
cords and correspondence to reconstruct 
advertising and the book trade in early 
nineteenth-century Ireland. Most books 
sold in Ireland at the time were imported 
from England or Scotland and marketed 
by sales representatives and through ads 
in newspapers and monthly and quarterly 
reviews. As in earlier centuries, publish-
ers and booksellers were aware of quite 
subtle national differences both in the 
types of works likely to be wanted and 
the way they could best be sold. 

As a mass market for books developed 
in the nineteenth century, the book trade 
seems to have become more specialized. 
The book jacket was an invention of that 
century that is still with us today, even in 
the digital environment. As Alan Powers 
explains, paper jackets were first used to 
protect the book but later used to attract 
readers and provide information such 
as blurbs or author photos. A snobbish 
prejudice against book jackets held sway 
among publishers. Colorful jackets were 



Book Reviews 593

associated with women’s and children’s 
books and compared to a pretty woman’s 
clothes. Nowadays, retro book jackets are 
all the rage.

Book prizes are largely a creature of the 
twentieth century. They were intended to 
reward serious authors and encourage 
reading in general, but did they actually 
help to sell books? In his essay “The Use 
and Effect of Literary Prizes in the Late 
Twentieth Century,” Peter Strauss finds 
that, with the sole exception of the Gon-
court Prize in France, they rarely did. The 
author’s reputation and word of mouth 
were more important routes to popular-
ity. Strauss offers a detailed look at sales 
of Booker Prize winners and especially 
Salmon Rushdie, whose novel Midnight’s 
Children, was the first to buck the trend. 
Nowadays the effect of the Booker on 
sales is “seismic.”

The eighth and final essay in the 
collection, “Advertising Books Online: 
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” is a 
little different from the rest. It is not a 
work of historical scholarship, but an 
account of the online used book business 
written by Udo Göllmann, Manager of 
Sales and Accounts at AbeBooks, Europe. 
Göllmann believes that the great strength 
of the Internet is that it offers “the largest 
possible selection of books” to the reader. 
Competition and collaboration among 
online mediators and vendors is in con-
stant flux. Göllmann provides a formula 
for business success that has allowed 
AbeBooks to survive, which includes an 
active marketing plan.

One of the virtues of this collection is 
that the authors do not press general ideas 
and interpretations; instead, they limit 
themselves to what the evidence sup-
ports. This allows the reader to participate 
in the act of historical interpretation based 
on primary sources, but with the guidance 
of an expert. There may be lessons to be 
drawn from the history of book advertis-
ing, but the main purpose and pleasure 
of this book is to understand a little better 
what life was like in times different from 
our own. The one thing that remained 

constant was the fact that books need to be 
connected to readers.—Jean M. Alexander, 
Carnegie Mellon University.

Mistakes in Academic Library Manage-
ment: Grievous Errors and How to 
Avoid Them. Ed. Jack E. Fritts, Jr. Lan-
ham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009. 132p. 
alk. paper, $50 (ISBN 9780810867444). 
LC2009-016939.

This concise collection of essays, each 
written by an experienced library ad-
ministrator, presents ten management 
mistakes commonly made by supervi-
sors working in academic libraries. The 
contributors describe errors made in 
communication, project management, 
staffing, knowledge management, pro-
gram planning, change management, and 
developing power and influence in the 
campus arena. Solutions are presented 
to help managers avoid these pitfalls. In 
his introduction to this volume, editor 
Jack Fritts states that the purpose of this 
book is “… to offer ideas and suggestions 
to help others avoid the snares some of 
us have already fallen into.” He stresses 
that good communication skills are vital 
to the success of an effective administra-
tor, a theme that links the essays together. 

Each chapter begins with a scenario 
that illustrates a managerial miscalcula-
tion. This stratagem sets the stage for 
the theory and advice that is presented 
in the body of the essay. Since this book 
is designed to be a practical guide, the 
authors concentrate on the presentation 
of solutions that might serve to resolve 
the scenario effectively. Each solution is 
contrasted to the inappropriate strate-
gies used within the case study. In some 
essays, the suggestions are backed by a 
brief explanation of related management 
theory. References are provided so that 
readers can refer to more theoretical 
works on the topic.

Unfortunately, the essays are incon-
sistent in quality. “Keeping Your Library 
on the Right (Correct) Side of Campus 
Politics” and “Developing Power and 
Influence as a Library Manager” would