From Revolution to Revolution: Perspectives on Publishing and Bookselling, 1501‐2001

Citation

Simpson, M. (2003), "From Revolution to Revolution: Perspectives on Publishing and Bookselling, 1501‐2001", Library Review, Vol. 52 No. 3, pp. 134-134. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530310465960

The authors are described on the cover of this book as “the dynamic duo of New York booksellers”. They have an impressive list of publications between them, and this latest book revisits themes of earlier publications. In fact, some of the chapters have appeared in almost the same form in various journals over the past five decades. By looking at the “Sources” page at the end of the book the reader might suspect this, and confirm it by checking various of the citations, but it is rather disingenuous not to state it categorically at the beginning of each relevant chapter.

There are 12 essays in all, spanning the early sixteenth century to the present day. Of these, six are on various aspects of the US book trade, and these are the most rewarding and thought‐provoking chapters, starting with one on the Franco‐American trade at the end of the eighteenth century, first published in Publishing Research Quarterly in 1994, and including a substantial piece on the role of the publisher in mid‐nineteenth‐century America, first published in Publishing History in 1981. The first two chapters, on the Aldine Press of the early sixteenth century and the Pilgrim Press at Leyden in the early seventeenth century are very insubstantial and fade to reminiscences of copies owned by famous collectors or purchased by the “dynamic duo”. Aspects of the seventeenth‐century English trade are covered in three chapters: one chapter on Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne at the start of the century, one on John Martyn in the middle of the century, and one on Richard and Anne Baldwin at the end. The last short chapter is a reflection on the threat to the conventional book by electronic developments. Stern and Rostenberg are passionate believers in the future of traditional methods of disseminating information, and the volume is in fact dedicated “to the survival of the printed book in the twenty‐first century”. There is an index, but not a footnote in the whole 12 chapters.