Libraries and the Book Trade: The Formation of Collections from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century

Citation

Glasgow, E. (2003), "Libraries and the Book Trade: The Formation of Collections from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century", Library Review, Vol. 52 No. 9, pp. 462-463. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530310501518

This extremely noteworthy and interesting book adds to its publisher's already distinguished series of “Publishing Pathways”, each volume of which embodies a fresh and original theme, with important trans‐Atlantic implications for all who are at all interested in book collecting, publishing, and the book trade. Librarians, of course, must be concerned with the subject, whether personally or professionally. The essential basis of its contents has been a series of learned and well‐researched papers, delivered for the 21st Annual Conference on the History of the Book Trade, organized by Birkbeck College, University of London, on 4 and 5 December 1999. This suitably attracted outstanding library scholars, from Oxford and Cambridge, Auckland and London, even the Curator of Manuscripts at the famous Houghton Library, at Harvard University, USA.

The cumulative outcome is a volume of outstanding merit for a wide range of discerning and perceptive readers. Necessarily, perhaps, the book begins with a well‐documented study of the supply of academic books to Oxford and Cambridge, traditionally the “two eyes” of the Elizabethan State. One has to expand outwards from that basis of the Classical Antiquity, into the more “popular” circulating libraries of the eighteenth century in England: after 1740, in both London and the Provinces. There is a useful chapter on the advancing Copyright Laws, especially after 1844. Sir George Grey (1812‐1898), although his active Colonial service included important posts in Australia, Cape Colony, and New Zealand, was also a pioneer in the antiquarian book trade, “squarely in the company of Earl Spencer, the Duke of Devonshire, and Richard Heber”. There is here an illuminating and fascinating essay about him. This book also includes an invaluable if slightly unexpected study of an American bibliophile, W.A. White (1843‐1927), of Brooklyn, educated at Harvard, who over his long life assembled a magnificent Library, ranging from nineteenth century English poets and novelists, back to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. The book continues with a very perceptive study of the somewhat fugitive role of the “Aldine” edition of Castiglione's “The Courtier” (1528), “a work reflecting in dialogues much of what was best in the social and intellectual life of his time”. There is finally a highly informative chapter on “bookbinding for libraries”, which begins with the “elitist” concepts of Oxford and Cambridge, but progresses into the evolving popular demands of the Victorian period, with the relevant experience of the formidable Edward Edwards (1812‐86), the first Librarian of the Manchester Public Library, set up under William Ewart's Act, of 1850.

Altogether, therefore, we must find here a consistently admirable volume, combining precise and wide‐ranging scholarship with lucid readability, and I can have no hesitation in recommending it for discerning students, on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, this is impeccably a book of solid learning, which will permanently retain its appeal, and its value, for all who may be in any way concerned with books – whether in libraries or shops – and as either professional practitioners or interested amateurs. At any rate, it has the additional recommendation, that it exudes a somewhat old‐fashioned taste for books, which seems happily to be able to co‐exist, alongside the strident demands nowadays, even in libraries, for electronic agencies for the dissemination of information.