500 Years of Printing New Edition

Citation

James, S. (1998), "500 Years of Printing New Edition", Library Review, Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 54-55. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1998.47.1.54.13

Was this the book that launched my library career? My memory was that I had bought a copy out of general interest fairly late in my undergraduate career, but bibliographers know how much can be learned from a copy of a book: my revised Penguin edition was published in 1961 and is signed by me as “Birmingham, 1962”, so that I must have bought it during my first term as an undergraduate; a Leeds City Transport bus ticket found inside the copy indicates my re‐reading it during the historical bibliography course at library school: such things were important to our profession then. As we pass from the age of the printed book into the age of electronic information, it seems very appropriate to re‐issue this testimony to a vital 500‐year period and its essential medium of communication. It is doubly appropriate that this elegant new edition should be published now by our National Library, but equally appropriate that its original publication should have been by the great popular educator Penguin Books.

The text will be as familiar to many Library Review readers as it is to me, and it deserves to be known more widely by any who have not yet come across it. They now have the ideal opportunity to acquaint, or re‐acquaint themselves with this work. It is inevitable that such a book, first published in 1955 and revised in 1961, needs some updating: scholarship has advanced in the meantime, just as the world of the printed book has moved on into realms hardly dreamed of in 1955. In fact, much of Steinberg’s original text is kept intact, as it deserves for his clarity, vision and all‐ embracing approach to such an enormous subject. It is to the credit of John Trevitt that this revision carries a very light touch and is unobtrusive, so paying its own ideal tribute to the original by preserving its virtues yet making it more accurate and up‐to‐date in the light of later research. The reviser’s preface pays its own homage with an account of both the author and his seminal work.

This edition has the great advantage over its two Penguin predecessors in its larger hardback format which gives even greater elegance to the book and certainly a greater clarity of illustration. Not that the original Penguins themselves lacked anything in that respect: they were well designed within the smaller paperback format and well (for their circumstances even lavishly) illustrated. But this edition has been designed by the author with more than 100 illustrations all carefully integrated within an equally elegant design for the typography of the text. And the cost is not too badly affected by the comparison: I do recall that my Penguin copy at eight shillings and sixpence was quite an investment out of my student grant, so perhaps £14.95 for this in paperback is not too inflationary; even at £25.00 for the hardback it is certainly not over‐priced.

This certainly deserves to be made more widely available once again. It is still a marvellous book and is now itself a text of great significance. Nor does it indicate the demise of the printed book, which itself has so much life left in it; but at the same time it offers many lessons for electronic texts: good design is good design (and bad design bad design) whether on page or screen, and many screens I have viewed are very much in need of lessons from typographic designers. So the message of this revised classic must be still as positive as its author would originally have wished.