A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558 ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558 ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell Jade Standing A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2014) 402 pp. Published by D. S. Brewer in Cambridge, UK, but printed and bound in the United States of America on papers made from wood grown in unspecified sustainable forests, A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain 1476–1558 is a beautiful exemplar of a printed book whose component parts derive from a plurality of origins, and a metonym for the early printed books it examines. Its target audience of upper level undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of book history can dip in and out of essays ranging from the foreign derivations of early English printing practices and materials, to the [End Page 219] transmission from manuscript to print, to humanism, to private reading practices and consumerism, or read through the collection in the order of its specifically grouped sub-fields. The heavy hardback edition weighs like iron in the palm; given the seventeen essays, generous illustrations, helpful further reading lists, Index of Manuscripts, thorough Index of Printed Books (a good separate reference tool) and the General Index contained within, its frame is compact, but its density deceives the eye and makes for a surprise when handling. It is neither so large and immobile as the chained and expensive core textbooks that James Willoughby discusses in his chapter on university books, nor as portable as the light quarto editions of the legal text-books or the New Testament that he goes on to consider. Companion’s precise footnotes, located at the bottom of each page, and the neat organization of its four thematic sections: “The Printed Book Trade”; “The Printed Book as Artefact”; “Patrons, Purchasers and Products”; and “The Cultural Capital of Print” contribute to a rich visual vocabulary and general comprehensibility. It exemplifies the characteristic logic of print that Martha Driver interrogates in her chapter on woodcuts. The cover image of a bespectacled, idiosyncratically attired reader bent over a book is taken from Wynkyn de Worde’s 1517 edition of Sebastian Brant’s Shyp of Folys, a book that criticizes the objectification and reduction of books to fair possessions alone. In his chapter on Thomas More and censorship, Thomas Betteridge touches on the irony of this message by observing that the high production values of Brant’s book placed it in danger of appealing to precisely the appearance-orientated readers it derides. The same might be said for Companion, whose glossed pages and smooth hardback finish create a visual appeal and aesthetic satisfaction that is consolidated by the haptic appeal of the weight of its bulk. Another way of interpreting the choice to use this particular image is to think of it as an act of reclamation: of the dignity of the sitting position, a posture of study with which the book’s readers will probably be overfamiliar; of the right to closet yourself in a room of books and wear motley; and of the right to enjoy the touch, feel, sight and smell of a book, not at the expense of its content but as an extension of intellectual curiosity and engagement. Whilst Daniel Wakelin’s chapter on “Humanism and Printing” inspects an instance of marginalia that draws particular attention to “Ovid’s famous comment that humankind’s upright form is a symbol of human dignity” (234), the Shyp of Folys cover image counter-intuitively promotes the solemnity of humankind’s sitting form by appropriating and intellectually repurposing a woodcut form to generate layered impressions of parody, self-recognition and learning. The first chapter, “From Manuscript to Print: Continuity and Change” by Julia Boffey, commences with Caxton and some examples of the books that he was printing in the late 1400s, before moving on to consider the two-way process of manuscript and early print production. Looking at manuscript additions to a copy of Caxton’s 1491 edition of Mirk’s Liber Festiualis and Quattuor sermons, letters of confraternity, indulgences and missals and also manuscript books embellished with pasted-in printed text...