The “evolution of media thought,” Alison Hedley contends early in her book, “has a Victorian lineage that has often been overlooked by those who study it” (17). Making Pictorial Print aims to remedy this omission by combining extensive archival work with recent theoretical innovations in media studies to examine the multimodal shifts of news periodicals during the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century. With a keen eye on the many factors at play, Hedley points out the emergence of other visual and auditory media (the gramophone, film, and radio), which exerted pressure on publishers to re-situate their weekly and monthly magazines among the contemporary news media. She points to these new technological innovations and the rising national pride in the British Empire as the leading causes of new aesthetic strategies and “instructional journalism” methods, which fostered readers’ interest in and understanding of media and mediation. Indeed, her analysis of the most popular weekly and monthly magazines of the period reveals that the increased use of illustrations and photomechanical processes influenced media literacy, reader reception, and consumer behavior–while also allowing for individual interests and priorities.The book starts with a thorough review of the historical underpinnings of the topic and the argument’s theoretical framework. The magazine illustration samples from the period, the detailed explanation of different print processes, and the description of the emergence of the line-block and halftone methods help readers understand the significance of nineteenth-century technological innovations. References to key tenets by Jerome McGann, Michel de Certeau, Benedict Anderson, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Gerry Beegan, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno allow scholars from print history, media archeology, digital humanities, and beyond to find their interests in this intricate study of a key moment in the development of print media. Hedley also builds on recent scholarly interest in “technological imagination,” foregoing an emphasis on publishers’ abilities to add new media affordances for one focused on the readers’ imagination as an interpretive practice used for the visual representations of mass culture.The book then examines the turn-of-the-century shift from text to visual dominance in news weekly magazines as the result of the technology developments that started in the 1840s. Relying on visual samples of different illustration techniques and statistical data based on sample issues, Hedley compares the increase of illustrations in the Illustrated London News to the continuing dominance of text during most of the nineteenth century. Drawing on André Gaudreault’s and Phillipe Marion’s three-phase understanding of the development of a new medium, Hedley argues that the early twentieth century decrease of written explanations is definitive proof of this transformation’s last phase. Her analysis of special issues in 1902, 1906, and 1907, in which the visual dominated through aesthetic collages with staged photographs and themed decorations, demonstrates that this was the period when the illustrated magazine grew into an autonomous medium after decades of media literacy improvements.Drawing on deCerteau’s study of cultural producer strategies and consumer tactics, the book continues with a close examination of the juxtaposition of different print technologies, narratives, values, and aesthetic strategies in advertisements. Hedley emphasizes the ways in which publishers spread (especially among the middle class) a pleasure-driven attitude toward shopping by hyper-aestheticizing visuals and relying on the mass multiplication of art works to achieve emotional and behavioral effects. Her claim that the visual and cultural hybridity on a page reflects modernity, an extension of her earlier discussion of British national pride in print technology advancements, shows mass culture promoting a certain value system and proper behavior in a capitalist society. Yet she also attends to the consumption end, relying on N. Katherine Hayles’s types of hyper-reading to examine rare archival samples of readers’ transitory tactical responses, including collages of repurposed advertising images and counter-interpretations based on political views.Moving to the monthly magazines, Hedley coins the term “population journalism” to highlight magazines’ extensive use of data graphics in combination with written statistical analysis (89). Building on Michel Foucault’s biopolitical theory, Hedley explores the contemporary British interest to measure the population size and health to monitor the nation’s power and the effects of industrialization. Discussing the late nineteenth-century replacement of tables with bar graphs, pie charts, and thematized maps, she reveals how they contributed to both the photorealistic and highly aestheticized presentation of information at the time when spectacle was widely popular. Sample Pearson’s Magazine pages with halftone images prove that population journalism was used to foster consumer interest, boost national pride, and normalize a certain social behavior and individual responsibility for the population size and health in Britain. Very insightfully, the book also covers some tactical responses, including an 1898 parody of these articles that exaggerated and mocked the popular visual and verbal techniques.A chapter on readers’ scrapbooks provides further proof of media literacy and technological imagination and adds specificity to the earlier analysis of readers’ responses. Since scrapbook creation requires a longer and more personal engagement with a magazine than a simple reading, its layout, decorations, text passages, and images can reveal more about the reader’s understanding and appreciation of the technological and aesthetic choices of magazines. Hedley’s detailed analysis of several samples offers a unique insight into the different styles and uses of scrapbooks, which range from a seemingly unorganized pasting of images for aesthetic pleasure, to a series of text passages, images, and decorations selected to inform the viewer, honor somebody’s memory, or achieve something similar. Many of these scrapbooks reflect the organizational and aesthetic choices of the magazines, but Hedley unveils several subversive and innovative additions, such as dissenting annotations, nonlinear chronologies, three-dimensional pastings, and artifacts. The scrapbooks thus transform the readers into creators, while further drawing attention to the mediation of mass culture.The book then shifts to what Hedley calls the “participatory journalism” of the “Curiosity” section of Strand Magazine, which from 1896 to 1918 published the readers’ snapshot images of exceptional or unusual objects, events, and more. Hedley points out that the Eastman Kodak Company improved the portability and ease of use of their cameras exactly when the Strand publishers sought to improve consumer loyalty by inviting readers to contribute to the magazine. She also highlights the transition from images of foreign curiosities and publisher-curated captions to those of local events and personal experiences, and contributor commentaries. Most interestingly, Hedley uses Patrice Flichy’s “frame of functioning” and “frame of use” concepts to discuss how amateur photographers’ technological experiments were shared in periodicals–effectively subverting Kodak’s efforts to limit users’ knowledge and to determine their use of the camera. Through the emerging power of popular snapshot culture, she contends, these unexpected behaviors became normative, eventually leading to trick photographs that helped shape modernist thought by pushing the boundaries of the technological imagination and visual aesthetics.The conclusion offers an extensive review of some of the key transformations in the history of pictorial print and mass culture along with reflections on some moments when future development was misjudged, or innovations were criticized. Elaborating on William Wordsworth’s and John Ruskin’s misunderstanding of the value and impact of the emerging new medium at the time, Hedley underlines the logical fallacies inherent in any approach that uses the existing media and the aesthetic values of one social class to understand the future trajectory of a new medium. As she reiterates the readers’ growing media literacy and awareness of print mediation along with the different views about the veracity of visual representation, she reflects on the Victorian path to modernity: “Consciousness of the relationship between mechanized mediation and modern reality,” she asserts, “was one of the many ways in which Victorian print culture not only shaped mass culture sensibilities but also laid the groundwork for modernist art and criticism” (178).Shifting to more recent developments, however, she examines the readers’ false assumptions about the veracity of data visualizations, and she discusses mediation awareness and media literacy in the context of socioeconomic limits to digital media exposure. Her analysis of Instagram serves as a reminder of the recurring patterns of producer strategies and consumer tactics, but it also sheds light on the consumers’ limited agency in comparison to those contributing to the Strand “Curiosity” a century ago. Ultimately, Headley reveals the pitfalls of a limited perspective and a narrow scope in recent media studies, and she extends an invitation to scholars to continue her work. The combination of extensive archival work and a wide range of theories renders her method difficult to follow, but it results in a book that can be a great resource for scholars in reception study, print history, media studies, and digital humanities.