Students of book history will not need to be reminded that most of what was published in the early modern transatlantic world was not novels, or even literature designed for entertainment, or even literature. More nonbook ephemera were printed than books, and novels were a vanishingly small portion of the book market. Jordan Alexander Stein is a student of book history, and When Novels Were Books is well versed in these facts. What remains to be explained is why the novel retains an outsized importance when we tell the cultural history of the book, why, even though there were only a handful of them relative to all the stuff in print, even though they “spark no boom in the Anglophone publishing industry,” novels loom so large in histories of reading and of print (139). When Novels Were Books, compact and erudite, aims directly at this mismatch, addressing it from a book historian’s point of view.There is an additional embarrassment targeted by Stein’s book: the claim, sometimes in mild disrepute, that the novel’s special province is the cultivation of interiority. Depth psychology, so the argument runs, was formalized through novels like Pamela, where it was put on display for eager members of the reading public to learn to perform. But printers and publishers, we also know, had been trading in books of self-improvement or self-cultivation for decades and more; varieties of print-mediated self-fashioning long predated the canonical triad of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Because the novel and its predecessors rely on the same batch of formal tricks, attending to form will not help us clarify their separate histories. It is time, Stein argues, that we turned to format, including a close look at the material shapes and paratextual encrustations of formally similar texts, in order to locate them in their different production and consumption networks. It is not for total populations, he contends, but for specific “text-networks” that the case is best made for the novel’s cultural impact.Stein’s starting place is the confessional tradition of seventeenth-century congregational Protestantism. Applying for full congregational membership, Protestant hopefuls repeatedly staged the same or similar autobiographical narratives; they described journeys of self-erasure similar to the narrative arc captured in John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. In one sense, this is a formalist’s reading, full stop. The fingerprint of the Protestant salvation narrative is its litotes-like profession of disgrace; only by acknowledging sin is the believer admitted into the circle of the saved. Once we see the paradox of Protestant renunciation as the repeatable discursive operation that it is, that paradox links texts in different languages and different times, with or without explicit debts. So Stein is comfortable discussing the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo (25–36) alongside the diaries and notebooks of seventeenth-century Puritan church members (36–52), bound together, as they are, by similarities of the merely formal sort.Identifying this formal fingerprint is, however, the first step in reconstructing distinct text-networks. Protestant worshippers apparently learned the path to selfhood by reading manuscript accounts of the confessions of others, cultivating interiority, as it were, from a crib. The same texts that allowed worshippers to study up on the path to salvation allowed confessional practices at one congregation to make their way to others, even performing transmediated leaps to pious print documents like Thomas Shepard’s spiritual autobiography, or his Sincere Convert (47–50). It would be hard, from this perspective, to imagine something more like the middle-class practice of self-witnessing described in Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel; these confessional literatures not only emerge as texts used by a community to witness itself but also stage a version of modern selfhood for private consumption and performance. Only, this was not the middle class discovering itself; these books, and these authors, predate that development and persist alongside it.Stein’s history is not, however, about soteriological trots; it is about secular novels, and so the remainder of When Novels Were Books observes the retreat of devotional literatures to specialized niche industries, which, “subtracting” themselves from mainstream publishing outlets and print sellers’ shops, made way for the novel’s emergence. In the early eighteenth century, Stein notes, we would not have been surprised to find a copy of The Life and Diary of David Brainerd (1749) alongside Richardson’s Pamela; a “well-thumbed” and much-loaned copy of the latter was in the library of the New England divine Jonathan Edwards, a principal editor of the former. Brainerd recounts the conversion experience of its eponymous autobiographer, offering a model of one form of devotional life (110). Edwards appears to have experienced Pamela as a moral text of a similar sort, what one anonymous editor called an “instructive little Piece . . . for the Fair to copy out and imitate” (quoted on 111). Pamela and Brainerd, that is, were once part of the same text-network; each was solicited by a publishing group that specialized in devotional literatures, made its way through the libraries like those of New England clergymen, and featured much the same “material format” and “rhetorical form” (20, 52).The very success of books like Richardson’s appears, however, to have upset the alignment between printers of devotional literature and the emerging market for novels. Some publishers sought stability in the reproduction of books we now call “steady sellers”: compact, pocket-sized, “tubby bricks” of religious text (quoted on 56)—like Brainerd’s Narrative. These books found their way into the job-printing market, where editions tended to be commissioned by voluntary organizations for distribution through their networks. Here the random access and the portability of the book were the important features of format; their “material properties,” Stein writes, “indicate that their imagined use was the access and contemplation of bits of pious thought,” making it possible to treat narratives, like Brainerd’s multiply republished Narrative, as collections of instructive episodes with salutary morals to be easily distributed and carried in the pocket (57).Other printers saw in the emerging star system of authorship a different opportunity to establish a predictable income. By midcentury the novel began to sustain bookseller’s shops and subscription libraries, where publishers relied on consumers to pay a recurring fee or to make regular purchases of new novels printed on speculation. For these booksellers, the length and durability of the codex format appear to have been its important affordances; the book could encourage absorptive reading even while surviving its circulation through multiple hands. Stein, therefore, has witnessed something like the emergence of literature as it looks from the publishing industry. Though dwarfed by the print runs of devotional texts, which were mass-produced for evangelical distribution, the novel emerged as one crucial instrument for sectors of the print industry catering to consumer culture.What we sometimes recognize as the secularization of the print marketplace therefore obscures a decision between two strategies for minimizing risk. It obscures the autotelic emergence of two major sorts of text-network: one, based on commission, printed texts for circulation within devotional groups; the other, more speculative, printed books for direct sale to consumers or through institutions like circulating libraries. Each recognized self-cultivation as a vendible commodity, but only the latter specialized in novels. Attending to format makes it possible to tease these two systems apart—revealing, along the way, the distinct work that the novel performed.Now it is time for me to share my wish list. When discussing sacred text-networks, When Novels Were Books is convincing in its treatment of the relationship between the “format” of the book and its purpose; one “dips into” books like the Bible for moral instruction. When it comes to novels, however, Stein is on less certain ground. Some readers might desire more careful attention to the many ways novels were encountered and used: an account of the codex format as something other than an atavistic holdover or artifact of a printing industry that conceived of its task as binding sheets rather than, say, printing rolls. For “continuous” reading is only one of many ways that people use novels. And while Stein raises a valid point that the “formalist” history of the novel tends toward “extrapolating enormous claims about the culture from . . . a handful of texts” (18; Watt’s Rise of the Novel is mentioned), the technique pioneered here, the book historian’s approach to formal questions, is vulnerable to the same criticism. Some will feel that When Novels Were Books grants outsized importance to a handful of texts; Richardson’s Pamela and Brainerd’s Narrative, one of Shepard’s notebooks, and The Pilgrim’s Progress loom especially large.Still, this is clearly a pathfinding book, transatlantic in scope and clear in its focus. It usefully reframes the novel as one print-based mechanism in the emergence of modern selfhood, putting our sometimes soggy claims about the links between self-invention and the novel on more certain footing. Readers, therefore, will welcome this careful, innovative study as an important reminder that the novel’s rise, including even its most cherished formal features, did not happen merely to meet the demand of a new middle-class readership but was the effect also of calculated transformations in the incipient book-publishing industry. This is what it means to remember that the novel, before it was the novel, was already a book.