Victorian Studies

A handsomely produced and finely crafted book is a rarity in these days of online media and global markets. Oxford University Press has set high production standards with this publication, a highly ambitious two-volume combination of extended essays and encyclo-paedic entries covering all aspects of book and print culture. Featuring over one million [End Page 528] words contributed by almost four hundred scholars from twenty-seven countries, it is divided into fifty-one extended essays (nineteen thematic studies on the intricacies of print, and thirty-two articles on "national and regional histories of the book"), and 5,160 alphabetized encyclopaedic entries. It is a beautifully crafted, handsome, and stylish work of art. Featuring an elegant typeface, fine paper, and a handsome red imitation morocco leather quarter binding and slipcase with matching endpapers, this set will appeal to the bibliophile collector who can afford to purchase it as an accompaniment to his or her personal collection. Its hefty weight and imposing size is in keeping with Kathleen Walkup's featured definition of coffee-table books, "whose size and often high price have made such books worthy vehicles for book designers to exhibit their art, and for owners to display their cultural consumption" (619). Less financially well-off readers can only hope their libraries value fine craftsmanship in equal measure.

As befits a work directed by two eminent scholars of the book, the Oxford Companion is rich with information on the evolving materiality of written text and print. There is strong coverage of the history of early, pre-Gutenberg print and text. Care to find out how writing traditions evolved across time and space? Look no further than the first essay by Andrew Robinson. Puzzled by why formative Hindu religious texts such as the Rig Veda are so rooted in oral forms? The Companion explains that the oral recitation of the sacred formulas of the Vedic verses and hymns at the core of Hindu rituals is seen to enable the poet or reciter to "send his inner spirit back to the realm of the divine beings" (17), spiritually uniting higher deities with lesser mortals. The extended pieces forming the main part of the first volume—particularly the long pieces surveying national histories of the book—provide valuable context for immersing oneself fully in a worldwide history of the book. Many of these build on recent scholarly projects that cast light on the spread of print and reading across the English speaking world, such as the multivolume histories of the book in America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Scotland. Others bring to Anglophone attention surveys of lesser-known national histories, such as the telling pieces on the Balkans, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Nordic countries. The non-Western book is given its full and proper place in this volume, as exemplified in entries on the book in the Muslim world and sub-Saharan Africa, an extremely positive achievement.

For Victorianists, there are plenty of fine-grained insights and succinct nuggets to uncover here. Survey pieces on the technologies and economics of print, for example, as well as on Victorian British and United States book culture, offer useful entry points for following significant trends and items in the later, encyclopaedic section. Most plentiful are details of production processes and the social and cultural changes in book and reading practices wrought by industrialisation, mechanisation, technological innovation, and education across the nineteenth century. The tidal wave of ephemeral print generated during the Victorian period to service different industrial needs could be overwhelming, ranging from posters and advertising leaflets to key information carriers such as almanacs and railway timetables. Yet as the short entry on timetables baldly reminds us, the ephemeral nature of such throwaway items can create lacunae in our knowledge: "As with most printed ephemera, timetables have very low survival rates, despite most having been produced in very large press runs" (1207).

Equally delightful is the space accorded to a multiplicity of press...