David McKitterick. Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830. Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 052182690X. Price: US$65.

David McKitterick’s latest book is a very readable and highly enjoyable expansion of the Lyell Lectures in Bibliography, which he delivered at the University of Oxford in 2000. The volume concentrates on issues of stability and instability in the history of book production from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. McKitterick’s focus is the whole of Western Europe, not just Britain, and his examples are not only literary, but are drawn from a wide array of texts and genres. The scope of the book is vast, and it is hard not to be awed by the breadth of McKitterick’s knowledge. Despite the range of genres, nations, and historical periods discussed, McKitterick easily holds his readers’ attention and interest by adhering to a clear argumentative and descriptive path. For readers of this journal, the second half of the book--Chapters 5-9--will be of greatest immediate interest, as they cover the developments of print in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the first five chapters, however, will not fail to fascinate and educate. The first chapter provides an overview of the central concerns of the book. Here McKitterick discusses the relationships between the disciplines of historical and textual bibliography, literary criticism, library science, the history of reading, and the history of the book, suggesting that misunderstandings and gaps in communication between these related fields have seriously hindered our comprehension of books, their readers, and their production. This is a subject to which he returns, and further develops, in the final chapter. McKitterick stresses the need to understand the “link between bibliographical form and its public meaning,” because “[h]ow and to what extent we comprehend the ways by which thought and knowledge have been shared and interpreted for five hundred years among authors, printers, publishers, and readers, depends on understanding their medium” (19). He focuses specifically on the divorce of manuscript and print studies within the disciplines and, in this and the subsequent two chapters, he explores how the two media are interrelated and mutually dependant. Chapters 2 and 3, which focus on text and images respectively, show that print did not immediately supplant manuscript production, but that the process was one of gradual displacement, with manuscript production continuing in various guises through the seventeenth century. Similarly, ways of thinking about manuscript and print shifted slowly. The media were used and combined in varying ways based not only on social and economic factors (on which scholars usually focus), but also on specific contexts and pressures related to the private needs and interests of individuals. Concrete examples, with very useful illustrations, are provided in order to demonstrate how books could be, and indeed were, personalised and modified by authors, printers and readers at different stages of production. This discussion highlights the problems inherent in our conceptualisation of printed books as complete, finished, stable or identically uniform products. McKitterick elucidates, here and indeed throughout subsequent chapters, that books are highly unstable entities constantly subject and susceptible to alteration in form and meaning. “[T]his innate instability of printed texts” is further discussed in chapter 4, as McKitterick, building on the examples provided in chapters 2 and 3, argues that texts “are always mobile---at the time of writing, at the time of publication, and over the course of time, quite apart from in the hands of different readers” (97). Widening the discussion, here he explores the varying reactions of readers and authors to this instability, questioning their expectations of constancy and consistency when faced with printed texts. He delves deeper into how texts of (what in bibliographic terms are considered to be) the same edition or impression differ, …