The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book

Starred review from June 15, 2020
A profusely illustrated, handsomely produced intellectual history. Raven, a history professor and director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust, has drawn together scholarly essays offering a sweeping, erudite, and thoroughly engaging narrative focused on "how the book has been remodelled and reformed over time and in different parts of the world." Beginning with evidence of the earliest writing in 3500 B.C.E. and ending with Google's project to create a global, digitized library, the contributors consider the technologies and economics involved in textual production, distribution, and reception; varied uses of written material; censorship and piracy; and the ways that books reflect and shape the societies from which they emerge. "What do books do?" asks Eleanor Robson, a scholar of ancient Middle Eastern history, a question that underlies many essays, as does a more basic question: What is a book? Raven suggests that books "offer a durable, portable, or mobile, replicable and legible (that is, readable and communicable) means of recording and disseminating information and knowledge," although he readily admits that evolving technologies may require a revision of even so capacious a definition. Legal, scholarly, religious, and literary texts survive from ancient times as parchment, scrolls, and steles, and, Robson notes, every literate society "supported a class of professional scribes who were not obviously economically productive." The spread of basic literacy incited a desire for books. As cultural historian Ann Blair reveals in an essay about information management, readers looked for aids in finding content both within books and among them. The index and table of contents proved to be welcome new innovations, and with a huge proliferation of books resulting from printing, library catalogs became indispensable. Other contributors range across time and place, focusing on the Renaissance and Reformation, the Islamic world, and modern China, Japan, and Korea. In addition to the striking illustrations, Raven also includes a helpful 14-page timeline. A deeply informative, stimulating volume.

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September 1, 2020
The most common conceptualizations of the book do not consider the long history of writing and producing material formats that started before 3000 BCE. This volume is a cultural biography of the book, taking a global view of its underlying function as a portable, durable conveyor of reproducible information. Fourteen chapters vary in length from 20 to 30 pages, with images, and are written in scholarly but accessible language by historians from the U.S., Europe, and Japan. A wide range of international topics is covered, from the inception of orthography in the ancient world to the variety of fonts and ornamentation in the Roman and Muslim empires, printing technologies developed in East Asia, the history of book production in the Islamic world, the development of modern book proportions that began in medieval Western Europe, the impact of Gutenberg, the growth of the book trade, industrialization of production, and the future of book technology. The book concludes with a glossary, further readings, image credits, and an index. Other works trace the history of the book, but Oxford's treatment is a deeper, more multicultural, and more visually appealing approach.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)