Andrew Pettegree. The Book in the Renaissance. Hew Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 421p. ISBN 978-0-300-11009-8. $40

Abstract

It is ironic, as Pettegree points out in his “A Note on Sources” (353–56), that it has been the enormous growth of information about early printed books available through the Internet that has made this, by far the most significant publication yet on the social history of the book, possible. As outstanding and important as Lucian Febvre and Henry-Jean Martin’s groundbreaking The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1458–1800 (1976) and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) and her subsequent The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983) were, this masterpiece . . .