As his title suggests, Patrick Valentine, who teaches a course in the general subject area of the book in the graduate library school at East Carolina University in the USA, has taken on a very ambitious project – the more so, as he does not limit himself to Europe and areas of European settlement, but also deals with books and libraries in other parts of the world, particularly east Asia. In some respects his project is made even more ambitious by the fact that he attempts to encompass his topic in only 170 pages of text, including chapter endnotes.
After a somewhat ponderous introduction explaining the aims and approach of the book, there are six chapters: Early Books: Beginnings to circa 1450, Early Libraries: Beginnings to circa 1450, Books and Printing: Fifteenth-Nineteenth Centuries, Libraries in the Renaissance and Beyond, Modern Print & Computers and American Libraries. (The last chapter is not the least interesting from an Australian perspective: in reading it one can readily think of ways in which our colonial and national library experiences have been similar to and different from those in the USA.) A 19 page Select Bibliography and an 11 page index complete the volume. The bibliography contains interesting items, but is in one alphabetical listing without annotations (and displays a strong tendency to mangle French titles).
The huge ambitions and brief extent of the book might well seem an open invitation to complain of inevitable superficiality and even trivialisation. But this rather densely written work avoids these shortcomings to a remarkable degree. Topics such as the impact of printing in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe are considered with what the non-specialist might well regard as more than adequate detail. Many intriguing and interesting details and comments enliven the work, such as that for some time staff at Yale University used the Kelmscott Chaucer, no less, as a doorstop (117), a summary of Melvil Dewey's career which suggests he was “a hero and a villain” (151), and the paradoxical observation that in antiquity “librarians thrived where the ability to read and write was limited” (31).
A reviewer who could comment authoritatively on all Valentine has to say in an exuberantly discursive work about the diverse civilisations of the world over a period of 5,000 years would be exceptional indeed. I observed only one clear error of fact (Louis XVIII for Louis XIV on page 83), though the library activities of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) should probably be attributed to the seventeenth rather than the eighteenth century (92). But as a onetime medievalist I am uneasy about the statement that writing in the vernacular was taught in the schools of “Saxon” England and only there (20). As a former librarianship educator I am worried by the statements on page 132 that “Book binding … disappeared as publishers began mechanically binding new books during the 1840s and 1850s”, and that “Cataloging is giving way, reluctantly, to meta-data”, though I suspect that I know what the author means by those instances.
The book has narrow margins and is far from lavishly produced and illustrated, despite a surprisingly surreal image (dating from 1566) on the cover. It will probably not “leap out” at students and others browsing the shelves. I would hesitate to recommend it to undergraduates in the earlier part of their course, but more senior students and others skilled in reading critically are likely to find it informative, insightful, and entertaining, if not always an easy read.