Choice 评论
Twenty-eight contributors (including some obvious experts) here offer discursive essays on 37 printers, booksellers, and publishers, mostly in London, during a period of exceptional expansion and transition in the book trade and in the practice of authorship. Their subjects issued works not only of belles lettres but also of history and politics, medicine and religion, children's books, dictionaries, and--of special note in this period--periodicals. Frequent quotations, good bibliographies, and many illustrations (often with no source attribution) accompany each entry and engage the reader. This DLB volume looks backward from v. 106 (CH, Jan'92), which covered publishing houses 1820-80, and v. 112 (CH, Sep'92), which covered 1881-1965. Inclusion of an entry for the Glasgow firm of Collins, from its founding in 1819 through 1990, illustrates the necessarily arbitrary chronology of the series. Consequently, DLB's cummulative index should be consulted, but with imagination (since it is compiled by computer rather than by an editor) and persistence (since few libraries class the series together). Consulting this readable reference work can profitably extend the perspective of anyone concerned with the English-speaking world, 1700-1820. E. A. Swaim; Wesleyan University