THINK BACK TO 1993. What was your computer like? There was no World Wide Web, only something called the “Gopher,” through which you could access resources such as library catalogues. That was the context in which The Bryn Mawr Medieval Review, later called The Medieval Review (TMR), began publishing book reviews as email messages. The journal has always been exclusively digital, with no print version, and it has always been open access, which means that subscriptions to the listserv and access to the website are free and available to anyone. As such, it is one of the oldest online, open-access journals around. In 1993, there were forty-five such journals, and a year later (BMMR’s first year on the list) there were 181. Today, there are over ten thousand.

The “online book review journal” took scholarly publishing ideas that already existed in print, and said, “what if we did all this electronically?” It embodies Marshall McLuhan’s principle that the content of a new medium is an old medium. The book review, a genre dating back arguably to Photius’s ninth-century CE Bibliotheca, only came into full flower in the late nineteenth century. The British journal Classical Review, containing only reviews, was launched in 1887, and the New York Times Book Review in 1896. By the early twentieth century, the book review had a recognized place in most print academic journals. A well-developed process existed, by which a book’s publisher sent free copies of the book to major journals in the field, and the journal assigned the review to a scholar who could appropriately assess it. As late as 1999, Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, assigned books through a panel of sub- editors, most of whom were Harvard graduate alumni and all of whom had to live within driving distance of Harvard Square, in order to go to the academy office to inspect the volumes up for review and select from the official rolodex of prospective reviewers.