Michelle Brown's book is based on the series of Sanders Lectures in Bibliography that she delivered in the University of Cambridge in 2009. As its title suggests, the book provides an account of many aspects connected with book production in the Anglo-Saxon period as a whole, from the very introduction of Latin texts (in connection in particular with the arrival of Augustine and Christianity) to the book's status as a sacred and (sometimes commercially) valuable physical object. Brown also discusses interesting aspects of Anglo-Saxon literacy, how far different sections of lay and ecclesiastical society would have been immersed in writings of various kinds (from stone inscriptions to lavish gospel-books) and whether or not such written texts would have been understandable. Connected to this is the rise of vernacular literacy in England, a phenomenon which Brown suggests became more prominent from the ninth century onwards and which she considers may have been one response to the arrival of a Scandinavian population, as Anglo-Saxons tried to reassert their own ethnicity. In the course of her discussion, Brown provides information about, for example, the processes of book production, how many people/scribes were involved in different kinds of enterprises and indeed the different functions such books could fulfill: perhaps as works of reference or as specially commissioned gifts. Brown also considers the potential audiences for Anglo-Saxon books, pointing out that some people would have been able to read and understand texts, whereas others, without the aptitude to read, would simply have viewed books and understood their significance as objects. In one part of the book Brown engages with a recent and important scholarly debate over the extent to which King Alfred himself can really be credited as the author of various works ostensibly written in his name, a debate prompted in particular by recent publications by Malcolm Godden. It is her conclusion that ‘Alfred did not “write” anything’ himself (p. 116), but rather that he may have been the commissioning authority behind some texts. This is a view which, as she points out, has not been wholly accepted by scholars. She concludes with an account of the formation of various Anglo-Saxon libraries (including perhaps the most famous example of Wearmouth-Jarrow) and also further comments about levels of literacy in late tenth- and eleventh-century England (as indicated by the number of extant individual scribal hands in vernacular manuscripts dating between 960 and 1100). For Brown, the ‘frequency of trained hands represents a high level of literacy in an agrarian society – and the number of readers can be assumed to have considerably exceeded the number of scribes’ (p. 155).