These two volumes offer a chronological history of London ‘stationers’ (embracing printers, bookbinders, publishers, and booksellers) as an occupational group, from their mid-fourteenth century precursors (mostly text writers, limners, and binders), to their incorporation by royal charter as the Stationers' Company of London in 1557. They also offer a critical history of the printing and publishing trades during the period 1501–1557, set against the political, economic, and cultural context of that era. Twelve hefty chapters follow the evolution of the craft, person by person and press by press, with additional emphasis on such issues as the evolution of printing technique, the emerging institutional setting for English publication, the origins of copyright protection for printed works, the often competitive role of foreign and native English printers, and the gradual imposition of government support and regulation, culminating in the 1557 incorporation. Along the way, Blayney methodically delineates the chronological appearance of stationers in the official records, examines the trade in imported books, and traces emerging legislative framework which came to govern the whole. Eleven supporting appendices print critical documents, offer statistics on imports, describe and map particular printers and their workshops, discuss Stationers' Hall, and offer a 39 page index to numbered items in the Revised Short Title Catalogue that have been cited in the text.

The bibliographic genre of English company histories in London and elsewhere stretches well back in time, finding most of its roots in the antiquarian traditions of the nineteenth century and before. Blayney's work surely must represent the most sophisticated example to date, not only in its exhaustive scholarship—at their best the Victorians excelled at gathering and recording information—but by examining every possible document and in placing the subject in its appropriately broad series of contexts. Given the rapid pace of political and religious change that marked the opening half of the sixteenth century, the role and composition of the Stationers remained in constant flux as well. Blayney charts the company's interaction with government policy both closely and well. Thus the 1520s saw concerted efforts by church authorities to control the content of print; the latter half of Henry's reign witnessed the growing importance of royal authority as disseminated via the printed word. The more vigorous Protestantism of Edwards's reign created an unprecedented demand for printed works amongst the laity, albeit not one which favored all segments of the Stationers' Company to the same extent. Bookbinders and sellers benefitted most, but text writers and printers suffered new competition from Protestant reformers and humanists who, often working on the continent to begin with, began to print their own works from outside the company. And Mary, who had the most to lose from an unfettered, subversive, and Protestant-leaning English press both home and abroad, incorporated the Stationers' Company as one of many efforts to exercise greater control.

Though clearly and engagingly written in the first person, this cannot be said to be an easy book to navigate. The publisher has done no one any favors by adopting two sets of notes: one in the form of explanatory footnotes designated by uppercase superscript letters; the other as documentary endnotes designated by superscript arabic numerals and placed at the end of each volume. The endnotes themselves are highly abbreviated, so that one must go one step further, to the 34 page bibliography at the end of the second volume, to access their full extent: in all, a very cumbersome task.

Then, too, Blayney is as feisty as his book is exhaustive. “Others may have preferred different terminal dates,” he warns us, “but I do not consider that I have wronged them by writing my book instead of theirs” (xviii). That tone continues throughout, so that the book may be read as a candid, emphatic, and critical dialogue with what seems like anyone who has ever written on the subject. Pithy declarations on the order of “not a word of this is true” liberally pepper the discussion, and longer admonitions appear as well: “Many seem to have forgotten that before discussing a statute, proclamation, or patent it is useful both to read and understand it—and book-trade history is littered with the opinions of those who have skipped one or both of those steps.” (929). One would pass this off as colorful crankiness if such challenges were not frequently accompanied by quotation from the offending commentary juxtaposed with the text of the misread document. Blayney is nothing if not thorough. He does indeed systematically check out, and often extensively excerpt from, his primary sources.

One takes seriously the author's insistence on writing his own book and not mistaking it for what it is not. But whether explicitly or implicitly, his work nevertheless suggests all sorts of questions to be followed up by others, and thus fulfils an important criterion for a seminal work. Its value to book historians is most obvious. But investigators of many other issues will find this a key text as well. In sum, one may safely take Peter Blayney at his word when he tells us that he began work on this tour de force in 1984. His three decades of exhaustively comprehensive, critical, and thoughtful research remind us what can be achieved when demands for the pace and volume of publication are not made to trump the quality, breadth, and significance of meticulous scholarship.