In acknowledging his debt to two major historians, Pettegree thanks them for recognising ‘that the historian is also a storyteller’. In this study of the printed book in ‘the first era of printing' – i.e. 1450–1600 – Pettegree exceeds his own hope that his work will make ‘a modest contribution to upholding this tradition’. The book tells a great story – indeed, many great stories. As Pettegree correctly notes, his ‘study of the Renaissance book world’ brings ‘on to the stage a large number of larger than life characters’. It is also filled with exciting action, suspense and economic and emotional ups and downs as it traces the impact of print on religious upheavals, on wars, on education, and on politics along with the equally heavy impact of these and other historical phenomena on the world of print culture. Using the resources of the soon-to-be-released online Universal Short Title Catalogue and marshalling research and analysis from the most recent scholarship, Pettegree takes us across the reaches of Europe to show how, for example, a victory on a French battlefield or a particular moment in Calvinist or Lutheran reform made itself felt in print shops from Finland to Spain, from Moravia to England, itself an interesting outlier in terms of its small number of presses and its limited range of publications. The weakness of the book is that amidst the wealth of fascinating detail lurk occasional errors. To cite a single instance, when Pettegree discusses the printing of plays in England in the late sixteenth century, he assumes that ‘the author’ received the money when a play manuscript was bought for printing; this is not the case. This error does not affect Pettegree's argument and such mistakes are perhaps understandable in a book so rich in detail from so many areas of specialist expertise. But it suggests that this book is not so much a reference work as it is a door opening into a vital period of book history that, as Pettegree clearly shows, is much more complex, much more fascinating, than we have up to now believed.