A book that does justice to the richness of the subject of print popularity would inevitably unsettle any definitive definition of the popular. In the early modern era, the ephemeral nature of much printed material; the difficulties—already noted by early modern booksellers themselves—of documenting numbers of print runs and compiling records of the mobile market in printed books; the differences between local popularity and national popularity; the strained relationship of market share, reprint rates, and profitability; the problems of classifying or categorizing books in terms of distinct genres (even the differences between religious and political books are constantly elided); the indeterminate number of books needed to “add up to ‘popularity’” (22); and the uneasy relation between print popularity and “profound cultural effects” (52) are among the numerous factors addressed in The Elizabethan Top Ten, a cleverly designed handbook on popularity. Gauging and measuring popularity also involves identifying how often specific books were borrowed, stolen, or gifted, or even, as Helen Smith points out, how often books received visitors and how far scholars would travel to visit them (97). Then there is the even larger question raised by the editors of The Elizabethan Top Ten themselves about whether books can be described as popular in an era before mass literacy, a time when oral and manuscript communication were more prevalent than print.

Showcasing a range of intersecting methodologies from empirical and statistical analysis to material textual criticism, book history, and literary criticism, the stellar lineup of contributors is responsible for inaugurating what the editors describe as a new conversation about popularity. As the literature review indicates, the conversation about early modern forms of popularity is not new, though it is constantly reinventing itself. Andy Kesson and Emma Smith note their departure from Peter Burke's approach to the subject, an approach that has, however, shifted since the time he produced Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. His most recent work is on ordinary people's engagement with printed histories and is featured in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (2011). Joad Raymond, the volume 1 editor of the Oxford series, suggestively opts for “Cheap Print” rather than “popular culture” in his title. As for the title “The Elizabethan Top Ten,” it arguably “invites a popularity contest,” Beth Quitslund rightly observes (203). Still, the editors labor to unsettle fixed definitions of popularity and the hierarchical model implied by their book title. They also resist nominating best sellers, a term that is itself not an automatic indicator of popularity. Popularity is thus presented as a multivalent concept whose historical sense mutated over time: it referred, for example, to a dangerous privileging of ordinary people, a democratic style of government, and the democratization of thought, speech, and action, as well as to the condition of being liked, or to a cause for explicit disapproval. Indeed popularity is also stigmatized, so that Shakespeare's most popular play (Henry IV, Part 1) actually includes a critique of popularity, Neil Rhodes reminds us (119). Appropriately, the indexes of popularity throughout The Elizabethan Top Ten are multiple, constantly yield new results, and in various essays, declare unexpected winners (e.g., damask paper, Mucedorus, or Henry Smith's sermons).

Along with the introduction, the first chapters, constituting part 1, actually represent more than half of the volume. The four discrete essays in this section describe or apply different methodological approaches to the topic of print popularity. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser literally map the economic performance of books in a guide on the retail trade. Lucy Munro studies the insertion and repackaging of older texts in the Elizabethan print marketplace and considers how they register claims to antiquity. Helen Smith presents an intriguing analysis of the social lives of books, specifically “how many friends books had” in an inventory of collections and catalogues (82). Neil Rhodes examines the relationship between market success and the “different kinds of role[s], conceived in terms in literary and social status,” available to writers (114). His primary focus is Shakespeare, who won popularity by producing a small volume of poems, only to achieve repute as a canonical writer through the folio of his plays.

What is largely a case study anticipates part 2 of the book, consisting of ten, occasionally cross-referenced essays, averaging ten pages each. The contributors each argue for the popularity of a particular genre while broadening the spectrum of definitions of popularity and, in some cases, complicating the relationship between early modern popular and present-day canonical literature. We move from Adam Smyth's illuminating discussion of almanacs and the paradoxes of popular genres as amphibious, transient, and ultimately destructive to Brian Cummings's essay on the widely reprinted Book of Common Prayer, which was an early modern best seller in all respects. In most libraries, Helen Smith points out earlier in the volume, the Bible itself was the most popular book and literally the top choice insofar as it headed classification schemes (91–92). Of course, one need not have chosen between the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, which were often found bound together, along with Sternhold and Hopkins's Whole Booke of Psalmes.

S. K. Barker makes an excellent case for examining the news pamphlets and translations of foreign language news texts, which offered a window into the international scene. Abigail Shinn's valuable study of Spenser's appropriation in his poems of popular best-selling texts affords insight into the construction of his literary identity and about the layers of cultural interaction. Popularity and the popular deserve to be considered in their own right, and yet, as Shinn's essay reveals, they inform the way we understand high culture and the relationship between the two categories.

We must attend to the ways that books were used if we are to understand popularity, maintains Catherine Richardson in her useful review of domestic books and manuals (169). The Elizabethan Top Ten refers regularly to Roger Chartier's observations on the circulation of the same texts in the same milieus and his popular premise that book ownership is less indicative of social status than the ways in which the same texts and ideas are used (213). The mass production and also recycling, in the sixteenth and primarily the seventeenth centuries, of decorative paper used for wallpaper (damask papers) is the subject of Juliet Fleming's essay, which effectively complicates the notion of ephemera and examines the later notion of damasking as the cancelation and/or overprinting of offensive printed works. Beth Quitslund gauges popularity in terms of how the material version of “The whole booke of Psalmes” was affected by devotional practices of its consumers. Louise Wilson posits serial publication as an index for print popularity in a study of the romance whose accessibility sustained its pre-eminence in the early modern marketplace of print (215). Peter Kirwan discusses Mucedorus, the best-selling and most popular play of the early modern era, though obscure today. Indeed, the disjunctions between early modern and present-day conceptions of popularity are rightly considered here and, earlier, in Lori Anne Ferrell's contribution on popularity as generated by the pulpit (197). Using the example of the now largely unknown Henry Smith, who was Elizabethan England's best-selling preacher, Ferrell makes a persuasive case for recognizing popularity as “a time-bound value” (194).

In the end, Kesson and Smith's The Elizabethan Top Ten might seem to invite the creation of a hierarchical model, yet they expend much energy on qualifying the model. Though they offer no explanation for gaps in coverage, the editors are conscious of the volume's omissions (e.g., an essay on ballads). The jest book and broadside might also serve as contenders for the top ten. The inclusion of such canonical authors as Spenser and Shakespeare in a volume on early modern popularity is explained in terms of disciplinary demands and expectations, and the potential for increasing the book's appeal and marketability among today's academic audiences. Shakespeare aside, The Elizabethan Top Ten offers more than ten compelling reasons for deserving popularity among humanities scholars and students.