Historians of the long eighteenth century (c.1688–1832) have often commented on the impact of the rise of the press and the changing nature of printing on British society, from its social interactions to its economic expansion, colonialism, and politics. The fourteen essays included in Pen, Print and Communication in the Eighteenth Century, however, places the focus on the format, typography, the mechanics of printing, the materials used, and the cultural impact of written communication. This focus is apt, for the collection originated as papers delivered at the Baskerville Society conference held at Birmingham City University in 2015. John Baskerville (c.1706–1775) was a leading Birmingham industrialist, typographer, and printer when Birmingham was by mid-century fast becoming the center of European printing (158).

After their introduction, Caroline Archer-Parré and Malcolm Dick present the collection in four sections: the impact printing had on penmanship; the use printing and writing had for personal pleasure and public performance; how printing widened cultural horizons; and how printing created new international intellectual, political, and cultural identities. Contained in the chapters on penmanship there is an interesting contribution by Persida Di Giacomo on the career of the Serbian linguist, poet, and engraver Zaharija Orfelin (1726–1785). Few will be familiar with this eclectic figure, but Di Giacomo completes a useful survey of his career even if more evidence is needed to support the claim that Orfelin was influential in founding the later Serbian nation (43). As is usually the case with conference paper collections, the content and standard varies, but included here two standout essays concerning Birmingham itself.

In discussing the career of James Bisset (c.1762–1832) Jenni Dixon outlines how his A Poetical Survey round Birmingham, which included twenty-seven copperplate engravings and was later renamed A Grand National Dictionary in 1800, constituted a visual excursion through the town's main urban features. This visual tour, Dixon suggests, encouraged a new type of grand tour; one that promoted new manufactories, rather than antiquities, as curiosities (170). In “Marigolds Not Manufacturing,” Elaine Mitchell illustrates the impact of Birmingham's growing commercial nursery businesses and the increased publication of their seed and plant catalogues on the global movement of plants and their introduction to Britain's gardens and greenhouses. By the last quarter of the eighteenth-century, Dixon concludes, many British gardens were becoming as connected to the natural worlds of Asia, the Americas, and Africa as they were to their neighboring counties. Increasing global consumerism is touched on in Ruth Lawson's chapter on late eighteenth-century aristocratic female letter writing. The expensive paper used, together with their imported inks and seals, make such letters important historical artifacts, the correspondents’ elite status reinforced through this conspicuous consumption.

Increased written communication and the rising price of paper helped generate interest in shorthand as a cost and labor-saving alternative to longhand. In his chapter on John Byrom (1692–1763) and his New Method of Shorthand (1723), Timothy Underhill claims, perhaps too generally given the other advocates of shorthand he reviews and the previous scholarship he references, that shorthand remains a neglected area of study. Bryom taught his system at Cambridge University, and it became popular with the aristocracy (including Horace Walpole). Although Bryom's own obsession with secrecy in an era of rampant plagiarism limited the long-term success of his system, as Underhill concludes, his system became the most important shorthand method developed prior to the publication of Isaac Pitman's Stenographic Sound-Hand in 1837 (39).

The British pamphlet press, the proliferation of cheap prints, and the development of magazine gossip columns undoubtedly had an impact on public opinion. In an analysis of the way that two actresses, Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) and Mary Robinson (c.1757–1800), attempted to forge their own public image, Joanna Jarvis concludes that Mrs. Siddons was clearly the more successful at deflecting adverse public scrutiny. In an era when attitudes toward working women were changing, Mrs. Siddons projected a private life of probity as a wife and mother, which reflected rising conservative social norms. Mary Robinson's public aristocratic liaisons, however, helped define her as a courtesan—a woman from a different age, when a woman's reputation was attacked because of the actions of her male companions rather than her own (120).

Of the remaining eight articles, five discuss penmanship and printing while three add an international dimension to the collection. Peter Pellizzari's essay on the circulation of the Federalist Papers in America may complement the vast body of scholarship on the eighty-five essays, but his conclusion that they addressed a local New York audience, rather than a national Federalist cause, will surprise no one. What is surprising is his ranking of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay as thinkers alongside Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Callie Wilkinson's account of the press controversy following the death of Sir David Ocherterlony (1758–1825) concerns the Bharatpur succession crisis of 1824. The subsequent 1826 expedition against the kingdom prompted a press attack on Lord Amherst, the governor-general who had opposed Ocherterlony's earlier military intervention. The use of Ocherterlony's private correspondence, Wilkinson argues, raised questions concerning the freedom of the press in Calcutta. This is a well-written narrative, but previous East India Company controversies, such as the 1764 controversy concerning the succession and later removal of Mir Jafar in Bengal, had also sparked similar press campaigns in which private correspondence was often used. Emil Rybczak's investigation into how the publication of English contemporary drama in Holland and the German States may have influenced European visions of Britain is a perceptive and thoughtful contribution. As Rybczak admits, his essay remains something of a brief introduction; one hopes that it will spark future research.

The general editors of the series of which this volume is a part, Eighteenth-Century World, Eve Rosenhaft and Mark Towsey, hope that these publications will further promote further innovative and an interdisciplinary approach to global eighteenth-century studies by making specialist research available to an informed audience. Their aim has certainly been achieved in Pen, Print and Communication, a well-produced, enlightening, and attractively illustrated volume.