Julia Boffey's project is a difficult one: trying to glean the motives and preferences of text producers and consumers in the fifty years after the first printed book appeared in England. Like other recent scholars, she provides numerous examples of volumes that dismantle the very idea of a print/manuscript divide but admits that “[d]etermining what influenced the choices readers made between manuscripts and printed books, however, is not easy” (125). To get around the lack of consistent data about markets and motives, she allows the surviving texts to speak for themselves, which itself raises the question of whether or not what survives is ordinary or extraordinary.

Given the relatively small corpus of relevant texts, the five chapters in Manuscript and Print are necessarily set up as a series of case studies centered on specific themes. The first chapter compares and contrasts two books used primarily in London: a printed text, Customs of London (ca.1502), and a late fifteenth-century manuscript compilation written in multiple hands (Huntington MS HM 140). This establishes the parameters of her study, which then moves in chapter 2 to examples of textual hybridity—print enhanced with manuscript, manuscript enhanced with print, marginalia, and decoration. Chapter 3 speculates on why certain kinds of texts appeared in print while others remained in manuscript, and Boffey reminds us that London-based printers initially did not compete to print texts that were widely available in continental printed editions but tried to find lucrative London-specific niches. Chapter 4 turns to books that can be traced to their original collectors and collections: institutional libraries, religious houses, and the collections of two of the wealthier companies, the Mercers and the Drapers. Chapter 5 looks at the chronicler Robert Fabyan as a compiler and creator of manuscripts and printed works, and makes a close study of the various witnesses of Fabyan's New Chronicles.

The biggest takeaway from this careful and detailed study is that if a text appears in manuscript, it does not mean that it did not also have an earlier, or different, life in print. The same can be said for manuscripts in the decades after her study ends. Boffey cites various motives for moving from print to manuscript: to make deluxe presentation copies, because of limited access to print versions of a text, and, less convincingly, because of the inability to afford a printed copy. Anthologizing, or copying extracts from a variety of printed works to make a personal miscellany, was another reason. Certain texts tend to survive more often than others in multiple scribal copies that postdate their printed debuts, such as The Canterbury Tales, The Golden Legend, and parts of the Brut chronicle.

Boffey acknowledges: “Any attempt to construct a uni-directional model of script to print is quickly complicated by evidence of the many different kinds of scribal activity by which printed books were copied back into manuscript form, as also by the persistence of scribal copying more generally throughout the age of print” (57). Text flowed in both directions, and no one has yet done a quantitative study to determine whether or not the majority of late medieval and early modern manuscript works were, in fact, copies of printed texts. The flexibility of manuscript and printed pages is made apparent by the fact that many printed works are completed in manuscript (rubrication added, corrections made, blanks filled in, and illustrations hand-colored) and many devotional manuscripts are enhanced with woodcuts. Further, it was not unusual to bind similarly sized manuscript and printed works in the same volume “for convenience of use and storage” (76). For the reader, text was largely text, regardless of whether it was written by hand or set by a compositor.

That being said, certain categories of texts lent themselves to print production, and print shops began to concentrate near London's commercial and educational centers to capitalize on the need. Printers began printing statutes and yearbooks for lawyers, and even more important, job printing made the distribution of bills, indulgences, proclamations, subsidy forms, sermons, and other ephemeral and/or London-specific texts exponentially easier and more efficient than scribal production. Scribal production was still the persistent and dominant form for most other types of textual production, however, although much of it at this point was for private use.

The first question that comes to mind after finishing this book is: Why limit the study to London? Yes, London was the center of the book trade, but this is an unnecessary constraint precisely because London was the center of the book trade. Any manuscript or printed book that survives from this period could be said to have some sort of London connection, and it would be as interesting to think about the equally elusive regional differences alongside the urban similarities. Another minor issue, of the organizational variety: the same call numbers crop up chapter after chapter, and it is hard work to keep track of all of them and have them serve as meaningful examples, rather than footnotes to a larger argument, especially with the British Library's low-quality, small, and black-and-white reproductions.

This book provides a rich introduction to a textually complex half century, as professional scriveners and amateur scribes, printers, woodcutters, illuminators, binders, and others involved in the burgeoning book trade worked to meet the demands of an increasingly literate, savvy, and cosmopolitan audience who were just beginning to make subtle distinctions between print and manuscript, embracing the new technology by integrating it into an older technology.