With this volume a new series is inaugurated, dedicated to The Library of the Written Word, and under the general editorship of Andrew Pettegree. It is subdivided into ‘The manuscript World’, ‘The Handpress World’ and ‘The Industrial World’. This volume is a collection of essays, eight of them already published in journals and volumes, five of them new; together, in the words of their author, they comprise ‘a celebration of ten years of work on the history of the book’.

What is worth spelling out even more is that this collection is a celebration of the value of direct examination of the sources, as is amply shown by the important results presented by each of these contributions. The essays are concerned with the spread of information in sixteenth-century France and how that shaped an active and politically aware public (a complement to the work of Peter Burke and Mario Infelise, and, most recently, Filippo de Vivo); with how the large increase in vernacular Protestant printing determined a change in the nature and location of Protestant presses, from the well known example of Geneva to little studied Caen (again, thanks to hands-on bibliographical research in local archives); with the role played by popular literature in the expansion of French Calvinism; with Protestant printing at Lyon and Geneva, as well as French Catholic polemical writings; with the growing desire for news as the French wars of religion intensified; with French books at the Frankfurt fair; with the book trade in Emden (a north German port); with the relationship between book production and the spread of the Reform; with how regional print culture was enormously stimulated by the conflicts arising from the French wars of religions, though its bedrock remained official printing; and finally with the reception of Calvinism in Britain and its relationship with the press.

The opening essay, not previously published, is a tribute to the source. French municipal libraries have furnished the means by which so much of the new and original research on sixteenth-century France has been produced: they are ‘one of the great unknown treasures of the library world’, in the author's view. While in every other part of the world major collections of early printed books have been accumulated in universities or great national libraries, France remains a shining exception. In fact, without looking very far, Italy presents exactly the same situation for exactly the same reasons: a long and general history of collecting, the dissolution of the religious institutions (the first Napoleonic, the second domestic) and then local relocation of their library collections. The story of the Napoleonic suppressions of religious institutions and the consequent shift of book collections from ecclesiastical to state property is of fundamental importance for our cultural heritage and is surely not as well researched and studied as it deserves to be. Two examples are worth mentioning: the case of Strasbourg described by Claude Muller in his ‘La Fin d'un monde: la suppression des monastères et abbayes d'ancien régime sous la Révolution (1791–1792)’, Archives de l'Eglise d'Alsace lii (1995–7), and the excellent analysis of the example of Bologna detailed by Maria Cristina Bacchi and Laura Miani in ‘Vicende del patrimonio librario bolognese: manoscritti e incunaboli della biblioteca universitaria di Bologna’, in Pio VI Braschi e Pio VII Chiaramonti: due pontefici cesenati nel bicentenario della Campagna d'Italia: atti del convegno internazionale maggio 1997, Bologna 1999, 369–475. The latter article details the system (and its surviving records) operated by the French officers charged with the task in 1796 of selecting manuscripts from the Congregation of SS. Salvatore in Bologna to be taken to Paris.

The most recent approach adopted for exhibition catalogues and for catalogues of early printed books has been to use a discrete section for the descriptive entries and another for essays focusing on the most interesting or problematic examples so that the authors can discuss in a more leisurely way various issues that have arisen during the cataloguing phase. This volume is in a way the second part of such book, based as it is on the raw data collected and published in French vernacular books: books published in the French language before 1601, edited by Andrew Pettegree, Malcom Walsby and Alexander Wilkinson (Leiden–Boston 2007), the fruit of a twelve-year project based at the University of St Andrews, which recorded some 52,000 bibliographical items in Parisian libraries, in two hundred French municipal libraries, and in collections outside France, in Europe and the United States. More than half of the 52,000 bibliographical items in French vernacular books survive in fewer than four copies, more than 5,000 items in only one copy: these are made up of many rare examples of ephemeral regional print, the source of many unexpected and unique discoveries.

French vernacular books is a bibliographical list giving the location of known surviving copies, but no details of the material aspects of the books (ownership inscriptions and notes), although information of this nature has clearly been collected and used in Pettegree's essays. Because the link between French vernacular books and the essays in The French book is regularly stated, and rightly so, one wonders whether the material evidence has been recorded systematically, and if so, where it is stored and whether it will be used to compile other volumes or will perhaps be made available to the public in database form.

It is a common fashion these days to attach very broad-ranging titles to books which in fact deal with a rather narrow aspect of the subject. Generally they are followed by a subtitle which clarifies the topic. The French book does not have a meaningful title, and the ecclesiastical historian, who will benefit greatly from reading this stimulating collection, will come across it only by means of a subject search, not via its title.