This volume collects nine of the lectures (some revised and expanded, some close to their oral form) delivered by a roster of distinguished scholars in memory of the late Myron M. Weinstein, an eminent bibliographer and former head of the Library of Congress's renowned Hebraic Section. Weinstein retired in 1984 but remained active in scholarship until his death in 1998. Some of the lectures focus on material in the Library of Congress collection, while others offer broader perspectives on aspects of Jewish book history. In this way (although quite by accident), the work as a whole shows the connections of this collection to other major Judaica and Hebraica collections. And so not only are the individual essays a tribute to Weinstein but the book as whole honors his “cage work” described by his successor and disciple Peggy Pearlstein in her introduction: “Myron's in-depth and long-term research of the collections enabled him to successfully identify elusive rare items, sometimes making connections to similar items, or to ‘joins,’ parts of manuscripts held in collections elsewhere” (9). As Pearlstein points out, some of the lectures here are directly dependent on Weinstein's findings.

Two of the essays are comprehensive overviews of Jewish book culture in different cultural contexts: Joseph R. Hacker's study of “Authors, Readers, and Printers of Sixteenth-Century Hebrew Books in the Ottoman Empire” and Jonathan D. Sarna's survey of “American Jewish Publishing in the United States to 1950.” Others take microhistorical approaches, focusing on one text or one figure, such as Bernard Dov Cooperman's presentation of the career of Isaac de Lattes, a sixteenth-century Italian printer, editor, and book enthusiast; the separate contributions of Evelyn M. Cohen and Doris A. Hamburg, each focused on the Washington Haggadah, one of the most important manuscripts held in the Library of Congress collection; Marsha L. Rozenblit's discussion of the “Mannheimer Prayer Book in Nineteenth-Century Vienna”; and Gershon Gorenberg's work on a “Hidden Hasidic Text of 1947.” Two of the essays survey a range of material in a particular genre or context: Grace Cohen Grossman looks at Hebrew liturgical broadsides in the Library of Congress's Washington cousin, the Smithsonian Institution; Zachary M. Baker looks at works from the Yiddish theatre. Almost all of the essays bring out the theme of connections between texts (such as Cohen's careful comparison of the Washington Haggadah with a manuscript in the British Library penned by the same scribe, Judah ben Simeon).

The diversity and interdisciplinary nature of book history are revealed here with essays ranging from technical discussions of conservation (e.g. Hamburg); book history as an underpinning for various modes of history—intellectual, cultural, religious, social, and literary (e.g. Hacker, Cooperman, Sarna, Rozenblit, Gorenberg); and the intertwining of book history and art history (e.g. Cohen). For anyone who has seen Michael Tilson Thomas's loving tribute to his grandparents the Thomashefskys on stage, Zachary Baker's essay will show the way that close bibliographical work and library collections form a kind of “backstory” that can deepen the understanding of artistic performance. Although not the intention of the work, one also learns a great deal about the history of libraries and collections and the workings of librarians, from the descriptions of the material in the Library of Congress collection (and the Smithsonian) and the authors' shared memories of interactions with Weinstein. Each essay stands on its own, to be sure, but as a whole the collection offers us a list of what close attention to material texts can do for various kinds of scholarly endeavors.

This collective portrait justifies the decision to publish the lectures together in book form rather than as a series of pamphlets or as individual PDFs available online. The order of essays is the one area in which I have a (minor) criticism: the lectures are printed in the volume in the order they were delivered from 2000 to 2009, and thus, however much individual essays were revised prior to publication in 2012, the work reads sometimes as miscellany. A rearrangement by topic or chronology would have made things a bit easier on the reader of the volume as a whole: for example, Hamburg's essay follows Cohen (as 2006 followed 2005) but more background on the Washington Haggadah is found in Hamburg and thus her essay would profitably be read first by someone with little knowledge of this manuscript. But perhaps it's not so bad if future readers have to do a little work themselves to understand and assess the “joins” in this excellent volume.