The project sounds innocent enough. We all know what textbooks are, and it seems to be an interesting question to trace the history of an emerging theory through an analysis of its early textbooks. But as this book shows, not surprisingly perhaps, it is not nearly as simple as this. For one thing, quantum physics has a long and convoluted history, it was shaped by many contributors, and it is even questionable whether it constitutes a discipline or theory of its own or rather pertains to several different disciplines or theories in physical science. To complicate matters even further, it turns out that the category of a textbook is an elusive one as well. It seems straightforward to name typical examples of textbooks – we all have learned science through textbooks. But it is one of the surprises of this collection of essays, each of them dealing with one textbook from the early years of quantum theory, that each and every one of those textbooks is an individual, if not idiosyncratic, piece of scholarship, and each and every one of them defies classification as a typical textbook of quantum physics. There really is no such thing as a typical exposition of quantum physics prior to the mid-1930s, which is the cut-off date for the volume. This, at least, is my impression from the ten essays that the editors have assembled, all written by competent historians of physics.

The collection starts out with a contribution by Marta Jordi Taltavull on Paul Drude, whose textbooks Physik des Aethers (1894) and Lehrbuch der Optik (1900, 1906) belong, of course, to the realm of textbooks that need to be considered, although they do not contain any quantum physics – yet. Dieter Hoffmann discusses Max Planck as a textbook author, commenting on the ‘bizarre’ fact that the quantum hypothesis ‘received almost passing treatment in his lectures and anything but center stage’ (pp. 78–79) and that one of the founders of and main contributors to the new theory never wrote an independent textbook on quantum physics. Massimiliano Badino writes about Otto Sackur and his Lehrbuch der Thermochemie und Thermodynamik (1912), which blurred the distinction between classroom pedagogy and presentation of new research. Similarly, Clayton Gearhart presents Fritz Reiche's Die Quantentheorie: Ihr Urspung und ihre Entwicklung (1921) as a snapshot of ongoing research across disciplines. Arnold Sommerfeld's Atombau und Spektrallinien in its various editions and translations is discussed by Michael Eckert. First published in 1919, it saw new and revised editions almost every year in 1921, 1922 and 1924. Perhaps one of the most influential monograph expositions of the mature old quantum theory, it is an individual par excellence, with its hybrid form of non-technical exposition and highly technical extensive endnotes, and its emphasis on, and inclusion of, new research in every edition. Charles Midwinter and Michel Janssen take a look at the situation outside Europe and discuss John H. Van Vleck's 1927 exposition of the old quantum theory in a book-length Bulletin for the US National Research Council as well as his later textbook on The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities (1932). They go into technical details in a discussion of ‘Kuhn losses' (p. 139), explanatory feats of an old theory that get lost with the establishment of a new paradigm. Domenico Giulini emphasizes the uniqueness of Max Born's Vorlesungen ueber Atommechanik, the first volume of which appeared in 1925 and is remarkable both for the epistemological aspect of its axiomatic treatment and for the technical aspect of Bohr–Sommerfeld quantization of multiply periodic systems. Jaume Navarro takes a look at the teaching of quantum physics in the tradition of the Cambridge tripos in the 1920s, highlighting the two textbooks on The Quantum Theory of the Atom (1926) and The New Quantum Mechanics (1928) of the now lesser-known Cambridge-trained physicist George Birtwistle. The situation in Cambridge changed when Paul Dirac entered the stage, whose abstract and somewhat inaccessible Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930) is presented by Helge Kragh. Don Howard finally discusses Pascual Jordan's Anschauliche Quantentheorie (1936) as ‘an unusual and complicated textbook authored by an unusual and complicated working physicist in an unusual and complicated setting’ (p. 265).

With all this richness in material, presented with detailed historical context, the book calls for historiographical reflection, and the editors offer interesting thoughts on the epistemological role of textbooks. These represent media that facilitate deductive organization, although they often come with historical introductions. Their contents reveal the necessity of having some organizational principle to deal with the sheer amount of material. In the case of quantum physics, the textbooks also reflect an emerging division between theoretical and experimental physics. There is a history to the genre, too, emerging from a nineteenth-century tradition of university lecturing, embedded in a Humboldtian ideal of unity of research and pedagogy. David Kaiser completes the volume with some general historical reflections on the use of textbooks in science.

Notwithstanding the fact that there is no typical textbook, the selection of works analysed in this collection offers a fairly representative cornucopia of books about an unwieldy field of quantum physics in its first three decades. Some important textbooks and authors are missing, such as John von Neumann and Werner Heisenberg, but they get mentioned by way of comparison with their competitors. The book is a thought-provoking read and offers many insights and nuances for our understanding of the history of quantum physics as well as for a general historiography of science. Nevertheless, as a book about books, one needs an independent, prior knowledge of quantum physics and its early history in order to fully appreciate its interest.