In Marketing English Books, 1476–1550: How Printers Changed Reading, Alexandra da Costa offers a detailed study of English printers’ innovations from the first days of print to the mid-sixteenth century, arguing that early English printers created and cultivated markets for their productions through careful attention to the design of the printed page. Da Costa's study adds to existing work on the materiality of the printed book in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including monographs—such as Julia Boffey's Manuscript and Print in London c.1475–1530 (2012); Alexandra Gillespie's Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and their Books 1473–1557 (2006); and Martha Driver's The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and its Sources (2004)—and foundational articles like A. S. G. Edwards and Carol M. Meale's “The Marketing of Printed Books in Late Medieval England” (The Library s6-15, no. 2 [1993]: 95–124).

After an introductory chapter, da Costa organizes her study into three broad categories. “Devotional Reading” is an examination of books about catechism and contemplation, along with more dangerous evangelical books printed both abroad and in England. “Worldly Reading” includes a chapter on romances and gests and a chapter about news. “Practical Reading” looks to the market regarding pilgrimage and travel and books printed to support household management. Marketing English Books ends with a useful index of those printed books discussed, allowing readers with particular inquiries to find specific works easily. Uniting each chapter and section is a sustained attention to books’ paratexts, design elements such as title pages, prefaces, illustrations, or tables of contents. Printers’ attention to these paratextual designs, da Costa claims, worked “to encourage demand for particular kinds of text and to shape how they were read” (18). Thus, printers in late medieval and early modern England took a remarkably active role in determining what books readers might desire or purchase, and they affected the larger literary landscape in ways more significant than scholars have previously observed.

While da Costa surveys several different English printers—to name just a few, William Caxton, Thomas Godfray, and Richard Pynson all receive sustained discussion—it is clear that Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's successor, is the book's protagonist. In nearly each genre under investigation, de Worde's marketing savvy, attention to his books’ paratexts, and understanding of the needs and desires of his audiences all paved the way for larger changes in readers’ preferences and printers’ business strategies. For instance, with religious genres, de Worde recognized “the appeal of the mixed life to devout readers” and marketed his productions in ways that “resisted limited conceptions of lay spiritual potential” (62). In marketing the romance genre, he diverged from Caxton's focus on highlighting texts’ morality and instead added woodcuts and chapter headings that “encouraged an interest in chivalric adventure without suggesting to the reader the need for any further [moral] justification” (110). And after improving upon Pynson's edition of Mandeville's Travels, de Worde “capitalized” on his audience's interest in this book to produce related pilgrimage literature that was both pragmatic and affordable (178–79).

Previous studies of de Worde also emphasize his shrewd business skills. Edwards and Meale, for instance, argue that de Worde's career is of “crucial” importance for printing history because of his “expansion of the possible markets for printed books” (Edwards and Meale, 124). But the scope of da Costa's study sets it apart from previous works. In da Costa's book, de Worde is not an exception, but a particularly prolific example of a wider trend in which printers take an active role in shaping markets and readers.

However, this emphasis on printers’ marketing power left me wondering about other actors in the production of early printed books. How much control, if any, did authors exert? How did printers interact with readers, and through which mechanisms were their responses taken into account? What about patrons, visual artists, or booksellers? These actors, of course, are not completely ignored. For instance, da Costa provides some evidence from readers’ annotations, like those of a “novice” farmer annotating his copy of John Fitzherbert's Book of Husbandry (216). And booksellers are present on occasion too: on several pages, da Costa references Oxford bookseller John Dorne's daybook (for example, 113, 209, 211). But I wanted to know more, given the book's focus on marketing, about the role of someone like Dorne in marketing books; or, given the book's focus on printers, about what kind of interactions printers might have had with a bookseller like Dorne or indeed with a reader like the one annotating Fitzherbert's Book of Husbandry. In other words, how did printers understand and interact with their audiences and with the others involved in a book's production and reception?

These questions, though, do not detract from my strong praise for this book. By shining the spotlight on printers, da Costa reminds literary scholars of the importance of looking beyond the text, not just to the paratext but also to the economic motives of those who had a hand in producing the text. And for book historians, da Costa's study demonstrates the benefits of looking beyond a single printer, author or genre to see broader trends arise from books that may not have otherwise been studied together. Overall, Marketing English Books is a crucial resource for anyone who wants to better understand early printed books, their production, and especially the role of marketing and page design in shaping reception.