By the end of the sixteenth century, Christopher Plantin owned and operated from Antwerp one of the largest printing houses in Europe. He is perhaps best known to scholars as the printer of the Polyglot Bible, a project undertaken in 1568 that took five years to complete. Taking full advantage of the remarkably extant and extensive archive of the house that one can still visit in Antwerp, the curator of the archives at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Dirk Imhof, and coauthor Karen Bowen have produced a piece of scholarship remarkable for its intensive engagement with the Plantin archive. In a thorough and systematic archival recovery of Plantin's production and printing of intaglio illustrations in the late sixteenth century, Imhof and Bowen painstakingly detail Plantin's position and relationships in Europe as one of the most prolific and successful printers of illustrated printed matter. By using intaglio illustrations as a lens through which to view his business, the authors of this work refine our understanding of the complexities of the early modern world of print, one in which relationships and connections were important financial concerns, where physical location had unforeseen consequences, and technical innovation was as equally necessary as practicality in an expensive and new business such as print.

Bowen and Imhof's work divides itself into two parts: the text and its appendices. In the first half of the book, the authors begin with a basic overview of the process of print making in early modern Europe, explaining how the inclusion of illustrations necessarily revised the steps of production. Because books with intaglio illustrations (engraved or etched drawings) were more expensive to produce, as they required the purchase of and maintenance of copper plates, Plantin was initially hesitant to produce anything more than limited numbers of texts with intaglio illustrations. By the late 1560s and early 1570s, however, Plantin emerged as an internationally known and reputed publisher of books with engraved illustrations. This was not done, Bowen and Imhof explain, solely by Plantin himself, but involved the assistance, support, and active involvement of other men and women. With his publication of the Polyglot Bible, through which he established connections with Philip II of Spain and Arias Montano, Plantin cemented his international reputation. Plantin's trade was strikingly international in scope. His books were sold throughout Europe, not just at the court of Philip II. This international scope of his trade made his business very typical of Antwerp, itself an international commercial and cultural center of Europe in the sixteenth century.

Thanks to the Council of Trent, the market for Catholic religious texts boomed in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Plantin benefited immensely from this increased demand, being appointed Philip II's official printer for the revised Catholic liturgical and devotional texts, but he also distinguished himself on the wider continental market for his inclusion of engraved illustrations. In using engraved illustrations in his texts, Plantin relied not only on plates he commissioned for other works but also commissioned hundreds of new plates for these new texts he printed in the 1570s. Plantin's possession of many expensive plates allowed him to mix and match his illustrations. Bowen and Inhof's investigation of Plantin's text and his archive demonstrate that Plantin's use of illustrations was not book specific. Rather, he was happy to mix and match his illustrations, provided they fit the space available in the page and matched the subject matter well enough, revealing that Plantin's investment in an extensive plate collection was actually quite the cost-effective investment scheme.

In the late 1580s, Plantin began to shift from using engraved illustrations to etchings. This decision, Bowen and Imhof argue, was based on many factors. Antwerp's economic decline because of repeated foreign (mostly Spanish) attacks prompted many of its residents to leave, including among their numbers some of Plantin's engravers. Those who remained demanded more for their services than Plantin was willing to pay. In addition, etchings were technically easier to manufacture than engraved plates and therefore cost less. They were, however, not as durable as engravings, making engravings a safer long-term investment, particularly for the devotional and liturgical texts that established Plantin's reputation as an internationally renowned printer, whereas etchings were the financially savvy decision to make for print with more topical and temporal appeal. Nonetheless, wealthy buyers of printed matter clearly prized engraved illustrations more highly than etchings, and Plantin used the latter with far more frequency in his best sellers, the Catholic devotional and liturgical texts.

The second part of the book is composed of five appendices. It is in these appendices that the true extent of Bowen and Imhof's immersion in the Plantin archive becomes apparent. Bowen and Inhof provide their readers with biographies of the artists who worked with Plantin, complete with extensive archival citations. Their appendix for Plantin's price-calculating schema for his liturgical additions includes a translation from Latin of the letter Plantin wrote to the court of Philip II in 1574 determining the cost of printing a text with engraved illustrations. Practical lists are included, such as the sales figures for Plantin's liturgical texts with intaglio illustrations, inventories of his copper plates collections, and a list of all of Plantin's known works with intaglio illustrations done for a third party. The accumulation and presentation (in English) of these archival transcriptions provide scholars with an interest in early modern print with an invaluable resource.

Bowen and Imhof present their reader with a painstakingly researched work that reconstructs the elements of the Plantin intaglio illustrations archive. Complementing this scholarship are the over one hundred reproductions of illustrations, many of which are from Plantin's works and discussed explicitly in the text itself. While Bowen and Imhof pay scant attention to other contemporary printing houses, and few extended comparisons are made between Plantin and other early modern printers, such was clearly not the author's intention in their book. Rather, their book is a detailed examination of this one element, intaglio illustrations, in the Plantin archive. And while the conclusions drawn from their research are far from groundbreaking, they do present a complete and full picture of Plantin's motivations and models, problems, and successes in intaglio printing.