Reviews.indd


386 College & Research Libraries July 2006 

vancements in information technology, 
has become the guiding principle of the 
post-Industrial Age. He described infor-
mation capitalism and the growing global 
class division between the info-rich and 
the info-poor. In their efforts to decrease 
the distance between these two groups, 
researchers have discovered that the 
simple introduction of telecommunica-
tion programs in third-world countries 
was not enough to guarantee access. In 
some cases, ICT actually served to main-
tain socioeconomic inequalities. This 
volume presents the most recent steps 
taken by international agencies, NGOs, 
and universities toward elimination of 
the world’s information class struggles 
through the employment of culturally 
sensitive strategies. 

Dr. Hakikur Rahman, a researcher with 
the Sustainable Development Network-
ing Programme (SDNP) in Bangladesh, 
edited the volume’s thirteen articles and 
organized the book into four thematic 
sections: “Education and Learning,” “Sci-
ence and Research,” “Social and Human 
Science,” and “Information Networking 
and Knowledge Management.” His own 
article on the Reflect ICT approach serves 
as chapter two and reports on the experi-
ence of the SNDP in using ICT to empower 
marginal communities through collabora-
tive learning. Reflect ICT is a participatory 
approach designed to enable people in 
economically marginal communities to 
move from passive reception to becoming 
effective advocates for the enrichment of 
their own lives. Rahman writes with au-
thority on matters of computer education, 
especially distance education, as he was 
previously director of the Computer Divi-
sion of the Bangladesh Open University. 

Enabling social groups to make in-
formed decisions is empowerment. The 
key to the sustainable development of 
empowerment, made evident in many of 
these case studies, is embedding informa-
tion technologies into existing and tradi-
tional social structures. This sensitivity to 
sociopolitical context, however, does not 
guarantee success in connecting ICT and 

poverty reduction. It is also important 
that organizations maintain the flexibility 
to learn and to quickly adjust to the effects 
of ICT usage. 

The book acts as a resource kit for 
policy formulation in the hope of creating 
a more evenly distributed knowledge soci-
ety. Access to ICT is not merely a question 
of physical infrastructure, but a process of 
human development. The book may be of 
use to librarians, museum offi  cials, and in-
formation studies faculty. For researchers 
studying the impact of ICTs in marginal 
communities, it offers an essential collec-
tion of guidelines, best practices, and case 
studies developed in the past ten years. It 
is also well suited as a reference source on 
policy and human resource development 
for improvement of the skills of local 
community members by increasing their 
access to information.—Thomas Lannon, 
New York Public Library. 

Printing Places: Locations of Book 
Production & Distribution Since 
1500. Eds. John Hinks and Catherine 
Armstrong. New Castle, Del.; Lon-
don: Oak Knoll; The British Museum 
(Print Networks), 2005, 208p. $45 
(ISBN 1584561652; 0712349065). LC 
2006-271247. 

This volume is the latest installment 
in the Print Networks series devoted to 
publishing the proceedings of the annual 
Conference on the History of the British 
Book Trade. Comprising fourteen papers 
from the 2002 conference held at Exeter, 
it takes as its Leitmotif the signifi cance of 
location as a factor in the history of British 
printing, publishing, and book-selling. 
The presence of a single unifying theme 
does not, however, imply uniformity in 
outlook. Rather, the authors, whose ranks 
include academics, librarians, and a for-
mer bookseller, use a broad array of meth-
odological approaches in treating their 
respective subjects. The theme of location 
correspondingly takes on variable signifi-
cance in different articles: in some, it lies 
at the very heart of the author’s investi-
gation, whereas, in others, it functions as 



the setting against which an interesting 
phenomenon of the provincial book trade 
is framed and analyzed. Indeed, one of the 
book’s great merits is to foreground the 
diversity of ways in which the concept of 
“location” can be used within the history 
of the book trade, encompassing not only 
the geographical, but also the social and 
cultural dimensions of book production 
and distribution. 

The individual articles, which are ar-
ranged in grosso modo by the chronological 
order of the topic treated, cover a wide 
spectrum of subjects. After a brief general 
introduction by the editors, Lucy Lewis 
opens with a bibliographical study of 
the 1525 Tavistock edition of Boethius’s 
Consolation of Philosophy, “one of the 
earliest productions of a provincial press 
anywhere in England.” Discussing this 
edition’s physical format, typographical 
layout, textual history, and use by read-
ers, she nicely illuminates its place in the 
English reception of Boethius’s famous 
work. In the following essay, Catherine 
Armstrong offers a model of the com-
munications circuit by which knowledge 
of the New World was disseminated in 
seventeenth-century England: she ably 
presents a typology of the texts about the 
American colonies then available to the 
reading public, discusses the venues in 
which they were published, and recon-
structs the various pathways (booksellers 
and pedlars, oral recitation) through which 
their contents were circulated through 
London and beyond. The subsequent piece 
by David Stoker examines publishing 
conditions at Norwich in the seventeenth 
century, surveys publications that mention 
Norwich booksellers in their imprints and 
analyzes these to uncover trends in their 
content and distribution over time. 

The next three essays deal with various 
aspects of the periodical press. Taking a 
biographical approach, Stephen Brown 
offers a glimpse into the seamier sides of 
periodical publishing in late-eighteenth-
century Edinburgh by examining the 
tumultuous life of one of its more colorful 
characters, the journalist and self-taught 

Book Reviews 387 

printer, James Tytler. Ian Jackson presents 
a penetrating longitudinal study of adver-
tising in two eighteenth-century provin-
cial newspapers, using quantitative and 
content analysis of advertisements to trace 
shifts in the newspapers’ “sphere of influ-
ence” over time to examine the rhetorical 
strategies used in advertisements and to 
consider the social, political, and economic 
impact of advertising in the provinces. The 
following essay by Lisa Peters treads simi-
lar ground, giving a lively, if somewhat 
superficial, content analysis of the medical 
advertising in the Wrexham press during 
the late nineteenth century. 

The following essays tackle various 
aspects of the provincial book trade of the 
early-to-mid nineteenth century. David 
Hounslow’s overview of the activities of 
two printing-cum-book-selling houses, 
based respectively at Gainsborough and 
York, paints a detailed picture of their 
booklists and business practices (espe-
cially their use of false imprints) and 
relates the latter to general trends in the 
contemporary book trade. Taking a topo-
graphical approach, K. A. Manley traces 
the geographical spread of commercial 
circulating and subscription libraries in 
the southwest of England; enlivening the 
essay are brief biographical sketches of 
the library proprietors and descriptions 
of their lending policies. Nicely comple-
menting Manley’s study is Ian Maxted’s 
survey of “the production and publication 
of topographical prints in Devon,” in 
which he discusses the artists, printers, 
and publishers (both local and London 
based) involved in the creation of prints 
relating to the Devon countryside, and 
sketches the social and business milieu 
within which they operated. 

With the following essay, we return 
to the north of the British Isles. Draw-
ing on resources in the archives of John 
Murray (Publishers) Ltd. and the collec-
tions of the National Library of Scotland, 
Peter Isaac reconstructs in detail both 
the business arrangements and personal 
relations between the prominent London 
publisher John Murray (II) and his agents 



388 College & Research Libraries 

in Edinburgh, tracing the history of the 
partnership over a sixteen-year period 
(1819–1835). Ian Beavan contributes a 
brief appendix to Isaac’s study, offering 
evidence that the partnership extended 
as late as 1843 and discussing the failed 
attempt of a rival Glasgow firm to secure 
distribution rights from John Murray’s 
son in that same year. Alice Ford-Smith 
follows with an essay on the fascinating, if 
macabre, subject of the trade in execution 
broadsides (i.e., broadsides reporting on 
the trials and executions of criminals) in 
Nottingham and Birmingham, incisively 
analyzing the contents, circumstances of 
publishing, and general social context of 
these curious documents. 

The book’s final two essays take us 
into the high Victorian period and early 
twentieth century. Stephen Colclough re-
examines W. H. Smith’s rise to dominance 
in the bookstall business along the London 
and North Western Railway, throwing 
new light on the socioeconomic profi les of 
the book and newspaper vendors whom 
Smith displaced and analyzing the busi-
ness strategies that Smith’s company used 
to sell printed materials at railroad sta-
tions. Graham Law deals with distribution 
of a different sort, discussing how three 
minor, but popular, regional authors of 
the Victorian era—David Pae, James Skipp 
Borlase, and J. Monk Foster—made use of 
syndication to ensure the wide circulation 
of their serial novels in Scottish and north 
English newspapers: these serial novels, 
he argues, “both reflected and contributed 
to a sense of a broad ‘Northern’ cultural 
identity” in the face of the powerful trend 
toward a “national” and increasingly 
imperialist English identity promoted by 
the all-influential London press. 

Although the summaries presented 
above do not begin to do justice to the 
wealth of information and insight con-
tained in each essay, they should amply 
indicate that, as a whole, Printing Places 
is a very good book indeed. The broad 
range of themes it covers and the variety 
of methodologies its authors employ 
should appeal to scholarly readers inter-

July 2006 

ested in fields as diverse as the history 
of the book and book trades, English 
literature, and English social history. All 
the authors make excellent use of primary 
and secondary sources and their careful 
documentation of these will provide re-
searchers with much grist for their mills. 
Some of the essays employ illustrations, 
including facsimiles, graphs, and tables: 
in general, these are well chosen and 
enhance the authors’ presentations of 
their subject matter. This is not to say that 
the book’s presentation is fl awless in all 
respects: weak points include a rather 
skimpy index restricted to proper names 
and the occasional presence of typograph-
ical infelicities, some of which may give 
the reader cause for perplexity. However, 
such blemishes do not vitiate the overall 
value of the book, which should fi nd a 
place on the shelves of any academic or 
rare book library collecting in the history 
of the book and related fields.—Thomas 
Dousa, Indiana University. 

Metadata : A Cataloger’s Primer. Ed. 
Richard P. Smiraglia. N.Y.: Haworth 
(published simultaneously as Cata-
loging & Classification Quarterly; v. 
40, no. 3/4), 2005. 303p. alk. paper 
$59.95 (cloth) $39.95 (paper) (ISBN 
9780789028006;9780789028013). LC 
2005-9646. 

After reading this book I felt like Mick 
Jagger, not because I couldn’t get any 
“satisfaction,” but because I had “mixed 
emotions.” I really felt that some of the 
chapters were so clear, informative, and 
even fun; and yet found other sections al-
most unreadable. The book is arranged in 
two parts. The first section deals with the 
theoretical foundations of metadata struc-
ture and creation. The second part is con-
cerned with some of the actual metadata 
schemes used today, such as Dublin Core 
and EAD (Encoded Archival Description), 
and how a “cataloger” would apply them. 
The text also includes an understandable 
and instructive introduction that actually 
contains a quick, fun, and thought-pro-
voking exercise that teaches you how to