reviews.indd


Book Reviews 479 

Each of the three cases is explored with 
masterful command of both basic science 
and the secondary literature, although 
the parallels among the three cases are 
not always convincingly demonstrated, 
in my view. 

Librarians may be especially interested 
in the section on biodiversity, with its at-
tention to problems of creating and main-
taining information in databases. Bowker 
believes that standards and protocols are 
essential, but that there is no such thing 
as a universal, permanent standard. The 
longevity of data depends on metadata 
and the ability to translate between disci-
plines. He argues for enhanced metadata 
that will capture the wider context in 
which data was created. He also makes 
the unpopular point—music to the ears 
of the library profession—that mainte-
nance of the information infrastructure 
is important. In other words, more cata-
logers and specialists in systematics are 
needed. Problems in classification are 
explored with examples from botany, 
species, fossils, soils, landscape topol-
ogy, and ecological communities. It is 
demonstrated beyond doubt that no clas-
sification system can ever be perfect, not 
because of human error, but because of 
real tensions in the definitions within the 
sciences themselves. Bowker cautions that 
to attempt to create a “global panopticon” 
would be misguided at best. 

There has been space here to mention 
only a handful of the interesting ideas 
that can be found on every page—in-
deed, every paragraph—of this book. 
My chief criticism is that the writing is 
sometimes disjointed and rambling, and 
the many digressions and allusions to 
people and ideas from Plato to Proust 
to Derrida can be distracting. The ideal 
reader would need to be familiar with 
current theory in information science 
as well as postmodern theory. Never-
theless, I think that every reader will 
find much to ponder in this provoca-
tive exploration of the relationship of 
the present to the past.—Jean Alexander, 
Carnegie Mellon University 

Foot, Mirjam M. Bookbinders at Work: Their 
Role and Methods. Newcastle, Del.: Oak 
Knoll; London: The British Library, 
2006. 163 p. $59.95 (ISBN 1584561688 
[US]; 0712349014 [UK]). 

Book bindings of the hand-press period 
(1455–1830) range in sophistication from 
the simple paper wrappers of a seven-
teenth-century child’s catechism to the 
extraordinarily ornate gold-tooled, red-
dyed, goatskin covers created for the king 
of France. For us today, it is easy to see in 
the manner of binding either delight in 
ornament or its absence, the whim of an 
aristocratic collector, or the extravagance 
of a bookseller hoping to make a sale 
to a wealthy customer. To take just one 
example of early modern book decora-
tion: books decorated with sprinkled or 
stained edges. Speckles were usually red, 
or mixed red and green or red and blue, 
or edges were stained in solid colors such 
as red, yellow, green, even black. Why 
these techniques? These colors? Were 
they an expression of a purchaser’s or a 
bookbinder’s mood? Were they the paints 
or dyes that just happened to be available 
at the time? Readers of Mirjam Foot’s 
book on binding quickly learn how naïve 
assumptions of randomness are. Almost 
every aspect of a binding is suff used with 
meaning and historical clues, sememes 
waiting to be deciphered and understood 
by the librarian or the historian with the 
eyes to see. Our presumption must always 
be: What greater or more subtle purpose 
is being served by the bookbinder ’s 
choice? What traditions of the guild or of 
the culture have been respected and per-
petuated? As Thomas Mann refl ected in 
Doktor Faustus: “Ornament and meaning 
have always run alongside each other. . . . 
Let no one claim that nothing is being 
communicated.” 

To stay for a moment with the example 
at hand: we learn in Foot’s book that 
sprinkled edges on books were not just 
decorative, but often helped hide the dirt 
on the edges; that red and green sprin-
kling said “French” to German readers; 
that sprinkling with red alone suggested 



480 College & Research Libraries 

elegance, but a solid red edge signaled a 
book that was for peasants. The message 
of yellow edges was “old-fashioned” (at 
least in Germany), while black edges were 
“for certain service books or for funeral 
sermons”—one of the few semiotic sig-
nificances Foot reveals that we can relate 
to directly today. 

We emerge at the end of reading this 
wonderful treatise realizing how bind-
ings, referred to by some disparagingly 
as the “costume” of the text (E.Ph. Gold-
schmidt), or “part of the dress in which 
an author’s words are presented” (G.T. 
Tanselle), are in fact integral to the his-
torical evidence which the physical book 
represents. Prompted by the author, one 
wonders just who is paying attention to 
the messages bindings contain, both in 
their decorative and structural aspect. 
Foot suggests at the very beginning of 
her book—and cinches her argument 
by the end—that such individuals are 
far too few. She makes a strong case for 
the description and analysis of bindings 
becoming a part of the tool chest imparted 
not only to book historians, but also to cu-
rators of book collections and to analytic 
and descriptive bibliographers. But the 
question remains: does the binding of a 
book actually belong to the book? Or is it 
more a part of the world around it? 

Part of the problem stems from the 
fact that for the first several hundred 
years after the invention of printing, 
bindings were rarely part of the book 
as purchased by readers or collectors. 
Edition bindings did not arise until the 
early 1800s, while retailers’ bindings were 
infrequent into the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries—though documentable 
in Italy as early as the late fift eenth and 
early sixteenth. As a student, I remember 
reading in W.H. Bruford’s Germany in the 
Eighteenth Century (1935) how booksell-
ers traveling to the great fairs in Leipzig 
and Frankfurt transported their wares 
in quires—stacks of unbound printed 
sheets—sealed in vats. (Foot also refers to 
this practice.) Once books were sold, then 
and only then would they be sent to the 

September 2006 

binder, since why bind a book if you’re 
not sure you will sell it? Foot carefully 
analyzes illustrations of bookshops of the 
period, most notably comparing images 
in two editions of Comenius’s famous 
Orbis pictus, one from 1659 and a second 
one from 1777. The first shows mainly 
unbound parcels of sheets on the book-
shop shelves. The second one—a revised 
and updated version of the first—shows 
almost exclusively bound books. What 
had changed in the intervening 120 years? 
Well, clearly the market had changed, 
evolving from dependence on the scholar 
and connoisseur-collector to the much 
broader market of the educated bour-
geoisie. The next historical step—that to 
the cheaper edition bindings of the early 
nineteenth century—had to await the 
spread of literacy to an even broader seg-
ment of society. Traditional bibliography, 
says Foot, tends to ignore the significance 
of bindings before the advent of edition 
bindings. She characterizes this as a grave 
mistake. 

All of these issues, from the micropro-
cedural to the macroeconomic, fall within 
the scope of this book: from recipes for 
paints (“Red is often made of Brazil wood, 
carmine or cinnabar, mixed with water 
and paste or with gum Arabic or gum 
tragacanth”) to a chapter on “The Eco-
nomics of the Binding Trade,” in which 
we learn how much a binder was paid for 
his work, what he in turn had to pay for 
his materials (e.g., a large skin of vellum, 
enough to cover three folios, six quartos, 
or twelve octavos, cost 6s. 6d. in England 
around 1720 or 1 fl. 40 kr. in Germany 
around 1750), and what the equivalent 
costs were for beer, eggs, herring, cloth-
ing, and other essentials. A fi nal chapter 
(“Image and Reality”) considers the ethos 
and social standing of members of the 
profession as reflected in contemporane-
ous accounts and illustrations, conclud-
ing with: “Overall the binders we have 
encountered look cheerful, sometimes 
prosperous.” 

Bookbinders at Work is sumptuously 
illustrated with over sixty illustrations, 



many of them in color and many full-page 
plates, and concludes with appendices 
of German and French binding terms, 
though (a minor quibble) retaining the 
often antiquated spellings of the source 
manuals. 

One final observation: the meticulous 
quality of Foot’s work calls to mind the 
microscopic attention to detail charac-
teristic of Nicholson Baker’s novels, e.g., 
The Mezzanine (1990), the same author’s 
essays collected in The Size of Thoughts 
(1996), or of Patrick Süskind’s richly 
imagined, yet scrupulously researched 
and historically accurate novel of eigh-
teenth-century France, Perfume (1985). 
Certainly, authors of the increasingly 
popular mystery genre revolving around 
the oft en baffling ciphers and semiotics of 
old books and their constituent parts—in 
the tradition of Eco’s Name of the Rose 
(1981) and Pérez-Reverte’s Club Dumas 
(1993), now, of course, Dan Brown’s The 
Da Vinci Code (2003)—could weave many 
wonderful tales from the arcana and mi-
nutiae Mirjam Foot has brought together 
in this volume. Yet the principal audience 
for her work remains students of history 
and especially students (and practitio-
ners) of the history of the book. And to 
them it offers a valuable introduction, 
highly recommended.—Jeffrey Garrett, 
Northwestern University 

Huber, Mary Taylor, and Pat Hutchings. 
The Advancement of Learning: Building 
the Teaching Commons. San Francisco: 
Jossey-Bass, 2005. 187 p. alk. paper, $35 
(ISBN 078798115X). LC 2005-12459. 

This timely publication from the Carn-
egie Foundation for the Advancement of 
Teaching reports on the state of scholar-
ship addressing teaching and learning. 
Historically, the teaching of higher educa-
tion has been described as a lonely profes-
sion. Committed professors, well trained 
in their disciplines, have had litt le op-
portunity to engage in collective inquiry 
into the learning process. The creation of 
a “teaching commons,” as the authors of 
this volume call it, provides opportunities 

Book Reviews 481 

for educators to explore and share ideas 
about teaching and learning. The authors 
argue, quite successfully, that teaching 
and learning, in and of themselves, are 
legitimate foci of scholarship and that all 
disciplines will benefit from the outcomes 
of research in these areas. 

Pedagogy and the science of learning 
are not new subjects to be explored by 
researchers. In recent years, however, 
great changes have occurred that call for 
a renewed inquiry. New generations of 
students, technological change, classroom 
renovation, and, indeed, as the authors 
note, “new ideas about learning itself” 
are changing the landscape. 

The Advancement of Learning is orga-
nized into seven chapters. Chapter One 
provides an historical overview of the 
scholarship relating to teaching and 
learning. This chapter contains an excel-
lent, succinct summary of significant 
curricular initiatives and studies under-
taken throughout the twentieth century. 
In addition to documenting the evolution 
of scholarship on teaching and learning, 
changes in the demographic makeup 
of students, the rise in interdisciplinary 
studies, and other pertinent variables are 
presented. 

The second chapter sets the agenda 
for the rest of the book. Here, the authors 
provide their operational definitions 
relating to the types of scholarship they 
are promoting. Taking their case beyond 
schools of education, where inquiry into 
learning and pedagogy typically reside, 
the authors invite all higher education 
faculty to join their teaching commons 
to share information, best practice, and 
collaborative research. 

Chapters Three through Six look at 
specific examples and contexts related to 
the scholarship of learning. The authors 
draw heavily upon their experience with 
the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship 
of Teaching (CASTL), citing numerous 
examples of individuals and programs 
supported by CASTL since its inception. 
CASTL’s Higher Education program 
consists of a center for advanced study