Book Reviews 191 icle (and later groundbreaking works like his Canon Tables of the Gospels), he would have needed a remarkable scholarly team to help him gather, collate, and process the many texts upon which he would have based his writing. In chapter 4, the authors reveal that the key to Eusebius’s revolu- tionary textual successes was Caesarea’s library, the hub of Christian scholarship in the ancient world. The library owed its existence to Pamphilus (d. 310), a wealthy Christian presbyter who dedicated much of his fortune to amassing a remarkable collection of writings, including Origen’s works and correspondence. But he did more than just accumulate texts; he also catalogued and organized them, trans- forming a gentleman’s collection into a true scholarly resource. Caesarea’s library was home to more than a notable assembly of texts, however. It also played host to a large and active scriptorium whose scribes produced books for the entire Christian world. Grafton and Williams place Eu- sebius and his work firmly within the larger scholarly, political, economic, and sociocultural contexts of the library and its diverse network of users, patrons, scribes, and partners, paying particular attention to how Eusebius assumed administrative control of the library after Pamphilus’ death and built upon his predecessor’s work to create a remarkable center of knowledge creation and preservation, textual production, and intellectual ex- change. What emerges is a compelling picture of how scholarship and librarian- ship worked together in the late-antique world to produce new modes of writing, reading, and learning. Although it deals with a world of information production, packaging, dis- semination, and reception that initially might seem foreign to our modern under- standings of these concepts, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book clearly reveals that a better understanding of book culture in the ancient world can teach us much about textual culture— whether print or digital—today. In their concern for the architecture and mediation of knowledge, the early scholar-librarians of Caesarea presuppose the concerns and practices of modern librarians and their efforts to develop new and efficient ways to organize and promote information to meet changing reader tastes and support the emerging needs of new, more techno- logically sophisticated user communities. Lively, accessible, and extremely informa- tive, Grafton and Williams’ book should be essential reading for any librarian wanting a fuller understanding of the historical and practical evolution of the written and printed word, the creation and organiza- tion of knowledge, and the cooperative role that early scholars, librarians, and their libraries played in these processes.— Eric J. Johnson, The Ohio State University. Periodicals and Publishers: The Newspa- per and Journal Trade, 1740 –1914. Eds. John Hinks, Catherine Armstrong, and Matthew Day. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2009. 251p. alk. paper, $49.95 (ISBN 9781584562665). LC 2009-015098. This is the tenth volume in the series of proceedings published from the “Print Networks” conferences. Unlike the pre- vious volumes, however, this is the first “themed” collection—that is, the eleven papers offered herein are not from one conference, but rather were selected from multiple meetings (Dublin 2006, Chester 2007, and Lincoln 2008). Opening up the selection in this way allows the further development of broad themes—in this in- stance, the close examination of so-called “provincial” print networks. The first paper, by Iain Beavan (retired Keeper of Rare Books at the University of Aberdeen), is a think-piece on the uses and abuses of the term “provincial” and the utility of its orthodox definition in the scholarship of the book trade in England. It functions as a prefatory framework of sorts, and Beavan’s remarks are borne out by the end of the book: as one will see, simple dichotomies (center/fringe, or cosmopolitan/local) break down once enough mapping of the relationships 192 College & Research Libraries March 2010 and interdependencies among printers, publishers, and booksellers and their consumers is accomplished. Several of the papers take an industry- level view. Canadian scholar Stephen W. Brown (coeditor of volume two of the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland) contributes a detailed case study of how the Edinburgh papers variously reported and exploited an incest/murder trial in 1765. Through a careful and dogged study of the relationships and politics of the printers and publishers, Brown delivers a nicely nuanced portrait of the press of Edinburgh in the mid-eighteenth century. Michael Powell (librarian) and Terry Wyke (social historian) of Manchester use an unpublished manuscript history of the Manchester press (by Frederick Leary, b. 1841) to examine the plight of the North of England Magazine, which ran for 18 months in 1842–1843, as a typical repre- sentative of Manchester periodicals in the nineteenth century. Lisa Peters and Kath Skinner (of Chester) examine in great de- tail the newspaper distribution networks of the North Wales town of Wrexham, consisting of the post, shops, hawkers, messengers, and agents during the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, Stephen Colclough (lecturer in English, University of Bangor), examines the 1914 “dispute between the retail newsagents of Lancashire and the wholesalers that sup- plied them,” which ultimately encouraged regional unions to form the National Fed- eration of Retail Newsagents, Booksellers and Stationers in 1919. Biography is the other major approach in this collection. Jennifer Moore (a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Limerick) offers a sketch of John Ferrar (1742–1804), an Irish printer and writer active in Limer- ick for over 30 years and Dublin for almost a decade. Ferrar wrote a history of Limer- ick, ran the region’s major newspaper for 20 years, and used his family connections and business networks to influence the politics and culture of the day. Máire Ken- nedy (in charge of special collections in the Dublin City Libraries) uses the figure of William Flynn (1740–1811), who “rep- resented a typical printer and bookseller of the late eighteenth century,” to explore different aspects of the book trade in the Munster region of Ireland, specifically the port of Cork and its surrounds. Ria Snow- don presents an overview of the life and career of Sarah Hodgson, who inherited her father’s Newcastle printing business in 1784 (which included the influential weekly Newcastle Chronicle), married her late father’s apprentice in 1785 (who took over the business), and then successfully ran the business herself after her husband died (in 1800) for 22 years. Graham Hogg (senior rare book curator at the Na- tional Library of Scotland), writes of the struggles of George Miller (1771–1835), a printer and bookseller of Dunbar, Scot- land, who by virtue of two manuscript volumes is the most well-documented Scottish provincial bookseller of the hand- press period. Elizabeth Tilley (Lecturer in English, National University of Ireland) uses the example of James Duffy (1809– 1871), a Dublin periodical publisher, to explode the long-accepted notion that Irish periodicals from 1830–1870 were unsustainable. In a very focused study, Victoria Gardner (a newly minted Ph.D. from St. John’s College, Oxford) analyzes a hitherto unexamined account book re- cording the weekly business of the Chester Chronicle (1783–1786) during the first three of John Fletcher’s 52-year owner- ship. Fletcher (1756–1835) was a surveyor, engineer, and businessman, and his work with the paper helped launch him into town politics and civic administration. The implicit (and convincing) argu- ment of Periodicals and Publishers is for a more complex approach to researching “provincial” book and printing trade net- works. The result is a deep understanding of the relationships that drove (and im- peded) the flow of books and pamphlets into every corner of the literate public.— Richard J. Ring, Providence Public Library. Nicolas Barker. The Glory of Writing: The Calligraphic Work of Francesco Alunno.