<b>Andrew Pettegree.</b> <i>The Book in the Renaissance</i>. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010. 421p. $40.00 (ISBN 9780300110098). LC2009-026513.

" Printing did not invent the book, " An-drew Pettegree reminds his readers at the outset of this highly readable volume. Much of the remaining pages essay a new history of the first hundred and fifty years of printing, a history tantalizingly de-coupled from just the books themselves. This is a vision of the history of the book that may only be possible now that global Internet resources are available to historians. Pettegree in his concluding " Note on Sources " notes that the foundations of book history in the writings of Lucien Febvre and Elizabeth Eisenstein had been rooted in the most prominent library collections , which naturally represent the printed works that have been most valued and received the greatest custodial care. The Book in the Renaissance is an attempt at reformulating our understanding of the first age of print, based on new tabulations—and guesses—about printed materials that have heretofore escaped scrutiny. The Book in the Renaissance is an outcome of long work by a team at the University of St. Andrews, synthesizing the wide variety of Web-based data now available with a wealth of more traditional scholarship in book history; it is a herald of the information that will soon be available in the Universal Short Title Catalogue. The book aims toward a much wider history of early printed works—not only the humanists' pride in the rediscovered wisdom of the ancients, but also the everyday prayer books, bestseller romances, pamphlets, almanacs, newsletters, broadsheets, indulgences, among others, that provided the income that allowed many printers to keep their business alive. The text carefully navigates a balance between popular history and scholarly monograph, between educational tool (the opening chapters might easily serve as a course reading) and sociology essay. Its historical narrative contains both chronological and topical elements, illustrated with a great variety of the printed objects described in the text (with emphasis on the author's Reformation specialty). Pettegree's history keeps the business motivations of all parties—authors, scribes, publishers, booksellers—at the forefront, and this economic focus dominates the beginning of his history. The opening chapters are devoted to a well-crafted introduction to the history of the book before printing, to the invention of various book-printing technologies from woodcuts to movable type, to the spread of those technologies from Germanic lands to stylistic and technical advances in Venice, and further spread to hundreds of European cities. He carefully delin-eates the …