<b><i>Envisioning Future Academic Library Services: Initiatives, Ideas and Challenges.</i></b> Ed. Sue McKnight. London: Facet Publishing, 2010. 247p. (ISBN 9781856046916). LC2010-478131.

works less well collected by major libraries: prayer books, newsletters, Papal indulgences (perhaps 30 percent of the surviving printed documents from the fifteenth century), the Reformation's war-ring pamphlets, best-selling vernacular works (especially chivalric romances), and bread-and-butter Latin grammars and other educational works. In all cases, Pettegree is able to back up his narrative with concrete data from a variety of sources , often including counts of specific print runs to demonstrate the relative profitability of a particular printed edition. The third and fourth sections of The Book in the Renaissance evolve into even more interesting and even more esoteric subjects; in these chapters, the history of print is a lens and data point through which to view several different areas of more general social history. Printed books are examined as a point of political and religious conflict (via incidents of book burnings and mass censorship), as a philosophical grounding point in strife-torn France, as a benchmark for economic distribution in the midst of confessional wars, and as participants in the sixteenth-century development of technical scientific illustration and medical practice. Finally, he offers a chapter ruminating on the effects of widespread printing on the Renaissance concept of the library itself: the collections that had once been the province (and the pride) of great lords became possible for average scholarship, and the erudite discourse once relegated to the libraries of the nobility were now possible in the stationer's shop. Pettegree admits, however, that even this more boisterous history of early Eu-ropean printing may still be incomplete. Plantin kept a single copy of everything he printed, no matter how ephemeral; for how many other presses are the complete riches of history lost? Booksellers' inventories can be quite revealing, but if they represent unsold inventory, do we gain a complete picture? Pettegree closes his history with two counterexamples to his own approach. After noting the too-numerous examples of book destruction in the course of warfare (up to World War II and the Gulf wars), he notes an instance in 1989 in which Dutch work-men discovered a group of Protestant books apparently hidden more than four hundred years prior in a house in Delft; fully four of the six books had no other known exemplars anywhere in the world. In a different example, the prolific scrapbooks of the sixteenth-century diarist Pierre de L'Estoile apparently preserve vestiges of a variety of " street " sources, many …