Laura Cruz. The Paradox of Prosperity: The Leiden Booksellers' Guild and the Distribution of Books in Early Modern Europe. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2009. 275p. alk. paper, $55 (ISBN 9781584562351). LC 2008-027743.

dozen other coauthors (all identified in a contributors list) were doctoral students at her institution when the chapters were written. While the title is unwieldy, it is nevertheless exact. The author's stated aim is to encourage readers to contribute to the field " by conducting research and evaluation studies and publishing their results. " To learn how to do that—to learn how to use appropriate research models to achieve desired results—other texts from other fields, such as psychology or sociology, have traditionally been used. Seeing a need for a book that would explain research methods to librarians and informational professionals and students, using examples from the ILS field, she set out to fill the gap and has succeeded admirably. Once noting the aim of the book, Wildemuth explains its tone. She writes that she " was envisioning a student or colleague sitting in my office, asking me questions. " The friendly and jargon-free language she uses helps explicate concepts that could otherwise seem dense. Copious examples, breaking up of text with boldface titles and subtitles, the use of frequent summaries, and short chapter help in the process as well. The organizational principles of the book and individual chapters are quite logical and uniform. A brief introduction (Section One) is followed by an examination of how to identify and refine a research question; Section Three discusses the number of options available in research designs, and associated sampling issues. Section Four introduces the methods of collecting data; Section Five focuses on the analyzing of data; and the final section briefly addresses how various research methods can be combined in particular studies. Each chapter can be read individually from the others, and related themes present elsewhere in the book are helpfully noted to those readers who are sampling. (Those reading the text straight through might find the constant explanation of abbreviations and the repeating patterns of explanation a bit wearying, but both are a tribute to the author's determination to be consistent.) The topic to be discussed in each chapter is summarized; the reader is told what will follow. The research method or analytical construct is identified and explained, and sometimes even the history of a particular methodology is given as well. Any confusion that might arise after a theoretical discussion almost always is resolved as the authors follow up the abstract with specific studies summarized from ILS literature. What is produced is …