The instruction sheet sent to RBML reviewers states: "Librarianship is the operative word in our title. In your review, bring out aspects of the item you are reviewing which speak to issues in the field of rare books and manuscripts librarianship." His literal adherence to this instruction would enable the reviewer to make short shrift of Henri-Jean Martin's The French Book. As it happens, this elegant little book does speak about historical libraries--briefly--but in no other sense does it specifically concern either libraries or librarianship. I can imagine no working librarian who needs to read this book for the better performance of his or her daily tasks.

So much for instructions.

Martin divides his book into four chapters and a conclusion. "The Catholic Reformation and the Book (1585-1650)," chapter 1, deals primarily with the world of the printing office and the commerce of printing. The chapter opens with a brief description of the way in which an older printing office worked and the numbers of copies of its products it might have produced. Martin then turns to consider mundane matters, such as shipping, and more complex issues, such as censorship, the impact of economic cycles on book production, and the ways in which the press responded to the exigencies of religious conflict.

"Absolutism and Classicism," chapter 2, shows how representatives of the French state found various means in the world of the book through which to reinforce the cultural hegemony of the royal center while simultaneously supporting a sense of public harmony throughout the realm. Matters apparently as disparate as typefaces, accent marks, and diacriticals, on the one hand, and patronage of humanist scholarship, on the other (the latter seen as a moderate reformism encouragement of which would counter the more extreme reformism of the Lutherans), were both significant concerns. The larger milieu was defined by widespread efforts to create a kind of "typographical absolutism" (p. 37), a world where censorship and regulations both worked to further the maintenance of public order. The rise of an opposition press, often outside national borders, in times when maintenance of public order and regulation of the press were both often strained beyond their effective capacities, is a reiterated theme.

"The Reading Public and Its Books," chapter 3, looks at some of the ways in which historians can retrieve a sense of what books were actually read and how they were used. Here Martin discusses libraries, creation of which is a matter obviously related to issues of status and social rank. Here too he asks whether assemblages of "costly monuments" amount to "a proclamation of symbolic dependence on a culture . . . already dead or at least moribund" (p. 59), a question that even modern librarians might want to ponder if they have not already done so. The account books of a Grenoble bookseller provide a useful aid to analysis here; so does discussion of the operation of regulation and censorship in Rouen.

"The French Classical Book: Text and Image," chapter 4, pays attention to matters such as language and its standardization, the layout of the page, and illustration, both in general and in such special cases as the emblem book. The importance of the physical book is a constant theme in this chapter (indeed, it is so throughout Martin's study). Martin begins by proclaiming the necessity for "any serious study of the function that a book performs" (my italics) to "analyze the messages transmitted by the book while understanding how these messages are received" (p. 77); language, layout, and illustration are among the determinants of reception.

In his conclusion, Martin recollects how new a discipline book history remains. He speaks about the field's relationship to "the new history of mentalities," comments on the "rapprochement between the history of the book and analytical bibliography, fields . . . destined to unite . . . [in] the sociology of reading," and notes a return to "study of the book as an artifact" simultaneous with "a new effort to delineate the functions and the status of the author" (p. 99). A closing peroration urges new book historians to build on the achievements and the methods of their predecessors. Moreover, all students need to remember that much basic research remains to be done. Martin calls for a "comparative history of the book" involving study of how books circulated, the social functions to which they were destined, and the "text format" ("layout," I called it earlier) which, after such formats began to diverge between differing language and cultural groups, came to signify the hardening of national and other divisions.

When I opened the Jiffy bag in which RBML, contrary to sound conservation practices, had sent me the review copy (paperback) of Martin's book, and looked at it, I confess my heart sank. Despite its alleged 117 pages, this volume in fact contains fewer than 100 pages of text. It looks very much like A Child's Garden of Martin, or, perhaps more accurately, what we might expect a Martin book to look like if it had been made to undergo the famous regimen at Pleasantville, New York, where the well-trained cultural workers at Reader's Digest do to books what, in Camden, New Jersey, Campbell's workforce does to tomatoes. But that initial response was changed by my experience of the book itself.

The French Book does not, as it happens, substitute for The Coming of the Book, the study that Martin wrote with Lucien Febvre and from which modern book history emerges. It does not substitute, either, for Martin's own Print, Power, and People (as it is called in English) or for The History of Reading. Nor does it try to. What it does, instead, is to offer a reading of one period of book history and suggest ways in which a sophisticated historical intelligence approaches some of the issues that that period's history raises. Its power and suggestiveness are, I think, directly proportional to the impact its brevity allows it. I would therefore give it to students in almost any course on the history of the book, whether or not its concerns included seventeenth-century France, so powerful are the general implications of Martin's narrowly-focused and almost schematically brief book.

I might even encourage librarians to read this book, although of course it has nothing whatever to do with the daily requirements of library work. Particularly librarians whose work engages them with rare books and manuscripts might find useful an unsentimental view of the kinds of information preserved and the kinds of issues raised by such materials. If it does nothing else, Martin's book serves as a reminder of what the point is to the things and the processes, the sheer enormous amounts of stuff, such librarians bother about.

Daniel Traister
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
University of Pennsylvania

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Last update: 31 May 1997

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