P.J.M. Marks. Beautiful Bookbindings: A Thousand Years of the Bookbinder's Art. New Castle, Del.: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2011. 192p. alk. paper, $49.95 (ISBN 9781584562931). LC 2011-016079

census as a contribution to book history. The KC was born a collector's book, and it has remained so for over a century. This is what makes it such an interesting series of case studies in book history. And it is what makes this census so valuable. Peterson is not interested here in the making of the KC, but rather in its afterlife: its myriad pathways through the book trade. Since the vast majority of vellum and paper copies of the KC have been institional-ized, those fascinating stories have largely ended, but there are many available for the harvesting, chiefly from the pre-WW II period. It will probably come as no surprise that most of the extant copies of the KC repose in U.S. libraries (more than 175), but what is interesting is to see just how quickly the U.S. market responded to the lure of the book. American collectors were there from the start, astutely primed by their principal supplier, Bernard Quaritch. Indeed, it is probably the case that most of the U.S. cache of KCs were initially acquired by collectors before the Depression. The book was, from the beginning, a staple of the trade. And in reading through some of Sydney Cock-erell's correspondence with American collectors, one gets a fairly vivid picture of how quickly and deeply the Arts & Crafts movement rooted across the pond. Thus, it is not uncommon for institutions to have more than one copy of the KC. Yale is the leader here, with six copies, one of which is on vellum. The state of Texas contains within its borders at least twelve copies, with five each at SMU in Dallas and the HRC in Austin, both of which have a vellum copy. Berkeley, Princeton, and Cambridge each hold four copies. And there are (at least for this reviewer) some initial surprises. Carnegie Mellon holds as many copies as the Morgan Library (three), though one of the Morgan's copies is on vellum. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and the Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon, each have a copy. And Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber has his very own vellum copy. In the 1980s, copies of the KC began moving to Japan in such quantities that Japan now ranks third on the sweeps list after the United States and the United Kingdom. Space limitations do not allow me to do anything but hint at …