Nicolas Barker. The Glory of Writing: The Calligraphic Work of Francesco Alunno. Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press, 2009. 2 vols.: vol. 1, 141p.; vol. 2, 231p. (ISBN 9780974516837)

and interdependencies among printers, publishers, and booksellers and their consumers is accomplished. Several of the papers take an industrylevel view. Canadian scholar Stephen W. Brown (coeditor of volume two of the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland) contributes a detailed case study of how the Edinburgh papers variously reported and exploited an incest/murder trial in 1765. Through a careful and dogged study of the relationships and politics of the printers and publishers, Brown delivers a nicely nuanced portrait of the press of Edinburgh in the mid-eighteenth century. Michael Powell (librarian) and Terry Wyke (social historian) of Manchester use an unpublished manuscript history of the Manchester press (by Frederick Leary, b. 1841) to examine the plight of the North of England Magazine, which ran for 18 months in 1842–1843, as a typical representative of Manchester periodicals in the nineteenth century. Lisa Peters and Kath Skinner (of Chester) examine in great detail the newspaper distribution networks of the North Wales town of Wrexham, consisting of the post, shops, hawkers, messengers, and agents during the second half of the nineteenth century. Finally, Stephen Colclough (lecturer in English, University of Bangor), examines the 1914 “dispute between the retail newsagents of Lancashire and the wholesalers that supplied them,” which ultimately encouraged regional unions to form the National Federation of Retail Newsagents, Booksellers and Stationers in 1919. Biography is the other major approach in this collection. Jennifer Moore (a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Limerick) offers a sketch of John Ferrar (1742–1804), an Irish printer and writer active in Limerick for over 30 years and Dublin for almost a decade. Ferrar wrote a history of Limerick, ran the region’s major newspaper for 20 years, and used his family connections and business networks to influence the politics and culture of the day. Máire Kennedy (in charge of special collections in the Dublin City Libraries) uses the figure of William Flynn (1740–1811), who “represented a typical printer and bookseller of the late eighteenth century,” to explore different aspects of the book trade in the Munster region of Ireland, specifically the port of Cork and its surrounds. Ria Snowdon presents an overview of the life and career of Sarah Hodgson, who inherited her father’s Newcastle printing business in 1784 (which included the influential weekly Newcastle Chronicle), married her late father’s apprentice in 1785 (who took over the business), and then successfully ran the business herself after her husband died (in 1800) for 22 years. Graham Hogg (senior rare book curator at the National Library of Scotland), writes of the struggles of George Miller (1771–1835), a printer and bookseller of Dunbar, Scotland, who by virtue of two manuscript volumes is the most well-documented Scottish provincial bookseller of the handpress period. Elizabeth Tilley (Lecturer in English, National University of Ireland) uses the example of James Duffy (1809– 1871), a Dublin periodical publisher, to explode the long-accepted notion that Irish periodicals from 1830–1870 were unsustainable. In a very focused study, Victoria Gardner (a newly minted Ph.D. from St. John’s College, Oxford) analyzes a hitherto unexamined account book recording the weekly business of the Chester Chronicle (1783–1786) during the first three of John Fletcher’s 52-year ownership. Fletcher (1756–1835) was a surveyor, engineer, and businessman, and his work with the paper helped launch him into town politics and civic administration. The implicit (and convincing) argument of Periodicals and Publishers is for a more complex approach to researching “provincial” book and printing trade networks. The result is a deep understanding of the relationships that drove (and impeded) the flow of books and pamphlets into every corner of the literate public.— Richard J. Ring, Providence Public Library.