Books for Sale: The Advertising and Promotion of Print since the Fifteenth Century. Eds. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2009. 191p. alk. paper, $49.95 (ISBN 9781584562658). LC 2009-046880

" Advertising is part of life, " asserts Mi-chael Harris in an essay on the selling and promotion of books. " It is not simply a deplorable spin-off. " Proof of that assertion can be found in this delightful collection based on papers presented at the 30th Annual Book Trade History conference in Bloomsbury in November 2008. The es-says—by academics, librarians, and publishing professionals—retain the brevity and accessibility of oral presentations without sacrificing scholarly depth. The book reads like a chronological sequence of microhistories. Each chapter stands alone, while implicitly enriching those that come before and after. The book is generously furnished with black-and-white illustrations ranging from French trade cards to book jackets. In her essay on " Sale Advertisements for Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century , " Lotte Hellinga examines 44 extant single sheets that were used for selling books, the " earliest witnesses to use of the printing press for retail purposes. " She concludes that there is growing " evidence for the big business of the book trade " even in this early period. Julianne Simpson's piece on the selling of the Biblia Regia shows how complex the trade had become by the sixteenth century. The " shrewd " publisher Christopher Plantin used royal subsidies, custom editions, presentation copies, sales agents, book fairs, catalogs, and display posters to promote his polyglot Bible in 8 volumes. Boundaries between book selling and general trade were not at all fixed, as Mi-chael Harris shows in his study of printed advertising in London around 1700. In printed publications, book notices might be interspersed with other commodities and services. Patent medicines were distributed at bookshops. Book notices were fixed to the walls of bureaus of exchange, public gathering places that grew up in large urban centers to provide information on labor and trade. The essay by Phillippa Plock on an eighteenth-century Parisian trade card collection also discusses such a gathering place, which in France was called a bureau d'adresse. Plock brings out the varied uses of printed paper materials, not only for advertising, but for their aesthetic qualities, to stimulate conversation, or to wrap purchases. Such ephemeral paper materials made up a large part of the printing trade, but most of them have not survived. Like many of the other authors, Charles Benson draws on business records and correspondence to reconstruct advertising and the book trade in early nineteenth-century Ireland. Most …