Periodicals and Publishers: The Newspaper and Journal Trade, 1740-1914. Eds. John Hinks, Catherine Armstrong, and Matthew Day. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2009. 251p. alk. paper, $49.95 (ISBN 9781584562665). LC 2009-015098

icle (and later groundbreaking works like his Canon Tables of the Gospels), he would have needed a remarkable scholarly team to help him gather, collate, and process the many texts upon which he would have based his writing. In chapter 4, the authors reveal that the key to Eusebius’s revolutionary textual successes was Caesarea’s library, the hub of Christian scholarship in the ancient world. The library owed its existence to Pamphilus (d. 310), a wealthy Christian presbyter who dedicated much of his fortune to amassing a remarkable collection of writings, including Origen’s works and correspondence. But he did more than just accumulate texts; he also catalogued and organized them, transforming a gentleman’s collection into a true scholarly resource. Caesarea’s library was home to more than a notable assembly of texts, however. It also played host to a large and active scriptorium whose scribes produced books for the entire Christian world. Grafton and Williams place Eusebius and his work firmly within the larger scholarly, political, economic, and sociocultural contexts of the library and its diverse network of users, patrons, scribes, and partners, paying particular attention to how Eusebius assumed administrative control of the library after Pamphilus’ death and built upon his predecessor’s work to create a remarkable center of knowledge creation and preservation, textual production, and intellectual exchange. What emerges is a compelling picture of how scholarship and librarianship worked together in the late-antique world to produce new modes of writing, reading, and learning. Although it deals with a world of information production, packaging, dissemination, and reception that initially might seem foreign to our modern understandings of these concepts, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book clearly reveals that a better understanding of book culture in the ancient world can teach us much about textual culture— whether print or digital—today. In their concern for the architecture and mediation of knowledge, the early scholar-librarians of Caesarea presuppose the concerns and practices of modern librarians and their efforts to develop new and efficient ways to organize and promote information to meet changing reader tastes and support the emerging needs of new, more technologically sophisticated user communities. Lively, accessible, and extremely informative, Grafton and Williams’ book should be essential reading for any librarian wanting a fuller understanding of the historical and practical evolution of the written and printed word, the creation and organization of knowledge, and the cooperative role that early scholars, librarians, and their libraries played in these processes.— Eric J. Johnson, The Ohio State University.