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73 Books in Review / Comptes rendus in the narrative and a renewal of the author's sharp-eyed and reflective prose. Scholars and general readers are likely· to regard this volume as a model of its kind. BRUCE GREENFIELD Dalhousie University English Studies in Canada zy, nos. 3-4 (September/December I399): 24I-yoz. Special Issue: The History of the Book. $Ixpoo (paper) ISSN 03I7-0802. On the tw·enty-fifth anniversary of the establishment of English Studies in Canada (ESC), it is entirely appropriate that this special theme issue should be devoted to the history of the book. Since its inception with the publication of Lucien Febvre and H·~enri-Jean Martin's L'4pparition du livre (1958), the history of the book has been multi-disciplinary in its approach concerned with issues such as reading, literacy, publishing, bibliographical investigations, and print culture. Although literature need not be confined to the historical interpretation of books, literature as an area of study and appreciation overlaps significantly with the history of the book and much of the writing in the history of the book is concerned with literary topics. This special theme issue of ESC consists of an editorial by Mary Jane Edwards ("Historying the Book"), eight articles, three book reviews, and a concluding essay, "Metropolises and Frontiers: Books in the English-Speaking World," by the doyen of Australian scholarship, Wallace Kirsop. As in most collections of this kind, the essays themselves are quite diverse in character and employ different methodological techniques. Some are heavily theory-laden; others depend on the archival record and bibliographical analysis. Four of the essays deal with some aspect of Canadian publishing. The issue begins on a promising note with Corey Coates's investigation of "paratextual" materials ("epigraphs or epilogues, mottoes or glosses, proems or prologues, choruses, prefaces, and arguments"), in particular the complex, and sometimes conflicting, nature ofspousal acknowledgements written by male authors. Coates refers to scientific studies by Alan G. Heffner and Michael Moore of authorial recognition of subordinates in collaborative research, but Coates's 74 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 39hI own observations are based primarily on a random selection of 500 books on British literature published between I930 and I990. To a great extent his conclusions confirmi his initial impressions of "progressive enlightenment on the part of males in their recognition of females" (258). The second essay, Hugh Reid's "'Those Beck'ning Ghost(s)': The Subscribers to Thomas Warton's Poems (I748)," shifts to the eighteenth century. Publishing by subscription, Reid rightly points out, was a common solution to publishing in the eighteenth century. His analysis of the subscription list to Warton's Poems leads him to conclude, however, that not all subscription publishing followed the same path and that the type of subscribers often differed substantially in terms of social class. Perhaps the most abstruse article in this issue is Michael J. O'Driscoll's "Whitman in the Archive: Leaves of Grass and the Culture of the Book." According to O'Driscoll, Whitman's writing is characterized by a dichotomy between a love of book culture and print technology and a growing realization that the materiality of text inevitably detracts from the ineffable and transcendental uniqueness of poetic utterance. In an attempt to escape from the formality of print, Whitman embraces a theory of language of primal gestures which O'Driscoll calls "indexical textuality." The fourth essay in this issue, by Janis Svilpis, traces the development of American pulp fiction from the late nineteenth century to the I960s, particularly the publication of pulp fiction by Ace Books under the editorship of David A. Wollheim. The conventional view regards pulp fiction aesthetically as a low-status genre whose demise led to the emergence of science fiction as a respectable form of writing. In Svilpis's opinion, this view distorts the significance of pulp fiction in its own right and ignores its cultural value. Svilpis in fact presents a diagram similar to Robert Darnton's communications circuit to explain the involvement of readers and fans of pulp fiction and the realm of publishing. Although Svilpis's account is grounded in the several histories that are available, it also uses Jtirgen Habermas's model of mass culture as a basis of interpretation. As the title of the first of the four essays on Canadian topics, Richard Cavell's "Typing Tay john," suggests, Cavell's focus is on the typography of Howard O'Hagan's classic novel (first published by Laidlaw and Laidlaw in 1939). Cavell argues that typography plays an important role in the understanding of O'Hagan's story of the Metis, Tay John, set in British Columbia and Alberta during the 1880s. With the exception of a reference to O'Hagan comparing the 75 Books in Review / Comptes rendus characters of his book to pieces of type, Cavell does not substantiate his case with direct evidence--for example, correspondence between O'Hagan and his publishers. Instead he discusses tangential issues such as the introduction of printing to the Hudson Bay Territory, Marshall McLuhan's theories, and design and typography in the treatises of Renaissance neo-P)latonists. In contrast to Cavell's speculative pyrotechnics, George Parker's essay on the influence of British publishing in Canada during the Second World War is a carefully written study solidly based on the records of the Book Publishers' Branch of the Board of Trade of the City of Toronto. Parker may not have written the last word on this subject (publishers' archives may supplement the account), but it is certainly- an in- depth examination of a neglected area of Canadian publishing. Sheila Latham's impressive article on the publication of W.O. Mitchell's The Kite is also a very strong piece of scholarly writing that draws upon Mitchell's archives and the archives of Macmillan Canada. An added feature of Latham's essay is a descriptive bibliography of all editions of the book. The final essay is Robert Lecker's "The Canada Council's Block Grant Program and the Construction of Canadian Literature." Lecker maintains that when the Canada Council initiated its Block Grant Program for Canadian publishers in I972, the course of Canadian literature was inevitably altered since Canadian publishers were forced instinctively to publish certain types of books as a sheer matter of survival in tune with the criteria imposed upon them by the Canada Council. Readers acquainted with Lecker's MakingIt Real. The Canonization ofEnglish- Canadian Literature (I995) will be on familiar terrain in this essay which combines an interesting blend of rhetoric with irrefutable logic. This issue of ESC deftly closes with Wallace Kirsop's wise, encompassing remarks on current research in the history of the book. Kirsop begins by noting that Febvre and Martin's ground- breaking work is global and international in its outlook. Yet the history of the book has often been conducted at the national and parochial levels. In his wide-ranging reflections Kirsop instances the series of colloquia initiated by Ian Willison at the British Library, the international colloquium held at the Université de Sherbrooke in May 2000, collections and recent publications, and the many history of the book projects either completed or now in progress. In the final analysis Kirsop concludes that the history of the book as a discipline is potentially all-embracing-there are no necessary conflicts 76 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 39hI between analytical bibliography and histoire du~livre, between the Old and New Worlds, and between the metropolis and the frontier. CARL SPADONI McMaster University Library The Challenge of Change: A Consideration of the Canadian Book Industry / Le de'fz du changernent: Étude de l'industrie canadienne du livre. Ottawa: Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, zooo. Io9 pp.; $32.oo (paper). ISBN 0-660-61326-3. The mandate of the Standing Committee is to oversee issues and legislation pertaining to the Canadian Heritage portfolio. With respect to the book industry, the Committee's mandate is to monitor the link between the Government of Canada's support to the book industry and the provision of increased choice of Canadian-authored materials to Canadian readers. (4) The Challenge of Change is a timely investigation by the Standing Committee of new trends in wholesale distribution and ownership, namely, the arrival of the retail superstore and innovations in information technology, especially online publishing and bookselling. These key shifts are of recent origin, merely the latest of many transformations in the book industry throughout the last half-century. Among those changes were government funding to creators and publishers, the compilation of industry statistics, the arrival of major wholesalers and of multinational firms, a number of casualties among long-established Toronto publishing houses, the rise and near decline of regional literary presses, and the international popularity of Canadian writers. An exciting era, certainly, but many of the fundamental problems that have plagued publishing and bookselling for the last century have simply turned up in a new guise. The retail landscape was again transformed in 1995 when Larry Stevenson created Chapters as part of his empire that includes the SmithBooks and Coles chain of 240 stores (2ooo figures). Chapters is a super-bookstore chain along the lines of Borders and Barnes 86 Noble in the United States. Two years later his arch-rival (that's what the chattering classes say) Heather Reisman created her own superstore empire, Indigo Books and Music. Each had attempted to link up with one of the American superstores, but Ottawa's rules on.

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