Book Review

What is a book, anyway? As the score of essays that make up this massive new volume on the book in colonial British America demonstrate, the answer is far from simple. As much cultural as physical artifacts, books are, by their very nature, deeply historical. Virtually everything about them—from content to form, fromproduction to consumption—is contingent upon place and time. And, as these authors make clear, early America was an especially dizzying place and time to be a book. Produced in the colonies when not brought over from London, chiefly religious yet sometimes secular, usually printed but often "published" scribally, read silently but also spoken and heard: the early American book lived a schizophrenic life, much like the colonists themselves. Indeed, as the coeditor David D. Hall and the contributor Elizabeth Carroll Reilly note, the most fundamental "social and cultural hierarchies of colonial society . . . were mirrored in the presence and meaning of books."

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Bringing together the work of fourteen scholars from diverse backgrounds—historians, literary scholars, curators, librarians, and bibliographers are all represented here—the volume thus tackles a vast topic, one with few clear boundaries. So before trying to sketch what its authors discover about the presence and meaning of books in the prerevolutionary United States, it may be useful to say a bit about what The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World is not.

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