The tell-tale bright yellow cover of Brill's Library of the Written Word series is always easy to spot on the new acquisitions shelf in the library. Looking across the shelf, publication seems surprisingly unabated over the past few years, despite world events. Kudos to Brill and all the editors who strive—even under strained conditions—to produce the series.

This volume, like so many others in The Handpress World segment of the series, stems from the annual conference series sponsored by the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. It reflects the breadth of conference participation with a broad consideration of the printed book across the multiple religious and ethnic groups active in Central Europe. In the introduction, Louthan makes the point that the 2017 conference (and by extension, this volume) intended to provide a more integrated view of early modern print culture in Central Europe by discussing the geographic region rather than just a single theme or concept. Thus, readers need to shift their expectations (based on other volumes in the series) of how the essays may relate to each other.

Unfortunately, all twenty-four essays in the volume cannot be discussed here. Not surprisingly, the largest percentage of essays provide multivalent examinations of the production (writing, translating, printing) of the diversity of religious works across the region (including Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish), as well as examinations of individual printing shop histories and output. I was particularly pleased to see several essays that pushed the idea of print culture beyond this more typical understanding, including those offerings by Herman on printed images and print albums, Czapnik on provenance marks, Jurkowlaniec on the reuse and relationship of printed images between works, and Płaszczyńska-Herman on bookbindings and the retail market. Perhaps because they just align more with my own bookish interests, but it is important to understand that print culture includes a greater variety of topics beyond traditional textual or literary considerations to the production of images, as well as the distribution, acquisition, and subsequent use of all such production. The essay collection does well to contextualize both sides of the often nebulous print culture discussion: how the printed work was created, and then what happens to that work after it leaves the press.

Would that the editors/indexers thought to make the index a bit more useful by including concepts/themes/ideas—anything that would help draw the essays together and highlight the common themes, even though this was not a specified goal of the editors. As it is, the index is restricted almost exclusively to proper names, the majority of which only have a single page reference that frequently only leads to a mention of the name with little historical or biographical content (e.g., the index to Queen Anna Jagiellon leads only to her name being used to define her court physician, Kasper Wilkowski), and few names appear in more than one contribution. While Volek's essay highlights female patronage, a concept such as women printers/book producers ideally could have been reflected in the index, as passing comments to women working in the book industry are buried in other essays by Lovas, Płaszczyńska-Herman, Brophy, and others. Short of scouring the index for female names—not all of which are even indexed—the role of women in the book industry remains hidden.

The twenty-four essays (and introduction) create a weighty tome, and I would not want to haul it home from the library with too many other books in tow—hopefully your library has access to a Brill online subscription. While the geographic considerations of the volume can be applauded, I wonder how that may play out in research and teaching. Researchers seem to always fracture such volumes, plucking out only the bits of information germane to their current project. Perhaps those who assign readings out of this volume might think of dividing it up by section and consider the essays through their respective groupings rather than as independent case studies.